Purity (15 page)

“No,” Annagret said. But she was inclined to believe it. More and more often lately, there was something dulled about her mother.

“She's very expert at pilfering,” Horst said. “No one at the hospital suspects.”

“We need to talk to her about it and tell her to stop.”

“Addicts don't stop without treatment. If she asks for treatment, the authorities will know she was stealing.”

“But they'll be happy that she's honest and trying to get better.”

“Well, unfortunately, there's another matter. An even bigger secret. Not even your mother knows this secret. Can I tell it to you?”

He was one of her best friends, and so, after a hesitation, she said yes.

“I took an oath that I would never tell anyone,” Horst said. “I'm breaking that oath by telling you. For some years now, I've worked informally for the Ministry for State Security. I'm a well-trusted unofficial collaborator. There's an officer I meet with from time to time. I pass along information about my workers and especially about my superiors. This is necessary because the power plant is vital to our national security. I'm very fortunate to have a good relationship with the ministry. You and your mother are very fortunate that I do. But do you understand what this means?”

“No.”

“We owe our privileges to the ministry. How do you think my officer will feel if he learns that my wife is a thief and a drug addict? He'll think I'm not trustworthy. We could lose this flat, and I could lose my position.”

“But you could just tell the officer the truth about Mother. It's not your fault.”

“If I tell him, your mother will lose her job. She'll probably go to prison. Is that what you want?”

“Of course not.”

“So we have to keep everything secret.”

“But now I wish I didn't know! Why did I have to know?”

“Because you need to help me keep the secret. Your mother betrayed us by breaking the law. You and I are the family now. She is the threat to it. We need to make sure she doesn't destroy it.”

“We have to try to help her.”

“You matter more to me than she does now. You are the woman in my life. See here.” He put a hand on her belly and splayed his fingers. “You've become a woman.”

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 half-wittingly 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.