Forgiving the Angel

by Jay Cantor

  “Why?” she said, because she could tell he’d wanted her to ask. Her only real question, though, now that her father had revealed his weakness, was what she might do, so her mother would forgive her betrayal and protect her again.

  Lusk felt the answer to his daughter’s question rise out of his body, as insistently as a baby’s wailing. “Because no one,” Lusk said, “lives even a moment outside terror for his life. We want a god who will order us to fire a bullet into another man’s belly, so we can feel the master, even if only for the length of the victim’s scream.”

  At which he felt his body relax, as if he’d finally let go of a dream of freedom and equality so long and rigidly grasped, and had found peace in thinking that the only earth ever to be was one populated by butchers and those about to be butchered; and the only equality was that they sometimes changed places.

  That’s a mood, he could hear his mother say, not a world-view, though perhaps out of consideration for Kolyma she wouldn’t have said mood. Still, she was right. There must be a way out of the abattoir, Lusk thought wearily, only he was too old and damaged to find it.

  Still, he didn’t need to tell his daughter any of that. Instead, he gave her shoulders a squeeze.

  That touch made Marianne’s muscles rigid. Her father was a hollow man who’d easily been made into an accomplice and a slave; he couldn’t help her, and their closeness could only drive her mother away.

  Lusk stretched his legs and wondered how those who’d once rolled up their pants for him felt today, the few left alive. That their limbs had looked so much like his had been a thing he couldn’t bear that day in the Lubyanka. Today, though, he’d wanted to repair his relationship to his daughter, and had ended up surrendering the party; he’d finally become one of them, one of the numerous.

  Good for him. But it still left him feeling empty. Sad, too, because, like any father, he also wanted to be someone his daughter would remember proudly after he died. Or at least remembered for something in particular about his life.

  “You’re like the tattooed man,” she said, getting up from her perch.

  Meaning what? Was it a figure from some hateful story of Kafka’s he hadn’t read? “I don’t understand.”

  “Your body, I mean. It has the history of the century written on it.”

  Thus his daughter resolved the contradiction for him: he was singular because his flesh had been maimed by so many mass experiences. More than most—a certain writer, say—where blood had flowed, his had flowed, too. There were several such, of course, as there were of everything; still, he supposed, it was something.

  When they left the bathroom, they found the other guests had discreetly departed but hadn’t cleaned up. The two of them washed and rinsed cups together. Marianne, lying, mechanically talked of maybe studying nursing again, when she really wondered how she would even manage to walk to the greengrocer. “The buses …”

  “I remember. Jonah’s whale,” he said, with, he hoped, the proper touch of irony.

  “You think I sound like him, don’t you?” She was not, however, the least displeased by that. The more he saw himself in her, the more her mother might be drawn back to her.

  Lusk felt exhausted by his confession, but he still managed to see something more he might gain from it, for his daughter’s well-being. An exchange: my god for yours. “Kafka tells us to hate ourselves,” he said, “and the party orders us to brutalize others. You and I have to give up those gods, Marianne; we have to find our own way now.”

  She wanted to slap him for that, so he’d remember that first father was no god for her, and never had been. And also to show where her loyalties lay—with her mother, and the man who wasn’t a god to her, who her mother had loved. But no, her mother (at least when she’d lived with first father) hated violence. She gave Lusk a quick peck on the cheek, and a pat on the back when his cab arrived.

  V

  1

  NATALIE LOOKED DOWN at Lusk from the top of her concrete stairwell.

  “You’re laboring badly,” she said. “You need to see a doctor.” She turned, though, before he reached her, and went back into her flat.

  “The Stasi called me in while you were away. Why England? they asked. Who had you seen there beside your daughter? What bitter things had you said to them about the DDR?”

  Lusk went to the couch to rest from the climb. “My advice is sign the first confession offered, if it’s not for a capital crime. Otherwise, the ways they torture you to get your signature will kill you, as they have me.”

  That nonsense painted her thin face clown white. He told her of the mathematician from his first cell.

  “It’s good advice,” she said. “It’s what I did before.”

  He understood what she’d confessed about herself, and how little he knew of her. But then, the last week had also shown how little he knew of himself. “As I did,” he said.

  “But your legs?” she said, without consideration.

  “Perhaps not the first confession. But I sacrificed the same people in the end, a whole institute of them.”

  She embraced him, by way of comfort, he was sure, rather than congratulations. Still, she added, “We shouldn’t see each other anymore. I couldn’t—”

  He understood; the Stasi had sent her careening toward her wall. The Law, he thought, is that each one must be alone among the shards and scrape their own skin only.

  He made his way back to the stairs. Both the steps and the loss turned out to be more painful than he expected, and they both led downward to darkness.

  2

  IT MADE HIM FEEL he’d no time to waste, and when he got home, he set to work reminding Marianne of the imagined bargain, my god for yours.

  No, Franz’s hold on his Franziska was too strong for a mere exchange. The only thing that would work in his daughter’s case was to have the god himself tell her that she must stop worshipping him. Lusk’s hatred of Kafka had outlasted his love for Dora, but to save his daughter he would have to let that man’s spirit invade him, take him over.

  I remembered something you said when your grandmother lay dying, he wrote, and it reminded me of a passage in a diary of Kafka’s the Gestapo seized that has never been recovered:

  The indestructible is a fragile, and shy thing, always partly hidden. You have to devote your life to finding it. No doubt this is because if you thought you had found it, taken possession of it, you would command others in its name, and so pervert it.

  And who knows? Perhaps it’s our search that gives the indestructible life, and gives us life at the same time.

  No, that last line was sentimental; Marianne wouldn’t believe that it had come from Kafka. He crumpled the paper and took out a new sheet. He pushed on, though becoming this man, even to put an end to him, humiliated Lusk; it wasn’t Trotsky, he thought, but Kafka who ended up fucking him in the ass.

  I remember something from a diary of his that was seized by the Gestapo and never recovered:

  An author’s greatest fear should be that he might be mistaken for a wise man. And how much worse that would be if the author knows that all he has to offer is the knowledge that a man benefits most from a special sort of pilgrimage, a search that looks to the uninitiated like wandering. And to the initiated as well.

  Each person’s path is used up in the walking, if the person has the courage to take it; or its wasted, if he doesn’t—for it was a path only for that one person. So no way can be known from the first, and none can be repeated.

  Like all of Kafka’s work, the specific injunctions seemed at once vague, and from a wintry medieval world. Would she understand that when his imaginary Franz wrote of pilgrimages it meant she should take buses to work, and lovers into her bed? For of all the many good things he once wanted for his daughter, what Lusk wanted now was only that she venture out of her flat a little more, and he wanted this, oddly enough, despite all the terrible things that leaving his room had brought to Ludwig (Lusk) Lask.

  The worst disaster for s
uch a writer would be if readers asked the author in what direction they should travel; after all, if someone knew the direction, there would be no point in your making the journey—it wouldn’t be your path. And in any case, a writer would be the worst person to ask. Writing (is there such a thing?) shows nothing about an author’s wisdom or character, except that he is the sort of person who can hold on to his desk at night in a strong sea, even with his teeth if necessary—and that requires only tenacity, and probably, also, a fear of water.

  No, Marianne would suspect those lines, too. How could Lusk, she’d wonder, have memorized so much of Kafka? Or was he supposed to have copied it out and taken it with him to Kolyma, when everyone knew they hadn’t been permitted even to keep their own underwear?

  To make it believable that he could have remembered this, he had to make it shorter, reduce it to an aphorism. He methodically set to making a thick blackness over parts of each sentence. After that, he found himself filling in the curls of each e and o in the rest of it, before putting lines through all the remaining words. He blacked the spaces between the lines, obliterating everything, and made one solid rectangle that soaked through the page. At the bottom, he pointlessly wrote Marianne, you are my heart, and sentimentally didn’t bother to throw the page away before he went to bed.

  3

  WHEN HE DIDN’T come to work for several days, Natalie Kolman, who still had a key to his flat, went to look for him. She knew it most probably hadn’t been a broken heart that had kept him from the institute, but she found it easier to distract herself from her more major worry with a minor (if flattering) guilt.

  She found him in his bed. Luckily, Lusk was neither her first lover nor her first corpse, and she could calmly look about the flat for anything left that might incriminate her.

  Along the way, she found the black rectangle of ink, and the words about his daughter. A painting? Had he known to make a tombstone? Or maybe it was a way of taking the censor’s pen from the Stasi’s hand and using it on himself? There was an envelope next to it, addressed and stamped.

  No work at all for her to send the letter. But what if the Stasi thought that enigmatic quadrangle was a code? Could they trace the letter all the way back to Natalie Kolman? On the other hand, mailing the letter gave her a way to make up for her cowardice—for the cowardice toward him, anyway.

  Later, when Ludwig (Lusk) Lask was awarded the Fatherland Order of Merit for his service to the working class, and an honorary medal for forty years of membership in the party, she arranged that both those things, too, might be sent to Marianne Lask—not knowing that when Lusk’s daughter opened this letter, it might undo all the good Lusk had hoped to achieve by surrendering his god for hers.

  VI

  1

  MARIANNE NEVER OPENED ANY of the envelopes from Germany, just stuffed them far back in a drawer in her kitchen. It just wasn’t worth the trouble to walk to a bridge where it would be safe to read them, as they probably contained only more of Lusk’s pointless warnings not to make first father into a god, when he’d never been that to her, only a helpless man her mother had deeply loved. Marianne wanted to please him, yes, but only so her mother might come close to her again and protect her, as she had him, from the ghosts.

  It was Marianne’s misfortune to rummage for matches in that drawer nine years after the last letter had arrived and feel the edges of the envelopes she’d been so stupidly sentimental as to save. She slammed the drawer shut.

  Too late. We’ve always known you once turned to Lusk Lask for protection, the more brutal one wrote. He always gave an extra charge to the nerves in her leg they used to form the script a painful education had finally taught her to read, though her profit on that was to compound the physical agony with shame for the things they wrote about her.

  And to think that you would put Lask’s letters—the second one added—in the same place where you hid his picture when that pathetic slave, your real and only father, visited you.

  Was that particularly offensive to him or her mother, and actually, was that ghost a second one? She had thought so, because the pain this other one caused (if it was another one) was always so much worse. Maybe, though, it was just the same entity in different moods. She reminded herself that neither one of them (or the one of them) spoke for him or for her mother, or had ever offered her the least bit of useful advice.

  Why would we? You’re an excrescence on the earth, the first wrote. He’d become ever cruder and more insistent since she’d stopped taking the pills, berating her and poisoning her with black guilt but never saying what the guilt was for—to make sure, probably, that she couldn’t make restitution.

  You know what to do for that.

  Not a long passage but a searing pain, because it meant: You should die.

  She ran out the door without a coat, and toward the greengrocer—though she wondered why she should bother to run; after all, one couldn’t escape from what had neither form nor place.

  The people in the shop looked at her with faces as expressionless as hammers, or with contempt for a withered woman in her forties who, like an eight-year-old child, still needed her mother to smooth down her spiky hair, to remind her to wear a coat in December, and to protect her from demons. She was an object of all men’s disdain.

  Because you’ve never had a penis in your vagina, the first one explained.

  She said aloud that she could reduce them both (or the one of them, if that’s all there were) to an annoyance no worse than a rash just by taking the oblong pills the doctors had given her the last time she’d given up on her own methods. “This is all a simple mistake in biochemistry,” the doctor had said. “Ghosts are only bad chemicals in the brain.”

  But you know better, the kinder one explained, as if to a child, though a child whose legs he wanted to hurt. You know the material world always reaches to the other realm. Ghosts are chemicals in your brain, because the chemicals in your brain are ghosts.

  And the other brute wrote in letters of infinite hatred that if she took pills, she might not feel their messages in her legs anymore, but they’d cover her world in a veil again, and make her body tremble uncontrollably, just the way they had before.

  Marianne managed to give the white-haired man in the smock the last of the month’s benefit money in exchange for a week’s worth of turnips, beets, and carrots. The grocer maybe remembered her from a time when her hair was well cut, her tweed skirt and blouse cleaner. He smiled at her and said, “These are all things that keep their heads in the ground.”

  Was that a pleasantry or an accusation? She looked at the pavement all the way home, so as not to see the Christmas decorations, rejoicing at the birth of a child that had been a gift to the world.

  Her dinner was a plate of the uncooked roots, and she chewed each bite slowly, as he had, grinding each mouthful down till it lost all flavor before swallowed, a lonely, methodical, and slightly repellent enterprise even for her. How could her mother have loved that? But she had, so Marianne did it, too, praying it would bring her mother closer tonight.

  Because after dinner, she must sleep, and almost every night since she’d stopped the medication, she’d wake at three, covered in sweat, sure that the terrible thing she’d done had been revealed in a dream that she could no longer remember.

  The punishment for pretending not to know your crime will be added to that for your crime, the more brutal one wrote.

  What difference would an additional punishment make, she said to him, when they’d already decided on a capital sentence for her?

  The vicious one increased the voltage, shocking her with shit-brain, stupid cunt, bastard, and bitch, to demonstrate that the time between dying and dead could itself be made into an ever-worsening punishment.

  The next night she saw how she might please him (and so please her mother) by doing the very thing that he’d most wanted done before he died. She put his picture by the edge of the sink, fanned the pages of her mother’s copy of Der Prozess, and lit the edges
. She dropped the book in the sink.

  No luck. That charred only a few pages, but still someone banged at the door, shouting that she was trying to destroy the house. This was wrong, but the voice also accused her of not having paid her rent for two months, which was true. He sentenced her to leave this place in one week.

  In the loudest voice she could still manage she promised that she’d be gone by the end of the month.

  How could she have said that? How would she find another place without her mother’s help? In fact, without her aid, how would she even walk through the door again to get groceries?

  A few nights later, she wrote the milkman a note to stop delivery (because he hated waste) and she made out a last will, not because she would need it—she certainly didn’t mean to kill herself, and had nothing worth distributing, anyway—but she wanted her mother to see how very desperate things had become.

  That night, her tormentors woke her by making her limbs jerk up and down like a spastic puppet’s. You’ve made your will. It’s time for excrement like you to vacate this flat and this planet.

  Don’t worry, though, the less brutal one wrote. I’ve made this journey myself. It’s as easy as taking a long train trip.

  But Marianne wouldn’t be gotten rid of so easily. She’d come up with a much better plan than filling a cup with hair or charring his books. She’d become the character in his story who stopped eating and drinking altogether. She wouldn’t hold herself back from the common crucifixion. “That will make my kidneys fail,” she said aloud, so her tormentors would think she’d taken the whip from their hands and had begun to punish herself.

  It was all a ruse. She was sure she’d please him by starving herself to acknowledge she felt she couldn’t ever please him—which was just the kind of convoluted thinking he savored most. He would smile on her, and her mother would come to her; she’d surprise her tormentors by leaping up again, brandishing her fist at them, having become Marianne once more.