Forgiving the Angel (8 page)

Lusk told her that as he and Dora leafleted on Unter den Linden. She said nothing, and handed a man in a cloth cap a leaflet for their last big rally before the vote, and smiled at him, but the man didn’t look at that lovely gesture in his rush to get to a warmer place. Lusk, overcome by love, decided he must get Dora a better coat.

Their post was near the university, a place busy with a mix of students, bourgeois, workers, yet as everyone rushed by, their faces set against leaflets and cold, Dora said she felt as though it wasn’t the German working class against Hitler anymore, only the two of them.

He reassured her that the party had posted many other
teams up and down the avenue, and, in any case, a Communist should always know he’s not alone; he’s part of the masses in motion.

But what if a Communist
wanted
, if only occasionally, to be alone with his wife? How could he do that as long as a ghost was always with them, too? Lusk had to reduce the writer in size so he could blow him away. He told Dora that
The Trial
was meant to convince the petite bourgeoisie that one needn’t take up the struggle for justice; a man was an isolated atom, and all struggles end in defeat.

Dora, oddly, agreed. Joseph K’s struggle was futile, but Lusk didn’t understand why. In fact, no one who hadn’t known Franz could understand him.

“That will certainly limit his readership.”

She ignored that. “Franz condemns Joseph K. because he tries to shape his life differently from the life of crucifixion, the only life there is.”

Dora, he wanted to say—to cry, perhaps, as if from the cross—if you think there’s no life but crucifixion, what do you think we’re doing here handing out leaflets? What are we struggling for?

“You can hold back from the suffering of the world,” Dora said, “but perhaps this holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”

He could tell from her tone that she was quoting
him
, and wondered why the phrases didn’t make his ears bleed. Before he could reply, one of the Nazi trucks came by, with Hitler’s voice blaring from a gramophone record. Dora watched it pass. “Sometimes,” she said, “I feel like we’re on horseback.” She meant, he knew, that Hitler had a private plane, and traveled to fifteen well-staged rallies each day.
The party had many brave horse cavalry—handing out leaflets—but they were charging the machine guns of the twentieth century.

“No,” Lusk said, against all the mechanical evidence, “the Nazis are the ones in costumes from the past. Only the proletariat can give birth to the future.”

And Hindenburg won the runoff. He banned the SA while he investigated the accusation that they’d plotted a coup. That made for a momentary lull in the street fighting, and a chance for the agitprop troop to work again. “But what does it mean about us,” his brother Hermann asked at dinner, “that the midwife of the future depends for its survival on that remnant of feudalism?”

Still, it relieved the pressure on all their chests a little, gave them a chance to work more freely. And it even let Lusk go so far as to have a drink with a comrade who had brought someone that he said Lusk had to meet—a Joseph Polack, whose former wife had had an affair with the very man Lusk himself seemed always to be talking about, the writer Franz Kafka.

This fellow, Polak, was a square-faced Jew with a monocle. It saddened Lusk that despite the silly eyepiece, Polak was handsome; if Kafka might have an affair with this man’s wife, then perhaps the picture in the silver frame didn’t do him justice.

But then, it hadn’t precisely been an affair, Polak said, only a grand epistolary romance, “a
white
passion, if you believe in such a thing.” Polak thought Kafka had gone to whores in Prague, but he believed Franz couldn’t have an erection with Milena. “Maybe it was because, as Milena
said, that he hated the flesh, maybe it was because she was a gentile, and Franz hated himself.”

People stared at them. Had they heard the fool talk about a Jew fucking a gentile?

Polak gulped his beer and gestured peremptorily for the sullen waiter—a stupid way to act in combustible Berlin—certain of the aggrieved waiter’s obedience and of Lusk’s wallet.

“Franz was maybe not much of a lover,” he said, and his voice lost a bit of his overdone bonhomie, “but he
was
a great writer, and, I’ll tell you, a very heroic person.” He let the monocle drop out of his eye and acted as if he reflected inwardly. “He truly couldn’t tell a lie, and he was, at every moment, engaged in a great trial of conscience, a truly extraordinary monologue directed toward a God Franz didn’t believe was listening.”

To Lask, that part of the report sounded like praise for the ridiculous—a mad man shouting and gesticulating at an emptiness—but the rest might contain a kernel of comfort for him, and the next night, when he and Dora were in bed, Lusk told her about the meeting with the monocle-wearing Jew.

“I know all about Milena,” Dora said flatly.

“He said Milena told him Kafka feared the flesh.” Foolish thing to say; what if she replied,
But not my flesh
?

Dora sat up. The sheet dropped from her breasts. “I think, Lusk, what you really want to ask is, did Franz put his penis in my vagina?” She stared at him in a way both furious and vulnerable, and Lusk felt mortified at the transformation he’d caused in this unfailingly gentle woman.

Dora, in turn, must have seen his stricken look. She touched his hair, told him that she loved him, and that he, Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, was her life now. She spoke for the first time of their having a child.

Lusk, pleased and terrified (a child—a Jewish child? and today, when a million German voices spoke of murdering Jews?), was still almost jealous enough to ask if Kafka would have approved. But that would have been foolish. Really, would Dora have said it if Kafka
hadn’t
approved?

Besides, what did that matter? Kafka was in the ground in Prague, Lusk was in bed with Dora in Berlin.
You will give her a child
, his mother had said,
and her Kafka will disappear
. Well, they would see now, wouldn’t they?

If they survived. By the time of the next election for deputies, the SA had been reinstated, and had soon doubled its number. The party assigned as many men as they could to protect the agitprop performances, but every show had ended in a battle, and when one of his comrades took out a Luger, Lusk confessed (or boasted) to the dinner guests that he’d felt the weight of the pistol in his own hands, and the feel of the trigger the man had pulled that had made blood bloom on a brown shirt. The Nazi’s scream made him feel there was nothing contingent in his life; all had been fated, and even as they’d run from the SS, Lusk had never more felt the master. He’d positively wanted to bellow in triumph from the exultation of it all.

To which Dora said nothing, only looked down at her plate. Lusk had wanted it all to mean
I’m not like Kafka
, but he’d probably only made himself look ridiculous.

“The problem isn’t my brother’s bloodlust,” Hermann
said. “It’s that the tally of wounded is the wrong way round. The party thinks our real enemy is the Social Democrats.”

“Hermann’s right,” the great prophet Brecht said. “The Social Democrats think Hitler’s stupid but useful. They believe he’ll destroy the Communists for them, and they’ll take over. The Comintern thinks, Let’s get rid of the Social Democrats, even if it brings Hitler to power. The vagabond will fail to save capitalism, and we’ll take over. Hitler, though, he knows that in gross times, it’s better to consider things in a cruder way. He thinks, I have three hundred thousand Storm Troopers. As soon as I take over, I’ll murder every Social Democrat and Communist left alive.”

Lusk’s mother said, “Hitler’s outvoted in the Reichstag and in the cabinet. We’ll force new elections. He won’t be chancellor anymore by June.”

“Or we’ll all be dead by then,” Brecht said.

“Don’t be foolish,” Lusk’s mother replied, and the other guests listened most attentively to her. Bertha Lask had buried two brothers in the war, and had written a great pacifist play, but that had only brought her a despair that hadn’t dissipated until she’d embraced Lenin, and the need for a violence to end violence. Her reluctant journey gave her commitments an imperative force. People made wry faces at Brecht’s aphorisms, but they rested themselves in Lusk’s mother’s reassurance and returned to their fish—except, that is, for Dora, of course, who, like her former husband, was a vegetarian.

On the thirtieth of January, when elections had achieved only stalemates, the senile Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor. On the twenty-seventh of February, the
Nazis staged their own bit of epic theater. They burnt the Reichstag and hung a Communist for starting the fire. All but the party’s own parliamentary delegates voted Hitler emergency powers. “The German people long to do away with their own will,” Dora said to him in bed that night. “They want to pledge obedience to a vengeful god.”

That evening, the great playwright Bertolt Brecht fled Germany.

Soon after, the opposition newspapers had their presses destroyed, their staff arrested. The SA shuttered all trade union offices, arrested the officers, and put them in camps. In May, they took away the prominent Communists, including Lusk’s mother.

They also seized some manuscripts, including a notebook of Kafka’s aphorisms that Dora must have hidden from the implacable invalid by some sleight of hand when he’d ordered her to burn his things. Dora was inconsolable—for the manuscripts, in Lusk’s opinion, not for Bertha, though Lusk would have said she liked his mother very much. There were many mothers, he supposed, but only one copy of Kafka’s aphorisms in the world.

Without her permission, Lusk had already read them one night, months before, the manuscript no more than eighty pages, with only one or two sentences to a page, as if Kafka thought his words were holy writ. Much speculation about God—always present, but dangerous if ever named—many warnings against collaboration with the demons.
The reservations with which you take Evil into yourself are not yours, but those of Evil
. Et cetera.

He couldn’t see the use, but to comfort Dora, he said,
“They were good. Piercing, even.” Of course that might make the loss worse. Or she might say,
How dare you have touched Franz’s things
.

But she seemed pleased. They were united for a moment, so he didn’t add,
A lot of them I couldn’t understand
. After all, no one could who hadn’t known Franz. On the other hand, he was beginning to feel that he had known him, and all too well.

After three weeks, his mother had been released from a basement near the university with much of her beautiful black hair gone, and some of it turned white. “The Jews,” Bertha said, “don’t believe in hell. But we’re wrong. It’s right below the houses of Berlin.” Beyond that, she wouldn’t say what had happened to her.

Within the month Lusk’s sister, her husband, and her child had left for Holland, and his parents and his brothers had fled Prague to wait for permission—granted only to the most loyal party members—to enter the Soviet Union. The party, though, had tasked Ludwig Lask with the production and distribution of the now-illegal newspaper in the Steglitz area. Dora was a few weeks pregnant but decided to stay and work with him, moving from apartment to apartment every few weeks as a safety measure.

An ineffective one. At the beginning of August, the Gestapo came for Ludwig (Lusk) Lask.

Lusk had been taken to a wooden barracks and tortured for weeks with barbed wire wrapped on a stick. He screamed from the pain, but, as the party had instructed,
he denied any involvement in Communism. He listened to the sounds of executions and was told he’d be next if he didn’t provide information on his comrades. Lusk pissed himself but remained faithful to the leadership’s directive and denied he had any comrades.

And the party’s wisdom had once again been his salvation. The Gestapo decided that “Ludwig Lask had no information about plans hostile to the state” and, though a Jew, was not a Communist. They released him.

Lusk had done the hardest thing in his life; he’d kept his integrity, had betrayed no one. His spouse, however, had been disloyal to him, and had named their two-week-old child Franziska Marianne, in honor of the one forever Incorruptible thing in her life. His usually discerning mother, Lusk thought, had been wrong: Dora Diamant Kafka would never truly become Ludwig Lask’s wife.

But when he held his daughter, his Marianne, his anger was replaced by a compound of love and terror for his infant much stronger than he’d expected, much stronger than anything he’d thought himself capable of feeling. The touch of her skin overcame his isolation, gave him a connection to a wider view, in which he felt himself not reduced but almost infinitely extended. He put his thumb in her small, soft palm and wished only that her fingers might one day curl around his.

He believed Dora loved him, at least a little, but she would never need him. His fragile infant daughter, by contrast, required his protection at every moment, and his help in learning about the world. He could teach her scientific Marxism-Leninism instead of self-defeating aphorisms.
If Lusk’s mother could play on her ties with the German party leadership in exile and get permission for the new family to join her, Marianne would even have the great privilege of growing up in the first Workers’ State, where his daughter could solve the difficult technical problems of building industry that served humanity, rather than endlessly stumbling over the pointless, insoluble contradictions of an absent God.

And if his mother couldn’t get them visas, she and her parents would almost certainly be hunted down by the Nazis and murdered.

ALMOST AS SOON as the Lasks came together in Moscow, they would have to part again, Hermann for a construction project at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and his parents for Sebastopol, where his father would take up his research again, but now in service to all humanity. He, Dora, and Marianne had to remain in the city, where Lusk had been given a job as a researcher at the Marxist-Leninist Institute (and membership in the Soviet Communist Party) and where Dora, if the Soviet party agreed to transfer her membership from the KPD, might find work in the Yiddish theater.