The Republic of Bad Taste

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 defended 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 “counter-revolutionary 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 that 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. 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 behind 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 counsellor of at-risk youth. Had any East German child ever been less at risk than he? Yet here he was, in the basement of the rectory, in group sessions and private meetings, counselling teen-agers 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 grace 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 as a twenty-one-year-old, in 1981, but in return for this favor they protected him. He hadn’t even been arrested for the “subversive” prank he’d played on the Republic’s leading literary magazine, the way any of his at-risk charges would have been. But they couldn’t help liking him and responding to him, because he spoke the truth, and they were hungry to hear it. The girls practically lined up outside his office door to drop their pants for him, and this, too, of course, was ironic. He rendered a valuable service to the state, coaxing antisocial elements back into the fold, and was paid for his service in teen pussy.

Although his appetite for girls seemed boundless, he prided himself on never having knowingly 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. He had a phobia of associating himself with predation.

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—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 that it demanded he play was Assibräuteaufreisser. 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 No. 53, a small redhead, Petra, temporarily 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 (or his for her), but it did mean that she considered sex in a church disrespectful to God. Andreas 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 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.

The dacha, walkable from the train station, was set on a large plot of piney land that sloped gently to the lakeshore. 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 in six years. His mother had apparently redecorated the city flat in the meantime.

“Whose house is this?” Petra said, impressed with the amenities.

“Never mind that.”

He turned on the electric furnace and led Petra down the hall to the room that had once been his. “Can I take a bath?” she said.

“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 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 had she locked the door when he was the only other person in the house? But maybe it was just his bad luck that she was immobilized in the bathtub with the water still running, the flow in the pipes loud enough to cover the sound of an approaching vehicle and footsteps, when he heard a pounding on the front door and then a barking: “Volkspolizei!”

The water 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 the 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 Under-Secretary. 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 found 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 dialled it on the living-room extension.

“Mr. Under-Secretary?” 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 Under-Secretary.

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. Under-Secretary.” 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 Under-Secretary wanted to make sure you understood that. But me personally? I hope you come back, and I hope I’m on duty when you do.”

When the police were gone, Andreas 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 gave the officers a little wave. At the next bend, he ducked behind some pine trees to wait until they 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 enraged at 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 that, by that point, he entirely reciprocated. He never saw her again.

He spent the following spring and summer depressed, and therefore all the more preoccupied with sex, but since he suddenly distrusted both himself and girls he denied himself the relief of it. 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. 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 counsellor.”

“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 in 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.

“O.K. Why don’t I sit down behind you, where you don’t have to see me. And then, if you—”

“Please don’t do that.”

“All right. I’ll stay in sight.” He took the pew in front of her. “I’m Andreas. I’m a counsellor here. Will you tell me your name?”

She shook her head.

“Are you here to pray?”

She smirked. “Is there a God?”

“No, of course not. Where would you get an idea like that?”

“Somebody built this church.”

“Somebody was thinking wishfully.”

She raised her head, as if he’d slightly interested her. “Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?”

“With who? The minister? God’s only a word he uses against the state. Nothing in this country exists except in reference to the state.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“I’m only saying what the state itself says.”

He looked down at her legs, which were of a piece with the rest of her.

“Are you very afraid of getting in trouble?” he said.

She shook her head.

“Afraid of getting someone else in trouble, then. Is that it?”

“I come here because this is nowhere. It’s nice to be nowhere for a while.”

“Nowhere is more nowhere than this place, I agree.”

She smiled faintly.

“When you look in the mirror,” he said, “what do you see? Someone pretty?”

“I don’t look in mirrors.”

“What would you see if you did?”

“Nothing good.”

“Something bad? Something harmful?”

She shrugged.

“Why didn’t you want me to sit down behind you?”

“I like to see who I’m talking to.”

“So we are talking. You were only pretending that you weren’t going to talk to me. You were being self-dramatizing—playing games.”

Sudden honest confrontation was one of his counselling tricks. That he was sick of these tricks didn’t mean they didn’t still work.

“I already know I’m bad,” the girl said. “You don’t have to explain it to me.”

“But it must be hard for you that people don’t know how bad you are. They simply don’t believe a girl so pretty can be so bad inside. It must be hard for you to respect people.”

“I have friends.”

“So did I when I was your age. But it doesn’t help, does it? It’s actually worse that people like me. They think I’m funny; they think I’m attractive. Only I know how bad I am inside. I’m extremely bad and extremely important. In fact, I’m the most important person in the country.”

It was encouraging to see her sneer like an adolescent. “You’re not important.”

“Oh, but I am. You just don’t know it. But you do know what it’s like to be important, don’t you. You’re very important yourself. Everyone pays attention to you, everyone wants to be near you because you’re beautiful, and then you harm them. You have to go hide in a church to give the world a rest from you.”

“I wish you’d leave me alone.”

“Who are you harming? Just say it.”

The girl lowered her head.

“You can tell me,” he said. “I’m an old harmer myself.”

She shivered a little and knit her fingers together in her lap. From outside, the rumble of a truck and the sharp clank of a bad gearbox entered the sanctuary and lingered in the air, which smelled of charred candlewick and tarnished brass.

“My mother,” the girl murmured. The hatred in her voice was hard to square with the notion that she cared that she was doing harm. Andreas knew enough about abuse to guess what this meant.

“Where’s your father?” he asked gently.

“Dead.”

“And your mother remarried.”

She nodded.

“Is she not at home?”

“She’s a night nurse at the hospital.”

He winced; he got the picture.

“You’re safe here,” he said. “This really is nowhere. There’s no one you can hurt here. It’s all right if you tell me your name. It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m Annagret,” the girl said.

Their initial conversation was analogous, in its swiftness and directness, to his seductions, but in spirit it was just the opposite. Annagret’s beauty was so striking, so far outside the norm, that it seemed like a pointed affront to the Republic of Bad Taste. It shouldn’t have existed; it upset the orderly universe at whose center he’d always placed himself; it frightened him. He was twenty-seven years old, and (unless you counted his mother when he was little) he’d never been in love, because he had yet to meet—had stopped even trying to imagine—a girl who was worth it. But here one was.

He saw her again on each of the following three evenings. He felt bad about looking forward to it just because she was so pretty, but there was nothing he could do about that. On the second night, to deepen her trust in him, he made a point of telling her that he’d slept with dozens of girls at the church. “It was a kind of addiction,” he said, “but I had strict limits. I need you to believe that you personally are way outside all of them.”

This was the truth but also, deep down, a total lie, and Annagret called him on it. “Everyone thinks they have strict limits,” she said, “until they cross them.”

“Let me be the person who proves to you that some limits really are strict.”

“People say this church is a hangout for people with no morality. I didn’t see how that could be true—after all, it’s a church. But now you’re telling me it is true.”

“I’m sorry to be the one to disillusion you.”

“There’s something wrong with this country.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“The Judo Club was bad enough. But to hear it’s in the church . . .”

Annagret had an older sister, Tanja, who’d excelled at judo as an Oberschule student. Both sisters were university-tracked, by virtue of their test scores and their working-class credentials, but Tanja was boy-crazy and overdid the sports thing and ended up working as a secretary after her Abitur, spending all her free time either dancing at clubs or training and coaching at the sports center. Annagret was seven years younger and not as athletic as her sister, but they were a judo family and she’d joined the local club when she was twelve.

A regular at the sports center was a handsome older guy, Horst, who was maybe thirty and owned a large motorcycle. He came to the center mostly to maintain his impressive buffness, but he also played handball and liked to watch the advanced judo students sparring, and by and by Tanja managed to score a date with him and his bike. This led to a second date and then a third, at which point a misfortune occurred: Horst met their mother. After that, instead of taking Tanja out on his bike, he wanted to see her at home, in their tiny shitty flat, with Annagret and the mother.

Inwardly, the mother was a hard and disappointed person, the widow of a truck mechanic who’d died wretchedly of a brain tumor, but outwardly she was thirty-eight and pretty—not only prettier than Tanja but also closer in age to Horst. Ever since Tanja had failed her by not pursuing her education, the two of them had quarrelled about everything imaginable, which now included Horst, who the mother thought was too old for Tanja. When it became evident that Horst preferred her to Tanja, she didn’t see how it was her fault. Annagret was luckily not at home on the fateful afternoon when Tanja stood up and said she needed air and asked Horst to take her out on his bike. Horst said there was a painful matter that the three of them needed to discuss. There were better ways for him to have handled the situation, but probably no good way. Tanja slammed the door behind her and didn’t return for three days. As soon as she could, she relocated to Leipzig.

After Horst and Annagret’s mother were married, the three of them moved to a notably roomy flat, where Annagret had a bedroom of her own. She felt bad for Tanja and disapproved of her mother, but her stepfather fascinated her. His job, as a labor-collective leader at the city’s largest power plant, was good but not quite good enough to explain the way he had of making things happen: the bike, the roomy flat, the oranges and Brazil nuts and Michael Jackson records he sometimes brought home. From her description of Horst, Andreas had the impression that he was one of those people whose self-love is untempered by shame and thus fully contagious. Certainly Annagret liked to be around him. He gave her rides on his motorcycle to and from the sports center. He taught her how to ride it by herself, in a parking lot. She tried to teach him some judo in return, but his upper body was so disproportionately developed that he was bad at falling. In the evening, after her mother left for her night shift, Annagret explained the extra-credit work she was doing in the hope of attending an Erweiterte Oberschule; she was impressed by Horst’s quick comprehension and told him that he should have gone to an EOS himself. Before long, she considered him one of her best friends. As a bonus, this pleased her mother, who seemed increasingly worn out by her nursing job and was grateful that her husband and daughter got along well. Tanja may have been lost to her, but Annagret was the good girl, her mother’s hope for the future of the family.

And then one night, in the notably roomy flat, Horst came tapping on her bedroom door before she turned off her light. “Are you decent?” he said playfully.

“I’m in my pajamas,” she said.

He came in and pulled up a chair by her bed. He had a very large head—Annagret couldn’t explain it to Andreas, but the largeness of Horst’s head seemed to her the reason that everything always worked out to his advantage. Oh, he has such a splendid head—let’s just give him what he wants. Something like that. On this particular night, his large head was flushed from drinking.

“I’m sorry if I smell like beer,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be able to smell it if I could have one, too.”

“You sound like you know quite a bit about beer drinking.”

“Oh, it’s just what they say.”

“You could have a beer if you stopped training, but you won’t stop training, so you can’t have a beer.”

She liked the joking way they had together. “But you train, and you drink beer.”

“I only drank so much tonight because I have something serious to say to you.”

She saw that something, indeed, was different in his face tonight. A kind of ill-controlled anguish in his eyes. Also, his hands were shaking.

“What is it?” she said, worried.

“Can you keep a secret?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you have to, because you’re the only person I can tell, and if you don’t keep the secret we’re all in trouble.”

She thought about this. “Why do you have to tell me?”

“Because it concerns you. It’s about your mother. Will you keep a secret?”

“I can try.”

Horst took a large breath that came out beer-smelling. “Your mother is a drug addict,” he said. “I married a drug addict. She steals narcotics from the hospital and uses them when she’s there and also when she’s at home. Did you know that?”

“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 being 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 of 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 downward, and her heart began to hammer.

“Is it this?” he said. “Is this your most secret thing?”

“I don’t know,” she whimpered.

“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 grownup secret thing that happened after she put on her pajamas and went 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 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 that 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 become its unofficial collaborator; she’d tacitly sworn an oath. She couldn’t go to the authorities, because Horst would tell them about the drugs and they’d put her mother in jail and leave her alone with the pecker. And maybe her mother deserved to be jailed, but not if it meant that Annagret remained at home and kept harming her. She wondered if her mother took narcotics so as not to face up to which body the pecker really wanted.

This was what came out on the fourth evening of Andreas’s counselling. 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. 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. Counsellor.”

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 were 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, home-school her, practice English with her, train her as a counsellor for at-risk youth, and be her friend, the way King Lear imagined being friends 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. Until that moment, 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 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 an Assibräuteaufreisser, a troller for sex among 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 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.

“Do 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.” She paused. “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. 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.”

“O.K., 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 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 had to 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.”

“O.K. 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 teen-agers 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.

He sat down not very close to her. For a long time, for several minutes, they didn’t speak. Love altered the way he perceived her uneven mouth-breathing and her trembling hands—again the disparity between the largeness of her mattering and the ordinariness of the sounds she made, the everydayness of her schoolgirl fingers. He had the strange thought that it was wrong, wrong as in evil, to think of killing a man who, in however sick a way, was also in love with her, that he instead ought to have compassion for that man.

“So I have to be at the Judo Club,” she said finally. “I can’t stay long.”

“It’s good to see you,” he said. Love made this feel like the most remarkably true statement he’d ever made.

“So just tell me what to do.”

“Maybe now is not a good time. Maybe you want to come back some other day.”

She shook her head, and some of her hair fell over her face. She didn’t push it back. “Just tell me what to do.”

“Shit,” he said honestly. “I’m as scared as you are.”

“Not possible.”

“Why not just run away? Come and live here. We’ll find a room for you.”

She began to shiver more violently. “If you won’t help me, I’ll do it myself. You think you’re bad, but I’m the bad one.”

“No, here, here.” He took her shaking hands in his own. They were icy and so ordinary, so ordinary; he loved them. “You’re a very good person. You’re just in a bad dream.”

She turned her face to him, and through her hair he saw the burning look. “Will you help me out of it?”

“It’s what you want?”

“You said you’d help me.”

Could anyone be worth it? He did wonder, but he set down her hands and took a map that he’d drawn from his jacket pocket.

“This is where the house is,” he said. “You’ll need to take the S-Bahn out there by yourself first, so you’ll know exactly where you’re going. Do it after dark and watch out for cops. When you go back there on the motorcycle, have him cut the lights at the last corner, and then go all the way back behind the house. The driveway curves around behind. And then make sure you take your helmets off. What night are we talking about?”

“Thursday.”

“What time does your mother’s shift start?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Don’t go home for dinner. Tell him you’ll meet him by his bike at nine-thirty. You don’t want anyone to see you leaving the building with him.”

“O.K. Where will you be?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just head for the back door. Everything will be the way we talked about.”

She convulsed a little, as if she might retch, but she mastered herself and put the map in her jacket pocket. “Is that all?” she said.

“You suggested it to him. The date.”

She nodded quickly.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Is that all?”

“Just one other thing. Will you look at me?”

She remained hunched over, like a guilty dog, but she turned her head.

“You have to be honest with me,” he said. “Are you doing this because I want it or because you want it?”

“What does it matter?”

“A lot. Everything.”

She looked down at her lap again. “I just want it to be over. Either way.”

“You know we won’t be able to see each other for a very long time, whichever way it goes. No contact of any kind.”

“That’s almost better.”

“Think about it, though. If you came here instead, we could see each other every day.”

“I don’t think that’s better.”

He looked up at the stained ceiling of the sanctuary and considered what a cosmic joke it was that the first person his heart had freely chosen was someone he not only couldn’t have but wouldn’t even be allowed to see. And yet he felt all right about it. His powerlessness itself was sweet. Who would have guessed that? Various clichés about love, stupid adages and song lyrics, flashed through his head.

“I’m late for judo,” Annagret said. “I have to go.”

He closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to see her leave.

The drizzle persisted through the week, with intermittent harder showers, and for three nights he obsessed about the rain, wondering whether it was good or bad. When he managed to sleep for a few minutes, he had dreams that he ordinarily would have found laughably obvious—a body not in the place where he’d left it, feet protruding from under his bed when people entered his room—but which under the circumstances were true nightmares, of the sort from which he ordinarily would have been relieved to awaken. But being awake was even worse now. He considered the plus side of rain: no moon. And the minus side: deep footprints and tire tracks. The plus side: easy digging and slippery stairs. And the minus side: slippery stairs. The plus side: cleansing. And the minus side: mud everywhere. . . . The anxiety had a life of its own; it churned and churned. The only thought that brought relief was that Annagret was unquestionably suffering even more. The relief was to feel connected to her. The relief was love, the astonishment of experiencing her distress more keenly than he experienced his own, of caring more about her than about himself. As long as he could hold that thought and exist within it, he could halfway breathe.

At three-thirty on Thursday afternoon he packed a knapsack with a hunk of bread, a pair of gloves, a roll of piano wire, and an extra pair of pants. He had the feeling that he’d slept not at all the previous night, but maybe he had, maybe a little bit. He left the rectory basement by the back stairs and emerged into the courtyard, where a light rain was falling. Earnest embarrassments were smoking cigarettes in the ground-floor meeting room, the lights already on.

On the train he took a window seat and pulled the hood of his rain parka over his face, pretending to sleep. When he got out at Rahnsdorf, he kept his eyes on the ground and moved more slowly than the early commuters, letting them disperse. The sky was nearly dark. As soon as he was alone he walked more briskly, as if he were out for exercise. Two cars, not police, hissed past him. In the drizzle he looked like nobody. When he rounded the last bend before the house and didn’t see anyone on the street, he broke into a lope. The soil here was sandy and drained well. At least on the gravel of the driveway, he wasn’t leaving footprints.

No matter how many times he’d gone over the logistics in his head, he couldn’t quite see how it would work: how he could conceal himself completely and still be within striking distance. He was desperate to keep Annagret out of it, to keep her safe in her essential goodness, but he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to. His anxiety the previous night had swirled around the image of some awful three-person scrum that would leave her trust in him shattered.

He strung the piano wire between two railing posts, across the second of the wooden steps to the back porch. Tightening it at a level low enough that she could not too obviously step over it, he dug the wire into the wood of the posts and flaked some paint off them, but there was nothing to be done about that. In the middle of his first night of anxiety, he’d got out of bed and gone to the rectory’s basement staircase to conduct a test of tripping on the second step. He’d been surprised by how hard he pitched forward, in spite of knowing he was going to trip—he’d nearly sprained his wrist. But he wasn’t as athletic as the stepfather, he wasn’t a bodybuilder. . . .

He went around to the front of the dacha and took off his boots. He wondered if the two VoPos he’d met the previous winter were patrolling again tonight. He remembered the senior one’s hope that they would meet again. “We’ll see,” he said aloud. Hearing himself, he noticed that his anxiety had abated. Much better to be doing than to be thinking about doing. He entered the house and took the key to the toolshed from the hook where it had hung since he was little.

He went outside again and put on his boots and stepped carefully around the edge of the back yard, mindful of footprints. Once he was safely in the toolshed, which had no windows, he groped for a flashlight and found one on the usual shelf. In its light, he checked inventory. Wheelbarrow—yes. Shovel—yes. He was shocked to see, by his watch, that it was already nearly six o’clock. He turned off the flashlight and took it out into the drizzle with the shovel.

The spot he had in mind was behind the shed, where his father piled yard waste. Beyond the pile, the pines were sparse, their fallen needles lying thick on soil furrowed by the frost heaves of winters past. The darkness was near-total here, the only light a few grayish panels between the surrounding trees, in the direction of the West’s greater brightness. His mind was now working so well that he thought to remove his watch and put it in his pocket, lest the shock of digging damage it. He turned on the flashlight and laid it on the ground while he cleared needles, setting aside the most freshly fallen in a separate pile. Then he turned out the light and dug.

Chopping through roots was the worst—hard work and loud work. But the neighboring houses were dark, and he stopped every few minutes to listen. All he heard was the rustle of rain and the faint generic sounds of civilization that collected in the basin of the lake. Again he was glad of the soil’s sandiness. He was soon into gravel, noisier to dig through but harder to slip on. He worked implacably, chopping roots, levering out larger stones, until he recalled, with some panic, that his sense of time was messed up. He scrambled out of the hole for the flashlight. Eight-forty-five. The hole was more than a half-metre deep. Not deep enough, but a good start.

He made himself keep digging, but now his anxiety was back, prompting him to wonder what time it was, what time. He knew he had to hold out and keep doing, not thinking, for as long as he could, but he soon became too anxious to wield the shovel with any force. It wasn’t even nine-thirty, Annagret hadn’t even met her stepfather in the city yet, but he climbed out of the hole and forced himself to eat some bread. Bite, chew, swallow, bite, chew, swallow. The problem was that he was parched and hadn’t brought water.

Fully out of his head, he dropped the bread on the ground and wandered back to the shed with the shovel. He could almost not remember where he was. He started to clean his gloved hands on the wet grass but was too out of his head to finish the job. He wandered around the edge of the yard, stepped wrong and left a deep footprint in a flower bed, dropped to his knees and madly filled it, and managed to leave an even deeper footprint. By now he was convinced that minutes were passing like seconds without his knowing it. From a great distance he could discern his ridiculousness. He could picture himself spending the rest of the night leaving footprints while cleaning his hands after filling footprints he’d left while cleaning his hands, but he also sensed the danger of picturing this. If he let his resolution be taken over by silliness, he was liable to put down the shovel and go back to the city and laugh at the idea of himself as a killer. Be the former Andreas, not the man he wanted to be now. He saw it clearly in those terms. He had to kill the man he’d always been, by killing someone else.

“Fuck it,” he said, deciding to leave the deep footprint unfilled. He didn’t know how long he’d knelt on the grass having extraneous and postponable thoughts, but he feared that it was a lot more time than it had felt like. Again from a great distance, he observed that he was thinking crazily. And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.

Interesting thought, bad time to be having it. There were a lot of small things he should have been remembering to do now, in the proper sequence, and wasn’t. He found himself on the front porch again without knowing how he’d got there. This couldn’t be a good sign. He took off his muddy boots and his slippery socks and went inside. What else, what else, what else? He’d left his gloves and the shovel on the front porch. He went back out for them and came inside again. What else? Shut the door and lock it. Unlock the back door. Practice opening it.

Extraneous bad thought: were the whorls of toe prints unique, like those of fingerprints? Was he leaving traceable toe prints?

Worse thought: what if the fucker thought to bring a flashlight or routinely carried one on his bike?

Even worse thought: the fucker probably did routinely carry a flashlight on his bike, in case of a nighttime breakdown.

A still worse thought was available to Andreas—namely, that Annagret would use her body, would feign uncontrollable lust, to forestall any business with a flashlight—but he was determined not to entertain it, not even for the relief from his terrible new anxiety, because it would entail being conscious of an obvious fact, which was that she must already have used her body and feigned lust to get the fucker out here. The only way Andreas could stand to picture the killing was to leave her entirely out of it. If he let her into it—allowed himself to acknowledge that she was using her body to make it happen—the person he wanted to kill was no longer her stepfather but himself. For putting her through a thing like that, for dirtying her in the service of his plan. If he was willing to kill the stepfather for dirtying her, it logically followed that he should kill himself for it. And so, instead, he entertained the thought that, even with a flashlight, the stepfather might not see the trip wire.

He’d heard it said that every suicide was a proxy for a murder that the perpetrator could only symbolically commit; every suicide a murder gone awry. He was prepared to feel universally grateful to Annagret, but right now he was more narrowly grateful that she was bringing him a person worth killing. He imagined himself purified and humbled afterward, freed finally of his sordid history. Even if he ended up in prison, she would literally have saved his life.

But where was his own flashlight?

It wasn’t in one of his pockets. It could be anywhere, although he surely hadn’t dropped it randomly in the driveway. Without it, he couldn’t see his watch, and without seeing his watch he couldn’t ascertain whether he had time to put his boots on and return to the back yard and find the flashlight and ascertain whether he did, in fact, have time to be looking for it. The universe, its logic, suddenly felt crushing to him.

There was, however, a small light above the kitchen stove. Turn it on for one second and check his watch? He had too complicated a mind to be a killer, too much imagination for it. He could see no rational risk in turning on the stove light, but part of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn’t think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity. An interesting paradox. But it didn’t answer the question of whether he should turn the light on.

And why was it so important to look at his watch? He couldn’t actually think of why. This went to his point about intelligence and its limits. He leaned the shovel against the back door and sat down cross-legged on the mud rug. Then he worried that the shovel was going to fall over. He reached to steady it with such an unsteady hand that he knocked it over. The noise was catastrophic. He jumped to his feet and turned on the stove light long enough to check his watch. He still had at least thirty minutes, probably more like forty-five.

He sat down on the rug again and fell into a state that was like a fever dream in every respect except that he was fully aware of being asleep. It was like being dead without the relief from torment. And maybe the adage had it backward, maybe every murder was a suicide gone awry, because what he was feeling, besides an all-permeating compassion for his tormented self, was that he had to follow through with the killing to put himself out of his misery. He wouldn’t be the one dying, but he might as well have been, because the relief that would follow the killing had a deathlike depth and finality in prospect.

For no apparent reason, he snapped out of his dream and into a state of chill clarity. Had he heard something? There was nothing but the trickle and patter of light rain. It seemed to him that a lot of time had passed. He stood up and grasped the handle of the shovel. He was having a new bad thought—that, for all his care in planning, he’d somehow neglected to consider what he would do if Annagret and her stepfather simply didn’t show up; he’d been so obsessed with logistics that he hadn’t noticed this enormous blind spot, and now, because the weekend was coming and his parents might be out here, he was facing the task of refilling the hole that he’d dug for nothing—when he heard a low voice outside the kitchen window.

A girl’s voice. Annagret.

Where was the bike? How could he not have heard the bike? Had they walked it down the driveway? The bike was essential.

He heard a male voice, somewhat louder. They were going around behind the house. It was all happening so quickly. He was shaking so much that he could hardly stand. He didn’t dare touch the doorknob for fear of making a sound.

“The key’s on a hook,” he heard Annagret say.

He heard her feet on the steps. And then: a floor-shaking thud, a loud grunt.

He grabbed the doorknob and turned it the wrong way and then the right way. As he ran out, he thought he didn’t have the shovel, but he did. It was in his hands, and he brought the convex side of its blade down hard on the dark shape looming up in front of him. The body collapsed on the steps. He was a murderer now.

Pausing to make sure of where the body’s head was, he raised the shovel over his shoulder and hit the head so hard he heard the skull crack. Everything so far fully within the bounds of planned logistics. Annagret was somewhere to his left, making the worst sound he’d ever heard, a moan-keen-retch-strangulation sound. Without looking in her direction, he scrambled down past the body, dropped the shovel, and pulled the body off the steps by its feet. Its head was on its side now. He picked up the shovel and hit the head on the temple as hard as he could, to make sure. At the second crack of skull, Annagret gave a terrible cry.

“It’s over,” he said, breathing hard. “There won’t be any more of it.”

He dimly saw her moving on the porch, coming to the railing. Then he heard the strangely childish and almost dear sounds of her throwing up. He didn’t feel sick himself. More like post-orgasmic, immensely weary and even more immensely sad. He wasn’t going to throw up, but he began to cry, making his own childish sounds. He dropped the shovel, sank to his knees, and sobbed. His mind was empty, but not of sadness.

The drizzle was so fine it was almost a mist. When he’d cried himself dry, he felt so tired that his first thought was that he and Annagret should go to the police and turn themselves in. He didn’t see how he could do what still had to be done. Killing had brought no relief at all—what had he been thinking? The relief would be to turn himself in at the police station.

Annagret had been still while he cried, but now she came down from the porch and crouched by him. At the touch of her hand on his shoulder, he sobbed again.

“Sh-h, sh-h,” she said.

She put her face to his wet cheek. The feel of her skin, the mercy of her warm proximity: his weariness evaporated.

“I must smell like vomit,” she said.

“No.”

“Is he dead?”

“He must be.”

“This is the real bad dream. Right now. Before wasn’t so bad. This is the real bad.”

“I know.”

She began to cry voicelessly, huffingly, and he took her in his arms. He could feel her tension escaping in the form of whole-body tremors, and there was nothing he could do with his compassion except hold her until the tremors subsided. When they finally did, she wiped her nose on her sleeve and pressed her face to his. She opened her mouth against his cheek, a kind of kiss. They were partners, and it would have been natural to go inside the house and seal their partnership, and this was how he knew for certain that his love for her was pure: he pulled away and stood up.

“Don’t you like me?” she whispered.

“Actually, I love you.”

“I want to come and see you. I don’t care if they catch us.”

“I want to see you, too. But it’s not right. Not safe. Not for a long time.”

In the darkness, at his feet, she seemed to slump. “Then I’m completely alone.”

“You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me.”

She made a little snorting sound, possibly mirthful. “I barely even know you.”

“Safe to say I don’t make a habit of killing people.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” she said, “but I guess I should thank you. Thank you for killing him.” She made another possibly mirthful sound. “Just hearing myself say that makes me all the more sure that I’m the bad one. I made him want me, and then I made you do this.”

Andreas was aware that time was passing. “What happened with the motorcycle?”

She didn’t answer.

“Is the motorcycle here?”

“No.” She took a deep breath. “He was doing maintenance after dinner. He didn’t have it put back together when I went to meet him—he needed some new part. He said we should go out some other night.”

Not very ardent of him, Andreas thought.

“I thought maybe he’d gotten suspicious,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do, but I said I really wanted it to be tonight.”

Again, Andreas suppressed the thought of how she’d persuaded the stepfather.

“So we took the train,” she said.

“Not good.”

“I’m sorry!”

“No, it was the right thing to do, but it makes things harder for us.”

“We didn’t sit together. I said it was safer not to.”

Soon other riders on the train would be seeing the missing man’s picture in the newspaper, maybe even on television. The entire plan had hinged on the motorcycle. But Andreas needed to keep her morale up. “You’re very smart,” he said. “You did the right thing. I’m just worried that even the earliest train won’t get you home in time.”

“My mother goes straight to bed when she comes home. I left my bedroom door closed.”

“You thought of that.”

“Just to be safe.”

“You’re very, very smart.”

“Not smart enough. They’re going to catch us. I’m sure of it. We shouldn’t have taken the train, I hate trains, people stare at me, they’ll remember me. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Just keep being smart. The hardest part is behind you.”

She clutched his arms and pulled herself to her feet. “Please kiss me,” she said. “Just once, so I can remember it.”

He kissed her forehead.

“No, on the mouth,” she said. “We’re going to be in jail forever. I want to have kissed you. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. It’s the only way I got through the week.”

He was afraid of where a kiss might lead—time was continuing to pass—but he needn’t have been. Annagret kept her lips solemnly closed. She must have been seeking the same thing he was. A cleaner way, an escape from the filth. For his part, the darkness of the night was a blessing: if he could have seen the look in her eyes, he might not have been able to let go of her.

While she waited in the driveway, away from the body, he went inside the house. The kitchen felt steeped in the evil of his lying in ambush there, the evil contrast between a world in which Horst had been alive and the world where he was dead, but he forced himself to put his head under the faucet and gulp down water. Then he went to the front porch and put his socks and boots back on. He found the flashlight in one of the boots.

When he came around the side of the house, Annagret ran to him and kissed him heedlessly, with open mouth, her hands in his hair. She was heartbreakingly teen-aged, and he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to give her what she wanted—he wanted it himself—but he was aware that what she ought to want, in the larger scheme, was not to get caught. He took her face in his gloved hands and said, “I love you, but we have to stop.”

She shivered and burrowed into him. “Let’s have one night and then be caught. I’ve done all I can.”

“Let’s not be caught and then have many nights.”

“He wasn’t such a bad person, he just needed help.”

“You need to help me for one minute. One minute and then you can lie down and sleep.”

“It’s too awful.”

“All you have to do is steady the wheelbarrow. You can keep your eyes shut. Can you do that for me?”

In the darkness, he thought he could see her nod. He left her and picked his way back to the toolshed. It would be a lot easier to get the body into the wheelbarrow if she helped him lift it, but he found that he welcomed the prospect of wrangling the body by himself. He was protecting her from direct contact, keeping her as safe as he could, and he wanted her to know it.

The body was in coveralls, work clothes from the power plant, suitable for motorcycle maintenance but not for a hot date in the country. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the fucker really hadn’t intended to come out here tonight, but Andreas did his best not to think about it. He rolled the body onto its back. It was heavy with gym-trained muscle. He found a wallet and zipped it into his own jacket, and then he tried to lift the body by its coveralls, but the fabric ripped. He was obliged to apply a bear hug to wrestle the head and torso onto the wheelbarrow.

The wheelbarrow tipped over sideways. Neither he nor Annagret said anything. They just tried again.

There were further struggles behind the shed. She had to help him by pushing on the wheelbarrow’s handles while he pulled from the front. The footprint situation was undoubtedly appalling. When they were finally beside the grave, they stood and caught their breath. Water was softly dripping from pine needles, the scent of the needles mixing with the sharp and vaguely cocoa smell of fresh-turned earth.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she said.

“I’m sorry you had to help.”

“It’s just . . . I don’t know.”

“What is it?”

“Are we sure there isn’t a God?”

“It’s a pretty far-fetched idea, don’t you think?”

“I have the strongest feeling that he’s still alive somewhere.”

“Where, though? How could that be?”

“It’s just a feeling I have.”

“He used to be your friend. This is so much harder for you than for me.”

“Do you think he was in pain? Was he frightened?”

“Honestly, no. It happened very fast. And now that he’s dead he can’t remember pain. It’s as if he’d never existed.”

He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.

“Well,” Annagret said in a harder voice. “If there is a God, I guess my friend is on his way to Hell for raping me.”

This was the first time she’d used the word “rape_.”_ He loved that she wasn’t consistent; was possibly even somewhat dishonest. His wish to puzzle her out was as strong as his wish to lie down with her; the two desires almost amounted to the same thing. But time was passing. He jumped into the grave and set about deepening it.

“I’m the one who should be doing that.”

“Go in the shed and lie down. Try to sleep.”

“I wish we knew each other better.”

“Me, too. But you need to try to sleep.”

She watched in silence for a long time, half an hour, while he dug. He had a confusing twinned sense of her closeness and complete otherness. Together, they’d killed a man, but she had her own thoughts, her own motives, so close to him and yet so separate. She’d seen immediately how important it was to be together—what a ceaseless torture it would be to remain apart, after what they’d done—while he was seeing it only now. She was just fifteen, but she was quick and he was slow.

Only after she went to lie down did his mind shift back into logistics mode. He dug until three o’clock and then, without pausing, dragged and rolled the body into the hole and jumped down after it to wrestle it into a supine position. He didn’t want to have to remember the face, so he sprinkled some dirt over it. Then he turned on the flashlight and inspected the body for jewelry. There was a heavy watch, not inexpensive, and a sleazy gold neck chain. The watch came off easily, but to break the chain he had to plant a hand on the dirt-covered forehead and yank. Fortunately nothing was real, at least not for long. Infinitesimally soon, the eternity of his own death would commence and render all of this unreal.

In two hours he had the hole refilled and was jumping on the dirt, compacting it. When he returned to the toolshed, the beam of the flashlight found Annagret huddled in a corner, shivering, her arms around her knees. He didn’t know which was more unbearable to see, her beauty or her suffering. He turned the light off.

“Did you sleep?”

“Yeah. I woke up freezing.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed when the first train comes.”

“Five-thirty-eight.”

“You’re remarkable.”

“He was the one who checked the time. It wasn’t me.”

“Do you want to go over your story with me?”

“No, I’ve been thinking about it. I know what to say.”

The mood between the two of them felt cold and chalky now. For the first time, it occurred to Andreas that they might have no future together—that they’d done a terrible thing and would henceforth dislike each other for it. Love crushed by crime. Already it seemed like a very long time since she’d run to him and kissed him. Maybe she’d been right; maybe they should have spent one night together and then turned themselves in.

“If nothing happens in a year,” he said, “and if you think you’re not being watched, it might be safe to see each other again.”

“It might as well be a hundred years,” she said bitterly.

“I’ll be thinking of you the whole time. Every day. Every hour.”

He heard her standing up.

“I’m going to the station now,” she said.

“Wait twenty minutes. You don’t want to be seen standing around there.”

“I have to warm up. I’ll run somewhere and then go to the station.”

“I’m sorry about this.”

“Not as sorry as I am.”

“Are you angry at me? You can be. Whatever you need to be is fine with me.”

“I’m just sick. I feel so sick. They’ll ask me one question, and everything will be obvious. I feel too sick to pretend.”

“You came home at nine-thirty and he wasn’t there. You went to bed because you weren’t feeling well. . . .”

“I already said we don’t have to go over it.”

“I’m sorry.”

She moved toward the door, bumped into him, and continued on outside. Somewhere in the darkness, she stopped. “So I guess I’ll see you in a hundred years.”

“Annagret.”

He could hear the earth sucking at her footsteps, see her dark form receding across the back yard. He’d never in his life felt more tired. But finishing his tasks was more bearable than thinking about her. Using the flashlight sparingly, he covered the grave with older and then fresher pine needles, did his best to kick away footprints and wheelbarrow ruts, and artfully strewed leaf litter and lawn waste. His boots and jacket sleeves were hopelessly muddy, but he was too spent to muster anxiety about it. At least he could change his pants.

The mist had given way to a warmer fog that made the arrival of daylight curiously sudden. Fog was not a bad thing. He policed the back yard for footprints and wheelbarrow tracks. Only when the light was nearly full strength did he return to the back steps to remove the trip wire. There was more blood than he’d expected on the steps, less vomit than he’d feared on the bushes by the railing. He was seeing everything now as if through a long tube. He filled and refilled a watering can at the outside spigot, to wash away the blood.

The last thing he did was to check the kitchen for signs of disturbance. All he found was wetness in the sink from the drink he’d taken. It would be dry by evening. He locked the front door behind him and set out walking toward Rahnsdorf. By eight-thirty he was back in the basement of the rectory. Peeling off his jacket, he realized that he still had the dead man’s wallet and jewelry, but he could sooner have flown to the moon than dispose of them now; he could barely untie his muddy boots. He lay down on his bed to wait for the police.

They didn’t come. Not that day, that week, or that season—they never came at all.

And why didn’t they? Among the least plausible of Andreas’s hypotheses was that he and Annagret had committed the perfect crime. Certainly it was possible that his parents hadn’t noticed what a wreck he’d made of the dacha’s back yard; the first heavy snow of the season had come the following week. But that nobody had noticed the unforgettably beautiful girl on either of her train trips? Nobody in her neighborhood had seen her and Horst walking to the station? Nobody had looked into where she’d been going in the weeks before Horst’s disappearance? Nobody had questioned her hard enough to break her? The last Andreas had seen of her, a feather would have broken her.

Less implausible was that the Stasi had investigated the mother, and that her addiction and pilferage had come to light. The Stasi would naturally have interested itself in a missing informal collaborator. If the mother was in Stasi detention, the question wasn’t whether she’d confess to the murder (or, depending on how the Stasi chose to play it, to the crime of assisting Horst’s flight to the West). The only question was how much psychological torture she’d endure before she did.

Or maybe the Stasi’s suspicions had centered on the stepdaughter in Leipzig. Or on Horst’s co-workers at the power plant, the ones he’d reported on. Maybe one of them was already in prison for the crime. For weeks after the killing, Andreas had looked at the newspapers every day. If the criminal police had been handling the case, they surely would have put a picture of the missing man in the papers. But no picture ever appeared. The only realistic explanation was that the Stasi was keeping the police out of it.

Assuming he was right about this, he had one more hypothesis: the Stasi had easily broken Annagret, she’d led them to the dacha, and they’d discovered who owned it. To avoid public embarrassment of the Under-Secretary, they’d accepted Horst’s sexual predation as a mitigating circumstance and contented themselves with scaring the daylights out of Annagret. And to torture Andreas with uncertainty, to make his life a hell of anxiety and hypercaution, they’d left him alone.

He hated this hypothesis, but unfortunately it made more sense than any of the others. He hated it because there was an easy way to test it: find Annagret and ask her. Already scarcely an hour of his waking days passed without his wanting to go to her, and yet, if he was wrong about his hypothesis, and if she was still under suspicion and still being closely watched, it would be disaster for them to meet. Only she could know when they were safe.

He went back to counselling at-risk youths, but there was a new hollowness at his core that never left him. He no longer taught the kids levity. He was at risk himself now—at risk of weeping when he listened to their sad stories. It was as if sadness were a chemical element in everything he touched. His mourning was mostly for Annagret but also for his old lighthearted, libidinous self. He would have expected his primary feeling to be a feverish fear of discovery and arrest, but the Republic appeared to be intent on sparing him, for whatever sick reason, and he could no longer remember why he’d laughed at the country and its tastelessness. It now seemed to him more like a Republic of Infinite Sadness. Girls still came to his office door, interested in him, maybe even all the more fascinated by his air of sorrow, but instead of thinking about their pussies he thought about their young souls. Every one of them was an avatar of Annagret; her soul was in all of them.

Meanwhile in Russia there was glasnost; there was Gorby. The true-believing little Republic, feeling betrayed by its Soviet father, cracked down harder on its own dissidents. The police had raided a sister church in Berlin, the Zion Church, and earnestness and self-importance levels were running high on Siegfeldstrasse. There was a wartime mood in the meeting rooms. Secluding himself, as always, in the basement, Andreas found that his sorrow hadn’t cured him of his megalomaniacal solipsism. If anything, it was all the stronger. He felt as if his misery had taken over the entire country.

Late in the spring of 1989, his anxiety returned. At first he almost welcomed it, as if it were the companion of his AWOL libido, reawakened by warm nights and flowering trees. He found himself drawn to the television in the rectory’s common room to watch the evening news, unexpurgated, on ZDF. The embarrassments watching with him were jubilant, predicting regime collapse within twelve months, and it was precisely the prospect of regime collapse that made him anxious. Part of the anxiety was straightforward criminal worry: he suspected that only the Stasi was keeping the police at bay; that he was safe from prosecution only as long as the regime survived; that the Stasi was (irony of ironies) his only friend. But there was also a larger and more diffuse anxiety, a choking hydrochloric cloud. As Solidarity was legalized in Poland, as the Baltic states began to break away, as Gorbachev publicly washed his hands of his Eastern Bloc foster children, Andreas felt more and more as if his own death were imminent. Without the Republic to define him, he’d be nothing. His all-important parents would be nothing, be less than nothing, be dismal tainted holdovers from a discredited system, and the only world in which he mattered would come to an end.

It got worse through the summer. He could no longer bear to watch the news, but even when he locked himself in his room he could hear people in the hallway yammering about the latest developments, the mass emigration through Hungary, the demonstrations in Leipzig, the rumors of a coming coup.

On a Tuesday morning in October, after the largest demonstration in Leipzig yet, the young vicar came tapping on his door. The guy ought to have been in giddy spirits, but something was troubling him. Instead of sitting down cross-legged, he paced the room. “I’m sure you heard the news,” he said. “A hundred thousand people in the street and no violence.”

“Hooray?” Andreas said.

The vicar hesitated. “I need to come clean with you about something,” he said. “I should have told you a long time ago—I guess I was a coward. I hope you can forgive me.”

Andreas wouldn’t have figured the guy for an informant, but his preamble had that flavor.

“It’s not that,” the vicar said, reading his thought. “But I did have a visit from the Stasi, about two years ago. Two guys who looked the part. They had some questions about you, and I answered them. They implied that I’d be arrested if you found out they’d been here.”

“But now it turns out that their guns are loaded with daisy seeds.”

“They said it was a criminal matter, but they didn’t say what kind. They showed me a picture of that girl who came here. They wanted to know if you’d spoken to her. I said you might have, because you’re the youth counsellor. I didn’t say anything definite. But they also wanted to know if I’d seen you on some particular night. I said I wasn’t sure—you spend so much time alone in your room. The whole time we were having this conversation, I’m pretty sure you were down here, but they didn’t want to see you. And they never came back.”

“That’s all?”

“Nothing happened to you, nothing happened to any of us, and so I assumed that everything was O.K. But I felt bad about talking to them and not telling you. I wanted you to know.”

“Now that the ice is melting, the bodies are coming to the surface.”

The vicar bristled. “I think we’ve been good to you. It’s been a good arrangement. I know I probably should have said something earlier. But the fact is we’ve always been a little afraid of you.”

“I’m grateful. Grateful and sorry for any trouble.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

Andreas shook his head, and the vicar left him alone with his anxiety. If the Stasi had come to the church, it meant that Annagret had been questioned, and had talked. This meant that the Stasi had at least some of the facts, maybe all of them. But, with a hundred thousand people assembling unhindered on the streets of Leipzig, the Stasi’s days were obviously numbered. Before long, the VoPos would take over, the real police would do policework. . . .

He jumped up from his bed and put on a coat. If nothing else, he now knew that he had little to lose by seeing Annagret. Unfortunately, the only place he could think of to look for her was at the Erweiterte Oberschule nearest to her old neighborhood, in Friedrichshain. It seemed inconceivable that she’d proceeded to an EOS, and yet what else would she be doing? He left the church and hurried through the streets, taking some comfort in their enduring drabness, and stationed himself by the school’s main entrance. Through the high windows he could see students continuing to receive instruction in Marxist biology and Marxist math. When the last hour ended, he scanned the faces of the students streaming out the doors. He scanned until the stream had dwindled to a trickle. He was disappointed but not really surprised.

For the next week, every afternoon and evening, he loitered outside judo clubs, at sports centers, at bus stops in Annagret’s old neighborhood. By the end of October, he’d given up hope of finding her, but he continued to wander the streets. He trawled the margins of protests, both planned and spontaneous, and listened to ordinary citizens risking imprisonment by demanding fair elections, free travel, the neutering of the Stasi. Honecker was gone, the new government was in crisis, and every day that passed without violence made a Tiananmen-style crackdown seem less likely. Change was coming, and there was nothing he could do but wait to be engulfed by it.

And then, on November 4th, a miracle. Half the city had bravely taken to the streets. He was moving through crowds methodically, scanning faces, smiling at the loudspeakered voice of reason rejecting reunification and calling for reform instead. On Alexanderplatz, toward the ragged rear of the crowd, among the claustrophobes and undecideds, his heart gave a lurch before his brain knew why. There was a girl. A girl with spikily chopped hair and a safety-pin earring, a girl who was nonetheless Annagret. Her arm was linked with the arm of a similarly coiffed girl. Both of them blank-faced, aggressively bored. She’d ceased to be the good girl.

“WE MUST FIND OUR OWN WAY. WE MUST LEARN TO TAKE THE BEST FROM OUR IMPERFECT SYSTEM AND THE BEST FROM THE SYSTEM WE OPPOSED.”

As if seeking relief from the boringness of the amplified voice, Annagret looked around the crowd and saw Andreas. Her eyes widened. He was smiling uncontrollably. She didn’t smile back, but she did put her mouth to the ear of the other girl and break away from her. As she approached him, he could see more clearly how changed her demeanor was, how unlikely it was that she might still love him. She stopped short of embrace range.

“I can only talk for a minute,” she said.

“We don’t have to talk. Just tell me where I can find you.”

She shook her head. Her radical haircut and the safety pin in her ear were helpless against her beauty, but her unhappiness wasn’t. Her features were the same as two years ago, but the light in her eyes had gone out.

“Trust me,” he said. “There’s no danger.”

“I’m in Leipzig now. We’re only up for the day.”

“Is that your sister?”

“No, a friend. She wanted to be here.”

“I’ll come and see you in Leipzig. We can talk.”

She shook her head.

“You don’t want to see me again,” he said.

She looked carefully over one shoulder and then over the other. “I don’t even know. I’m not thinking about that. All I know is we’re not safe. That’s all I can think about.”

“Annagret. I know you talked to the Stasi. They came to the church and asked about me. But nothing happened, they didn’t question me. We’re safe. You did the right thing.”

He moved closer. She flinched and edged away from him.

“We’re not safe,” she said. “They know a lot. They’re just waiting.”

“If they know so much anyway, it doesn’t matter if we’re seen together. They’ve already waited two years. They’re not going to do anything to us now.”

She looked over her shoulder again. “I should go back.”

“I have to see you,” he said, for no reason except honesty. “It’s killing me not to see you.”

She hardly seemed to be listening; was lost in her unhappiness. “They took my mother away,” she said. “I had to tell them some kind of story. They put her in a psychiatric hospital for addiction, and then she went to prison.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But she’s been writing letters to the police. She wants to know why they didn’t investigate the disappearance. She gets released in February.”

“Did you talk to the police yourself?”

“I can’t see you,” she said, her eyes on the ground. “You did a big thing for me, but I don’t think I can ever see you again. I had the most horrible feeling when I saw you. Desire and death and that thing. It’s all mixed up and horrible. I don’t want to want things like that anymore.”

“Let me make it go away.”

“It will never go away.”

“Let me try.”

She murmured something he couldn’t hear above the noise. Possibly I don’t want to want it. Then she ran to her friend, and the two of them walked away briskly, without looking back. ♦