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Her mother shook her head. “This is my worst nightmare. And now Andreas Wolf. This is a nightmare, a nightmare.”
“What do you know about Andreas?”
“I know that he is not a good person.”
“How? How do you know that? I just spent half a day researching him, and he’s the opposite of a bad person. I have emails from him! I can show you.”
“Oh my God,” her mother said, shaking her head.
“What? Oh my God what?”
“Has it occurred to you why a person like that is emailing you?”
“They have a paid internship program. You have to take a test, and I passed it. They do amazing work, and they actually want me. He’s been sending me all these personal emails even though he’s incredibly busy and famous.”
“It could be some assistant who’s writing to you. Isn’t that the thing about emails? You never know who’s writing them.”
“No, this is definitely him.”
“But think about it, Purity. Why do they want you?”
“You’re the one who’s been telling me I’m so special for twenty-three years.”
“Why does a man with bad morals pay a beautiful young woman to come to South America?”
“Mother, I’m not beautiful. I’m also not stupid. That’s why I researched him and wrote to him.”
“But pussycat, the Bay Area is full of people who could want you. Appropriate people. Kind people.”
“Well, it’s safe to say I haven’t been meeting them.”
Her mother took hold of Pip’s hands and searched her face. “Did something happen to you? Tell me what happened to you.”
The maternal hands suddenly seemed like grasping claws to Pip, and her mother like a stranger. She pulled her own hands away. “Nothing happened to me!”
“Dearheart, you can tell me.”
“I wouldn’t tell you if you were the last person on earth. You don’t tell me anything.”
“I tell you everything.”
“Nothing that matters.”
Her mother fell back in her seat and looked at the empty window again. “No, you’re right,” she said. “I don’t. I have my reasons, but I don’t.”
“Well, so then leave me alone. You don’t have any rights with me.”
“I have the right to love you more than anything in this world.”
“No you don’t!” Pip cried. “No you don’t! No you don’t! No you don’t!”
The Republic of Bad Taste (#ulink_0c8e513b-5725-52d1-8f17-35f6ae3ff0a6)
The church on Siegfeldstraße was open to anyone who embarrassed the Republic, and Andreas Wolf was so much of an embarrassment that he actually resided there, in the basement of the rectory, but unlike the others—the true Christian believers, the friends of the Earth, the misfits who believed in human rights or didn’t want to fight in World War III—he was no less an embarrassment to himself.
For Andreas the most achievedly totalitarian thing about the Republic was its ridiculousness. It was true that people who tried to cross the death strip were unridiculously shot, but to him this was more like an oddity of geometry, a discontinuity between Eastern flatness and Western three-dimensionality that you had to assume to make the math work. As long as you avoided the border, the worst that could happen was that you’d be spied on and picked up and interrogated, do prison time and have your life wrecked. However inconvenient this might be for the individual, it was leavened by the silliness of the larger apparatus—the risible language of “class enemy” and “counterrevolutionary elements,” the absurd devotion to evidentiary protocol. The authorities would never just dictate your confession or denunciation and force or forge your signature. There had to be photos and recordings, scrupulously referenced dossiers, invocations of democratically enacted laws. The Republic was heartbreakingly German in its striving to be logically consistent and do things right. It was like the most earnest of little boys, trying to impress and outdo its Soviet father. It was even loath to falsify election returns. And mostly out of fear, but maybe also out of pity for the little boy, who believed in socialism the way children in the West believed in a flying Christkind who lit the candles on the Christmas tree and left presents underneath it, the people all went to the polls and voted for the Party. By the 1980s, it was obvious that life was better in the West—better cars, better television, better chances—but the border was closed and the people indulged the little boy’s illusions as if recalling, not unfondly, their own illusions from the Republic’s early years. Even the dissidents spoke the language of reform, not overthrow. Everyday life was merely constrained, not tragically terrible (Olympic bronze was the Berliner Zeitung’s idea of calamity). And so Andreas, whose embarrassment it was to be the megalomaniacal antithesis of a dictatorship too ridiculous to be worthy of megalomania, kept his distance from the other misfits hiding in the church’s skirts. They disappointed him aesthetically, they offended his sense of specialness, and they wouldn’t have trusted him anyway. He performed his Siegfeldstraße ironies privately.
Alongside the broad irony of being an atheist dependent on a church was the finer irony of earning his keep as a counselor of at-risk youth. Had any East German child ever been more privileged and less at risk than he? Yet here he was, in the basement of the rectory, in group sessions and private meetings, counseling teenagers on how to overcome promiscuity and alcohol dependency and domestic dysfunction and assume more productive positions in a society he despised. And he was good at what he did—good at getting kids back into school, finding them jobs in the gray economy, connecting them with trustworthy government caseworkers—and so he was himself, ironically, a productive member of that society.
His own fall from privilege served as his credential with the kids. Their problem was that they took things too seriously (self-destructive behavior was itself a form of self-importance), and his message to them was always, in effect, “Look at me. My father’s on the Central Committee and I’m living in a church basement, but do you ever see me serious?” The message was effective, but it shouldn’t have been, because, in truth, he was scarcely less privileged for living in a church basement. He’d severed all contact with his parents, but in return for this favor they protected him. He’d never even been arrested, the way any of his at-risk charges would have been if they’d pulled the shit he’d pulled at their age. But they couldn’t help liking him and responding to him, because he spoke the truth, and they were too hungry to hear the truth to care how privileged he was to speak it plainly. He was a risk the state seemed willing to run, a misleading beacon of honesty to confused and troubled adolescents, for whom the intensity of his appeal then became a different sort of risk. The girls practically lined up outside his office door to drop their pants for him, and if they could plausibly claim to be sixteen he helped them with their buttons. This, too, of course, was ironic. He rendered a valuable service for the state, coaxing antisocial elements back into the fold, speaking the truth while enjoining them to be careful about doing it themselves, and was paid for his service in teen pussy.
His unspoken agreement with the state had been in place for so long—for more than six years—that he assumed he was safe. Nevertheless, he continued to take the precaution of avoiding friendships with men. He could tell, for one thing, that the other men around the church envied his way with the youngsters and therefore disapproved of it. Avoiding men also made actuarial sense, since there were probably ten male informers for every female. (The actuarial odds further argued for preferring females in their teens, because the spy runners were too sexist to expect much of a schoolgirl.) The biggest drawback of men, though, was that he couldn’t have sex with them; couldn’t cement that deep complicity.
Although his appetite for girls seemed boundless, he prided himself on never knowingly having slept with anyone below the age of consent or anyone who’d been sexually abused. He was skilled at identifying the latter, sometimes by the fecal or septic imagery they used to describe themselves, sometimes merely by a certain telltale way they giggled, and over the years his instincts had led to successful prosecutions. When a girl who’d been abused came on to him, he didn’t walk away, he ran away; he had a phobia of associating himself with predation. The sort of things that predators did—groping in crowds, lurking near playgrounds, forcing themselves on nieces, enticing with candy or trinkets—made him murderously angry. He took only girls who were more or less of sound mind and freely wanted him.
If his scruples still left an apparent residuum of sickness—a worry about what it meant that he felt compelled to repeat the same pattern with girl after girl, or that he not only never tired of it but seemed to want it only more, or that he preferred having his mouth between legs to having it near a face—he chalked it up to the sickness of the country he lived in. The Republic had defined him, he continued to exist entirely in relation to it, and apparently one of the roles it demanded he play was Assibräuteaufreißer. It wasn’t he, after all, who’d made all men and any woman over twenty untrustable. Plus, he came from privilege; he was the exiled blond prince of Karl-Marx-Allee. Living in the basement of a rectory, eating bad food out of cans, he felt entitled to the one small luxury that his vestigial privileges afforded. Lacking a bank account, he kept a mental coitus ledger and regularly checked it, making sure that he remembered not only first and last names but the exact order in which he’d had them.
His tally stood at fifty-two, late in the winter of 1987, when he made a mistake. The problem was that number fifty-three, a small redhead, Petra, momentarily residing with her unemployable father in a cold-water Prenzlauer Berg squat, was, like her father, extremely religious. Interestingly, this in no way dampened her hots for Andreas (nor his for her), but it did mean that she considered sex in a church disrespectful to God. He tried to relieve her of this superstition but succeeded only in making her very agitated about the state of his soul, and he saw that he risked losing her altogether if he failed to keep his soul in play. Once he’d set his mind on sealing a deal, he could think of nothing else, and since he had no close friend whose flat he could borrow and no money for a hotel room, and since the weather on the crucial night was well below freezing, the only way he could think to gain access to Petra’s pants (which now seemed to him more absolutely imperative than any previous access to anyone else’s, even though Petra was somewhat loopy and not particularly bright) was to board the S-Bahn with her and take her out to his parents’ dacha on the Müggelsee. His parents rarely used it in the winter and never during the work week.
By rights, Andreas ought to have grown up in Hessenwinkel or even Wandlitz, the enclave where the Party leadership had its villas, but his mother had insisted on living closer to the city center, on Karl-Marx-Allee, in a high-floor flat with big windows and a balcony. Andreas suspected that her real objection to the suburbs was bourgeois-intellectual—that she found the furnishings and conversations out there unbearably spießig, dowdy, philistine—but she was no more capable of uttering this truth than any other, and so she claimed to be pathologically prone to carsickness, hence unable to commute by car to her important job at the university. Because Andreas’s father was indispensable to the Republic, nobody minded that he lived in town or that his wife, again on grounds of carsickness, had selected the Müggelsee as the site of the dacha where they went for weekends in the warmer months. As Andreas came to see it, his mother was not unlike a suicide bomber, forever carrying the threat of crazy behavior fully armed and ready to detonate, and so his father acceded to her wishes as much as possible, asking only that she help him maintain the necessary lies. This was never a problem for her.
The dacha, walkable from the train station, was set on a large plot of piney land sloping gently to the lake shore. By feel, in the dark, Andreas located the key hanging from the customary eave. When he went inside with Petra and turned on a light, he was disoriented to find the living room outfitted with the faux-Danish furniture of his childhood in the city. He hadn’t been out to the dacha since the end of his homeless period, six years earlier. His mother had apparently redecorated the city flat in the meantime.
“Whose house is this?” Petra said, impressed with the amenities.
“Never mind that.”
There was zero danger of her finding a photograph of him. (Sooner a portrait of Trotsky.) From the tower of beer crates he took two half liters and gave one to Petra. The topmost Neues Deutschland on the outgoing stack was from a Sunday more than three weeks earlier. Imagining his parents alone here on a winter Sunday, childless, their conversation infrequent and scarcely audible, in that older-couple way, he felt his heart veer dangerously close to sympathy. He didn’t regret having made their later years barren—they had no one but themselves to blame for that—but he’d loved them so much, as a child, that the sight of their old furniture saddened him. They were still human beings, still getting old.
He turned on the electric furnace and led Petra down the hall to the room that had once been his. The quick cure for nostalgia would be to bury his face in her pussy; he’d already touched it, through her pants, while they were making out on the train. But she said she wanted to take a bath.
“You don’t have to on my account.”
“It’s been four days.”
He didn’t want to deal with a damp bath towel; it would have to be dried and folded before they left. But it was important to put the girl and her desires first.
“It’s fine,” he assured her pleasantly. “Take a bath.”
He sat down with his beer on his old bed and heard her lock the bathroom door behind her. In the weeks that followed, the click of this lock became the seed of his paranoia: why would she have locked the door when he was the only other person in the house? It was improbable for eight different reasons that she could have known or been involved in what was coming. But why else lock the door, if not to protect herself against it?
Then again, maybe it was just his bad luck that she was immobilized in the bathtub with the water still running, her splashing and the flow in the pipes loud enough to have covered the sound of an approaching vehicle and footsteps, when he heard a pounding on the front door and then a barking: “Volkspolizei!”
The water in the pipes abruptly stopped. Andreas thought about making a run for it, but he was trapped by the fact that Petra was in the tub. Reluctantly, he heaved himself off the bed and went and opened the front door. Two VoPos were backlit by the flashers and headlights of their cruiser.
“Yes?” he said.
“Identification, please.”
“What’s this about?”
“Your identification, please.”
If the policemen had had tails, they wouldn’t have been wagging; if they’d had pointed ears, they would have been flattened back. The senior officer frowned at Andreas’s little blue book and handed it to the junior, who carried it back toward the cruiser.
“Do you have permission to be here?”
“In a certain sense.”
“Are you alone?”
“As you find me.” Andreas beckoned politely. “Would you care to come in?”
“I’ll need to use the telephone.”
“Of course.”
The officer entered circumspectly. Andreas guessed that he was more wary of the house’s owners than of any armed thugs who might be lurking in it.
“This is my parents’ place,” he explained.
“We’re acquainted with the undersecretary. We’re not acquainted with you. No one has permission to be in this house tonight.”
“I’ve been here for fifteen minutes. Your vigilance is commendable.”
“We saw the lights.”
“Really highly commendable.”
From the bathroom came a single plink of falling water; in hindsight, Andreas would find it noteworthy that the officer had shown no interest in the bathroom. The man simply paged through a shabby black notebook, found a number, and dialed it on the undersecretary’s telephone. In the moment, Andreas’s main feeling was a wish that the police would go away and let him get on with eating little Petra. Everything else was so unfortunate that he didn’t want to think about it.
“Mr. Undersecretary?” The officer identified himself and tersely reported the presence of an intruder who claimed to be a relative. Then he said “Yes” several times.
“Tell him I’d like to speak to him,” Andreas said. The officer made a silencing gesture.
“I want to talk to him.”
“Of course, right away,” the officer said to the undersecretary.
Andreas tried to grab the receiver. The officer shoved him in the chest and knocked him to the floor.
“No, he’s trying to take the phone … That’s right … Yes, of course. I’ll tell him … Understood, Mr. Undersecretary.” The officer hung up the phone and looked down at Andreas. “You’re to leave immediately and never come back.”
“Got it.”
“If you ever come back, there will be consequences. The undersecretary wanted to make sure you understand that.”
“He’s not really my father,” Andreas said. “We just happen to have the same last name.”
“Me personally?” the officer said. “I hope you come back, and I hope I’m on duty when you do.”
The younger officer returned and handed Andreas’s ID to the senior, who examined it with his lip curled. Then he flipped it into Andreas’s face. “Lock the door behind you, asshole.”
When the police were gone, he knocked on the bathroom door and told Petra to turn off the light and wait for him. He turned off the other lights and went out into the night, heading toward the train station. At the first bend in the lane, he saw the cruiser parked and dark and gave the officers a little wave. At the next bend, he ducked behind some pine trees to wait until the cruiser drove away. The evening had been damaging, and he wasn’t about to waste it. But when he was finally able to creep back into the dacha and found Petra cowering on his boyhood bed, mewling with fear of the police, he was too angry about his humiliation to care about her pleasure. He ordered her to do this and do that, in the dark, and it ended with her weeping and saying she hated him—a feeling he entirely reciprocated. He never saw her again.
Three weeks later, the German Christian Youth Conference invited him to speak in West Berlin. He presumed (though you could never know for sure; that was the beauty of it) that the conference had been thoroughly infiltrated by his cousin once removed, the spymaster Markus Wolf, because the invitation came forwarded from the Foreign Ministry with a notice to pick up a visa that had already been granted. It was laughably obvious that if he crossed the border he wouldn’t be allowed to reenter the country. Equally obvious was that the invitation was a warning from his father, a punishment for his indiscretion at the dacha.
Everyone else in the country wanted permission to travel even more than they wanted cars. The bait of attending some miserable three-day trade conference in Copenhagen was enough to entice the ordinary citizen to rat out colleagues, siblings, friends. Andreas felt singular in every way, but in none more than his disdain for travel. How the royal Danish poisoner and his lying queen had wanted their son out of the castle! He felt himself to be the rose and fair expectancy of the state, its product and its antic antithesis, and so his first responsibility was to not budge from Berlin. He needed his so-called parents to know that he was still there on Siegfeldstraße, knowing what he knew about them.
But it was lonely to be singular, and loneliness bred paranoia, and he soon reached the point of imagining that Petra had set him up, the whole rigmarole about sex in churches and the need for a bath a ruse to lure him into violating his tacit agreement with his parents. Now every time another at-risk girl appeared at his office door with that familiar burning look in her eyes, he remembered how uncharacteristically selfish he’d been with Petra, and how humiliated he’d been by the police, and instead of obliging the girl he teased her and drove her away. He wondered if he’d been lying to himself about girls forever—if the hatred he’d felt for number fifty-three was not only real but retroactively applicable to numbers one through fifty-two. If, far from indulging in irony at the state’s expense, he’d been seduced by the state at his point of least resistance.
He spent the following spring and summer depressed, and therefore all the more preoccupied with sex, but since he suddenly distrusted both himself and the girls, he denied himself the relief of it. He curtailed his individual conferences and ceased trolling the Jugendklubs for at-risk kids. Though he was jeopardizing the best job an East German in his position could hope to find, he lay on his bed all day and read British novels, detective and otherwise, forbidden and otherwise. (Having been force-fed Steinbeck and Dreiser and Dos Passos by his mother, he had little interest in American writing. Even the best Americans were annoyingly naïve. Life in the U.K. sucked more, in a good way.) Eventually he determined that what had depressed him was his childhood bed, the bed itself, in the Müggelsee house, and the feeling that he’d never left it: that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them. But it was one thing to identify the source of his depression, quite another to do anything about it.
He was seven months celibate on the October afternoon when the church’s young “vicar” came to see him about the girl in the sanctuary. The vicar wore all the vestments of renegade-church cliché—full beard, check; faded jean jacket, check; mod copper crucifix, check—but was usefully insecure in the face of Andreas’s superior street experience.
“I first noticed her two weeks ago,” he said, sitting down on the floor. He seemed to have read in some book that sitting on the floor established rapport and conveyed Christlike humility. “Sometimes she stays in the sanctuary for an hour, sometimes until midnight. Not praying, just doing her homework. I finally asked if we could help her. She looked scared and said she was sorry—she’d thought she was allowed to be here. I told her the church is always open to anyone in need. I wanted to start a conversation, but all she wanted was to hear that she wasn’t breaking any rules.”
“So?”
“Well, you are the youth counselor.”
“The sanctuary isn’t exactly on my beat.”
“It’s understandable that you’re burned out. We haven’t minded your taking some time for yourself.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I’m concerned about the girl, though. I talked to her again yesterday and asked if she was in trouble—my fear is that she’s been abused. She speaks so softly it’s hard to understand her, but she seemed to be saying that the authorities are already aware of her, and so she can’t go to them. Apparently she’s here because she has nowhere else to go.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“She might say more to you than to me.”
“How old is she?”
“Young. Fifteen, sixteen. Also extraordinarily pretty.” Underage, abused, and pretty. Andreas sighed.
“You’ll need to come out of your room at some point,” the vicar suggested.
When Andreas went up to the sanctuary and saw the girl in the next-to-rear pew, he immediately experienced her beauty as an unwelcome complication, a specificity that distracted him from the universal female body part that had interested him for so long. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, unrebelliously dressed, and was sitting with a Free German Youth erectness of posture, a textbook open on her lap. She looked like a good girl, the sort he never saw in the basement. She didn’t raise her head as he approached.
“Will you talk to me?” he said.
She shook her head.
“You talked to the vicar.”
“Only for a minute,” she murmured.
