this about?”
“Your identification, please.”
If the policemen had had tails, they wouldn’t have been wagging; if they’d had pointed ears, they would have been flattened back. The senior officer frowned at Andreas’s little blue book and handed it to the junior, who carried it back toward the cruiser.
“Do you have permission to be here?”
“In a certain sense.”
“Are you alone?”
“As you find me.” Andreas beckoned politely. “Would you care to come in?”
“I’ll need to use the telephone.”
“Of course.”
The officer entered circumspectly. Andreas guessed that he was more wary of the house’s owners than of any armed thugs who might be lurking in it.
“This is my parents’ place,” he explained.
“We’re acquainted with the undersecretary. We’re not acquainted with you. No one has permission to be in this house tonight.”
“I’ve been here for fifteen minutes. Your vigilance is commendable.”
“We saw the lights.”
“Really highly commendable.”
From the bathroom came a single plink of falling water; in hindsight, Andreas would find it noteworthy that the officer had shown no interest in the bathroom. The man simply paged through a shabby black notebook, found a number, and dialed it on the undersecretary’s telephone. In the moment, Andreas’s main feeling was a wish that the police would go away and let him get on with eating little Petra. Everything else was so unfortunate that he didn’t want to think about it.
“Mr. Undersecretary?” The officer identified himself and tersely reported the presence of an intruder who claimed to be a relative. Then he said “Yes” several times.
“Tell him I’d like to speak to him,” Andreas said. The officer made a silencing gesture.
“I want to talk to him.”
“Of course, right away,” the officer said to the undersecretary.
Andreas tried to grab the receiver. The officer shoved him in the chest and knocked him to the floor.
“No, he’s trying to take the phone … That’s right … Yes, of course. I’ll tell him … Understood, Mr. Undersecretary.” The officer hung up the phone and looked down at Andreas. “You’re to leave immediately and never come back.”
“Got it.”
“If you ever come back, there will be consequences. The undersecretary wanted to make sure you understand that.”
“He’s not really my father,” Andreas said. “We just happen to have the same last name.”
“Me personally?” the officer said. “I hope you come back, and I hope I’m on duty when you do.”
The younger officer returned and handed Andreas’s ID to the senior, who examined it with his lip curled. Then he flipped it into Andreas’s face. “Lock the door behind you, asshole.”
When the police were gone, he knocked on the bathroom door and told Petra to turn off the light and wait for him. He turned off the other lights and went out into the night, heading toward the train station. At the first bend in the lane, he saw the cruiser parked and dark and gave the officers a little wave. At the next bend, he ducked behind some pine trees to wait until the cruiser drove away. The evening had been damaging, and he wasn’t about to waste it. But when he was finally able to creep back into the dacha and found Petra cowering on his boyhood bed, mewling with fear of the police, he was too angry about his humiliation to care about her pleasure. He ordered her to do this and do that, in the dark, and it ended with her weeping and saying she hated him—a feeling he entirely reciprocated. He never saw her again.
Three weeks later, the German Christian Youth Conference invited him to speak in West Berlin. He presumed (though you could never know for sure; that was the beauty of it) that the conference had been thoroughly infiltrated by his cousin once removed, the spymaster Markus Wolf, because the invitation came forwarded from the Foreign Ministry with a notice to pick up a visa that had already been granted. It was laughably obvious that if he crossed the border he wouldn’t be allowed to reenter the country. Equally obvious was that the invitation was a warning from his father, a punishment for his indiscretion at the dacha.
Everyone else in the country wanted permission to travel even more than they wanted cars. The bait of attending some miserable three-day trade conference in Copenhagen was enough to entice the ordinary citizen to rat out colleagues, siblings, friends. Andreas felt singular in every way, but in none more than his disdain for travel. How the royal Danish poisoner and his lying queen had wanted their son out of the castle! He felt himself to be the rose and fair expectancy of the state, its product and its antic antithesis, and so his first responsibility was to not budge from Berlin. He needed his so-called parents to know that he was still there on Siegfeldstraße, knowing what he knew about them.
But it was lonely to be singular, and loneliness bred paranoia, and he soon reached the point of imagining that Petra had set him up, the whole rigmarole about sex in churches and the need for a bath a ruse to lure him into violating his tacit agreement with his parents. Now every time another at-risk girl appeared at his office door with that familiar burning look in her eyes, he remembered how uncharacteristically selfish he’d been with Petra, and how humiliated he’d been by the police, and instead of obliging the girl he teased her and drove her away. He wondered if he’d been lying to himself about girls forever—if the hatred he’d felt for number fifty-three was not only real but retroactively applicable to numbers one through fifty-two. If, far from indulging in irony at the state’s expense, he’d been seduced by the state at his point of least resistance.
He spent the following spring and summer depressed, and therefore all the more preoccupied with sex, but since he suddenly distrusted both himself and the girls, he denied himself the relief of it. He curtailed his individual conferences and ceased trolling the Jugendklubs for at-risk kids. Though he was jeopardizing the best job an East German in his position could hope to find, he lay on his bed all day and read British novels, detective and otherwise, forbidden and otherwise. (Having been force-fed Steinbeck and Dreiser and Dos Passos by his mother, he had little interest in American writing. Even the best Americans were annoyingly naïve. Life in the U.K. sucked more, in a good way.) Eventually he determined that what had depressed him was his childhood bed, the bed itself, in the Müggelsee house, and the feeling that he’d never left it: that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them. But it was one thing to identify the source of his depression, quite another to do anything about it.
He was seven months celibate on the October afternoon when the church’s young “vicar” came to see him about the girl in the sanctuary. The vicar wore all the vestments of renegade-church cliché—full beard, check; faded jean jacket, check; mod copper crucifix, check—but was usefully insecure in the face of Andreas’s superior street experience.
“I first noticed her two weeks ago,” he said, sitting down on the floor. He seemed to have read in some book that sitting on the floor established rapport and conveyed Christlike humility. “Sometimes she stays in the sanctuary for an hour, sometimes until midnight. Not praying, just doing her homework. I finally asked if we could help her. She looked scared and said she was sorry—she’d thought she was allowed to be here. I told her the church is always open to anyone in need. I wanted to start a conversation, but all she wanted was to hear that she wasn’t breaking any rules.”
“So?”
“Well, you are the youth counselor.”
“The sanctuary isn’t exactly on my beat.”
“It’s understandable that you’re