Forgiving the Angel

by Jay Cantor

  Still, as if bound by an archaic injunction, Marianne didn’t tell the Other Marianne about the change in Lusk Lask, whose name or letters she rarely mentioned. Instead, she served her some tea and a plate of biscuits, and asked politely if she could borrow money from the estate, “for travel.”

  “Wonderful,” Marianne Steiner said. She’d long worried, she said, that Marianne’s life had become only bed-sit and office, office and bed-sit, and (though she didn’t say as much) she felt deeply for this girl, this fellow sufferer. “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. Someplace warm, I think.”

  Marianne didn’t see through the lie, and immediately arranged for money to be transferred to Marianne’s account.

  8

  FATHER AND DAUGHTER spent most of her time in Berlin sitting by Bertha Lask’s bedside, in a barely heated, very crowded hospital ward that was only marginally better furnished than the one at Kolyma. Lusk’s mother had had the brain hemorrhage that all the doctors had known her dizziness predicted, though none of them, it seemed, could do anything to prevent it.

  It left her face looking slack, white, almost dead. “She’s in some in-between place,” Lusk said pointlessly.

  Marianne took her father’s mangled hand so his strength might flow into her. “How did you know that’s what I called the hospitals?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “The inbetween. I guess I mean in between home and the grave. I had the silly fantasy that my mother might forget me there, and I’d be changed by the inbetween, and even if I got out of the hospital, the living wouldn’t be able to hear me.”

  “Your mother would never forget you,” Lusk said, and he felt how his defense of Dora made him a good father.

  “She didn’t forget, of course. But I was so afraid of her leaving me there that I always tried to be a perfect child, one who never disobeyed and didn’t complain about anything.” She omitted, though, that she also tried to do the sorts of things first father liked, even the kabbalistic manipulation of objects, because her mother had especially loved all his ways. “Of course, I also did complain about her leaving me, even though I knew that was the most annoying thing I could complain about, and it might cause her to leave me. I couldn’t stop myself.”

  She couldn’t stop herself today, either. Lusk could hear the choked, insistent tone of a heart-divided young person who feared she might not be believed when she accused her parent of an injustice. So Lusk must hear about her mother and her, and right now, even as his own mother lay dying. In another way, though, her selfishness was reassuring; it was how children acted, playing one parent against the other.

  “But she never left you,” Lusk said, hoping to approve of himself again, “did she?”

  “She did, sometimes,” Marianne said. Marianne thought her honesty would strengthen the bond between them, and so his protection of her. “When I was at Yealand, she went to London to work for Yiddish. And she went to Israel while I was in the hospital. She had to save the Indestructibles. I never understood why something no one could destroy needed so much effort just to keep alive.”

  Lusk offered his daughter some chocolate to comfort her, a great luxury in the Workers’ State. Since Khrushchev’s speech he’d spent far too much money on it, by way of celebration of the party’s reform, or compensation for all that it still hadn’t accomplished in his hollow chest.

  “Mother said she had to go to Israel to heal her soul.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Maybe. But it turns out the soul and the body aren’t joined the way he’d thought. She got sick, anyway.” She felt dizzy when she said that, like a tightrope walker looking down.

  Lusk saw an opportunity to wean her from Kafka’s pernicious influence. “He wasn’t a god, the way your mother thought,” Lusk said, and he heard the choked tone in his own voice now, himself thrown back to the unfairness of his marriage. “He was only ever a bewildered man, just like the rest of us. More terrified and bewildered than the rest of us, maybe.”

  “I never thought he was a god,” she said. “A broken sort of angel, maybe, crippled when he fell. Some such thing, anyway.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m glad you don’t worship him.”

  “I don’t.” Her mother had, though.

  But he didn’t believe her. Some greater exorcism was necessary for a habit so rooted, though as with Dora, he couldn’t imagine what it would be.

  He got up and stood looking down at his mother’s still face, as if she might have the answer.

  “You should tell her you love her,” Marianne said.

  Talking to someone who couldn’t hear sounded like more Kafka nonsense. “I love her, Marianne, but I can’t do that,” he said. “It would be like talking to a ghost, and, unlike Kafka, I’m not foolish enough to believe in ghosts.” He sat down, put his arm around his daughter.

  A nurse came by a few minutes later and leaned over the immense form. She stood up with some extra solemnity to her bearing and drew the corpse’s eyelids down with a single finger. Lusk was glad his daughter was with him. It meant he wouldn’t let his mind go toward the wall.

  That protection would be lost soon; Marianne would have to return to London immediately after the cremation, and without party membership, Lusk would never be allowed to visit her. His greatest sadness, for now, anyway, wasn’t for his mother’s death, but that he might never see his daughter again.

  A month later, Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, as his mother had promised, was rehabilitated, and his membership in the Communist Party was reinstated, first by the Soviet party and then by its fraternal brother in the German Democratic Republic. He read the letter in the same dark entryway where he’d read Khrushchev’s speech, and felt not joy for himself, or confidence in the party’s renewal, but a greater loneliness: the person who’d have been most pleased by this, the one who understood the meaning for which his life had once been lived, was no more.

  Fortunately, the reinstatement also meant that he could at least apply for permission to travel to England, where he could tell his living daughter of his love for her.

  9

  A YEAR LATER, Ludwig Lask waited in Marianne’s small flat in London for her friends to arrive for the unveiling of the hidden father. His daughter was neatly, if a little nunishly, dressed in a white shirt and a well-tailored brown skirt and jacket. Thirty-seven years old, she looked and acted much younger than her years. She was, Lusk feared, too much untouched by life outside these three rooms.

  She arranged and rearranged biscuits on a plate. Some had chocolate on them, and it was all Lusk could do not to stuff them in his pockets. He felt as if something momentous would happen here—as if her friends could decide if he was suitable to become her father again—a feeling that reminded him of the interviews before receiving his party membership, which had also occurred in small, drab rooms, though without biscuits. To calm himself, he sat on the sofa, crossed his palms on his lap, and looked toward the heater. Was it coin-operated? he wondered.

  Marianne thought his glance had been toward the molding, and that he’d seen that she’d hidden the silver picture in a drawer. But before she could try to find out, the guests had started to arrive.

  Four, in total. Was this a nucleus, Lusk wondered, or his daughter’s whole universe? There was a girl with prominent teeth from her office; the still attractive middle-aged niece of Kafka’s who shared his daughter’s first name, and her beefy husband, who worked at the BBC. The two of them had spent the war here, had returned to Czechoslovakia, and then come back again as refugees, the man said in a deep voice and with ominous irony, “from Victorious February,” the triumph of the party in Czechoslovakia. The last guest was an older man, Isaac something, who’d been in the Yiddish theater with his former wife. He had a familiar face; but the tribe of which he and Lusk were a part looked, Lusk believed, more and more similar as they aged.

  There was room at Marianne’s table for only three of them, and the guest of honor—or was he the accused
? Marianne Steiner sat with the stiff back of a former Soviet officer and the disdainful look of an interrogator, as if, as a Kafka, she had the right to judge everyone. Steiner’s husband stood behind her chair with a hawk’s nose and a face as impassive as a guard who would pump water into the stomach of the honored guest as soon as his wife rang the bronze bell on her desk.

  Lusk was too much reminded of his past, and he stumbled in his English today. In Berlin, the War and the Wall cast a shadow on everyone, and helped hide his difficulties; here, he feared his daughter would see how much outside life Lusk remained.

  Marianne hovered near her father. She thought fatigue had made him quiet. Grieving for his mother, along with the heavy responsibility of party membership, had turned his hair gray and made him labor for breath when they walked through museums. But he was still, she could tell, spiritually strong. She put her hand on his shoulder for a moment to feel that strength and then went to the kitchen to get more biscuits.

  Lusk was delighted by the touch. He ate another biscuit, and made an effort to fit in. “It’s hard for you, no?” he said to the playwright. “Writing in a dying language?” Stupid thing to say, Lusk knew, both mean and a cliché. What he really wanted to say was, It’s not an Indestructible.

  The old playwright stared at him. Lusk couldn’t bear the magnified blurred eyes that were so much like his own, and turned his attention to the man’s ears, which would someday be his, too, and which were like the shells of huge mollusks that had little beards peeking from the holes where the animal hid.

  “Dying, yes,” the man said, “but not dead.” He smiled with blackened teeth. “It’s always been the language of an in-between place.”

  Lusk saw Marianne start with fear at the coincidence of words, Dora having taught their daughter the Kafka gospel that all things were linked, so a bird or an old Yiddish writer might speak your secrets. He felt a gust of fury toward Kafka’s malign spirit for the way it had trapped his daughter, made her as neurotically superstitious as a tribesman or a Hasidim.

  “And the population of the inbetween grows by the day, doesn’t it?” the old man said. “You’re one of us, too, aren’t you?”

  Lusk couldn’t help himself; he nodded.

  “Don’t worry, Lusk. We Jews have learned that between dying and dead can take a very long time.”

  “Have you pronounced a blessing on me,” Lusk said, “or a curse?”

  The man raised his huge eyebrows and nodded in sad, if ironic, agreement to Lusk’s irony.

  “The whole Soviet block,” Marianne Steiner said. “Isn’t it all another in-between place?” She stared at Lusk, as if he’d driven her out of Prague. “People not quite alive, mouthing nearly dead slogans.”

  That, too, was a cliché. But his daughter looked scared for him. He had to show her that a man who could survive interrogation in the Lubyanka could make short work of Kafka’s niece, and all that Kafka might represent to Marianne.

  He repeated some of the things he’d written his daughter in his letters, though spoken here they sounded, he had to admit, like what one might read every day in the newspapers of the DDR.

  The bucktoothed girl looked bored by it all, the husband indifferent, and the niece’s face showed disdain. Lusk looked toward his daughter’s large, sympathetic eyes to see if she believed he’d something valuable to say, but she seemed bewildered. He went on, and the words left his mouth and rose toward the Man in the Moon, without reaching any other ear.

  Marianne Steiner’s husband leaned over his wife, and toward Lusk, about to tell him that he was the usual petit-bourgeois excrement. He took a biscuit instead, but Lusk had lost his way, wandered back to the interrogation rooms and faces that despised him. “Rededication to Lenin …” he heard himself say. “And foreign enemies.” He was running out of breath. “And even our slave labor,” he said, “will become a benefit to the Socialist world now that the party has reformed itself.”

  Marianne Steiner looked disgusted with him, as if he had shat his britches. After all, she already had confessions that proved his words were lies. Lusk careened toward the wall he’d never reach. He dug his nails into his hands to stop the trembling. When he returned to the world, he’d blood on his right palm, and Marianne had disappeared.

  “It’s not easy for her,” Marianne Steiner said.

  He wiped his hands on his pants and went to look for his daughter.

  Not a long search, as she was, as always, reluctant to leave the flat. She sat on the edge of the claw-footed bathtub, face contorted, as if engaged in some battle with itself. An incongruous pink shower curtain, decorated with shepherdesses and lambs, hung bunched to her side.

  Lusk sat down next to her and pressed her close. The warmth helped keep him still, but he could see from her face that it had done nothing for his daughter.

  “You’re like one of West-West’s villagers,” she said, in half-swallowed words.

  It was a phrase from the lexicon that Dora had taught them both. She meant that whatever the Castle might do, the villagers made it seem part of the inevitable order of things.

  “Even if the party turns you into a slave, you justify it,” she said, the words coming in a rush, “even if your legs are …” But at that she began to cry.

  For him or for herself? He took a washcloth from a wire rack beneath the sink and began to dab lightly at his daughter’s face.

  She stopped crying, calmed by the touch of the moist cloth, or perhaps so she could better accuse him. “Your indestructible party is only bewildered and terrified men.”

  He recognized his words about Kafka from the hospital where his mother lay dying. His daughter wanted to tell him that he was the one who’d made fallible men into a god—and that meant he’d been a hypocrite about Kafka, which was, he knew, among the worst things a child might say about her father. Much he might say in argument to that, but more than being right, he wanted to reconcile with his daughter. “I can see,” he said, “that I might have sounded like I’d made the party into a god.”

  “Not just sound.”

  He needed to find a more peaceful place for the two of them, and that depended, he knew, on his honesty. “No, you’re right. Not just sound. I wanted the party to be more than human.”

  She studied Lusk’s face. This father didn’t know that honesty was above all. He lied to himself. This man could never protect her.

  She was, in her way, a skilled interrogator. “When I was younger,” he said, “I was insecure. I wanted there to be a power that could say I was substantial, something more than papier-mâché.”

  She blew her nose into the washcloth and handed it back to him. It felt oddly trusting. “I can see now,” he said, by way of an offering, “that that must be why the man hit me in the eye with a pick.” Though he saw the result every moment, it had been years since he’d remembered the blow.

  “You can see it now,” she said, “that you don’t have the eye?”

  That sounded almost friendly, made him feel he was on the right track with her. “It couldn’t have been that he thought I was a snitch,” he said, and he wondered why he hadn’t thought of this before. “Why would he care about that? He was one, himself. No, it had to be because he’d heard me reverently say Lenin’s name. He knew I thought my pious attitude made me different from him and the others.” Even in the general destruction, he’d dreamt, he’d be the one who continued to believe, and because of the faith clung to within the whirlwind, he’d someday be reinstated by a purged, a renewed, Communist Party.

  “And you have been,” Marianne said. She still had a small hope that her father might somehow move from willing slave to master again.

  To Lusk, though, she sounded like she wanted to comfort him, and that sense of a kindly presence made him feel that if he could only be more honest with her—with himself—he might build something lasting between them. “But when the party admitted its errors,” he said, “it made things worse for me, made me feel hollow again.”

  His
daughter looked toward him with bewildered eyes, and mucus all over her face. He wiped it from her cheeks, and threw the washcloth into the sink. “Your grandmother believed Khrushchev had given the people the truth. He’d revealed Stalin the schemer, told the world of Stalin the slave master, confessed to Stalin the murderer.” Once, he’d needed to protect his mother, so she would not think she’d led her sons to slaughter; now that she was gone, he felt himself in the grip of an almost physical insistence to speak. “My mother was wrong, Marianne. Khrushchev had lied. He’d been complicit in the murders. They all had.” Lusk, sadly, could hear that he sounded like the one who’d been crying, even if he’d run out of moisture some years ago. “And it wasn’t Stalin who smashed my legs with a rubber pipe.”

  “The men who beat you obeyed his orders, though,” Marianne said. She hoped her father couldn’t tell she’d only been half-listening, lost in terror now that she knew her father’s protection was worthless, that she’d soon feel the indecipherable electrical script tormenting the nerves in her legs.

  “I understand fear,” Lusk said. “I expect cowardice. It was something more than that. They wanted to hurt me.” Lusk saw his torturers’ hammerlike faces, each man as they beat him enjoying the peace of the corpse while still alive. “You were right, Marianne, the Communist Party is only bewildered and terrified men. And those men wanted to surrender their conscience; they longed to serve a brutal god.”