Forgiving the Angel (7 page)

and here the manuscript breaks off.

AT THE BEGINNING OF 1931, the Communist Party of Germany tasked Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, a twenty-five-year-old course trainer for the Marxist Workers Evening School, with teaching the rudiments of economics to the members of the Brandenburg-Berlin Agitprop Department. Unfortunately, the party office had given Lusk the address for the apartment building where he was to hold the class, and the party name of the cadre, but not the flat number or the member’s real name, which would, of course, be the one on the door.

This made Lusk smile wryly, but in no way diminished his faith in the Communist Party of Germany. Not that he was a naïf. Far from it. His mother, the famous playwright Bertha Lask, was a party member, as was his brother, Hermann. His mother knew the leadership, and they often came to dinner at his family’s house, along with fellow travelers such as the great cynic Bertolt Brecht; the party’s
petty internal politics provided Lusk’s family’s table talk. But those squabbles, Lusk knew, were like a play of foam above waves; the ocean was the proletariat, and Lenin, who his mother called the party’s “animating and protecting spirit,” was, he supposed, none other than the Man in the Moon, who guided the ocean’s tides.

Lusk wholeheartedly shared his mother’s admiration for Lenin; he’d learned Russian at sixteen to read him in his original language, and to make himself someone the party might choose for membership. And in the story Lusk narrated to himself this suburban night, “Lusk Lask, a thin wiry, long-legged fellow, whose coat wasn’t warm enough for a late fall night, walked with strong, confident strides through the suburban streets of Zehlendorf because he was being used by the leadership of the Leninist Party, the only force that could defeat fascism and make a world of brotherhood.” Still, his faith in the party might have been still greater if someone in the office had given him the real name of the woman who rented the apartment where he was to teach.

Fortunately, when he got to the building, he found he could see through the street-level windows to a flat where people had spread out on couches, on folding seats, and on the floor. They spoke loudly, and made broad—yes, theatrical—gestures. Lusk compared them to the workers he usually taught, comrades who had a sincere, determined air made up of both confidence and resignation; they made clear that they might not like what was thrown at them by the bosses, but they would do whatever was necessary to
survive and move forward. After all, what choice did they have?

He stepped behind a table set up for him at the front of the room and began the course by describing the one class that, if it didn’t receive the party’s correctives, was most likely to produce work that they might think revolutionary, but that would really serve the rulers. This was, of course, the class into which he, and probably many of the people here, had been born, the petit bourgeoisie. Lenin, fortunately, had given all of them a way to guard against this self-deception; cadre must accept party discipline and let the party ruthlessly unmask and correct them when they found themselves clinging to imaginary distinctions, such as a degree in philosophy, a place in the theater, a small shop, or whatever.

The workers in his classes had been attentive, like prisoners who believed Marx knew the way out of their jail. The actors, on the other hand, looked mocking. As always when he doubted himself, Lusk began to feel hollow, like a papier-mâché figure which might tip over at any time. To steady himself, his gaze returned to a small, attractive, full-breasted woman with a light blue shawl around her shoulders. She had large, sympathetic eyes that told him she both believed he’d something valuable to say and was sorry for the difficulty her comrades had made for him in saying it. But she looked so sad to him, he found he wanted to comfort
her
, tell her things weren’t really that bad.

As soon as he finished, he moved toward her and stumbled over a thick white cast on a man’s leg, making himself look
both foolish and inconsiderate. The woman, it turned out, was the Dora Diamant whose name had been on the front door, and she was also the party’s
Maira Jalens
. And the large-eared man he’d tripped over to get to her was, she said proudly, not only an actor but a brave Yiddish playwright. Three Brownshirts had followed him home after their last performance; two had held him while the third had swung a bat that broke his left leg, below the knee.

Lusk winced. Six feet tall, he himself had long, sinewy legs of which he was a little proud, and just before he’d stumbled, he’d been hoping that Dora would notice them when he came toward her.

Soon others came up to talk to Dora, some of them, Lusk saw now, also bruised. Dora had the same respectful, sympathetic attitude toward all of them that she had for Lusk. Strangely, though that made him jealous, it didn’t diminish his sense of its value when her kindness was directed toward him.

After each class, he pushed forward through the men and women around Dora and made sure they got to talk together. She told him that she was the widow of Franz Kafka, but that name didn’t mean anything to Lusk. A writer, she added reverently. Lusk imagined that like Dora, Kafka’s work would be socially and politically aware, though Dora spoke less about the politics of her own work as an actress, and more about “a gesture’s emotional truth,” which meant something different from realism, something about the expressive hand being moved by some unseen power (and not, from the sound of it, either the proletariat or the capitalist market). Lusk didn’t see what
she meant, and suspected it was foolishness, but he could see that she had an inner radiance, and a generosity that attracted others—making her like his own mother in that way. There was, also like his mother, an air of inaccessibility to Dora. She liked Lusk, or so he thought, but he didn’t feel she in any way required him. She had a sense of completeness about her.

He told her that last part, and, sadly for Lusk, she credited her husband for it. He’d died seven years before, after such a small time together, but he’d given her so many things, she said, a lifetime of riches (was she boasting, or giving him a warning?), including the inspiration for her career. She and this tubercular man had read to each other in their little apartment—a place not far from here—and that had been her first encounter with Kleist, Heine, Ibsen, even Goethe. Her lover had said her recitations had great purity, and had encouraged her to become an actress, and his words, or so Lusk felt, had had for Dora the force of a dying man’s wishes.

And she’d become a powerful actress, Brecht said at dinner that week. “Which is all the worse for anything she’s in, as she is effective in a dreadful style, all hand on heart,
Oh, Schmerz! Schmerz!
”

Lusk remembered his first talk to the agitprop group, his sense that she felt too worried for him. Had she been acting? But why? If it was because she had found him attractive, that might be even better than if she’d felt concerned for him.

“It’s a dangerous style for Agitprop,” Brecht said. “The time I saw her, everyone wept for and with this woman,”
Brecht said, “and while they did, the Brownshirts arrived, and they all finished by weeping for themselves.”

“And you?” Isaac Chazzan asked. He was the Yiddish playwright whose cast Lusk had tripped over. He had a smile that was ironic but also accepting, almost fond. “I know you must have fought back against the SA manfully, with fists and sticks.”

Brecht, who was famously the great coward, smiled back—equally accepting, but of himself. “Still, one has to make do,” he said, referring not to the physically craven Brecht—the only Brecht we have, after all—but to his own struggles with actors. “The Dora I remember is certainly pretty, Lusk. Slight and short, no? Yet with such large breasts. Seemingly gentle, too, but who knows what’s behind all that
Schmerz
. Something very steely and self-possessed, I’ll bet.” Brecht, who made such a point of displaying his appetites that one doubted how much pleasure they truly gave him, made it clear that he wouldn’t mind fucking her. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have minded fucking Lusk, too, or Lusk’s mother. It wasn’t much of an honor to be desired by the bullet-faced great seducer.

Lusk felt how much he wanted to protect Dora from Brecht’s gross appetites, or from the SA, or from whatever dangers history might threaten her with. This adolescent attitude was, he knew, both condescending and petty bourgeois of him, and called for rigorous self-examination. After all, without it, cadre that formed into couples might try to protect each other at a demonstration, at a time when there should be no room for personal concerns as to who took a beating or who had the chance to hand one out. Party cadre had to place themselves beyond affections,
beyond good and evil even, and fight with whatever sacrifice and brutality the Party deemed necessary, so they might make a world where brutality and sacrifice would no longer be necessary.

Lusk reassured himself that he would always put the necessary discipline first, and after the next class he waited till most of the others had left, then made his way to Dora. She thanked him for the evening’s lecture and called him “a servant of the Incorruptible.”

He felt flattered but a little confused. It turned out that the Incorruptible (he had the feeling from her tone that the word should be capitalized) was something that people often knew in love, or sometimes through a belief in God. Her late husband, though, had given her an idea that it might be in other things, as well. Lusk came from the party of the working class, and he expounded the truth of History, so that made him an agent of the Incorruptible.

Not long ago, this very transcendence of self into
agent
had been all Lusk wanted. Now he resented that he didn’t have something more intimate and personal to offer her, something
in particular
. Which once again showed that the party had been right. Cadre shouldn’t form couples. It kept one from having a Communist attitude.

Her dead husband stared down at them from a silver-framed picture on the mantelpiece. He looked terrified.

“What large eyes, he has,” Lusk said, in what he hoped was a neutral tone.
And what
huge
ears
, he might have added.

Perhaps she thought he’d meant how piercing the Kafka gaze, how far-seeing. Perhaps his praising him pleased her. In any case, Lusk and Dora made love for the first time that night, and Lusk’s own sharp eyes went happily blind.

Usually, the sensual world evaded or bored Lusk unless he could give it some world-historical significance, but in the days that followed he loved simply, and without thinking, to kiss the nape of Dora’s neck, to watch the way she gestured with her small hands, and, most of all, to feel those hands touching him
in particular
. He decided sex with Dora meant transcending himself and most being himself at once; and then he stopped thinking about that, too, and felt her lips on his, the press of her breasts against his chest, her hands touching his legs. Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, he narrated to himself, was in love.

Which made him all the more vulnerable to the pain Herr Ears could cause him. Every word about Kafka (and it seemed as though Dora’s mouth released flocks of them every day) hurt like a sharp peck to his body. And it wasn’t just words; Dora’s Kafka Museum had objects in it, too, such as the picture, or a fountain pen or even a hairbrush of his. He loathed those things, and even more that she sometimes got small royalty payments from his estate.

“Don’t be foolish,” his mother said. “She needs the money to live on, so she can struggle for the rights of the proletariat.” Bertha thought her son too much troubled by a ghost.

This ghost, however, was very real to Dora, perhaps because when alive, the writer had himself foolishly believed in ghosts. He’d made her burn his manuscripts, for example, to ward off the unseen presences.

“Her feelings about this man will change,” his mother said. “That is, if you want her enough to give her a child. When you do that, the phantom will disappear like so much mist.”

Soon Dora petitioned the party to change her membership to his cell, and she moved in with him at his parents’ house. She still performed with her agitprop troop, but on her free days she worked with Lusk to produce the party newspaper (his newly assigned task) and sell it at meetings. Dora might not yet belong altogether to Lusk, but she’d given herself wholly to the party, to the work against Hitler, and to the pleasures of the Lusks’ home, the books everywhere, the burnished wood, the warmth of Lusk’s father (a cultured and famous neurologist), the fierce debates at the dinner table.

And that life together also gave Lusk many opportunities to eavesdrop. “It was the same when he prepared tea for a visitor,” he heard Dora saying to his mother one morning, and he stopped outside the kitchen door to listen. “When Franz performed even a simple, seemingly insignificant action like that,” she said, “he made it seem as if he were doing it for someone that he revered.”

His mother, from the sound of it, must be making Dora some tea—though apparently with an inferior, only human level of concentration.

“His manner gave everything he did a religious intensity,” Dora said, and Lusk could easily imagine her infuriating
fond smile. “Of course, this thoroughness kept him so busy that he didn’t manage to put the cup of tea on the table. He used up all his strength in the preparation.”

His mother placed something that sounded solid on the round glass table in the alcove off the kitchen. “Then there was no tea, Dora?” his mother said. “Was it Kafka’s concern that friends were supposed to drink? You make me wonder if the man had ever been thirsty.”

At that, Dora had run through the swinging door and right past Lusk. She said nothing about his spying, just rushed on toward their bedroom, weeping. Apparently, no one but Kafka had ever known what thirst truly meant.

Lusk decided to learn all he could about his rival. He read
The Trial
—unfinished—and
The Castle
, also unfinished, both of them stories about and by a petit-bourgeois defeatist who couldn’t even manage to give his character a name. They showed no social and political awareness.