Forgiving the Angel (16 page)

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.

After a few days without food and drink, the little left of Marianne felt desperate to go on living. She longed for a glass of water, but she didn’t want to betray a plan that she was sure was just on the point of success.

You’re being foolish
, the kinder one wrote.
You can’t please a man who hates himself by imitating him. He’ll never adopt you as his child—

—which you know
, the brutal one wrote,
is the one your mother truly wants
.

Had she known? Of course, she must have. And as self-deception was what
he
and her mother both hated most, she felt as though she’d covered herself in her own urine.

Exhausted, she lay down on the floor and closed her eyes. She hoped for even a stuporous sleep, but the cold coming up her dress kept her awake. On the train, that chill would mean snow on the ground outside, and if she was lucky the snow would soon be so deep that they couldn’t move forward anymore and would have to remain in their compartment.

The wind through the train windows continued to
sneak up her nightgown and made her teeth begin to chatter. Her mother tucked a shawl around her so she might sleep warmly through the night. She felt scratchy wool on her bare legs. She mouthed the word
blue
but said nothing out loud; she suspected the snow, the train, the blanket, the feeling was a fever dream and that she mustn’t speak or open her eyes, or even the last blue possibility might disappear forever.

AFTER MARIANNE’S CORPSE had been lowered into the ground next to her mother’s, the two mourners—Kafka’s niece and the old Yiddish writer, who had, just as he feared, buried almost everyone he knew—strolled for a few minutes in the nearly empty cemetery. The ground was hard underfoot, and the air cold enough to show itself before their faces.

“Poor Marianne,” Kafka’s niece said. “She was probably more representative than she knew. Trapped between the worship of a spirit who offers garbled guidance, and a materialism sure it knows the way forward.”

“And then leads one to the wall,” Isaac said. “You know, I met her father before the war. But I’m re-formed by age now, and he didn’t recognize me.” He smiled. “I’m all ears,” he said, and pushed one outward. “Her father lectured on Marxism to my agitprop group, and I had dinner once or
twice at his family’s very nice house. The girl’s father, by the way, was ferociously jealous of your uncle.”

“As was my father,” Marianne Steiner said. “He felt he couldn’t compete with his brother-in-law.”

“There’s a lesson in that. If you ever meet someone who has known an angel, you should run away from her as fast as you can.” With difficulty, he took two long, high steps, but his old legs had begun to hurt again where they’d been broken long ago, and he returned to a methodical shuffle.

“Dora did have that air to her,” Marianne Stein said. “More even than my mother. I mean, that she felt she’d encountered a supernatural being.”

“Like Mary,” Isaac said. “Except that the ghost forgot to make her pregnant.”

“It felt like Dora had decided to spend her life reflecting on what she’d received. My mother had something of that about her, too.”

Isaac stopped to peer at the inscription on a grave, whose numbers summed to a short life. “Probably Dora shouldn’t have married again.”

“Or had a child,” Marianne Steiner said, with compassion, though for herself, mostly.

“She seemed very dedicated to this girl, though.”

“Yes, but even an infant,” Marianne Steiner said, quoting her own analyst, “requires that her mother need her a little bit, too, or she’ll be crushed by her own wanting.”

“That dinner in Berlin,” Isaac said, “the one where I met Marianne’s father, Brecht was there, also. The Lasks might not have known any angels, but they were an important family.” He stopped by a stone to get his breath.

“Maybe better if Dora had married Brecht,” Marianne said. “I’m told no one ever thought he was a saint.”

“Oh, the Great Seducer would have fucked her, but he wouldn’t have married her. He liked her breasts, I remember, but he feared her acting. Too hand on heart, O Schmerz! Schmerz! Schmerz!”

“One can understand his fear.” Marianne Steiner smiled at Isaac’s warbling cry. “After all, once one starts to wail, when will it ever end?”

“Should it end?” Isaac said. “Isn’t it a fine thing for man to say just that to his dear friends.” And once or twice as they walked along in silence, the old man bowed to the occupants of the graves and fondly, if mockingly, mouthed the words again.

ON OCTOBER 19, 1941, the Senior of Reception Block 7 brought Eva Muntzberg, the Senior for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a note from a political prisoner, Inge Heschel, who that week had been transferred with a hundred others to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

Eva Muntzberg had met Inge Heschel a year before, in the holding cell in the Alexanderplatz Gestapo Prison, where they’d been held with other politicals, Jews, race defilers, lesbians, and other asocials, mostly prostitutes, all of whom babbled anxiously of their coming transfers—though it had seemed to Eva that their chief worry hadn’t been beatings, hard labor, or the likelihood of starvation but that anyone found with lice in her hair would have her head shaved down to the skin. Many of the women had shrieked at the prospect.

Eva Muntzberg had already spent three years in Stalin’s labor camp in Karaganda—including three months in solitary—and her interest had narrowed to those things
necessary to her survival. Hair had been useful once; on the steppes, a man had liked her and had shown her the proper way to weed so she wouldn’t break her back; but she didn’t believe it would help her anymore; the Gestapo would be as brutal but more rigorous than the Soviets, and all the other inmates would be women. Besides, desire was farther from her now than memories of infancy.

Still, those in the cell paired off and searched each other’s scalps for nits, and though Karaganda might have diminished Eva’s interest in her (or anyone’s) appearance, it had also taught her never to stand out. She’d partnered with Inge Heschel, whose name Eva had recognized as that of a famous political philosopher who’d studied with Husserl and Heidegger but who had become a Marxist, and even for a time a party member.

Eva had spread the strands of the professor’s graying hair, and in response to Inge’s questions, had told her about her experience in the NKVD prison in Moscow, in the labor camp, and of Stalin’s latest betrayal.

Inge’s questions made Eva think that she might be one of those who’d already had suspicions of Stalin, yet couldn’t believe they’d been lied to by the party whose structure Lenin had made flawless, and whose goal was humanity’s only chance to survive. Such people remained always unsure about the truth, like a quivering compass needle. Eva’s account today wasn’t much more than a bare recital of events, but the needle had finally pointed north, and Inge began to weep. “We’ve sacrificed ourselves,” Inge said, “and for what? What is there to live for now?”

Eva didn’t know how to respond. In 1928, in Berlin, a court had given Eva’s first husband and his family custody of her child; the court said her commitment to the party
and to her lover, the party leader Paul Muntzberg, made her a negligent mother. In 1938, Stalin’s courts had taken both Paul and the party from her, and she’d been sentenced to hard labor in Karaganda. In an isolation cell there, and without her willing it, Eva had become hardly more than a small spot of consciousness, a thing of minimal want (so as not to be fooled by hallucinated bread), and minimal caring for those outside herself—to better bear the loneliness; and so, more or less, she’d remained. “We live,” she said to Professor Heschel, “in order to go on living,” a tautology that, not surprisingly, didn’t stop Inge’s weeping.