Forgiving the Angel (15 page)

“And you have been,” Marianne said. She still had a small hope that her father might somehow move from willing slave to master again.

To Lusk, though, she sounded like she wanted to comfort him, and that sense of a kindly presence made him feel that if he could only be more honest with her—with himself—he might build something lasting between them. “But when the party admitted its errors,” he said, “it made things worse for me, made me feel hollow again.”

His daughter looked toward him with bewildered eyes, and mucus all over her face. He wiped it from her cheeks, and threw the washcloth into the sink. “Your grandmother believed Khrushchev had given the people the truth. He’d revealed Stalin the schemer, told the world of Stalin the slave master, confessed to Stalin the murderer.” Once, he’d needed to protect his mother, so she would not think she’d led her sons to slaughter; now that she was gone, he felt himself in the grip of an almost physical insistence to speak. “My mother was wrong, Marianne. Khrushchev had lied. He’d been complicit in the murders. They all had.” Lusk, sadly, could hear that he sounded like the one who’d been crying, even if he’d run out of moisture some years ago. “And it wasn’t Stalin who smashed my legs with a rubber pipe.”

“The men who beat you obeyed his orders, though,” Marianne said. She hoped her father couldn’t tell she’d only been half-listening, lost in terror now that she knew her father’s protection was worthless, that she’d soon feel the indecipherable electrical script tormenting the nerves in her legs.

“I understand fear,” Lusk said. “I expect cowardice. It was something more than that. They wanted to hurt me.” Lusk saw his torturers’ hammerlike faces, each man as they beat him enjoying the peace of the corpse while still alive. “You were right, Marianne, the Communist Party is only bewildered and terrified men. And those men wanted to surrender their conscience; they longed to serve a brutal god.”

“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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.