Purity

“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.