Forgiving the Angel

by Jay Cantor

  “You’re proud of her.”

  “I am.” To prove her grandmother’s excellence, he described all that his mother had done to free him, told his daughter about the sad train of begging letters to Ulbricht, one of the leaders of the GDR. And when Lusk, by purest chance, had seen an article about a friend of Kafka’s (and not the wife of Ludwig Lask) who’d died, and it had mentioned her surviving daughter, it was her grandmother who’d gotten permission from Ulbricht for Lusk to communicate with England, and her friends had also helped get the visas for Marianne’s visit. “I suppose those things are like the best of the mother in the play.”

  “My grandmother knows Ulbricht,” Marianne replied, but Lusk couldn’t tell from her tone if she was impressed or offering an argument that she was like the woman in Brecht’s play.

  2

  THE ACQUAINTANCE of Ulbricht’s had waited up for them. Marianne embraced the gray-haired old lady and kissed her cheek over and over, as if it might disappear at any moment.

  In the little kitchen, Lusk got the kettle on, and Bertha told Marianne what Dora had once said about Kafka and the tea. Memories of Dora, after all, were what linked them.

  “I remember that story,” Marianne said. “The carefully brewed tea that never arrives.”

  Lusk measured out the leaves, and for many reasons (to show his love, because his vision was partial, because tea was expensive), he did it carefully. “I suppose,” Lusk said, “you could think of him as keeping the idea of things made with real concern alive, and at the same time showing that it couldn’t be done under capitalism.” He poured the water in. “But it’s ridiculous to think the workers need that further proof, no?”

  Marianne said, “Communism will be a world where one can be both caring and have some hot tea.” She felt smarter around her father. He had made her think she might take a course in nursing when she returned to London.

  “Lovely, you two,” her grandmother said. “May I use this in a book?”

  Lusk made a sour face. He didn’t want in any way to be linked with Kafka’s name—not even as a critic. He brought the teapot to the small wood table.

  “My mother said that when they lived in Berlin, during the inflation, he would make his way to the central part of town, so he could queue with the others for tea, even though he didn’t want to buy any.”

  “Where blood flowed, his must flow, too,” Lusk said, both mocking and sad.

  Marianne squeezed her father’s hand. It pleased her that he knew the story, as if it gave them a family life, though lived in different stages and places. She hoped that having a family would be a protection against what the ghosts were doing to her, like the shooting pains in her legs that felt like writing.

  “It’s ridiculous to go to look for suffering,” Lusk said. “If Kafka had led a more active life, suffering would have found him.” Or he could have just stayed home, and it would have conveniently come for him in a big black car. Anyway, Lusk had heard enough about Kafka for a night.

  Perhaps Bertha was sick of him, too—or simply tired. She left father and daughter to get to know each other better. Maybe, too, she didn’t want to be there if the talk turned again to Lusk’s own suffering.

  And as soon as she left, Marianne asked what had happened to his left eye. But the moment she asked, she regretted the question. He said nothing, only stared at her unseeingly through his thick glasses. One eye was dead, but the other eye required the strongest lens to see at all. A right lens had wastefully been made to match the other, though it could do nothing except make the blind eye look like a monstrous wound—or, because it was paired with its living brother, like a corpse.

  The memory of the blow that had destroyed his eye, and the river that would have killed him, made his body tremble from the chill. He drove the nails of his hands into his palms until he could speak again. “A thief hit me because he thought I was a snitch.” He prayed she hadn’t seen him shake.

  Marianne heard the drop in temperature in his toneless voice, and it gave her a bad chill as well. Her father seemed almost indifferent with others, but never with her. That preference for her was something she hadn’t always felt with her mother, who didn’t act indifferently to anyone, but had a warm concern for all. Her father’s choosing her, in particular, was a gift of great value, but now it seemed to have been withdrawn.

  Still, if she was ever to have a father, her father had to have a past. She had no choice but to ask once more: “Were you a snitch?”

  “No.” He admired her implacability, found her persistence both painful and touching. But he had to be careful. He didn’t want Marianne to know that the cause of the Purge had been to make him and others into slaves, and he didn’t want her ever to see him tremble again.

  3

  FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Lusk and his daughter walked about the winter city, or sat drinking weak coffee in a café that made no concessions to bourgeois—or proletarian—decoration. Like an interrogator, Marianne returned (and returned him) to Kolyma repeatedly. And such was a daughter’s power that since she asked about the camps, he tried to answer. Odd, how rare these questions had been from anyone since his return. Maybe unlike the others, she hadn’t heard a thousand similar stories, or didn’t feel his stories were in competition with their own suffering during the war. Or that they were an accusation. Marianne wasn’t complicit, as every Communist, including the victim, Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, felt himself to be.

  He described being tied to a sleigh and dragged to the mine for being last out of the barrack his first year, or told how he and another man had to pull a cart like oxen, with leather thongs on their foreheads and chests, and she simply nodded with a birdlike motion, as if checking something from a list. Impossible, yet he would have said that his stories somehow comforted her.

  And, indeed, they had. Marianne felt her father’s stories made the horrible things come out of hiding, and showed that if one had sufficient strength, the way her father did, they could be survived. Her father’s legs had been damaged, his eyes nearly blinded, but he could still deal with whatever was thrown at him.

  A policeman, for example, who asked, in a most unkindly way, for them to show their papers. They’d been seen, he said, walking about. Where was their camera?

  They had no camera, her father said, in a voice Marianne thought neither polite nor aggrieved. And he had his papers in his overcoat, and a whole sheaf of hers, prepared for just this eventuality.

  The policeman left. Her earthly father had already saved her from lorries and from being arrested as a spy. She imagined standing on tiptoe and kissing him on the cheek, a thing she suspected daughters might do. The father who cared about her opinion would be pleased, she thought, but the cold person from Kolyma might be indifferent, and that would be painful for her. Best, she decided, not to try.

  She put her arm around him, though. Had there been even five men, she wondered, with whom she’d done this? His absence had been the problem; this was where a girl was meant to practice. Her time with her mother had been lived mostly in hospitals; now her kidneys had grown stronger and her soul would surely follow. Her father’s presence would both protect her from any malicious unseen things and calm her anxieties without her having to take the pills the doctors said might make her tremble. She was sure a new epoch would begin for her.

  4

  MARIANNE HAD TO RETURN to London, and Lusk, lacking party membership still, was repeatedly denied the right to visit her, or to send her money, supposing he should ever put aside any from his minor position at the Marxist-Leninist Institute, reediting already reedited texts. “It will be years before she can save enough for a ticket to Berlin,” Lusk told Natalie Kolman, another survivor of Stalin’s camps, and his one friend at the institute, or in the world, though Lusk did think that a friend might have said, Of course she’ll visit you again, so perhaps the very basis of their friendship was that each tolerated in the other the way they fell short as friends.

  As for his daughter, all he would have
of her companionship for a long while would be her letters—about her nursing course (“the other students had seemed a sad and harmless lot to me; but then, as it turns out, it was like Kafka said to Mother once, they, like me and most other animals, also have teeth”), about her difficulty with buses to get to that course (“when I get on I feel like I’m entering the belly of a monster, like Jonah, but with no God to make sure he’ll spit me back up at my destination, only a very human conductor”), about her nervous and cruel boss at the office where she worked (“her hands flutter in the air and in my stomach at the same time”), or about Dora’s friends, like Kafka’s niece, apparently also a Marianne, who took her to the beach, or had her to her house for holidays (“where I am tolerated as the remembrance of my mother, and as repository of her memories of another”).

  Lusk’s own daily life was conducted through a fogged glass, and if Natalie Kolman’s silence was company, it wasn’t companionship that brought any other color or form to him; only these letters from his daughter let Lusk glimpse the variegated world again. How, he wondered, could the name daughter be so powerful? But he remembered that once the entire Marxist-Leninist Institute in Moscow had discovered the power that word had over him when he had condemned them to the Lubyanka.

  He wrote Marianne that anyone who’d experienced her company valued her for herself. Or he told her about his day’s lunch, or what he’d read at the institute. Or … but he soon ran out of events to write about, or any interest in writing them. What he wanted to do, again and again, was to give her a better answer to the question Why were you arrested? and not just him but so many others. The many was the crux of the again; the enormity of the gulag overflowed any explanation that he could provide for it; he was like someone, who—without any recourse to parable—was trying to explain not why a person died but why there was death in the world at all. Why had the flowers of Lenin’s party pledged their obedience to the Gardener of Human Happiness, who had then immediately ripped so many of them up by the roots? He needed to explain those things, but in a way that let her see the enduring value of the Communist spirit—equality for all people—and that the need of the people for the guidance of a Leninist party to realize that spirit, remained.

  “You shouldn’t write about any of that to her,” his mother said when he told her about his letters. “They just upset you, and when the Stasi reads them, it could delay your reinstatement.” She paused, scared of her own words and of their possible effect on Lusk. “Or it could lead to an arrest.”

  5

  MARIANNE’S MOTHER had withdrawn to a middle distance, but her father’s presence (given to her simply for being his daughter) had compensated. The intense pain in her legs, which felt like someone’s malicious graffiti, had continued, but she could talk less anxiously to people in her new office, even the men. And thanks to her father’s protection, she could—if she found a seat by the aisle in front—take buses.

  It helped to take her father’s letters on the tram with her to read on her way to the nursing course. She barely ever attended to the first part of his letters, though, the kind and unconvincing words about her, the news of difficulties getting doctor’s appointments for her grandmother (she was having fainting spells), or about the bland sausage with too much cereal that he apparently ate absolutely every day for lunch, all things that she thought of as written by inbetween father, who remembered from when he’d been fully alive that friendship meant he should share fragments of his life, even ones about which he felt indifferent. But her real, her living, father always stopped that nonsense and wrote to her what he cared most about: that she not draw the wrong moral from the story told by his maimed body and lose hope for the Communist enterprise.

  Marianne knew he wanted to convince her of all this not because of her great intellect but because he didn’t want his daughter to think her father’s life had been wasted. She’d never been important in that way before—it was someone else’s opinion her mother valued most—and she usually found it immensely nourishing to be needed by her parent, especially as he was (at the same time) himself a man of such great inner strength.

  Today, though, she found this need also unsettled her, though despite her growing anxiety, she had to continue the trip or she’d miss her first exams. The bus bumped along, and the repetitive letter (Did the party have a choice but to industrialize with brutal rapidity in order to defend the Bolshevik Revolution?… And in the absence of long education of the worker by the market, what was left but the lash and prison?) began to seem as anxious as her own chest felt. Worse, it was littered with question marks, as if he wasn’t asking her to agree with his thoughts but wanting her to tell him what to think.

  She saw that the bus would crash at the next roundabout, and knowing that a vision was probably absurd was never any help. Thank God the driver had to stop. She pushed past the lady with the bags and managed to make it off, but she was miles from the school, and miles from home. Safest, though, to turn back.

  And not to go the next day, either. By the third day, she felt like it wasn’t worth the pain the trip would bring her. She would never catch up with the rest of the pack.

  6

  THE EMPTY WEEKS between Marianne’s letters began to increase like the grain in DDR sausage, and the brief accounts of her day at the office (no mention of nursing anymore) became as flat and smudged as Lusk’s own barely binocular world.

  “Do you think I offended her?” he asked Natalie. They lay in bed, having made love (in between his trips to the toilet) as reluctantly as they talked. Natalie, closer to his own height than Dora, was meager in body and gesture, where his former wife, as he remembered her, had been generous. On the other hand, Natalie never spoke of her first husband other than to say, Shot in the Lubyanka basement.

  “Your letters,” she said, “sound like a man going over and over an unhappy love affair.” She gave a small turn to her lips. Natalie, child of the proletariat, thought capitalism degraded and Communism enslaved. She had a most corrosive smile. “Maybe your daughter feels jealous of Lenin.”

  As he once had been of Franz Kafka. He told Natalie his worry that his daughter now too much imitated that sad, misguided, and misguiding man.

  “She wants to be a writer?”

  “Not that, fortunately. But that image of the bus as a beast, that sounds like something Kafka might have written. My daughter’s been taught that there are two communicating worlds, this one and an utterly nonexistent one.”

  “Not all people are materialists.”

  “Not all are filled with fear, either. And she’s made herself as painfully sensitive as he was, too.” Kafka, he thought, would have died during his first day of interrogation. The interrogator’s contempt would have turned him into a cockroach. “And I think she’s even more chaste than Kafka was.”

  “Fathers,” Natalie said, “are often wrong about that.” She lit a cigarette.

  “Maybe so, but he had so much self-hatred, he’s the wrong model for her, or for anyone.”

  “Better she worshipped her father, you think? And Lenin, of course.”

  Better, he thought, that she followed nothing but her own heart, but that wasn’t something he could say to Natalie. She undoubtedly would have used a zek’s worst opprobrium, and said that he’d been sentimental.

  That week, Bertha Lask (the acquaintance of Ulbricht’s), received a gift from the party, a book bound in red leather with gold letters stamped on the cover, Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress. Lusk began reading standing up in the hall, but by the end he had slumped against the wall, astounded by what he’d read—each of Stalin’s crimes enumerated and repeated to “applause and consternation in the hall”—but more astounded that the speech did nothing to warm or renew him. Instead, he felt an even more cavernous emptiness in his chest, as if the delegate leader’s words had turned his body into a shell, a papier-mâché doll. A small child could easily have stuck a hole in him and wiggled a finger where his heart had once been.

&nbs
p; “You expect too much,” his mother said that evening. “He admits everything, Lusk, but the truth can’t give us our lives back.” She put a piece of herring and some black bread on the table for his dinner. “Or your brother’s life.” Her worn face, Lusk thought, had lines for each year her children had spent in Stalin’s prison. “But look, he’s rededicated our party to the principles of Lenin.” She poured Lusk a cup of tea—brewed with at least a modicum of concern, he could be sure—and put it by his hand.

  Lusk hadn’t expected his life back, but he felt as though his emptiness and his questions could only line his mother’s face more, as if she would feel that really he was saying, Why did you lead your sons to slaughter? He stared at the herring, but cardboard figures have no appetite. He couldn’t imagine picking up his fork and eating.

  “Khrushchev will purge the party,” she said. “He will give the workers their guide again. You’ll see, you’ll be reinstated soon.”

  Lusk sipped the weak tea. Most probably his mother was right on all fronts; light was being shone into every corner, yet Lusk remained blinded by the darkness of the camps.

  China had awakened, he reminded himself. The Korean party had fought the Americans to a draw. The Vietminh had overrun the French. Even if he remained hollow, he could write to his daughter of these signs that Lusk’s life, Lusk’s cause, hadn’t been in vain.

  That conclusion let him pick at the fish.

  7

  MARIANNE RECEIVED A LETTER from her father with the good news about Khrushchev’s speech. As he’d promised her, the spirit of Lenin had proved itself an Indestructible. Letters from him about Mao and Ho Chi Minh that sounded still more fulfilled had followed, and when Marianne Steiner—tall, self-possessed, and with hair stylishly cut short in an intriguing geometric pattern—came to visit Marianne Lask, Ludwig Lask’s daughter felt both proud and anxious that she could meet his gracious niece with an inheritance all her own, a restored and powerful father who didn’t ask but told her what he and the party thought about history—told her, in particular.