“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 direct 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 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 joined the local club when she was twelve.
A regular at the sports center was a handsome older guy, Horst, who owned a large motorcycle. He was maybe thirty and was apparently married only to his bike. He came to the center mostly to maintain his impressive buffness—Annagret initially thought there was something conceited about the way he smiled at her—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 away 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 quarreled 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 disapproving 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 so good as to explain the way he had of making things happen: the powerful bike, the roomy flat, the oranges and Brazil nuts and Michael Jackson records he sometimes brought home. From her description of him, Andreas had the impression that he was one of those people whose self-love was 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 had left for her night shift, she explained the extra-credit work she was doing in the hope of attending an Erweiterte Oberschule; she was impressed by his quick comprehension and told him 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 hated her nursing job and seemed increasingly worn out by it and was grateful that her husband and daughter got along well. Tanja may have been lost, but Annagret was the good girl, her mother’s hope for the future of her family.
And then one night, in the notably roomy flat, Horst came tapping on her bedroom door before she’d turned her light out. “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 myself.”
“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 looked at his large head and 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,
