man or his Hungarian sarcasm get the last word. I will show him that
the buoyant dancer still lives in me, no matter how short my hair is,
how thin my face, how thick the grief in my chest. I bound ahead of
him and do the splits in the middle of the road.
* * *I don’t have TB, as it turns out. ey keep me for three weeks in the
hospital all the same to treat the Ęuid building up in my lungs. I am so
afraid of contracting TB that I open doors with my feet instead of my
hands, even though I know the disease can’t be spread through touch,
germs on doorknobs. It is a good thing that I don’t have TB, but I am
still not well. I don’t have the vocabulary to explain the Ęooded feeling
in my chest, the dark throb in my forehead. It’s like grit smeared
across my vision. Later, this feeling will have a name. Later, I will
know to call it depression. Now all I know is that it takes effort to get
out of bed. ere’s the effort of breath. And, worse, the existential
effort. Why get up? What is there to get up for? I wasn’t suicidal at
Auschwitz, when things were hopeless. Every day I was surrounded by
people who said, “e only way you’ll get out of here is as a corpse.”
But the dire prophecies gave me something to ĕght against. Now that I
am recuperating, now that I am facing the irrevocable fact that my
parents are never coming back, that Eric is never coming back, the only
demons are within. I think of taking my own life. I want a way out of
pain. Why not choose not to be?
* * *Béla has been assigned the room right above mine. One day he stops
by my room to check on me. “I’ll make you laugh,” he says, “and that
will make you better. You’ll see.” He waggles his tongue, pulls on his
ears, makes animal noises, the way you might entertain a baby. It’s
absurd, maybe insulting, yet I can’t help myself. e laugh rises out of