Forgiving the Angel

by Jay Cantor

  “It’s a dangerous style for Agitprop,” Brecht said. “The time I saw her, everyone wept for and with this woman,” Brecht said, “and while they did, the Brownshirts arrived, and they all finished by weeping for themselves.”

  “And you?” Isaac Chazzan asked. He was the Yiddish playwright whose cast Lusk had tripped over. He had a smile that was ironic but also accepting, almost fond. “I know you must have fought back against the SA manfully, with fists and sticks.”

  Brecht, who was famously the great coward, smiled back—equally accepting, but of himself. “Still, one has to make do,” he said, referring not to the physically craven Brecht—the only Brecht we have, after all—but to his own struggles with actors. “The Dora I remember is certainly pretty, Lusk. Slight and short, no? Yet with such large breasts. Seemingly gentle, too, but who knows what’s behind all that Schmerz. Something very steely and self-possessed, I’ll bet.” Brecht, who made such a point of displaying his appetites that one doubted how much pleasure they truly gave him, made it clear that he wouldn’t mind fucking her. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have minded fucking Lusk, too, or Lusk’s mother. It wasn’t much of an honor to be desired by the bullet-faced great seducer.

  Lusk felt how much he wanted to protect Dora from Brecht’s gross appetites, or from the SA, or from whatever dangers history might threaten her with. This adolescent attitude was, he knew, both condescending and petty bourgeois of him, and called for rigorous self-examination. After all, without it, cadre that formed into couples might try to protect each other at a demonstration, at a time when there should be no room for personal concerns as to who took a beating or who had the chance to hand one out. Party cadre had to place themselves beyond affections, beyond good and evil even, and fight with whatever sacrifice and brutality the Party deemed necessary, so they might make a world where brutality and sacrifice would no longer be necessary.

  Lusk reassured himself that he would always put the necessary discipline first, and after the next class he waited till most of the others had left, then made his way to Dora. She thanked him for the evening’s lecture and called him “a servant of the Incorruptible.”

  He felt flattered but a little confused. It turned out that the Incorruptible (he had the feeling from her tone that the word should be capitalized) was something that people often knew in love, or sometimes through a belief in God. Her late husband, though, had given her an idea that it might be in other things, as well. Lusk came from the party of the working class, and he expounded the truth of History, so that made him an agent of the Incorruptible.

  Not long ago, this very transcendence of self into agent had been all Lusk wanted. Now he resented that he didn’t have something more intimate and personal to offer her, something in particular. Which once again showed that the party had been right. Cadre shouldn’t form couples. It kept one from having a Communist attitude.

  Her dead husband stared down at them from a silver-framed picture on the mantelpiece. He looked terrified.

  “What large eyes, he has,” Lusk said, in what he hoped was a neutral tone. And what huge ears, he might have added.

  Perhaps she thought he’d meant how piercing the Kafka gaze, how far-seeing. Perhaps his praising him pleased her. In any case, Lusk and Dora made love for the first time that night, and Lusk’s own sharp eyes went happily blind.

  Usually, the sensual world evaded or bored Lusk unless he could give it some world-historical significance, but in the days that followed he loved simply, and without thinking, to kiss the nape of Dora’s neck, to watch the way she gestured with her small hands, and, most of all, to feel those hands touching him in particular. He decided sex with Dora meant transcending himself and most being himself at once; and then he stopped thinking about that, too, and felt her lips on his, the press of her breasts against his chest, her hands touching his legs. Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, he narrated to himself, was in love.

  Which made him all the more vulnerable to the pain Herr Ears could cause him. Every word about Kafka (and it seemed as though Dora’s mouth released flocks of them every day) hurt like a sharp peck to his body. And it wasn’t just words; Dora’s Kafka Museum had objects in it, too, such as the picture, or a fountain pen or even a hairbrush of his. He loathed those things, and even more that she sometimes got small royalty payments from his estate.

  “Don’t be foolish,” his mother said. “She needs the money to live on, so she can struggle for the rights of the proletariat.” Bertha thought her son too much troubled by a ghost.

  This ghost, however, was very real to Dora, perhaps because when alive, the writer had himself foolishly believed in ghosts. He’d made her burn his manuscripts, for example, to ward off the unseen presences.

  “Her feelings about this man will change,” his mother said. “That is, if you want her enough to give her a child. When you do that, the phantom will disappear like so much mist.”

  Soon Dora petitioned the party to change her membership to his cell, and she moved in with him at his parents’ house. She still performed with her agitprop troop, but on her free days she worked with Lusk to produce the party newspaper (his newly assigned task) and sell it at meetings. Dora might not yet belong altogether to Lusk, but she’d given herself wholly to the party, to the work against Hitler, and to the pleasures of the Lusks’ home, the books everywhere, the burnished wood, the warmth of Lusk’s father (a cultured and famous neurologist), the fierce debates at the dinner table.

  And that life together also gave Lusk many opportunities to eavesdrop. “It was the same when he prepared tea for a visitor,” he heard Dora saying to his mother one morning, and he stopped outside the kitchen door to listen. “When Franz performed even a simple, seemingly insignificant action like that,” she said, “he made it seem as if he were doing it for someone that he revered.”

  His mother, from the sound of it, must be making Dora some tea—though apparently with an inferior, only human level of concentration.

  “His manner gave everything he did a religious intensity,” Dora said, and Lusk could easily imagine her infuriating fond smile. “Of course, this thoroughness kept him so busy that he didn’t manage to put the cup of tea on the table. He used up all his strength in the preparation.”

  His mother placed something that sounded solid on the round glass table in the alcove off the kitchen. “Then there was no tea, Dora?” his mother said. “Was it Kafka’s concern that friends were supposed to drink? You make me wonder if the man had ever been thirsty.”

  At that, Dora had run through the swinging door and right past Lusk. She said nothing about his spying, just rushed on toward their bedroom, weeping. Apparently, no one but Kafka had ever known what thirst truly meant.

  Lusk decided to learn all he could about his rival. He read The Trial—unfinished—and The Castle, also unfinished, both of them stories about and by a petit-bourgeois defeatist who couldn’t even manage to give his character a name. They showed no social and political awareness.

  Lusk told her that as he and Dora leafleted on Unter den Linden. She said nothing, and handed a man in a cloth cap a leaflet for their last big rally before the vote, and smiled at him, but the man didn’t look at that lovely gesture in his rush to get to a warmer place. Lusk, overcome by love, decided he must get Dora a better coat.

  Their post was near the university, a place busy with a mix of students, bourgeois, workers, yet as everyone rushed by, their faces set against leaflets and cold, Dora said she felt as though it wasn’t the German working class against Hitler anymore, only the two of them.

  He reassured her that the party had posted many other teams up and down the avenue, and, in any case, a Communist should always know he’s not alone; he’s part of the masses in motion.

  But what if a Communist wanted, if only occasionally, to be alone with his wife? How could he do that as long as a ghost was always with them, too? Lusk had to reduce the writer in size so he could blow him away. He told Dora that The Trial was meant to convince the
petite bourgeoisie that one needn’t take up the struggle for justice; a man was an isolated atom, and all struggles end in defeat.

  Dora, oddly, agreed. Joseph K’s struggle was futile, but Lusk didn’t understand why. In fact, no one who hadn’t known Franz could understand him.

  “That will certainly limit his readership.”

  She ignored that. “Franz condemns Joseph K. because he tries to shape his life differently from the life of crucifixion, the only life there is.”

  Dora, he wanted to say—to cry, perhaps, as if from the cross—if you think there’s no life but crucifixion, what do you think we’re doing here handing out leaflets? What are we struggling for?

  “You can hold back from the suffering of the world,” Dora said, “but perhaps this holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”

  He could tell from her tone that she was quoting him, and wondered why the phrases didn’t make his ears bleed. Before he could reply, one of the Nazi trucks came by, with Hitler’s voice blaring from a gramophone record. Dora watched it pass. “Sometimes,” she said, “I feel like we’re on horseback.” She meant, he knew, that Hitler had a private plane, and traveled to fifteen well-staged rallies each day. The party had many brave horse cavalry—handing out leaflets—but they were charging the machine guns of the twentieth century.

  “No,” Lusk said, against all the mechanical evidence, “the Nazis are the ones in costumes from the past. Only the proletariat can give birth to the future.”

  And Hindenburg won the runoff. He banned the SA while he investigated the accusation that they’d plotted a coup. That made for a momentary lull in the street fighting, and a chance for the agitprop troop to work again. “But what does it mean about us,” his brother Hermann asked at dinner, “that the midwife of the future depends for its survival on that remnant of feudalism?”

  Still, it relieved the pressure on all their chests a little, gave them a chance to work more freely. And it even let Lusk go so far as to have a drink with a comrade who had brought someone that he said Lusk had to meet—a Joseph Polack, whose former wife had had an affair with the very man Lusk himself seemed always to be talking about, the writer Franz Kafka.

  This fellow, Polak, was a square-faced Jew with a monocle. It saddened Lusk that despite the silly eyepiece, Polak was handsome; if Kafka might have an affair with this man’s wife, then perhaps the picture in the silver frame didn’t do him justice.

  But then, it hadn’t precisely been an affair, Polak said, only a grand epistolary romance, “a white passion, if you believe in such a thing.” Polak thought Kafka had gone to whores in Prague, but he believed Franz couldn’t have an erection with Milena. “Maybe it was because, as Milena said, that he hated the flesh, maybe it was because she was a gentile, and Franz hated himself.”

  People stared at them. Had they heard the fool talk about a Jew fucking a gentile?

  Polak gulped his beer and gestured peremptorily for the sullen waiter—a stupid way to act in combustible Berlin—certain of the aggrieved waiter’s obedience and of Lusk’s wallet.

  “Franz was maybe not much of a lover,” he said, and his voice lost a bit of his overdone bonhomie, “but he was a great writer, and, I’ll tell you, a very heroic person.” He let the monocle drop out of his eye and acted as if he reflected inwardly. “He truly couldn’t tell a lie, and he was, at every moment, engaged in a great trial of conscience, a truly extraordinary monologue directed toward a God Franz didn’t believe was listening.”

  To Lask, that part of the report sounded like praise for the ridiculous—a mad man shouting and gesticulating at an emptiness—but the rest might contain a kernel of comfort for him, and the next night, when he and Dora were in bed, Lusk told her about the meeting with the monocle-wearing Jew.

  “I know all about Milena,” Dora said flatly.

  “He said Milena told him Kafka feared the flesh.” Foolish thing to say; what if she replied, But not my flesh?

  Dora sat up. The sheet dropped from her breasts. “I think, Lusk, what you really want to ask is, did Franz put his penis in my vagina?” She stared at him in a way both furious and vulnerable, and Lusk felt mortified at the transformation he’d caused in this unfailingly gentle woman.

  Dora, in turn, must have seen his stricken look. She touched his hair, told him that she loved him, and that he, Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, was her life now. She spoke for the first time of their having a child.

  Lusk, pleased and terrified (a child—a Jewish child? and today, when a million German voices spoke of murdering Jews?), was still almost jealous enough to ask if Kafka would have approved. But that would have been foolish. Really, would Dora have said it if Kafka hadn’t approved?

  Besides, what did that matter? Kafka was in the ground in Prague, Lusk was in bed with Dora in Berlin. You will give her a child, his mother had said, and her Kafka will disappear. Well, they would see now, wouldn’t they?

  If they survived. By the time of the next election for deputies, the SA had been reinstated, and had soon doubled its number. The party assigned as many men as they could to protect the agitprop performances, but every show had ended in a battle, and when one of his comrades took out a Luger, Lusk confessed (or boasted) to the dinner guests that he’d felt the weight of the pistol in his own hands, and the feel of the trigger the man had pulled that had made blood bloom on a brown shirt. The Nazi’s scream made him feel there was nothing contingent in his life; all had been fated, and even as they’d run from the SS, Lusk had never more felt the master. He’d positively wanted to bellow in triumph from the exultation of it all.

  To which Dora said nothing, only looked down at her plate. Lusk had wanted it all to mean I’m not like Kafka, but he’d probably only made himself look ridiculous.

  “The problem isn’t my brother’s bloodlust,” Hermann said. “It’s that the tally of wounded is the wrong way round. The party thinks our real enemy is the Social Democrats.”

  “Hermann’s right,” the great prophet Brecht said. “The Social Democrats think Hitler’s stupid but useful. They believe he’ll destroy the Communists for them, and they’ll take over. The Comintern thinks, Let’s get rid of the Social Democrats, even if it brings Hitler to power. The vagabond will fail to save capitalism, and we’ll take over. Hitler, though, he knows that in gross times, it’s better to consider things in a cruder way. He thinks, I have three hundred thousand Storm Troopers. As soon as I take over, I’ll murder every Social Democrat and Communist left alive.”

  Lusk’s mother said, “Hitler’s outvoted in the Reichstag and in the cabinet. We’ll force new elections. He won’t be chancellor anymore by June.”

  “Or we’ll all be dead by then,” Brecht said.

  “Don’t be foolish,” Lusk’s mother replied, and the other guests listened most attentively to her. Bertha Lask had buried two brothers in the war, and had written a great pacifist play, but that had only brought her a despair that hadn’t dissipated until she’d embraced Lenin, and the need for a violence to end violence. Her reluctant journey gave her commitments an imperative force. People made wry faces at Brecht’s aphorisms, but they rested themselves in Lusk’s mother’s reassurance and returned to their fish—except, that is, for Dora, of course, who, like her former husband, was a vegetarian.

  On the thirtieth of January, when elections had achieved only stalemates, the senile Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor. On the twenty-seventh of February, the Nazis staged their own bit of epic theater. They burnt the Reichstag and hung a Communist for starting the fire. All but the party’s own parliamentary delegates voted Hitler emergency powers. “The German people long to do away with their own will,” Dora said to him in bed that night. “They want to pledge obedience to a vengeful god.”

  That evening, the great playwright Bertolt Brecht fled Germany.

  Soon after, the opposition newspapers had their presses destroyed, their staff arrested. The SA shuttered all trade union offices, arrested the officers, and put them
in camps. In May, they took away the prominent Communists, including Lusk’s mother.

  They also seized some manuscripts, including a notebook of Kafka’s aphorisms that Dora must have hidden from the implacable invalid by some sleight of hand when he’d ordered her to burn his things. Dora was inconsolable—for the manuscripts, in Lusk’s opinion, not for Bertha, though Lusk would have said she liked his mother very much. There were many mothers, he supposed, but only one copy of Kafka’s aphorisms in the world.

  Without her permission, Lusk had already read them one night, months before, the manuscript no more than eighty pages, with only one or two sentences to a page, as if Kafka thought his words were holy writ. Much speculation about God—always present, but dangerous if ever named—many warnings against collaboration with the demons. The reservations with which you take Evil into yourself are not yours, but those of Evil. Et cetera.

  He couldn’t see the use, but to comfort Dora, he said, “They were good. Piercing, even.” Of course that might make the loss worse. Or she might say, How dare you have touched Franz’s things.

  But she seemed pleased. They were united for a moment, so he didn’t add, A lot of them I couldn’t understand. After all, no one could who hadn’t known Franz. On the other hand, he was beginning to feel that he had known him, and all too well.

  After three weeks, his mother had been released from a basement near the university with much of her beautiful black hair gone, and some of it turned white. “The Jews,” Bertha said, “don’t believe in hell. But we’re wrong. It’s right below the houses of Berlin.” Beyond that, she wouldn’t say what had happened to her.

  Within the month Lusk’s sister, her husband, and her child had left for Holland, and his parents and his brothers had fled Prague to wait for permission—granted only to the most loyal party members—to enter the Soviet Union. The party, though, had tasked Ludwig Lask with the production and distribution of the now-illegal newspaper in the Steglitz area. Dora was a few weeks pregnant but decided to stay and work with him, moving from apartment to apartment every few weeks as a safety measure.