Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor Page A

school. She is a friend of Anatoli Becker, who I know through his wife, the actress Carola Becker. Ula Wimmler came from a Nazi family and was a member of the NSDAP, until she began to sympathize with us. When she stayed in Berlin last year, I gave her small things to take with her to my acquaintances in the Soviet Union. When she visited them here, she denied categorically having seen me in Berlin. This is strange, to say the least. If the party thinks it important, I could find out one thing or another
.
    Lusk saw that it might be a problem even to lightly link the Beckers with Ula Wimmler, but the Beckers were obviously such harmless befuddled people, he didn’t see any great danger. The Soviet security services collected and evaluated all relevant evidence, and the higher councils within the party reviewed the findings; guiltless people like the Beckers needn’t worry.
    He handed the pages to his mother, who only glanced at them and smiled distantly, but said nothing. His father waved them away with one hand, without looking at them.
    The next time Lusk visited, bearing a small stuffed bear, Marianne ran out immediately from behind her grandfather’s leg. The two of them sat on the living room floor, and contentedly built workers’ housing with blocks, and he read to her from children’s books by his own mother, ones with a
very
nutritious content. It might, indeed, have been these sorts of stories that had led to his own commitments, and that might guide Marianne into a future likehis, fighting at Lenin’s direction for the equality of all the earth’s people.
    But would she ever enter that future, ever take up her place in the party? His daughter had lost most of her black hair, and she had dark circles beneath her eyes. Lusk wanted to enfold her in his arms and give her all the warmth from his body.
    Too late for that. The doctors had said the disease had already damaged her kidneys, and maybe her heart as well. “If my beautiful granddaughter is to survive,” his father said—as if the patient wasn’t there—“she has to be seen by specialists who are available only in Zurich or London.”
    His mother pointed out the obvious, that if Lusk and Dora applied for that permission, there’d be suspicions—which, she added, “are the regrettable result of the continuing deterioration of the international situation.” And besides, permission was unlikely to be granted.
    His father took a spoonful of cherry jam from a ceramic jar and offered it to Marianne. His daughter was intolerably thin for a three-year-old, and her eyes didn’t brighten, even when she smiled at the sweet.
    That afternoon, Lusk wrote to the party to ask that his wife be allowed to take his daughter to Switzerland for ten days for a medical consultation.
    There was no reply until January 8, 1938, when two agents of the NKVD came to Lusk’s apartment and led him to a black sedan. Lusk went along without a struggle but not without fear. To steady himself, he repeated his plan, which would be to tell his interrogators that
a mistake had been made in the case of Ludwig (Lusk) Lask
; he would insist on his innocence and not sign anything; and soon the party would rectify this error.

2
    TEN WEEKS LATER, after he signed his confession, his interrogator allowed Lusk a glass of water. After that, the guards shuffled him to a cell meant for two prisoners that he shared with six others—men whose necks had on them the first faces he’d seen since his arrest that didn’t radiate a loathing for Ludwig Lask.
    The cell had two bed boards that swung down from the wall, and, as the second-most-broken man (after a mathematician who looked like he’d be dead within the week), Lusk was granted one of them—“for the night,” someone said, in refreshingly good German, “as tomorrow new comrades will arrive, and you won’t be the baby anymore.”
    The next morning, Lusk met the German speaker, a thirty-year-old Russian doctor, and the other comrades,