Purity (51 page)

Anabel was lying facedown on the rocks and dirt, quietly sobbing, while I sorted out the topology of pants legs and underwear. I knew better than to ask why she was crying. We'd be here until nightfall if I did that. Much better to start hiking again and actually cover some ground while we had the conversation about why I hadn't asked her why she was crying.

She stood up to put her shirt on. “So,” she said. “Now you've had your treat, and you can go back to the city.”

“Please don't try to tell me you didn't want that yourself.”

“But it was the
only
thing you wanted,” she said. “And so now you can go back. Unless you want to do it again right now and then go back.”

Slapping a mosquito on my forearm, I looked at my watch and couldn't read what it plainly said.

“Tell me why we never had children,” Anabel said. “I don't remember what your explanation was.”

I felt suddenly light-headed. Even by Anabel standards, her broaching of the subject of children seemed an exorbitantly high price for me to pay for a few minutes of sex. She was also presenting the bill brutally soon.

“Do you remember?” she said. “Because I don't remember any real discussion.”

“So let's have a five-hour discussion about it right now,” I said. “This would be a great time and a great place.”

“You said, ‘To be discussed later.' And now it's later.”

I killed another mosquito. “I'm suddenly getting bit.”

“I've been getting bitten the whole time.”

“I didn't realize you meant that kind of discussion.”

“What did you think I meant?”

I touched the plump knotted rubber in my pants pocket. “I don't know. Some possible-other-partners, epidemiological type of thing.”

“Safe to say I don't want to hear about that.”

“Lot of mosquitoes here,” I said. “We should move.”

“Do you even know where we are? Can you find your way back?”

“No.”

“So I guess you need me after all. If you want to catch your bus.”

Strict vigilance was needed to avoid getting lost in the logic tree, but Anabel's heat, the heat of her back and of our liquid interfacing, and the scent of the Mane ‘n Tail shampoo in her hair, which was always faint but never entirely absent, had dulled my thinking. I'd eaten the opium of Anabel, with predictable consequences. I said, somewhat desperately, “Look, I already know there's no way you're letting me catch that bus.”

“Letting you. Ha.”

“Not you,” I said, “I meant
us
. There's no way we're letting me catch the bus.”

But the mistake had been made. She kicked her feet into her sneakers. “We'll go right back and wait,” she said. “Just to spare me a tiny bit of your hatred for once in my life. So for once I don't have to be blamed for making you miss your bus.”

Anabel refused to see that there was simply something broken about us, broken beyond repair and beyond assignment of blame. During our previous binge, we'd talked for nine hours nonstop, pausing only for bathroom breaks. I'd thought I'd finally succeeded in showing her that the only way out of our misery was to renounce each other and never communicate again; that nine-hour conversations were themselves the sickness that they were purportedly trying to cure. This was the version of us that she'd called me this morning to reject. But what was her version? Impossible to say. She was so morally sure of herself, moment by moment, that I perpetually had the feeling that we were getting somewhere; only afterward could I see that we'd been moving in a large, empty circle. For all her intelligence and sensitivity, she not only wasn't making sense but was unable to recognize that she wasn't, and it was terrible to see this in a person to whom I'd been so profoundly devoted and had made a vow of lifelong care. And so I had to keep working with her to help her understand why I couldn't keep working with her.

“Here's what's fucked up,” I said as we climbed out of the ruined basin and up to a less buggy height. “Just speaking for myself. A month goes by, and I'm feeling so freakish and depressed and ashamed, because of the last time we got together, that I can barely show my face to another human being. And so I have to come out here, and once I'm here it's practically
biological
that I'm going to end up staying thirty-six hours, and raising all sort of false hopes and expectations—”

Anabel spun around. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

“Do you want me to kill you?”

She shook her head emphatically, no, no, she didn't want to be killed.

“Then don't call me.”

“I wasn't strong enough.”

“Don't get me out here again. Don't do this to me.”

“I wasn't strong enough! For God's sake! Do you have to rub my face in how weak I am?” And she walked in a small circle with her hands bent into claws near her face, which looked as if a swarm of hornets had somehow got inside her head and were stinging her brain.

“Have pity on me,” she said.

I seized her and kissed her, my Anabel. She was snotty and teary and hot-breathed and dear. Also quite seriously disturbed and all but unemployable. I kissed her to try to make the pain stop, but in no time I also had my hands down the back of her corduroys. Her hips were so narrow that I could take her pants down without unbuttoning them. We'd been little more than children when we fell in love. Now everything was ashes, ashes of ashes burned at temperatures where ash burns, but our full-fledged sex life had only just begun, and I would never stop loving her. It was the prospect of another two or three or five years of sex in the ashes that made me think of death. When she pulled away from me and dropped to her knees and unzipped my knapsack and took out my Swiss Army knife, I thought she might be thinking of it, too. But instead she was stabbing the five remaining condoms dead.

*   *   *

The apartment on Adalbertstraße was hostage to a stomach. When Clelia closed her eyes at night, she could picture it hovering in the darkness above her cot. Outwardly taut and glossy, a pale pink digestive aubergine with darkish veins stemming off it, the stomach was red and shredded on the inside, awash in caustic liquids and liable to convulse like a raging baby at any hour, especially a wee one. This unhappy organ had its residence in the body of Clelia's mother, Annelie. Clelia slept in the corner of the living room nearest to her mother's bedroom, so that when Annelie called out for milk and zwieback in the night she wouldn't wake the younger children or her brother, Rudi, in their bedrooms, only Clelia.

The stomach was keenly attuned to Clelia's self-pity. It could hear her when she cried herself to sleep, it didn't like her doing this, it threw up blood and bile onto her mother's bedsheets, which Clelia then had to strip and soak. There was no arguing with blood. No matter how cruel her mother was to her, she held the bloody trump card of actually being ill.

Nor was there any arguing that Clelia needed to have a job. Even if she hadn't been denied entry to the university—the university that her father had attended, the four-hundred-year-old university that she passed every morning on her way to the bakery—the family couldn't have afforded to let her go full-time. Uncle Rudi worked for the city in a street-paving capacity, proud in his bright blue coveralls, the German worker's uniform, the true uniform of tyranny in the socialist workers' state, and he took care of his ailing sister to the extent of paying the rent. But he drank and had girlfriends, and so it fell to Clelia to put food on the table. Her brother was fifteen and her sister was still a little girl.

By day Clelia waited on customers at the bakery, by night she waited on the stomach. Only on Saturday afternoons and Sundays did she have a few hours to herself. She liked to walk along the river and, if the day was sunny, find a patch of clean grass to lie down on and close her eyes. She didn't need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger. Most of Clelia's
Oberschule
friends were now at the university and strangers to her, the rest kept their distance because her father's family was bourgeois, and she preferred to be by herself anyway, so she could dream of the man who would take her away from Adalbertstraße to Berlin, to France, to England, to America. A man like her father, whom she could still remember following up their building's stairs and hearing gently say, through the grudging one centimeter that their upstairs neighbor had opened his door, “My wife is very sick tonight. Her stomach. If you could not be quite so loud?” A man like that.

On a very warm June Saturday, not long after Clelia had turned twenty, she took off her apron at the bakery and told the manager she was leaving early. Already, in 1954, workers in Jena were learning that no harm would come of leaving early; all it meant was that customers had to wait in longer lines, at worst at the cost of work time at their own jobs, where it likewise didn't matter if they were absent. Clelia hurried home and changed into her favorite old faded lavender summer dress. Her uncle had taken her brother and sister fishing and left her mother, whom the stomach had kept awake all night, asleep in bed. Clelia made a pot of the blackberry tea that her mother claimed was calming to the stomach, although it contained tannic acid and caffeine, and took it to her bedroom with a plate of dry biscuits. She sat on the edge of her mother's bed and stroked her hair the way she remembered her father doing. Her mother awoke and pushed her hand away.

“I brought you some tea before I go out,” Clelia said, standing up.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

Her mother's face was still pretty when the stomach was off duty. She'd suffered for enough years to be ancient now, but she was only forty-three. For a moment, it seemed that she might be about to smile at Clelia, but then her eyes fell to Clelia's body, and her face immediately assumed its customary contours. “Not in that dress you're not.”

“What's wrong with this dress? It's a hot day.”

“If you had any sense, the last thing you'd do is call attention to your body.”

“What's wrong with my body?”

“Its chief defect is that there's rather a lot of it. A girl with any intelligence would seek to minimize its effect.”

“I'm very intelligent!”

“No, in fact,” her mother said, “you're a stupid goose. And I predict with some confidence that you'll make a present of yourself to the first stranger who says two kind words to you.”

Clelia blushed and, blushing, felt herself to be unquestionably a stupid goose: breasty and tall and absurd, with long feet and too much mouth. Goose that she was, she persisted in honking: “Two kind words is more than I ever heard in my whole life with you!”

“That's unjust, but never mind.”

“I
wish
some stranger would say kind words to me. I would
love
to hear kind words.”

“Oh, yes, it's very nice,” her mother said. “Every once in a long while, the stranger might even be sincere.”

“I don't care if he's sincere! I just want to hear kind words!”

“Listen to yourself.” Her mother felt the pot of tea and filled her cup. “You haven't cleaned the bathroom yet. Your uncle makes a mess of the toilet. I can smell it from in here.”

“I'll do it when I get back.”

“You'll do it now. I don't understand this ‘pleasure first and duty second.' You'll clean the bathroom and wash the kitchen floor, and then, if there's time, you can change your clothes and go out. I don't see how you can enjoy a pleasure when you know there's work to do.”

“I won't be gone long,” Clelia said.

“Why the hurry?”

“It's such a beautiful warm day.”

“Are you going to buy something? Are you worried that the store will close?”

Annelie was good at intuiting the one question Clelia didn't want to answer truthfully, and asking it.

“No,” Clelia said.

“Bring me your pocketbook.”

Clelia went to the parlor and came back with the pocketbook, which contained some small bills and change. She watched while her mother counted pfennigs. Although her mother hadn't hit her since she became the family's breadwinner, Clelia's expression was all animal edginess, the distraction of cornered prey.

“Where is the rest of it?” her mother said.

“This is all there is. I gave you the rest of it.”

“You're lying.”

All of a sudden, in the left cup of Clelia's bra, six twenties and eight tens began to stir like crisp-winged insects preparing for flight. She could hear the rustle of their paper wings, which meant that her sharp-eared mother could hear them too. Their scratchy legs and hard heads dug into Clelia's skin. She willed herself not to look down.

“It's the dress,” her mother said. “You want to buy the dress.”

“You know I can't afford that dress.”

“They'll take twenty marks and let you pay installments.”

“Not for this, they won't.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because I went and asked! Because I want a nice dress!” Clelia looked down in dismay as her right hand, entirely of its own volition, rose from her side and came to rest on the guilty bra cup. She was such an open book, such a guileless and everywhere-spilling mess, that her mother simply said:

“Show me what you have there.”

Clelia took the bills from her bra and gave them to her mother. In the rear of the clothing shop on their street was a particular sundress cut Western or what passed for Western in godforsaken Jena, certainly too Western to be placed on display. Clelia brought the shop lady fresh pastries that she said were old and had to be disposed of, and the shop lady was kind to her. But Clelia was such a stupid goose that she'd described the sundress to her little sister, as an example of what could be found in the rear of stores in the socialist republic, and her mother, though no fan of the socialist republic, had taken note. She was better at surveillance than the socialist republic was. Calm in victory, she put the money in the pocket of her robe, took a sip of tea, and said, “Did you want the dress for some particular assignation? Or just for walking the streets?”