Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Do you know why it matters to me?”

His father shrugged. “I have guesses, based on your past behavior. But, no, I don’t.”

“Then let me tell you why,” Andreas said. He was furious with himself for having waited five weeks for his mother to rescue him — would he ever stop being the dumbfuck four-year-old? But he was down to only two choices, either get out of the country or trust the man who wasn’t really his father, and so he told him the story. Told it with major embellishments and omissions, carefully framing it as a parable of a good socialist judo girl who had followed all the rules and been raped by a Stasi-abetted incarnation of pure evil. He made a case for his own reformation, spoke of his good work with at-risk youth, spoke of his successes, his genuine service to society, his refusal to mix with the dissidents: his attempt to become, in the church basement, a son worthy of his father. He cast his state-subverting poetry as a regrettable response to having had a mentally ill mother. He said he did repent of it now.

When he was finished, his father said nothing for a long time. Cars were still honking in the street now and then, the pool of cold blood sausage darkening toward black.

“Where did this … event occur?” his father said.

“It doesn’t matter. A safe place in the countryside. Better if you don’t know where.”

“You should have gone straight to the Stasi. They would have punished the individual severely.”

“She wouldn’t do it. She’d followed the rules all her life. She just wanted to have a good life in society as it existed. I was trying to give her that.”

His father went to a sideboard and returned with two glasses and a bottle of Ballantine’s. “Your mother is my wife,” he said, pouring. “She will always come first.”

“Of course.”

“But your story is affecting. It puts a different light on things. It makes me question, to some extent, the idea I’ve had of you. Should I believe it?”

“The only things I left out were to protect you.”

“Did you tell it to your mother?”

“No.”

“Good. It would only upset her, to no purpose.”

“I’m more like you than I am like her,” Andreas said. “Can you see that? We’re both dealing with the same difficult person.”

His father emptied his glass with one gulp. “These are difficult times.”

“Can you help me?”

His father poured more scotch. “I can ask. I fear the answer will be no.”

“That you would even ask—”

“Don’t thank me. I would be doing it for your mother, not for you. The law is the law — we can’t take it into our own hands. Even if I’m successful, you should go to the police and make a full confession. The act would be all the more commendable if you performed it when you no longer had to fear discovery. If the facts really are the way you’ve represented them, you can count on considerable leniency, especially in the current climate. It would be hard on your mother, but it would be the right thing to do.”

Andreas thought, but didn’t say, that in fact he was more like his mother, not his father, because he had no interest at all in doing the right thing if the wrong thing would save him from public shame and prison time. His life seemed to him a long war between two sides of him, the sick side that he had from his mother, the scrupled side that he had from a nongenetic father. But he feared that at base he was all Katya.

He’d taken leave of his father and was walking to the elevator when the door of the flat opened behind him. “Andreas,” his father called after him.

He went back to the door.

“Tell me the name of the individual,” his father said. “It occurs to me that you’ll also want the file on his disappearance.”

Andreas searched his father’s face. Did the old man intend to turn him in? Unable to find an answer, Andreas spoke the full name of the man he’d killed.

Late the following afternoon, the vicar came down to his room to tell him that he had a phone call.

“I think I’ve done it,” his father said, on the phone. “You won’t be sure until you actually go to the archive. They wouldn’t remove the files from there, and it’s quite possible that you won’t be allowed to take them with you. But they will show them to you. So, at least, they say.”

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Thank me by never speaking of it again.”

At eight o’clock in the morning, following his father’s instructions, Andreas went back to Normannenstraße and presented himself at the front gate. A television crew was eating hard rolls by a van. He gave the name he’d been told to give, Captain Eugen Wachtler, and submitted to a pat down, relinquishing the knapsack in which he’d hoped to carry the files away.

Captain Wachtler came to the gate twenty minutes later. He was bald and precancerously gray and had the faraway expression of someone enduring chronic pain. There was a small stain on the lapel of his suit jacket. “Andreas Wolf?”

“Yes.”

The captain gave him a security pass on a lanyard. “Put this on and follow me.”

Without further words, they crossed the courtyard and went through an unlocked gate and then a gate that Wachtler unlocked and relocked behind them. There were further locks at the entrance of the main archive building, one that Wachtler had a key for, another operated by a guard behind a thick glass window. Andreas followed the captain up two flights of stairs and down a corridor of closed doors. “Exciting times here,” Andreas ventured to say.

Wachtler didn’t respond. At the end of the hall, he unlocked yet another door and beckoned Andreas into a small room with a table and two chairs. On the table were four file folders, neatly stacked.

“I will be back in exactly one hour,” Wachtler said. “You are not to leave this room or remove any materials from it. The pages are numbered. Before we leave, I will examine them to make sure that nothing is missing.”

“Got it.”

The captain left and Andreas opened the topmost folder. There were only ten pages in it, pertaining to the disappearance of Unofficial Collaborator Horst Werner Kleinholz. The second folder also contained ten pages, a carbon copy of the first file. As soon as Andreas saw the carbon copy, he knew that there was hope. He’d been instructed not to remove anything, but there was no reason to give him the duplicate if they expected him to follow the instruction. The carbon copy was a clear signal that this was all they had and they were giving it to him. He was flooded with love and pride and gratitude. His father had worked for forty years within the system, playing by the rules, to bring about this moment. His father still had influence, and the Stasi had come through for him.

He took out the plastic shopping bag that he’d stuffed in his boot and put both copies of the investigation file in it. The other two folders on the table were thicker. They contained the two halves of his own file, continuously numbered. These, too, he put in the plastic bag.

His heart was pounding and he was getting a major stiffy, because the rest was a game. The rules of the game were that he was breaking the rules, stealing materials without the Stasi’s knowledge or consent, materials that he was only supposed to look at, not take with him. It wouldn’t be the Stasi’s fault if they went missing.

He had a flicker of worry that the captain had locked him in the room, but the door wasn’t locked, the game was on. He stepped out into the corridor. The building was weirdly silent, not a voice to be heard, just a low institutional humming. He retraced his steps to the stairs and down the two flights. From the main hallway he heard footsteps and voices, employees arriving for work. He stepped boldly into it and headed for the front door. Incoming workers gave him cold, incurious looks.