Free Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor Page B

pages, with only one or two sentences to a page, as if Kafka thought his words were holy writ. Much speculation about God—always present, but dangerous if ever named—many warnings against collaboration with the demons.
The reservations with which you take Evil into yourself are not yours, but those of Evil
. Et cetera.
    He couldn’t see the use, but to comfort Dora, he said,“They were good. Piercing, even.” Of course that might make the loss worse. Or she might say,
How dare you have touched Franz’s things
.
    But she seemed pleased. They were united for a moment, so he didn’t add,
A lot of them I couldn’t understand
. After all, no one could who hadn’t known Franz. On the other hand, he was beginning to feel that he had known him, and all too well.
    After three weeks, his mother had been released from a basement near the university with much of her beautiful black hair gone, and some of it turned white. “The Jews,” Bertha said, “don’t believe in hell. But we’re wrong. It’s right below the houses of Berlin.” Beyond that, she wouldn’t say what had happened to her.
    Within the month Lusk’s sister, her husband, and her child had left for Holland, and his parents and his brothers had fled Prague to wait for permission—granted only to the most loyal party members—to enter the Soviet Union. The party, though, had tasked Ludwig Lask with the production and distribution of the now-illegal newspaper in the Steglitz area. Dora was a few weeks pregnant but decided to stay and work with him, moving from apartment to apartment every few weeks as a safety measure.
    An ineffective one. At the beginning of August, the Gestapo came for Ludwig (Lusk) Lask.
    Lusk had been taken to a wooden barracks and tortured for weeks with barbed wire wrapped on a stick. He screamed from the pain, but, as the party had instructed,he denied any involvement in Communism. He listened to the sounds of executions and was told he’d be next if he didn’t provide information on his comrades. Lusk pissed himself but remained faithful to the leadership’s directive and denied he had any comrades.
    And the party’s wisdom had once again been his salvation. The Gestapo decided that “Ludwig Lask had no information about plans hostile to the state” and, though a Jew, was not a Communist. They released him.
    Lusk had done the hardest thing in his life; he’d kept his integrity, had betrayed no one. His spouse, however, had been disloyal to him, and had named their two-week-old child Franziska Marianne, in honor of the one forever Incorruptible thing in her life. His usually discerning mother, Lusk thought, had been wrong: Dora Diamant Kafka would never truly become Ludwig Lask’s wife.
    But when he held his daughter, his Marianne, his anger was replaced by a compound of love and terror for his infant much stronger than he’d expected, much stronger than anything he’d thought himself capable of feeling. The touch of her skin overcame his isolation, gave him a connection to a wider view, in which he felt himself not reduced but almost infinitely extended. He put his thumb in her small, soft palm and wished only that her fingers might one day curl around his.
    He believed Dora loved him, at least a little, but she would never need him. His fragile infant daughter, by contrast, required his protection at every moment, and his help in learning about the world. He could teach her scientific Marxism-Leninism instead of self-defeating aphorisms.If Lusk’s mother could play on her ties with the German party leadership in exile and get permission for the new family to join her, Marianne would even have the great privilege of growing up in the first Workers’ State, where his daughter could solve the difficult technical problems of building industry that served humanity, rather than endlessly stumbling over the pointless, insoluble contradictions of an absent God.
    And if his mother couldn’t get them visas, she and her parents