Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Andreas was at a table in a corner of the bar, typing on a tablet. As Pip crossed the room, she heard the words Toni Field from a table of three American businessmen. They were looking at Andreas, and it compounded her disorientation to be the person plunking her unfamous self down by him. He typed a little more before he turned off the tablet and smiled at her. “So,” he said.

“Yeah, so,” she said. “This is fully weird.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“Can we stay here if I don’t?”

“Certainly.”

She crossed her arms to suppress their shaking, but this only transferred the shaking to her jaw. She felt quite miserable.

“You look terrified,” Andreas said. “Please don’t be. I know this seems strange to you, but I brought you here for business only. I needed to talk to you, and I can’t do it at home. I’ve created a beehive of surveillance there.”

“There’s always the woods,” Pip said. “I seem to be the only one who walks in them.”

“Trust me. This is better.”

“Trust is kind of the opposite of what I’m feeling now.”

“I’m telling you: this is business. How are you liking working with Willow?”

“Willow?” She glanced over her shoulder at the American men. One of them was still looking at Andreas. “It’s just like you promised. She likes me. Although I do wonder if she’ll still like me after I’ve been in a hotel with you. I know Colleen won’t. I’m already pretty well compromised just by being here.”

Andreas looked at the Americans and gave them a little wave. “There’s a nice churrasquería around the corner. It will be empty at this hour. Are you hungry?”

“Yes and no.”

Walking with the Bringer of Sunlight on the city streets, carrying her dumb knapsack, she felt like a true San Lorenzo Valley yokel. A flock of green-and-orange parrots wheeled overhead, screeching louder than the buses and scooters. She wished that she could join their flock. At the churrasquería , in a secluded corner booth, Andreas ordered a bottle of wine. She knew she shouldn’t drink, but she couldn’t resist.

“Honestly?” she said when the wine was poured. “I don’t know why I’m here, but I wish I wasn’t.”

“It was your choice,” he said. “You didn’t have to get in the Land Cruiser.”

“How was that my choice? You’re the boss, you’re making my loan payments. You have all the power. You’ve got everything, I’ve got nothing. But it still doesn’t mean I want to be your special girl.”

He watched her drink without drinking from his own glass. “Is it so bad to be special?”

“Have you seen any kids’ movies lately?”

“I sat through Frozen with a woman I was seeing.”

“They’re all about being the special one, the chosen one. ‘Only you can save the world from Evil.’ That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They’re the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about them .”

He smiled. “You should have grown up in East Germany.”

“Maybe!”

“But what if ordinariness is an unrealistic ambition for you?”

“I’m telling you what you can do to help me, if you really want to help me. Just leave me alone. Don’t make me sit around in a hotel room all afternoon, waiting for you. I’d rather be part of the hive.”

“That’s unfortunate,” he said. “I do understand what you’re saying. But I need your help, too.”

Pip refilled her glass. “OK. I guess we’re on to plan B.”

“I’m going to tell you something that I’ve only told one other person, ever. After you hear it, I want you to think about which one of us has the real power over the other. I’m going to give you the power you say you don’t have. Do you want it?”

“Oh boy. More truth?”

“Yes, more truth.” He looked around the empty restaurant. The waiter was polishing glasses, and dusk had fallen on the street. “Can I trust you?”

“I haven’t told anyone about you and your mom’s vagina.”

“That was nothing. This is something.”

He picked up his wineglass, held it in front of his eyes, and drained it.

“I killed a person,” he said. “When I was twenty-seven. I killed a man with a shovel. I planned it carefully and did it in cold blood.”

The wooden spoon was in her head again, and this time it was worse, because this time it felt as if the disturbance were emanating from his own head. There was torment in his face.

“I’ve lived with it half a lifetime,” he said. “It never goes away.”

He looked so anguished, so much like a person, so little like a famous figure, that she reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

“The victim was Annagret’s stepfather,” he said. “She was fifteen, he was sexually abusing her. He worked for the Stasi, and she had no recourse. She came to the church where I worked. I murdered him to protect her.”

What he was saying couldn’t possibly be true, but Pip suddenly didn’t want to be touching him. She withdrew her hand from his and put it on her lap. One day when she was in high school, an ex-convict had come to talk to her civics class about conditions in California’s prison system. He was a well-spoken middle-class white guy who happened to have served fifteen years for shooting his stepfather in the heat of an argument. When he described the trouble he now had with women, the question of whether to cop to being an ex-con and a murderer before a first date, Pip’s skin had crawled at the thought of dating him. Once a killer, always a killer.

“What are you thinking?” he said.

“This is very disturbing,” she said.

“I know.”

“Am I really the only person you’ve ever told about this?”

“With one terrible exception, yes.”

“It’s not, like, some initiation thing you do with everyone who works for you?”

“No, Pip. It’s not.”

She was remembering that after the ex-con had made her skin crawl she’d felt guilty and compassionate for him. How hard it must have been to carry around forever a thing he’d done once on an impulse. She did things on impulse all the time.

“So,” she said. “This must be the real reason you trust Annagret.”

“That’s right. I didn’t tell you everything about us.”

“Annagret knows what you did.”

“Indeed. She helped me do it.”

“Criminy.”

He refilled their wineglasses. “We got away with it,” he said. “The Stasi had suspicions, but my parents protected me. I eventually got the case files, and the case went away. But there was a problem. I made a horrible mistake, after the Wall came down. I met a guy in a bar and told him what I’d done. An American…” He covered his face with his hands. “Horrible mistake.”

“Why’d you tell him?”

“Because I liked him. I trusted him. I also needed his help.”

“And why was it a mistake?”

Andreas lowered his hands. His expression had hardened. “Because now, all these years later, I have reason to think he intends to destroy the Project with his information. He’s already made one rather pointed threat. Are you starting to see why I need an intern I can trust?”

“I sure don’t see why it’s me.”

“I can take you to the airport right now. We’ll send your bag after you. I’ll understand if you want to leave now and never have anything to do with me again. Would you like that?”

Something was very wrong, but Pip didn’t know what. It didn’t seem possible that Andreas had killed a man with a shovel, but it also didn’t seem possible that he would just make up the story. Whether the story was true or not, she sensed that he was trying to do something to her by telling it. Something not right.