Purity. Джонатан Франзен

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