Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor Page A

tenure. And marry. But a man who’d found a new parable by Kafka would also discover that all the questions posed in it—which are really one question: What does God really want from us?—had taken up residence in his body. But, far worse, he would see from the way his own children walked, always as if a wind buffeted them from side to side, that he’d burdened them with the same worries, the same ambivalence, whose result would be that one felt that a world so insecurely both held and pushed away might be snatched from you at any moment. Or perhapshe gave them that fatal gift not because of a story but because that would have been the kind of person he always would have been, whether he had found a lost story or not, and maybe that “gift”—which is to say, his personality—would have been what had first attracted him to the study of Kafka, in whose work he might see his flaws made even worse, and yet at the same time transformed into art.
    Whatever the reason was for what had happened to his children, burdening one’s progeny does not answer a question of whether (for example) God wanted the goat to die. To know the answer to that is perhaps the way to the true promised land. But like Moses, he and his children were barred from that.
    Fortunately, and though a scholar’s once healthy wife surely would lose her own appetite from the contagion of eating and sleeping alongside him, and though the children have found themselves so divided in heart, not everyone feels crushed by questions. In Kafka’s other stories, the burdened and so burdensome characters will most likely die, and perhaps this scholar will choke to death at his dinner this very evening. (Dear God, Max, even I was surprised when I wrote that, shocked at how easily an author stops his character’s throat when he can barely get any water down his own anymore. It seems one is both executioner and goat—a worn insight, and one which I can assure you does not lead to the promised land.) But after a disaster, to mock the melancholy character, or to give the reader hope, Kafka often also ends his stories with a vision of health. After Gregor Samsa’s corpse is swept into the trash, his sister, freed finally from feeding and caring for him (however halfheartedly and disgustedly), extends her body in a gesture of youth and joy; and next to the cage where theemaciated corpse of the Hunger Artist lies forgotten in the hay, the sideshow customers stare avidly through the bars of the prison next door at a beautiful pacing leopard. So at the end of this story, please remember that many will sit down happily tonight to a well-cooked meal, will eat their meat with good appetite, and—mercifully for their families—quickly, too. And they’ll drink, too, without giving it a thought. After all, Max, as I once told you, when we sat together on that bench one gray Prague day, “There’s plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope,” and plenty of meat and air, too, I might have added. Though I admit, I also said, “but not for
    and here the manuscript breaks off.

LUSK AND MARIANNE

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    AT THE BEGINNING OF 1931, the Communist Party of Germany tasked Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, a twenty-five-year-old course trainer for the Marxist Workers Evening School, with teaching the rudiments of economics to the members of the Brandenburg-Berlin Agitprop Department. Unfortunately, the party office had given Lusk the address for the apartment building where he was to hold the class, and the party name of the cadre, but not the flat number or the member’s real name, which would, of course, be the one on the door.
    This made Lusk smile wryly, but in no way diminished his faith in the Communist Party of Germany. Not that he was a naïf. Far from it. His mother, the famous playwright Bertha Lask, was a party member, as was his brother, Hermann. His mother knew the leadership, and they often came to dinner at his family’s house, along with fellow travelers such as the great cynic