Forgiving the Angel (12 page)

Marianne wept, for her mother, and because her mother no longer knew who she was.

“Israel will heal and protect you.”

No, Marianne thought, the only thing that could protect her would be her mother’s watching over her, in this life or from the next.

A day later, her mother entered a more profound
inbetween
, one from which her words couldn’t be heard anymore, and Marianne sat by her bedside all day, confronting the emptiness now and the emptiness to come. Years ago, a nurse had told her that coma patients could hear those around them, even though they couldn’t reply. Marianne had said to the nurse, “Then God must be a coma patient.” Was that an aphorism worthy of
him
? No, Marianne had nothing to give her mother—no hairbrush, no aphorisms, nothing that could pull her back to life, to her.

Powerless and bereft, terrified and angry, Marianne stroked her mother’s stiff gray hair and told her she loved her, told her that over and over, until her mother stopped breathing, and then, in case death might be like a coma, she went on telling her mother her love for her even after.

MARIANNE, AGE EIGHTEEN, had spent so much time inbetween that she’d never been to a restaurant or the post office or made love to a man. Her kidneys had improved now, and she was looking forward to all those things. The world made her anxious, of course, but it also seemed like a colorful and exciting place, filled not only with dangers but with possible pleasures.

On the other hand, since her mother’s death, buses terrified her. Fortunately, she found a job within walking distance of her new flat, where, wonderfully enough, she’d be a secretary in an insurance company, as he’d been. She had the odd idea that as imitation was flattery, this might please him (so to speak) in that comfortable realm great spiritual beings must be given in which to live out the afterlife. If she pleased him, she would surely please her mother, and she would continue to feel her mother’s sustaining presence.

One or two old friends from the Yealand School, the old Yiddish playwright, and Kafka’s niece also came to visit her. Marianne Steiner even helped her apply for British citizenship, which would entitle her to free health care, which she needed now not because of her kidneys but because she had sharp electrical pains in the nerves of her legs, as if malign spirits wrote on them with high-voltage prods.

After several terrifying bus trips needed to get to the office where one filed the application for citizenship, and a long wait in a queue, they got to the necessary wicket, where the indifferent official had to watch her sign the document.

Marianne hesitated. To get citizenship she had to declare that Ludwig (Lusk) Lask was dead, and she didn’t know if that was true. She wondered if Kafka would have lied to get health care, to get love, to get more life. Doing something of which first father might disapprove might make her mother withdraw from her.

She stared at the pen in her hand. The noise from the people in the government office line grew louder and louder. If she signed, she felt she might (such are the hidden connections in the world) even kill Ludwig Lask, as if he, too, were maybe in between life and death, and her signature would decide things once and for all.

“If you don’t sign, how will you pay for the hospitals if you need them?” Marianne Steiner said.

That sounded almost like a prediction; and so Marianne Lask traded her father’s life for British citizenship.

OR SO SHE’D THOUGHT. Two years after that, a policeman came to her door at the behest of the mayor of London. He had a message from the German Democratic
Republic and Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, the man she’d supposedly destroyed with her pen stroke. Marianne Lask began to shiver uncontrollably, from anxiety, but also from expectation. She would have an earthly father, and that, she felt, might be the way to the world she still found it so hard to enter.

At that, she couldn’t talk, or stop shaking, and the policeman, thinking she’d had an epileptic fit, went to call for an ambulance. Marianna Lask didn’t need it, but if she had, she was fortunately, as a British citizen, part of the National Health Service.

AND AS A CITIZEN, she could also get the passport she needed to visit her father. A year after that policeman’s visit, Marianne and Ludwig (Lusk) Lask were on their way back from a performance by the Berliner Ensemble. They walked past mounds of uncleared rubble, craters filled with water that looked like septic lakes, façades of buildings that seemed portentous stage sets. These ruins embarrassed Lusk in front of his daughter. How could the party be so slow in having the remains of the disaster carted away, be so behindhand in rebuilding? Or did they leave the stones there intentionally, a Stalinist sort of propaganda:
See what happens if you take the capitalist path—it leads to your destruction
. How could he ever ask his daughter to believe in
this
party? But, of course, he didn’t want that; he wanted her to know what the party had been under Lenin, and what it could become again—the imperishable force of brotherhood to which he’d once devoted his life.

They started to cross the avenue, and a Soviet lorry, knowing it could afford to be indifferent, even vicious, to everything German, nearly ran his daughter down. He dragged her back.

“Thank you,” his daughter said, very quietly.

Lusk thought his daughter seemed at once terrified and oddly pleased by it all, not simply at being alive, but that
he
had been her salvation. He smiled fondly at her, both the fondness and the smile being so unexpected that he couldn’t walk for a moment. He looked at her.

His daughter was certainly pretty, in the way of a forest sprite; she had short brown hair, a fine thin frame (not buxom like her mother), and long legs, like his. Her bright, sharp eyes might also be like his—as they’d once been. Should he tell her how pretty she seemed—was that the sort of thing permitted to fathers who hadn’t seen their children for seventeen years and were almost strangers? Should he put his arm around her? Was that allowed to someone in his peculiar position? Instead, he said, “Is your coat warm enough?”

She nodded yes, and they started forward again, past a group of Soviet soldiers who were smoking and laughing. The CPSU treated the German party not like a younger brother but as a vassal in need of brutal supervision day to day. Lusk tasted the salt of truth in the Soviet attitude. The troops couldn’t leave until the DDR was cleansed of Nazism and no longer threated by the West, but he believed, too, that they would never leave. He suspected that the DDR was only another labor camp constructed to benefit the socialist Motherland.

The Soviet soldiers reminded Marianne of her father’s past, and she asked why he had been arrested. As soon as she’d said it, though, she wondered if that was a question allowed to someone in her position.

He could reply,
Ludwig Lask was an exception, arrested by mistake
. Of course, that meant he’d wintered in a gulag stuffed with exceptions. And it meant the admission of something worse than the Soviet party’s brutality and incompetence; it meant that at the time of his arrest he had been innocent; he truly hadn’t been part of the delegate leader’s opposition. As that recent corpse Brecht had aptly said, “The more innocent the arrested are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Lusk’s guiltlessness was his shame, even if it hardly compared with the guilt of the famous coward who, even in exile, had never said one public word against Stalin, or come to visit his old friend Bertha Lask, either. Too busy? More likely fear—the Stasi and the Soviets would be curious why he consorted with a woman whose two sons had once been declared enemies of the people.

“I don’t know why I was arrested.” That was true, anyway. For slave labor, probably, but he wasn’t going to say that to his daughter. That name, the true one, he knew, would reveal him as utterly pathetic.

They neared the cement housing block where Lusk and his mother lived. It, too, spoke of Stalin’s legacy, as if communal life should also always mean denial, pain, difficulty.

Marianne remembered her grandmother saying, “I wish you could have seen our house before the war. It was a great gathering place. Even Brecht used to visit.” Marianne thought of the play they’d just seen, the woman dragging her cart from battle to battle in Europe, her children spilling
from it to their deaths. “That mother in the play,” she said, “she reminded me of yours.”

“Your grandmother?” Lusk said, meaning to assert a lineage that would include him. Besides, that title had brightened his mother’s eyes, which otherwise often looked like they, too, had been hit by a pick. “No, she didn’t think she’d profit from a war.” He began to tell her about her famous pacifist play, her coming to Communism because its struggle, however violent, would eventually end war.

“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.

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.

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.