Read Online Gratitude by Joseph Kertes - Free Book Online

match contested by another friend, Bela Festo, on his way to the Olympics. “Don’t you wish you could do that?” she would say wistfully to Zoli. Afterward, over coffee, she’d giggle at every word Festo said, no matter how inane, and she winked at Zoli when she saw him staring. He called off the relationship, and he was surprised at how hard she took it. She cried bitterly. He wondered whether she’d be comparing her next date with him as she admired Zoli’s pieces in the paper.
    Zoli picked up his own paper sitting on the sideboard in the parlour and called in the direction of the darkroom. His father didn’t answer. “Mother,” he said, but then he became distracted by the paper and sat down. Zoli wondered why the article he and his father had produced on the ascendancy of the brutal Hungarian Arrow Cross had been moved from the front page. He flipped to the city pages but couldn’t find the story there, either. He then realized that the house buzzed with silence. “Mother,” he called out more insistently. “Father.”
    When he filed his very first story in the Csillag , he remembered he’d stayed up all night to finish it. The story was supposed to involve a shipment of beets to Austria, how Austria was taking less of Hungary’s produce that season. But Zoli had filled it with high purpose, describing the train workers, who’d been underpaid for decades, and, even worse, the farmers, who’d have starved had they not had their own produce to consume. The story ended with a dissertation on the amorality of business and the dark forces of capitalism. Zoli also filed two photographs, which he’d carefully set up and composed: one of an empty railway platform and the other of an idle ox, standing in a farmer’s field.
    When he rushed the next day to the newspaper’s offices and opened that day’s edition to the page where his story should have appeared, he found instead the photograph of a simple moth and, under his byline, his very first , a composition he’d written for school as a boy of twelve. In it, an unwitting white moth took a trip with a pair of lovers on a sailboat way out to sea, riding along on the hatch and then the boom, even as the boat began to sink and the lovers, oblivious to the danger they were in, continued to gaze into each other’s eyes. Believing the boat’s sail to be her mother, the moth clung to the mast until the tip at last sank beneath the surface, and she was left to fend for herself. She couldn’t smell the land, knew she couldn’t reach it, so she circled the spot where her mother had gone down, “ whirling and fluttering, touching down once on the salt surface, but by doing so doubling the weight of her own legs, wheeling and now gliding to conserve energy, fluttering again to gain height and drifting back down to save the last bit of nectar burning within her belly, fuelling her wings, until at last she knows, she understands, the lesson having been simpler than she at first thought and, in knowing, lets out her last breath, becomes weightless on the surface, a scrap of tissue, swallowed by a gulp of sea.”
    Zoli’s father had urged him that morning to rediscover that boyish wonder, relearn the simplicity he was now trying to bury under grand thoughts.
    Now, as Zoli searched for another story in the paper, he realized it wasn’t there, either. And yet Zoli’s family owned the Csillag . Zoli’s mother, Adel, had inherited a profitable brickyard and used some of the proceeds to run two papers, the foremost being the Csillag . It was true they had appointed an editor, Odon Mihaly, and tried to give him free rein, but it was not like Mihaly to kill a story without notice, especially one from Peter Mak, Zoli’s father. Had his father submitted the piece under his alias, Peter Vas? What difference would that have made? Where was Mihaly? Had someone spoken to him?
    Peter Mak was one of the most celebrated journalists and photographers in the city, regardless of the