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.
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