Free Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor Page A

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,” Hermannsaid. “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, theNazis 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