Purity (67 page)

I put my arm around his shoulders, and he turned to me and clung to me.

“It's all right,” I said.

“Not all right. Not all right.”

“No, no. It's all right.”

He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he'd been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden. He pulled away and composed himself.

“So that's my story,” he said.

“You got away with it.”

“Not quite. She won't see me until I know we're safe. We're almost safe, but there's still a body in my parents' yard.”

“Jesus.”

“Worse than that. They may be selling the house to speculators. There's talk of digging up the ground. If I want to see her again, I have to move the body.”

“I'm sorry I can't help you with that.”

“No, you're clean. I would never involve you.”

There was a note of tenderness in his voice. I asked what he planned to do about the body.

“I don't know,” he said. “I could learn to drive a car, but that would take time. I'm worried that I'm going to lose her. I guess I could do it with two suitcases, a trip on a train.”

“That would be some high-stress train trip.”

“I have to see her again. Whatever is needed, I'll do it. That's my only plan—to see her again.”

I felt another twinge of jealousy. Of exclusion; of competition with the girl. How else to explain what I said then?

“I can help you.”

“No.”

“I just cremated my mother. I'm up for it.”

“No.”

“I'm an American. I have a driver's license.”

“No. It's a dirty business.”

“If you've been telling me the truth, it's a thing worth doing.”

“I have to do it alone. I have no way to repay you.”

“No repayment necessary. I'm offering as a friend.”

Somewhere in the distance, in the dark trees and bushes behind us, a cat cried out faintly. Then there came a second cry, somewhat louder, not a cat. It was a woman receiving pleasure.

“What about the archives,” Andreas said.

“What about them?”

“The committee is going to Normannenstraße again on Friday. I could get you in.”

“I don't see them letting an American do that.”

“Your mother was German. You represent the people who escaped. They have files, too.”

“This doesn't have to be a quid pro quo.”

“Not quid pro quo. Friendship.”

“It would certainly be a journalistic coup.”

Andreas jumped up from the bench. “Let's do it! Both things.” He leaned over me and clapped me on the arms. “Shall we do it?”

The woman in the distance was crying out again. I had the thought that I could have this very woman, or one just like her, if I stayed with Andreas in Berlin.

“Yes,” I said.

Early the next morning, in Friedrichshain, I woke up in a state of remorse. The linens on my bed hadn't been clean to begin with, and I'd never washed them; had simply accustomed myself to squalor. If the person I'd fallen for had been female, and had been lying next to me in bed, naked, I might have been able to block out thoughts of Anabel. As it was, the only way I could get back to sleep was to resolve to call Anabel later in the day and try to make amends for what I'd said to Andreas about her.

But when I did get up, around noon, the prospect of hearing her voice, its tremolo of injury, was repellent to me. The voice I wanted to hear and the face I wanted to see were Andreas's. I went over to West Berlin and rented a car, making sure I was permitted to take it outside the city limits. Returning home, I found a telegram addressed to me on the floor of the vestibule.

CALL ME.

I lay down in my unclean bed, the telegram beside me, to wait for the city's coal smoke to thicken into darkness and the post offices to drop their shutters.

Driving out to the suburbs, under the cover of night, I swerved around a stopped streetcar and nearly mowed down the riders who came bursting out of its doors. They shouted angrily, and I waved my hands in American apology. With the help of my father's old patented-fold Berlin map, I navigated through endless neighborhoods of German penitence. The streets near the Müggelsee were more built up and heavily trafficked than I'd imagined; I was relieved to find the Wolfs' summer house secluded by overgrown conifers.

I cut the lights and drove the car onto the frozen lawn and around behind the house, as Andreas had instructed me. From there I could see the iced-over lake, mottled white beneath a dome of urban cloud, and a toolshed in the rear corner of the lot. Andreas was standing by the shed with a shovel and a tarp.

“Any trouble?” he said cheerfully.

“A near-fatal accident, but no.”

“You're good to do this for me.”

“Thank me later.”

He led me into the woods behind the shed. There was a pile of dirt and a corresponding hole. “My hands are terrible,” he said. “The dirt on top was frozen hard. But now I think we can just lift the thing out by the clothes. I already lifted up both ends.”

I looked down into the hole. There was enough ambient light to see that the body's coveralls, now impregnated with sandy mud, had once been blue. They gave the bones the shape and some of the bulk of a body. There looked to be some shreds of skin still on the hand bones. The smell wasn't bad, a faint rot on rot, like moldy cheese. Only one thing was missing.

“Where's the head?”

Andreas nodded over his shoulder. “In a plastic bag. No need for you to see that.”

I appreciated his consideration. Having sat so recently with my mother's body, I was still in a penumbra of inurement to death. But a skull, perhaps with bits of hair on it, would have been a bad sight. The bones were more safely abstract without it. I felt that in making myself look at them, I was ensuring that I could never go back to Anabel.

Nevertheless, my jaw was shuddering, and not simply from the cold. Andreas spread the tarp, and we straddled the hole and tugged on the coveralls. They must have been rotten underneath. They came apart in the middle, dumping bones and various lumps of unidentifiable substance.

“Fuck this,” I said.

“Yeah, OK. Leave it to me.”

I stood at the edge of the lake while Andreas heaved and shoveled things out of the hole. I didn't go back until he'd rolled up the tarp and was filling the hole with dirt again. I helped him with that, to speed things along.

“I got us some sandwiches,” he said when we'd stowed the tarp and its contents in the trunk of the car.

“I can't say I have much appetite.”

“Force yourself. We have a long drive.”

We washed our hands with a bottle of mineral water and ate the sandwiches. I was cold again, and in the cold it occurred to me, as it somehow hadn't before, that I was about to commit a serious crime. I felt a pang, not a large one, but a definite pang of homesickness for Anabel. Bad as our life had become, it was domestic, predictable, monogamous, uncriminal. In a corner of my mind, a rat of a thought scurried: that I'd met Andreas forty-eight hours ago, that I didn't really know him, and that he might have not told me the whole truth; that, indeed, he might have been working me all along, as his ticket back to Annagret.

“Reassure me about the police,” I said. “I'm picturing a routine traffic stop.
Please open the trunk
.”

“The police have bigger things to worry about these days.”

“I did almost kill about six people on the way over here.”

“Would you be happier if I said I'm scared out of my mind?”

“Are you?”

“A little bit, yeah.” He punched me in the arm. “You?”

“I've had funner evenings.”

“I won't forget what you're doing for me, Tom. Never.”

In the car, with the heat blasting, I felt better. Andreas told me more about his life, the bizarrely literary terms in which he understood it, and his yearning for a better, cleaner life with Annagret. “We're going to find a place to live,” he said. “You can stay with us for as long as you want. It's the least we can do for you.”

“And you'll do what for a living?”

“I haven't thought so far ahead.”

“Journalism?”

“Maybe. What's it like?”

I told him what it was like, and he seemed interested, but I sensed a faint, unspoken distaste, as if he had grander ambitions that he was tactfully refraining from mentioning. It was the same sense I'd had when he looked at Anabel's picture: he was happy to admire what I had as long as what he had was even better. This might not have boded well for a future friendship of equals, but there at the beginning, in the very warm car, it was consonant with my experience of crushes—the feeling of inferiority, the hope of being found worthy nonetheless.

“The Citizens' Committee is meeting tomorrow morning,” he said. “You should come along with me, so they know who you are on Friday. How's your German?”

“Eh.”

“
Sprich. Sprich
.”

“
Ich bin Amerikaner. Ich bin in Denver geboren
—”

“The
r
is wrong. Say it more in the throat.
Amerikaner. Geboren
.”

“My
r
's are the least of my problems.”

“
Noch mal, bitte: Amerikaner
.”

“
Amerikaner
.”

“
Geboren
.”

“
Geboren
.”

For a good hour, we worked on my pronunciation. It makes me sad to think of that hour. Judging from his arrogant street presentation, I would never have guessed what a patient teacher he was. We were already assuming that I would stay on in Berlin, but I could also feel that he liked both me and his language and wanted us to get along.

“Let's work on your English accent,” I said.

“My accent is flawless! I'm the son of an English professor.”

“You sound like the BBC. You've got to flatten your
a
's. You haven't really lived until you've said
a
like an American. They're one of the glories of our nation. Say
can't
for me.”

“Can't.”

“Aaaaa. Caaaan't. Like a bleating goat.”

“Caaaaan't.”

“There you go. The British have no concept of what they're missing.”

On the outskirts of a no-account town, we stopped at a shuttered gas station so that Andreas could dig into a trash bin and bury the skull in it. Waiting in the car, I felt convinced that I was performing a good deed. If my mother hadn't emigrated, if I'd been born in a Stasi-shadowed country, I might have killed a Stasi rat in self-defense myself. Helping Andreas seemed to me a way of atoning for my American advantages.

“You didn't leave the engine running,” he remarked when he was back in the car.

“Didn't want to be conspicuous.”

“It's a question of efficiency. Now you have to warm it up again.”

I put the car in gear and smiled at knowing better. “In the first place,” I said, “what heats a car is excess engine heat. The added fuel use is zero. You might know this if you'd ever driven one. More to the point, it's never efficient to maintain heat in a cold environment.”

“That's completely false.”

“No, in fact it's true.”

“Completely false.” He seemed eager to spar. “If you're heating a house, it's much more efficient to maintain a temperature of sixteen degrees overnight than to raise the temperature from five degrees in the morning. My father always did it at the dacha.”

“Your father was wrong.”

“He was the chief economist of a major industrialized nation!”

“I'm understanding better why the nation failed.”

“Trust me, Tom. You're wrong about this.”

It happened that my own father had explained to me the thermodynamics of home heating. Without mentioning him, I pointed out to Andreas that the rate of caloric transfer is proportional to temperature differential—the warmer the house, the more profusely it bleeds calories on a cold night. Andreas tried to fight me with integral calculus, but I remembered the basics of that, too. We tussled while I drove. He advanced ever-more esoteric arguments, refusing to accept that his father had been wrong. When I finally defeated him, I could feel that something had changed between us, some hook of friendship set. He seemed both confounded and admiring. Until then, I don't think he'd believed I was a worthy intellectual adversary.

It was after midnight when we reached the Oder valley. We crossed a decrepit wooden bridge to an island used only in the summer, by farmers growing hay. The crusted snow on the dikes between frozen marshes was virgin. I didn't like the tracks we were leaving, but Andreas said that the forecast was for rain and warmer weather. On the far side of the island was a tangle of woods that he remembered from a nature walk he'd taken while attending an elite summer camp. “It was the height of privilege,” he said. “We had border guards with us.”

Whatever the East German army was doing now, it was doing it somewhere else. We hustled the rolled-up tarp and two shovels up into a ravine where our footprints wouldn't be visible. From there, we struggled through leafless brambles and into the woods.

“Here,” he said.

The digging was hard but also warming. I was ready to stop when we were one foot down, but Andreas insisted on digging deeper. An owl was calling from somewhere near, but the only other sound was the crunch of our shovels and the crack of the tree roots we encountered.

“Now leave me alone,” he said.

“I don't mind helping. It's not like not helping will lessen my criminal offense.”

“I'm burying what I was before I knew Annagret. This is personal.”