Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor Page B

all of whom had been similarly processed, stored in a brightly lit isolation cell, until each felt in every part of his body that he’d become an object of all men’s disdain, a piece of barely sentient meat that deserved to be starved and kept awake until “the membrane of consciousness and self turned so thin,” the white-haired doctor said, “that our interrogators become sorcerers who can walk into our head and tell us what to do, and we still think it’s our own mind that gave us the orders.”
    “And how much more likely is that,” a former party official from Georgia said, “if a person had previously always been guided in actions by the wisdom of our Communist Party?”
    “But it’s not the party that tormented us,” Lusk said, “not in essence,” that being the position he’d come to that allowed for remnants of sanity.
    The mathematician laughed, though weakly. “So you think there are two parties, Lusk? Like real and imaginary numbers?”
    Not that precisely, but Lusk had concluded that the secret police had responded to the vipers biting at Soviet power by casting the widest net possible and using torture to get confessions from those mistakenly arrested; in this way, the NKVD made itself seem indispensable to a country that though surrounded was maybe less threatened internally than Yezhov pretended. Thus more police would be hired; Yezhov would increase
his
power, and soon the NKVD head would try to topple Stalin. Lusk only wished he could warn the comrade leader.
    Lusk understood immediately, though, that this cell might not be the place to speak of that.
    “Of what, by the way,” the Georgian asked, “had Ludwig Lask been accused? At the start of his story, I mean.” Lusk could tell from his tone that the man had once had authority, and from the way skin hung from his neck that he’d once been fat.
    “Of making a Trotskyite joke.”
    “A fiver right there,” the former member of the Red Army said, sounding both implacable and indifferent. Emaciated, he still had a military bearing.
    “Admit to the joke and whatever else they say, comrade,”the mathematician said. “Sign the first confession offered, if it’s not for a capital crime. If I had,” he said, “I might not be dead now.”
    Lusk wished he might have taken the advice that had at the beginning of his torment, not yet been offered, but instead he’d denied having made any joke (and not there or here using his brother’s name). His denial, though, had been easily proved to be a lie, since a waiter had heard him, and, in a way that was efficient without being obsequious, had run to retell the jape to the security service. Alerted, the Organs had followed the traces of fecal matter left by Lusk’s tarsus all the way back to his nest, the Trotskyite cell of the traitor Sten.
    Lusk had said he’d never met Sten, but his interrogator had shouted that that was another lie. The late assistant director had already given the NKVD a sworn statement that Lask had conspired with him to subvert the Institute, so that it would offer the masses Trotsky’s perverted interpretations of Lenin.
    Lusk’s consciousness might have become permeable, but there’d still been enough Lask left to scream, in perfect Russian, that that was a hideous lie, that there was nothing in the world that Lusk loved as much as the wise, prophetic, clear, and implacable voice of V. I. Lenin.
    “Not even your own life, apparently,” the mathematician whispered.
    For weeks after, different interrogators shouted the same accusation, while the only Lusk there would ever be remained obstinate in his love for Lenin, until, finally, he’d been forbidden to use the name. For wasting the State’s time, he’d been ordered to stand upright in his cell for thirty-six hours.
    “Makes the legs an impacted agony,” the Georgian said.
    “My feet,” the mathematician said, “were swollen to twice their size, and any touch was like a burning brand.”
    After that,