“You matter more to me than she does now. You are the woman in my life. See here.” He put a hand on her belly and splayed his fingers. “You’ve become a woman.”
The hand on her belly frightened her, but not as much as what he’d told her.
“A very beautiful woman,” he added huskily.
“I’m feeling ticklish.”
He closed his eyes and didn’t take away his hand. “Everything has to be secret,” he said. “I can protect you, but you have to trust me.”
“Can’t we just tell Mother?”
“No. One thing will lead to another, and she’ll end up in jail. We’re safer if she steals and takes drugs—she’s very good at not getting caught.”
“But if you tell her you work for the ministry, she’ll understand why she has to stop.”
“I don’t trust her. She’s betrayed us already. I have to trust you instead.”
She felt she might cry soon; her breaths were coming faster.
“You shouldn’t put your hand on me,” she said. “It feels wrong.”
“Maybe, yes, wrong, a little bit, considering our age difference.” He nodded his big head. “But look how much I trust you. We can do something that’s maybe a little bit wrong because I know you won’t tell anyone.”
“I might tell someone.”
“No. You’d have to expose our secrets, and you can’t do that.”
“Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me anything.”
“But I did. I had to. And now we have secrets together. Just you and me. Can I trust you?”
Her eyes filled. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me a secret of your own. Then I’ll know I can trust you.”
“I don’t have any secrets.”
“Then show me something secret. What’s the most secret thing you can show me?”
The hand on her belly inched southward, and her heart began to hammer.
“Is it this?” he said. “Is this your most secret thing?”
“I don’t know,” she whimpered, very frightened and confused.
“It’s all right. You don’t have to show me. It’s enough that you let me feel it.” Through his hand, she could feel his whole body relax. “I trust you now.”
For Annagret, the terrible thing was that she’d liked what followed, at least for a while. For a while, it was merely like a closer form of friendship. They still joked together, she still told him everything about her days at school, they still went riding together and trained at the sports club. It was ordinary life but with a secret, an extremely grown-up secret thing that happened after she’d put on her pajamas and gone to bed. While he touched her, he kept saying how beautiful she was, what perfect beauty. And because, for a while, he didn’t touch her with any part of himself except his hand, she felt as if she herself were to blame, as if the whole thing had actually been her idea, as if she’d done this to them with her beauty and the only way to make it stop was to submit to it and experience release. She hated her body for wanting release even more than she hated it for its supposed beauty, but somehow the hatred made it all the more urgent. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to need her. She was very bad. And maybe it made sense that she was very bad, being the daughter of a drug addict. She’d casually asked her mother if she was ever tempted to take the drugs she gave her patients. Every once in a while, yes, her mother had answered smoothly, if a little bit of something at the hospital was left unused, she or one of the other nurses might take it to calm their nerves, but it didn’t mean the person was an addict. Annagret hadn’t said anything about anyone being an addict.
For Andreas the terrible thing was how much the stepfather’s pussycentrism reminded him of his own. He felt only somewhat less implicated when Annagret went on to tell him that her weeks of being touched had been merely a prelude to Horst’s unzipping of his pants. It was bound to happen sometime, and yet it broke the spell that she’d been under; it introduced a third party to their secret. She didn’t like this third party. She realized that it must have been spying on the two of them all along, biding its time, manipulating them like a case officer. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want it near her, and when it tried to assert its authority she became afraid of being at home at night. But what could she do? The pecker knew her secrets. It knew that, if only for a while, she’d looked forward to being tampered with. She’d halfwittingly become its unofficial collaborator; she’d tacitly sworn an oath. She wondered if her mother took narcotics so as not to know which body the pecker really wanted. The pecker knew all about her mother’s pilferage, and the pecker was empowered by the ministry, and so she couldn’t go to the authorities. They’d put her mother in jail and leave her alone with the pecker. The same thing would happen if she told her mother, because her mother would accuse her husband, and the pecker would have her jailed. And maybe her mother deserved to be jailed, but not if it meant that Annagret remained at home and kept harming her.
This was the latest chapter of her unfinished story, and it came out on the fourth evening of Andreas’s counseling. When Annagret had finished her confession, in the chill of the sanctuary, she began to weep. Seeing someone so beautiful weeping, seeing her press her fists to her eyes like an infant, Andreas was gripped by an unfamiliar physical sensation. He was such a laugher, such an ironist, such an artist of unseriousness, that he didn’t even recognize what was happening to him: he, too, was starting to cry. But he did recognize why. He was crying for himself—for what had happened to him as a child. He’d heard many stories of childhood sexual abuse before, but never from such a good girl, never from a girl with perfect hair and skin and bone structure. Annagret’s beauty had broken something open in him. He felt that he was just like her. And so he was also crying because he loved her, and because he couldn’t have her.
“Can you help me?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Why did I tell you so much if you can’t help me? Why did you keep asking me questions? You acted like you could help me.”
He shook his head and said nothing. She put a hand on his shoulder, very lightly, but even a light touch from her was terrible. He bowed forward, shaking with sobs. “I’m so sad for you.”
“But now you see what I mean. I cause harm.”
“No.”
“Maybe I should just be his girlfriend. Make him divorce my mother and be his girlfriend.”
“No.” He pulled himself together and wiped his face. “No, he’s a sick fucker. I know it because I’m a little bit sick myself. I can extrapolate.”
“You might have done the same thing he did …”
“Never. I swear to you. I’m like you, not him.”
“But … if you’re a little sick and you’re like me, it means that I must be a little bit sick.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You’re right, though. I should go home and be his girlfriend. Since I’m so sick. Thank you for your help, Mr. Counselor.”
He took her by the shoulders and made her look at him. There was nothing but distrust in her eyes now. “I want to be your friend,” he said.
“We all know where being friends goes.”
“You’re wrong. Stay here, and let’s think. Be my friend.”
She pulled away from him and crossed her arms tightly.
“We can go directly to the Stasi,” he said. “He broke his oath to them. The minute they think he might embarrass them, they’ll drop him like a hot