Purity (72 page)

Completing his entrapment was Annagret's friendship with his mother. Back in 1990, after they'd set up house in Berlin and accustomed themselves to appearing in public together, unlearning the fear of incriminating themselves by doing so, he'd taken her to meet his parents. For the sake of his father, to whom he felt grateful and whose good opinion he prized, he ran the risk that his mother would be jealous of Annagret and cruel to her. But Katya was charming. She seemed to welcome Annagret's beauty, which made her a suitable Wolf ornament, and Annagret's youthful pliancy, which made Andreas's own hostility seem perverse. She wanted Annagret to go back to school, and when Annagret demurred, saying she preferred to roll up her sleeves and help other people, Katya gave her a wink and said, “We'll allow that. But you have to promise to attend my university instead. You can study with me in your free time, we'll work on your English, and everything you learn will be interesting. Believe me, I know where the boring things are.” She winked again.

Instinctively alarmed by the proposal, Andreas took Annagret home and told her his worst Katya stories, the ones he'd been holding back for fear that they'd reveal the family sickness in him. Annagret listened earnestly and said she liked Katya anyway. She liked her for having given birth to him. She liked her—no matter what he said—for obviously loving him as much as she did. And he was still so new to the miracle of possessing Annagret's body, the miracle of feeling capable of love, that he assented to the proposal. He managed to imagine that he might solve the problem of Katya by farming it out to Annagret.

Annagret's own mother was a disaster. As threatened, she'd pushed the police to investigate her husband's disappearance, but she was a known thief and drug addict, fresh out of prison, and made a poor impression. The police said honestly that the case file was lost and there was little they could do except circulate her husband's photograph. The mother tried to enlist the help of her husband's widowed mother and learned that the Stasi, two years earlier, had told his mother that he'd escaped to the West; she was still waiting to hear from him. Soon enough, Annagret's mother was using again. She came to Annagret and Andreas and badgered them for money. Annagret coldly suggested that her mother get sober and look for work in a foreign country where nurses were in short supply. Annagret's hatred of her was both genuine and convenient, since it protected her from the guilt of having had her husband murdered. The mother continued to harass them, turning up at their door to descant on Annagret's ingratitude, until she succeeded in trading her looks for drugs and lodging with a Polish carpenter who also used.

Katya, by comparison, was an angel to Annagret. After Andreas's father died, in 1993, she kept the old flat on Karl-Marx-Allee. She'd resigned from the university and endured a decent two-year interval of rehabilitation before resuming work as a
Privatdozent
and publishing a book-length study of Iris Murdoch to admiring reviews. She power walked eight kilometers every morning and traveled often to London with her Lhasa apso, Lessing. Annagret saw her at least once a week when she was in Berlin. The arrangement that Andreas had envisioned, whereby Annagret took over the distasteful job of keeping up family appearances, was working out much the way he'd hoped—except that he became insanely jealous of how close the two women were.

He hadn't seen this coming. Annagret's earnestness was never more unbearable to him, their wrongness as a couple never more evident, than on the evenings when she was at his mother's. He blamed her both for liking his mother and for being liked by her. And he had no acceptable outlet for his jealous rage. Even when they fought, his voice merely became chalkily rational. She detested this chalky voice, but it was effective in contrast to her red-faced blurting: he was a good man, in firm control of his temper and everything else. But if she happened to stay at Katya's even half an hour later than expected, he descended into a state of such eye-widened, heart-thudding rage that all he could do was sit with his arms pressed to his sides and try not to explode. It was so extreme that he began to suspect there was something inside him, some other self that had always been in him, that wasn't in other people. Was very unusual and sick and particular to him.

This thing, which he came to think of as the Killer, was like a neutrino or an esoteric boson, detectable only by inference. Observing his subatomic self with rigorous honesty, investigating the deep structure of his unhappiness, taking note of certain strange and evanescent fantasies, he slowly pieced together a theory of the Killer and the paradoxical equivalencies and time-bendings that characterized it. Boredom and jealous rage, for example, were equivalent. Both had to do with the Killer's frustration at not getting its object of desire. The Killer was enraged with Katya for depriving him of the object and no less enraged with Annagret herself. And what was this object? According to his theory, it was the fifteen-year-old girl he'd killed for. He'd believed he was attracted to her goodness, for its potential to redeem him, but to the Killer she was a fellow killer and liar and seducer. Her solemn gaze turned him on because it took him back to the night behind his parents' dacha, to the body of the man whom she'd seduced and lied to and helped him kill. The more she became her own person, became his mother's friend and many other women's friend, the harder it was to see her as that fifteen-year-old.

Denied this particular satisfaction, he was prone to Killer-sponsored fantasies, some of them so offensive to his self-image (for example, the fantasy of coming on Annagret while she was sleeping) that it took a huge exertion of honesty to clock them before he suppressed them. All of the fantasies, without exception, involved darkness at night, the darkness at his parents' dacha, the darkness of a hallway down which he was eternally walking to a bedroom. In his subatomic self, no chronology was stable. The object he wanted predated the piercings, the hair choppings, the gauzy Indian smocks she'd taken to wearing, and not because he “secretly” preferred fifteen-year-olds (if he ever had, he'd outgrown it) but because it was Annagret the socialist judo girl who'd helped him kill. Had
made
him kill; was
equivalent
to killing. The older Annagret, who was going to absurdly altruistic lengths to atone for the murder, didn't suit the Killer's purposes one bit, and so the Killer, in its fantasies, reversed the arrow of time and made her fifteen again. And more than that: when he examined certain fantasies closely, it was sometimes not he but her stepfather who walked down the dark hallway to the bedroom where she was sleeping. He was at once the man he'd killed and the man who'd killed him, and since another dark hallway existed in his memory, the dark hallway between his childhood bedroom and his mother's, there was a further twisting of chronology whereby his mother had given birth to the monster who was Annagret's stepfather, he was that monster, and he'd killed him in order to become him. In the shadowy world of the Killer, nobody was ever dead.

He would have loved not to believe in his theory, would have loved to lump it with the mumbo-jumbo of contemporary physics and dismiss it, but the thing he loved most about himself was his refusal to lie to himself, and no matter how busy he got and how much he traveled, there always seemed to come another night when he found himself alone at home, in the grip of a homicidal rage that he had no other way of explaining.

On one such night, Annagret returned from his mother's with an especially earnest look on her face. He was sitting on the sofa, not even pretending to be reading something. It was all he could do not to punch a wall; it was that bad.

“I thought you were coming home at nine,” he managed to say.

“We got to talking about things,” Annagret said. “I asked her about the fifties, what the country was like then. She told me all sorts of interesting things. But then—this is very strange. It's important. Do you mind talking to me now?”

He could feel her looking at him, and he willed his lips to curl upward, to smile. “Of course not.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Not hungry.”

“I'll make us some noodles later.” She sat down on the sofa by him. “Your mother was talking about your father's career, how brilliant he was, how busy he was. And then suddenly she stopped and said, ‘I had a lover.'”

The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was. How excellent it must have been for him to crush a man's skull with a shovel. If only he could recall—reexperience—the relief of doing that! He couldn't recall it. But the thought of it slightly calmed him; gave him something to hold on to.

“That's interesting,” he murmured.

“I know. I couldn't believe she was telling me. You said she's always claimed it never happened. I was too afraid to ask her to say more about it, and she didn't. Just ‘I had a lover.' And then she changed the subject. But then she kept looking at me, I don't know, like she wanted to make sure I'd noticed what she'd said.”

“Mm.”

“But listen. Andreas. I know we can't tell anyone our secret. I know that. But I see her so often, she's in her seventies, she is your mother. I had an impulse to tell her, and the impulse felt right. She would never tell anyone else, I'm sure of it. Do you think it's all right if I tell her?”

He didn't think so, not one bit. That Annagret could even imagine telling Katya! Previously unguessed vistas of female closeness opened up to his mind's eye. Katya having her way with him by way of pliant Annagret. Annagret so credulous, so earnest, so ready to betray him. Coming home at ten thirty when she'd promised to be home by nine—so many hours with Katya. Talking, talking, talking. Cunts, cunts, cunts. He was out of his mind.

“Are you out of your mind?” he said.

“No, I'm not,” she said, immediately on guard. “And she isn't, either. I actually think she's better. I know she was difficult when you were little, but that was a long time ago.”

She knew?
Difficult?
She didn't know. Nobody could know what having Katya as a mother had been like. What it was like to be psychically fucked with, day after day, and to be not only too young and weak to fight it but unable even to be angry, because she'd seduced him into wanting it. Annagret had wanted it from her stepfather for a week or two, a month at most. Andreas had wanted it throughout his childhood. And yet again he was trapped, because, unlike Annagret, he hadn't been physically raped. He had to live with the possibility that there had never been anything so monstrous about Katya. Her version of reality was seamless, especially in old age, her youthful peccadilloes now forgotten or rendered harmless by a nice French word like
lover
. She'd always insisted that the disturbance was in him, not her; that it was sick of him not to believe she was a good and loving mother. And indeed it was he who'd been sitting for hours in a jealous rage, waiting for the ladies to finish with their cozy chat.

“It can be a relief to confess things,” Annagret said. “Sometimes I think you forget that you got to confess to your father. I don't get to confess to
anyone
.”

COULD KILL HER WITH BARE HANDS RIGHT NOW

“Once you start confessing,” he said chalkily.

“What?”

“Where does it stop?”

“I'm saying we tell
one
person. Your own mother. Don't you want to? Your father was very understanding, and you felt better. I bet your mother would be all the more understanding, because she knows what it's like to make mistakes.”

Suddenly his mind changed temperature, as minds will do. In a cooler state, he imagined his mother knowing what they'd done. Katya was truly the last person in the world he had reason to be ashamed in front of, Katya who to him was vileness personified, and yet he imagined himself ashamed of being a killer. Ashamed of everything, every particle of himself, right up to this moment. Strangle his sweet judo girl to silence her? What was wrong with him?

Without looking at her face, he rotated toward her and buried his own face in her chest. He swung his legs up onto her lap and hung his arms around her neck. He looked like that stupid picture of John Lennon in Yoko's arms but who cared. He needed to be held. She was better than good, because she hadn't always been good. Had known badness and chosen goodness.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, stroking his hair, babying him. “I didn't mean to upset you.”

“Shh.”

“Are you all right?”

“Shh, shh.”

“What is it?”

“We can't tell her,” he said.

“We can, though. We should.”

“Please, no. We can't.”

He began to cry. The Killer stirred in him again, sensing opportunity in his tears, his regression. The Killer liked regression. The Killer liked it when he was four and Annagret fifteen. Blindly, with his eyes squeezed shut, he sought her lips with his. For a moment, hers were open and available, but then, as if she were prey, instinctively sensing a Killer she couldn't see, she averted her face. “We have to finish discussing this,” she said.

Discuss, discuss, discuss. Talk, talk, talk. He hated her. Needed her, hated her, needed her, hated her. Eyes still shut, he tried to kiss her again.

“I'm serious,” she said, trying to stand up. “Get off my lap.”

He got off her lap and opened his eyes. “Go to a priest,” he said.

“What?”

“If you want to confess. Find a Catholic church, go to the confessional, say what you have to say. You'll feel better.”

“I'm not Catholic.”

“I can't stop you from seeing her, but I don't like it.”

“She worships you! You're practically her Jesus.”

“She worships what she sees in a mirror. We're just useful objects to her. The more you tell her, the more she can use us.”