Forgiving the Angel (9 page)

Tonight would be their last dinner together for a long while, and they chose a restaurant with plush red carpets, white tablecloths, and meat on the menu, a place favored by party officials. Lusk took pleasure in the way the waiter refilled their crystal water glasses—efficient without being obsequious—but what one felt from the officials’ burdened
faces, and the bottles of vodka on the tables, wasn’t privilege and pleasure but a sense of foreboding and grim resolve. As the papers said, the rapid march to industrialization had been bound to intensify class divisions, and that week Zinovyev and Kamenev had confessed in open court that at Trotsky’s order, they’d arranged for Kirov’s assassination.

Dora, like a child who needed the multiplication table explained over and over, had asked, “But why did Trotsky want to have Kirov killed?”

Hermann said, “For the same reason that the KPD would burn down the Reichstag.”

“But we didn’t burn down the Reichstag.”

Hermann gave a twisted smile. Lusk did not. This wasn’t a laughing matter. The conspiracies of Trotskyites, working hand in glove with the Western powers, were much more dangerous and widespread than his brother suspected. The NKVD had even uncovered deviationists within his own Marxist-Leninist Institute, including the deputy head, Jan Sten, who’d once been one of Stalin’s tutors on Hegel.

His mother looked around the room, said, “Enough politics, let’s talk about something else.” No doubt, she didn’t want her family fighting in a way that might disturb the leadership.

Chocked by new sorrows, Lusk soon forgot about the Trotskyites. His two-year-old daughter had scarlet fever, and the cost of the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization had left the Soviet state no international credits with
which to buy penicillin. They had one hope, though: Lusk had to stay in Moscow, but Dora could take Marianne to his parents’ house in Sebastopol, where the weather itself, his father said, might work a cure.

It would be two months before Lusk could get permission to visit Sebastopol again, and when he walked across the lawn toward his daughter, she hid herself from the strange man behind her grandfather’s leg. When Lusk tried to kiss her, she turned her head downward, and his lips only touched her hair. He could feel himself disappear.

On the bureau in Dora’s room, he found the picture of Kafka, a solvent that ate away more of Lusk’s presence in the world. Next to the silver frame, his wife had left the first page of the account of her life that she had to write so she could transfer her membership to the Soviet party. It began,
I married the German-Czech writer Dr. Franz Kafka, who then died in the year 1924
.

He turned on her furiously, ordered her to finish the task the party had given her, and to make sure she gave them the information they had asked for about Ula Wimmler. He could see his anger strike her across the face like a blow, making her look like the day the sheet had dropped from her breasts. Still, to quiet him, to pretend she was a good party member and a good wife (or his wife at all), she sat down at the desk and wrote.

Later, over lunch beneath the spreading tree, Dora, looking exhausted, handed him the paragraph she’d labored over for an hour:

Lusk saw that it might be a problem even to lightly link the Beckers with Ula Wimmler, but the Beckers were obviously such harmless befuddled people, he didn’t see any great danger. The Soviet security services collected and evaluated all relevant evidence, and the higher councils within the party reviewed the findings; guiltless people like the Beckers needn’t worry.

He handed the pages to his mother, who only glanced at them and smiled distantly, but said nothing. His father waved them away with one hand, without looking at them.

The next time Lusk visited, bearing a small stuffed bear, Marianne ran out immediately from behind her grandfather’s leg. The two of them sat on the living room floor, and contentedly built workers’ housing with blocks, and he read to her from children’s books by his own mother, ones with a
very
nutritious content. It might, indeed, have been these sorts of stories that had led to his own commitments, and that might guide Marianne into a future like
his, fighting at Lenin’s direction for the equality of all the earth’s people.

But would she ever enter that future, ever take up her place in the party? His daughter had lost most of her black hair, and she had dark circles beneath her eyes. Lusk wanted to enfold her in his arms and give her all the warmth from his body.

Too late for that. The doctors had said the disease had already damaged her kidneys, and maybe her heart as well. “If my beautiful granddaughter is to survive,” his father said—as if the patient wasn’t there—“she has to be seen by specialists who are available only in Zurich or London.”

His mother pointed out the obvious, that if Lusk and Dora applied for that permission, there’d be suspicions—which, she added, “are the regrettable result of the continuing deterioration of the international situation.” And besides, permission was unlikely to be granted.

His father took a spoonful of cherry jam from a ceramic jar and offered it to Marianne. His daughter was intolerably thin for a three-year-old, and her eyes didn’t brighten, even when she smiled at the sweet.

That afternoon, Lusk wrote to the party to ask that his wife be allowed to take his daughter to Switzerland for ten days for a medical consultation.

There was no reply until January 8, 1938, when two agents of the NKVD came to Lusk’s apartment and led him to a black sedan. Lusk went along without a struggle but not without fear. To steady himself, he repeated his plan, which would be to tell his interrogators that
a mistake had been made in the case of Ludwig (Lusk) Lask
; he would insist on his innocence and not sign anything; and soon the party would rectify this error.

TEN WEEKS LATER, after he signed his confession, his interrogator allowed Lusk a glass of water. After that, the guards shuffled him to a cell meant for two prisoners that he shared with six others—men whose necks had on them the first faces he’d seen since his arrest that didn’t radiate a loathing for Ludwig Lask.

The cell had two bed boards that swung down from the wall, and, as the second-most-broken man (after a mathematician who looked like he’d be dead within the week), Lusk was granted one of them—“for the night,” someone said, in refreshingly good German, “as tomorrow new comrades will arrive, and you won’t be the baby anymore.”

The next morning, Lusk met the German speaker, a thirty-year-old Russian doctor, and the other comrades, all of whom had been similarly processed, stored in a brightly lit isolation cell, until each felt in every part of his body that he’d become an object of all men’s disdain, a piece of barely sentient meat that deserved to be starved and kept awake until “the membrane of consciousness and self turned so thin,” the white-haired doctor said, “that our interrogators become sorcerers who can walk into our head and tell us what to do, and we still think it’s our own mind that gave us the orders.”

“And how much more likely is that,” a former party official from Georgia said, “if a person had previously always been guided in actions by the wisdom of our Communist Party?”

“But it’s not the party that tormented us,” Lusk said, “not in essence,” that being the position he’d come to that allowed for remnants of sanity.

The mathematician laughed, though weakly. “So you think there are two parties, Lusk? Like real and imaginary numbers?”

Not that precisely, but Lusk had concluded that the secret police had responded to the vipers biting at Soviet power by casting the widest net possible and using torture to get confessions from those mistakenly arrested; in this way, the NKVD made itself seem indispensable to a country that though surrounded was maybe less threatened internally than Yezhov pretended. Thus more police would be hired; Yezhov would increase
his
power, and soon the NKVD head would try to topple Stalin. Lusk only wished he could warn the comrade leader.

Lusk understood immediately, though, that this cell might not be the place to speak of that.

“Of what, by the way,” the Georgian asked, “had Ludwig Lask been accused? At the start of his story, I mean.” Lusk could tell from his tone that the man had once had authority, and from the way skin hung from his neck that he’d once been fat.

“Of making a Trotskyite joke.”

“A fiver right there,” the former member of the Red Army said, sounding both implacable and indifferent. Emaciated, he still had a military bearing.

“Admit to the joke and whatever else they say, comrade,”
the mathematician said. “Sign the first confession offered, if it’s not for a capital crime. If I had,” he said, “I might not be dead now.”

Lusk wished he might have taken the advice that had at the beginning of his torment, not yet been offered, but instead he’d denied having made any joke (and not there or here using his brother’s name). His denial, though, had been easily proved to be a lie, since a waiter had heard him, and, in a way that was efficient without being obsequious, had run to retell the jape to the security service. Alerted, the Organs had followed the traces of fecal matter left by Lusk’s tarsus all the way back to his nest, the Trotskyite cell of the traitor Sten.

Lusk had said he’d never met Sten, but his interrogator had shouted that that was another lie. The late assistant director had already given the NKVD a sworn statement that Lask had conspired with him to subvert the Institute, so that it would offer the masses Trotsky’s perverted interpretations of Lenin.

Lusk’s consciousness might have become permeable, but there’d still been enough Lask left to scream, in perfect Russian, that that was a hideous lie, that there was nothing in the world that Lusk loved as much as the wise, prophetic, clear, and implacable voice of V. I. Lenin.

“Not even your own life, apparently,” the mathematician whispered.

For weeks after, different interrogators shouted the same accusation, while the only Lusk there would ever be remained obstinate in his love for Lenin, until, finally, he’d been forbidden to use the name. For wasting the State’s time, he’d been ordered to stand upright in his cell for thirty-six hours.

“Makes the legs an impacted agony,” the Georgian said.

“My feet,” the mathematician said, “were swollen to twice their size, and any touch was like a burning brand.”

After that, guards had dragged Lusk to his next interrogation room, stripped his pants off, and a guard with a face like a hammer had beat Lusk on his legs with a thick rubber strap. They’d turned him over so Trotsky could fuck him in the ass, and they’d beat him some more, while the officer sitting behind a desk had shouted over Lusk’s screams that he could stop the beating if he would lay down his arms and identify the members of the Sten cabal.

He hadn’t, but that night they’d permitted him to sleep before his next interrogation, anyway, perhaps because they knew he’d wake up after a few minutes jerking about like a puppet that was having an epileptic fit. His legs had turned very surprising shades of red, blue, and yellow.

At that, three cell mates rolled up their pants to show similar, if slightly faded, bruises that meant that the suffering that Lusk had thought so intimate to him—almost his greatest achievement—was, instead, his most shared attribute. That knowledge made Lusk feel lighter but also emptier. With all their legs the same, what life belonged to Lusk Lask in particular? He turned away.

With only the mildest imitation of interest, the former soldier said, “Things got darker after that, didn’t they?”

They had. His next interrogator, a man with a Tartar’s face and the usual infinite hatred for him, had read him statements from the fascists Anatoli and Carola Becker in which they swore that Trotsky himself had collaborated with the Gestapo to send the implacable enemy of the people, Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, to Russia
to lead
the cell Sten
had established. Lusk’s orders had been to murder the new director of the institute.

“Now you’re in for it,” the former soldier said. “No more fiver. It’s nine grams of lead to the head for that one.” He seemed to take no interest or satisfaction in that development, either.

The little left of Lusk Lask, though, had been interested, had been desperate to go on living, and had told the interrogator that the Beckers had said those things because Lusk had been enraged at his wife because of a picture of her first husband in a silver frame, and she had wanted to quiet his anger.

Naturally enough, the interrogator had ignored this. Besides, he’d another document that proved the Beckers’ honesty—namely, Lusk’s application to get his family to safety in Switzerland before the NKVD trap closed in on him. Clearly, Lusk hated the new world Lenin and Stalin had made.

At that, Lusk had lost his mind and, without waiting for permission, had stripped off his shirt. He turned so the interrogator could see the welts the fascists had made when they’d dragged some barbed wire wrapped on a stick up and down his back in order to punish him for his love for the Party of Lenin.

The interrogator assigned to Lusk’s case by that same party had laughed at the welts, which Lusk must have himself ordered the Gestapo to make, thinking they would deceive the stupid Soviets. He’d rung the brass bell on his desk to signal that the prisoner had resisted violently—he’d taken off his shirt without permission—and that guards should come to subdue him.

The former officer of the Red Army—sounding engaged with life for the first time—said, “And now comes pumping.”