The Afterlife of Stars

by Joseph Kertes

  “Do you see what I mean?” the man said. “Cage your hellcat.”

  Our father grabbed the judge by the collar and lifted him until the man’s feet left the floor of the bus. A woman called out—screamed, actually. It was the woman with the dangly pearl earrings and matching necklace. I hadn’t seen her board this bus too. The driver slowed the vehicle and shouted something over his shoulder at our father. He even blasted his horn twice.

  Our father let the judge down. The man had a smirk on his face. His propeller mustache was as crisp as ever, its blades turned up. “Just as I predicted,” he said. “Ha!”

  Out of nowhere, as if it had been a concealed weapon, my father’s fist shot up, a Superman fist, straight into the man’s chin. There was a terrible clack, and then the jaw unhinged and the man fell backwards to the floor with a thud. The woman in pearls cried out again. Blood spread from the side of the judge’s mouth. The bus swerved to the side of the road.

  The woman with the pearls tended to the man.

  “Is he dead?” my brother asked.

  The woman shook her head. She bent down to feel the man’s breath, hear his chest.

  “What did you do?” our mother said.

  “I shut him up,” our father said.

  The driver came back toward us.

  “Drive!” our father said in Hungarian. “Drive!” He held up his fist. “Paris!” he added with a French accent. The word, the way he said it, didn’t seem to go with the fist.

  The driver stopped, turned, and timidly returned to his seat.

  Our father was still standing over the fallen man when he said to Attila, “Now, what was it you wanted to know?”

  “Simon!” our mother shouted. “Sit down. We’re in enough trouble.”

  Our father was still huffy. I could almost see his heart pounding through his shirt.

  “We’re not in any kind of trouble,” he said, half out of breath.

  “This man won’t complain for some time,” the woman with the pearls said. She was tying up the judge’s jaw with a scarf. The man moaned but stayed put.

  The mood of the whole bus had changed. My brother and I were both sitting in the aisle seats now, right across from each other. My grandmother gripped my hand. Attila looked hot and pink.

  Our father was sitting again, saying nothing, staring out into the gray morning.

  “Aren’t we Hungarian?” I asked my brother.

  “We’re not anything.”

  “Aren’t we Hungarian until we become something else? What did the man mean?”

  “Dad should have finished the bastard off. I would have stepped on his neck, ground it, and crushed it into powder.”

  Our mother shook her head. She and our grandmother still seemed shaken.

  I joined our father, and he took my hand and moved over to where the judge had sat, by the window. We both spent a long while staring at the silver sun, the impostor sun.

  When we got to Paris late in the morning, Attila helped our father carry the man out. They laid him down on a bench. Our father stared the driver down, and the man loped away. He busied himself with whatever luggage the passengers had stored.

  Our father checked on the judge again, still lying on the bench, with his eyes open. One of his propeller blades was turned downward now. It gave the man half a frown. He looked alarmed when our father asked him how he felt, and he reached up to feel his jaw. Then he waved our father away. When our grandmother tried, he waved her away too.

  “Go,” he was telling all of us with a violent wave. “Go.”

  Twelve

  We took a taxi from the bus station to the 16th arrondissement, as our grandmother called it. The streets looked like sculpture gardens to me—the buildings and bridges and even the subway and bus stops. It was like driving through an outdoor art gallery.

  The driver wanted to be paid in advance and would not accept Hungarian currency, no matter how much we offered, so our grandmother gave him her pinkie ring with the turquoise stone. She said she didn’t like it much anyway, but I’d never seen her without it on.

  When we pulled up in front of Aunt Hermina’s home, the music coming from it was so loud that the whole street rumbled under our wheels. It was as if an entire opera house had been squeezed into our great-aunt’s white town house. We had to ring the doorbell repeatedly. No one answered until there was a lull in the aria.

  Then the door opened, and there stood Hermina, every bit as glamorous as Nero’s Poppea about to receive the crown. She was a thinner, younger, taller version of her sister, our grandmother. Our grandmother was the eldest in her family, and Hermina was the youngest, but I could easily tell that they were sisters. Our great-aunt had the same caramel eyes, the same auburn hair, except that hers was highlighted with strands of gold and whipped up onto her head in weaves and folds.

  The aria started up again, and the music was gigantic, big as a canyon.

  Our father pushed past his aunt, shouting, “You’re disturbing the peace!”

  “Darling,” Hermina said, “Handel is incapable of disturbing the peace.”

  Our father went searching for the phonograph and switched it off.

  As we stood in the ripe quiet, Aunt Hermina hummed the last notes of the aria. “Did you like what you heard, my darling?” she asked my brother.

  “If you like a lightning bolt to the ear,” he said.

  “Toujours Attila,” Hermina said.

  “Where is Andras?” she asked. “Where’s Judit? You wired that you were all coming together.”

  Our grandmother took her sister’s face in her hands and told her what had become of Judit and Andras and little Gisela. The sisters looked at each other, then put their foreheads together. Our mother joined them, and the three swayed together but said nothing more.

  I was going to join the huddle with the women but wanted to see what our father and Attila would do first. They stayed where they stood, and both hung their heads, so I hung my head too. I gulped repeatedly as I imagined little Gisela.

  It seemed like a very long time before my brother said, “Our father beat up a man on the bus.”

  “He did what?” Hermina asked, pulling away from the other women.

  “Please, darling, let’s not talk about it just yet,” our grandmother said as she kissed her sister.

  We left our bags and stepped into Hermina’s salon, which was like stepping into a French pastry, all billowy with creams and pallors, marzipan and peach. There was nothing crisp about the place. It was all soft lines and colors. An ivory grand piano sat poised in a tall bay window like an albino alligator with its jaw open wide. A portrait in oil of Hermina in her young years, her warm eyes gazing out over the room, hung above a plush blond sofa. On the opposite wall was a painting of a summerhouse with two children standing on the grass out front. The children had no faces. “It’s called Garden with Trees,” Hermina told me as I studied the picture. “Do you like it?”

  I nodded. I did like it, though I didn’t know how I would fill in the faces.

  Hermina herself was dressed in a cream floral gown that went with the room, and she wore blush-pink gloves. She smoothed my hair at the back with a warm hand. “My little dark beauty,” she said in a honeyed voice. Now she cupped my face in the bowl of her gloved hands. “So this is the one,” she said, looking at her sister. What about the golden beauty, I wanted to know? What about Attila? “My dark beauty,” she said again as she raised my face to the light and kissed me straight on the lips. A charge shot down my spine to my tail. She kissed my brother in the same way, but she was moving on, directing all movement in the room, inviting everyone to sit, get comfortable. Her housekeeper, Babette, brought in a tray heavy with croissants, petits fours and apricot preserves, tea, coffee, and cocoa specially made for my brother and me. Our parents and grandmother asked for a few minutes to sort out our things and left the room.

  Babette was young and blond and brown-eyed. She smiled radiantly. I could easily see a smiling duel lining up betwe
en Babette and our mother. She reminded me a bit of Sister Heidi, but Babette did not hide her beauty in the way of nuns. She lingered an extra moment and fluffed up a cushion as my brother and I gawked at her.

  Attila and I shared a large ottoman, where we ate and drank heartily as our great-aunt watched us. She was childless and a widow now. Our grandmother had told us that Uncle Ede and Aunt Hermina had moved to this house when he was invited to teach medicine at the university. He had just retired from his post when he died quietly one morning behind his newspaper.

  “You never had children,” my brother said.

  “No,” said Hermina.

  “You couldn’t?”

  “We could, I think.”

  “So why didn’t you?” Attila asked. I’m not sure our mother and grandmother would have let this question fly.

  Hermina sighed. “I would have been a bad mother,” she said. “I would have been a bad mother even if I’d given birth to myself.” She chuckled, but we both stared at her in horror. She looked away.

  My brother took a bite of pastry, nudged me with his elbow, and pointed with his face at Hermina’s hands, wanting me to take note of the claws. “Aunt Hermina,” he said, “what happened to your hands?”

  “Can we save our dark tales for a dark afternoon,” she said gently, “when we’re locked up in here?”

  Attila finished what was in his mouth and said, “I saw you in the opera in Budapest.”

  “I know, darling. I knew you were there. I was very glad. Did you like the opera? It was Monteverdi’s masterpiece, L’incoronazione di Poppea. The Coronation of Poppea.”

  “I liked one song,” Attila said. He licked jam from the corner of his mouth.

  “Just one?” she asked. She laughed.

  “Yes, and I’ve been meaning to ask you a series of questions ever since.”

  “A series?” she said and laughed again. “Let’s see if we have answers this time.” She sat up in her white chair and clasped her gloved hands together in her lap.

  “I thought I was going to die a slow, writhing death,” Attila said. Aunt Hermina sat as still as her painted self. “The opera was endless,” he went on. “Until that last song. When stupid Nero is crowning his Poppea, his second wife, I guess.”

  Aunt Hermina’s warm eyes widened. I looked at her lips, the ones that had kissed mine.

  “For me,” Attila said, “it was the first true moment, the first one that didn’t feel fake.”

  “Fake?”

  “It was hard to believe you could love that big fat Nero, but then suddenly I did believe it because Nero was giving you a crown to prove his love. Until then, he thought too much, and he sang out every boring thought, but really talk-singing rather than just talking.”

  “And then there was the song,” Aunt Hermina said eagerly.

  “Yes, then came that song. For me, it was the one single real moment, as I said. The two of you sang ‘Pur ti miro.’ Mamu helped me later with the words.”

  This was the song the Gypsy beggar had hummed back in Budapest!

  Attila closed his eyes dramatically. He put his hand on his heart. “‘I adore you,’ Poppea is saying, and he is saying it back. ‘I hold you. I want you. I enchain you.’”

  “But, darling,” Hermina said. “Remember, he is crowning her. There is irony there.”

  Attila opened his eyes. “Irony? Not in the song,” my brother said. “The song is about real love. It didn’t even match the songs that went before it. It was like someone else had dreamed it up and written it.”

  “Maybe it was another composer,” Aunt Hermina said good-naturedly.

  “Yes,” Attila said. He jumped up off the ottoman. “What if it was? Claudio Monteverdi had students. It was someone young, a young man, probably, and he was studying with the master, and maybe one day the student presented the master with a little tune he had composed, a song inspired, maybe, by the master himself. He wanted the master to approve of his work. He might have said to the composer, ‘It’s called “Pur ti miro.”’ Claudio looks over the pages of music. He looks up at the boy, who is not wearing a wig the way the master is. Claudio knows what he is holding. He says to his pupil, ‘Let me think about it. I’ll look it over again. Let me just give it a second look.’ And he rubs his chin, most likely, almost certainly, and pulls on his sharp beard for effect. The pupil grins and bows and raises his hands as if in prayer to his own god, the composer, the father of opera, and backs out of the room, tiptoes out, and never comes back. Somehow, he disappears. Just like that.” Attila snapped his fingers. “He never comes back to find out what’s happened to his song. But his song doesn’t disappear. Not his lovely song. His song moves to the top of the opera. And it stays there at the finale. Waiting for the night you sang it for me.”

  “Sometimes these things drop from heaven, quite by accident,” Hermina said. “Sometimes an angel comes through the window and sits by the composer until he has his song.”

  “Yes, but which composer did the angel visit? And did the angel visit one composer while the devil visited the other?”

  Our great-aunt was staring at my brother. “What an imagination you have, you dear boy,” she said. “But let me ask you. What if Monteverdi did compose ‘Pur ti miro’? Why would you take it away from him?”

  “It doesn’t fit—for me, I mean. That’s all. So I’m just saying.”

  “It doesn’t matter, dear. What matters is that we have the song. Can’t we just be happy for the song?”

  Attila moved close to our great-aunt. She was pinned to her seat. “But it bothers me,” he said.

  “What does?”

  “Truth. Doesn’t truth matter?”

  “The kind of truth you’re looking for relies more on a feeling, a hunch, rather than on proof,” she said. “A hunch lives in the world of instinct and belief, not proof. You loved the song, my darling. Love is its own truth. Isn’t it?”

  Attila considered the point. He looked at Hermina without responding.

  “In the end, my dear, the person hardly matters. No one knows where Mozart is buried, but we have his music.” She looked down at her gloved hands.

  My brother sat back down again beside me. He was glowing like a glowhead.

  Hermina stroked the column of her neck with her gloved hand. I thought she might have been blushing. “What an imagination you have, my dear,” she said again. “Do angels visit you?”

  “Angels and devils,” my brother said, very satisfied with himself.

  I ate a plump chocolate. It was molten sweet. It flowed brownly down my throat.

  Our great-aunt reached for a mother-of-pearl box beside her on the table. An ivory swan perched on its lid. She opened the box and released the music trapped inside. “It’s Swan Lake,” she said. It was a snuffbox. Using a snuff spoon, she lifted some to her nose and breathed in. “Snuff?” she said to us.

  “Sure,” said my brother. He took a wad in his fingers and snorted it hard, all the way up into his brain.

  The inquiries didn’t end there. Over a glittering dinner in a dining room with windows as tall as masts, our father asked Hermina why she was staying in Paris still.

  We were having veal goulash with dumplings, to remind us of home. Babette had served it from a porcelain tureen. She’d smiled at each of us as she did so. My brother and I followed her every move. Babette knew we were admiring her but didn’t break her stride. When she set down the tureen between us and stepped back, my brother whispered to me, “If only I had the gift of that Noseboy on the bus, just to interpret these joyous scents.” Babette was blushing as if she knew what we were saying. The pink suited her blond face. Attila and I kept staring, but she withdrew, aiming her warm blush away from us.

  “Why don’t you leave with us?” our father said. “It seems like the best plan, considering.”

  Hermina chewed and chewed and chewed while we watched and waited for her mouth to come to a stop.

  Finally, she said, “I can’t start again somewhere else. My
Ede and I started again here. This, for me, is as good as it gets. My Ede is buried here, in Passy. I visit him and chat with him. Sometimes, if I have more to say to him than usual, I set a place for him at this table. I go to concerts and galleries and museums. I sing here and watch others sing and dance. I love the culture. Everything I need and want is here.”

  “Yes, culture,” our father said.

  “Yes, culture,” Hermina repeated, turning up the heat in her voice.

  “You’re like my mother. You believe culture is restricted to a few special places.”

  “Thank you for the compliment,” Mamu said.

  “No, not restricted,” Hermina said. “But it doesn’t spring up just anywhere like a mushroom. It takes centuries to cultivate. You are going where? The New World, New York, Canada? I sang in Canada once, in Montreal. What is the formula there in Canada—draw everyone together into a huddle and then refrigerate? It’s a place to start. A nice, clean, fresh place, to be sure, but a place to start only. I still have hope for Europe, for France.”

  Our father took quite a scoop of dumplings into his mouth. He was a fast eater at the best of times, but now he wanted to add drama, so he chewed and chewed and chewed the way Hermina had. Finally, he said, “So we are the cultivated ones on this side of the planet—the supremely cultivated.”

  Hermina set down her mighty fork and knife. She was at the head of the table, looking queenly in a powder-green evening gown with her hair up. “In a word, yes, some of us are,” she said. “It’s never all of us. But it takes centuries to grow a Handel or a Beethoven. Millennia, even. Think of the achievements of Europeans, of Europe.”

  “Achievement is overrated. We’re on the run from it. One day you’re living in a golden tower, the next it topples.”

  My grandmother was about to say something, but her sister held up her hand. “It’s all right, Klari,” she said, taking a breath but looking hard at my father. My mother aimed the same look at him. Attila was smiling through a full mouth. “Do you think Handel and Beethoven and Goethe are overrated?” Hermina asked.