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formed into couples might try to protect each other at a demonstration, at a time when there should be no room for personal concerns as to who took a beating or who had the chance to hand one out. Party cadre had to place themselves beyond affections,beyond good and evil even, and fight with whatever sacrifice and brutality the Party deemed necessary, so they might make a world where brutality and sacrifice would no longer be necessary.
    Lusk reassured himself that he would always put the necessary discipline first, and after the next class he waited till most of the others had left, then made his way to Dora. She thanked him for the evening’s lecture and called him “a servant of the Incorruptible.”
    He felt flattered but a little confused. It turned out that the Incorruptible (he had the feeling from her tone that the word should be capitalized) was something that people often knew in love, or sometimes through a belief in God. Her late husband, though, had given her an idea that it might be in other things, as well. Lusk came from the party of the working class, and he expounded the truth of History, so that made him an agent of the Incorruptible.
    Not long ago, this very transcendence of self into
agent
had been all Lusk wanted. Now he resented that he didn’t have something more intimate and personal to offer her, something
in particular
. Which once again showed that the party had been right. Cadre shouldn’t form couples. It kept one from having a Communist attitude.
    Her dead husband stared down at them from a silver-framed picture on the mantelpiece. He looked terrified.
    “What large eyes, he has,” Lusk said, in what he hoped was a neutral tone.
And what
huge
ears
, he might have added.
    Perhaps she thought he’d meant how piercing the Kafka gaze, how far-seeing. Perhaps his praising him pleased her. In any case, Lusk and Dora made love for the first time that night, and Lusk’s own sharp eyes went happily blind.
    Usually, the sensual world evaded or bored Lusk unless he could give it some world-historical significance, but in the days that followed he loved simply, and without thinking, to kiss the nape of Dora’s neck, to watch the way she gestured with her small hands, and, most of all, to feel those hands touching him
in particular
. He decided sex with Dora meant transcending himself and most being himself at once; and then he stopped thinking about that, too, and felt her lips on his, the press of her breasts against his chest, her hands touching his legs. Ludwig (Lusk) Lask, he narrated to himself, was in love.
    Which made him all the more vulnerable to the pain Herr Ears could cause him. Every word about Kafka (and it seemed as though Dora’s mouth released flocks of them every day) hurt like a sharp peck to his body. And it wasn’t just words; Dora’s Kafka Museum had objects in it, too, such as the picture, or a fountain pen or even a hairbrush of his. He loathed those things, and even more that she sometimes got small royalty payments from his estate.
    “Don’t be foolish,” his mother said. “She needs the money to live on, so she can struggle for the rights of the proletariat.” Bertha thought her son too much troubled by a ghost.
    This ghost, however, was very real to Dora, perhaps because when alive, the writer had himself foolishly believed in ghosts. He’d made her burn his manuscripts, for example, to ward off the unseen presences.
    “Her feelings about this man will change,” his mother said. “That is, if you want her enough to give her a child. When you do that, the phantom will disappear like so much mist.”
    Soon Dora petitioned the party to change her membership to his cell, and she moved in with him at his parents’ house. She still performed with her agitprop troop, but on her free days she worked with Lusk to produce the party newspaper (his newly assigned task) and sell it at meetings. Dora might not yet belong altogether to Lusk, but she’d given herself wholly