Authors: Jonathan Franzen
“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
â”
“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 rightâI 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 thinkingânothing.”
“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 rock-solid, 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 himâ“Stinking deviant!” “Go wipe yourself!” etc.âwith 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 medium-rise 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 RhinstraÃe 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 RhinstraÃe. 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 expelledâyou probably heard him cryingâand I had to make some notes while it was still fresh in my mind.”