The Afterlife of Stars
Page 4
We left the railroad tracks behind and walked mightily toward the border, hundreds of us, many hundreds, like thieves through the dark. Now and then a bomb fell, and each time it did, Attila and I looked up to see who was dropping them. If they were celestial creatures, they flew without lights. They flew like bats. Judit whimpered and then yelped as if she were walking barefoot. My grandmother was beside me on my right, Attila on my left, and our parents were up ahead, keeping pace with Andras and Judit, our mother supporting Judit.
The sun had deputized the moon to give us light. Still, it was very dark—the stars were not much help—until a bomb went off again, again from nowhere. Something struck my brother, and he fell against me. My grandmother and I stopped and crouched beside him on the cool ground. My grandmother fumbled through her bag until she found her lighter. Its flame was as bright as a knife blade. It shone on a man’s shoe. The top of the shoe was red and steaming. My brother had been struck by a man’s shoe with the foot still inside it. Some of the blood dripped down his neck.
He jumped to his feet. “Where are these damn bombs falling from?” he said. He was rubbing at the side of his face where the boot had struck.
“They’re not falling,” our grandmother said. “This is a minefield we’re crossing.”
“Oh,” my brother said, and then he took off like a bird.
“I should lift you up,” my grandmother said to me. “It’s not far now.”
“You can’t. I’m too big. I should be lifting you up.”
She clenched my hand, our feet alive to every step as we walked.
It struck me just then how very keen I was on lamplight, its quiet little yellow show, and how nice it would be to have some in the field.
“Oh,” I said, and I stopped.
“What’s the matter?” my grandmother asked. She began searching for her lighter again but couldn’t find it this time.
“My teacher, Mrs. Molnar, will be very upset with me,” I said. “We have to tell her when we’re going to be absent. We didn’t tell her anything.”
“Mrs. Molnar will understand this time.”
“A boy in my class named Zoli was once strapped when he didn’t say.”
“This time is an exception, Robert. Mrs. Molnar herself is probably not far behind us.” I turned to look into the darkness. My grandmother said, “We’ll be finding you a new school up ahead.”
“Up ahead?” There was darkness up there too, wide and open. “What about everyone else? Are they coming this way too? To the new school?”
“Everyone who can is coming this way. Maybe you’ll see them again.”
“What if I don’t?”
She paused, put down her things, and reached through the dark to get hold of me. I tried to catch a deeper breath, just to calm my dizzy heart. “You will make new friends,” my grandmother told me. “They’ll be lucky to be your friends. I have left behind a lifetime of friends, sad to say. There’ll be as many up ahead as there are behind us.”
I took a last look into the darkness at Hungary. I couldn’t keep myself from hoping that Zoli and Mary were coming too. My grandmother took my hand again, lifted her bag, and led on.
It was just a few minutes, no more than ten, until we saw a light up ahead, a single bulb, a solitary lamppost. We heard someone say it. My father. “Austria.”
As we drew closer to the apron of light—there were only dozens of us now; we seemed to have scattered on our march—I saw Judit lying down on their Persian rug, her knees up, her head cradled by my mother, with Andras between her legs. She was lying right on top of the bird of paradise. The rug was darkening under her.
I was relieved to see my brother there too. His back was to us, and he was peeing.
My father offered to take my grandmother’s bag. “What’s in this?” he asked. He opened the bag. “What are these?”
“Phonograph records,” she said.
“You brought records with you?” he said in disbelief, and rifled through them. They were 78s. He held one up to the light. “The Barber of Seville?” He was yelling now. Judit howled. “This is what you brought?” he said. “The Merry Widow?” Then he hurled them, smashing one after another against the lamppost and against the concrete at its base.
“Hey, lunatic man,” Andras said. “Get away from here.”
“She was taking records to Canada. She wanted music there.”
“And now she’s not,” Andras said.
My father stopped. I looked at the scattered bits of record, shiny black shards of sound glinting in the Austrian lamplight. For the first time, I wanted to scream at my father, wanted to hit back.
But then a baby cried. Judit was crying, and my grandmother was crying too on account of the baby.
“Gisela,” Andras said as he lifted the little thing waist high. She was still tethered to her mother. “She’s a girl. Austrian. Gisela.”
Judit continued her crying. She was sweating too. And her fiery red hair fanned out from her head, drawing the rest of the light to itself.
“Why Gisela?” my father asked.
But Gisela overwhelmed him with her crying. Her cry was the shrillest. A small crowd had gathered in the light, mostly Hungarians, but also a single Austrian border guard. The little soprano called out to everyone. She was so new and loud, it felt to me that she would lead us now, wherever she needed to go.
Three
My grandmother and mother cleaned up the baby with cloths and a little warm water some nuns had brought in a hurry from a nearby convent, and they swaddled Gisela in a soft blanket while Andras cleaned up Judit below. My brother and I watched in horror. I thought Attila would throw up, but then we were treated to a view of Judit’s plump breast as she tried to get her little girl to suckle on it, and we marveled at the size of the nipple, round as a sunflower and alive.
Judit needed a rest. She closed her eyes, seemed even to close her ears to the commotion around her. Her heaving chest sagged, emptying itself of living air.
Judit never got up from the foot of that lamppost in Austria. Gisela suckled now with relish from her dying mother’s breast, the rug beneath them awash with their broth. The whole world frenzied around the mother and child, who were dazzling in their stillness. Just for a moment, the pair of them made more sense than the rest of us: one of them arriving and the other leaving.
Andras let out a wail. At first I thought the sound had come from somewhere else, somewhere deep in the earth, like something molten.
A flock of nuns swooped down on us. Several of them went straight to Andras. A couple of the others, along with my mother and grandmother, attended to Gisela. And two more of the nuns, big ones, stood between Attila and me and the scene we were watching. They took us each by the upper arm and steered us toward a building around the corner. My nun had a good strong hold on me.
Attila and I turned to take a last look at the foot of the lamppost, and now a second sound rose up, this time out of Gisela, a little trumpet, but with quite a blast, like someone breaking in her instrument. Gisela’s face in the lamplight was as red as Mars.
My brother and I were led to an old gray building made of stone, flat-roofed and rectangular. It was ample, but heaving up behind it stood the tower of an even older stone church. A brass sign that said CONVENT OF SAINT ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY arced over the entrance.
“I thought this was Austria,” I said to my brother.
“It is, but it used to be Hungary. Not long ago. They speak German and Hungarian here.”
The nuns showed us to a large open room called a lager, a dormitory with hundreds of cots covered in clean white sheets and nicely pressed wool blankets. There were some people there already and more arriving. Attila grabbed two cots not far from a window and urged me over. Soon, our grandmother joined us, but I couldn’t spot our parents, or Andras or Gisela. I was especially wondering about Gisela. I scanned the room, searching for familiar faces, but saw none I knew. I took a second, extra-long look for Zoli and Mary and for my teach
er, Mrs. Molnar.
There were no tables set out, but we were handed linen napkins, packets of biscuits and cheese, and milk and wine poured into pewter goblets.
We were surrounded by Hungarians, so it felt like home, though it didn’t look like it. Some more nuns stopped by to clear away the remains of our packets and to give us each a small pouch containing chocolates, a toothbrush, a toy-size tube of toothpaste (which I wanted to keep and not open), and a bar of soap.
The chocolates were the best I’d ever eaten, sweet and dense. The wrappers had a picture of Mozart on them.
A voice rang out through the hall, deep and clangy, like a bell. It startled me. We all turned toward a lectern with a microphone that had been set up at one end of the room, and standing at the microphone was a priest wearing a black robe and a great sail of a cap pinched together at the top.
“Today, I am a man without a homeland,” he boomed in Hungarian as he raised his arms. “Yesterday, I was Father Tamas, the bishop of Szeged. Today, we Hungarians move as a herd, and our herd has succeeded in eluding the lions to settle peacefully among the lambs. Do not grieve today, my friends, my people. Whatever you have left behind, the Lord will restore to you. Whomever you have left behind, he will protect from harm—if not from earthly harm, then from everlasting harm.”
A girl my age a few beds away was staring straight at me. Her mother, beside her, looked stooped and sad and gazed out from under heavy lids pasted with dark blue makeup. Another woman, a brunette of impressive size, tall and strong, sat facing my brother and me, her nightgown hiked up and her grasshopper legs spread wide.
“Look,” Attila said to me. “That one is open for business.”
The gangling woman had small green eyes like capers. She seemed to know we were talking about her and pulled her ganglies in so she could cover them with her blanket.
The bishop of Szeged clasped his hands in front of him and gazed up to the light, searching for the rest of his speech, it looked like. “The time has come to put sin behind us,” he said. “We enter a time of consolation, not vengeance. The Lord of the prophets once said, ‘The land is mine.’ No one can take away from us that which was not ours to begin with and will one day no longer be theirs. It is our defect, not the Lord’s, that we draw lines around things. If the air stood still, we would draw lines around it too. Our lands are those we carry here.” The bishop placed a hand flat on his heart. “Those among us here tonight more experienced in the ways of wandering must teach us to carry Mother Hungary in our hearts the way you have carried the Promised Land in yours.” Father Tamas crossed his hands over his chest and curled them into fists. He had a way of speaking that made it seem as if the words were written on the sky and he was just reading them, reciting them. “I have left behind me a great church built on a rock in the once picturesque city of Szeged on the shores of the river Tisza, bluer than the Danube. I have left behind me a loyal and true flock, some of whom have scattered today and will not return to the shores of the Tisza. But they walk with us today, those departed, every bit as alive as we are, more alive on account of their fate.
“I call upon you of the diaspora to teach us that the land of our fathers and the land of our mothers is here with us today where we sit. Show us how its fragrant green mass is without weight as we set out over the four corners of this earth perchance never again to return, never again to smell the apricot blossoms and blue waters of our Danube and our Tisza.
“And here is what I would say to you today. End your crusade. Moderate yourselves. Moderate yourselves, I urge you.” The bishop raised his fighting fists into the air and then just as abruptly dropped his open hands to his sides, slapping his robe, causing it to ripple like water. “Find peace,” he said, “and spread its word and design out from where you have found it. Teach us to find peace. Travel in safety, all of you, and may these be the last of your wanderings. May God bless each and every one of you. Remember always, I implore you, as the prophet Isaiah urged all of us, ‘Seek ye the Lord while he may be found.’”
The bishop once again raised his fists, this time to cover his eyes. Not a person spoke in the room or even whispered. The woman holding her daughter, the one who had been staring at me, had let her go and was weeping black-and-blue tears. Midnight-blue spots stained her white blouse. Her daughter sat with her legs crossed, her bare feet inverted, the soles turned upward as if to catch rain.
The brunette who’d been open for business still had her ganglies folded up as she faced the bishop. I guessed there were no clients for her here, except maybe Attila, who was game for most things.
But my brother was fast asleep, sitting up. I spotted my father and mother in the room now, a dozen cots away from us. There was no sign of Andras or Gisela. I felt terrible dread, felt for the first time how big this night was. I shuddered. My father was devouring several packets of the biscuits and cheese. My mother watched him, then glanced back at the lectern, waiting, it seemed, for the great voice to boom forth again. She looked sad, probably remembering Judit and thinking about Andras and his baby. We were all facing forward, waiting for more, possibly even hoping for it. Attila woke with a jerk amid the murmuring of the place.
The nuns came around with steaming bowls of chicken soup to calm us for the night and with extra napkins to shield our laps from the bowls. They also handed each of us a silver spoon big enough to fit an impressive mouth.
Attila was at his soup immediately, slurping with an ecstasy in his eyes, like someone in love. “Ah,” he said. Then he slurped some more, his eyes closed. “Liquefied bird,” he said. He lifted his bowl and drank the soup down, the first to finish, possibly, in the entire room. Then he set the bowl down on the floor and shifted on his haunches, still smacking his lips, waiting to see what was next. He slapped at something on his collarbone, his eyes casting around the room, searching among the girls. It was as if the bird had remade itself inside him.
Then my brother jumped to his feet. “Look,” he said. He was pointing to the front. I stood up to see.
Nuns with musical instruments were arranging themselves at the microphone where the bishop had stood. One had a cello, one a violin, and one a recorder. A fourth nun clapped her hands sharply until the room went quiet. The cello and violin players tuned their instruments for just a moment and waited for the leader to nod at them. Then the trio began playing a sad old song. The primary nun closed her eyes, approached the microphone, and sang. I was stunned. It was a haunting, mournful song, sung in Italian. It reminded me of some of my grandmother’s records.
“What is it?” I whispered to my grandmother. She was sitting on my cot with me now.
“Goodness,” she said. “Just a minute.” She stood up too. All over the room, others were standing. The crying woman and her young daughter were standing, and the woman’s eyes were welling up.
A flock of sounds swarmed over us in the big room. “Is it a hymn?” I asked. “What is it?”
“It’s not a hymn,” my grandmother said. “It’s an aria, from an opera, by Vivaldi, I think.”
The singer’s voice was deep as a well, as if a young man lived inside her.
“It’s a lament,” my grandmother said. “Listen to it.” She had her hand on her heart.
The nuns sang several more songs, the cello crooning, the violin soaring, the recorder fluttering like a bird.
“Judit’s soul is still here,” Attila whispered too loudly. “It’s sniffing around.”
I got to my feet and gazed all around me. I don’t know what I was expecting to find.
As the song wound down, Attila said, “Why does God need to inspire humans to create music just so they can play it back to him? It’s all mysterious to me. Are we his concert hall or his radio?”
Our grandmother held up her finger again, warning us to pipe down.
“The music’s for us too. Maybe he wants us to enjoy it,” I said, but Attila didn’t hear me.
“My grandsons, the theologians,” said our grandmother.
People were still arriving and crowding the door, people who hadn’t had the benefit of the bishop’s speech or the nuns’ concert. It made me think that maybe we’d missed some things too. More bombs went off, but their sound was faint, like distant thunder. The field with the mines.
Our grandmother took us to a big open bathroom with more sinks and shower stalls and toilets than I’d ever seen assembled in one place. Attila and I did our business and then washed our hands and faces.
He thought we should use up my toothpaste before we started on his. “There’ll be less to carry, my ever-precious love,” he said.
I gave it some thought before answering. “But we’d have the same result if we used up your toothpaste first.”
He snatched away my bag, but our grandmother said, “Use mine first,” and we did. Attila brushed more furiously than usual, spat, and stormed back to the dormitory ahead of our grandmother and me. She ushered me back before returning to clean herself up too.
Before that day, I did not know what a convent was. Attila told me it was a place to get people cleaned up for heaven, if you believed in that sort of thing. I felt very good there, and I told my brother so.
He patted my head and said, “Well, then, if you are an excellent lad, you could grow up to become a nun yourself.”
A few minutes later our mother came over to kiss us, but Attila was already out. He had that magic switch that turned off the day and opened up the night with a flick. He was already swinging on vines through the jungle and bellowing, pausing only to pound his chest.
My mother was staring at me and smiling. “How are you doing, my darling love?” she asked. She had such boiling gold hair—it made no sense that she was my mother. Except for her dazzling smile. I had inherited a slightly smaller, darker version of it. She’d passed all the rest of her looks on to Attila—the golden hair, the blue eyes—but she’d omitted her smile. It was the one trait she’d reserved for me. The one outward trait, that is. Attila had very few of her innards.