Джонатан Франзен – Purity (страница 20)
“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
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?”