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, the full-bore 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 hand-drawn map 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.”
“OK. Where will you be?”
“Don’t worry about that. Just head for the back door. Everything will be like 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 dog that had been bad, 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.
It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who’d stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less blameworthy than his.
An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You’d been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn’t remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your consciousness opened its little eyes for the first time and discovered that you were headlong in love with your mom. Being an exceptionally bright and receptive little boy, you also already believed in the historical inevitability of the socialist workers’ state. Your mother herself, in her secret heart, might not have believed in it, but you did. You’d been a person long before you had a conscious self. Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father’s dick had ever gone, you’d squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you’d sucked on her tits whenever you felt like it, and you couldn’t for the life of you remember it. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go.
Andreas’s father was the second-youngest Party member ever elevated to the Central Committee, and he had the most creative job in the Republic. As the chief state economist, he was responsible for the wholesale massaging of data, for demonstrating increases in productivity where there weren’t any, for balancing a budget that every year drifted farther from reality, for adjusting official exchange rates to maximize the budgetary impact of whatever hard currency the Republic could finagle or extort, for magnifying the economy’s few successes and making optimistic excuses for its many failures. The top Party leaders could afford to be stupid or cynical about his numbers, but he himself had to believe in the story they told. This required political conviction, self-deception, and, perhaps especially, self-pity.
A refrain of Andreas’s childhood was his father’s litany of the unfairnesses with which the German workers’ state contended. The Nazis had persecuted the Communists and nearly destroyed the Soviet Union, which had then been fully justified in exacting reparations, and America had diverted scarce resources from its own oppressed working class and sent them to West Germany to create an illusion of prosperity, luring weak and misguided East Germans across the border. “No state in world history has ever started at a greater disadvantage than ours,” he liked to say. “Beginning with sheer rubble, and with every hand raised against us, we’ve succeeded in feeding and clothing and housing and educating our citizens and providing every one of them with a level of security that only the wealthiest in the West enjoy.” The phrase every hand raised against us never failed to move Andreas. His father seemed to him the greatest of men, the wise and kindhearted champion of the conspired-against and spat-upon German worker. Was there anything more worthy of sympathy than a suffering underdog nation persevering and triumphing through sheer faith in itself? With every hand raised against it?
His father was overworked, however, and traveled a lot to Moscow and to other Eastern Bloc countries. Andreas’s real love affair was with his mother, Katya, who was no less perfect
