摘要：it churned and churned. The only thought that brought relief was that Annagret was unquestionably suffering even more. The relief was to feel connected to her. The relief was love, the astonishment of experiencing her distress more keenly than he experienced his own, of caring more about her than about himself. As long as he could hold that thought and exist within it, he could halfway breathe.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAt three-thirty on Thursday afternoon he packed a knapsack with a hunk of bread, a pair of gloves, a roll of piano wire, and an extra pair of pants. He had the feeling that he’d slept not at all the previous night, but maybe he had, maybe a little bit. He left the rectory basement by the back stairs and emerged into the courtyard, where a light rain was falling. Earnest embarrassments were smoking cigarettes in the ground-floor meeting room, the lights already on.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOn the train he took a window seat and pulled the hood of his rain parka over his face, pretending to sleep. When he got out at Rahnsdorf, he kept his eyes on the ground and moved more slowly than the early commuters, letting them disperse. The sky was nearly dark. As soon as he was alone he walked more briskly, as if he were out for exercise. Two cars, not police, hissed past him. In the drizzle he looked like nobody. When he rounded the last bend before the house and didn’t see anyone on the street, he broke into a lope. The soil here was sandy and drained well. At least on the gravel of the driveway, he wasn’t leaving footprints.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003ENo matter how many times he’d gone over the logistics in his head, he couldn’t quite see how it would work: how he could conceal himself completely and still be within striking distance. He was desperate to keep Annagret out of it, to keep her safe in her essential goodness, but he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to. His anxiety the previous night had swirled around the image of some awful three-person scrum that would leave her trust in him shattered.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe strung the piano wire between two railing posts, across the second of the wooden steps to the back porch. Tightening it at a level low enough that she could not too obviously step over it, he dug the wire into the wood of the posts and flaked some paint off them, but there was nothing to be done about that. In the middle of his first night of anxiety, he’d got out of bed and gone to the rectory’s basement staircase to conduct a test of tripping on the second step. He’d been surprised by how hard he pitched forward, in spite of knowing he was going to trip—he’d nearly sprained his wrist. But he wasn’t as athletic as the stepfather, he wasn’t a bodybuilder. . . .\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe went around to the front of the dacha and took off his boots. He wondered if the two VoPos he’d met the previous winter were patrolling again tonight. He remembered the senior one’s hope that they would meet again. “We’ll see,” he said aloud. Hearing himself, he noticed that his anxiety had abated. Much better to be doing than to be thinking about doing. He entered the house and took the key to the toolshed from the hook where it had hung since he was little.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe went outside again and put on his boots and stepped carefully around the edge of the back yard, mindful of footprints. Once he was safely in the toolshed, which had no windows, he groped for a flashlight and found one on the usual shelf. In its light, he checked inventory. Wheelbarrow—yes. Shovel—yes. He was shocked to see, by his watch, that it was already nearly six o’clock. He turned off the flashlight and took it out into the drizzle with the shovel.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe spot he had in mind was behind the shed, where his father piled yard waste. Beyond the pile, the pines were sparse, their fallen needles lying thick on soil furrowed by the frost heaves of winters past. The darkness was near-total here, the only light a few grayish panels between the surrounding trees, in the direction of the West’s greater brightness. His mind was now working so well that he thought to remove his watch and put it in his pocket, lest the shock of digging damage it. He turned on the flashlight and laid it on the ground while he cleared needles, setting aside the most freshly fallen in a separate pile. Then he turned out the light and dug.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EChopping through roots was the worst—hard work and loud work. But the neighboring houses were dark, and he stopped every few minutes to listen. All he heard was the rustle of rain and the faint generic sounds of civilization that collected in the basin of the lake. Again he was glad of the soil’s sandiness. He was soon into gravel, noisier to dig through but harder to slip on. He worked implacably, chopping roots, levering out larger stones, until he recalled, with some panic, that his sense of time was messed up. He scrambled out of the hole for the flashlight. Eight-forty-five. The hole was more than a half-metre deep. Not deep enough, but a good start.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe made himself keep digging, but now his anxiety was back, prompting him to wonder what time it was, what time. He knew he had to hold out and keep doing, not thinking, for as long as he could, but he soon became too anxious to wield the shovel with any force. It wasn’t even nine-thirty, Annagret hadn’t even met her stepfather in the city yet, but he climbed out of the hole and forced himself to eat some bread. Bite, chew, swallow, bite, chew, swallow. The problem was that he was parched and hadn’t brought water.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFully out of his head, he dropped the bread on the ground and wandered back to the shed with the shovel. He could almost not remember where he was. He started to clean his gloved hands on the wet grass but was too out of his head to finish the job. He wandered around the edge of the yard, stepped wrong and left a deep footprint in a flower bed, dropped to his knees and madly filled it, and managed to leave an even deeper footprint. By now he was convinced that minutes were passing like seconds without his knowing it. From a great distance he could discern his ridiculousness. He could picture himself spending the rest of the night leaving footprints while cleaning his hands after filling footprints he’d left while cleaning his hands, but he also sensed the danger of picturing this. If he let his resolution be taken over by silliness, he was liable to put down the shovel and go back to the city and laugh at the idea of himself as a killer. Be the former Andreas, not the man he wanted to be now. He saw it clearly in those terms. He had to kill the man he’d always been, by killing someone else.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Fuck it,” he said, deciding to leave the deep footprint unfilled. He didn’t know how long he’d knelt on the grass having extraneous and postponable thoughts, but he feared that it was a lot more time than it had felt like. Again from a great distance, he observed that he was thinking crazily. And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EInteresting thought, bad time to be having it. There were a lot of small things he should have been remembering to do now, in the proper sequence, and wasn’t. He found himself on the front porch again without knowing how he’d got there. This couldn’t be a good sign. He took off his muddy boots and his slippery socks and went inside. What else, what else, what else。”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“No, it was the right thing to do, but it makes things harder for us.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“We didn’t sit together. I said it was safer not to.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003ESoon other riders on the train would be seeing the missing man’s picture in the newspaper, maybe even on television. The entire plan had hinged on the motorcycle. But Andreas needed to keep her morale up. “You’re very smart,” he said. “You did the right thing. I’m just worried that even the earliest train won’t get you home in time.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“My mother goes straight to bed when she comes home. I left my bedroom door closed.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You thought of that.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Just to be safe.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You’re very, very smart.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Not smart enough. They’re going to catch us. I’m sure of it. We shouldn’t have taken the train, I hate trains, people stare at me, they’ll remember me. But I didn’t know what else to do.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Just keep being smart. The hardest part is behind you.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe clutched his arms and pulled herself to her feet. “Please kiss me,” she said. “Just once, so I can remember it.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe kissed her forehead.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“No, on the mouth,” she said. “We’re going to be in jail forever. I want to have kissed you. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. It’s the only way I got through the week.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe was afraid of where a kiss might lead—time was continuing to pass—but he needn’t have been. Annagret kept her lips solemnly closed. She must have been seeking the same thing he was. A cleaner way, an escape from the filth. For his part, the darkness of the night was a blessing: if he could have seen the look in her eyes, he might not have been able to let go of her.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhile she waited in the driveway, away from the body, he went inside the house. The kitchen felt steeped in the evil of his lying in ambush there, the evil contrast between a world in which Horst had been alive and the world where he was dead, but he forced himself to put his head under the faucet and gulp down water. Then he went to the front porch and put his socks and boots back on. He found the flashlight in one of the boots.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhen he came around the side of the house, Annagret ran to him and kissed him heedlessly, with open mouth, her hands in his hair. She was heartbreakingly teen-aged, and he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to give her what she wanted—he wanted it himself—but he was aware that what she ought to want, in the larger scheme, was not to get caught. He took her face in his gloved hands and said, “I love you, but we have to stop.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe shivered and burrowed into him. “Let’s have one night and then be caught. I’ve done all I can.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Let’s not be caught and then have many nights.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“He wasn’t such a bad person, he just needed help.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You need to help me for one minute. One minute and then you can lie down and sleep.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s too awful.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“All you have to do is steady the wheelbarrow. You can keep your eyes shut. Can you do that for me。

"\u003Cp\u003EOnce she stopped coming to the church, Andreas had no way to communicate with her. For the following six afternoons, he went up to the sanctuary and waited until dinnertime. He was pretty sure he’d never see her again. She was just a schoolgirl, she didn’t care about him, or at least not enough, and she didn’t hate her stepfather as murderously as he did. She would lose her nerve—either go alone to the Stasi or submit to worse abuse. As the afternoons passed, Andreas felt some relief at the prospect. In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable. What tormented him was the thought that he wouldn’t lay eyes on Annagret again. He pictured her studiously practicing her throws at the Judo Club, being the good girl, and felt very sorry for himself. He refused to picture what might be happening to her at home at night.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe showed up on the seventh afternoon, looking pale and starved and wearing the same ugly rain jacket that half the teen-agers in the Republic were wearing. A nasty cold drizzle was falling on Siegfeldstrasse. She took the rearmost pew and bowed her head and kneaded her pasty, bitten hands. Seeing her again, after a week of merely imagining her, Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe sat down not very close to her. For a long time, for several minutes, they didn’t speak. Love altered the way he perceived her uneven mouth-breathing and her trembling hands—again the disparity between the largeness of her mattering and the ordinariness of the sounds she made, the everydayness of her schoolgirl fingers. He had the strange thought that it was wrong, wrong as in evil, to think of killing a man who, in however sick a way, was also in love with her, that he instead ought to have compassion for that man.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“So I have to be at the Judo Club,” she said finally. “I can’t stay long.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s good to see you,” he said. Love made this feel like the most remarkably true statement he’d ever made.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“So just tell me what to do.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Maybe now is not a good time. Maybe you want to come back some other day.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe shook her head, and some of her hair fell over her face. She didn’t push it back. “Just tell me what to do.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Shit,” he said honestly. “I’m as scared as you are.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Not possible.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Why not just run away? Come and live here. We’ll find a room for you.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe 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.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“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.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe turned her face to him, and through her hair he saw the burning look. “Will you help me out of it?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s what you want?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You said you’d help me.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003ECould anyone be worth it? He did wonder, but he set down her hands and took a map that he’d drawn from his jacket pocket.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“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?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Thursday.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“What time does your mother’s shift start?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Ten o’clock.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“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.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“O.K. Where will you be?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Don’t worry about that. Just head for the back door. Everything will be the way we talked about.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe 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.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You suggested it to him. The date.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe nodded quickly.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m so sorry,” he said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Is that all?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Just one other thing. Will you look at me?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe remained hunched over, like a guilty dog, but she turned her head.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You have to be honest with me,” he said. “Are you doing this because I want it or because you want it?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“What does it matter?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“A lot. Everything.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe looked down at her lap again. “I just want it to be over. Either way.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“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.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“That’s almost better.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Think about it, though. If you came here instead, we could see each other every day.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I don’t think that’s better.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe 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.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m late for judo,” Annagret said. “I have to go.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to see her leave.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe drizzle persisted through the week, with intermittent harder showers, and for three nights he obsessed about the rain, wondering whether it was good or bad. When he managed to sleep for a few minutes, he had dreams that he ordinarily would have found laughably obvious—a body not in the place where he’d left it, feet protruding from under his bed when people entered his room—but which under the circumstances were true nightmares, of the sort from which he ordinarily would have been relieved to awaken. But being awake was even worse now. He considered the plus side of rain: no moon. And the minus side: deep footprints and tire tracks. The plus side: easy digging and slippery stairs. And the minus side: slippery stairs. The plus side: cleansing. And the minus side: mud everywhere. . . . The anxiety had a life of its own; it churned and churned. The only thought that brought relief was that Annagret was unquestionably suffering even more. The relief was to feel connected to her. The relief was love, the astonishment of experiencing her distress more keenly than he experienced his own, of caring more about her than about himself. As long as he could hold that thought and exist within it, he could halfway breathe.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAt three-thirty on Thursday afternoon he packed a knapsack with a hunk of bread, a pair of gloves, a roll of piano wire, and an extra pair of pants. He had the feeling that he’d slept not at all the previous night, but maybe he had, maybe a little bit. He left the rectory basement by the back stairs and emerged into the courtyard, where a light rain was falling. Earnest embarrassments were smoking cigarettes in the ground-floor meeting room, the lights already on.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOn the train he took a window seat and pulled the hood of his rain parka over his face, pretending to sleep. When he got out at Rahnsdorf, he kept his eyes on the ground and moved more slowly than the early commuters, letting them disperse. The sky was nearly dark. As soon as he was alone he walked more briskly, as if he were out for exercise. Two cars, not police, hissed past him. In the drizzle he looked like nobody. When he rounded the last bend before the house and didn’t see anyone on the street, he broke into a lope. The soil here was sandy and drained well. At least on the gravel of the driveway, he wasn’t leaving footprints.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003ENo matter how many times he’d gone over the logistics in his head, he couldn’t quite see how it would work: how he could conceal himself completely and still be within striking distance. He was desperate to keep Annagret out of it, to keep her safe in her essential goodness, but he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to. His anxiety the previous night had swirled around the image of some awful three-person scrum that would leave her trust in him shattered.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe strung the piano wire between two railing posts, across the second of the wooden steps to the back porch. Tightening it at a level low enough that she could not too obviously step over it, he dug the wire into the wood of the posts and flaked some paint off them, but there was nothing to be done about that. In the middle of his first night of anxiety, he’d got out of bed and gone to the rectory’s basement staircase to conduct a test of tripping on the second step. He’d been surprised by how hard he pitched forward, in spite of knowing he was going to trip—he’d nearly sprained his wrist. But he wasn’t as athletic as the stepfather, he wasn’t a bodybuilder. . . .\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe went around to the front of the dacha and took off his boots. He wondered if the two VoPos he’d met the previous winter were patrolling again tonight. He remembered the senior one’s hope that they would meet again. “We’ll see,” he said aloud. Hearing himself, he noticed that his anxiety had abated. Much better to be doing than to be thinking about doing. He entered the house and took the key to the toolshed from the hook where it had hung since he was little.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe went outside again and put on his boots and stepped carefully around the edge of the back yard, mindful of footprints. Once he was safely in the toolshed, which had no windows, he groped for a flashlight and found one on the usual shelf. In its light, he checked inventory. Wheelbarrow—yes. Shovel—yes. He was shocked to see, by his watch, that it was already nearly six o’clock. He turned off the flashlight and took it out into the drizzle with the shovel.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe spot he had in mind was behind the shed, where his father piled yard waste. Beyond the pile, the pines were sparse, their fallen needles lying thick on soil furrowed by the frost heaves of winters past. The darkness was near-total here, the only light a few grayish panels between the surrounding trees, in the direction of the West’s greater brightness. His mind was now working so well that he thought to remove his watch and put it in his pocket, lest the shock of digging damage it. He turned on the flashlight and laid it on the ground while he cleared needles, setting aside the most freshly fallen in a separate pile. Then he turned out the light and dug.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EChopping through roots was the worst—hard work and loud work. But the neighboring houses were dark, and he stopped every few minutes to listen. All he heard was the rustle of rain and the faint generic sounds of civilization that collected in the basin of the lake. Again he was glad of the soil’s sandiness. He was soon into gravel, noisier to dig through but harder to slip on. He worked implacably, chopping roots, levering out larger stones, until he recalled, with some panic, that his sense of time was messed up. He scrambled out of the hole for the flashlight. Eight-forty-five. The hole was more than a half-metre deep. Not deep enough, but a good start.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe made himself keep digging, but now his anxiety was back, prompting him to wonder what time it was, what time. He knew he had to hold out and keep doing, not thinking, for as long as he could, but he soon became too anxious to wield the shovel with any force. It wasn’t even nine-thirty, Annagret hadn’t even met her stepfather in the city yet, but he climbed out of the hole and forced himself to eat some bread. Bite, chew, swallow, bite, chew, swallow. The problem was that he was parched and hadn’t brought water.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFully out of his head, he dropped the bread on the ground and wandered back to the shed with the shovel. He could almost not remember where he was. He started to clean his gloved hands on the wet grass but was too out of his head to finish the job. He wandered around the edge of the yard, stepped wrong and left a deep footprint in a flower bed, dropped to his knees and madly filled it, and managed to leave an even deeper footprint. By now he was convinced that minutes were passing like seconds without his knowing it. From a great distance he could discern his ridiculousness. He could picture himself spending the rest of the night leaving footprints while cleaning his hands after filling footprints he’d left while cleaning his hands, but he also sensed the danger of picturing this. If he let his resolution be taken over by silliness, he was liable to put down the shovel and go back to the city and laugh at the idea of himself as a killer. Be the former Andreas, not the man he wanted to be now. He saw it clearly in those terms. He had to kill the man he’d always been, by killing someone else.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Fuck it,” he said, deciding to leave the deep footprint unfilled. He didn’t know how long he’d knelt on the grass having extraneous and postponable thoughts, but he feared that it was a lot more time than it had felt like. Again from a great distance, he observed that he was thinking crazily. And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EInteresting thought, bad time to be having it. There were a lot of small things he should have been remembering to do now, in the proper sequence, and wasn’t. He found himself on the front porch again without knowing how he’d got there. This couldn’t be a good sign. He took off his muddy boots and his slippery socks and went inside. What else, what else, what else? He’d left his gloves and the shovel on the front porch. He went back out for them and came inside again. What else? Shut the door and lock it. Unlock the back door. Practice opening it.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EExtraneous bad thought: were the whorls of toe prints unique, like those of fingerprints? Was he leaving traceable toe prints?\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWorse thought: what if the fucker thought to bring a flashlight or routinely carried one on his bike?\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EEven worse thought: the fucker probably did routinely carry a flashlight on his bike, in case of a nighttime breakdown.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EA still worse thought was available to Andreas—namely, that Annagret would use her body, would feign uncontrollable lust, to forestall any business with a flashlight—but he was determined not to entertain it, not even for the relief from his terrible new anxiety, because it would entail being conscious of an obvious fact, which was that she must already have used her body and feigned lust to get the fucker out here. The only way Andreas could stand to picture the killing was to leave her entirely out of it. If he let her into it—allowed himself to acknowledge that she was using her body to make it happen—the person he wanted to kill was no longer her stepfather but himself. For putting her through a thing like that, for dirtying her in the service of his plan. If he was willing to kill the stepfather for dirtying her, it logically followed that he should kill himself for it. And so, instead, he entertained the thought that, even with a flashlight, the stepfather might not see the trip wire.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe’d heard it said that every suicide was a proxy for a murder that the perpetrator could only symbolically commit; every suicide a murder gone awry. He was prepared to feel universally grateful to Annagret, but right now he was more narrowly grateful that she was bringing him a person worth killing. He imagined himself purified and humbled afterward, freed finally of his sordid history. Even if he ended up in prison, she would literally have saved his life.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EBut where was his own flashlight?\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIt wasn’t in one of his pockets. It could be anywhere, although he surely hadn’t dropped it randomly in the driveway. Without it, he couldn’t see his watch, and without seeing his watch he couldn’t ascertain whether he had time to put his boots on and return to the back yard and find the flashlight and ascertain whether he did, in fact, have time to be looking for it. The universe, its logic, suddenly felt crushing to him.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThere was, however, a small light above the kitchen stove. Turn it on for one second and check his watch? He had too complicated a mind to be a killer, too much imagination for it. He could see no rational risk in turning on the stove light, but part of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn’t think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity. An interesting paradox. But it didn’t answer the question of whether he should turn the light on.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAnd why was it so important to look at his watch? He couldn’t actually think of why. This went to his point about intelligence and its limits. He leaned the shovel against the back door and sat down cross-legged on the mud rug. Then he worried that the shovel was going to fall over. He reached to steady it with such an unsteady hand that he knocked it over. The noise was catastrophic. He jumped to his feet and turned on the stove light long enough to check his watch. He still had at least thirty minutes, probably more like forty-five.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe sat down on the rug again and fell into a state that was like a fever dream in every respect except that he was fully aware of being asleep. It was like being dead without the relief from torment. And maybe the adage had it backward, maybe every murder was a suicide gone awry, because what he was feeling, besides an all-permeating compassion for his tormented self, was that he had to follow through with the killing to put himself out of his misery. He wouldn’t be the one dying, but he might as well have been, because the relief that would follow the killing had a deathlike depth and finality in prospect.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFor no apparent reason, he snapped out of his dream and into a state of chill clarity. Had he heard something? There was nothing but the trickle and patter of light rain. It seemed to him that a lot of time had passed. He stood up and grasped the handle of the shovel. He was having a new bad thought—that, for all his care in planning, he’d somehow neglected to consider what he would do if Annagret and her stepfather simply didn’t show up; he’d been so obsessed with logistics that he hadn’t noticed this enormous blind spot, and now, because the weekend was coming and his parents might be out here, he was facing the task of refilling the hole that he’d dug for nothing—when he heard a low voice outside the kitchen window.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EA girl’s voice. Annagret.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhere was the bike? How could he not have heard the bike? Had they walked it down the driveway? The bike was essential.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe heard a male voice, somewhat louder. They were going around behind the house. It was all happening so quickly. He was shaking so much that he could hardly stand. He didn’t dare touch the doorknob for fear of making a sound.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“The key’s on a hook,” he heard Annagret say.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe heard her feet on the steps. And then: a floor-shaking thud, a loud grunt.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe grabbed the doorknob and turned it the wrong way and then the right way. As he ran out, he thought he didn’t have the shovel, but he did. It was in his hands, and he brought the convex side of its blade down hard on the dark shape looming up in front of him. The body collapsed on the steps. He was a murderer now.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EPausing to make sure of where the body’s head was, he raised the shovel over his shoulder and hit the head so hard he heard the skull crack. Everything so far fully within the bounds of planned logistics. Annagret was somewhere to his left, making the worst sound he’d ever heard, a moan-keen-retch-strangulation sound. Without looking in her direction, he scrambled down past the body, dropped the shovel, and pulled the body off the steps by its feet. Its head was on its side now. He picked up the shovel and hit the head on the temple as hard as he could, to make sure. At the second crack of skull, Annagret gave a terrible cry.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s over,” he said, breathing hard. “There won’t be any more of it.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe dimly saw her moving on the porch, coming to the railing. Then he heard the strangely childish and almost dear sounds of her throwing up. He didn’t feel sick himself. More like post-orgasmic, immensely weary and even more immensely sad. He wasn’t going to throw up, but he began to cry, making his own childish sounds. He dropped the shovel, sank to his knees, and sobbed. His mind was empty, but not of sadness.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe drizzle was so fine it was almost a mist. When he’d cried himself dry, he felt so tired that his first thought was that he and Annagret should go to the police and turn themselves in. He didn’t see how he could do what still had to be done. Killing had brought no relief at all—what had he been thinking? The relief would be to turn himself in at the police station.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAnnagret had been still while he cried, but now she came down from the porch and crouched by him. At the touch of her hand on his shoulder, he sobbed again.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Sh-h, sh-h,” she said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe put her face to his wet cheek. The feel of her skin, the mercy of her warm proximity: his weariness evaporated.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I must smell like vomit,” she said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“No.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Is he dead?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“He must be.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“This is the real bad dream. Right now. Before wasn’t so bad. This is the real bad.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I know.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe began to cry voicelessly, huffingly, and he took her in his arms. He could feel her tension escaping in the form of whole-body tremors, and there was nothing he could do with his compassion except hold her until the tremors subsided. When they finally did, she wiped her nose on her sleeve and pressed her face to his. She opened her mouth against his cheek, a kind of kiss. They were partners, and it would have been natural to go inside the house and seal their partnership, and this was how he knew for certain that his love for her was pure: he pulled away and stood up.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Don’t you like me?” she whispered.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Actually, I love you.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I want to come and see you. I don’t care if they catch us.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I want to see you, too. But it’s not right. Not safe. Not for a long time.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn the darkness, at his feet, she seemed to slump. “Then I’m completely alone.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe made a little snorting sound, possibly mirthful. “I barely even know you.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Safe to say I don’t make a habit of killing people.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s a terrible thing,” she said, “but I guess I should thank you. Thank you for killing him.” She made another possibly mirthful sound. “Just hearing myself say that makes me all the more sure that I’m the bad one. I made him want me, and then I made you do this.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAndreas was aware that time was passing. “What happened with the motorcycle?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe didn’t answer.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Is the motorcycle here?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“No.” She took a deep breath. “He was doing maintenance after dinner. He didn’t have it put back together when I went to meet him—he needed some new part. He said we should go out some other night.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003ENot very ardent of him, Andreas thought.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I thought maybe he’d gotten suspicious,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do, but I said I really wanted it to be tonight.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAgain, Andreas suppressed the thought of how she’d persuaded the stepfather.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“So we took the train,” she said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Not good.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m sorry!”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“No, it was the right thing to do, but it makes things harder for us.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“We didn’t sit together. I said it was safer not to.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003ESoon other riders on the train would be seeing the missing man’s picture in the newspaper, maybe even on television. The entire plan had hinged on the motorcycle. But Andreas needed to keep her morale up. “You’re very smart,” he said. “You did the right thing. I’m just worried that even the earliest train won’t get you home in time.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“My mother goes straight to bed when she comes home. I left my bedroom door closed.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You thought of that.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Just to be safe.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You’re very, very smart.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Not smart enough. They’re going to catch us. I’m sure of it. We shouldn’t have taken the train, I hate trains, people stare at me, they’ll remember me. But I didn’t know what else to do.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Just keep being smart. The hardest part is behind you.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe clutched his arms and pulled herself to her feet. “Please kiss me,” she said. “Just once, so I can remember it.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe kissed her forehead.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“No, on the mouth,” she said. “We’re going to be in jail forever. I want to have kissed you. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. It’s the only way I got through the week.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe was afraid of where a kiss might lead—time was continuing to pass—but he needn’t have been. Annagret kept her lips solemnly closed. She must have been seeking the same thing he was. A cleaner way, an escape from the filth. For his part, the darkness of the night was a blessing: if he could have seen the look in her eyes, he might not have been able to let go of her.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhile she waited in the driveway, away from the body, he went inside the house. The kitchen felt steeped in the evil of his lying in ambush there, the evil contrast between a world in which Horst had been alive and the world where he was dead, but he forced himself to put his head under the faucet and gulp down water. Then he went to the front porch and put his socks and boots back on. He found the flashlight in one of the boots.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhen he came around the side of the house, Annagret ran to him and kissed him heedlessly, with open mouth, her hands in his hair. She was heartbreakingly teen-aged, and he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to give her what she wanted—he wanted it himself—but he was aware that what she ought to want, in the larger scheme, was not to get caught. He took her face in his gloved hands and said, “I love you, but we have to stop.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe shivered and burrowed into him. “Let’s have one night and then be caught. I’ve done all I can.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Let’s not be caught and then have many nights.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“He wasn’t such a bad person, he just needed help.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You need to help me for one minute. One minute and then you can lie down and sleep.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s too awful.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“All you have to do is steady the wheelbarrow. You can keep your eyes shut. Can you do that for me?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn the darkness, he thought he could see her nod. He left her and picked his way back to the toolshed. It would be a lot easier to get the body into the wheelbarrow if she helped him lift it, but he found that he welcomed the prospect of wrangling the body by himself. He was protecting her from direct contact, keeping her as safe as he could, and he wanted her to know it.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe body was in coveralls, work clothes from the power plant, suitable for motorcycle maintenance but not for a hot date in the country. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the fucker really hadn’t intended to come out here tonight, but Andreas did his best not to think about it. He rolled the body onto its back. It was heavy with gym-trained muscle. He found a wallet and zipped it into his own jacket, and then he tried to lift the body by its coveralls, but the fabric ripped. He was obliged to apply a bear hug to wrestle the head and torso onto the wheelbarrow.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe wheelbarrow tipped over sideways. Neither he nor Annagret said anything. They just tried again.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThere were further struggles behind the shed. She had to help him by pushing on the wheelbarrow’s handles while he pulled from the front. The footprint situation was undoubtedly appalling. When they were finally beside the grave, they stood and caught their breath. Water was softly dripping from pine needles, the scent of the needles mixing with the sharp and vaguely cocoa smell of fresh-turned earth.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“That wasn’t so bad,” she said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m sorry you had to help.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s just . . . I don’t know.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“What is it?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Are we sure there isn’t a God?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s a pretty far-fetched idea, don’t you think?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I have the strongest feeling that he’s still alive somewhere.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Where, though? How could that be?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s just a feeling I have.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“He used to be your friend. This is so much harder for you than for me.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Do you think he was in pain? Was he frightened?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Honestly, no. It happened very fast. And now that he’s dead he can’t remember pain. It’s as if he’d never existed.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe wanted her to believe this, but he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Well,” Annagret said in a harder voice. “If there is a God, I guess my friend is on his way to Hell for raping me.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThis was the first time she’d used the word “rape_.”_ He loved that she wasn’t consistent; was possibly even somewhat dishonest. His wish to puzzle her out was as strong as his wish to lie down with her; the two desires almost amounted to the same thing. But time was passing. He jumped into the grave and set about deepening it.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m the one who should be doing that.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Go in the shed and lie down. Try to sleep.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I wish we knew each other better.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Me, too. But you need to try to sleep.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe watched in silence for a long time, half an hour, while he dug. He had a confusing twinned sense of her closeness and complete otherness. Together, they’d killed a man, but she had her own thoughts, her own motives, so close to him and yet so separate. She’d seen immediately how important it was to be together—what a ceaseless torture it would be to remain apart, after what they’d done—while he was seeing it only now. She was just fifteen, but she was quick and he was slow.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOnly after she went to lie down did his mind shift back into logistics mode. He dug until three o’clock and then, without pausing, dragged and rolled the body into the hole and jumped down after it to wrestle it into a supine position. He didn’t want to have to remember the face, so he sprinkled some dirt over it. Then he turned on the flashlight and inspected the body for jewelry. There was a heavy watch, not inexpensive, and a sleazy gold neck chain. The watch came off easily, but to break the chain he had to plant a hand on the dirt-covered forehead and yank. Fortunately nothing was real, at least not for long. Infinitesimally soon, the eternity of his own death would commence and render all of this unreal.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn two hours he had the hole refilled and was jumping on the dirt, compacting it. When he returned to the toolshed, the beam of the flashlight found Annagret huddled in a corner, shivering, her arms around her knees. He didn’t know which was more unbearable to see, her beauty or her suffering. He turned the light off.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Did you sleep?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Yeah. I woke up freezing.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I don’t suppose you noticed when the first train comes.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Five-thirty-eight.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You’re remarkable.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“He was the one who checked the time. It wasn’t me.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Do you want to go over your story with me?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“No, I’ve been thinking about it. I know what to say.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe mood between the two of them felt cold and chalky now. For the first time, it occurred to Andreas that they might have no future together—that they’d done a terrible thing and would henceforth dislike each other for it. Love crushed by crime. Already it seemed like a very long time since she’d run to him and kissed him. Maybe she’d been right; maybe they should have spent one night together and then turned themselves in.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“If nothing happens in a year,” he said, “and if you think you’re not being watched, it might be safe to see each other again.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It might as well be a hundred years,” she said bitterly.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’ll be thinking of you the whole time. Every day. Every hour.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe heard her standing up.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m going to the station now,” she said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Wait twenty minutes. You don’t want to be seen standing around there.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I have to warm up. I’ll run somewhere and then go to the station.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m sorry about this.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Not as sorry as I am.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Are you angry at me? You can be. Whatever you need to be is fine with me.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m just sick. I feel so sick. They’ll ask me one question, and everything will be obvious. I feel too sick to pretend.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You came home at nine-thirty and he wasn’t there. You went to bed because you weren’t feeling well. . . .”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I already said we don’t have to go over it.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m sorry.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe moved toward the door, bumped into him, and continued on outside. Somewhere in the darkness, she stopped. “So I guess I’ll see you in a hundred years.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Annagret.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe could hear the earth sucking at her footsteps, see her dark form receding across the back yard. He’d never in his life felt more tired. But finishing his tasks was more bearable than thinking about her. Using the flashlight sparingly, he covered the grave with older and then fresher pine needles, did his best to kick away footprints and wheelbarrow ruts, and artfully strewed leaf litter and lawn waste. His boots and jacket sleeves were hopelessly muddy, but he was too spent to muster anxiety about it. At least he could change his pants.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe mist had given way to a warmer fog that made the arrival of daylight curiously sudden. Fog was not a bad thing. He policed the back yard for footprints and wheelbarrow tracks. Only when the light was nearly full strength did he return to the back steps to remove the trip wire. There was more blood than he’d expected on the steps, less vomit than he’d feared on the bushes by the railing. He was seeing everything now as if through a long tube. He filled and refilled a watering can at the outside spigot, to wash away the blood.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe last thing he did was to check the kitchen for signs of disturbance. All he found was wetness in the sink from the drink he’d taken. It would be dry by evening. He locked the front door behind him and set out walking toward Rahnsdorf. By eight-thirty he was back in the basement of the rectory. Peeling off his jacket, he realized that he still had the dead man’s wallet and jewelry, but he could sooner have flown to the moon than dispose of them now; he could barely untie his muddy boots. He lay down on his bed to wait for the police.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThey didn’t come. Not that day, that week, or that season—they never came at all.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAnd why didn’t they? Among the least plausible of Andreas’s hypotheses was that he and Annagret had committed the perfect crime. Certainly it was possible that his parents hadn’t noticed what a wreck he’d made of the dacha’s back yard; the first heavy snow of the season had come the following week. But that nobody had noticed the unforgettably beautiful girl on either of her train trips? Nobody in her neighborhood had seen her and Horst walking to the station? Nobody had looked into where she’d been going in the weeks before Horst’s disappearance? Nobody had questioned her hard enough to break her? The last Andreas had seen of her, a feather would have broken her.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003ELess implausible was that the Stasi had investigated the mother, and that her addiction and pilferage had come to light. The Stasi would naturally have interested itself in a missing informal collaborator. If the mother was in Stasi detention, the question wasn’t whether she’d confess to the murder (or, depending on how the Stasi chose to play it, to the crime of assisting Horst’s flight to the West). The only question was how much psychological torture she’d endure before she did.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOr maybe the Stasi’s suspicions had centered on the stepdaughter in Leipzig. Or on Horst’s co-workers at the power plant, the ones he’d reported on. Maybe one of them was already in prison for the crime. For weeks after the killing, Andreas had looked at the newspapers every day. If the criminal police had been handling the case, they surely would have put a picture of the missing man in the papers. But no picture ever appeared. The only realistic explanation was that the Stasi was keeping the police out of it.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAssuming he was right about this, he had one more hypothesis: the Stasi had easily broken Annagret, she’d led them to the dacha, and they’d discovered who owned it. To avoid public embarrassment of the Under-Secretary, they’d accepted Horst’s sexual predation as a mitigating circumstance and contented themselves with scaring the daylights out of Annagret. And to torture Andreas with uncertainty, to make his life a hell of anxiety and hypercaution, they’d left him alone.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe hated this hypothesis, but unfortunately it made more sense than any of the others. He hated it because there was an easy way to test it: find Annagret and ask her. Already scarcely an hour of his waking days passed without his wanting to go to her, and yet, if he was wrong about his hypothesis, and if she was still under suspicion and still being closely watched, it would be disaster for them to meet. Only she could know when they were safe.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe went back to counselling at-risk youths, but there was a new hollowness at his core that never left him. He no longer taught the kids levity. He was at risk himself now—at risk of weeping when he listened to their sad stories. It was as if sadness were a chemical element in everything he touched. His mourning was mostly for Annagret but also for his old lighthearted, libidinous self. He would have expected his primary feeling to be a feverish fear of discovery and arrest, but the Republic appeared to be intent on sparing him, for whatever sick reason, and he could no longer remember why he’d laughed at the country and its tastelessness. It now seemed to him more like a Republic of Infinite Sadness. Girls still came to his office door, interested in him, maybe even all the more fascinated by his air of sorrow, but instead of thinking about their pussies he thought about their young souls. Every one of them was an avatar of Annagret; her soul was in all of them.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMeanwhile in Russia there was glasnost; there was Gorby. The true-believing little Republic, feeling betrayed by its Soviet father, cracked down harder on its own dissidents. The police had raided a sister church in Berlin, the Zion Church, and earnestness and self-importance levels were running high on Siegfeldstrasse. There was a wartime mood in the meeting rooms. Secluding himself, as always, in the basement, Andreas found that his sorrow hadn’t cured him of his megalomaniacal solipsism. If anything, it was all the stronger. He felt as if his misery had taken over the entire country.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003ELate in the spring of 1989, his anxiety returned. At first he almost welcomed it, as if it were the companion of his awol libido, reawakened by warm nights and flowering trees. He found himself drawn to the television in the rectory’s common room to watch the evening news, unexpurgated, on ZDF. The embarrassments watching with him were jubilant, predicting regime collapse within twelve months, and it was precisely the prospect of regime collapse that made him anxious. Part of the anxiety was straightforward criminal worry: he suspected that only the Stasi was keeping the police at bay; that he was safe from prosecution only as long as the regime survived; that the Stasi was (irony of ironies) his only friend. But there was also a larger and more diffuse anxiety, a choking hydrochloric cloud. As Solidarity was legalized in Poland, as the Baltic states began to break away, as Gorbachev publicly washed his hands of his Eastern Bloc foster children, Andreas felt more and more as if his own death were imminent. Without the Republic to define him, he’d be nothing. His all-important parents would be nothing, be less than nothing, be dismal tainted holdovers from a discredited system, and the only world in which he mattered would come to an end.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIt got worse through the summer. He could no longer bear to watch the news, but even when he locked himself in his room he could hear people in the hallway yammering about the latest developments, the mass emigration through Hungary, the demonstrations in Leipzig, the rumors of a coming coup.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOn a Tuesday morning in October, after the largest demonstration in Leipzig yet, the young vicar came tapping on his door. The guy ought to have been in giddy spirits, but something was troubling him. Instead of sitting down cross-legged, he paced the room. “I’m sure you heard the news,” he said. “A hundred thousand people in the street and no violence.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Hooray?” Andreas said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe vicar hesitated. “I need to come clean with you about something,” he said. “I should have told you a long time ago—I guess I was a coward. I hope you can forgive me.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAndreas wouldn’t have figured the guy for an informant, but his preamble had that flavor.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s not that,” the vicar said, reading his thought. “But I did have a visit from the Stasi, about two years ago. Two guys who looked the part. They had some questions about you, and I answered them. They implied that I’d be arrested if you found out they’d been here.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“But now it turns out that their guns are loaded with daisy seeds.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“They said it was a criminal matter, but they didn’t say what kind. They showed me a picture of that girl who came here. They wanted to know if you’d spoken to her. I said you might have, because you’re the youth counsellor. I didn’t say anything definite. But they also wanted to know if I’d seen you on some particular night. I said I wasn’t sure—you spend so much time alone in your room. The whole time we were having this conversation, I’m pretty sure you were down here, but they didn’t want to see you. And they never came back.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“That’s all?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Nothing happened to you, nothing happened to any of us, and so I assumed that everything was O.K. But I felt bad about talking to them and not telling you. I wanted you to know.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Now that the ice is melting, the bodies are coming to the surface.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe vicar bristled. “I think we’ve been good to you. It’s been a good arrangement. I know I probably should have said something earlier. But the fact is we’ve always been a little afraid of you.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m grateful. Grateful and sorry for any trouble.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Is there anything you want to tell me?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAndreas shook his head, and the vicar left him alone with his anxiety. If the Stasi had come to the church, it meant that Annagret had been questioned, and had talked. This meant that the Stasi had at least some of the facts, maybe all of them. But, with a hundred thousand people assembling unhindered on the streets of Leipzig, the Stasi’s days were obviously numbered. Before long, the VoPos would take over, the real police would do policework. . . .\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe jumped up from his bed and put on a coat. If nothing else, he now knew that he had little to lose by seeing Annagret. Unfortunately, the only place he could think of to look for her was at the Erweiterte Oberschule nearest to her old neighborhood, in Friedrichshain. It seemed inconceivable that she’d proceeded to an EOS, and yet what else would she be doing? He left the church and hurried through the streets, taking some comfort in their enduring drabness, and stationed himself by the school’s main entrance. Through the high windows he could see students continuing to receive instruction in Marxist biology and Marxist math. When the last hour ended, he scanned the faces of the students streaming out the doors. He scanned until the stream had dwindled to a trickle. He was disappointed but not really surprised.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFor the next week, every afternoon and evening, he loitered outside judo clubs, at sports centers, at bus stops in Annagret’s old neighborhood. By the end of October, he’d given up hope of finding her, but he continued to wander the streets. He trawled the margins of protests, both planned and spontaneous, and listened to ordinary citizens risking imprisonment by demanding fair elections, free travel, the neutering of the Stasi. Honecker was gone, the new government was in crisis, and every day that passed without violence made a Tiananmen-style crackdown seem less likely. Change was coming, and there was nothing he could do but wait to be engulfed by it.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAnd then, on November 4th, a miracle. Half the city had bravely taken to the streets. He was moving through crowds methodically, scanning faces, smiling at the loudspeakered voice of reason rejecting reunification and calling for reform instead. On Alexanderplatz, toward the ragged rear of the crowd, among the claustrophobes and undecideds, his heart gave a lurch before his brain knew why. There was a girl. A girl with spikily chopped hair and a safety-pin earring, a girl who was nonetheless Annagret. Her arm was linked with the arm of a similarly coiffed girl. Both of them blank-faced, aggressively bored. She’d ceased to be the good girl.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“we must find our own way. we must learn to take the best from our imperfect system and the best from the system we opposed.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAs if seeking relief from the boringness of the amplified voice, Annagret looked around the crowd and saw Andreas. Her eyes widened. He was smiling uncontrollably. She didn’t smile back, but she did put her mouth to the ear of the other girl and break away from her. As she approached him, he could see more clearly how changed her demeanor was, how unlikely it was that she might still love him. She stopped short of embrace range.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I can only talk for a minute,” she said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“We don’t have to talk. Just tell me where I can find you.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe shook her head. Her radical haircut and the safety pin in her ear were helpless against her beauty, but her unhappiness wasn’t. Her features were the same as two years ago, but the light in her eyes had gone out.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Trust me,” he said. “There’s no danger.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m in Leipzig now. We’re only up for the day.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Is that your sister?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“No, a friend. She wanted to be here.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’ll come and see you in Leipzig. We can talk.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe shook her head.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You don’t want to see me again,” he said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe looked carefully over one shoulder and then over the other. “I don’t even know. I’m not thinking about that. All I know is we’re not safe. That’s all I can think about.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Annagret. I know you talked to the Stasi. They came to the church and asked about me. But nothing happened, they didn’t question me. We’re safe. You did the right thing.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe moved closer. She flinched and edged away from him.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“We’re not safe,” she said. “They know a lot. They’re just waiting.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“If they know so much anyway, it doesn’t matter if we’re seen together. They’ve already waited two years. They’re not going to do anything to us now.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe looked over her shoulder again. “I should go back.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I have to see you,” he said, for no reason except honesty. “It’s killing me not to see you.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe hardly seemed to be listening; was lost in her unhappiness. “They took my mother away,” she said. “I had to tell them some kind of story. They put her in a psychiatric hospital for addiction, and then she went to prison.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m sorry.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“But she’s been writing letters to the police. She wants to know why they didn’t investigate the disappearance. She gets released in February.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Did you talk to the police yourself?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I can’t see you,” she said, her eyes on the ground. “You did a big thing for me, but I don’t think I can ever see you again. I had the most horrible feeling when I saw you. Desire and death and that thing. It’s all mixed up and horrible. I don’t want to want things like that anymore.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Let me make it go away.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It will never go away.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Let me try.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EShe murmured something he couldn’t hear above the noise. Possibly I don’t want to want it. Then she ran to her friend, and the two of them walked away briskly, without looking back. \u003C\u002Fp\u003E"'.slice(6, -6), groupId: '6719712748944491012