Free Gratitude by Joseph Kertes Page B

house on Alma Street, ordering her back to work in her old office under Herr Dr. Janos Benes.
    Little had changed in the office. It was as if Dr. Benes had been away on vacation and had now returned to his gleaming dentist’s chair and instruments he’d gathered from the Ritter Company of Rochester, New York, and Beethoven on his Graetz console specially selected in Berlin.
    “Do you know about the cuckoo bird?” Istvan asked Marta one night.
    “Yes.”
    “Why don’t we call him Dr. Cuckoo?”
    She suddenly found herself feeling defensive. “Did he have any more of a choice than you did or I did? It’s the cuckoo’s nature to occupy another’s nest. It is not Dr. Benes’s nature.”
    In fact, Herr Dr. Benes, as he was called, had no ill will, certainly none that was evident. He had been summoned from a village near Debrecen and assigned to Istvan’s office just as surely as Marta had been ordered to return to it.
    Days passed in this way, and the days became weeks and then months. Was it longer than that? He could have counted every second but had lost track. He listened to the ticking of the clock’s heart and the beating of the cat’s. Could he come out now, if only for an hour, to take in the sun? They could not take the chance. What if Frau Barta saw him, or Herr Newsman Cermak? Had Istvan not gone away, as reported, with the best of them, to hide his frozen carcass in Siberia? Wasn’t that the story?
    Oh, frigid Siberia! Thank the heavens for the books. During the day, when Marta was gone, Istvan would light an oil lamp or a candle in his lair when it could not be detected through the sunlit planks above. Autumn would come. He could see it ahead. What would happen in the long darkness when he was not able to light a lamp at all?
    He had read Anna Karenina in Hungarian translation four times, though he wished he could have tried his hand at the original Russian. He had managed it once before, when his friend Miklos had lent him the book in university. But the Hungarian translation was a good one. It was done by that sad poet Attila Jozsef, the son of Szeged, who’d been expelled for disparaging his native land. He’d written bold lines, Istvan remembered.
I have no brother
I have no father
I have no god
And I have no country.
With pure heart, I’ll burn and loot,
And if I have to, even shoot.
    Attila had been branded a Marxist, an anarchist, a communist, but his translations of Tolstoy and Shakespeare could stand with the originals.
    Marta had brought Istvan a weak translation of Victor Hugo, and to her amazement he’d stopped reading it the second time through. He told her that night, “Reading a bad translation is like listening to Beethoven played by a school band.” He chuckled, but she didn’t even smile. “I don’t mean to complain,” he told her. “I did read it once. More than once. It must be me. I’m sure it’s me.”
    How could he complain to the woman who’d brought him sustenance, who’d provided the activities that would make the ceiling disappear?
    Mrs. Anna Barta, bless her heart, had brought Marta a book published in German by a Czech writer, Der Prozess , “The Trial,” released not long before and already forbidden, Mrs. Anna had said. In fact, she had transported it to Marta’s house on Alma Street hidden in her ample brassiere and handed it to her, still warm from her breast. “Hide it, read it, then destroy it,” the good woman had said. Istvan listened to her voice above his head one Sunday afternoon, happy to hear another human. She’d brought some Havarti cheese, too, good Anna, with the little Franz Kafka treasure, which had surfaced from the underground somewhere and needed to return whence it came: the trash heap, the ash heap, whatever was easiest.
    A couple of weeks passed. Istvan devoured the new book six times, seven times. He was pierced through the heart by it, ready to make it his own suicide note as he boldly marched out of his den wearing it nailed