Jonathan Franzen - Purity

The next morning, sober, she’d regretted her promise. Andreas Wolf and his Project were currently conducting business out of South America, owing to various European and American warrants for his arrest on hacking and spying charges, and there was obviously no way that Pip was leaving her mother and moving to South America. Also, although Wolf was a hero to some of her friends and she was moderately intrigued by Wolf’s idea that secrecy was oppression and transparency freedom, she wasn’t a politically committed person; she mostly just tagged along with Stephen, dabbling in commitment in the same fitful way she dabbled in physical fitness. Also, the Sunlight Project, and the fervor with which Annagret had spoken of it, seemed possibly cultish. Also, as she was certain would become instantly clear when she did the questionnaire, she was nowhere near as smart and well-informed as her five-minute speech on Israel had made her seem. And so she’d been avoiding the Germans until this morning, when, on her way out to share the Sunday Times with Jason, she’d found a note from Annagret whose tone was so injured that she’d left a note of her own outside Annagret’s door, promising to talk to her tonight.

Now, as her stomach continued to register emptiness, she waited for some change in the stream of spoken German to indicate that Annagret was no longer in the kitchen doorway. Twice, like a dog overhearing human speech, Pip was pretty sure that she heard her own name in the stream. If she’d been thinking straight, she would have marched into the kitchen, announced that she had a boy over and couldn’t do the questionnaire, and gone upstairs. But she was starving, and sex was becoming more of an abstract task.

Finally she heard footsteps, the scrape of a kitchen chair. She bolted from the bathroom but snagged the hem of her robe on something. A nail in a piece of scavenged wood. As she danced out of the way of falling lumber, Annagret’s voice came up the hall behind her.

“Pip? Pip, I’m looking for you since three days ago!”

Pip turned around to see Annagret advancing.

“Hi, yeah, sorry,” she said, hastily restacking the lumber. “I can’t right now. I’ve got … How about tomorrow?”

“No,” Annagret said, smiling, “come now. Come, come, like you promised.”

“Um.” Pip’s mind was not prioritizing well. The kitchen, where the Germans were, was also where cornflakes and milk were. Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible if she ate something before returning to Jason? Might she not be more effective, more responsive and energetic, if she could have some cornflakes first? “Let me just run upstairs for one second,” she said. “One second, OK? I promise I’ll be right back.”

“No, come, come. Come now. It takes only a few minutes, ten minutes. You’ll see, it’s fun, it’s only a form we have to follow. Come. We’re waiting the whole evening for you. You’ll come do it now, ja?”

Beautiful Annagret beckoned to her. Pip could see what Dreyfuss meant about the Germans; and yet there was relief in taking orders from someone. Plus, she’d already been downstairs for so long that it would be unpleasant to go up and beg Jason for further patience, and her life was already so fraught with unpleasantnesses that she’d adopted the strategy of delaying encounters with them as long as possible, even when the delay made it likely that they would be even more unpleasant when she did encounter them.

“Dear Pip,” Annagret said, stroking Pip’s hair when she was seated at the kitchen table and eating a large bowl of cornflakes and not greatly in the mood to have her hair touched. “Thank you for doing this for me.”

“Let’s just get through it quickly, OK?”

“Yes, you’ll see. It’s only a form we have to follow. You remind me so much of myself when I was at your age and needed a purpose in my life.”

Pip didn’t care for the sound of this. “OK,” she said. “I’m sorry to ask, but is the Sunlight Project a cult?”

“Cult?” Martin, all stubble and Palestinian kaffiyeh, laughed from the end of the table. “Cult of personality, maybe.”

“ Ist doch Quatsch, du ,” Annagret said with some heat. “ Also wirklich. ”

“Sorry, what?” Pip said.

“I said it’s really bullshit, what he’s saying. The Project is the opposite of cult. It’s about honesty, truth, transparency, freedom. The governments with a cult of personality are the ones who hate it.”

“But the Project has a very cher iss metic leader,” Martin said.

“Charismatic?” Pip said.

“Charismatic. I made it sound like arissmetic . Andreas Wolf is very charismatic.” Martin laughed again. “This could nearly be in a textbook for vocabulary. How to use the word charismatic in a sentence. ‘Andreas Wolf is very charismatic.’ Then the sentence makes immediate sense, you know right away what the word means. He is the definition of the word itself.”

Martin seemed to be needling Annagret and Annagret not liking it; and Pip saw, or thought she saw, that Annagret had slept with Andreas Wolf at some point in the past. She was at least ten years older than Pip, maybe fifteen. From a semitransparent plastic folder, a European-looking office supply, she took some pages slightly longer and narrower than American pages.

“So are you like a recruiter?” Pip asked. “You travel with the questionnaire?”

“Yes, I have authority,” Annagret said. “Or not authority, we reject authority. I’m one of the people who do this for the group.”

“Is that why you’re here in the States? Is this a recruiting trip?”

“Annagret is a multitasker ,” Martin said with a smile somehow both admiring and needling.

Annagret told him to leave her and Pip alone, and he went off in the direction of the living room, apparently still serenely unaware that Dreyfuss didn’t like having him around. Pip took the opportunity to pour herself a second bowl of cereal; she was at least putting a check mark in the nourishment box.

“Martin and I have a good relationship, except for his jealousy,” Annagret explained.

“Jealousy of what?” Pip said, eating. “Andreas Wolf?”

Annagret shook her head. “I was very close with Andreas, for a long time, but that’s some years before I knew Martin.”

“So you were really young.”

“Martin is jealous of my female friends. Nothing more threatens a German man, even a good man, than women being close friends with each other behind his back. It really upsets him, like it’s something wrong with how the world is supposed to be. Like we’re going to find out all his secrets and take away his power, or not need him anymore. Do you have this problem, too?”

“I’m afraid I tend to be the jealous party.”

“Well, this is why Martin is jealous of the Internet, because this is how I primarily communicate with my friends. I have so many friends I haven’t even met — real friends. Email, social media, forums. I know Martin sometimes watches pornography, we don’t have secrets from each other, and if he didn’t watch it he probably would be the only man in Germany who didn’t — I think Internet pornography was designed for German men, because they like to be alone and control things and have fantasies of power. But he says he only watches it because I have so many female Internet friends.”

“Which of course may just be porn for women,” Pip said.

“No. You only think that because you’re young and maybe don’t need friendship so much.”

“So do you ever think about just going with girls instead?”

“It’s pretty terrible right now in Germany with men and women,” Annagret said, which somehow amounted to a no.

“I guess I was just trying to say that the Internet is good at satisfying needs from a distance. Male or female.”