Forgiving the Angel

by Jay Cantor

  He delayed only long enough to sharpen his knife (and he so wanted to delay, and so wanted his son’s end both never to come and to be painless and quick when it did, that you can imagine how long he worked and how sharp he must have made that knife); he packed wood for the offering and left immediately, not telling anyone why he must make this trip. Truly, he didn’t know why, could not understand this monstrous demand. But he had to trust God’s murderous guidance, and if he did—he looked up at the night sky for reassurance—God, perhaps, would (in time!) keep faith with him again.

  Fire made. Child bound to the rocks. Then, at the last instant, as his knife was poised over his son’s throat, God had relented. Had it all been a test whose right answer was that if Abraham so trusted God that he would kill his own son, then he didn’t have to kill his son, but could—as God now commanded—kill the goat that the Lord had made conveniently available, tangled in a thicket nearby?

  Of course, since Adam was cast from the Garden, there was never a time when the animals could talk; but in Abraham’s time, one closer to Eden, they were far more expressive, and could make their feelings, and even their thoughts, known to men. The goat used its eyes—so haunting and lovely, with an air of sad bewilderment, however goatish his actions had been in the past—to plead for its life. He offered promises—but what can a goat promise compared to God? and he flattered Abraham, who was, he said, a good man, one who never ate meat—cleverly adding (to show his sincerity) that that goodness persisted even if Abraham followed that diet only because he thought it was healthier. Surely, here, as always, Abraham had done (the goat conveyed) what God wanted all men to do. Hadn’t God once, in the time before Noah, already drowned the world because men weren’t satisfied with the bountiful fruits and cereals He’d offered them for their food, and had fallen ravenously on the animals? Which must mean that God wanted us to spare His creatures, and by simple logic, must want Abraham to spare him.

  All this the animal spoke with its eyes, and with the panting panic of his heaving chest, the quiver in his legs, the slight turns of his body (though he could hardly move, Abraham’s knife was pressed so close to the veins in his neck).

  Abraham remembered that he, too, had heard of that first flood, God discarding the grand labor of the six days because men had eaten meat. But had God destroyed the world because men killed animals (in which case, he should spare the expressive goat), or because they had disobeyed Him (in which case he should do as God had ordered him and kill the wily goat)? Abraham couldn’t decide. This, too, might be another test, just like the command to kill his son. But what was the right answer? The goat’s pleading was driving him mad, and trembling with fury with the goat (or was it with God?) for putting him in this quandary, his arm moved ever so slightly, almost haphazardly, and sliced the thick but delicate vein in the goat’s neck, a shallow cut that nonetheless could not ever be taken back, one that was so small that it caused the animal’s blood to drain slowly, though inevitably and irretrievably, onto the desert floor. But worse than the blood, if such a thing’s possible, was the last look of disappointment, of bewilderment made infinite, that the kid gave him as its life trickled away.

  Abraham was certain he’d made a mistake. He stood still, head bowed, and waited for the divine knife that would cut his throat. But God did not punish him. If there had been a test, perhaps he’d passed.

  Abraham, as the goat had said, had never eaten meat, but not out of goodness, or even, truly, for health. He simply didn’t care for its taste, which smelt rotten in his nose. Now it all the more reminded him of death and, worse, his own murderous impulses; the odor made him sick to his stomach. But he knew he must not betray that he’d ever had doubts, that he’d nearly not fulfilled God’s command to him. So he ate meat at every meal to show God that the blood of animals meant nothing to him. Chewed it thoroughly to show that this horrifying thing didn’t horrify him (or perhaps the repeated motion leached some of the horror out of the flesh for him, made it possible to swallow and digest this carrion thing). Alas, each bite, each working of jaw and mandible, reminded him of the goat’s eyes, the goat’s blood, his own confusion, his haphazard violence—and, most of all, his near mistake when he’d almost been won over by the devilish goat into disobeying God.

  Worse still, Abraham knew he hadn’t meant to kill the goat, that he hadn’t been truly obedient, and he suspected, too, that his hiding of his real feelings (bite by bite) toward the goat was to pile error on error. At any moment, God would punish him. Perhaps, in fact, this continual nausea was punishment, though only a first installment of the final pain he’d feel. (Where? In his neck? In his heart?) Or maybe he was being punished like this because God had wanted him to spare the goat?

  It may be that eating meat didn’t shorten Abraham’s life (though, again, perhaps it did), but it did make every meal a misery to him—and equally wearying to those who happened to eat with him, most particularly for Isaac, his beloved son, a child of delicate digestion. Perhaps because of those awful meals with his father—for God’s sake, three hundred grindings of teeth before he would swallow a bite—this dyspepsia was handed down from generation to generation of the Jews—

  Until Moses, who understood what had happened to Abraham (and then to Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and their progeny more numerous than the stars). In order to justify the Patriarch, and perhaps ease everyone’s burden, Moses, without divine sanction, turned the goat’s slow bleeding into a Law, hoping this might restore his people’s appetite.

  Of course God was horrified that a man, even Moses, would meddle with his intricately calibrated Torah—condemning His animals to lingering deaths. But He, in his wisdom, didn’t want to call this human and invented law into question, lest people begin to pick and choose among the other mitzvahs, saying maybe some of them had been added on by men as well. He didn’t correct the text, but punished Moses for this transgression by barring him from entering the promised land.

  So the story ended. Or did it? A scholar who found this parable would know, of course, that Kafka had told his friend Brod to destroy all his work upon his death. Surely, though, that must mean only the known work? After all, this lost story could make the scholar’s reputation, and though, from the quality of the parable, he might doubt that the story would add much to Kafka’s luster, he might hope it wouldn’t detract much, either.

  Should he publish? What would Kafka want done? Hadn’t he really just told Brod to burn his work in order to make Brod into what he’d most wanted to be, a divided ever-miserable character in a story by the genius he most admired, Franz Kafka? And if this man were a true scholar, then that would be how he, too, felt about himself and his author—that his life was a story narrated by Kafka.

  And if Kafka had written this story, in which a man is visiting Prague because of his work, it would seem to indicate that he’d imagined that whatever he’d intended, he at least suspected that Brod might not obey him, and that he would be famous long after his death.

  Would the scholar, as he himself suspected, be saying all this only to justify his publishing the story, getting tenure, and so being able to do what Kafka had never done, which was to marry his beloved? Even if the scholar didn’t eat meat, he might be said to have a good appetite, so he didn’t make meals a misery for the other guests at this pension. Why shouldn’t such a man marry? Perhaps even the woman who had rented him this low-ceilinged room with the comfortable well-stuffed bed, this grandchild of Kafka’s lover, whose ample bosom, and open, even wanton, sexual look he would have found he couldn’t bar from his dreams. Perhaps he could have her here, in this bed that she had said had been blessed by Kafka, the two of them lost in feathers.

  But not tonight. The confusions around and in this story would give a man a stomachache.

  Of course, he would publish the story and be recommended for tenure. And marry. But a man who’d found a new parable by Kafka would also discover that all the questions posed in it—which are really one question: What does God rea
lly want from us?—had taken up residence in his body. But, far worse, he would see from the way his own children walked, always as if a wind buffeted them from side to side, that he’d burdened them with the same worries, the same ambivalence, whose result would be that one felt that a world so insecurely both held and pushed away might be snatched from you at any moment. Or perhaps he gave them that fatal gift not because of a story but because that would have been the kind of person he always would have been, whether he had found a lost story or not, and maybe that “gift”—which is to say, his personality—would have been what had first attracted him to the study of Kafka, in whose work he might see his flaws made even worse, and yet at the same time transformed into art.

  Whatever the reason was for what had happened to his children, burdening one’s progeny does not answer a question of whether (for example) God wanted the goat to die. To know the answer to that is perhaps the way to the true promised land. But like Moses, he and his children were barred from that.

  Fortunately, and though a scholar’s once healthy wife surely would lose her own appetite from the contagion of eating and sleeping alongside him, and though the children have found themselves so divided in heart, not everyone feels crushed by questions. In Kafka’s other stories, the burdened and so burdensome characters will most likely die, and perhaps this scholar will choke to death at his dinner this very evening. (Dear God, Max, even I was surprised when I wrote that, shocked at how easily an author stops his character’s throat when he can barely get any water down his own anymore. It seems one is both executioner and goat—a worn insight, and one which I can assure you does not lead to the promised land.) But after a disaster, to mock the melancholy character, or to give the reader hope, Kafka often also ends his stories with a vision of health. After Gregor Samsa’s corpse is swept into the trash, his sister, freed finally from feeding and caring for him (however halfheartedly and disgustedly), extends her body in a gesture of youth and joy; and next to the cage where the emaciated corpse of the Hunger Artist lies forgotten in the hay, the sideshow customers stare avidly through the bars of the prison next door at a beautiful pacing leopard. So at the end of this story, please remember that many will sit down happily tonight to a well-cooked meal, will eat their meat with good appetite, and—mercifully for their families—quickly, too. And they’ll drink, too, without giving it a thought. After all, Max, as I once told you, when we sat together on that bench one gray Prague day, “There’s plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope,” and plenty of meat and air, too, I might have added. Though I admit, I also said, “but not for

  and here the manuscript breaks off.

  LUSK AND MARIANNE

  I

  1

  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1931, the Communist Party of Germany tasked Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, a twenty-five-year-old course trainer for the Marxist Workers Evening School, with teaching the rudiments of economics to the members of the Brandenburg-Berlin Agitprop Department. Unfortunately, the party office had given Lusk the address for the apartment building where he was to hold the class, and the party name of the cadre, but not the flat number or the member’s real name, which would, of course, be the one on the door.

  This made Lusk smile wryly, but in no way diminished his faith in the Communist Party of Germany. Not that he was a naïf. Far from it. His mother, the famous playwright Bertha Lask, was a party member, as was his brother, Hermann. His mother knew the leadership, and they often came to dinner at his family’s house, along with fellow travelers such as the great cynic Bertolt Brecht; the party’s petty internal politics provided Lusk’s family’s table talk. But those squabbles, Lusk knew, were like a play of foam above waves; the ocean was the proletariat, and Lenin, who his mother called the party’s “animating and protecting spirit,” was, he supposed, none other than the Man in the Moon, who guided the ocean’s tides.

  Lusk wholeheartedly shared his mother’s admiration for Lenin; he’d learned Russian at sixteen to read him in his original language, and to make himself someone the party might choose for membership. And in the story Lusk narrated to himself this suburban night, “Lusk Lask, a thin wiry, long-legged fellow, whose coat wasn’t warm enough for a late fall night, walked with strong, confident strides through the suburban streets of Zehlendorf because he was being used by the leadership of the Leninist Party, the only force that could defeat fascism and make a world of brotherhood.” Still, his faith in the party might have been still greater if someone in the office had given him the real name of the woman who rented the apartment where he was to teach.

  Fortunately, when he got to the building, he found he could see through the street-level windows to a flat where people had spread out on couches, on folding seats, and on the floor. They spoke loudly, and made broad—yes, theatrical—gestures. Lusk compared them to the workers he usually taught, comrades who had a sincere, determined air made up of both confidence and resignation; they made clear that they might not like what was thrown at them by the bosses, but they would do whatever was necessary to survive and move forward. After all, what choice did they have?

  He stepped behind a table set up for him at the front of the room and began the course by describing the one class that, if it didn’t receive the party’s correctives, was most likely to produce work that they might think revolutionary, but that would really serve the rulers. This was, of course, the class into which he, and probably many of the people here, had been born, the petit bourgeoisie. Lenin, fortunately, had given all of them a way to guard against this self-deception; cadre must accept party discipline and let the party ruthlessly unmask and correct them when they found themselves clinging to imaginary distinctions, such as a degree in philosophy, a place in the theater, a small shop, or whatever.

  The workers in his classes had been attentive, like prisoners who believed Marx knew the way out of their jail. The actors, on the other hand, looked mocking. As always when he doubted himself, Lusk began to feel hollow, like a papier-mâché figure which might tip over at any time. To steady himself, his gaze returned to a small, attractive, full-breasted woman with a light blue shawl around her shoulders. She had large, sympathetic eyes that told him she both believed he’d something valuable to say and was sorry for the difficulty her comrades had made for him in saying it. But she looked so sad to him, he found he wanted to comfort her, tell her things weren’t really that bad.

  As soon as he finished, he moved toward her and stumbled over a thick white cast on a man’s leg, making himself look both foolish and inconsiderate. The woman, it turned out, was the Dora Diamant whose name had been on the front door, and she was also the party’s Maira Jalens. And the large-eared man he’d tripped over to get to her was, she said proudly, not only an actor but a brave Yiddish playwright. Three Brownshirts had followed him home after their last performance; two had held him while the third had swung a bat that broke his left leg, below the knee.

  Lusk winced. Six feet tall, he himself had long, sinewy legs of which he was a little proud, and just before he’d stumbled, he’d been hoping that Dora would notice them when he came toward her.

  Soon others came up to talk to Dora, some of them, Lusk saw now, also bruised. Dora had the same respectful, sympathetic attitude toward all of them that she had for Lusk. Strangely, though that made him jealous, it didn’t diminish his sense of its value when her kindness was directed toward him.

  After each class, he pushed forward through the men and women around Dora and made sure they got to talk together. She told him that she was the widow of Franz Kafka, but that name didn’t mean anything to Lusk. A writer, she added reverently. Lusk imagined that like Dora, Kafka’s work would be socially and politically aware, though Dora spoke less about the politics of her own work as an actress, and more about “a gesture’s emotional truth,” which meant something different from realism, something about the expressive hand being moved by some unseen power (and not, from the sound of it, either the proletariat or the capitalist market). Lusk didn’t see what s
he meant, and suspected it was foolishness, but he could see that she had an inner radiance, and a generosity that attracted others—making her like his own mother in that way. There was, also like his mother, an air of inaccessibility to Dora. She liked Lusk, or so he thought, but he didn’t feel she in any way required him. She had a sense of completeness about her.

  He told her that last part, and, sadly for Lusk, she credited her husband for it. He’d died seven years before, after such a small time together, but he’d given her so many things, she said, a lifetime of riches (was she boasting, or giving him a warning?), including the inspiration for her career. She and this tubercular man had read to each other in their little apartment—a place not far from here—and that had been her first encounter with Kleist, Heine, Ibsen, even Goethe. Her lover had said her recitations had great purity, and had encouraged her to become an actress, and his words, or so Lusk felt, had had for Dora the force of a dying man’s wishes.

  And she’d become a powerful actress, Brecht said at dinner that week. “Which is all the worse for anything she’s in, as she is effective in a dreadful style, all hand on heart, Oh, Schmerz! Schmerz!”

  Lusk remembered his first talk to the agitprop group, his sense that she felt too worried for him. Had she been acting? But why? If it was because she had found him attractive, that might be even better than if she’d felt concerned for him.