Читать книгу Purity - Джонатан Франзен, Jonathan Franzen - Страница 13

The church on Siegfeldstraße was open to anyone who embarrassed the Republic, and Andreas Wolf was so much of an embarrassment that he actually resided there, in the basement of the rectory, but unlike the others—the true Christian believers, the friends of the Earth, the misfits who believed in human rights or didn’t want to fight in World War III—he was no less an embarrassment to himself.

For Andreas the most achievedly totalitarian thing about the Republic was its ridiculousness. It was true that people who tried to cross the death strip were unridiculously shot, but to him this was more like an oddity of geometry, a discontinuity between Eastern flatness and Western three-dimensionality that you had to assume to make the math work. As long as you avoided the border, the worst that could happen was that you’d be spied on and picked up and interrogated, do prison time and have your life wrecked. However inconvenient this might be for the individual, it was leavened by the silliness of the larger apparatus—the risible language of “class enemy” and “counterrevolutionary elements,” the absurd devotion to evidentiary protocol. The authorities would never just dictate your confession or denunciation and force or forge your signature. There had to be photos and recordings, scrupulously referenced dossiers, invocations of democratically enacted laws. The Republic was heartbreakingly German in its striving to be logically consistent and do things right. It was like the most earnest of little boys, trying to impress and outdo its Soviet father. It was even loath to falsify election returns. And mostly out of fear, but maybe also out of pity for the little boy, who believed in socialism the way children in the West believed in a flying Christkind who lit the candles on the Christmas tree and left presents underneath it, the people all went to the polls and voted for the Party. By the 1980s, it was obvious that life was better in the West—better cars, better television, better chances—but the border was closed and the people indulged the little boy’s illusions as if recalling, not unfondly, their own illusions from the Republic’s early years. Even the dissidents spoke the language of reform, not overthrow. Everyday life was merely constrained, not tragically terrible (Olympic bronze was the Berliner Zeitung’s idea of calamity). And so Andreas, whose embarrassment it was to be the megalomaniacal antithesis of a dictatorship too ridiculous to be worthy of megalomania, kept his distance from the other misfits hiding in the church’s skirts. They disappointed him aesthetically, they offended his sense of specialness, and they wouldn’t have trusted him anyway. He performed his Siegfeldstraße ironies privately.

Alongside the broad irony of being an atheist dependent on a church was the finer irony of earning his keep as a counselor of at-risk youth. Had any East German child ever been more privileged and less at risk than he? Yet here he was, in the basement of the rectory, in group sessions and private meetings, counseling teenagers on how to overcome promiscuity and alcohol dependency and domestic dysfunction and assume more productive positions in a society he despised. And he was good at what he did—good at getting kids back into school, finding them jobs in the gray economy, connecting them with trustworthy government caseworkers—and so he was himself, ironically, a productive member of that society.

His own fall from privilege served as his credential with the kids. Their problem was that they took things too seriously (self-destructive behavior was itself a form of self-importance), and his message to them was always, in effect, “Look at me. My father’s on the Central Committee and I’m living in a church basement, but do you ever see me serious?” The message was effective, but it shouldn’t have been, because, in truth, he was scarcely less privileged for living in a church basement. He’d severed all contact with his parents, but in return for this favor they protected him. He’d never even been arrested, the way any of his at-risk charges would have been if they’d pulled the shit he’d pulled at their age. But they couldn’t help liking him and responding to him, because he spoke the truth, and they were too hungry to hear the truth to care how privileged he was to speak it plainly. He was a risk the state seemed willing to run, a misleading beacon of honesty to confused and troubled adolescents, for whom the intensity of his appeal then became a different sort of risk. The girls practically lined up outside his office door to drop their pants for him, and if they could plausibly claim to be sixteen he helped them with their buttons. This, too, of course, was ironic. He rendered a valuable service for the state, coaxing antisocial elements back into the fold, speaking the truth while enjoining them to be careful about doing it themselves, and was paid for his service in teen pussy.

His unspoken agreement with the state had been in place for so long—for more than six years—that he assumed he was safe. Nevertheless, he continued to take the precaution of avoiding friendships with men. He could tell, for one thing, that the other men around the church envied his way with the youngsters and therefore disapproved of it. Avoiding men also made actuarial sense, since there were probably ten male informers for every female. (The actuarial odds further argued for preferring females in their teens, because the spy runners were too sexist to expect much of a schoolgirl.) The biggest drawback of men, though, was that he couldn’t have sex with them; couldn’t cement that deep complicity.

Although his appetite for girls seemed boundless, he prided himself on never knowingly having slept with anyone below the age of consent or anyone who’d been sexually abused. He was skilled at identifying the latter, sometimes by the fecal or septic imagery they used to describe themselves, sometimes merely by a certain telltale way they giggled, and over the years his instincts had led to successful prosecutions. When a girl who’d been abused came on to him, he didn’t walk away, he ran away; he had a phobia of associating himself with predation. The sort of things that predators did—groping in crowds, lurking near playgrounds, forcing themselves on nieces, enticing with candy or trinkets—made him murderously angry. He took only girls who were more or less of sound mind and freely wanted him.

If his scruples still left an apparent residuum of sickness—a worry about what it meant that he felt compelled to repeat the same pattern with girl after girl, or that he not only never tired of it but seemed to want it only more, or that he preferred having his mouth between legs to having it near a face—he chalked it up to the sickness of the country he lived in. The Republic had defined him, he continued to exist entirely in relation to it, and apparently one of the roles it demanded he play was Assibräuteaufreißer. It wasn’t he, after all, who’d made all men and any woman over twenty untrustable. Plus, he came from privilege; he was the exiled blond prince of Karl-Marx-Allee. Living in the basement of a rectory, eating bad food out of cans, he felt entitled to the one small luxury that his vestigial privileges afforded. Lacking a bank account, he kept a mental coitus ledger and regularly checked it, making sure that he remembered not only first and last names but the exact order in which he’d had them.

His tally stood at fifty-two, late in the winter of 1987, when he made a mistake. The problem was that number fifty-three, a small redhead, Petra, momentarily residing with her unemployable father in a cold-water Prenzlauer Berg squat, was, like her father, extremely religious. Interestingly, this in no way dampened her hots for Andreas (nor his for her), but it did mean that she considered sex in a church disrespectful to God. He tried to relieve her of this superstition but succeeded only in making her very agitated about the state of his soul, and he saw that he risked losing her altogether if he failed to keep his soul in play. Once he’d set his mind on sealing a deal, he could think of nothing else, and since he had no close friend whose flat he could borrow and no money for a hotel room, and since the weather on the crucial night was well below freezing, the only way he could think to gain access to Petra’s pants (which now seemed to him more absolutely imperative than any previous access to anyone else’s, even though Petra was somewhat loopy and not particularly bright) was to board the S-Bahn with her and take her out to his parents’ dacha on the Müggelsee. His parents rarely used it in the winter and never during the work week.

By rights, Andreas ought to have grown up in Hessenwinkel or even Wandlitz, the enclave where the Party leadership had its villas, but his mother had insisted on living closer to the city center, on Karl-Marx-Allee, in a high-floor flat with big windows and a balcony. Andreas suspected that her real objection to the suburbs was bourgeois-intellectual—that she found the furnishings and conversations out there unbearably spießig, dowdy, philistine—but she was no more capable of uttering this truth than any other, and so she claimed to be pathologically prone to carsickness, hence unable to commute by car to her important job at the university. Because Andreas’s father was indispensable to the Republic, nobody minded that he lived in town or that his wife, again on grounds of carsickness, had selected the Müggelsee as the site of the dacha where they went for weekends in the warmer months. As Andreas came to see it, his mother was not unlike a suicide bomber, forever carrying the threat of crazy behavior fully armed and ready to detonate, and so his father acceded to her wishes as much as possible, asking only that she help him maintain the necessary lies. This was never a problem for her.

The dacha, walkable from the train station, was set on a large plot of piney land sloping gently to the lake shore. By feel, in the dark, Andreas located the key hanging from the customary eave. When he went inside with Petra and turned on a light, he was disoriented to find the living room outfitted with the faux-Danish furniture of his childhood in the city. He hadn’t been out to the dacha since the end of his homeless period, six years earlier. His mother had apparently redecorated the city flat in the meantime.

“Whose house is this?” Petra said, impressed with the amenities.

“Never mind that.”

There was zero danger of her finding a photograph of him. (Sooner a portrait of Trotsky.) From the tower of beer crates he took two half liters and gave one to Petra. The topmost Neues Deutschland on the outgoing stack was from a Sunday more than three weeks earlier. Imagining his parents alone here on a winter Sunday, childless, their conversation infrequent and scarcely audible, in that older-couple way, he felt his heart veer dangerously close to sympathy. He didn’t regret having made their later years barren—they had no one but themselves to blame for that—but he’d loved them so much, as a child, that the sight of their old furniture saddened him. They were still human beings, still getting old.

He turned on the electric furnace and led Petra down the hall to the room that had once been his. The quick cure for nostalgia would be to bury his face in her pussy; he’d already touched it, through her pants, while they were making out on the train. But she said she wanted to take a bath.

“You don’t have to on my account.”

“It’s been four days.”

He didn’t want to deal with a damp bath towel; it would have to be dried and folded before they left. But it was important to put the girl and her desires first.

“It’s fine,” he assured her pleasantly. “Take a bath.”

He sat down with his beer on his old bed and heard her lock the bathroom door behind her. In the weeks that followed, the click of this lock became the seed of his paranoia: why would she have locked the door when he was the only other person in the house? It was improbable for eight different reasons that she could have known or been involved in what was coming. But why else lock the door, if not to protect herself against it?

Then again, maybe it was just his bad luck that she was immobilized in the bathtub with the water still running, her splashing and the flow in the pipes loud enough to have covered the sound of an approaching vehicle and footsteps, when he heard a pounding on the front door and then a barking: “Volkspolizei!”

The water in the pipes abruptly stopped. Andreas thought about making a run for it, but he was trapped by the fact that Petra was in the tub. Reluctantly, he heaved himself off the bed and went and opened the front door. Two VoPos were backlit by the flashers and headlights of their cruiser.

“Yes?” he said.

“Identification, please.”

“What’s this about?”

“Your identification, please.”

If the policemen had had tails, they wouldn’t have been wagging; if they’d had pointed ears, they would have been flattened back. The senior officer frowned at Andreas’s little blue book and handed it to the junior, who carried it back toward the cruiser.

“Do you have permission to be here?”

“In a certain sense.”

“Are you alone?”

“As you find me.” Andreas beckoned politely. “Would you care to come in?”

“I’ll need to use the telephone.”

“Of course.”

The officer entered circumspectly. Andreas guessed that he was more wary of the house’s owners than of any armed thugs who might be lurking in it.

“This is my parents’ place,” he explained.

“We’re acquainted with the undersecretary. We’re not acquainted with you. No one has permission to be in this house tonight.”

“I’ve been here for fifteen minutes. Your vigilance is commendable.”

“We saw the lights.”

“Really highly commendable.”

From the bathroom came a single plink of falling water; in hindsight, Andreas would find it noteworthy that the officer had shown no interest in the bathroom. The man simply paged through a shabby black notebook, found a number, and dialed it on the undersecretary’s telephone. In the moment, Andreas’s main feeling was a wish that the police would go away and let him get on with eating little Petra. Everything else was so unfortunate that he didn’t want to think about it.

“Mr. Undersecretary?” The officer identified himself and tersely reported the presence of an intruder who claimed to be a relative. Then he said “Yes” several times.

“Tell him I’d like to speak to him,” Andreas said. The officer made a silencing gesture.

“I want to talk to him.”

“Of course, right away,” the officer said to the undersecretary.

Andreas tried to grab the receiver. The officer shoved him in the chest and knocked him to the floor.

“No, he’s trying to take the phone … That’s right … Yes, of course. I’ll tell him … Understood, Mr. Undersecretary.” The officer hung up the phone and looked down at Andreas. “You’re to leave immediately and never come back.”

“Got it.”

“If you ever come back, there will be consequences. The undersecretary wanted to make sure you understand that.”

“He’s not really my father,” Andreas said. “We just happen to have the same last name.”

“Me personally?” the officer said. “I hope you come back, and I hope I’m on duty when you do.”

The younger officer returned and handed Andreas’s ID to the senior, who examined it with his lip curled. Then he flipped it into Andreas’s face. “Lock the door behind you, asshole.”

When the police were gone, he knocked on the bathroom door and told Petra to turn off the light and wait for him. He turned off the other lights and went out into the night, heading toward the train station. At the first bend in the lane, he saw the cruiser parked and dark and gave the officers a little wave. At the next bend, he ducked behind some pine trees to wait until the cruiser drove away. The evening had been damaging, and he wasn’t about to waste it. But when he was finally able to creep back into the dacha and found Petra cowering on his boyhood bed, mewling with fear of the police, he was too angry about his humiliation to care about her pleasure. He ordered her to do this and do that, in the dark, and it ended with her weeping and saying she hated him—a feeling he entirely reciprocated. He never saw her again.

Three weeks later, the German Christian Youth Conference invited him to speak in West Berlin. He presumed (though you could never know for sure; that was the beauty of it) that the conference had been thoroughly infiltrated by his cousin once removed, the spymaster Markus Wolf, because the invitation came forwarded from the Foreign Ministry with a notice to pick up a visa that had already been granted. It was laughably obvious that if he crossed the border he wouldn’t be allowed to reenter the country. Equally obvious was that the invitation was a warning from his father, a punishment for his indiscretion at the dacha.

Everyone else in the country wanted permission to travel even more than they wanted cars. The bait of attending some miserable three-day trade conference in Copenhagen was enough to entice the ordinary citizen to rat out colleagues, siblings, friends. Andreas felt singular in every way, but in none more than his disdain for travel. How the royal Danish poisoner and his lying queen had wanted their son out of the castle! He felt himself to be the rose and fair expectancy of the state, its product and its antic antithesis, and so his first responsibility was to not budge from Berlin. He needed his so-called parents to know that he was still there on Siegfeldstraße, knowing what he knew about them.

But it was lonely to be singular, and loneliness bred paranoia, and he soon reached the point of imagining that Petra had set him up, the whole rigmarole about sex in churches and the need for a bath a ruse to lure him into violating his tacit agreement with his parents. Now every time another at-risk girl appeared at his office door with that familiar burning look in her eyes, he remembered how uncharacteristically selfish he’d been with Petra, and how humiliated he’d been by the police, and instead of obliging the girl he teased her and drove her away. He wondered if he’d been lying to himself about girls forever—if the hatred he’d felt for number fifty-three was not only real but retroactively applicable to numbers one through fifty-two. If, far from indulging in irony at the state’s expense, he’d been seduced by the state at his point of least resistance.

He spent the following spring and summer depressed, and therefore all the more preoccupied with sex, but since he suddenly distrusted both himself and the girls, he denied himself the relief of it. He curtailed his individual conferences and ceased trolling the Jugendklubs for at-risk kids. Though he was jeopardizing the best job an East German in his position could hope to find, he lay on his bed all day and read British novels, detective and otherwise, forbidden and otherwise. (Having been force-fed Steinbeck and Dreiser and Dos Passos by his mother, he had little interest in American writing. Even the best Americans were annoyingly naïve. Life in the U.K. sucked more, in a good way.) Eventually he determined that what had depressed him was his childhood bed, the bed itself, in the Müggelsee house, and the feeling that he’d never left it: that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them. But it was one thing to identify the source of his depression, quite another to do anything about it.

He was seven months celibate on the October afternoon when the church’s young “vicar” came to see him about the girl in the sanctuary. The vicar wore all the vestments of renegade-church cliché—full beard, check; faded jean jacket, check; mod copper crucifix, check—but was usefully insecure in the face of Andreas’s superior street experience.

“I first noticed her two weeks ago,” he said, sitting down on the floor. He seemed to have read in some book that sitting on the floor established rapport and conveyed Christlike humility. “Sometimes she stays in the sanctuary for an hour, sometimes until midnight. Not praying, just doing her homework. I finally asked if we could help her. She looked scared and said she was sorry—she’d thought she was allowed to be here. I told her the church is always open to anyone in need. I wanted to start a conversation, but all she wanted was to hear that she wasn’t breaking any rules.”

“So?”

“Well, you are the youth counselor.”

“The sanctuary isn’t exactly on my beat.”

“It’s understandable that you’re burned out. We haven’t minded your taking some time for yourself.”

“I appreciate it.”

“I’m concerned about the girl, though. I talked to her again yesterday and asked if she was in trouble—my fear is that she’s been abused. She speaks so softly it’s hard to understand her, but she seemed to be saying that the authorities are already aware of her, and so she can’t go to them. Apparently she’s here because she has nowhere else to go.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“She might say more to you than to me.”

“How old is she?”

“Young. Fifteen, sixteen. Also extraordinarily pretty.” Underage, abused, and pretty. Andreas sighed.

“You’ll need to come out of your room at some point,” the vicar suggested.

When Andreas went up to the sanctuary and saw the girl in the next-to-rear pew, he immediately experienced her beauty as an unwelcome complication, a specificity that distracted him from the universal female body part that had interested him for so long. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, unrebelliously dressed, and was sitting with a Free German Youth erectness of posture, a textbook open on her lap. She looked like a good girl, the sort he never saw in the basement. She didn’t raise her head as he approached.

“Will you talk to me?” he said.

She shook her head.

“You talked to the vicar.”

“Only for a minute,” she murmured.

“OK. Why don’t I sit down behind you, where you don’t have to see me. And then, if you—”

“Please don’t do that.”

“All right. I’ll stay in sight.” He took the pew in front of her. “I’m Andreas. I’m a counselor here. Will you tell me your name?”

She shook her head.

“Are you here to pray?”

She smirked. “Is there a God?”

“No, of course not. Where would you get an idea like that?”

“Somebody built this church.”

“Somebody was thinking wishfully. It makes no sense to me.”

She raised her head, as if he’d slightly interested her. “Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?”

“With who? The minister? God’s only a word he uses against the state. Nothing in this country exists except in reference to the state.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“I’m only saying what the state itself says.”

He looked down at her legs, which were of a piece with the rest of her.

“Are you very afraid of getting in trouble?” he said. She shook her head.

“Afraid of getting someone else in trouble, then. Is that it?”

“I come here because this is nowhere. It’s nice to be nowhere for a while.”

“Nowhere is more nowhere than this place, I agree.”

She smiled faintly.

“When you look in the mirror,” he said, “what do you see? Someone pretty?”

“I don’t look in mirrors.”

“What would you see if you did?”

“Nothing good.”

“Something bad? Something harmful?”

She shrugged.

“Why didn’t you want me to sit down behind you?”

“I like to see who I’m talking to.”

“So we are talking. You were only pretending that you weren’t going to talk to me. You were being self-dramatizing—playing games.”

Sudden honest confrontation was part of his bag of counseling tricks. That he was sick of these tricks didn’t mean they didn’t still work.

“I already know I’m bad,” the girl said. “You don’t have to explain it to me.”

“But it must be hard for you that people don’t know how bad you are. They simply don’t believe a girl so pretty can be so bad inside. It must be hard for you to respect people.”

“I have friends.”

“So did I when I was your age. But it doesn’t help, does it? It’s actually worse that people like me. They think I’m funny, they think I’m attractive. Only I know how bad I am inside. I’m extremely bad and extremely important. In fact, I’m the most important person in the country.”

It was encouraging to see her sneer like an adolescent. “You’re not important.”

“Oh, but I am. You just don’t know it. But you do know what it’s like to be important, don’t you. You’re very important yourself. Everyone pays attention to you, everyone wants to be near you because you’re beautiful, and then you harm them. You have to go hide in a church to be nowhere, to give the world a rest from you.”

“I wish you’d leave me alone.”

“Who are you harming? Just say it.”

The girl lowered her head.

“You can tell me,” he said. “I’m an old harmer myself.”

She shivered a little and knit her fingers together on her lap. From outside, the rumble of a truck and the sharp clank of a bad gearbox entered the sanctuary and lingered in the air, which smelled of charred candle wick and tarnished brass. The wooden cross on the wall behind the pulpit seemed to Andreas a once magical object that had lost its mojo through overuse both for and against the state; had been dragged down to the level of sordid accommodation and dreary dissidence. The sanctuary was the very least relevant part of the church; he felt sorry for it.

“My mother,” the girl murmured. The hatred in her voice was hard to square with the notion that she cared that she was doing harm. Andreas knew enough about abuse to guess what this meant.

“Where’s your father?” he asked gently.

“Dead.”

“And your mother remarried.”

She nodded.

“Is she not at home?”

“She’s a night nurse at the hospital.”

He winced; he got the picture.

“You’re safe here,” he said. “This really is nowhere. There’s no one you can hurt here. It’s all right if you tell me your name. It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m Annagret,” the girl said.

Their initial conversation was analogous, in its swiftness and directness, to his seductions, but in spirit it was just the opposite. Annagret’s beauty was so striking, so far outside the norm, that it seemed like a direct affront to the Republic of Bad Taste. It shouldn’t have existed, it upset the orderly universe at whose center he’d always placed himself; it frightened him. He was twenty-seven years old, and (unless you counted his mother when he was little) he’d never been in love, because he had yet to meet—had stopped even trying to imagine—a girl who was worth it. But here one was.

He saw her again on each of the following three evenings. He felt bad about looking forward to it just because she was so pretty, but there was nothing he could do about that. On the second night, to deepen her trust in him, he made a point of telling her that he’d slept with dozens of girls at the church. “It was a kind of addiction,” he said, “but I had strict limits. I need you to believe that you personally are way outside all of them.”

This was the truth but also, deep down, a total lie, and Annagret called him on it. “Everyone thinks they have strict limits,” she said, “until they cross them.”

“Let me be the person who proves to you that some limits really are strict.”

“People say this church is a hangout for people with no morality. I didn’t see how that could be true—after all, it’s a church. But now you’re telling me it is true.”

“I’m sorry to be the one to disillusion you.”

“There’s something wrong with this country.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“The Judo Club was bad enough. But to hear it’s in the church …”

Annagret had an older sister, Tanja, who’d excelled at judo as an Oberschule student. Both sisters were university-tracked, by virtue of their test scores and their class credentials, but Tanja was boy crazy and overdid the sports thing and ended up working as a secretary after her Abitur, spending all her free time either dancing at clubs or training and coaching at the sports center. Annagret was seven years younger and not as athletic as her sister, but they were a judo family and she joined the local club when she was twelve.

A regular at the sports center was a handsome older guy, Horst, who owned a large motorcycle. He was maybe thirty and was apparently married only to his bike. He came to the center mostly to maintain his impressive buffness—Annagret initially thought there was something conceited about the way he smiled at her—but he also played handball and liked to watch the advanced judo students sparring, and by and by Tanja managed to score a date with him and his bike. This led to a second date and then a third, at which point a misfortune occurred: Horst met their mother. After that, instead of taking Tanja away on his bike, he wanted to see her at home, in their tiny shitty flat, with Annagret and the mother.

Inwardly, the mother was a hard and disappointed person, the widow of a truck mechanic who’d died wretchedly of a brain tumor, but outwardly she was thirty-eight and pretty—not only prettier than Tanja but also closer in age to Horst. Ever since Tanja had failed her by not pursuing her education, the two of them had quarreled about everything imaginable, which now included Horst, who the mother thought was too old for Tanja. When it became evident that Horst preferred her to Tanja, she didn’t see how it was her fault. Annagret was luckily not at home on the fateful afternoon when Tanja stood up and said she needed air and asked Horst to take her out on his bike. Horst said there was a painful matter that the three of them needed to discuss. There were better ways for him to have handled the situation, but probably no good way. Tanja slammed the door behind her and didn’t return for three days. As soon as she could, she relocated to Leipzig.

After Horst and Annagret’s mother were married, the three of them moved to a notably roomy flat where Annagret had a bedroom of her own. She felt bad for Tanja and disapproving of her mother, but her stepfather fascinated her. His job, as a labor-collective leader at the city’s largest power plant, was good but not quite so good as to explain the way he had of making things happen: the powerful bike, the roomy flat, the oranges and Brazil nuts and Michael Jackson records he sometimes brought home. From her description of him, Andreas had the impression that he was one of those people whose self-love was untempered by shame and thus fully contagious. Certainly Annagret liked to be around him. He gave her rides on his motorcycle to and from the sports center. He taught her how to ride it by herself, in a parking lot. She tried to teach him some judo in return, but his upper body was so disproportionately developed that he was bad at falling. In the evening, after her mother had left for her night shift, she explained the extra-credit work she was doing in the hope of attending an Erweiterte Oberschule; she was impressed by his quick comprehension and told him he should have gone to an EOS himself. Before long, she considered him one of her best friends. As a bonus, this pleased her mother, who hated her nursing job and seemed increasingly worn out by it and was grateful that her husband and daughter got along well. Tanja may have been lost, but Annagret was the good girl, her mother’s hope for the future of her family.

And then one night, in the notably roomy flat, Horst came tapping on her bedroom door before she’d turned her light out. “Are you decent?” he said playfully.

“I’m in my pajamas,” she said.

He came in and pulled up a chair by her bed. He had a very large head—Annagret couldn’t explain it to Andreas, but the largeness of Horst’s head seemed to her the reason that everything always worked out to his advantage. Oh, he has such a splendid head, let’s just give him what he wants. Something like that. On this particular night, his large head was flushed from drinking.

“I’m sorry if I smell like beer,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be able to smell it if I could have one myself.”

“You sound like you know quite a bit about beer drinking.”

“Oh, it’s just what they say.”

“You could have a beer if you stopped training, but you won’t stop training, so you can’t have a beer.”

She liked the joking way they had together. “But you train, and you drink beer.”

“I only drank so much tonight because I have something serious to say to you.”

She looked at his large head and saw that something, indeed, was different in his face tonight. A kind of ill-controlled anguish in his eyes. Also, his hands were shaking.

“What is it?” she said, worried.

“Can you keep a secret?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you have to, because you’re the only person I can tell, and if you don’t keep the secret we’re all in trouble.”

She thought about this. “Why do you have to tell me?”

“Because it concerns you. It’s about your mother. Will you keep a secret?”

“I can try.”

Horst took a large breath that came out again beer-smelling. “Your mother is a drug addict,” he said. “I married a drug addict. She steals narcotics from the hospital and uses them when she’s there and also when she’s home. Did you know that?”

“No,” Annagret said. But she was inclined to believe it. More and more often lately, there was something dulled about her mother.

“She’s very expert at pilfering,” Horst said. “No one at the hospital suspects.”

“We need to talk to her about it and tell her to stop.”

“Addicts don’t stop without treatment. If she asks for treatment, the authorities will know she was stealing.”

“But they’ll be happy that she’s honest and trying to get better.”

“Well, unfortunately, there’s another matter. An even bigger secret. Not even your mother knows this secret. Can I tell it to you?”

He was one of her best friends, and so, after a hesitation, she said yes.

“I took an oath that I would never tell anyone,” Horst said. “I’m breaking that oath by telling you. For some years now, I’ve worked informally for the Ministry for State Security. I’m a well-trusted unofficial collaborator. There’s an officer I meet with from time to time. I pass along information about my workers and especially about my superiors. This is necessary because the power plant is vital to our national security. I’m very fortunate to have a good relationship with the ministry. You and your mother are very fortunate that I do. But do you understand what this means?”

“No.”

“We owe our privileges to the ministry. How do you think my officer will feel if he learns that my wife is a thief and a drug addict? He’ll think I’m not trustworthy. We could lose this flat, and I could lose my position.”

“But you could just tell the officer the truth about Mother. It’s not your fault.”

“If I tell him, your mother will lose her job. She’ll probably go to prison. Is that what you want?”

“Of course not.”

“So we have to keep everything secret.”

“But now I wish I didn’t know! Why did I have to know?”

“Because you need to help me keep the secret. Your mother betrayed us by breaking the law. You and I are the family now. She is the threat to it. We need to make sure she doesn’t destroy it.”

“We have to try to help her.”

“You matter more to me than she does now. You are the woman in my life. See here.” He put a hand on her belly and splayed his fingers. “You’ve become a woman.”

The hand on her belly frightened her, but not as much as what he’d told her.

“A very beautiful woman,” he added huskily.

“I’m feeling ticklish.”

He closed his eyes and didn’t take away his hand. “Everything has to be secret,” he said. “I can protect you, but you have to trust me.”

“Can’t we just tell Mother?”

“No. One thing will lead to another, and she’ll end up in jail. We’re safer if she steals and takes drugs—she’s very good at not getting caught.”

“But if you tell her you work for the ministry, she’ll understand why she has to stop.”

“I don’t trust her. She’s betrayed us already. I have to trust you instead.”

She felt she might cry soon; her breaths were coming faster.

“You shouldn’t put your hand on me,” she said. “It feels wrong.”

“Maybe, yes, wrong, a little bit, considering our age difference.” He nodded his big head. “But look how much I trust you. We can do something that’s maybe a little bit wrong because I know you won’t tell anyone.”

“I might tell someone.”

“No. You’d have to expose our secrets, and you can’t do that.”

“Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me anything.”

“But I did. I had to. And now we have secrets together. Just you and me. Can I trust you?”

Her eyes filled. “I don’t know.”

“Tell me a secret of your own. Then I’ll know I can trust you.”

“I don’t have any secrets.”

“Then show me something secret. What’s the most secret thing you can show me?”

The hand on her belly inched southward, and her heart began to hammer.

“Is it this?” he said. “Is this your most secret thing?”

“I don’t know,” she whimpered, very frightened and confused.

“It’s all right. You don’t have to show me. It’s enough that you let me feel it.” Through his hand, she could feel his whole body relax. “I trust you now.”

For Annagret, the terrible thing was that she’d liked what followed, at least for a while. For a while, it was merely like a closer form of friendship. They still joked together, she still told him everything about her days at school, they still went riding together and trained at the sports club. It was ordinary life but with a secret, an extremely grown-up secret thing that happened after she’d put on her pajamas and gone to bed. While he touched her, he kept saying how beautiful she was, what perfect beauty. And because, for a while, he didn’t touch her with any part of himself except his hand, she felt as if she herself were to blame, as if the whole thing had actually been her idea, as if she’d done this to them with her beauty and the only way to make it stop was to submit to it and experience release. She hated her body for wanting release even more than she hated it for its supposed beauty, but somehow the hatred made it all the more urgent. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to need her. She was very bad. And maybe it made sense that she was very bad, being the daughter of a drug addict. She’d casually asked her mother if she was ever tempted to take the drugs she gave her patients. Every once in a while, yes, her mother had answered smoothly, if a little bit of something at the hospital was left unused, she or one of the other nurses might take it to calm their nerves, but it didn’t mean the person was an addict. Annagret hadn’t said anything about anyone being an addict.

For Andreas the terrible thing was how much the stepfather’s pussycentrism reminded him of his own. He felt only somewhat less implicated when Annagret went on to tell him that her weeks of being touched had been merely a prelude to Horst’s unzipping of his pants. It was bound to happen sometime, and yet it broke the spell that she’d been under; it introduced a third party to their secret. She didn’t like this third party. She realized that it must have been spying on the two of them all along, biding its time, manipulating them like a case officer. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want it near her, and when it tried to assert its authority she became afraid of being at home at night. But what could she do? The pecker knew her secrets. It knew that, if only for a while, she’d looked forward to being tampered with. She’d halfwittingly become its unofficial collaborator; she’d tacitly sworn an oath. She wondered if her mother took narcotics so as not to know which body the pecker really wanted. The pecker knew all about her mother’s pilferage, and the pecker was empowered by the ministry, and so she couldn’t go to the authorities. They’d put her mother in jail and leave her alone with the pecker. The same thing would happen if she told her mother, because her mother would accuse her husband, and the pecker would have her jailed. And maybe her mother deserved to be jailed, but not if it meant that Annagret remained at home and kept harming her.

This was the latest chapter of her unfinished story, and it came out on the fourth evening of Andreas’s counseling. When Annagret had finished her confession, in the chill of the sanctuary, she began to weep. Seeing someone so beautiful weeping, seeing her press her fists to her eyes like an infant, Andreas was gripped by an unfamiliar physical sensation. He was such a laugher, such an ironist, such an artist of unseriousness, that he didn’t even recognize what was happening to him: he, too, was starting to cry. But he did recognize why. He was crying for himself—for what had happened to him as a child. He’d heard many stories of childhood sexual abuse before, but never from such a good girl, never from a girl with perfect hair and skin and bone structure. Annagret’s beauty had broken something open in him. He felt that he was just like her. And so he was also crying because he loved her, and because he couldn’t have her.

“Can you help me?” she whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“Why did I tell you so much if you can’t help me? Why did you keep asking me questions? You acted like you could help me.”

He shook his head and said nothing. She put a hand on his shoulder, very lightly, but even a light touch from her was terrible. He bowed forward, shaking with sobs. “I’m so sad for you.”

“But now you see what I mean. I cause harm.”

“No.”

“Maybe I should just be his girlfriend. Make him divorce my mother and be his girlfriend.”

“No.” He pulled himself together and wiped his face. “No, he’s a sick fucker. I know it because I’m a little bit sick myself. I can extrapolate.”

“You might have done the same thing he did …”

“Never. I swear to you. I’m like you, not him.”

“But … if you’re a little sick and you’re like me, it means that I must be a little bit sick.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You’re right, though. I should go home and be his girlfriend. Since I’m so sick. Thank you for your help, Mr. Counselor.”

He took her by the shoulders and made her look at him. There was nothing but distrust in her eyes now. “I want to be your friend,” he said.

“We all know where being friends goes.”

“You’re wrong. Stay here, and let’s think. Be my friend.”

She pulled away from him and crossed her arms tightly.

“We can go directly to the Stasi,” he said. “He broke his oath to them. The minute they think he might embarrass them, they’ll drop him like a hot potato. As far as they’re concerned, he’s just some bottom-tier collaborator—he’s nobody.”

“No,” she said. “They’ll think I’m lying. I didn’t tell you everything I did—it’s too embarrassing. I did things to interest him.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re fifteen. In the eyes of the law, you have no responsibility. Unless he’s very stupid, he’s got to be scared out of his mind right now. You’ve got all the power.”

“But even if they believe me, everybody’s life is ruined, including mine. I won’t have a home, I won’t be able to go to university. Even my sister will hate me. I think it’s better if I just give him what he wants until I’m old enough to move away.”

“That’s what you want.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be here if that was what I wanted. But now I see that nobody can help me.”

Andreas didn’t know what to say. What he wanted was for her to come and live in the basement of the rectory with him. He could protect her, homeschool her, practice English with her, train her as a counselor for at-risk youth, and be her friend, the way King Lear imagined life with Cordelia, following the news of the court from a distance, laughing at who was in, who was out. Maybe in time they’d be a couple, the couple in the basement, leading their own private life.

“We can find room for you here,” he said.

She shook her head again. “He’s already upset that I don’t come home until midnight. He thinks I’m out with boys. If I didn’t come home at all, he’d turn my mother in.”

“He said that to you?”

“He’s an evil person. For a long time, I thought the opposite, but not anymore. Now everything he says to me is some kind of threat. He’s not going to stop until he gets everything he wants.”

A different sensation, not tears, a wave of hatred, came over Andreas. “I can kill him,” he said.

“That’s not what I meant by helping me.”

“Somebody’s life has to be ruined,” he said, pursuing the logic of his hatred. “Why not his and mine? I’m already in a kind of prison. The food can’t be any worse in a real prison. I can read books at state expense. You can go to school and help your mother with her problem.”

She made a derisive sound. “That’s a good plan. Trying to kill a bodybuilder.”

“Obviously I wouldn’t warn him in advance.”

She looked at him as if he couldn’t possibly be serious. All his life, until now, she would have been right. Levity was his métier. But it was harder to see the ridiculous side of the casual destruction of lives in the Republic when the life in question was Annagret’s. He was already falling in love with this girl, and there was nothing he could do with the feeling, no way to act on it, no way to make her believe that she should trust him. She must have seen some of this in his face, because her own expression changed.

“You can’t kill him,” she said quietly. “He’s just very sick. Everyone in my family is sick, everyone I touch is sick, including me. I just need help.”

“There is no help for you in this country.”

“That can’t be right.”

“It’s the truth.”

She stared for a while at the pews in front of them or at the cross behind the altar, forlorn and murkily lit. After a time, her breaths became quicker and sharper. “I wouldn’t cry if he died,” she said. “But I should be the one to do it, and I could never do it. Never, never. I’d sooner be his girlfriend.”

On more careful reflection, Andreas didn’t really want to kill Horst, either. He could imagine surviving prison, but the label murderer didn’t accord with his self-image. The label would follow him forever, he wouldn’t be able to like himself as much as he did now, and neither would other people. It was all very well to be a Assibräuteaufreißer, a troller for sex with the antisocial—the label was appropriately ridiculous. But murderer was not.

“So,” Annagret said, standing up. “It’s nice of you to offer. It was nice of you to listen to my story and not be too disgusted.”

“Wait, though,” he said, because another thought had occurred to him: if she were his accomplice, he might not automatically be caught, and even if he were caught her beauty and his love for her would forever adhere to what the two of them had done. He wouldn’t simply be a murderer; he’d be the person who’d eliminated the molester of this singular girl.

“Can you trust me?” he said.

“I like that I can talk to you. I don’t think you’re going to tell anyone my secrets.”

These weren’t the words he wanted to hear. They made him ashamed of his fantasy of homeschooling her in the basement.

“I don’t want to be your girlfriend,” she added, “if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend.”

“You’re fifteen, I’m twenty-seven. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“I’m sure you have your own story, I’m sure it’s very interesting.”

“Do you want to hear it?”

“No. I just want to be normal again.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

Her expression became desolate. The natural thing would have been to put his arms around her and console her, but nothing about their situation was natural. He felt completely powerless—another new sensation and one he didn’t like one bit. He figured that she was about to walk away and never come back. But instead she drew a stabilizing breath and said, without looking at him, “How would you do it?”

In a low, dull voice, as if in a trance, he told her how. She had to stop coming to the church and go home and lie to Horst. She had to say that she’d been going to a church to sit by herself and pray and seek God’s guidance, and that her mind was clearer now. She was ready to give herself fully to Horst, but she couldn’t do it at home, out of respect for her mother. She knew a better place, a romantic place, a safe place where some of her friends went on weekends to drink beer and make out. If he cared about her feelings, he would take her there.

“You know a place like that?”

“I do,” Andreas said.

“Why would you do this for me?”

“Who better to do it for? You deserve a good life. I’m willing to take a risk for that.”

“It’s not a risk. It’s guaranteed—they’d definitely catch you.”

“OK, thought experiment: if it were guaranteed they wouldn’t, would you let me do it?”

“I’m the one who should be killed. I’ve been doing something terrible to my sister and my mother.”

He sighed. “I like you a lot, Annagret. I’m not so fond of the self-dramatizing, though.”

This was the right thing to have said—he saw it immediately. Not a full-bore burning look from her but unmistakably a spark of fire. He almost resented his loins for warming at the sight; he didn’t want this to be just another seduction. He wanted her to be the way out of the wasteland of seduction he’d been living in.

“I could never do it,” she said, turning away from him.

“Sure. We’re just talking.”

“You self-dramatize, too. You said you were the most important person in the country.”

He could have pointed out that such a ridiculous claim could only be ironic, but he saw that this was only half true. Irony was slippery, the sincerity of Annagret was firm. “You’re right,” he said gratefully. “I self-dramatize, too. It’s another way the two of us are alike.”

She gave a petulant shrug.

“But since we’re only talking, how well do you think you could ride a motorbike?”

“I just want to be normal again. I don’t want to be like you.”

“OK. We’ll try to make you normal again. But it would help if you could ride his motorbike. I’ve never been on one myself.”

“Riding it is sort of like judo,” she said. “You try to go with it, not against it.”

Sweet judo girl. She continued like this, closing the door on him and then opening it a little, rejecting possibilities that she then turned around and allowed, until it got so late that she had to go home. They agreed that there was no point in her returning to the church unless she was ready to act on their plan or move into the basement. These were the only two ideas either of them had.

Once she stopped coming to the church, Andreas had no way to communicate with her. For the following six afternoons, he went up to the sanctuary and waited until dinnertime. He was pretty sure he’d never see her again. She was just a schoolgirl, she didn’t care about him, or at least not enough, and she didn’t hate her stepfather as murderously as he did. She would lose her nerve—either go alone to the Stasi or submit to worse abuse. As the afternoons passed, Andreas felt some relief at the prospect. In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable. What tormented him was the thought that he wouldn’t lay eyes on Annagret again. He pictured her studiously practicing her throws at the Judo Club, being the good girl, and felt very sorry for himself. He refused to picture what might be happening to her at home at night.

She showed up on the seventh afternoon, looking pale and starved and wearing the same ugly rain jacket that half the teenagers in the Republic were wearing. A nasty cold drizzle was falling on Siegfeldstraße. She took the rearmost pew and bowed her head and kneaded her pasty, bitten hands. Seeing her again, after a week of merely imagining her, Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.

He sat down not very close to her. For a long time, for several minutes, they didn’t speak. Love altered the way he perceived her uneven mouth-breathing and her trembling hands—again the disparity between the largeness of her mattering and the ordinariness of the sounds she made, the everydayness of her schoolgirl fingers. He had the strange thought that it was wrong, wrong as in evil, to think of killing a man who, in however sick a way, was also in love with her; that he instead ought to have compassion for that man.

“So I have to be at the Judo Club,” she said finally. “I can’t stay long.”

“It’s good to see you,” he said. Love made this feel like the most remarkably true statement he’d ever made.

“So just tell me what to do.”

“Maybe now is not a good time. Maybe you want to come back some other day.”

She shook her head, and some of her hair fell over her face. She didn’t push it back. “Just tell me what to do.”

“Shit,” he said honestly. “I’m as scared as you are.”

“Not possible.”

“Why not just run away? Come and live here. We’ll find a room for you.”

She began to shiver more violently. “If you won’t help me, I’ll do it myself. You think you’re bad, but I’m the bad one.”

“No, here, here.” He took her shaking hands in his own. They were icy and so ordinary, so ordinary; he loved them. “You’re a very good person. You’re just in a bad dream.”

She turned her face to him, and through her hair he saw the burning look, the full-bore burning look. “Will you help me out of it?”

“It’s what you want?”

“You said you’d help me.”

Could anyone be worth it? He did wonder, but he set down her hands and took a hand-drawn map from his jacket pocket.

“This is where the house is,” he said. “You’ll need to take the S-Bahn out there by yourself first, so you’ll know exactly where you’re going. Do it after dark and watch out for cops. When you go back there on the motorcycle, have him cut the lights at the last corner, and then go all the way back behind the house. The driveway curves around behind. And then make sure you take your helmets off. What night are we talking about?”

“Thursday.”

“What time does your mother’s shift start?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Don’t go home for dinner. Tell him you’ll meet him by his bike at nine thirty. You don’t want anyone to see you leaving the building with him.”

“OK. Where will you be?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just head for the back door. Everything will be like we talked about.”

She convulsed a little, as if she might retch, but she mastered herself and put the map in her jacket pocket. “Is that all?” she said.

“You suggested it to him. The date.”

She nodded quickly.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Is that all?”

“Just one other thing. Will you look at me?”

She remained hunched over, like a dog that had been bad, but she turned her head.

“You have to be honest with me,” he said. “Are you doing this because I want it, or because you want it?”

“What does it matter?”

“A lot. Everything.”

She looked down at her lap again. “I just want it to be over. Either way.”

“You know we won’t be able to see each other for a very long time, whichever way it goes. No contact of any kind.”

“That’s almost better.”

“Think about it, though. If you came here instead, we could see each other every day.”

“I don’t think that’s better.”

He looked up at the stained ceiling of the sanctuary and considered what a cosmic joke it was that the first person his heart had freely chosen was someone he not only couldn’t have but wouldn’t even be allowed to see. And yet he felt all right about it. His powerlessness itself was sweet. Who would have guessed that? Various clichés about love, stupid adages and song lyrics, flashed through his head.

“I’m late for judo,” Annagret said. “I have to go.”

He closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to see her leave.

It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who’d stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less blameworthy than his.

An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You’d been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn’t remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your consciousness opened its little eyes for the first time and discovered that you were headlong in love with your mom. Being an exceptionally bright and receptive little boy, you also already believed in the historical inevitability of the socialist workers’ state. Your mother herself, in her secret heart, might not have believed in it, but you did. You’d been a person long before you had a conscious self. Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father’s dick had ever gone, you’d squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you’d sucked on her tits whenever you felt like it, and you couldn’t for the life of you remember it. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go.

Andreas’s father was the second-youngest Party member ever elevated to the Central Committee, and he had the most creative job in the Republic. As the chief state economist, he was responsible for the wholesale massaging of data, for demonstrating increases in productivity where there weren’t any, for balancing a budget that every year drifted farther from reality, for adjusting official exchange rates to maximize the budgetary impact of whatever hard currency the Republic could finagle or extort, for magnifying the economy’s few successes and making optimistic excuses for its many failures. The top Party leaders could afford to be stupid or cynical about his numbers, but he himself had to believe in the story they told. This required political conviction, self-deception, and, perhaps especially, self-pity.

A refrain of Andreas’s childhood was his father’s litany of the unfairnesses with which the German workers’ state contended. The Nazis had persecuted the Communists and nearly destroyed the Soviet Union, which had then been fully justified in exacting reparations, and America had diverted scarce resources from its own oppressed working class and sent them to West Germany to create an illusion of prosperity, luring weak and misguided East Germans across the border. “No state in world history has ever started at a greater disadvantage than ours,” he liked to say. “Beginning with sheer rubble, and with every hand raised against us, we’ve succeeded in feeding and clothing and housing and educating our citizens and providing every one of them with a level of security that only the wealthiest in the West enjoy.” The phrase every hand raised against us never failed to move Andreas. His father seemed to him the greatest of men, the wise and kindhearted champion of the conspired-against and spat-upon German worker. Was there anything more worthy of sympathy than a suffering underdog nation persevering and triumphing through sheer faith in itself? With every hand raised against it?

His father was overworked, however, and traveled a lot to Moscow and to other Eastern Bloc countries. Andreas’s real love affair was with his mother, Katya, who was no less perfect and much more available. She was pretty and lively and quick; rigid only in her politics. She had boyishly short hair of unrivaled redness, blazing but natural-looking redness, the product of a Western bottle obtainable only by the very privileged. She was a jewel of the Republic, a person of great physical and intellectual charm who’d elected to stay behind while others like her were getting out. Nobody toed the Party line with greater ease. Andreas had gone to lectures of hers and seen the hold she had on her classes, the way she mesmerized them with the redness of her hair and the torrent of words she delivered without notes. She could quote whole chunks of Shakespeare from memory, whatever random lines her thought process happened to call for, and then freely translate them into German for the slower students, and everything she said was shot through with orthodoxy: the Danish tragedy a parable of false consciousness and its downfall, Polonius a travesty of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the blond prince a prophetic prefigurement of Marx, Horatio his Engels, and Fortinbras the Lenin-like fulfiller and guarantor of revolutionary consciousness, arriving at the Danish equivalent of the Finland Station. If anyone was put off by how obviously well Katya thought of herself, if anyone found her liveliness unsettling (safety lay in drabness), she had her position as chair of her division’s political oversight committee to set their minds at rest.

She also came from heroic stock. In 1933, after the burning of the Reichstag and the banning of the Communist Party, the smart or lucky party leaders fled to the Soviet Union for advanced training by the NKVD while the others dispersed across Europe. Katya’s mother held a British passport and managed to emigrate to Liverpool with her husband and their two girls. The father found work at the dockyards and did enough spying for the Soviets to stay in their good graces; Katya claimed to remember Kim Philby coming to dinner once. When the war broke out, the family was politely but firmly relocated to the Welsh countryside and waited out the war there. Minus Katya’s older sister, who’d married a swing-band leader, the parents returned to East Berlin, marched in a celebratory parade, received public commendations for their resistance to fascism, and then were quietly exiled to Rostock by the NKVD-trained leaders whom the Soviets had installed in power. Only Katya was allowed to remain in Berlin, because she was a student. Her father hanged himself in Rostock in 1948; her mother had a nervous breakdown and was warehoused in a locked ward until she, too, died. Andreas later came to think it possible that the secret police had assisted his grandfather’s suicide and his grandmother’s breakdown, but such consolation was politically foreclosed to Katya. Her own star rose with the eclipse of her parents, who could now safely be remembered as martyrs. She became a full professor and eventually married a university colleague who’d weathered the war in the Soviet Union, along with his Wolf relatives, and learned his economics there.

Nothing about Andreas’s childhood with her was ordinary. She permitted him everything, and in return she required only that he be with her constantly, asked only that he be delighted with her. The delight came naturally to him. Her tenure at the university was in Anglistik, and from the beginning she spoke both German and English at home with him, best of all in the same sentence. Mixing up the two languages was endless fun. Du hast ein bloody awful mess gemacht! The Vereinigten Staaten are rotten! Is that a fart oder eine Ausfahrt I smell? Willst du ein otheres Stück creamcake? What goeth in thy little head on? She refused to entrust him to day care, because she wanted him all to herself, and she had the privilege to get away with it. He started reading so young he didn’t remember learning to do it. He did remember sleeping in her bed when his father was away; also remembered his father’s snoring when he tried to join the two of them at night, remembered feeling scared of the snores, remembered her getting up and taking him back to his room and sleeping with him there. He was apparently incapable of doing anything she didn’t like. When he had a tantrum, she sat down on the floor and cried with him, and if this upset him all the more, she became all the more upset herself, until finally the funniness of her make-believe distress distracted him from his own distress. Then he laughed, and she laughed with him.

One time he got so angry at her that he kicked her in the shin, and she stumbled around the living room in make-believe agony, crying, in English, “A hit, a palpable hit!” It was so funny and infuriating that he ran and kicked her again, harder. This time she collapsed on the floor and lay motionless. He giggled and thought about kicking her one more time, since they were having so much fun. But when she continued not to move he became worried and kneeled down by her face. She was breathing, not dead, but there was a strange empty look in her eyes. “Mama?”

“Do you like to be kicked?” she said in a low monotone.

“No.”

She didn’t say anything more, but he was highly precocious and immediately felt ashamed of kicking her. She never had to tell him what not to do, and she never did. He began to paw and prod her, trying to rouse her, saying, “Mama, Mama, I’m sorry I kicked you, please get up.” But now she was weeping—real tears, not make-believe. He stopped pawing her and didn’t know what to do. He ran to his bedroom and did some crying of his own, hoping she would hear him. He ended up howling, but she still didn’t come to him. He stopped crying and went back to the living room. She was still on the floor, in the exact same position, her eyes open.

“Mama?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she murmured.

“I didn’t hurt you?”

“You’re perfect. The world isn’t.”

She didn’t move. The only thing he could think to do was to go back to his room and lie very still, like her. But this was boring, so he opened a book. He was still reading it when he heard his father come home. “Katya? Katya!” His father’s footsteps sounded stern and angry. Then Andreas heard a slap. After a moment, a second slap. Then his father’s footsteps again, and then his mother’s, then a clatter of pots and pans. When he went out to the kitchen, his mother gave him a warm smile, her familiar warm smile, and asked what he’d been reading. At dinner the parental conversation was the same as ever, his father mentioning the name of some person, his mother saying something funny and slightly mean about this person, his father replying “From each according to his ability” or something similarly sententious and correct, his mother turning to Andreas and giving him the special wink she liked to give him. How he loved her! Loved both of them! The earlier scene had been a bad dream.

Many of his other early memories were of attending committee meetings at the university with her. She gave him a chair in the corner of the meeting room, away from the table, and he precociously read chapter-books—in German, Werner Schmoll, Nackt unter Wölfen, Kleine Shakespeare-Fabeln für junge Leser; in English, Robin Hood and Steinbeck—while the gathered professors outdid one another in proposing new ways to align the Anglistik curriculum with class struggle and better serve the German worker. Probably no meetings at the university were more suffocatingly doctrinaire, because no department was more inessential and embattled. Andreas developed an almost telepathic connection with his mother; he knew exactly when to look up from his book and receive her special wink, the wink that told him that she and he were suffering together and together were smarter than anyone else. Her colleagues probably didn’t love having a child in the room, but Andreas had a preternaturally long attention span and was so in tune with his mother that he knew what might embarrass her and never did it. Only in extreme situations did he get up and tug on her sleeve so that she could take him to the ladies’ room to pee.

At one of the longest of these meetings—so Katya’s story went; Andreas didn’t remember it—he became too drowsy to read and nestled his head on the armrest of his chair. One of Katya’s colleagues, trying to be tactful in the presence of her son, and presumably unaware of his language skills, suggested in English that perhaps the boy should go lay down in her office. According to Katya, Andreas immediately sat up straight and shouted out, in English: “To say ‘lay’ when you mean ‘lie’ is a lie!” It was true that he’d learned the distinction between lie and lay at some point, and that his estimation of his own intelligence was very high, but he still couldn’t believe that he’d been clever enough, at six, to say such a thing. Katya insisted that he had. It was one of many precocity stories that she liked to retell: how her six-year-old’s English was better than her tenured colleague’s. Her retellings didn’t embarrass Andreas as much as he later came to feel they should have. He learned early to tune out her pride in him, to take it as a given and move on.

He saw less of her as he advanced through the regimentations and indoctrinations of lower school and afterschool programs, but by then he was already convinced that he had the world’s best parents. He still loved coming home and matching wits with his mother bilingually, he was better able now to read her favorite plays and novels and be the person his father wasn’t, a person who read literature, and although he could also see better that she wasn’t entirely stable (there were further mental collapses, on the floor of her study, in the bathtub, and occasional unaccountable absences followed by unlikely explanations) he felt a kind of noblesse oblige toward his friends and classmates, taking it as a given that their mothers were less wonderful than his. This conviction persisted until puberty.

In theory, psychologists were unnecessary in the Republic of Bad Taste, because neurosis was a bourgeois malady, a morbid expression of contradictions that by definition could not exist in a perfect workers’ state. Nevertheless, there were psychologists, a few of them, and when Andreas was fifteen his father arranged for him to see one of them. He stood accused of having tried to kill himself, but his presenting symptom was excessive masturbation. In his opinion, excess was in the eye of the beholder, and in his mother’s opinion he was going through a natural adolescent phase, but he allowed that his father might be right in thinking otherwise. Ever since he’d discovered a secret passageway out of self-alienation, in the form of giving himself pleasure while also receiving it, he’d increasingly resented any activity that took him away from it.

The most time-consuming of these was football. No sport was less interesting to the East German intelligentsia, but by the age of ten Andreas had already absorbed his mother’s disdain for the intelligentsia. He argued to his father that the Republic was a workers’ state and football the sport of the working masses, but this was a cynical argument, worthy of his mother. Football’s real attraction was that it separated him from classmates who fancied themselves interesting but weren’t. He compelled his best friend, Joachim, for whom he was the glass of fashion and the mold of form, to sign on with him. They went to a sports center agreeably distant from Karl-Marx-Allee, and with their talk of Beckenbauer and Bayern München they made their classmates feel left out. Later on, after he saw the ghost, Andreas pursued the sport obsessively, practicing with his clubmates at the sports center and by himself at the Weberwiese, because he imagined himself as a star striker and it spared him from thinking about the ghost.

But he was never going to be a star striker, and the ease of masturbation only heightened his frustration with the defenders who kept thwarting his attempts to score. By himself, in his room, he could score at will. There, the only frustration was that he became bored and depressed when he’d scored too many times and couldn’t do it again for a while.

To sustain his interest, he had the inspiration of making pencil drawings of naked girls. His first drawings were extremely crude, but he discovered that he had some talent, especially when he could work from a model in an illustrated magazine, undressing her as he copied, and that by drawing with one hand and touching himself with the other he could prolong the pleasurable suspense for hours. The less successful drawings he came on, balled up, and threw away. The better ones he saved and improved and delayed adding filthy captions to, because, although the idealized faces and bodies remained lovely to him, the words he imputed to them embarrassed him the next day.

He informed his parents that he was quitting football. His mother approved ipso facto of everything he did, but his father said that if he quit he would have to find other healthful and commensurately time-consuming activities, and so, one evening, on the way home from practice, he jumped off the Rhinstraße bridge and down into the trashy bushes where, as it happened, he’d last seen the ghost. He broke his ankle and told his parents that he’d jumped on a stupid dare.

The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn’t do today really could be put off until tomorrow. Every other commodity may have been scarce, but never time, especially if you had a broken ankle and were extremely intelligent. Homework was a laugh for a boy who’d been reading since three and doing multiplication since five, there was a limit to the pleasure he could take in entertaining the boys at school with his intelligence, the girls didn’t interest him, and ever since he’d seen the ghost he’d stopped enjoying conversations with his mother. She was as interesting as ever, she dangled her interestingness at the dinner table like a piece of luscious fruit, but he’d lost his appetite for it. He lived in a vast proletarian desert of time and boringness, and so he didn’t see anything wrong or excessive in devoting a good chunk of each day to producing beauty with his hands, transforming blank paper into female faces that owed their very existence to him, transforming his dinky worm into something big and hard. He became so unashamed of his drawings that he took to working on the faces on the living-room sofa, sometimes touching his pants to maintain a moderate level of stimulation, sometimes becoming so absorbed in his art that he forgot to be stimulated.

“Whose face is that?” his mother asked him one day, looking over his shoulder. Her tone was coy.

“No one’s,” he said. “It’s just a face.”

“It must be someone’s face. Is it a girl you know at school?”

“No.”

“You seem very practiced. Is this what you’ve been working on with your door closed?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have other drawings that I can see?”

“No.”

“I’m really impressed with your talent. Can’t I see your other drawings?”

“I throw them away when I’m done with them.”

“You have no others?”

“That’s right.”

His mother frowned. “Are you doing this to hurt me?”

“Honestly, the thought of you never crosses my mind. You should be worried if it did.”

“I can protect you,” she said, “but you have to talk to me.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“It’s normal to be excited by pictures at your age. It’s healthy to have urges at your age. I’m just interested in knowing whose face that is.”

“Mother, it’s an invented face.”

“Your drawing looks so personal, though. Like you know very well who that’s supposed to be.”

Without another word, he put the drawing in a binder and went and shut himself in his bedroom. When he opened the binder again, the penciled face looked loathsome to him. Hideous, hideous. He tore up the paper. His mother knocked on the door and opened it.

“Why did you jump off the bridge?” she said.

“I told you. It was a dare.”

“Were you trying to harm yourself? It’s important that you tell me the truth. It would be the end of the world for me if you did what my father did to me.”

“Joachim dared me, just like I said.”

“You’re too intelligent to do something so stupid on a dare.”

“All right. I wanted to break my leg so I could spend more time masturbating.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Please go away so I can masturbate.” The words just popped out of his mouth, but the shock of hearing them jolted something loose in him. He jumped to his feet and came at his mother, trembling, grinning, and said, “Please go away so I can masturbate. Please go away so I can—”

“Stop!”

“I’m not like your father. I’m like you. But at least I keep to myself. I don’t harm anyone but myself.”

She blanched at the goal he’d scored. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No, of course not. I’m the crazy one. I can’t even tell a hawk from a handsaw.” He knew the line in English.

“Enough with the Hamletizing.”

“A little more than kin, a little less than kind.”

“You have some thoroughly wrong idea,” she said. “You got it from a book and it annoys me, all this hinting. I’m starting to think your father’s right—I let you read things when you were too young for them. I can still protect you, but you have to confide in me. You have to tell me what you’re really thinking.”

“I’m thinking—nothing.”

“Andreas.”

“Please go away so I can masturbate!”

He was protecting her, not the other way around, and when his father came home from yet another round of factory tours and informed him that he had a date with a psychologist, he assumed that his mission in the counseling sessions would be to continue protecting her. His father wouldn’t have entrusted him to anyone but the most politically rocksolid, Stasi-certified psychologist. However much Andreas was coming to hate his mother, there was no way that he was telling the psychologist about the ghost.

The Republic’s capital wasn’t just spiritually flat but literally flat. Such few hills as it had were composed of rubble from the war, and it was on a minor one of these, a grassy berm behind the back fence of the football pitch, that Andreas had first seen the ghost. Beyond the berm were disused rail tracks and a narrow stretch of wasteland too irrationally shaped to have fit into any five-year development plan to date. The ghost must have come up from the tracks on the late afternoon when Andreas, winded from sprints, hung his hands on the fence and pressed his face into its links to catch his breath. At the top of the rise, maybe twenty meters away, a gaunt and bearded figure in a ratty sheepskin jacket was looking at him. Feeling his privacy and privilege invaded, Andreas turned around and put his back to the fence. When he returned to running sprints and glanced up at the hill, the ghost was gone.

But he appeared again at dusk the following day, again looking directly at Andreas, singling him out. This time some of the other players saw the ghost and shouted at him—“Stinking deviant!” “Go wipe yourself!” etc.—with the morally untroubled contempt that club members had for anyone not playing by society’s rules. You couldn’t get in trouble for reviling a bum; quite the opposite. One of the boys peeled off and went to the fence to shout abuse from a closer range. Seeing him approach, the ghost ducked behind the hill and out of sight.

After that, he appeared after dark, loitering at the point on the hill where the light from the pitch ended, his head and shoulders dimly visible. Running up and down the pitch, Andreas kept looking to see if the ghost was still there. Sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn’t; twice he seemed to beckon to Andreas with a motion of his head. But he was always gone by the time the final whistle blew.

After a week of this peek-a-boo, Andreas took Joachim aside when practice ended and everyone else was leaving the pitch. “That guy on the hill,” he said. “He keeps looking at me.”

“Oh, so it’s you he’s after.”

“Like he has something to say to me.”

“Gentlemen prefer blonds, man. Somebody should report him.”

“I’m going to jump the fence. Find out what his story is.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“There’s something weird about the way he looks at me. It’s like he knows me.”

“Wants to get to know you. It’s your curly golden locks, I’m telling you.”

Joachim was probably right, but Andreas had a mother in whose eyes he could do no wrong, and by now, at the age of fourteen, he was accustomed to following his impulses and taking what he wanted, so long as he didn’t directly disrespect authority. Things always turned out well for him: instead of falling on his face, he was praised for his initiative and creativity. He felt like talking to the ghost in the sheepskin jacket and getting his story, which was bound to be less boring than anything else he’d heard in the past week, and so, with a shrug, he went over to the fence and wedged a toe in its links.

“Hey, come on,” Joachim said.

“Call the police if I’m not back in twenty minutes.”

“You’re unbelievable. I’m coming with you.”

This was what Andreas had wanted, and, as usual, he was getting it.

From the top of the rise, they couldn’t see much in the shadows along the rail tracks. A truck skeleton, urban weeds, small prospectless trees, some pale lines that might have been the remains of walls, and their own attenuated shadows from the pitch lights. Banks of mediumrise socialist housing were massed in the far distance.

“Hey!” Joachim shouted at the darkness. “Antisocial Element! You here?”

“Shut up.”

Down by the tracks they saw a movement. They took the straightest line they could to it, picking their way slowly in the poor light, weeds grabbing at their bare legs. By the time they reached the tracks, the ghost was all the way down near the Rhinstraße bridge. It was hard to tell, but he seemed to be looking at them.

“Hey!” Joachim bellowed. “We want to talk to you!”

The ghost started moving again.

“Go back and shower,” Andreas said. “You’re scaring him.”

“This is stupid.”

“I’ll only go as far as the bridge. You can meet me there.”

Joachim hesitated, but in the end he almost always did what Andreas wanted. When he was gone, Andreas trotted down the tracks, enjoying his little adventure. He could no longer see the ghost, but it was interesting just to be in an unregulated space, in the dark. He was smart and knew the rules, and he wasn’t breaking any by being here. He felt entitled to it, just as he felt entitled to be the player on the football pitch whom the figure stared at. He wasn’t afraid; he felt unharmable. Still, he was glad of the safety of the streetlights on the bridge. He stopped in front of it and peered into its shadows. “Hello?” he said.

A foot scraped on something in the shadows.

“Hello?”

“Come under the bridge,” a voice said.

“You come out.”

“No, under here. I won’t hurt you.”

The voice sounded gentle and educated, which somehow didn’t surprise him. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for a person who wasn’t intelligent to stare at him and beckon to him. He moved under the bridge and made out a human shape by one of the pillars. “Who are you?” he said.

“Nobody,” the ghost said. “An absurdity.”

“Then what do you want? Do I know you?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I can’t stay here, but I wanted to see you before I go back.”

“Back to where?”

“Erfurt.”

“Well, here I am. You’re seeing me. Do you mind if I ask why you’re spying on me?”

The bridge above them shook and boomed with the weight of a passing truck.

“What would you say,” the ghost said, “if I told you I’m your father?”

“I’d say you’re a lunatic.”

“Your mother is Katya Wolf, née Eberswald. I was her student and colleague at Humboldt University from 1957 until February 1963, at which time I was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in prison for subversion of the state.”

Andreas involuntarily took a step backward. His fear of political lepers was instinctive. No good could come of contact with them.

“Needless to say,” the ghost added, “I did not subvert the state.”

“Obviously the People thought otherwise.”

“No, interestingly, no one ever thought otherwise. I went to prison for the crime of having relations with your mother before and after she was married. The after in particular was a problem.”

A horrible feeling seized Andreas, part loathing, part pain, part righteous rage.

“Listen to me, dirtbag,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but you can’t talk about my mother that way. You understand? If I see you again at the football pitch, I’m calling the police. You understand?” He turned and stumbled back toward the light.

“Andreas,” the dirtbag called after him. “I held you when you were a baby.”

“Go fuck yourself, whoever you are.”

“I’m your father.”

“Go fuck yourself. You’re filthy and disgusting.”

“Do one thing for me,” the dirtbag said. “Go home and ask your mother’s husband where he was in October and November of 1959. That’s all. Just ask him and see what he says.”

Andreas’s eyes fell on a scrap of lumber. He could bash the dirtbag’s head in, nobody would miss an enemy of the state, nobody would care. Even if they caught Andreas, he could say it was self-defense and they’d believe him. The idea was giving him a stiffy. There was a murderer in him.

“You don’t have to worry,” the dirtbag said. “You won’t see me again. I’m not allowed to enter Berlin. I’m almost certainly on my way back to prison, just for having disappeared from Erfurt.”

“You think I care?”

“No. Why would you. I’m nobody.”

“What’s your name?”

“It’s safer for you if you don’t know.”

“Then why are you doing this to me? Why did you even come here?”

“Because I sat in prison for ten years imagining it. I spent another year imagining it after I got out. Sometimes you imagine something for so long, you find that you have no choice but to do it. Maybe you’ll have a son of your own someday. You might understand better then.”

“People who tell filthy lies belong in prison.”

“It’s not a lie. I told you the question you need to ask.”

“If you did something bad to my mother, you deserve all the more to be in prison.”

“That’s the way her husband saw it, too. You can understand why I might see things rather differently.”

The dirtbag said this with a note of bitterness, and already Andreas could sense what later became transparent to him: the guy was guilty. Maybe not of the crime for which he’d been imprisoned, but certainly of having taken advantage of something unstable in his mother, and then of coming back to Berlin to make trouble; of caring more about getting even with his former lover than about the feelings of their fourteen-year-old son. He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. At no point did Andreas dream of reestablishing contact with him.

All he said in the moment was “Thanks for ruining my day.”

“I had to see you at least once.”

“Fine. Now go back to Erfurt and fuck yourself.”

Still muttering this phrase, Andreas hurried out from under the bridge and scrambled up the embankment to Rhinstraße. There was no sign of Joachim, so he made his way home, pausing twice in shadowed doorways to rearrange his underpants, because his homicidal stiffy was persisting in his football shorts. He had no intention of asking his father the question the ghost had suggested, but he was suddenly thinking of scenes from the past two or three years which had made so little sense to him that he’d dutifully put them out of his mind.

There was the time he’d gone out to the dacha on a Friday afternoon and found his mother sitting stark naked between two rosebushes, unable or unwilling to utter a word until his father finally arrived, after dark, and slapped her face. That was a weird one. And the time he’d been sent home from school with a fever and found his parents’ bedroom door locked and later seen two workers in blue coveralls hastening out of the bedroom. And the time he’d gone to her office at the university to have a permission slip signed, and again the door was locked, and after some minutes a male student had come out, his hair plastered with sweat, and Andreas had tried to go through the door but his mother had pushed it shut from inside and locked it again.

And what she’d said afterward, the bewitching gaiety of her explanations:

“I was just smelling the roses, and it was such a lovely day I took my clothes off, to be closer to nature, and then when I saw you I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t say a word to you.”

“They were fixing the electricity and they needed me to stand by the light switch and flip it on and off and on and off, and they were so silly with their rules that they wouldn’t even let me open the door. It was like I was their prisoner!”

“We’d had the most horribly excruciating disciplinary meeting, the poor boy is being expelled—you probably heard him crying—and I had to make some notes while it was still fresh in my mind.”

He remembered the determined pressure of her office door, the irresistible force pushing him back. He remembered remembering, when he saw her pussy in the rose garden, that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen it—that something he’d thought was a disturbing dream from his early childhood hadn’t actually been a dream; that she’d shown it to him once before, to answer some precocious question of his. He remembered that although he’d been sprawled with his fever in the living room, in plain sight, the two workmen in coveralls hadn’t said hello to him, hadn’t even glanced at him, as they made their escape.

When he got home, Katya was sitting on their fake-leather fauxDanish sofa—so tacky and yet two cuts above most other sofas in the Republic—reading the ND and drinking her after-work glass of wine. She had an air of knowing that she looked like an advertisement for life in East Berlin. In the window behind her were the pretty lights of another superior modern building across the street. “You’re still in your football clothes,” she said.

Andreas moved behind a chair to conceal his stiffy. “Yeah, I decided to run home.”

“You left your clothes at the pitch?”

“I’ll get them tomorrow.”

“Joachim just called. He wondered where you were.”

“I’ll call him back.”

“Is everything all right?”

He wanted to believe in the image she was presenting, since it obviously meant so much to her: the ideal worker and mother and wife relaxing after a productive day within a system that provided better security than capitalism and was, to boot, in the best of ways, more serious. Her ability to read every last dull word in the ND with seeming interest was undeniably impressive. The true extent of his love was becoming evident only now, when the sight of her also revolted him.

“Everything couldn’t be better,” he said.

Retreating to the bathroom, he took out his stiffy and was saddened by how minor it seemed, compared to how prominent it had felt on the street. Nevertheless, it was what he had to work with, and he proceeded to work with it that night, and the next night, and the next, until he succeeded in banishing the thought of asking his parents where his father had been in the fall of 1959. The ghost from Erfurt may have been wronged, but Andreas himself hadn’t been, not in any meaningful sense. Rather than stir up pointless trouble, rather than cause his parents anguish, he took what he knew and suspected about his mother and used it only to excuse his own solitary depravities. If she was entitled to entertain a random pair of workers in her bedroom on a Tuesday afternoon, he was certainly entitled to impute raunchy words to the women he drew and to shoot his seed all over them.

The psychologist, Dr. Gnel, had a spacious ground-floor office in the Charité complex and sat behind his desk in an impressively clinical white coat. Andreas, taking a seat opposite him, had the sense of being at a medical consultation or a job interview. Dr. Gnel asked him if he knew why his father had sent him here.

“He’s being sensible and careful,” Andreas said. “If I turn out to be a sex criminal, there’ll be a record of his having intervened.”

“So you personally don’t feel there’s any reason for you to be here?”

“I’d much rather be at home masturbating.”

Dr. Gnel nodded and jotted on his notepad.

“That was a joke,” Andreas said.

“What we choose to joke about can be revealing.”

Andreas sighed. “Can we establish right away that I’m much smarter than you are? My joke was not revealing. The joke was that you’d take it to be revealing.”

“But that in itself is revealing, don’t you think?”

“Only because I want it to be.”

Dr. Gnel set down his pen and notepad. “It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I’m a psychologist and they are not. I don’t have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.”

Andreas felt unexpectedly sorry for the psychologist. How painful it must have been to know that your intelligence was limited. How shameful to have to confess your limitations to a patient. Andreas was well aware that he was brighter than the other kids at his school, but not one of them would have admitted it in the piteously limpid way that Dr. Gnel had. He decided that he would like the psychologist and try to take care of him.

Dr. Gnel returned the favor by pronouncing him not suicidal. After Andreas explained why he’d jumped from the bridge, the doctor simply complimented him on his resourcefulness: “There was something you wanted, you didn’t see how you could get it, and yet you found a way.”

“Thank you,” Andreas said.

But the doctor had follow-up questions. Was he attracted to any of the girls at his school? Were there ones he felt like kissing, or touching, or having sex with? Andreas honestly answered that all his female classmates were stupid and repellent.

“Really? All of them?”

“It’s like I see them through some distorting pane of glass. They’re the opposite of the girls I draw.”

“You wish you could have sex with the girls you draw.”

“Absolutely. It’s a great frustration that I can’t.”

“Are you sure you’re not drawing self-portraits?”

“Of course not,” Andreas said, offended. “They’re totally female.”

“I’m not objecting to your drawings. To me they’re another example of your resourcefulness. I don’t want to judge, I only want to understand. When you tell me you draw figments of your imagination, things that only exist inside your head, doesn’t that sound a bit like a self-portrait?”

“Maybe in the most narrow and literal sense.”

“What about the boys in your school? Are you attracted to any of them?”

“Nope.”

“You say that so flatly, it’s as if you didn’t honestly consider my question.”

“Just because I like my friends, it doesn’t mean I think about having sex with them.”

“All right. I believe you.”

“You say that like you don’t believe me.”

Dr. Gnel smiled. “Tell me more about this distorting pane of glass. What do your female classmates look like through it?”

“Boring. Stupid. Socialist.”

“Your mother is a committed socialist. Is she boring or stupid?”

“Not at all.”

“I see.”

“I don’t want to have sex with my mother, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“I didn’t suggest that. I’m just thinking about sex. Most people think it’s exciting to have it with a real flesh-and-blood person. Even if she bores you, even if she seems stupid to you. I’m trying to understand why you don’t think that.”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Do you think the things you want are so dirty that no real girl could possibly want them?”

The doctor may have been smart about only one thing, but Andreas had to admit that, within his narrow speciality, the doctor was apparently smarter than he was. He himself was feeling quite mixed up, because he had evidence that his mother herself wanted to do dirty things, and had in fact done them, which ought to have suggested that other females might also want to do them, and do them with him; but somehow he felt just the opposite. It was as if he loved his mother so much, even now, that he subtracted the things that were disturbing about her and mentally implanted them in other females to make them frightening to him, make him prefer masturbation, and let his mother remain perfect. This didn’t make sense, but there it was.

“I don’t even want to know what a real girl wants,” he said.

“The same thing as you, maybe. Love, sex.”

“I’m worried that there’s something wrong with me. All I want to do is masturbate.”

“You’re only fifteen. That’s very young to be having sex with another person. I’m not telling you it’s what you should be doing. I just find it interesting that not one single classmate of yours, female or male, is attractive to you.”

Years later, Andreas still couldn’t say whether his sessions with Dr. Gnel had greatly helped him or grievously harmed him. Their immediate result, though, was that he started chasing girls. What he wanted above all was that there not be something wrong with him. Before the sessions had even ended, he applied his intelligence to the task of being more normal, and it turned out that Dr. Gnel was right: the real thing was more exciting—more challenging than drawing pictures, not as impossible as becoming a star striker. From dealing with his mother, he had a powerful arsenal of sensitivity, entitlement, and disdain to bring to bear on girls. Because there was so much time to talk and so little of interest to talk about, everyone at his school knew that his parents were important. This inclined girls to trust him and take their cues from him. They felt excited, not threatened, by his joking about the Free German Youth, or the senility of the Soviet politburo, or the Republic’s solidarity with the rebels in Angola, or the eugenic physiques of the Olympic diving team, or the appalling petit bourgeois taste of his countrymen. It wasn’t that he cared much, one way or another, about socialism. The point of his joking was to convey to his female listeners that he was capable of naughtiness, and to gauge their level of interest in being naughty with him. In his last years at the Oberschule, he got quite far with many of them. And yet, repeatedly, at the crucial moment, he ran aground on their narrow-minded working-class morality. The line they drew between finger fucking and real fucking was like the line between ridiculing German-Angolan brotherhood and calling the socialist workers’ state a failure and a fraud. He found only two girls willing to cross the line, and both of them had dismayingly romantic visions of their future with him.

It was the quest for wilder girls that led him into Berlin’s bohemian scene—to the Mosaik, the Fengler, the poetry readings. By then he was studying math and logic at the university, subjects “hard” enough to pass muster with his father and abstract enough to spare him from tedious political discussion. He got top marks in his classes, engaged intensively with Bertrand Russell (he’d turned against his mother but not against her Anglophilia), and still had copious free time. Unfortunately, he was by no means the only man to whom it had occurred to trawl the scene for sex, and although he did have the advantage of being young and good-looking he was also radiantly privileged. Not that anyone imagined the Stasi would be so dumb as to send a person like him undercover, but he sensed an aversion to his privilege everywhere he went, a feeling that he could get a person into trouble, whether he intended to or not. To succeed with the arty girls, he needed bona fides of disaffection. The first girl he set his sights on was a self-styled Beat poet, Ursula, whom he’d seen at two readings and whose ass was an amazement. Chatting her up after the second reading, he was inspired to claim that he wrote poetry himself. This was an outrageous lie, but it landed him a date to have coffee with her.

She was nervous when they met. Nervous somewhat on her own account but mostly, it seemed, on his.

“Are you suicidal?” she bluntly asked him.

“Ha. Only north-northwest.”

“What does that mean?”

“Shakespeare reference. It means not really.”

“I had a friend in school who killed himself. You remind me of him.”

“I did jump off a bridge once. But it was only an eight-meter drop.”

“You’re more of a reckless self-harmer.”

“It was rational and deliberate, not reckless. And that was years ago.”

“No, but right now,” she said. “It’s almost like I can smell it on you. I used to smell the same thing on my friend. You’re looking for trouble, and you don’t seem to understand how serious trouble can be in this country.”

Her face wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t matter.

“I’m looking for some other way to be,” he said seriously. “I don’t care what it is, just as long as it’s different.”

“Different how?”

“Honest. My father is a professional liar, my mother a gifted amateur. If they’re the ones who are thriving, what does it say about this country? Do you know the Rolling Stones song ‘Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby’?”

“‘Standing in the Shadow.’”

“The very first time I heard it, on RIAS, I could tell in my gut that everything they’d told me about the West was a lie. I could tell it just from the sound—there was no way a society that produced that kind of sound could be as oppressed as they said it was. Respectless and depraved, maybe. But happily respectless, happily depraved. And what does that say about a country that wants to forbid that kind of sound?”

He was saying these things just to be saying them, because he hoped they would bring him closer to Ursula, but he realized, as he said them, that he also meant them. He encountered a similar irony when he went home (he still lived with his parents) and tried to write something that Ursula might mistake for actual poetry: the initial impulse was pure fraudulence, but what he found himself expressing was authentic yearning and complaint.

And so he became, for a while, a poet. He never got anywhere with Ursula, but he discovered that he had a gift for poetic forms, perhaps akin to his gift for realistically drawing naked women, and within a few months he’d had his first poem accepted by a state-approved journal and made his debut at a group reading. The male bohemians still distrusted him, but not the females. There ensued a happy period when he woke up in the beds of a dozen different women in quick succession, all over the city, in neighborhoods he’d never dreamed existed—in flats without running water, in absurdly narrow bedrooms near the Wall, in a settlement twenty minutes by foot from the nearest bus stop. Was there anything more sweetly existential than the walking done for sex in the most desolate of streets at three in the morning? The casual slaughter of a reasonable sleep schedule? The strangeness of passing someone’s hair-curlered mother in a bathrobe on your way to her heartrendingly hideous bathroom? He wrote poems about his experiences, intricately rhymed renderings of his singular subjectivity in a land whose squalor was relieved only by the thrill of sexual conquest, and none of it got him in trouble. The country’s literary regime had lately relaxed to the extent of permitting this kind of subjectivity, at least in poetry.

What got him in trouble was a cycle of word puzzles that he worked on when his brain was too tired to do math. The soothing thing about the sort of poetry he wrote was that it limited his choice of words. It was as if, after the chaos of a childhood with his mother, he craved the discipline of rhyme schemes and other formal constraints. At another cattle-call literary event, where he was given only seven minutes at the podium, he read his puzzle poems because they were short and didn’t betray their secrets to a listener, only to a reader. After the reading, an editor from Weimarer Beiträge complimented him on the poems and said she could fit a few of them into the issue she was closing. And why did he say yes? Maybe there really was something suicidal in him. Or maybe it was the looming of his military service, which it was already a small scandal that he’d deferred, given his father’s lofty position. Even if, as was likely, he served in an elite intelligence or communications corps, he couldn’t imagine himself surviving the military. (Poetic discipline was one thing, army discipline another.) Or maybe it was just that the magazine editor was about the same age as his mother and reminded him of her: somebody too blinded by self-regard and privilege to recognize what a total tool she was. She must have fancied herself a sensitive advocate of youthful subjectivity, a woman who really understood young people today, and it must have been inconceivable to her and her supervisors that a young man even more privileged than they were could wish to embarrass them, because none of them noticed what everyone else did within twenty-four hours of the magazine’s distribution:

	Muttersprache / Mother Tongue
I	Ich
connected
her	danke
	es
with	deiner
inappropriate	immensen
desire,	Courage,
made	allabendlich.
every	Träume
	ermächtigen.
enthusiastically	Träume
unnatural	hüten
response	eines
entirely
mine.	Muttersöhnchens
	ohnmächtigen
She	Schlaf.
observed	Träumend
zealously,
if	gelingt
a	Liebe
little	ohne
irritably;	Reue:
she	In
made	Oedipus’
up	Unterwelt
such	singt
droll	ein
excuses;	jauchzender,
nobody	aberwitziger
	Chor
had	uns
ever	Lügen
really	aus
relished	Träumen
lying	ins
if	Ohr.
correct	Nur
hypocrisies
sufficed	tags
to	offenbaren
evade	Yokastes
negativity.	Obsession
	und
She	Rasen
allowed
me	sich,
everything;	ordnungshalber,
not	charakterlich.
every	Ich
radically	aber
grotesque	liege
upbringing	im
so	Schlaf,
succeeds.	Mutter.

The hullabaloo that followed was delicious. The magazine was yanked from every shelf and trucked away for pulping, the editor was fired, her boss demoted, and Andreas speedily expelled from the university. He left the office of his department chair wearing a grin so wide it made his neck hurt. From the way the heads of strangers swiveled toward him, from the way the students who knew him turned their backs at his approach, he could tell that the entire university had already heard the news of what he’d done. Of course it had—talking was pretty much the only thing that anyone in the Republic, except maybe his father, had to fill their days with.

When he went out onto Unter den Linden, he noticed a black Lada double-parked across from the main university entrance. Two men were in the car, watching him, and he gave them a wave that they didn’t return. He didn’t really see how he could be arrested, given who his parents were, but he also didn’t mind the thought of it. If anything, he’d relish the opportunity to not recant his poems. After all, didn’t he adore sex? Didn’t he dearly love coming? And so, if you took him at his literal word, what more heartfelt tribute to socialism could he offer than to dedicate his MoST gLoRIOUs orgasm to it? Even his wayward dick rose to attention and saluted it!

The Lada tailed him all the way to Alexanderplatz, and when he emerged from the U-Bahn at Strausbergerplatz, a different car, also black, was waiting for him on the Allee. For the previous two nights he’d been hiding out at the Müggelsee, but now that his expulsion was official there was no point in avoiding his parents. It was February, and the day was unusually warm and sunny, the coal pollution mild and almost pleasant, not throat-burning, and Andreas was in such sunny spirits that he felt like approaching the black car and explaining to its occupants, in a lighthearted tone, that he was more important than they could ever hope to be. He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string. He hoped he might never in his life be serious again.

The car tailed him to the Karl Marx Buchhandlung, where he went inside and asked a bad-smelling clerk if they had the latest issue of Weimarer Beiträge. The clerk, who knew his face but not his name, briskly replied that the issue wasn’t in yet.

“Really?” Andreas said. “I thought it was supposed to be in last Friday.”

“There was a problem with the content. It’s being reissued.”

“What problem? What content?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“Why, no, I didn’t.”

The clerk evidently considered this so unlikely as to be suspicious. He narrowed his eyes. “You’ll have to ask someone else.”

“I always seem to be the last person to find out …”

“A stupid adolescent vandal caused a lot of trouble and cost a lot of money.”

What was it about bookstore clerks and their powerful body odor?

“They ought to hang the guy,” Andreas said.

“Maybe,” the clerk said. “What I don’t like is that he got innocent people in trouble. To me, that’s selfish. Sociopathic.”

The word landed in Andreas’s gut like a punch. He left the store in a state of deflation and doubt. Was that what he was—a sociopath? Was that what his mother and motherland had made him? If so, he couldn’t help it. And yet he had a horror of diagnostic labels that suggested there was something wrong with him. As he headed up the Allee toward his parents’ building, under a sun that now seemed wan, he mentally scurried to rationalize what he’d done to the magazine editor—tried to tell himself that she’d gotten only what every apparatchik deserved, that she was being punished for her own stupidity in failing to notice the obvious acrostics, and that, in any case, he was suffering consequences easily as dire as hers—but he couldn’t get around the fact that he hadn’t thought once, let alone twice, about what he might be doing to her by giving her his poems. It was as if he’d chosen to commit vehicular suicide by swerving at high speed into a car filled with children.

He racked his memory for an example of his having treated another human being as anything but an instrumentality. He couldn’t count his parents—his whole childhood was a sense-defying brainfuck. But what about Dr. Gnel? Hadn’t he felt compassion for the psychologist and tried to take care of him? Alas, the label sociopath reduced the example of Gnel to shit. Seducing the shrink who was investigating his sociopathy? His motives there were suspect, to say the least. He thought of the women he’d slept with on his poetry-sponsored spree and how grateful he’d felt to each of them—surely his gratitude counted as evidence in his favor? Maybe. But he couldn’t even remember half their names now, and the work he’d done to give them pleasure seemed in hindsight merely a device to heighten his own. He was dismayed to find no evidence at all of having cared about them as people.

How strange that he went through life loving who he was, savoring himself, enjoying his capabilities and levity, only to see something loathsome when a store clerk uttered a chance word and he saw himself objectively. He recalled his jump from the bridge—at first a delicious sense of floating on air but then a merciless acceleration, the ground lurching up at him viciously uncontrollable momentum body impact pain. Gravity was objective. And who had set him up to jump? It was so easy to blame the mother. He was her instrumentality, the accouterment of her sociopathy. There was a submerged but killing violence in what she’d done to him, but being a killer didn’t accord with her selfregard, and so, to help her out, he’d jumped from the bridge, and so he’d published those poems.

The black car shadowed him to their building and stopped when he went inside. Upstairs, on the top floor, he found the flat filled unusually with cigarette smoke, an ashtray heaping on a faux-Danish end table. He looked for Katya in her bedroom, in her study, in his own room, and finally in the bathroom. She was on the floor by the toilet, in the half-uncurled position of a stillbirth, her eyes staring at the toilet’s base.

For a moment, his guts twisted up. He was a four-year-old again, stricken at the sight of his beloved red-haired mother in distress. It all came back, especially the love. But the fact that it was coming back made him angry.

“Ah, so here we are,” he said. “What happened—the cigarettes make you sick?”

She didn’t move or answer.

“It’s wise to go slowly when you take up a habit again after twenty years.”

No response. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

“It’s just like old times,” he said jovially. “You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It’s remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I’m the only one who gets to see you on the floor.”

She breathed out and her lips grasped feebly at the exhalation, forming a few faint fricatives but nothing like a word.

“Sorry, didn’t catch that,” Andreas said.

Her next exhalation seemed to form the words what’s wrong with you.

“What’s wrong with me? I’m not the one on the floor in a fugue state.”

No response.

“I bet you’re rethinking your decision not to abort me, right around now. It turns out to be so much more painful to wait twenty years for me to do it myself.”

Her eyes weren’t even blinking.

“I’ll be in my room if you want me,” he said, standing up. “Maybe you’d like to come and watch me masturbate—speaking of taking up old habits again.”

In truth he had no inclination to jerk off and wasn’t sure he ever would again. Nor was he sleepy or depressed—didn’t feel like lying down. He was in a state unlike any he’d ever known, a state of having absolutely nothing to do. No point in studying math or logic, no point in writing poetry, no interest in reading, no energy for throwing things away, no responsibilities, nothing. He thought of packing a bag, but he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to take to wherever he was going. He was afraid that if he went back into the bathroom he would kick his mother, and although it was true that his father could slap her out of her states, he somehow doubted that blows from him would do the trick. He perched on a windowsill and looked down at the black car on the street. The man in the passenger seat was reading a newspaper. This seemed to Andreas a poignant futility.

After a few hours, the telephone rang. He guessed that the caller was his father and that he wasn’t supposed to answer the phone himself. This was convenient, because he was afraid of speaking to his father. And maybe he wasn’t a total sociopath after all, because the thought of his father’s anger and shame and disappointment brought tears to his eyes. His father was the earnest little German boy who believed in socialism. He worked hard, he had a disturbed wife, and he’d lovingly raised a child who wasn’t his, not even spiritually. Beyond pity, Andreas had a sense of identification with him, for sharing the burden of Katya.

The phone rang and rang. It was a form of slapping but one so attenuated by distance that he counted more than fifty rings before he heard Katya stirring. The uncertain padding of her little feet. The ringing stopped, and he heard her murmur a few times and then hang up. Then sounds of her putting herself back together. By the time she approached his room, her steps were brisk, her false self reassembled.

“You have to leave here,” she said from the doorway. She was holding a lighted cigarette and the ashtray, which she’d emptied.

“You don’t say.”

“For now, you’re safe from arrest, thanks to your father. Of course, that could change at any time, depending on how you behave.”

“Tell him I appreciate it. Seriously.”

“He’s not doing it for you.”

“Even so. It’s nice for me, too. He’s been a good stepfather.”

Rather than take the bait, she dragged hard on the cigarette, not looking at him.

“How are those tasting, after all these years?”

“It’s not out of the question that you can do your service now. It would be hard service, on the worst base, and you’d be watched. Your deferment was already a costly embarrassment to your father, and it would be an immense favor to me if you’d do the service now. You may recall that I interceded for you.”

“When have you ever done anything but intercede for me? Everything I am I owe to you. Mother.”

“You’ve put both him and me in a terrible position. Me especially, since I was the one who interceded for you. The best thing you can do now is accept this extremely merciful offer.”

“Hup, two, three, four. Are you out of your mind?” He laughed and slapped his head. “Sorry, tactless question.”

“Will you accept the offer?”

“How much do you want it? Enough to have an honest conversation with me?”

She snapped off a drag with the practice of a former smoker. “I’m always honest with you.”

“See what I mean? It’s not going to be so easy for you. But all you have to do is tell the truth for once, and I’ll do the service for you.”

She snapped off another drag. “That’s no bargain at all if you refuse to believe the truth.”

“Trust me. I’ll know it when I hear it.”

“The only other option is that you sever all contact with us permanently and take your chances on your own.”

That she could say such a thing, and say it so coolly, was an unexpectedly painful blow to him. He saw that, in her own way, she really was being honest with him now: there was room for only one fuckup in the home of Undersecretary Wolf. His father had enough trouble covering for her, cleaning up her messes, talking her out of rose gardens. He’d had at least one lover of hers imprisoned, he’d performed untold further miracles of suppression, and Katya wasn’t so bonkers that she didn’t know a good thing when she had it. Andreas had been flattering to her when he was the world’s most precocious boy, when he was in love with her, when he was her pretty prince. But as soon as she’d seen the pictures he was drawing, she’d ratted him out to his father and had him sent to a psychologist, and now there was nothing at all for her in him. The time had come to give him the boot.

And again tears came to his eyes, because, no matter how he’d come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes. He’d even believed, at some level, that the cleverness of “Muttersprache” would please her. He was twenty years old and as duped as ever. And he didn’t want to leave her. That was the saddest, sickest part of it. He was still a wanting four-year-old, still betrayed by shit that had happened to his brain before he had a self that remembered.