she stays in the sanctuary for an hour, sometimes until midnight. Not praying, just doing her homework. I finally asked if we could help her. She looked scared and said she was sorry—she’d thought she was allowed to be here. I told her the church is always open to anyone in need. I wanted to start a conversation, but all she wanted was to hear that she wasn’t breaking any rules.”
“So?”
“Well, you are the youth counselor.”
“The sanctuary isn’t exactly on my beat.”
“It’s understandable that you’re burned out. We haven’t minded your taking some time for yourself.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I’m concerned about the girl, though. I talked to her again yesterday and asked if she was in trouble—my fear is that she’s been abused. She speaks so softly it’s hard to understand her, but she seemed to be saying that the authorities are already aware of her, and so she can’t go to them. Apparently she’s here because she has nowhere else to go.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“She might say more to you than to me.”
“How old is she?”
“Young. Fifteen, sixteen. Also extraordinarily pretty.” Underage, abused, and pretty. Andreas sighed.
“You’ll need to come out of your room at some point,” the vicar suggested.
When Andreas went up to the sanctuary and saw the girl in the next-to-rear pew, he immediately experienced her beauty as an unwelcome complication, a specificity that distracted him from the universal female body part that had interested him for so long. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, unrebelliously dressed, and was sitting with a Free German Youth erectness of posture, a textbook open on her lap. She looked like a good girl, the sort he never saw in the basement. She didn’t raise her head as he approached.
“Will you talk to me?” he said.
She shook her head.
“You talked to the vicar.”
“Only for a minute,” she murmured.
“OK. 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 counselor 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. It makes no sense to me.”
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 part of his bag of counseling 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 be nowhere, 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 on 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 candle wick and tarnished brass. The wooden cross on the wall behind the pulpit seemed to Andreas a once magical object that had lost its mojo through overuse both for and against the state; had been dragged down to the level of sordid accommodation and dreary dissidence. The sanctuary was the very least relevant part of the church; he felt sorry for it.
“My mother,” the girl murmured. The hatred in her voice was hard to square with the notion
