Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“Here’s what’s fucked up,” I said as we climbed out of the ruined basin and up to a less buggy height. “Just speaking for myself. A month goes by, and I’m feeling so freakish and depressed and ashamed, because of the last time we got together, that I can barely show my face to another human being. And so I have to come out here, and once I’m here it’s practically biological that I’m going to end up staying thirty-six hours, and raising all sort of false hopes and expectations—”

Anabel spun around. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

“Do you want me to kill you?”

She shook her head emphatically, no, no, she didn’t want to be killed.

“Then don’t call me.”

“I wasn’t strong enough.”

“Don’t get me out here again. Don’t do this to me.”

“I wasn’t strong enough! For God’s sake! Do you have to rub my face in how weak I am?” And she walked in a small circle with her hands bent into claws near her face, which looked as if a swarm of hornets had somehow got inside her head and were stinging her brain.

“Have pity on me,” she said.

I seized her and kissed her, my Anabel. She was snotty and teary and hot-breathed and dear. Also quite seriously disturbed and all but unemployable. I kissed her to try to make the pain stop, but in no time I also had my hands down the back of her corduroys. Her hips were so narrow that I could take her pants down without unbuttoning them. We’d been little more than children when we fell in love. Now everything was ashes, ashes of ashes burned at temperatures where ash burns, but our full-fledged sex life had only just begun, and I would never stop loving her. It was the prospect of another two or three or five years of sex in the ashes that made me think of death. When she pulled away from me and dropped to her knees and unzipped my knapsack and took out my Swiss Army knife, I thought she might be thinking of it, too. But instead she was stabbing the five remaining condoms dead.

* * *

The apartment on Adalbertstraße was hostage to a stomach. When Clelia closed her eyes at night, she could picture it hovering in the darkness above her cot. Outwardly taut and glossy, a pale pink digestive aubergine with darkish veins stemming off it, the stomach was red and shredded on the inside, awash in caustic liquids and liable to convulse like a raging baby at any hour, especially a wee one. This unhappy organ had its residence in the body of Clelia’s mother, Annelie. Clelia slept in the corner of the living room nearest to her mother’s bedroom, so that when Annelie called out for milk and zwieback in the night she wouldn’t wake the younger children or her brother, Rudi, in their bedrooms, only Clelia.

The stomach was keenly attuned to Clelia’s self-pity. It could hear her when she cried herself to sleep, it didn’t like her doing this, it threw up blood and bile onto her mother’s bedsheets, which Clelia then had to strip and soak. There was no arguing with blood. No matter how cruel her mother was to her, she held the bloody trump card of actually being ill.

Nor was there any arguing that Clelia needed to have a job. Even if she hadn’t been denied entry to the university — the university that her father had attended, the four-hundred-year-old university that she passed every morning on her way to the bakery — the family couldn’t have afforded to let her go full-time. Uncle Rudi worked for the city in a street-paving capacity, proud in his bright blue coveralls, the German worker’s uniform, the true uniform of tyranny in the socialist workers’ state, and he took care of his ailing sister to the extent of paying the rent. But he drank and had girlfriends, and so it fell to Clelia to put food on the table. Her brother was fifteen and her sister was still a little girl.

By day Clelia waited on customers at the bakery, by night she waited on the stomach. Only on Saturday afternoons and Sundays did she have a few hours to herself. She liked to walk along the river and, if the day was sunny, find a patch of clean grass to lie down on and close her eyes. She didn’t need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger. Most of Clelia’s Oberschule friends were now at the university and strangers to her, the rest kept their distance because her father’s family was bourgeois, and she preferred to be by herself anyway, so she could dream of the man who would take her away from Adalbertstraße to Berlin, to France, to England, to America. A man like her father, whom she could still remember following up their building’s stairs and hearing gently say, through the grudging one centimeter that their upstairs neighbor had opened his door, “My wife is very sick tonight. Her stomach. If you could not be quite so loud?” A man like that.

On a very warm June Saturday, not long after Clelia had turned twenty, she took off her apron at the bakery and told the manager she was leaving early. Already, in 1954, workers in Jena were learning that no harm would come of leaving early; all it meant was that customers had to wait in longer lines, at worst at the cost of work time at their own jobs, where it likewise didn’t matter if they were absent. Clelia hurried home and changed into her favorite old faded lavender summer dress. Her uncle had taken her brother and sister fishing and left her mother, whom the stomach had kept awake all night, asleep in bed. Clelia made a pot of the blackberry tea that her mother claimed was calming to the stomach, although it contained tannic acid and caffeine, and took it to her bedroom with a plate of dry biscuits. She sat on the edge of her mother’s bed and stroked her hair the way she remembered her father doing. Her mother awoke and pushed her hand away.

“I brought you some tea before I go out,” Clelia said, standing up.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

Her mother’s face was still pretty when the stomach was off duty. She’d suffered for enough years to be ancient now, but she was only forty-three. For a moment, it seemed that she might be about to smile at Clelia, but then her eyes fell to Clelia’s body, and her face immediately assumed its customary contours. “Not in that dress you’re not.”

“What’s wrong with this dress? It’s a hot day.”

“If you had any sense, the last thing you’d do is call attention to your body.”

“What’s wrong with my body?”

“Its chief defect is that there’s rather a lot of it. A girl with any intelligence would seek to minimize its effect.”

“I’m very intelligent!”

“No, in fact,” her mother said, “you’re a stupid goose. And I predict with some confidence that you’ll make a present of yourself to the first stranger who says two kind words to you.”

Clelia blushed and, blushing, felt herself to be unquestionably a stupid goose: breasty and tall and absurd, with long feet and too much mouth. Goose that she was, she persisted in honking: “Two kind words is more than I ever heard in my whole life with you!”

“That’s unjust, but never mind.”

“I wish some stranger would say kind words to me. I would love to hear kind words.”

“Oh, yes, it’s very nice,” her mother said. “Every once in a long while, the stranger might even be sincere.”

“I don’t care if he’s sincere! I just want to hear kind words!”

“Listen to yourself.” Her mother felt the pot of tea and filled her cup. “You haven’t cleaned the bathroom yet. Your uncle makes a mess of the toilet. I can smell it from in here.”

“I’ll do it when I get back.”

“You’ll do it now. I don’t understand this ‘pleasure first and duty second.’ You’ll clean the bathroom and wash the kitchen floor, and then, if there’s time, you can change your clothes and go out. I don’t see how you can enjoy a pleasure when you know there’s work to do.”