Forgiving the Angel (11 page)

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.

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.

This morning, her mother sat by her bed and told her and the other children in the ward stories from the Yiddish
theater, a precious place because it had awakened first father to the bitterness of exile and the need for a homeland. Her mother had to keep Yiddish culture alive so that it would be there to work that same magic on the Jews who returned after the war.

Marianne, age eight, didn’t understand much of this, but she loved watching her mother’s round, mobile, shining face and listening to her retell the stories of the plays she’d reviewed, tales of greedy fathers who wanted their daughters to marry rich gentiles, and had to be taught a lesson that usually involved the daughter dying.

And hearing her mother’s anger at the utter lack of professionalism of the performances she’d seen of these stories was especially satisfying for Marianne because, unlike the other children, Marianne understood the importance—in the way that air was important to a drowning man—of truth in art. That integrity had been what first father had lived, and you could be sure that Marianne, when she became an actress, would remember his lesson.

Her mother had stayed beside her in the ward every day, and Marianne had rested herself in the lilac smell of her powder, the salt-sweet taste of her skin, and her voice most of all, singing to her till she feel asleep. At the end of two weeks, her mother’s concern had healed her; the doctors said she could return to school, and her mother to London.

“But you
could
come back to Yealand, instead,” Marianne said. “They’d let you work in the kitchens again.” She knew what was to come, but she had her own reasons for making her mother say it.

“Yes,” Dora admitted, “I could go back to the scullery. But don’t you think it’s better for you if you have a happier mother? One who has such good work to do?”

“Because Yiddish is an Incorruptible?”

Her mother nodded. Marianne considered that, and had to agree, had always wanted to agree. Fairness was one of the virtues
he’d
most prized, and she had asked in the first place, so she might display that virtue, as that was something bound to please her mother.

She decided she would make a study circle (which she thought meant they would sit in a circle) at Yealand, where she and her friends would work at learning Yiddish. It would be like Quaker meeting, except that they would feel that they were in exile from somewhere wonderful. For her, of course, that would mean away from her mother.

SIX YEARS LATER, Marianne left Yealand Manor for Hampstead High, where she could live at home with Dora. By then her mother was busy with petition drives and fund-raising to bring a restored Hebrew and Jewish state back to life so that the Jewish people would finally have their place of renewal and safety.

Never had these things been more needed. Eight of Dora’s siblings—Marianne’s unknown (though permissible to speak of) aunts and uncles from her mother’s side, and all of Kafka’s sisters, had been murdered by the Nazis. Very few souls would return who could make use of the culture her mother had protected during the war, so that
it might awaken in them the bitterness of exile, which the Jews of Europe had anyway otherwise learned. They needed now to learn the modern Hebrew her mother and Kafka had studied together in their room in Berlin, and make themselves ready for their Return.

They both believed Marianne was to be an actress (for her mother said she had a wonderfully elegant look, expressive eyes, and a voice of both surpassing gentleness and great directness), and it might well be at the theater Kafka’s friend, Max Brod, managed in Tel Aviv. Toward that end, Marianne began to learn Hebrew herself. As with Yiddish (or English, or German), she turned out to be a very good student.

Just after Israel’s rebirth, another miracle: Marianne Steiner, a niece of Franz Kafka’s, had found them, and niece and widow had wept with wonder and joy, each at the other’s survival. The younger Marianne was at first suspicious of this thin, attractive woman, with her stiff bearing, who, as a Kafka, might feel she had the right to judge Marianne. But she turned out to be more than kind, and offered Dora money from the royalties for Kafka’s books, the ones that, ineffectively destroyed by her mother, were now almost everywhere. At first, her mother refused—the books were an Indestructible, and so belonged, like Yiddish or the Jewish State, to everyone and no one, but when Marianne—
her
Marianne—required treatment at Pembury Hospital, Dora had no choice but to accept it.

Besides, with these extra funds, she said, she might also manage to save enough money for a visit to Israel, and at least see the country to which she’d planned to immigrate
before she had met Kafka. The two of them had also talked of going together, but they both knew, given his lungs, that was a fantasy. “We would talk about opening a restaurant together,” her mother said, “with Franz as the waiter.” That compounded fantasy by fantasy, Marianne Steiner said. Her uncle, she said, would no doubt have carried the food very carefully, yet it would always have remained only a dream for the would-be diners.

A trip to Israel, Marianne knew, was impossible now, and her mother said it only to make her daughter feel that it would be all right to take charity for Marianne’s care by pretending in this way that it was also for her.

But then it turned out (such were the myriad connections between events), the famous Mr. Brod had arranged for the city of Tel Aviv to sponsor a trip for her mother to give talks about Kafka (and perhaps to leave something precious in the homeland, as her mother, of course, knew that special objects could move the spiritual powers). Soon after, Marianne had another attack. Not very serious, the doctors said, she’d probably need to stay in the ward for only a month, but Marianne had become afraid of Pembury Hospital, as if it were an inbetween place whose inhabitants were neither alive or dead and might remain that way forever.

She understood, though, why her mother needed to go to Israel to know that the Jewish people would survive—and perhaps to see the life that might have been if she hadn’t met Kafka. “If it hadn’t been for him,” she told her mother when she visited, “you’d have been spared so much.” She had her own agenda in saying that.

“But look at all I would have lost if I hadn’t met Franz,” her mother said. “And most of all, if I’d gone to Palestine, I wouldn’t have had you.”

Those words had been Marianne’s goal, but now that she heard them they only made the world spin around her dizzyingly. Her mother had told a Yiddish playwright with very large ears that a child of Kafka’s would have been a gift to the world. Marianne wanted to ask,
Do you think I’m a gift, too?

As if she knew the question, her mother said, “You’re my life’s greatest joy, Marianne. I’ll miss you terribly, and will write every day, so that it will be as if you were with me.”

TWO YEARS LATER, when Marianne had returned to the hospital for an operation that might both save her life and let her have a more normal one, her mother’s kidneys began to fail. Within the vast cascading and compounding terror, her mother’s arrival also felt like a reprieve. The hospital was even kind enough to let them have beds next to each other; and this stay in the inbetween became almost as good as the best time in her life, when she and her mother had been on the train that took them across Europe, and they’d been forbidden to leave the car when the train stopped along the way. Her mother, as anyone could see (and everyone did), had a special inner
light (one that either had attracted or been provided by first father). She was a warm, enthusiastic, compassionate being, someone to whom people were naturally drawn, any one of whom might distract her from her daughter. On the train, those people couldn’t find her; and the ones already there might ask too many questions, and were to be avoided. In fever dreams, sometimes, if Marianne was fortunate, she even returned there.

The hospital wasn’t as effective a barrier to others as the train. During visiting hours, her mother had the company of friends from the Yiddish theater, from the school, and from
his
world, too, scholars of his work, none of whom talked much to Marianne, though they often talked about her.

Her mother made her visitors promise to take care of her little girl, and Isaac Chazzan, the same Yiddish playwright who’d heard what a gift Kafka’s child might have been, turned to her to make the vow, though it was clear to Marianne that this man, who was only ten years older than her mother, was so frail that even if her own operation failed, she would out-live him.

He also must have read Marianne’s mind. He said, “Don’t worry, child. I plan to be around a long time. Long past the time anyone has a use for me.” He smiled with blackened teeth, though it horrified him to think the world might be so arranged that he’d live longer than this odd, bright-eyed girl.

Soon after that promise, Dora began to say nonsensical things about the Tel Aviv restaurant she worked in where Franz was a waiter.

Dora’s hands began to paw the thin blanket, looking for his silver brush so she could take care of his hair.

“It’s not here, Mama. You left it at a kibbutz in Israel.”

“If you’re a Jewish girl,” her mother said, “you must go to Israel.”