Free Gratitude by Joseph Kertes Page A

job, finally: too much like you in walk and talk, we stand here caught in your midst, our wings atrophied, our grins gone. Let us say we’re your competitors—even if we’re not, but let us say we are. Don’t competitors have the same aim, to score enough goals to win, not too many, not so many as to humiliate, but enough to win? Survive. Eat. Breathe.
    May we look at your moon? May we borrow it one night to compose a ditty by its light? May we gaze at your stars? What constellation might you not be using tonight?
    Could you lend us your caves, so that we can draw images of the passing animals? And then, in the bottom corner, where the feet are, can we leave the imprint of our hand—not to say, “I was here.” Never that—that message is for you and you alone. But to say, “I was also here.” I was also here, and now I’ve moved on. I was also here, and some day it might be all right for me to return.
    For you, Emperor, our good Lord Franz-Josef, for you we’ll conceal our past—we don’t know where we came from anyway. For you, Lord, we’ll take on good German names like yours: Klein if we’re small, Gross if we’re large, Roth if our hair is red, Beck if we bake a sweet cake, Tanz if we dance, Mondtanz if we dance by the light of the moon. For you, Herr Horthy, good Lord Regent, we’ll take Hungarian names to blend with the scenery: Nagy if we’re big, Kis if we’re little, Halasi if we fish, Kertesz if we keep a garden, Ordog if we’re devilish. We’ll put on a white shirt and white apron embroidered with folkland flowers and roll the strange sounds of the Huns and Magyars and Turks off our tongues and make them all ours, eat paprika and pork and horse, dance Gypsy and waltz—if only, in return, Herr Adolf, Herr Nicholas, Herr Franz-Josef, if only you promise not to point out our snouts, our bank accounts, our diplomas, our afternoons with the violin. Promise us, and you’ll stay our lords forever—promise us, and we’ll board airless cars with a bucket for relief and travel to holiday destinations of your choosing and devising.
    When the rain fell, it fell like clocks clanging on the roof, and after the clouds chugged past, the sun beamed out its long hour. Istvan could smell the sun—could hear it—as the days grew longer. How he’d always craved the warmth, loved feeling the summer opening up its limbs to him. Istvan lived in chunks of air, cartons of his own dust and follicles, and when he stood, it was to visit a new hemisphere where exotic creatures flew and floated. He was a microscope, magnifying every jagged little black leg, extrapolating every eye and tail into a resident, granting it citizenship by its persistence in the neighbourhood, the toy world, flecks of civilization colliding like epochs. Boxes of darkness were piled in the corner, but sometimes their colours could be unpacked, and they were wild and vivid: jewel green, wet blue, fragrant red.
    And Marta was his light-bearing creature. He sucked the street out of her, the chlorophyll, the learning—let alone the love and nourishment.
    Each day, Marta told Istvan as much as he could stand about the dental office, Istvan’s own practice, now occupied by a young dentist, Dr. Janos Benes, whom the Reich had assigned to his office. Istvan had fled the country, Marta had told them. The authorities confiscated Istvan’s deeds and his belongings, emptying out the house he shared with his father, piling up their household effects, together with the effects of other evacuated Jews, in the synagogue on Jozsika Street. Dr. Beck had said he was heading east through Russia, Marta told the Germans—and she had no way of knowing—but she guessed he would not be back. He knew what was good for him. They made a mark in their black hardcover notebooks, followed by a scratched out sentence, and then snapped them shut. They looked at Marta, looked her in the eye, and, predictably, marched out. A day later a letter came to her at her little