Purity (19 page)

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 faux-Danish 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.