Purity (52 page)

The money didn't rightfully belong to Clelia and was, to this extent, unreal to her, and she felt that she deserved the punishment of having it taken away from her—indeed, she'd reached into her bra with a sense of penitent relief. But seeing the money disappear into her mother's pocket made it real to her again. Six months it had taken her to save it up without being caught. Her eyes filled.

“
You're
the streetwalker,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Horrified with herself, she tried to take it back. “I meant, you like to walk in the street. I like to walk in the park.”

“But the word you just used. It was?”

“Streetwalker!”

Warm dark tea slapped Clelia full across the bodice of her lavender dress. She looked down, wide-eyed, at the destruction.

“I should have let you starve,” her mother said. “But you ate and ate and ate, and now look at how much there is of you. Was I supposed to let my children starve? I couldn't work, and so I did the only thing I could. Because you ate and ate and ate. You have no one but yourself to blame for what I did. It was your appetite, not mine.”

It was true enough that her mother had no appetite. But she spoke with such fairy-tale cruelty, in a voice so exacting and controlled, that it was as if there were no mother there at all: as if the person in bed were merely a flesh-and-blood dummy through which the vengeful stomach spoke. Clelia waited to see if some human remnant of her mother might reconsider what she'd said and apologize for it, or at least mitigate it; but her mother's face distorted with a sudden writhing of the stomach. She gestured feebly toward the teapot. “I need hot tea,” she said. “This isn't hot enough.”

Clelia fled the bedroom and hurled herself onto her cot.

“You're a dirty—
whore!
” she whispered. “
A dirty whore!
”

Hearing herself, she immediately sat up and clamped her mouth shut with her fingers. Tears in her eyes gave trembling, diaphanous wings to the bars of sunlight leaking in around the heavy curtains that the stomach insisted be kept closed. My God, she thought. How can I say that? I'm a terrible person! And then, throwing herself back down on the narrow mattress, she expelled more words into her pillow: “
A whore! A whore! A filthy whore!
” At the same time, she beat on her head with her knuckles. She felt herself to be the world's most terrible person, also one of the most unlucky and ridiculous. Her legs were so long that to sleep on the cot she had to bend them or leave her feet hanging off the end. She was more than one and three-quarters meters tall, a ridiculous goose in the too-small cage of her cot, with the ugliest name any girl was ever given. People at the bakery had the impression that she was stupid because she giggled for no reason and tended to blurt out whatever came into her head.

She wasn't stupid. She got excellent marks in school and could have been taking classes at the university if the committee had let her. The official word was that her father was bourgeois, but her father was dead and her mother and uncle came from the correct social class. The real stigma was that her mother had granted favors to one and then another black-uniformed officer in the worst years. Clelia's little sister was the daughter of the second one. And, yes, Clelia had eaten the meat and butter and candy, but she'd been a child, unversed in evil. It was to the evil stomach that one of the officers had brought an entire case of authentic
Pepto-Bismol
. Annelie had sold herself for the stomach, not for her children.

In my mother's many tellings of this story to me, she always stressed that when she'd changed out of her ruined dress and dropped one hard roll and two books into her purse, she hadn't been intending to abandon her siblings, hadn't been acting on any long-contemplated plan. She just wanted an evening away from the stomach, at most a night and day of relief from an apartment that made her both wholly conscious of the misery of being German and wholly unable to imagine not being German. Until that Saturday in June, the worst thing she'd ever plotted was to buy a Western sundress. Now she'd never have the dress, but she could still go walking in the West, the American sector was only a train ride away.

With thirty marks in her shoulder bag, she hurried downhill to the center of town, which was still being rebuilt, with socialist unhurry, from the pummeling it had received for harboring the manufacturer of bomb sights and rifle scopes for the war. The round-trip ticket to Berlin cost her nearly all her money. With the little that remained she bought a small bag of candy that left her all the hungrier by the time the train reached Leipzig. So little had she planned to run away, one dry roll was the only other food she had. But what she mainly yearned for now was fresh air. The air in her train compartment stank of socialist underarm, the air from the open window was hot and rank with heavy industry, the air at the Friedrichstraße station was befouled with cheap tobacco smoke and bureaucratic ink. She had no sense of being one drop in the bucket of brains and talent that was draining out of the republic in those years. She was just a blindly running goose.

The West was even more ruined than the East, but the air really was a little fresher, if only because night had fallen. The impression Clelia had on Kurfürstendamm was of a place that had experienced a hard winter, not permanent socialist ruination. Already, like the first green shoots of spring, like snowdrops and crocuses, the vital signs of commerce were emerging on the Ku'damm. She walked up the length of it and back down again, never stopping, because to stop would mean to think about how hungry she was. She walked and walked, through darker streets and neighborhoods more demolished. Eventually she became aware that, in some unthinking animal way, she was looking for a bakery, because bakeries dumped their stale
Schrippen
after closing hour on Saturdays. But why, when a person was desperately seeking one particular kind of store in an unfamiliar city, did she invariably choose the best route to not find it? Every intersection was another opportunity for error.

Error by error, Clelia blundered into the extremely dark and deserted neighborhood of Moabit. A light rain had started falling, and when she finally stopped walking, under a mutilated linden tree, she had no idea where she was. But the city seemed to know—seemed only to have been waiting for her to stop walking. A black sedan, windows open, roof poxed with raindrops, pulled up alongside her, and a man leaned out from the passenger side.

“Hey there, Legsy!”

Clelia looked around to see if the man might be addressing someone else.

“Yes—you!” the man said. “How much?”

“Excuse me?”

“How much for the two of us?”

Smiling politely, because the two men were smiling in such a friendly way themselves, Clelia glanced over her shoulder and started walking again in that direction. She stumbled and began to hurry.

“Oh, hey, wait, you're fantastic—”

“Come back—”

“Legsy—Legsy—Legsy—”

She felt she was being impolite, even though the two men appeared to have mistaken her for a prostitute. It was an honest mistake and understandable given the circumstances. I should go back, she thought. I should go back and make sure it really was a mistake, and try to think of the right thing to say, because otherwise they're going to feel embarrassed and ashamed, even though it's my own stupid fault for walking on this street … But her legs kept carrying her forward. She could hear the sedan turning around and coming after her.

“Apologies for the misunderstanding,” the driver said, slowing the car to match her pace. “You're a decent girl, aren't you?”

“Pretty girl,” the other man averred.

“This is no kind of neighborhood for a decent girl to walk in. We'll give you a ride.”

“It's raining, sweetheart. Don't you want to get out of the rain?”

She kept moving, too embarrassed to look in their direction, but also unsure of herself, because it really was raining and she was very hungry; and maybe this was how it had started for her mother, too, maybe her mother had once been a girl like she was now, lost in the world and needing something from a man …

On the dark sidewalk in front of her another man loomed up. She stopped and the car stopped. “You see what I mean?” the driver said to her. “It isn't safe to walk alone here.”

“Come, come,” the other one urged. “Come with us.”

The man on the sidewalk wasn't physically imposing, but he had a broad, honest face. And this would have been my father: even on a dark and rainy night in sinister Moabit, he was unmistakably trustworthy. I'm helpless to picture him on that street in anything but cheerfully terrible clothes, his L.L.Bean walking shoes, his khaki high-water pants, and one of those fifties sport shirts whose collar tabs opened wide and flat. After sizing up the situation with a frown, he spoke to Clelia in self-taught German:
Entshooldig, fraulein. Con ick dick helfen? Ist allus okay here? Spreckinzee english?

“A little,” she said in English.

“D'you know these guys? D'you want 'em here?”

After a hesitation, she shook her head. Whereupon my father, who was in any case physically fearless, and who believed, moreover, that if you treated people in a rational and friendly manner they would treat you the same way, and that the world would be a better place if everyone would do this, went over to the sedan and shook the men's hands, introduced himself in German as Chuck Aberant of Denver, Colorado, and asked them if they lived in Berlin or were just visiting like he was, listened with genuine interest to their answers, and then told them not to worry about the girl; he would personally vouch for her safety. It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the world.

My mother, who at twenty had already witnessed the bombing of Jena, the Red Army's arrival, her mother being doused with the contents of a neighbor's chamber pot, a dog eating a child's corpse, pianos hacked apart for firewood, and the rise of the socialist workers' state, liked to say to me that she had never in her life seen anything more amazing than the American man's warmth toward the two creeps in their sedan. His kind of trust and openness was, for a Prussian, inconceivable.

“What's your name?” my father asked her when they had the street to themselves.

“Clelia.”

“Oh my, what a beautiful name,” my father said. “That's a
great
name.”

My mother happily smiled and then, certain that she looked like a mouthsome Tyrannosaur, tried to stretch her lips down over her hundred teeth; but concealment was a lost cause. “Do you really think?” she said, smiling all the more widely.

My father hadn't said two kind words, it was more like ten. It still wasn't very many. In the back pocket of his khakis was a map of Berlin, the kind with the patented folding system (my father loved innovations, loved to see inventors rewarded for improving the human condition), and he was able to lead my mother to Zoo Station and buy her some wurst at the all-night food kiosk there. In a mix of English and German, followable only spottily by my mother, he explained that this was his first day in Berlin and he was so excited to be here that he could have walked all night. He was a delegate to the Fourth World Congress of the Association for International Understanding (which wouldn't survive to hold a fifth congress, owing to its exposure, the following autumn, as basically a Communist front). He'd left his two little girls, from his first marriage, in the care of his sister, and had flown to Berlin on his own nickel. He'd had some disappointments in life, he'd hoped to contribute more to the world than teaching high-school biology, but the wonderful thing about teaching was that it gave him whole summers to get
out
, out into the world, out into nature. He delighted in meeting foreigners and uncovering common ground; at one point, he'd studied Esperanto. His girls, only four and six, were already great little campers, and when they were older he intended to take them to Thailand, to Zambia, to Peru. Life was too short for sleeping. He didn't want to waste one minute of his week in Berlin.

When my mother told him she'd run away from Jena, my father's first impulse was to think of his own daughters and insist that she go home again in the morning. But when he learned that her mother had beaten her and that she'd never go to college, he reconsidered. “Golly, that's rough,” he said. “Something wrong with a system that makes a bright, vital girl like you work behind the counter in a bakery. I'm an old-fashioned camper—a blanket and a piece of level ground's enough for me. My hotel's not much, but it does have beds. Why don't you sleep in mine, and we'll see how things look to you tomorrow. I can get a little shut-eye on the floor.”

His motives were almost certainly benign. My father was a good man: a tireless teacher and loyal husband, a seeder of independence in my sisters, a sucker for stories of injustice, a reflexive giver of the benefit of the doubt, a vigorous raiser of his hand when there was unpleasant work to be volunteered for. And yet I'm haunted by the fact that, all his life, he did exactly what he pleased. If he wanted to take his students to Honduras to dig sewage lines, or to a Navajo reservation to paint houses and brand cattle, even if it meant leaving my mother alone for weeks with the kids, he did it. If he wanted to stop the family car and chase a butterfly, he did it. And if he felt like marrying a pretty woman young enough to be his daughter, he did it—twice.

He was originally from Indiana. Hoping to make a contribution to agriculture, he'd pursued entomology, but the road to a PhD in entomology is long. Certain stages in the life cycle of the caddis flies he was studying could be collected only for a week or two each year, and to support himself while the years went by he took a job with the Colorado Department of Agriculture. He was living in Denver when he finished his dissertation and sent his collection to his committee in Indiana, which couldn't grant a degree without seeing specimens. The package, which represented eight years of work, disappeared in the U.S. mail without a trace. His dream had been to teach at a university and do pure research, but instead he ended up as an ABD in the Denver public school district.