Free Gratitude by Joseph Kertes

liked them crossing out his feet and crossing out his neck. He liked to shift himself from latitude to longitude to watch them divide his body straight up the middle, featuring his gonads on either side, lighting a highway between the telltale nose and penis that led him to this cell.
    Who’d have thought? Must tell Marta when she gets back. Must tell Marta the line of destiny can be drawn between these two points.
    Besides the movement of the lines of light, there was one other measure and one distraction from that measure: the clock and the cat, the latter called Smetana, after Marta’s favourite composer. The clock ticked tirelessly. How ridiculous we are, Istvan thought, counting out eternity in bits of light and sound. Smetana scampered and slept, scratched and slept.
    When the sun switched off, and the lamp above followed, right at curfew, Marta could creak down at last to join Istvan in the palpable darkness, to feel one of his points of destiny gain prominence over the other.
    In this blindness, they felt safe at last, their dark union lifting them up the tunnel, out of the cottage, over the city. After, she would creak back up to get them their meal: beans, mostly, sometimes leeks, often cabbage or peppers, a treat of carrots occasionally, a potato between them, and once a week a tin of sardines. Istvan suspected Marta might have done better with her food coupons. He suspected she did do better and that Smetana got a sardine a day—the other tin to which Marta’s rations entitled her. The authorities did not know she was feeding all of them. Two tins of protein were intended for her, not for all of them, not him, her, the cat and the clock. Then they brushed their teeth with salt, using a new shoe brush she’d managed to procure.
    Oh, how sweet she was with her tins and her warmed potato and her fragrant visits. They whispered together for hours at a time, lying on his mat, holding hands beneath the prickly warm blanket. He fed off her news or at least the distorted versions of news she carried with her and what they could really make of them.
    Within two months, the Germans took authority over the city, and within three months cleansed it of most of its Jews and Gypsies. There was a blackout on news. Listening to the BBC broadcasts earned you the death penalty, often carried out on the spot. So the news they got was from Anna Barta, who used to be the local florist but now issued food coupons, and Denes Cermak, who used to sell the papers but told the news now instead, whatever he could garner from Berlin, from Warsaw, from Prague and from the riot of rumour in the streets of Szeged and Budapest. It was this news that Marta brought home to Istvan.
    It was news about the French underground and the coming fall of London. Hitler was in Africa. He would take Europe, followed by Russia. He would take on all comers, vanquish all enemies, and he would rule the planet. King Adolf of Austria! King Adolf of Arya! The Aryan Eagle spreads his fists into wings! Aquila non capit muscas! An eagle does not catch flies! Whoever of us is left—whatever vermin Jews and communists and Gypsies and homosexuals—can fly into the bush and buzz around the turds so generously dropped by the noble Aryan Eagle.
    What is the issue, after all? Istvan wondered. What is it really ? Is it that we cover our heads, warm a small patch of our offensive pates? Is it our music? Our dentistry? Our thoughts? Our mathematics? Our mimicry of you in dress and talk and appetite? Do you despise the softness of our gold, thinking it brass impregnable like good King Richard’s? What exactly pings the chip that cracks the concord of your state? Is it that we flies make like eagles, aspire to be eagles, until, with battered impish little wings, we drone off to another dung heap—just as juicy, just as inviting? Is it that we never quite get that it is you who are King Richard, and we the antic, “grinning at his pomp”? You did a good job, now, a good