Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor

would almost certainly be hunted down by the Nazis and murdered.

II

1
    ALMOST AS SOON as the Lasks came together in Moscow, they would have to part again, Hermann for a construction project at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, and his parents for Sebastopol, where his father would take up his research again, but now in service to all humanity. He, Dora, and Marianne had to remain in the city, where Lusk had been given a job as a researcher at the Marxist-Leninist Institute (and membership in the Soviet Communist Party) and where Dora, if the Soviet party agreed to transfer her membership from the KPD, might find work in the Yiddish theater.
    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’ burdenedfaces, 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 withwhich 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:
    I knew Ula Wimmler from drama