After a few hours, the telephone rang. He guessed that the caller was his father and that he wasn’t supposed to answer the phone himself. This was convenient, because he was afraid of speaking to his father. And maybe he wasn’t a total sociopath after all, because the thought of his father’s anger and shame and disappointment brought tears to his eyes. His father was the earnest little German boy who believed in socialism. He worked hard, he had a disturbed wife, and he’d lovingly raised a child who wasn’t his, not even spiritually. Beyond pity, Andreas had a sense of identification with him, for sharing the burden of Katya.
The phone rang and rang. It was a form of slapping but one so attenuated by distance that he counted more than fifty rings before he heard Katya stirring. The uncertain padding of her little feet. The ringing stopped, and he heard her murmur a few times and then hang up. Then sounds of her putting herself back together. By the time she approached his room, her steps were brisk, her false self reassembled.
“You have to leave here,” she said from the doorway. She was holding a lighted cigarette and the ashtray, which she’d emptied.
“You don’t say.”
“For now, you’re safe from arrest, thanks to your father. Of course, that could change at any time, depending on how you behave.”
“Tell him I appreciate it. Seriously.”
“He’s not doing it for you.”
“Even so. It’s nice for me, too. He’s been a good stepfather.”
Rather than take the bait, she dragged hard on the cigarette, not looking at him.
“How are those tasting, after all these years?”
“It’s not out of the question that you can do your service now. It would be hard service, on the worst base, and you’d be watched. Your deferment was already a costly embarrassment to your father, and it would be an immense favor to me if you’d do the service now. You may recall that I interceded for you.”
“When have you ever done anything but intercede for me? Everything I am I owe to you. Mother.”
“You’ve put both him and me in a terrible position. Me especially, since I was the one who interceded for you. The best thing you can do now is accept this extremely merciful offer.”
“Hup, two, three, four. Are you out of your mind?” He laughed and slapped his head. “Sorry, tactless question.”
“Will you accept the offer?”
“How much do you want it? Enough to have an honest conversation with me?”
She snapped off a drag with the practice of a former smoker. “I’m always honest with you.”
“See what I mean? It’s not going to be so easy for you. But all you have to do is tell the truth for once, and I’ll do the service for you.”
She snapped off another drag. “That’s no bargain at all if you refuse to believe the truth.”
“Trust me. I’ll know it when I hear it.”
“The only other option is that you sever all contact with us permanently and take your chances on your own.”
That she could say such a thing, and say it so coolly, was an unexpectedly painful blow to him. He saw that, in her own way, she really was being honest with him now: there was room for only one fuckup in the home of Undersecretary Wolf. His father had enough trouble covering for her, cleaning up her messes, talking her out of rose gardens. He’d had at least one lover of hers imprisoned, he’d performed untold further miracles of suppression, and Katya wasn’t so bonkers that she didn’t know a good thing when she had it. Andreas had been flattering to her when he was the world’s most precocious boy, when he was in love with her, when he was her pretty prince. But as soon as she’d seen the pictures he was drawing, she’d ratted him out to his father and had him sent to a psychologist, and now there was nothing at all for her in him. The time had come to give him the boot.
And again tears came to his eyes, because, no matter how he’d come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes. He’d even believed, at some level, that the cleverness of “Muttersprache” would please her. He was twenty years old and as duped as ever. And he didn’t want to leave her. That was the saddest, sickest part of it. He was still a wanting four-year-old, still betrayed by shit that had happened to his brain before he had a self that remembered.
He watched her pretty fingers stub the cigarette out. The agony of withdrawal from her was a measure of the depth of his addiction.
“You were fucking a grad student for six years,” he said. “You fucked him for so long that he grew up to be your colleague.”
“No,” she said calmly, almost as if she were bored. “I would never have done that.”
“You were alone at home the entire fall when I was conceived.”
“No. Your father never went on trips that long.”
“And then, after I was born, you kept on fucking your colleague.”
“That’s entirely false,” she said. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter, since you have no intention of believing me. I do ask, though, that you not use the word fuck with your mother.”
This reproach, mild though it was, was all but unprecedented. Her entire method as a mother was to abjure direct correction.
“Why would a well-educated man I’ve never seen,” he said, “start following me around at the football pitch and tell me a story like that?”
Her face became masklike.
“Mother? Why would a person do that?”
She blinked and came to. “I have no idea,” she said. “There are all kinds of strange people in the world. If this is what’s been upsetting you all this time…” She frowned.
“Yes?”
“It occurs to me that we have a third option. We can have you admitted to a mental hospital.”
He burst out laughing. “For real? That’s the third option?”
“I’m afraid we may have ignored your cries for help for far too long. But now you’ve made one that we can’t ignore, and it’s not too late for help. Now that I think about it, getting you the help you need may be the most attractive of all our options.”
“You think I’m mentally ill.”
“No, never. Not a mental illness. But extreme emotional distress. You experienced some kind of trauma at the football pitch that you didn’t tell us about. A thing like that can fester.”
“Indeed.”
Her gaze wandered away, out into the hallway. “Andreas, consider it,” she said. “My family has a history of emotional distress. I’m afraid that some of that may have been passed on to you.”
“Skipping a generation, of course.”
“I think what you’ve done to your father and me qualifies as extreme disturbance. I think I have a right to lie down on the bathroom floor.”
“When you go back there, take a pillow. It’s a hard floor.”
“I admit that I’ve had mood swings over the years. But that’s all they are, mood swings. I’m sorry if that was hard to live with. I don’t think it’s enough to explain what you’ve done to us.”
“I have my own unique mental illness.”
“Well,” she said, turning away from him. “Please consider it. I think it’s good that we had this honest conversation.”
It didn’t speak well of his sanity that he actively had to squelch the impulse to run after her and kill her with whatever came to hand. Then again, he did squelch it, which spoke better of his sanity. And his next impulse—to run out to the street and find a girl he could bang—was not only reasonable but fully practicable. His bohemian credentials were golden now. He threw some clothes and books into a duffel bag. In the seven years that followed, he saw his mother only twice, accidentally, from a distance.
* * *
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 d
reams which 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 … The anxiety had a life of its own, it churned and churned. The one 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.
There is a divinity that shapes our ends …
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 in 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 they 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 gotten 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’d 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 had always 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 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 half a meter 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 still 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 still 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 it. His mind was drawn to silliness as if to some sweet infantile distraction from anxiety. If he let the native hue of his resolution be sicklied over with it, 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 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 toeprints unique like those of fingerprints? Was he leaving traceable toeprints?
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.
&nb
sp; A still worse thought was available to Andreas—namely, that Annagret would be there and could use her body, could 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, possibly by Dr. Gnel, 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 the filth, freed of the sordid history of which this lakeside dacha was a part. Even if he ended up in prison, she would literally have saved his life.
But where was his own flashlight?
It wasn’t in 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 back 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.