Forgiving the Angel

by Jay Cantor

  “I thought,” the mathematician said, “that if my betrayers at the university had turned me in for a glass of water, it was just possible I might forgive them.”

  At his next interrogation, the NKVD officer had been a fat man with manicured fingernails. He’d put a pile of pages on the desk next to a pen and a full glass of water.

  Lusk, not trying to convince the man he wasn’t a spy who should be shot, but only that he should let him have a sip of the water, had said, “Ludwig Lask’s arrest was an exception to the usually accurate determinations of our great party. Ludwig Lask is, and has always been, a loyal party member.”

  “No,” the man had said, “you’re no exception. You’re typical petite-bourgeoisie excrement. Look, for example, how attached you are to your name.” He paused, picked up the water, and put it down again without drinking, and Lusk’s eyes had followed the glass as if he were taking a neurological test. He’d wondered if he could get to the water and lap up a little before the officer rang the bell for the guards. Even the memory of that sound had made Lusk tremble like a man on a dark road whose car careens toward a wall that it never hits but never stops being about to hit.

  The interrogator had looked at this quivering coward with disgust and said he couldn’t possibly have ever been a loyal party member, or he would have recognized that the greatest danger to the party is not that an innocent man might be convicted but that an exception might prove the party had been wrong in its judgment, and so undermine the working class’s faith in the wisdom of Stalin and Lenin.

  He’d gestured for Lusk to approach the desk and read the statement the party had prepared for him.

  “Which, amazingly enough,” the former party official said, “didn’t speak anymore of Lusk’s being a German agent.”

  “No, it only asked me to acknowledge that I’d been a deviationist,” which meant not a bullet to the head, but five years in a labor camp. That would have seemed like paradise to Lusk, if the document hadn’t also listed everyone who worked at the Marxist-Leninist Institute in Moscow as coconspirators.

  “On the other hand,” the mathematician said, smiling weakly, “couldn’t it be that your colleagues were guilty? Some of them, at least?”

  “Perhaps you are innocent,” the Georgian said, “but the institute under Sten might have been thoroughly rotten?”

  “Why not lay down your arms and reconcile with the party?” the doctor said.

  Alas, a small fold in Lusk’s brain had stored a grain of poison: “The reservations with which you take Evil into yourself are not yours, but those of Evil.”

  “That sounds clever,” the former soldier said. “What does it mean?”

  It had meant that from a very momentary and completely regrettable sense of shame, and a weak but habitual desire to prove himself to be as good as a man who supposedly wouldn’t lie (though who but he, himself, had ever tortured that man?), Lusk had set the papers back down next to the chipped glass of water and the bell.

  The moment the pages had touched the desk, Lusk had seen that they’d reinstate the charge that he’d been a Gestapo agent, and he’d given an involuntary shriek of regret and despair.

  The interrogator had looked at him as if he’d shat his britches in front of him. Still, he’d offered to give Lusk one last chance to save his wife and daughter.

  “My daughter?” Lusk had said.

  “My sister.”

  “My father.”

  “My son.”

  “My mother.”

  “Of course, your daughter,” the interrogator had said. “Your wife is the spouse of a traitor to the Motherland. According to the legal code, she, too, is an enemy of the people. If you don’t sign, I will have the bitch arrested tonight, and I will order your daughter taken to an orphanage, where the sickly little mongrel will surely die.” He’d held out a pen for Lusk, and Lusk had taken the instrument into his hand.

  Would it be right for him to betray fifty coworkers for a daughter he hardly knew, a girl who was a kind of fetish to him that meant Love, or the Future, when she wasn’t any of those things, but only a four-year-old with damaged kidneys who wouldn’t survive for very long, no matter what he did?

  This calculus of years gained per person tortured was the objective materialist view, and in that perspective, which had guided Lusk’s whole life, his daughter was, like all individuals, only a piece of dust, yet all that had mattered to him at that moment was that that speck should spend however much life she might have in the care of her mother, who would make sure she got enough to eat and would tuck her own blue shawl around her at night so his daughter might sleep warmly. In fact, at that moment, there was suddenly no end to the good things he’d wanted for his daughter, even that there might be penicillin for her, for this one child, even if it meant all the progress that the Socialist state had made toward industrialization would come to ruin. He’d wanted her not to die, though the great mass of humanity might die; and if life was for almost all men an endless crucifixion, he hadn’t wanted it to be that for his daughter. Yes, more than anything on earth, he’d wanted his daughter to be an exception.

  He’d signed the paper.

  “You can have it now,” the interrogator had said, sounding as disgusted with Lusk as before. Lusk had drained the glass, spilling some on his chin and his chest.

  The mathematician died during the night, and the guards dragged the corpse away. In the afternoon, three enemies of the people were brought to the cell with bruised legs, salted throats, and similar stories to tell, and Lusk received a letter from his mother that had passed the censors the month before, when he’d still been being interrogated. Dora and Marianne, his mother wrote, had received permission to visit the doctors in Switzerland.

  “That must be a lie,” the Georgian said. “They don’t let anyone leave.”

  “It’s your mother trying to comfort you,” the former Red Army officer said. “She’s telling you that your wife is safe, when she, too, has been arrested. Later she’ll write to you in the camp to tell you that your family never returned from abroad, and your wife never got in touch with her again.”

  “Shut up,” the doctor said.

  “Well, if there’s any truth to your mother’s letter,” the former Georgian party official said, “it means that your wife has been recruited as a spy.”

  Yes, Lusk decided, Dora would do that to get Marianne to a doctor. He applauded her initiative. The party must trust that she wouldn’t defect when she got to the West, must believe in her political formation, perhaps because she’d turned in others voluntarily—which made her statement betraying the Beckers a piece of good fortune, and not to be waved away with one hand, even if it had led to his own torture. But was that true if the Beckers had been shot in the Lubyanka basement? That was too complicated a moral calculus for a recently, if unexceptionally, tortured man.

  Of course, even the best political formation is a frail reed. The party must think they’d another reason to believe that she wouldn’t defect once she got to the West—namely, that her husband was their hostage. He laughed. Dora knew him no better than he knew her anymore. Instead, he thought, they should have threatened that they’d torture Franz Kafka.

  3

  AS LUSK WORKED in the mines and rivers of Kolyma, his daughter, his wife, and the ghost of Kafka became like characters in a novel Lusk barely remembered having once read. In fact, best for him to forget that book altogether, since thinking about it meant he might miss a chance to steal a bit of bread, or he might forget to properly wrap his feet so he wouldn’t lose any more toes, or he might not attend to working exactly the amount needed to avoid the punishment coffin, but not so much as to die from malnutrition.

  In the six months since the Lubyanka, a third of the men who’d come with him had died. Sometimes Lusk prided himself on the job he’d done carrying his life in his hands, a job that had made him suspicious, vicious, and dishonest, but in other ways had formed him into someone like the working-class comrades he’
d once taught, a person able to deal with whatever happened, except that their attitude had a tincture of confidence, while his felt fatalistic. Did he still believe as they had—as he had taught them—that Marxism would show the way forward? It was hard to think about that, or about anything today. His hands had gone numb. That meant it must be near noon, though the sky was too dark to be sure.

  With an effort that felt physical (and so, costly), Lusk forced himself to remember what he’d been considering, because it was important to him to once in a while think continuously about something, as if that separated one from the beasts.

  And from his fellow zeks, too? In the absence of the party that Stalin had covered with shit (yes, he knew now that it was Stalin, not Yezhov or anyone else), Lusk was forced to try to see his own eyeball, and correct himself. Was he being petit bourgeois by trying to think, or would he die a Communist?

  Well, he sometimes said, we, didn’t he? After all, if his group didn’t fulfill their work quota, he’d be among those put in the coffins and left outside to die before being dumped out into the snow. Lusk would have maimed a man from his group (except for one of the criminals) who tried to take any of his soup or bread, but if Lusk had had enough (when, though, had he ever had enough?), he could make room for a little anger that some of his fellow prisoners didn’t have that much. QED: Lusk had shown that even in Kolyma the rudiments of the Communist spirit remained, one that saw the survival of the I and the we as identical.

  Nearly. The man next to him had just fallen facedown in the freezing water. Snow had started; time for work would be short. No one had tried to raise the man back up, because if he lived he’d still lose some limbs and never be any use to the work group again.

  That night in the barracks, the zeks drank cups of warm snow heated on the top of the stove. Lusk told the doctor, who’d accompanied him step-by-step from the Lubyanka, of his discovery of the Communist “we” even in Kolyma. He didn’t prize the thought much anymore, but, so close to dying himself, he wanted someone to know he could still think. Though the man who knew, Lusk could see, wouldn’t live much longer than he would.

  In a barely audible voice, the doctor said Lusk’s hypothesis seemed to be that Cucaracha’s goal in the Purge had been metaphysical. He’d wanted to see if he could bring about the origin and essence of Communism again, by persecuting a group of Communists to near extinction.

  Lusk, however, was wrong. First, the Boss had done it to eliminate his many opponents—present or not yet born. After that, he wanted to see to it all men feared their own will, and obeyed his, without thought. But he’d accomplished all that, the doctor whispered, and the flow of zeks hadn’t stopped. QED: the Purge now had nothing to do with metaphysics or even politics; it was a way to provide slaves for the north.

  That made sense to Lusk. First of all, it was Marxist in its way: Stalin was an atavistic apparition of the Oriental despot. Besides, as someone had once said, in gross times, it’s better to consider things in a crude way. They were all slaves who would die from hunger and cold and be replaced by other slaves. After all, unless your labor costs are nil, panning for gold was an economically inefficient way to extract the precious metal.

  Yet almost as reflexively if he were saying Ludwig Lask is innocent, Lusk said, “Lenin would never have done this.”

  The doctor had met survivors of the Solovetsky Islands, but he saw how much of Lusk’s scaffolding depended on a name, and he didn’t argue anymore.

  “The Communist spirit will never die,” Lusk said, “and it will give rise to the Leninist party again.” He added, in a way bound to be meaningless to anyone but the dead, “Together they form an Indestructible. The party will always renew itself.”

  Fortunately, by that time, the doctor had fallen into a stupor that could be confused by the uninitiated with sleep, at least for a few days; but substance was wasted by this “rest,” and no cells were renewed.

  The next day, a young criminal, the leader of their work group, had decided to take over the doctor’s role in the debate. He had disputed the point about Lenin by hitting Lusk with his pick several times, close to his eyes. Blood poured down Lusk’s face into the frigid river, and Lusk wanted to follow after. Through staggering pain and bewilderment, he remembered that he must not let himself fall into the water, or he’d be of no use to anyone anymore, and so not worth saving. He remained upright, and comrades had carried him back to the camp instead of his being left to bleed out and die.

  With the warmth and the better rations of the hospital, some memories and dreams of Lusk’s former life returned, which, as with frostbitten toes, was a painful process. He imagined, first, that the dark around his daughter’s eyes had probably taken over her face. That misery turned him to lead.

  A man learns in the camp, though, what the tragic writers (and homeopaths) already know, that you can’t distract yourself from pain by dreaming of pleasure, but only by contemplating another pain, so instead of thinking of his daughter’s death, he tormented himself by thinking about how if she lived, Marianne would never hear a word about Ludwig (Lusk) Lask from Dora, and if she even remembered his name, her mother would forbid her to speak it, afraid the name might lead to a prisoner in Stalin’s gulag, and so to Dora’s Communist past. History had turned out to be on his opponent’s side. Dora Diamant would once again have become Franz Kafka’s widow, and most people (not knowing the date of that obscure author’s death) would probably assume that Marianne had been his child. Soon, she would probably think that, too.

  As Lusk wallowed in this, the criminal who’d maimed him came to look over his work. A small, twitchy man who nonetheless spoke slowly, he explained that he’d thought only a snitch would have defended Lenin, but later he’d considered, and decided that a man who wanted to fool him wouldn’t say he loved Lenin, he’d talk about hating Stalin. “Unless, that is, you were very clever.”

  Lusk was clever enough to know that the right answer was “I’m not very clever.”

  “No, I suppose not,” he said, which was maybe his apology. He also told Lusk that the gray-haired old man he’d been jabbering with had been put in a punishment coffin, so he could become familiar with death before he died. His offense had been parasitism; meaning he’d become too weak to work anymore.

  The thief left Lusk enough tobacco for two thin cigarettes, which must be the going price among the criminals for one eye destroyed, along with forty percent of the vision in the other.

  After the hospital, it looked to Lusk as if God had dragged His greasy thumb across the world. He’d die if he returned to panning for gold, but that would mean less than nothing to those who made the work assignments. What did matter is that his mother had recently been allowed to send him food packages (no doubt her reward to him for his defense of Lenin, even though she couldn’t know of it), and, without tasting even a bite, he’d given the parcels untouched (which meant after the various inspectors and clerks stole their shares) to the fat criminal who made the work assignments. The man had been generous (though he hadn’t given Lusk even a crumb of food from his own parcel) and had asked if Lusk wanted to stay in the hospital as an orderly. That meant he’d have the hospital’s heat, and the extra food that he could easily steal from the dying.

  Lusk might not be clever, but he recognized that the name orderly meant guarantee of life, and that, in turn, meant the job was far too precious for him. Someone would eventually outbid him and take his place. Instead, he asked to be sent to the storage sheds, a job more in between life and death; it would provide some, but not complete, protection from the cold, for as long, anyway, as his mother continued to send him packages. If she died, or even forgot for a month, he’d die, too. But he didn’t worry about that; he’d either deal with it or fail to deal with it when it happened.

  III

  1

  AT AGE EIGHT, his daughter, Marianne Lask, lived in a Quaker school in Yealand, while her mother dodged fireballs in London, where she labored as a dressmaker to earn money to
sustain their bodies and worked to save Yiddish culture to sustain her soul. When Marianne, just past her birthday, saw blood in the toilet bowl, she knew the red drops dissolving into the water would reach out to her mother and bring her back from the dangers in London. It will be for your own good, Mother, Marianne thought, those being the words her mother had used when she’d left Marianne at Yealand.

  The doctor who attended at the school arranged for her transfer to the small local hospital. Marianne worried her mother might not find her there; the blood had probably told her that her daughter was at Yealand. The doctor understood that a child so often sick might both have developed some comforting fantasies and feel she needed a mother’s protection; he played along and promised that if the blood didn’t pass on the right route, he’d definitely help her mother get to the hospital.

  For several nights in the ward, Marianne worried that the ghosts that had tormented first father had made the doctor forget his promise, or that they’d put up an obstacle that had made her mother give up on finding her.

  Marianne knew that first father believed that there were many unseen connections between things, and one could protect oneself from ghosts by special manipulations: like the proper arrangement of furniture (also, when she received a letter she must make sure to open it only on a bridge). She didn’t have much to work with here, though—a pad, a water glass, a picture book—but she tried different arrangements, and within a day her mother arrived.

  Marianne threw her arms around her mother’s neck, overcome with gratitude that she hadn’t given up and, really, for everything her mother had done for her. It had to have been hard work for her to carry Marianne wrapped in blankets from the snowy Soviet Union (a place whose name, Marianne had been warned, she must never use). And when Switzerland had slammed a door as big a mountain in their faces, her mother had found a way to get them visas for England. Once in the internment camp (also a place not to be mentioned anymore) she’d found a way to get Marianne fresh vegetables so her kidneys wouldn’t fail. And when they’d been released from the camp, her mother had found her a safe haven from the bombs in the Quaker school at Yealand.