Before we settled in for the evening, each of us, including Attila and me, including our parents and grandmother, was taken into a curtained-off booth and examined by a doctor and nurse—our noses, throats, ears, and armpits, and even our nether parts—the parts made for all those functions, as my brother had pointed out. When the doctor was down there, I told him all about Peter Halasz, what a chance the doctor had missed not giving the man’s nose a good going-over, but the doctor didn’t even speak Hungarian, and the nurse spoke only a little.
Even worse, these medicals took my blood, had me pee into a bottle, and gave me a shot of vaccine, which, for all they knew (because they didn’t ask in any language), I’d already received back in Budapest. I was then taken off for an X-ray of my chest and had to hold my breath for it, something the technician demonstrated rather than told me while they got ready. One of them even turned to take a gulp of coffee to fortify himself.
My brother and I met in the giant bathroom. I saw my brother enter one toilet stall, and I ran to get the one beside him.
“What a strange thing,” he said. His voice echoed here.
“What is?”
“This inward and outward movement,” he said. “Food in, food out, water in, water out, air in, air out. Turning all this fine food into crap. Turning enticing, fragrant things into stink. You have to wonder why it’s necessary. You have to think there must be a lesson in it somehow.”
As Attila was talking, I was thinking again of Judit, in the ground, and of the sheep we had seen, how my brother had said we were their afterlife, but possibly just the afterlife of things, not of the light from dead stars. I wasn’t sure. “It’s a cycle,” I said. “Everything’s a cycle.”
“Yes, and the cycle is always the same,” my brother said. “We just don’t always see it. Different food, same crap; different lives, same ground. Holy lives, poor lives, long lives, short lives, glorious lives and inglorious.”
We sat, then, in silence. The radiator ticked in the bathroom. It was quite warm. There was a sound like a towel being snapped and then some pattery footsteps.
By the time we were finished, washed, fed, and sitting out front on our new cots, dressed in the gowns we’d been given, which were now doubling as nightshirts, my brother and I looked like swashbucklers who’d been stripped of our capes, swords, and three-cornered hats.
Our father was having words with an official as he held out our papers, but a larger, more commanding official stopped by us, and my father shrank into a meek and sheepish look. With this look, he would surely inherit the earth.
Then, across the room, I was sure I spotted the tall woman with the caper eyes. I jumped up, and I searched frantically for others: the girl with the mouth and her mother, Zoli, Mary, Mrs. Molnar, Andras and Gisela, in case they were leaving from here, and Father Tamas—where was he going? On what rock was he going to build his new church? I was always expecting something, looking for someone familiar. I did see the blond girl with the green-checked dress—she was peering back our way in the distance—but that was all. I wasn’t sure if I should wave and decided not to.
I was on the verge of salting up when Attila noticed someone, a boy, taller, bigger, and darker than Attila was, pass by our row of cots. “Look!” Attila said, jumping up. “He was on the swim team that beat us in the relays, from Saint Hilda’s School, over in the eighth district, and they beat us in water polo too, and in both they cheated their heads off. They pulled little tricks under the surface and brought in a ringer. What’s his name?” Attila was punching his own side.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s his goddamn name?” Attila punched the air and even jumped once. The boy was some distance away now. “Hey,” Attila yelled, and the boy turned. “Hey!”
The boy came over and looked down at my excited brother’s sunny hair. Clearly, he could not make out who my brother was, let alone name him.
“You!” my brother barked.
“What?” the boy said, except he was really a man in every respect but age.
“You don’t know my name,” my idiot brother said as he poked the man-boy in the chest. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“Do you know my name?” the boy said, poking Attila all the way back down into a sitting position on his cot.
Attila leapt up into the boy’s face. “Do you know what?” He poked him again. “You don’t forget my name. I forget yours. You got that?”
The boy tried to push my brother back down, but Attila stood firm and glared up into his opponent’s face. Our father was now standing too, but the boy moved off.
Within ninety seconds of this incident, my brother was asleep.
Our grandmother and parents filed by to kiss us, and the lights soon went out. I didn’t want to disturb anyone or trip over anything searching for a window, so I stayed put in the darkness, but I wished there’d been a window, like the one in the convent.
I don’t know how long I waited, but I heard someone whispering in a cot not far away, and then I heard the sound of kissing and cooing. I lifted my head off the pillow, strained in the darkness to see the sloshy, gaspy couple, but couldn’t make out a thing. If creamy pastries made a sound, this was it. I tried to imagine what the pair looked like, how old they were, how they managed on these little cots, but in the end I didn’t want to know. I would add the incident to my bank of secrets.
Ten
That night as we were boarding the bus marked PARIS, an Austrian police officer and a man in a black trench coat who was holding a notebook detained our father. My father urged us to get on and take our seats, but Attila wouldn’t hear of it. He leered at the men and looked ready to lunge. Our grandmother and mother had to stand in his way.
Luckily, our father was soon released. He was shaking his head and had a furious look on his face when he joined us.
“What did they want?” Attila said.
“Not now,” our mother said.
“They wanted to know about Paul,” our father said.
“Our Paul? Paul Beck?” she asked.
“Yes, Paul Beck.”
“Our cousin?” my brother said.
“What did you tell them?” our grandmother asked.
“I told them what I know—nothing.”
“We do know nothing,” our mother said.
“That’s what I told them.”
“Were they both Austrian?” our grandmother asked.
“No, only the policeman. The other one might have been an agent of some kind, a French government agent.”
Our grandmother looked pale. I knew right away that the conversation was over.
The bus driver wanted us to take our seats. He spoke to us in French but was not friendly. My mother shot him numerous unanswered smiles just to cheer him up, and I shot him several lesser ones, but the man was all grim business. He glanced at our papers. These, naturally, didn’t excite him either. He was keen to get going.
“What about Paul?” Attila said again as we worked our way to the back.
“Nothing,” our father said.
“What about him?” my brother insisted.
“You know as much about him as I do. Now be quiet.” My father looked fierce, which only sometimes made my brother back down, but this time it worked.
It was my turn. “Was Paul your first cousin?” I asked our father.
“Yes,” he said more kindly. “His father, Heinrich, and my father were brothers.”
The bus was full, and here the seats did not face each other. We were all arranged in pairs facing forward, the usual way. Attila and I had quite a wrestling match over the window seat, but our mother stepped in and sat with Attila so he could have a window. Our grandmother sat with me across the aisle so I could too. Our father sat next to a man with an impressive mustache, which had sharp ends and looked like a propeller blade. The man had been a lawyer and judge, he said, and was meeting his nephew in Paris to plan his next move.
We were visiting our great-au
nt Hermina, the famous opera singer, our father told the man, who said he knew about her.
“She’s quite a singer,” the man said, “but she has not been back in Hungary for some time.”
“No,” our father said. “She’s been living in Paris for years now.”
“Naturally,” the man said, but I didn’t know what he meant.
I got out my Pez Tin Man and popped a candy from its neck. My grandmother didn’t want one. I worried suddenly about the marzipan monkey in my bag and hoped he had made the long journey without getting deformed.
We drove quite a long way before Attila leaned over our mother across the seats to tell me that we were meeting the Crow Woman.
Both women jumped in. Our mother said, “Don’t speak about your grandmother’s sister in that way.”
Our grandmother balled her hands into fists.
“But it’s true,” Attila said, and he held up his fingers like claws. “Her hands are like a crow’s talons. She can’t straighten her fingers.” He was still making his claws, raking the air and, for some reason, hissing like a tiger.
“Is that true, Mamu?” I asked.
My grandmother said her sister had suffered a trauma in the war and was not to be mocked. “Why would you add to her misfortune by making fun of her?” she asked us both.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“Ask them,” my brother said.
“Attila, please,” said our mother.
My brother lunged at her. “I feel we have a right to know, now that we are men, or at least I am. You said you’d tell me what happened once I was ready to hear about it.”
Our father, in his seat in front of us, turned his head. “You’ll never be ready,” he said.
“Simon, why must you say such things about your bright sons?”
“They’re not that bright.”
“They’re very bright.”
“Brightness is not the point, in any case,” he said. “You know what I’m saying.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said. I turned to our grandmother. “Why can’t we know?”
“News like that can wait. Trust me, my angel.”
“But I can’t wait,” Attila said.
“You will wait,” our grandmother said. “And don’t make fun of your great-aunt, especially since you know she suffered. Hermina doesn’t like people to know about it. She has a right to keep these matters to herself.”
“Mother,” my brother said, “I need your help.”
“Not this time,” she said. She was not smiling, and because my mother’s smile was so true and natural, its disappearance was like the end of happiness.
Attila huffed and turned toward his window.
I felt sick now. What had happened to our cousin Paul? What had happened to our great-aunt Hermina? Why had so many members of our family been marked in this way, made to suffer? And those were the lucky ones, the ones who’d made it. At that moment, I could not look out my window at my half of the world the way Attila was looking at his half. If my window had served up the Eiffel Tower or plopped down a pyramid, I could not have cared.
My brother had met Hermina just once, when she came back to Budapest to sing, and I had known her only through glamorous photographs, especially one that showed her dressed as Emperor Nero’s bride, Poppea. She stood with Nero on the cover of a Hungarian national opera program. Attila had seen that opera with our grandmother, but I hadn’t. She had worried that I was too young.
I said to my grandmother, “Does Aunt Hermina still sing?”
“Oh, yes, she sings,” Mamu said. “She might even sing for you. She loves baroque. Maybe she’ll sing some Handel or Bach. Do you remember the songs the nuns were singing?” I nodded yes. “Those were baroque too.”
I told my grandmother about the Statue Graveyard, which Attila had taken me to. She had never seen it.
“We saw the Swedish man there, at the graveyard. We saw Raoul Wallenberg.”
“What?” she asked. Our mother had heard me too, as had our father and the man with the propeller mustache. Attila seemed the least interested in what I was saying.
“I don’t mean the man. I mean the monument.”
“Oh.” My grandmother put a hand on her heart. My mother smiled.
I wanted to know, specifically, what Raoul Wallenberg had done for us.
“Quite a bit,” my grandmother said. “We wouldn’t be on this bus if not for him.”
“And my cousin Paul,” our father said.
“Not now,” said our grandmother.
“Tell us about Paul,” Attila said right away.
“He’s—” our father began.
“Not now!” our grandmother insisted and stamped her foot.
Even Attila backed off. “Then when?” he asked.
“Your poor grandfather would not have wanted you ever to know.”
“Robert?” I said.
“Yes, my Robert. Dear Robert.” She sighed. “Another time,” she said. “I promise.”
A while later, our mother took Attila and me to the water closet in the back of the bus, and when we returned to our seats, Attila put his head down on our mother’s lap and went straight to sleep. I wondered if the statue of Mor Jokai would still be allowed to guard our street back home and how long he would last. Would he outlast the street? Would the time come for him to take a seat at the Statue Graveyard, watch over it for a while? I strained to hear love sounds as I had back in the dormitory in Vienna, but the bus’s motor was too loud, even if there were any.
Except for our driver and me, everyone on the bus was having quite a snooze, sitting straight up or lying on someone’s lap or leaning against a rattling window. The driver himself must have been fighting off sleep.
The moon was full and outlined the shape of things, like a night artist. I wondered why the moon had to be round. What if it were square, to line up with windows? It would be like a Picasso painting I’d seen at the National Gallery—a painting of lovers, all their features pulled to the front, sitting under the bright glowing square. The only risk I could see was that if the moon were square it might mock the sun rather than doing the important job of reflecting its light.
Eleven
We were all roused by a jolt. A shoe and a bag fell off the rack above our heads, and a bottle rolled toward the front and shattered on something. My tired eyes struggled to interpret the vinegary dawn. “France,” I heard a couple of people on the bus say.
My father and the man with the propeller mustache looked coldly at each other, like the strangers they were. My mother had ripe pears in her bag, and she offered one to each of us, including the propeller man, but he declined. The bus kept rolling into the thin light.
France.
The countryside seemed too bashful to be France, the land of Napoleon and Louis XIV and the Three Musketeers. There wasn’t much to it: some rocks and fields, a bridge over a creek, some wooden houses with small vineyards out back, a weak sun.
My pear was juicy and sweet. I finished first, before Attila, and he knew it, but he acted as if he didn’t notice. He hung his hands over the seat in front, our father’s seat, and said to him, “Can I hear now about Raoul Wallenberg and Paul Beck?”
Our father didn’t answer him. Our mother and grandmother looked straight ahead.
“The war was over in Hungary,” Attila said. “Can you at least tell me why the Russians took Raoul Wallenberg?”
The man with the propeller mustache, the former judge, half turned in his seat and said, “The Russians removed Wallenberg because he was a menace.”
“What did you say?” our father asked. He was grinding his teeth.
“The Swede was an interloper. He had no business in Hungary.”
“He was saving Hungarians.”
“Not exactly,” the man said.
Attila stood up, hovering over the men from behind.
“You know Wallenberg was trying to impede the Germans’ removal of people of impure blood,
” the man continued. “Cosmopolitans. Gypsies. Jews. Swedes, or manufactured Swedes, I should say.”
“The Germans were removing Hungarian nationals,” our father said. “I am a Hungarian national, an expatriate, a refugee. As are you. As are we all on this bus.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” the man said, and he looked straight ahead rather than at my father.
My brother was leaning over the seat, huffing right into the man’s hair. Our mother reached over to put a hand on our father’s shoulder. She had a pleading look that said, “Enough. Please, leave it alone.”
But my father couldn’t. “Did you say you were a judge?” he asked.
The man turned back toward him. He too was huffing. Others on the bus could hear the commotion now.
“By not finishing their work,” the man said, “the Germans have unleashed a species twice as noxious as the original. Survivors who have been wronged. Righteous whiners. Seekers of justice all over the planet. Hounding the rest of us to an early grave. Wanting—nay, needing—to make us repent. I knew it would happen. I knew it instantly.”
The man got to his feet.
Our father did as well and moved out into the aisle, where the man joined him. “By ‘the rest of us,’” our father said, “do you mean those of pure blood?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Your impure blood. It’s the very thing you’re going to export now to foreign lands. With your impure selves. Your righteousness. Your victimhood. It’s what we’ll hear until the end of time. Prattle, prattle, prattle, until we’re ready to do anything, give you anything, just to make you shut up.” As he spoke, the man made a prattling mouth out of his hand and flapped it in our father’s face. “Everyone will go on hating Jews. You might succeed in driving the hatred underground. People will appear to like you. People will act as though they want to side with what is right and just. But even the people who appear to like you won’t. Not really. And they’ll look for the first excuse to let you know it.”
Attila lunged at the propeller man’s neck, nearly knocking over our mother, but our father stood in his way and shoved him back down.
The Afterlife of Stars Page 9
