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The hand on her belly frightened her, but not as much as what he’d told her.
“A very beautiful woman,” he added huskily.
“I’m feeling ticklish.”
He closed his eyes and didn’t take away his hand. “Everything has to be secret,” he said. “I can protect you, but you have to trust me.”
“Can’t we just tell Mother?”
“No. One thing will lead to another, and she’ll end up in jail. We’re safer if she steals and takes drugs—she’s very good at not getting caught.”
“But if you tell her you work for the ministry, she’ll understand why she has to stop.”
“I don’t trust her. She’s betrayed us already. I have to trust you instead.”
She felt she might cry soon; her breaths were coming faster.
“You shouldn’t put your hand on me,” she said. “It feels wrong.”
“Maybe, yes, wrong, a little bit, considering our age difference.” He nodded his big head. “But look how much I trust you. We can do something that’s maybe a little bit wrong because I know you won’t tell anyone.”
“I might tell someone.”
“No. You’d have to expose our secrets, and you can’t do that.”
“Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me anything.”
“But I did. I had to. And now we have secrets together. Just you and me. Can I trust you?”
Her eyes filled. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me a secret of your own. Then I’ll know I can trust you.”
“I don’t have any secrets.”
“Then show me something secret. What’s the most secret thing you can show me?”
The hand on her belly inched southward, and her heart began to hammer.
“Is it this?” he said. “Is this your most secret thing?”
“I don’t know,” she whimpered, very frightened and confused.
“It’s all right. You don’t have to show me. It’s enough that you let me feel it.” Through his hand, she could feel his whole body relax. “I trust you now.”
For Annagret, the terrible thing was that she’d liked what followed, at least for a while. For a while, it was merely like a closer form of friendship. They still joked together, she still told him everything about her days at school, they still went riding together and trained at the sports club. It was ordinary life but with a secret, an extremely grown-up secret thing that happened after she’d put on her pajamas and gone to bed. While he touched her, he kept saying how beautiful she was, what perfect beauty. And because, for a while, he didn’t touch her with any part of himself except his hand, she felt as if she herself were to blame, as if the whole thing had actually been her idea, as if she’d done this to them with her beauty and the only way to make it stop was to submit to it and experience release. She hated her body for wanting release even more than she hated it for its supposed beauty, but somehow the hatred made it all the more urgent. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to need her. She was very bad. And maybe it made sense that she was very bad, being the daughter of a drug addict. She’d casually asked her mother if she was ever tempted to take the drugs she gave her patients. Every once in a while, yes, her mother had answered smoothly, if a little bit of something at the hospital was left unused, she or one of the other nurses might take it to calm their nerves, but it didn’t mean the person was an addict. Annagret hadn’t said anything about anyone being an addict.
For Andreas the terrible thing was how much the stepfather’s pussycentrism reminded him of his own. He felt only somewhat less implicated when Annagret went on to tell him that her weeks of being touched had been merely a prelude to Horst’s unzipping of his pants. It was bound to happen sometime, and yet it broke the spell that she’d been under; it introduced a third party to their secret. She didn’t like this third party. She realized that it must have been spying on the two of them all along, biding its time, manipulating them like a case officer. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want it near her, and when it tried to assert its authority she became afraid of being at home at night. But what could she do? The pecker knew her secrets. It knew that, if only for a while, she’d looked forward to being tampered with. She’d halfwittingly become its unofficial collaborator; she’d tacitly sworn an oath. She wondered if her mother took narcotics so as not to know which body the pecker really wanted. The pecker knew all about her mother’s pilferage, and the pecker was empowered by the ministry, and so she couldn’t go to the authorities. They’d put her mother in jail and leave her alone with the pecker. The same thing would happen if she told her mother, because her mother would accuse her husband, and the pecker would have her jailed. And maybe her mother deserved to be jailed, but not if it meant that Annagret remained at home and kept harming her.
This was the latest chapter of her unfinished story, and it came out on the fourth evening of Andreas’s counseling. When Annagret had finished her confession, in the chill of the sanctuary, she began to weep. Seeing someone so beautiful weeping, seeing her press her fists to her eyes like an infant, Andreas was gripped by an unfamiliar physical sensation. He was such a laugher, such an ironist, such an artist of unseriousness, that he didn’t even recognize what was happening to him: he, too, was starting to cry. But he did recognize why. He was crying for himself—for what had happened to him as a child. He’d heard many stories of childhood sexual abuse before, but never from such a good girl, never from a girl with perfect hair and skin and bone structure. Annagret’s beauty had broken something open in him. He felt that he was just like her. And so he was also crying because he loved her, and because he couldn’t have her.
“Can you help me?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Why did I tell you so much if you can’t help me? Why did you keep asking me questions? You acted like you could help me.”
He shook his head and said nothing. She put a hand on his shoulder, very lightly, but even a light touch from her was terrible. He bowed forward, shaking with sobs. “I’m so sad for you.”
“But now you see what I mean. I cause harm.”
“No.”
“Maybe I should just be his girlfriend. Make him divorce my mother and be his girlfriend.”
“No.” He pulled himself together and wiped his face. “No, he’s a sick fucker. I know it because I’m a little bit sick myself. I can extrapolate.”
“You might have done the same thing he did …”
“Never. I swear to you. I’m like you, not him.”
“But … if you’re a little sick and you’re like me, it means that I must be a little bit sick.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You’re right, though. I should go home and be his girlfriend. Since I’m so sick. Thank you for your help, Mr. Counselor.”
He took her by the shoulders and made her look at him. There was nothing but distrust in her eyes now. “I want to be your friend,” he said.
“We all know where being friends goes.”
“You’re wrong. Stay here, and let’s think. Be my friend.”
She pulled away from him and crossed her arms tightly.
“We can go directly to the Stasi,” he said. “He broke his oath to them. The minute they think he might embarrass them, they’ll drop him like a hot potato. As far as they’re concerned, he’s just some bottom-tier collaborator—he’s nobody.”
“No,” she said. “They’ll think I’m lying. I didn’t tell you everything I did—it’s too embarrassing. I did things to interest him.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re fifteen. In the eyes of the law, you have no responsibility. Unless he’s very stupid, he’s got to be scared out of his mind right now. You’ve got all the power.”
“But even if they believe me, everybody’s life is ruined, including mine. I won’t have a home, I won’t be able to go to university. Even my sister will hate me. I think it’s better if I just give him what he wants until I’m old enough to move away.”
“That’s what you want.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be here if that was what I wanted. But now I see that nobody can help me.”
Andreas didn’t know what to say. What he wanted was for her to come and live in the basement of the rectory with him. He could protect her, homeschool her, practice English with her, train her as a counselor for at-risk youth, and be her friend, the way King Lear imagined life with Cordelia, following the news of the court from a distance, laughing at who was in, who was out. Maybe in time they’d be a couple, the couple in the basement, leading their own private life.
“We can find room for you here,” he said.
She shook her head again. “He’s already upset that I don’t come home until midnight. He thinks I’m out with boys. If I didn’t come home at all, he’d turn my mother in.”
“He said that to you?”
“He’s an evil person. For a long time, I thought the opposite, but not anymore. Now everything he says to me is some kind of threat. He’s not going to stop until he gets everything he wants.”
A different sensation, not tears, a wave of hatred, came over Andreas. “I can kill him,” he said.
“That’s not what I meant by helping me.”
“Somebody’s life has to be ruined,” he said, pursuing the logic of his hatred. “Why not his and mine? I’m already in a kind of prison. The food can’t be any worse in a real prison. I can read books at state expense. You can go to school and help your mother with her problem.”
She made a derisive sound. “That’s a good plan. Trying to kill a bodybuilder.”
“Obviously I wouldn’t warn him in advance.”
She looked at him as if he couldn’t possibly be serious. All his life, until now, she would have been right. Levity was his métier. But it was harder to see the ridiculous side of the casual destruction of lives in the Republic when the life in question was Annagret’s. He was already falling in love with this girl, and there was nothing he could do with the feeling, no way to act on it, no way to make her believe that she should trust him. She must have seen some of this in his face, because her own expression changed.
“You can’t kill him,” she said quietly. “He’s just very sick. Everyone in my family is sick, everyone I touch is sick, including me. I just need help.”
“There is no help for you in this country.”
“That can’t be right.”
“It’s the truth.”
She stared for a while at the pews in front of them or at the cross behind the altar, forlorn and murkily lit. After a time, her breaths became quicker and sharper. “I wouldn’t cry if he died,” she said. “But I should be the one to do it, and I could never do it. Never, never. I’d sooner be his girlfriend.”
On more careful reflection, Andreas didn’t really want to kill Horst, either. He could imagine surviving prison, but the label murderer didn’t accord with his self-image. The label would follow him forever, he wouldn’t be able to like himself as much as he did now, and neither would other people. It was all very well to be a Assibräuteaufreißer, a troller for sex with the antisocial—the label was appropriately ridiculous. But murderer was not.
“So,” Annagret said, standing up. “It’s nice of you to offer. It was nice of you to listen to my story and not be too disgusted.”
“Wait, though,” he said, because another thought had occurred to him: if she were his accomplice, he might not automatically be caught, and even if he were caught her beauty and his love for her would forever adhere to what the two of them had done. He wouldn’t simply be a murderer; he’d be the person who’d eliminated the molester of this singular girl.
“Can you trust me?” he said.
“I like that I can talk to you. I don’t think you’re going to tell anyone my secrets.”
These weren’t the words he wanted to hear. They made him ashamed of his fantasy of homeschooling her in the basement.
“I don’t want to be your girlfriend,” she added, “if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend.”
“You’re fifteen, I’m twenty-seven. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I’m sure you have your own story, I’m sure it’s very interesting.”
“Do you want to hear it?”
“No. I just want to be normal again.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
Her expression became desolate. The natural thing would have been to put his arms around her and console her, but nothing about their situation was natural. He felt completely powerless—another new sensation and one he didn’t like one bit. He figured that she was about to walk away and never come back. But instead she drew a stabilizing breath and said, without looking at him, “How would you do it?”
In a low, dull voice, as if in a trance, he told her how. She had to stop coming to the church and go home and lie to Horst. She had to say that she’d been going to a church to sit by herself and pray and seek God’s guidance, and that her mind was clearer now. She was ready to give herself fully to Horst, but she couldn’t do it at home, out of respect for her mother. She knew a better place, a romantic place, a safe place where some of her friends went on weekends to drink beer and make out. If he cared about her feelings, he would take her there.
“You know a place like that?”
“I do,” Andreas said.
“Why would you do this for me?”
“Who better to do it for? You deserve a good life. I’m willing to take a risk for that.”
“It’s not a risk. It’s guaranteed—they’d definitely catch you.”
“OK, thought experiment: if it were guaranteed they wouldn’t, would you let me do it?”
“I’m the one who should be killed. I’ve been doing something terrible to my sister and my mother.”
He sighed. “I like you a lot, Annagret. I’m not so fond of the self-dramatizing, though.”
This was the right thing to have said—he saw it immediately. Not a full-bore burning look from her but unmistakably a spark of fire. He almost resented his loins for warming at the sight; he didn’t want this to be just another seduction. He wanted her to be the way out of the wasteland of seduction he’d been living in.
“I could never do it,” she said, turning away from him.
“Sure. We’re just talking.”
“You self-dramatize, too. You said you were the most important person in the country.”
He could have pointed out that such a ridiculous claim could only be ironic, but he saw that this was only half true. Irony was slippery, the sincerity of Annagret was firm. “You’re right,” he said gratefully. “I self-dramatize, too. It’s another way the two of us are alike.”
She gave a petulant shrug.
“But since we’re only talking, how well do you think you could ride a motorbike?”
“I just want to be normal again. I don’t want to be like you.”
“OK. We’ll try to make you normal again. But it would help if you could ride his motorbike. I’ve never been on one myself.”
“Riding it is sort of like judo,” she said. “You try to go with it, not against it.”
Sweet judo girl. She continued like this, closing the door on him and then opening it a little, rejecting possibilities that she then turned around and allowed, until it got so late that she had to go home. They agreed that there was no point in her returning to the church unless she was ready to act on their plan or move into the basement. These were the only two ideas either of them had.
Once she stopped coming to the church, Andreas had no way to communicate with her. For the following six afternoons, he went up to the sanctuary and waited until dinnertime. He was pretty sure he’d never see her again. She was just a schoolgirl, she didn’t care about him, or at least not enough, and she didn’t hate her stepfather as murderously as he did. She would lose her nerve—either go alone to the Stasi or submit to worse abuse. As the afternoons passed, Andreas felt some relief at the prospect. In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable. What tormented him was the thought that he wouldn’t lay eyes on Annagret again. He pictured her studiously practicing her throws at the Judo Club, being the good girl, and felt very sorry for himself. He refused to picture what might be happening to her at home at night.
She showed up on the seventh afternoon, looking pale and starved and wearing the same ugly rain jacket that half the teenagers in the Republic were wearing. A nasty cold drizzle was falling on Siegfeldstraße. She took the rearmost pew and bowed her head and kneaded her pasty, bitten hands. Seeing her again, after a week of merely imagining her, Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.
