The Afterlife of Stars

by Joseph Kertes

  “I want to stand.”

  She looked Attila dead in the eye. “I will tell you if you sit down.”

  He plopped himself down beside me, where she’d been sitting, and she stayed on her feet.

  “You’re not going to like this story,” she said.

  “Then why do you insist on telling it?” Mamu said. “They have plenty of time to find out.”

  “They’ve earned it, Mother. They’ve come such a long way on this journey with us.”

  Our grandmother sighed and leaned back, but the soft divan had no back to rest against and she sat forward again.

  “It was after the war,” our mother began.

  “Right after?” Attila asked.

  “Not right after, but soon after, in forty-six. Robert, Dr. Beck, your grandfather, came home from his clinic one day to find Paul in his—your grandfather’s—study. Paul spent a great deal of time in there. His sister Rozsi was prancing around the living room, saying she’d finally found herself a pair of nylon stockings. She had drawn seams up the back of her legs with an eyebrow pencil, and I must say, the lines were drawn with some skill, because they looked quite straight, and in dim light you might have thought she was wearing stockings. I had arranged at the druggist for Rozsi to have sedatives, because every time we went looking for her fiancé, Tibor, at the train station and didn’t find him, she despaired. Her Tibor had been taken away and never came back.”

  “Who took him away?” I asked.

  “The Germans took him. He was deported. The deal back then, after the war—I mean the law, actually—was that two able-bodied people from each family, if the family had two able-bodied people left in it, would have to go out to rebuild the city. We each had our assignments. I was helping clean up the National Gallery, which was damaged, and your father was helping to rebuild the Chain Bridge across the Danube. The Germans had bombed all the bridges. You were already with us, my darling,” she said to my brother. “But we hadn’t started on you yet,” she said to me and smiled. I blushed. “So your father and I went on this work detail each day, and Paul and Rozsi did not.” Mamu was shaking her head, wishing our mother would stop.

  “Who looked after me?” Attila asked.

  “Your grandmother.”

  A cloud passed from above the solarium, and the room lit up. My brother shut his right eye. “Why didn’t Paul and Rozsi go?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. To this day, I don’t know for sure. Rozsi was depressed. Her man was gone and would not return. Paul was depressed. His hero—and ours—was gone. I don’t know. But I didn’t care. Paul had saved us.”

  The room clouded over again. It felt cooler, all of a sudden. The white radiator was ticking.

  “Your father and I were happy to go. You were growing like a weed, but we had your grandmother to look after you, as I said. It didn’t seem a problem for us. We’d made it—whoever was left of us. My parents did not survive. My brothers and sisters did not survive. But we did. You did and we did. We were alive. We could make it work.

  “But the arrangement was not sitting right with your grandfather. And one night at dinner, after some months together, he asked Paul if he and Rozsi were ever going out on the work detail in place of us. ‘They have a child now,’ he said to them. ‘They want to have another one.’” Paul told him that he didn’t think so. “We went on eating quietly for what felt like several minutes, several awful minutes, until your grandfather put down his fork, wiped his mouth, and told Paul he thought he and his sister should go out on work detail the following day. “Paul wiped his mouth too and finished chewing. He replied, ‘And what if we refuse?’

  “Your grandfather said, ‘Then I think you and your sister should leave.’”

  The radiator seemed all of a sudden to be working extra hard. I felt flushed, raised a cool hand to my cheek. Mamu put her arm around me.

  “Then what?” Attila said and started to get to his feet. The room brightened again. His eyes were blazing blue.

  Our mother put a hard hand on his shoulder. “Stay there,” she said. “I’m telling you the story.”

  For once my brother obeyed.

  “In the middle of that night…” She paused. My grandmother removed her arm from around me and covered her face with her hands. “In the middle of the night, Paul and his sister left.”

  I could feel my grandmother’s body trembling. She was still covering her face.

  “That night was the last time we saw them or heard from them,” our mother said. She held her hands together under her chin, as if she were praying. Her eyes were welling up too. “There was no trace of them, not anywhere near their own house, which had taken a direct hit, not in Paul’s old law office, not in his usual haunts, like the New York Café and Gerbeaud. We caught up with his brother Istvan in Szeged, and he told your grandparents that Paul did not want to be found. He and Rozsi were gone. They had left for the Americas, as Istvan put it. We thought, actually, that Paul might have come here to Paris. He adored his aunt. We thought they might stop here on their way to something.”

  “To what?” Attila shouted. Now my brother did stand up. He turned to our grandmother. “Mamu,” he snapped. She pulled her hands from her face. “Your husband banished the man who saved our lives, and a decade later we’re sitting around guessing where he might have gotten to?”

  “I’m sure he was looking for something,” our mother cut in. “He would have been trouble to the Russians, the way Wallenberg was. Wallenberg was a subversive where the authorities were concerned—whatever authorities. That’s all the Russians cared about. Make order. Clear out the rabble-rousers. Clear out subversives, troublemakers. Paul would be on the warpath. There was no proof Wallenberg died. There still isn’t. We don’t know what happened. Paul would still be agitating. He would still be a menace, if he could be.”

  “And that’s it?” Attila slapped at the air.

  I ducked, thinking he might connect with one of us.

  “You have some of Paul’s qualities,” our mother said to Attila.

  “Is that so?” he said. He was fuming.

  “What about me?” I asked.

  “Actually—” my mother began to say, when Attila interrupted.

  “Actually, you were named after our grandfather, the man who evicted Paul from our house, the man who banished our savior.”

  “Attila! Why would you say that to your brother? You don’t know who to be angry at.”

  “He is Robert, is he not? I’m angry at all of you—all of us!”

  I took off to our bedroom in the library and slammed the door. I threw myself down on the daybed underneath the shelves of books, hoping they’d collapse and bury me in their considerations.

  Of course I knew I’d been named after our grandfather, but now it seemed I had not been named Robert so much as branded. In how many ways could a single soul be branded? It was hard enough being an earthling, receiving the light of dead stars, but to be a branded earthling, a marked earthling. To be 9.8 and relegated to childhood and childish ways and questions was one thing, but to be a Hungarian, or maybe not even a Hungarian, a Jew, a boy on the run, to have seen my redheaded cousin die at the foot of a lamppost, and a man with combed hair—also red—hanged, and another with his hat blown away, complete with his head, to have pictured a dear great-aunt hung out on a frozen line, to have longed hopelessly for a pretty nun with a soft white neck in a convent in Austria, or even a girl with banana-string hair and delicious lips who would end up in another section of heaven, a better section, no doubt; to have watched our father beat a propeller judge, these were brands enough. But to have been made a Robert too, not a Paul, not a Raoul, not even an Attila, but a Robert, the man who’d banished our savior—this was a branding meant to burn deep.

  I had my back to the door, my arm folded over my face, when my mother and grandmother slipped into the room. My mother kissed me on my temple and smiled her starry smile at me. My grandmother gently waved my mother away, and my mother kissed me aga
in in the same spot before departing. “It will all be good, I promise,” she said.

  “You were named after a good and noble man,” Mamu said.

  “Yes, the man who threw out the man who’d saved him—and you.”

  “That was not your grandfather’s intention. He made a mistake.”

  “Oh, so that’s what it was.”

  “My first Robert was a kind, brilliant, imaginative, loving man, the way my second Robert is. Yes, he made a mistake. He was human, like the rest of us.”

  “Why not Paul? Why didn’t I get his name?”

  “Because he may be alive. We are hoping he is alive.”

  “And what about Raoul?”

  “Raoul too. We pray he is alive. He would be a saint to us, if we had saints.” She sighed. “You have the chance to redeem the name Robert. Your grandfather would have given anything to have Paul back, and he would have given anything to have met you. He would have cherished you, you know. You look like him. You have much of his character. We must have divined something when we named you.”

  Music came from the other room. It was Medea singing again. My father and great-aunt were back. Hermina had brought bags filled with clothing for Attila and me. She’d even bought us proper suitcases to carry our new things in.

  Fifteen

  We all met in the kitchen, but my brother was missing. My mother searched the house for him. I found him in the shed. It was obvious he’d been crying. When I opened the door, he was sitting on top of the black trunk. “Hello, my fine Hungarian boy,” he said. I knew this was the best he could do for now.

  The late morning sun beamed in the window, turning him into a glowhead. His cheeks were shiny with tears. I wanted to hug him, but that would have been going too far. I’d never seen my brother this way. Granted, I had shared only 9.8 of his 13.7 years, really just 71.5 percent of his life, but I had never seen him so moved. In fact, since I was not present when our great-aunt sang “Pur ti miro,” I’d never seen him moved at all.

  “I found a diary,” he said.

  “In the trunk?”

  He pulled a leather-bound notebook out from under himself. “I found it before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before you were in here.”

  “And you kept it from me?”

  He didn’t answer. We were even now, even if he didn’t know it. He opened the diary to a page he’d marked, and he read out loud again.

  7 November 1951

  I didn’t think there could be much surprise left for me in the world, and yet there is. Colonel Josef Dortmund showed up at Ede’s office today! If he had not directly been my tormentor, he felt responsible for it. Here he was, complaining of a stomach ailment and asking Ede to help him, the only doctor he trusted. The Dortmunds are living in Paris now! They were originally Volksdeutsche from Alsace, living on the French side, and his wife’s family is French. Now they have moved to Paris! He spent three years in prison for his crimes. We have been invited to visit with them when Colonel Dortmund gets better. They live over on rue Guy de Maupassant, number 21. He gave the address to my Ede freely. Imagine it!—We could now be friends. Take a gâteau to their house, sit and smile and have tea and cake. I would, of course, wear my elegant gloves.

  My Ede will do his duty and help the man if he can. They are both men of duty.—Ede will do his duty, just as Dortmund was doing his.

  My brother looked up from his book. “This man hurt our family,” he said. “I don’t know how. I searched earlier in the diary, but there’s no hint.”

  I was about to tell Attila, but I was worried about how he’d react, and in any case, he didn’t give me time. “It’s the Second Coming,” he said. “Do you see it?”

  I took a step back. “Yes, I do. I mean no, I don’t. I’m very young.”

  “I want you to listen now,” he said. “I want to show you the Statue Graveyard in living Technicolor.”

  My brother reached behind him and pulled out an army helmet. With a grunt, he plopped it onto his head. “Heavy,” he said. He turned his head one way and the other, modeling it for me. It had a golden eagle on its side, standing on the same wheel with the bent spokes, the swastika. “The helmet was in the trunk,” Attila said. “The question is how Uncle Ede and Aunt Hermina came to have it.”

  “Maybe they saved the man’s life,” I said. “The helmet wearer’s life.”

  “Yes, the helmet wearer’s life—what a bright little seedling you are. Do you think they spent more time with Colonel Dortmund than we know? Do you think their oppressor would show up at Uncle Ede’s office if he didn’t feel safe?”

  The helmet was too big for my brother’s head. He kept adjusting some straps inside until finally it sat just right, if a little heavily, on his head. He began his speech again. “Everyone is searching for the meaning of life. We belong to certain categories, like Rock, Bird, Human, but it is only humans who choose subcategories to divide themselves into. Pigeons and carp don’t do that. Adam and Eve lived in a very good place, very, very good. But part of the original plan of creation was that they would choose to fall. Oh, yes.” My brother held up his index finger. “Oh, yes. The Lord saw it coming. He is omniscient. If everything is good, how can God’s special creatures choose him? They don’t know any better. So he sent along the serpent and said unto it, ‘You make sure they eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’ And on that day, we became choosers. Eve chose the fruit. Adam chose Eve. Sometimes we’re good at it, sometimes not.” My brother reached behind him and then raised his Gott mit Uns belt buckle to his eye. “‘God with us,’ it means. Mamu told me.”

  “You showed her the buckle.”

  “No, I just asked her what it meant. ‘God with us.’ So you see, you’ve found God after all.” He slapped the side of his helmet. “You have found him again, far from the Garden, and now you’re able to say, ‘I am the greatest.’ We all want to say it, but to be the greatest implies that someone else is not so great. To this person I award a shitty cloth star.” My brother held up the cloth Star of David and spoke to it. He had a number of objects behind him on the lid of the trunk. “You are vermin,” he said to the star, “and we must get a special pesticide to eradicate you.” He flung the star across the room.

  I went to get it. I wanted to hold it. I took a seat on the footstool. “So where does that leave us?” he asked. I shrugged my shoulders. “It brings us to the heart of the matter,” he said, “that’s where. Give me your sleeve. I want to wipe my nose.”

  “I’ll give you the back of my underpants.”

  He ran the palm of his hand under his nose and up his cheek. A cloud passed over the sun, graying the room, giving it drama. “You see,” my brother said. He was pointing to the window. “The eye of heaven blinked. It is here, my slovenly boy, that things fall apart. Bear with me.”

  “Who else am I going to bear with?”

  “Someone says, ‘I am the greatest,’ and mows down what is in his path, since everything and everyone else must be less than the greatest. It is the only thing that makes sense. Then a second group comes along and says, ‘No, you are not the greatest,’ and this second group pushes back. Some from this second group secretly want to be the greatest too, and they want to prove it by beating the first group. There is a third group, sensible and orderly, and they just want to go on with their lives, make the best of what they have, do whatever good they can for themselves and others, carry on, carry on, carry on, until they inherit the earth. This group contains our grandfather Robert.”

  I was pleased to hear him say “our grandfather.” “He meant no harm,” I put in.

  “No, he meant no harm. Usually. But this once he lost his head. He wanted to be the bigger man, or as big, just once. People in this group mean no harm, even if they cause some. Many of the people we know are in this group, maybe we are too. Right?”

  “Right. But maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re slightly disturbed.”

  He ignored me. He said, “The
n there is a fourth group, a few people who say no to the ones who think they are the greatest. They risk their own lives and find the only meaning they can in doing so. They fight to help their peers, help them and save them, put themselves in harm’s way to do so. Our own Paul Beck is a member of this group. Hitler’s resisters even in his own country are in this group. They lost their heads in resisting; then they lost their actual heads.”

  “What about Raoul Wallenberg?”

  “And then there’s Raoul Wallenberg. Raoul belongs to his own group. Sometimes it’s not even a group, just a solitary soul. This is the fifth group, the apex. They come out of nowhere, or somewhere, the Garden of Eden—they can still smell the Garden of Eden—and they know what it takes to get us back there. They have no other reason to help or even save people other than that scent, that sense of the possibility of things. Raoul is the Second Coming. Or Raoul is the First Coming, depending on who it is you’re talking to, and he is the one foreseen by Isaiah. How else is he going to show up? Dressed in a toga? On a beam of light? No. He is a thin, balding young Swede who shows up in Budapest wanting to do good and is smart enough to figure out how to do it. Then one day he is taken away for his efforts, not from the Via Dolorosa, not even from Andrassy Avenue, but from a shitty street in Debrecen. And poof, he’s gone.”

  “When do you have these thoughts?” I asked him. “Can you think things while you’re swinging through the trees?”

  My brother cleared his throat and wiped his cheeks and nose on his sleeve, a bold move, since he liked to keep his shirts neat and clean.

  “Maybe it was the tree and the flowers,” I said.

  “What was, my dim-witted boy?” He sniffled.

  “What if it wasn’t the Lord at all who expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden? Maybe it wasn’t enough for them to slosh around among the flowers. You can have too many flowers,” I said.

  “Yes.” My brother pointed at me. “Yes, you can have too many flowers. Where is Noseboy when we need him?”

  “So maybe it was the flowers,” I said.