Forgiving the Angel

by Jay Cantor

  This morning, her mother sat by her bed and told her and the other children in the ward stories from the Yiddish theater, a precious place because it had awakened first father to the bitterness of exile and the need for a homeland. Her mother had to keep Yiddish culture alive so that it would be there to work that same magic on the Jews who returned after the war.

  Marianne, age eight, didn’t understand much of this, but she loved watching her mother’s round, mobile, shining face and listening to her retell the stories of the plays she’d reviewed, tales of greedy fathers who wanted their daughters to marry rich gentiles, and had to be taught a lesson that usually involved the daughter dying.

  And hearing her mother’s anger at the utter lack of professionalism of the performances she’d seen of these stories was especially satisfying for Marianne because, unlike the other children, Marianne understood the importance—in the way that air was important to a drowning man—of truth in art. That integrity had been what first father had lived, and you could be sure that Marianne, when she became an actress, would remember his lesson.

  Her mother had stayed beside her in the ward every day, and Marianne had rested herself in the lilac smell of her powder, the salt-sweet taste of her skin, and her voice most of all, singing to her till she feel asleep. At the end of two weeks, her mother’s concern had healed her; the doctors said she could return to school, and her mother to London.

  “But you could come back to Yealand, instead,” Marianne said. “They’d let you work in the kitchens again.” She knew what was to come, but she had her own reasons for making her mother say it.

  “Yes,” Dora admitted, “I could go back to the scullery. But don’t you think it’s better for you if you have a happier mother? One who has such good work to do?”

  “Because Yiddish is an Incorruptible?”

  Her mother nodded. Marianne considered that, and had to agree, had always wanted to agree. Fairness was one of the virtues he’d most prized, and she had asked in the first place, so she might display that virtue, as that was something bound to please her mother.

  She decided she would make a study circle (which she thought meant they would sit in a circle) at Yealand, where she and her friends would work at learning Yiddish. It would be like Quaker meeting, except that they would feel that they were in exile from somewhere wonderful. For her, of course, that would mean away from her mother.

  2

  SIX YEARS LATER, Marianne left Yealand Manor for Hampstead High, where she could live at home with Dora. By then her mother was busy with petition drives and fund-raising to bring a restored Hebrew and Jewish state back to life so that the Jewish people would finally have their place of renewal and safety.

  Never had these things been more needed. Eight of Dora’s siblings—Marianne’s unknown (though permissible to speak of) aunts and uncles from her mother’s side, and all of Kafka’s sisters, had been murdered by the Nazis. Very few souls would return who could make use of the culture her mother had protected during the war, so that it might awaken in them the bitterness of exile, which the Jews of Europe had anyway otherwise learned. They needed now to learn the modern Hebrew her mother and Kafka had studied together in their room in Berlin, and make themselves ready for their Return.

  They both believed Marianne was to be an actress (for her mother said she had a wonderfully elegant look, expressive eyes, and a voice of both surpassing gentleness and great directness), and it might well be at the theater Kafka’s friend, Max Brod, managed in Tel Aviv. Toward that end, Marianne began to learn Hebrew herself. As with Yiddish (or English, or German), she turned out to be a very good student.

  Just after Israel’s rebirth, another miracle: Marianne Steiner, a niece of Franz Kafka’s, had found them, and niece and widow had wept with wonder and joy, each at the other’s survival. The younger Marianne was at first suspicious of this thin, attractive woman, with her stiff bearing, who, as a Kafka, might feel she had the right to judge Marianne. But she turned out to be more than kind, and offered Dora money from the royalties for Kafka’s books, the ones that, ineffectively destroyed by her mother, were now almost everywhere. At first, her mother refused—the books were an Indestructible, and so belonged, like Yiddish or the Jewish State, to everyone and no one, but when Marianne—her Marianne—required treatment at Pembury Hospital, Dora had no choice but to accept it.

  Besides, with these extra funds, she said, she might also manage to save enough money for a visit to Israel, and at least see the country to which she’d planned to immigrate before she had met Kafka. The two of them had also talked of going together, but they both knew, given his lungs, that was a fantasy. “We would talk about opening a restaurant together,” her mother said, “with Franz as the waiter.” That compounded fantasy by fantasy, Marianne Steiner said. Her uncle, she said, would no doubt have carried the food very carefully, yet it would always have remained only a dream for the would-be diners.

  A trip to Israel, Marianne knew, was impossible now, and her mother said it only to make her daughter feel that it would be all right to take charity for Marianne’s care by pretending in this way that it was also for her.

  But then it turned out (such were the myriad connections between events), the famous Mr. Brod had arranged for the city of Tel Aviv to sponsor a trip for her mother to give talks about Kafka (and perhaps to leave something precious in the homeland, as her mother, of course, knew that special objects could move the spiritual powers). Soon after, Marianne had another attack. Not very serious, the doctors said, she’d probably need to stay in the ward for only a month, but Marianne had become afraid of Pembury Hospital, as if it were an inbetween place whose inhabitants were neither alive or dead and might remain that way forever.

  She understood, though, why her mother needed to go to Israel to know that the Jewish people would survive—and perhaps to see the life that might have been if she hadn’t met Kafka. “If it hadn’t been for him,” she told her mother when she visited, “you’d have been spared so much.” She had her own agenda in saying that.

  “But look at all I would have lost if I hadn’t met Franz,” her mother said. “And most of all, if I’d gone to Palestine, I wouldn’t have had you.”

  Those words had been Marianne’s goal, but now that she heard them they only made the world spin around her dizzyingly. Her mother had told a Yiddish playwright with very large ears that a child of Kafka’s would have been a gift to the world. Marianne wanted to ask, Do you think I’m a gift, too?

  As if she knew the question, her mother said, “You’re my life’s greatest joy, Marianne. I’ll miss you terribly, and will write every day, so that it will be as if you were with me.”

  3

  TWO YEARS LATER, when Marianne had returned to the hospital for an operation that might both save her life and let her have a more normal one, her mother’s kidneys began to fail. Within the vast cascading and compounding terror, her mother’s arrival also felt like a reprieve. The hospital was even kind enough to let them have beds next to each other; and this stay in the inbetween became almost as good as the best time in her life, when she and her mother had been on the train that took them across Europe, and they’d been forbidden to leave the car when the train stopped along the way. Her mother, as anyone could see (and everyone did), had a special inner light (one that either had attracted or been provided by first father). She was a warm, enthusiastic, compassionate being, someone to whom people were naturally drawn, any one of whom might distract her from her daughter. On the train, those people couldn’t find her; and the ones already there might ask too many questions, and were to be avoided. In fever dreams, sometimes, if Marianne was fortunate, she even returned there.

  The hospital wasn’t as effective a barrier to others as the train. During visiting hours, her mother had the company of friends from the Yiddish theater, from the school, and from his world, too, scholars of his work, none of whom talked much to Marianne, though they often talked about her.

  Her mother
made her visitors promise to take care of her little girl, and Isaac Chazzan, the same Yiddish playwright who’d heard what a gift Kafka’s child might have been, turned to her to make the vow, though it was clear to Marianne that this man, who was only ten years older than her mother, was so frail that even if her own operation failed, she would out-live him.

  He also must have read Marianne’s mind. He said, “Don’t worry, child. I plan to be around a long time. Long past the time anyone has a use for me.” He smiled with blackened teeth, though it horrified him to think the world might be so arranged that he’d live longer than this odd, bright-eyed girl.

  Soon after that promise, Dora began to say nonsensical things about the Tel Aviv restaurant she worked in where Franz was a waiter.

  Dora’s hands began to paw the thin blanket, looking for his silver brush so she could take care of his hair.

  “It’s not here, Mama. You left it at a kibbutz in Israel.”

  “If you’re a Jewish girl,” her mother said, “you must go to Israel.”

  Marianne wept, for her mother, and because her mother no longer knew who she was.

  “Israel will heal and protect you.”

  No, Marianne thought, the only thing that could protect her would be her mother’s watching over her, in this life or from the next.

  A day later, her mother entered a more profound inbetween, one from which her words couldn’t be heard anymore, and Marianne sat by her bedside all day, confronting the emptiness now and the emptiness to come. Years ago, a nurse had told her that coma patients could hear those around them, even though they couldn’t reply. Marianne had said to the nurse, “Then God must be a coma patient.” Was that an aphorism worthy of him? No, Marianne had nothing to give her mother—no hairbrush, no aphorisms, nothing that could pull her back to life, to her.

  Powerless and bereft, terrified and angry, Marianne stroked her mother’s stiff gray hair and told her she loved her, told her that over and over, until her mother stopped breathing, and then, in case death might be like a coma, she went on telling her mother her love for her even after.

  4

  MARIANNE, AGE EIGHTEEN, had spent so much time inbetween that she’d never been to a restaurant or the post office or made love to a man. Her kidneys had improved now, and she was looking forward to all those things. The world made her anxious, of course, but it also seemed like a colorful and exciting place, filled not only with dangers but with possible pleasures.

  On the other hand, since her mother’s death, buses terrified her. Fortunately, she found a job within walking distance of her new flat, where, wonderfully enough, she’d be a secretary in an insurance company, as he’d been. She had the odd idea that as imitation was flattery, this might please him (so to speak) in that comfortable realm great spiritual beings must be given in which to live out the afterlife. If she pleased him, she would surely please her mother, and she would continue to feel her mother’s sustaining presence.

  One or two old friends from the Yealand School, the old Yiddish playwright, and Kafka’s niece also came to visit her. Marianne Steiner even helped her apply for British citizenship, which would entitle her to free health care, which she needed now not because of her kidneys but because she had sharp electrical pains in the nerves of her legs, as if malign spirits wrote on them with high-voltage prods.

  After several terrifying bus trips needed to get to the office where one filed the application for citizenship, and a long wait in a queue, they got to the necessary wicket, where the indifferent official had to watch her sign the document.

  Marianne hesitated. To get citizenship she had to declare that Ludwig (Lusk) Lask was dead, and she didn’t know if that was true. She wondered if Kafka would have lied to get health care, to get love, to get more life. Doing something of which first father might disapprove might make her mother withdraw from her.

  She stared at the pen in her hand. The noise from the people in the government office line grew louder and louder. If she signed, she felt she might (such are the hidden connections in the world) even kill Ludwig Lask, as if he, too, were maybe in between life and death, and her signature would decide things once and for all.

  “If you don’t sign, how will you pay for the hospitals if you need them?” Marianne Steiner said.

  That sounded almost like a prediction; and so Marianne Lask traded her father’s life for British citizenship.

  5

  OR SO SHE’D THOUGHT. Two years after that, a policeman came to her door at the behest of the mayor of London. He had a message from the German Democratic Republic and Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, the man she’d supposedly destroyed with her pen stroke. Marianne Lask began to shiver uncontrollably, from anxiety, but also from expectation. She would have an earthly father, and that, she felt, might be the way to the world she still found it so hard to enter.

  At that, she couldn’t talk, or stop shaking, and the policeman, thinking she’d had an epileptic fit, went to call for an ambulance. Marianna Lask didn’t need it, but if she had, she was fortunately, as a British citizen, part of the National Health Service.

  IV

  1

  AND AS A CITIZEN, she could also get the passport she needed to visit her father. A year after that policeman’s visit, Marianne and Ludwig (Lusk) Lask were on their way back from a performance by the Berliner Ensemble. They walked past mounds of uncleared rubble, craters filled with water that looked like septic lakes, façades of buildings that seemed portentous stage sets. These ruins embarrassed Lusk in front of his daughter. How could the party be so slow in having the remains of the disaster carted away, be so behindhand in rebuilding? Or did they leave the stones there intentionally, a Stalinist sort of propaganda: See what happens if you take the capitalist path—it leads to your destruction. How could he ever ask his daughter to believe in this party? But, of course, he didn’t want that; he wanted her to know what the party had been under Lenin, and what it could become again—the imperishable force of brotherhood to which he’d once devoted his life.

  They started to cross the avenue, and a Soviet lorry, knowing it could afford to be indifferent, even vicious, to everything German, nearly ran his daughter down. He dragged her back.

  “Thank you,” his daughter said, very quietly.

  Lusk thought his daughter seemed at once terrified and oddly pleased by it all, not simply at being alive, but that he had been her salvation. He smiled fondly at her, both the fondness and the smile being so unexpected that he couldn’t walk for a moment. He looked at her.

  His daughter was certainly pretty, in the way of a forest sprite; she had short brown hair, a fine thin frame (not buxom like her mother), and long legs, like his. Her bright, sharp eyes might also be like his—as they’d once been. Should he tell her how pretty she seemed—was that the sort of thing permitted to fathers who hadn’t seen their children for seventeen years and were almost strangers? Should he put his arm around her? Was that allowed to someone in his peculiar position? Instead, he said, “Is your coat warm enough?”

  She nodded yes, and they started forward again, past a group of Soviet soldiers who were smoking and laughing. The CPSU treated the German party not like a younger brother but as a vassal in need of brutal supervision day to day. Lusk tasted the salt of truth in the Soviet attitude. The troops couldn’t leave until the DDR was cleansed of Nazism and no longer threated by the West, but he believed, too, that they would never leave. He suspected that the DDR was only another labor camp constructed to benefit the socialist Motherland.

  The Soviet soldiers reminded Marianne of her father’s past, and she asked why he had been arrested. As soon as she’d said it, though, she wondered if that was a question allowed to someone in her position.

  He could reply, Ludwig Lask was an exception, arrested by mistake. Of course, that meant he’d wintered in a gulag stuffed with exceptions. And it meant the admission of something worse than the Soviet party’s brutality and incompetence; it meant that at the time of his arrest he had been inn
ocent; he truly hadn’t been part of the delegate leader’s opposition. As that recent corpse Brecht had aptly said, “The more innocent the arrested are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Lusk’s guiltlessness was his shame, even if it hardly compared with the guilt of the famous coward who, even in exile, had never said one public word against Stalin, or come to visit his old friend Bertha Lask, either. Too busy? More likely fear—the Stasi and the Soviets would be curious why he consorted with a woman whose two sons had once been declared enemies of the people.

  “I don’t know why I was arrested.” That was true, anyway. For slave labor, probably, but he wasn’t going to say that to his daughter. That name, the true one, he knew, would reveal him as utterly pathetic.

  They neared the cement housing block where Lusk and his mother lived. It, too, spoke of Stalin’s legacy, as if communal life should also always mean denial, pain, difficulty.

  Marianne remembered her grandmother saying, “I wish you could have seen our house before the war. It was a great gathering place. Even Brecht used to visit.” Marianne thought of the play they’d just seen, the woman dragging her cart from battle to battle in Europe, her children spilling from it to their deaths. “That mother in the play,” she said, “she reminded me of yours.”

  “Your grandmother?” Lusk said, meaning to assert a lineage that would include him. Besides, that title had brightened his mother’s eyes, which otherwise often looked like they, too, had been hit by a pick. “No, she didn’t think she’d profit from a war.” He began to tell her about her famous pacifist play, her coming to Communism because its struggle, however violent, would eventually end war.