Forgiving the Angel by Jay Cantor

that book altogether, since thinking about it meant he might miss a chance to steal a bit of bread, or he might forget to properly wrap his feet so he wouldn’t lose any more toes, or he might not attend to working exactly the amount needed to avoid the punishment coffin, but not so much as to die from malnutrition.
    In the six months since the Lubyanka, a third of the men who’d come with him had died. Sometimes Lusk prided himself on the job he’d done carrying his life in his hands, a job that had made him suspicious, vicious, and dishonest, but in other ways had formed him into someone like the working-class comrades he’d once taught, a person able to deal with whatever happened, except that their attitude had a tincture of confidence, while his felt fatalistic. Did he still believe as they had—as he had taught them—that Marxism would show the way forward? It was hard to think about that, or about anything today. His hands had gone numb. That meant it must be near noon, though the sky was too dark to be sure.
    With an effort that felt physical (and so, costly), Lusk forced himself to remember what he’d been considering, because it was important to him to once in a while think continuously about something, as if that separated one from the beasts.
    And from his fellow
zeks,
too?
In the absence of the party that Stalin had covered with shit (yes, he knew now that it was Stalin, not Yezhov or anyone else), Lusk was forced to try to see his own eyeball, and correct himself. Was he being petit bourgeois by trying to think, or would he die a Communist?
    Well, he sometimes said,
we
, didn’t he? After all, if his group didn’t fulfill their work quota, he’d be among those put in the coffins and left outside to die before being dumped out into the snow. Lusk would have maimed a man from his group (except for one of the criminals) who tried to take any of his soup or bread, but if Lusk had had enough (when, though, had he ever had enough?), he could make room for a little anger that some of his fellow prisonersdidn’t have that much. QED: Lusk had shown that even in Kolyma the rudiments of the Communist spirit remained, one that saw the survival of the
I
and the
we
as identical.
    Nearly. The man next to him had just fallen facedown in the freezing water. Snow had started; time for work would be short. No one had tried to raise the man back up, because if he lived he’d still lose some limbs and never be any use to the work group again.
    That night in the barracks, the
zeks
drank cups of warm snow heated on the top of the stove. Lusk told the doctor, who’d accompanied him step-by-step from the Lubyanka, of his discovery of the Communist “we” even in Kolyma. He didn’t prize the thought much anymore, but, so close to dying himself, he wanted someone to know he could still think. Though the man who knew, Lusk could see, wouldn’t live much longer than he would.
    In a barely audible voice, the doctor said Lusk’s hypothesis seemed to be that Cucaracha’s goal in the Purge had been metaphysical. He’d wanted to see if he could bring about the origin and essence of Communism again, by persecuting a group of Communists to near extinction.
    Lusk, however, was wrong. First, the Boss had done it to eliminate his many opponents—present or not yet born. After that, he wanted to see to it all men feared their own will, and obeyed his, without thought. But he’d accomplished all that, the doctor whispered, and the flow of
zeks
hadn’t stopped. QED: the Purge now had nothing to do with metaphysics or even politics; it was a way to provide slaves for the north.
    That made sense to Lusk. First of all, it was Marxist inits way: Stalin was an atavistic apparition of the Oriental despot. Besides, as someone had once said, in gross times, it’s better to consider things in a crude way. They were all slaves who would die from hunger and cold and be replaced by other slaves. After all, unless your labor costs are nil,