244
PARTISAN REVIEW
We put down roots. We move forward into the future.
Pull me into it. Pull me back.
My beast is dying. I see his shape in the mirror. I bare my breasts. I
come back.
No priests, no rabbis. He carves his totem - bird and leaning man. I am
your soldier, your comrade-at-arms. We fight the enemy together. We win.
When I was small, he wrote my name in his
szep iras,
his beautiful
writing, and that was my name.
I am his mother and his sisters. I am all the women in the garden.
A dream - I am standing in the garden feeding the birds.
I am your bird. I come back to your dovecote, to your cupped hand.
He looks at me. My face is wrong, my name is not my name.
"My sister Katitza was squell." Swell, Daddy, swell.
I am a bird swaying on my soft belly.
My survivor is dying. Attention must be paid.
My mother left home and she couldn't go back.
Sometimes you lose yourself. Sometimes you stay between two
worlds.
The lights go on and off and the thieves come and take what you have.
We never found our house again, only rooms.
Listen
to
my mother's story. A boy falls in love with a girl and the girl
tells him that as proof of his love he must kill his mother and cut out her
heart. He does as she asks, but as he is carrying the heart back to the
girl,
he
trips and fulls and the heart cries out to him, "Son, are you hurt?"
Szivem.
Listen. A Hungarian freedom fighter returning from America after
thirty years remembers the fighting - "There was much confusion but it was
a sweet confusion."
I am Pal, your pal, your boy apprentice. I keep your secrets, I follow
your rules.
I see that you are on a silver plane. I see that I have to get off.
Other people suffer.
I talk too much. He puts up his hands. My talk kills. When I was small,
he cut out my tongue but it grew back.
"You should have this Parkinson's, this shaking."
I have it. I caught it from you.
He tells the doctor he can control the shaking. He says his leg was al–
ready shaking by the time he was fifteen. The doctor asks me if my father
ate chick peas in concentration camp because chick peas can produce Parkin–
son's symptoms. But my father was in labor camp before they went into
hiding.
"Jews were in charge. They had good Jewish food."
My father tells me I should drink a glass of water halffull and I do it
