Jonathan Franzen - Purity

“I won’t be gone long,” Clelia said.

“Why the hurry?”

“It’s such a beautiful warm day.”

“Are you going to buy something? Are you worried that the store will close?”

Annelie was good at intuiting the one question Clelia didn’t want to answer truthfully, and asking it.

“No,” Clelia said.

“Bring me your pocketbook.”

Clelia went to the parlor and came back with the pocketbook, which contained some small bills and change. She watched while her mother counted pfennigs. Although her mother hadn’t hit her since she became the family’s breadwinner, Clelia’s expression was all animal edginess, the distraction of cornered prey.

“Where is the rest of it?” her mother said.

“This is all there is. I gave you the rest of it.”

“You’re lying.”

All of a sudden, in the left cup of Clelia’s bra, six twenties and eight tens began to stir like crisp-winged insects preparing for flight. She could hear the rustle of their paper wings, which meant that her sharp-eared mother could hear them too. Their scratchy legs and hard heads dug into Clelia’s skin. She willed herself not to look down.

“It’s the dress,” her mother said. “You want to buy the dress.”

“You know I can’t afford that dress.”

“They’ll take twenty marks and let you pay installments.”

“Not for this, they won’t.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because I went and asked! Because I want a nice dress!” Clelia looked down in dismay as her right hand, entirely of its own volition, rose from her side and came to rest on the guilty bra cup. She was such an open book, such a guileless and everywhere-spilling mess, that her mother simply said:

“Show me what you have there.”

Clelia took the bills from her bra and gave them to her mother. In the rear of the clothing shop on their street was a particular sundress cut Western or what passed for Western in godforsaken Jena, certainly too Western to be placed on display. Clelia brought the shop lady fresh pastries that she said were old and had to be disposed of, and the shop lady was kind to her. But Clelia was such a stupid goose that she’d described the sundress to her little sister, as an example of what could be found in the rear of stores in the socialist republic, and her mother, though no fan of the socialist republic, had taken note. She was better at surveillance than the socialist republic was. Calm in victory, she put the money in the pocket of her robe, took a sip of tea, and said, “Did you want the dress for some particular assignation? Or just for walking the streets?”

The money didn’t rightfully belong to Clelia and was, to this extent, unreal to her, and she felt that she deserved the punishment of having it taken away from her — indeed, she’d reached into her bra with a sense of penitent relief. But seeing the money disappear into her mother’s pocket made it real to her again. Six months it had taken her to save it up without being caught. Her eyes filled.

“ You’re the streetwalker,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Horrified with herself, she tried to take it back. “I meant, you like to walk in the street. I like to walk in the park.”

“But the word you just used. It was?”

“Streetwalker!”

Warm dark tea slapped Clelia full across the bodice of her lavender dress. She looked down, wide-eyed, at the destruction.

“I should have let you starve,” her mother said. “But you ate and ate and ate, and now look at how much there is of you. Was I supposed to let my children starve? I couldn’t work, and so I did the only thing I could. Because you ate and ate and ate. You have no one but yourself to blame for what I did. It was your appetite, not mine.”

It was true enough that her mother had no appetite. But she spoke with such fairy-tale cruelty, in a voice so exacting and controlled, that it was as if there were no mother there at all: as if the person in bed were merely a flesh-and-blood dummy through which the vengeful stomach spoke. Clelia waited to see if some human remnant of her mother might reconsider what she’d said and apologize for it, or at least mitigate it; but her mother’s face distorted with a sudden writhing of the stomach. She gestured feebly toward the teapot. “I need hot tea,” she said. “This isn’t hot enough.”

Clelia fled the bedroom and hurled herself onto her cot.

“You’re a dirty— whore! ” she whispered. “ A dirty whore! ”

Hearing herself, she immediately sat up and clamped her mouth shut with her fingers. Tears in her eyes gave trembling, diaphanous wings to the bars of sunlight leaking in around the heavy curtains that the stomach insisted be kept closed. My God, she thought. How can I say that? I’m a terrible person! And then, throwing herself back down on the narrow mattress, she expelled more words into her pillow: “ A whore! A whore! A filthy whore! ” At the same time, she beat on her head with her knuckles. She felt herself to be the world’s most terrible person, also one of the most unlucky and ridiculous. Her legs were so long that to sleep on the cot she had to bend them or leave her feet hanging off the end. She was more than one and three-quarters meters tall, a ridiculous goose in the too-small cage of her cot, with the ugliest name any girl was ever given. People at the bakery had the impression that she was stupid because she giggled for no reason and tended to blurt out whatever came into her head.

She wasn’t stupid. She got excellent marks in school and could have been taking classes at the university if the committee had let her. The official word was that her father was bourgeois, but her father was dead and her mother and uncle came from the correct social class. The real stigma was that her mother had granted favors to one and then another black-uniformed officer in the worst years. Clelia’s little sister was the daughter of the second one. And, yes, Clelia had eaten the meat and butter and candy, but she’d been a child, unversed in evil. It was to the evil stomach that one of the officers had brought an entire case of authentic Pepto-Bismol . Annelie had sold herself for the stomach, not for her children.

In my mother’s many tellings of this story to me, she always stressed that when she’d changed out of her ruined dress and dropped one hard roll and two books into her purse, she hadn’t been intending to abandon her siblings, hadn’t been acting on any long-contemplated plan. She just wanted an evening away from the stomach, at most a night and day of relief from an apartment that made her both wholly conscious of the misery of being German and wholly unable to imagine not being German. Until that Saturday in June, the worst thing she’d ever plotted was to buy a Western sundress. Now she’d never have the dress, but she could still go walking in the West, the American sector was only a train ride away.

With thirty marks in her shoulder bag, she hurried downhill to the center of town, which was still being rebuilt, with socialist unhurry, from the pummeling it had received for harboring the manufacturer of bomb sights and rifle scopes for the war. The round-trip ticket to Berlin cost her nearly all her money. With the little that remained she bought a small bag of candy that left her all the hungrier by the time the train reached Leipzig. So little had she planned to run away, one dry roll was the only other food she had. But what she mainly yearned for now was fresh air. The air in her train compartment stank of socialist underarm, the air from the open window was hot and rank with heavy industry, the air at the Friedrichstraße station was befouled with cheap tobacco smoke and bureaucratic ink. She had no sense of being one drop in the bucket of brains and talent that was draining out of the republic in those years. She was just a blindly running goose.