Free Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor

“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 Milenasaid, 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