Purity (26 page)

“I'm physically well. Older, as you see.”

“You look great.”

His father sat down at the table and said nothing. He'd never been an eye-contact kind of man.

“I take it you're not watching the news,” Andreas said.

“I lost my appetite for news some months ago.”

“They're storming Stasi headquarters as we speak. Thousands of people. They're in the main building.”

His father merely nodded, as if in assent.

“You're a good man,” Andreas said. “I'm sorry I've made life harder for you. My problem was never with you.”

“Every society has rules,” his father said. “A person either follows them or he doesn't.”

“I respect that you followed them. I'm not here to accuse you. I'm here to ask a favor.”

His father nodded again. Down on Karl-Marx-Allee, cars were honking in what sounded like celebration.

“Did Mother tell you that I need a favor?”

His father's face became sad. “Your mother had a lengthy file of her own,” he said.

Andreas was so startled by the non sequitur that he didn't know what to say.

“Over the years,” his father continued, “she has had repeated episodes during which she behaved irresponsibly. She's a committed socialist and a loyal citizen, but there have been embarrassments. Quite a number of them. I suspect that you're aware of this.”

“It does me good to hear it from you.”

His father made a demurring gesture with his fingers. “We have had, for some years, issues of command and control with the Ministry for State Security. I've been fortunate in my dealings with it, thanks to my cousin and to my oversight of its budget. But the ministry has considerable autonomy, and a relationship is a two-way street. I've asked many favors of it, over the years, and I now have very little to offer it in return. I'm afraid that such goodwill as I still had was exhausted when I obtained your mother's file for her. She still has many years of professional life ahead of her, and it was important to her, going forward, that no record of her past behavior come to light.”

However much Andreas had hated Katya in the past, he'd never hated her more than he did right now. “So, wait,” he said. “You're saying you know what I'm here for.”

“She mentioned it,” his father said, withholding eye contact.

“But she didn't care about me. She just cared about protecting herself.”

“She did intercede on your behalf as well, once we had her records.”

“First things first!”

“She is my wife. You need to understand that.”

“And I'm not really your son.”

His father shifted uncomfortably. “I suppose that may be correct, in a technical sense.”

“So I'm fucked. She fucked me over.”

“You chose not to play by society's rules, and you don't seem to have repented of it. When your mother is her true self, she repents of what she's done when she was not herself.”

“You're saying there's nothing you can do for me.”

“I'm reluctant to go back to a well I fear is dry now.”

“Do you know why it matters to me?”

His father shrugged. “I have guesses, based on your past behavior. But, no, I don't.”

“Then let me tell you why,” Andreas said. He was furious with himself for having waited five weeks for his mother to rescue him—would he ever stop being the dumbfuck four-year-old? But he was down to only two choices, either get out of the country or trust the man who wasn't really his father, and so he told him the story. Told it with major embellishments and omissions, carefully framing it as a parable of a good socialist judo girl
who had followed all the rules
and been raped by a Stasi-abetted incarnation of pure evil. He made a case for his own reformation, spoke of his good work with at-risk youth, spoke of his successes, his genuine service to society, his refusal to mix with the dissidents: his attempt to become, in the church basement, a son worthy of his father. He cast his state-subverting poetry as a regrettable response to having had a mentally ill mother. He said he did repent of it now.

When he was finished, his father said nothing for a long time. Cars were still honking in the street now and then, the pool of cold blood sausage darkening toward black.

“Where did this … event occur?” his father said.

“It doesn't matter. A safe place in the countryside. Better if you don't know where.”

“You should have gone straight to the Stasi. They would have punished the individual severely.”

“She wouldn't do it. She'd followed the rules all her life. She just wanted to have a good life in society as it existed. I was trying to give her that.”

His father went to a sideboard and returned with two glasses and a bottle of Ballantine's. “Your mother is my wife,” he said, pouring. “She will always come first.”

“Of course.”

“But your story is affecting. It puts a different light on things. It makes me question, to some extent, the idea I've had of you. Should I believe it?”

“The only things I left out were to protect you.”

“Did you tell it to your mother?”

“No.”

“Good. It would only upset her, to no purpose.”

“I'm more like you than I am like her,” Andreas said. “Can you see that? We're both dealing with the same difficult person.”

His father emptied his glass with one gulp. “These are difficult times.”

“Can you help me?”

His father poured more scotch. “I can ask. I fear the answer will be no.”

“That you would even ask—”

“Don't thank me. I would be doing it for your mother, not for you. The law is the law—we can't take it into our own hands. Even if I'm successful, you should go to the police and make a full confession. The act would be all the more commendable if you performed it when you no longer had to fear discovery. If the facts really are the way you've represented them, you can count on considerable leniency, especially in the current climate. It would be hard on your mother, but it would be the right thing to do.”

Andreas thought, but didn't say, that in fact he was more like his mother, not his father, because he had no interest at all in doing the right thing if the wrong thing would save him from public shame and prison time. His life seemed to him a long war between two sides of him, the sick side that he had from his mother, the scrupled side that he had from a nongenetic father. But he feared that at base he was all Katya.

He'd taken leave of his father and was walking to the elevator when the door of the flat opened behind him. “Andreas,” his father called after him.

He went back to the door.

“Tell me the name of the individual,” his father said. “It occurs to me that you'll also want the file on his disappearance.”

Andreas searched his father's face. Did the old man intend to turn him in? Unable to find an answer, Andreas spoke the full name of the man he'd killed.

Late the following afternoon, the vicar came down to his room to tell him that he had a phone call.

“I think I've done it,” his father said, on the phone. “You won't be sure until you actually go to the archive. They wouldn't remove the files from there, and it's quite possible that you won't be allowed to take them with you. But they will show them to you. So, at least, they say.”

“I don't know how to thank you.”

“Thank me by never speaking of it again.”

At eight o'clock in the morning, following his father's instructions, Andreas went back to Normannenstraße and presented himself at the front gate. A television crew was eating hard rolls by a van. He gave the name he'd been told to give, Captain Eugen Wachtler, and submitted to a pat down, relinquishing the knapsack in which he'd hoped to carry the files away.

Captain Wachtler came to the gate twenty minutes later. He was bald and precancerously gray and had the faraway expression of someone enduring chronic pain. There was a small stain on the lapel of his suit jacket. “Andreas Wolf?”

“Yes.”

The captain gave him a security pass on a lanyard. “Put this on and follow me.”

Without further words, they crossed the courtyard and went through an unlocked gate and then a gate that Wachtler unlocked and relocked behind them. There were further locks at the entrance of the main archive building, one that Wachtler had a key for, another operated by a guard behind a thick glass window. Andreas followed the captain up two flights of stairs and down a corridor of closed doors. “Exciting times here,” Andreas ventured to say.

Wachtler didn't respond. At the end of the hall, he unlocked yet another door and beckoned Andreas into a small room with a table and two chairs. On the table were four file folders, neatly stacked.

“I will be back in exactly one hour,” Wachtler said. “You are not to leave this room or remove any materials from it. The pages are numbered. Before we leave, I will examine them to make sure that nothing is missing.”

“Got it.”

The captain left and Andreas opened the topmost folder. There were only ten pages in it, pertaining to the disappearance of Unofficial Collaborator Horst Werner Kleinholz. The second folder also contained ten pages, a carbon copy of the first file. As soon as Andreas saw the carbon copy, he knew that there was hope. He'd been instructed not to remove anything, but there was no reason to give him the duplicate if they expected him to follow the instruction. The carbon copy was a clear signal that this was all they had and they were giving it to him. He was flooded with love and pride and gratitude. His father had worked for forty years within the system, playing by the rules, to bring about this moment. His father still had influence, and the Stasi had come through for him.

He took out the plastic shopping bag that he'd stuffed in his boot and put both copies of the investigation file in it. The other two folders on the table were thicker. They contained the two halves of his own file, continuously numbered. These, too, he put in the plastic bag.

His heart was pounding and he was getting a major stiffy, because the rest was a game. The rules of the game were that he was breaking the rules, stealing materials without the Stasi's knowledge or consent, materials that he was only supposed to look at, not take with him. It wouldn't be the Stasi's fault if they went missing.

He had a flicker of worry that the captain had locked him in the room, but the door wasn't locked, the game was on. He stepped out into the corridor. The building was weirdly silent, not a voice to be heard, just a low institutional humming. He retraced his steps to the stairs and down the two flights. From the main hallway he heard footsteps and voices, employees arriving for work. He stepped boldly into it and headed for the front door. Incoming workers gave him cold, incurious looks.

He tapped on the window at the door where the guard sat. “Can you let me out?”

The guard half stood to read the pass hanging from Andreas's neck. “You'll have to wait for your escort.”

“I'm not feeling well. I might throw up.”

“There's a bathroom down the hall to your left.”

He went to the bathroom and locked himself in a stall. If the game was on, there had to be some way for him to escape. He still had his stiffy, and he felt a curiously strong impulse to take it out and ejaculate, most gloriously, into a Stasi toilet. It had been three years since he'd felt so wildly aroused, but he told himself—spoke it out loud—“Wait. Soon. Not yet. Soon.”

Returning to the hallway, he saw an open door with daylight spilling through it, suggesting a window he might climb out of. Again boldly, he walked to the door. It was a conference room, with windows on the courtyard. The windows had heavy grates, but two of them had been opened, as if to let in more light. When he stepped into the room, a female voice spoke sharply, “Can I help you?”

A thick middle-aged woman was placing biscuits on a glass plate.

“No, sorry, wrong room,” he said, retreating.

More workers were entering the building, dispersing into stairwells and side hallways. He stationed himself at the end of the main hallway, keeping an eye on the conference room, waiting for the woman to step out. He was still waiting when a commotion developed at the far end of the hall, at the entrance. He hurried toward it, plastic bag in hand.

Eight or ten men and women, manifestly not Stasi, were making their way through the portal. A smaller group of Stasi officers, in decent suits, was standing inside to greet them. Andreas recognized several of the visitors' faces—this had to be the ad hoc Citizens' Committee of Normannenstraße, making its first inspection of the archives, under strict supervision. The committee members were holding themselves erect, with self-importance but also with awe and trepidation. Two of them were shaking Stasi hands when Andreas pushed past them and through the inner door.

“Stop,” came the voice of the guard behind glass.

An officer was locking the outer door but hadn't got the job done yet. Andreas shoved him aside, turned the handle, and pushed through. He sprinted across the courtyard with his plastic bag. There was shouting behind him.

The gate in the fence was locked, but there was no barbed wire, no concertina. He scrambled up and vaulted down and sprinted for the main gate. The guards merely watched as he ran out to the street.

And there were the TV cameras. Three of them, pointing at him.

A phone was ringing at the guard station.

“Yes, he's right here,” a guard said.

Andreas glanced over his shoulder and saw two guards coming for him. He dropped his bag, raised his hands, and addressed the cameras. “Are you rolling?” he shouted.

One television crew was scrambling. A woman in another gave him a thumbs-up. He turned to her camera and began to speak.

“My name is Andreas Wolf,” he said. “I am a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, and I am here to monitor the work of the Citizens' Committee of Normannenstraße. I'm coming directly from the Stasi archives, where I have reason to fear that a whitewash is occurring. I'm not here in an official capacity. I'm not here to work
with
, I'm here to work
against.
This is a country of festering secrets and toxic lies. Only the strongest of sunlight can disinfect it!”