their escape.
When he got home, Katya was sitting on their fake-leather fauxDanish sofa—so tacky and yet two cuts above most other sofas in the Republic—reading the ND and drinking her after-work glass of wine. She had an air of knowing that she looked like an advertisement for life in East Berlin. In the window behind her were the pretty lights of another superior modern building across the street. “You’re still in your football clothes,” she said.
Andreas moved behind a chair to conceal his stiffy. “Yeah, I decided to run home.”
“You left your clothes at the pitch?”
“I’ll get them tomorrow.”
“Joachim just called. He wondered where you were.”
“I’ll call him back.”
“Is everything all right?”
He wanted to believe in the image she was presenting, since it obviously meant so much to her: the ideal worker and mother and wife relaxing after a productive day within a system that provided better security than capitalism and was, to boot, in the best of ways, more serious. Her ability to read every last dull word in the ND with seeming interest was undeniably impressive. The true extent of his love was becoming evident only now, when the sight of her also revolted him.
“Everything couldn’t be better,” he said.
Retreating to the bathroom, he took out his stiffy and was saddened by how minor it seemed, compared to how prominent it had felt on the street. Nevertheless, it was what he had to work with, and he proceeded to work with it that night, and the next night, and the next, until he succeeded in banishing the thought of asking his parents where his father had been in the fall of 1959. The ghost from Erfurt may have been wronged, but Andreas himself hadn’t been, not in any meaningful sense. Rather than stir up pointless trouble, rather than cause his parents anguish, he took what he knew and suspected about his mother and used it only to excuse his own solitary depravities. If she was entitled to entertain a random pair of workers in her bedroom on a Tuesday afternoon, he was certainly entitled to impute raunchy words to the women he drew and to shoot his seed all over them.
The psychologist, Dr. Gnel, had a spacious ground-floor office in the Charité complex and sat behind his desk in an impressively clinical white coat. Andreas, taking a seat opposite him, had the sense of being at a medical consultation or a job interview. Dr. Gnel asked him if he knew why his father had sent him here.
“He’s being sensible and careful,” Andreas said. “If I turn out to be a sex criminal, there’ll be a record of his having intervened.”
“So you personally don’t feel there’s any reason for you to be here?”
“I’d much rather be at home masturbating.”
Dr. Gnel nodded and jotted on his notepad.
“That was a joke,” Andreas said.
“What we choose to joke about can be revealing.”
Andreas sighed. “Can we establish right away that I’m much smarter than you are? My joke was not revealing. The joke was that you’d take it to be revealing.”
“But that in itself is revealing, don’t you think?”
“Only because I want it to be.”
Dr. Gnel set down his pen and notepad. “It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I’m a psychologist and they are not. I don’t have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.”
Andreas felt unexpectedly sorry for the psychologist. How painful it must have been to know that your intelligence was limited. How shameful to have to confess your limitations to a patient. Andreas was well aware that he was brighter than the other kids at his school, but not one of them would have admitted it in the piteously limpid way that Dr. Gnel had. He decided that he would like the psychologist and try to take care of him.
Dr. Gnel returned the favor by pronouncing him not suicidal. After Andreas explained why he’d jumped from the bridge, the doctor simply complimented him on his resourcefulness: “There was something you wanted, you didn’t see how you could get it, and yet you found a way.”
“Thank you,” Andreas said.
But the doctor had follow-up questions. Was he attracted to any of the girls at his school? Were there ones he felt like kissing, or touching, or having sex with? Andreas honestly answered that all his female classmates were stupid and repellent.
“Really? All of them?”
“It’s like I see them through some distorting pane of glass. They’re the opposite of the girls I draw.”
“You wish you could have sex with the girls you draw.”
“Absolutely. It’s a great frustration that I can’t.”
“Are you sure you’re not drawing self-portraits?”
“Of course not,” Andreas said, offended. “They’re totally female.”
“I’m not objecting to your drawings. To me they’re another example of your resourcefulness. I don’t want to judge, I only want to understand. When you tell me you draw figments of your imagination, things that only exist inside your head, doesn’t that sound a bit like a self-portrait?”
“Maybe in the most narrow and literal sense.”
“What about the boys in your school? Are you attracted to any of them?”
“Nope.”
“You say that so flatly, it’s as if you didn’t honestly consider my question.”
“Just because I like my friends, it doesn’t mean I think about having sex with them.”
“All right. I believe you.”
“You say that like you don’t believe me.”
Dr. Gnel smiled. “Tell me more about this distorting pane of glass. What do your female classmates look like through it?”
“Boring. Stupid. Socialist.”
“Your mother is a committed socialist. Is she boring or stupid?”
“Not at all.”
“I see.”
“I don’t want to have sex with my mother, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“I didn’t suggest that. I’m just thinking about sex. Most people think it’s exciting to have it with a real flesh-and-blood person. Even if she bores you, even if she seems stupid to you. I’m trying to understand why you don’t think that.”
“I can’t explain it.”
“Do you think the things you want are so dirty that no real girl could possibly want them?”
The
