Read Online Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor - Free Book Online

respectful, sympathetic attitude toward all of them that she had for Lusk. Strangely, though that made him jealous, it didn’t diminish his sense of its value when her kindness was directed toward him.
    After each class, he pushed forward through the men and women around Dora and made sure they got to talk together. She told him that she was the widow of Franz Kafka, but that name didn’t mean anything to Lusk. A writer, she added reverently. Lusk imagined that like Dora, Kafka’s work would be socially and politically aware, though Dora spoke less about the politics of her own work as an actress, and more about “a gesture’s emotional truth,” which meant something different from realism, something about the expressive hand being moved by some unseen power (and not, from the sound of it, either the proletariat or the capitalist market). Lusk didn’t see whatshe meant, and suspected it was foolishness, but he could see that she had an inner radiance, and a generosity that attracted others—making her like his own mother in that way. There was, also like his mother, an air of inaccessibility to Dora. She liked Lusk, or so he thought, but he didn’t feel she in any way required him. She had a sense of completeness about her.
    He told her that last part, and, sadly for Lusk, she credited her husband for it. He’d died seven years before, after such a small time together, but he’d given her so many things, she said, a lifetime of riches (was she boasting, or giving him a warning?), including the inspiration for her career. She and this tubercular man had read to each other in their little apartment—a place not far from here—and that had been her first encounter with Kleist, Heine, Ibsen, even Goethe. Her lover had said her recitations had great purity, and had encouraged her to become an actress, and his words, or so Lusk felt, had had for Dora the force of a dying man’s wishes.
    And she’d become a powerful actress, Brecht said at dinner that week. “Which is all the worse for anything she’s in, as she is effective in a dreadful style, all hand on heart,
Oh, Schmerz! Schmerz!
”
    Lusk remembered his first talk to the agitprop group, his sense that she felt too worried for him. Had she been acting? But why? If it was because she had found him attractive, that might be even better than if she’d felt concerned for him.
    “It’s a dangerous style for Agitprop,” Brecht said. “The time I saw her, everyone wept for and with this woman,”Brecht said, “and while they did, the Brownshirts arrived, and they all finished by weeping for themselves.”
    “And you?” Isaac Chazzan asked. He was the Yiddish playwright whose cast Lusk had tripped over. He had a smile that was ironic but also accepting, almost fond. “I know you must have fought back against the SA manfully, with fists and sticks.”
    Brecht, who was famously the great coward, smiled back—equally accepting, but of himself. “Still, one has to make do,” he said, referring not to the physically craven Brecht—the only Brecht we have, after all—but to his own struggles with actors. “The Dora I remember is certainly pretty, Lusk. Slight and short, no? Yet with such large breasts. Seemingly gentle, too, but who knows what’s behind all that
Schmerz
. Something very steely and self-possessed, I’ll bet.” Brecht, who made such a point of displaying his appetites that one doubted how much pleasure they truly gave him, made it clear that he wouldn’t mind fucking her. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have minded fucking Lusk, too, or Lusk’s mother. It wasn’t much of an honor to be desired by the bullet-faced great seducer.
    Lusk felt how much he wanted to protect Dora from Brecht’s gross appetites, or from the SA, or from whatever dangers history might threaten her with. This adolescent attitude was, he knew, both condescending and petty bourgeois of him, and called for rigorous self-examination. After all, without it, cadre that