The Afterlife of Stars

by Joseph Kertes

  “Yes,” my brother said. He was still pointing at me, pointing at the air. He started shouting. “The flowers saw a chance in Adam and Eve, and yes, you have it—you can have too many flowers, too much perfume. They saw a chance with the humans. They could spread the flowers outside the Garden. They could spread the flowers all over the world. The flowers rose up against them to cast them out of paradise. They thrust up their pink lady dicks with the seeds standing out of them. ‘Take us,’ they said. ‘Let us rub up against you and leave our essence on you, so you can scatter us, so your wicked children can plant garden after garden all over the world. We’ll color your planet. We’ll sweeten your planet, and if you don’t like color or sweetness, we have no use for you.’ And so they went forth, Adam and Eve and their wicked children, and their wicked children after them—or after the one, to be precise—and the joke was on them because of the cycle of things, my fawn-eyed boy. You spend the rest of eternity trying to get back to the Garden. You have a live electrical wire that drives you on, drives you toward that golden land, in whatever feeble or misguided or half-witted way you think you can make it. Yes, a spark, a live wire.”

  My brother was standing now, quite straight and tall. I said, “I think yours is more live than other people’s wires, until it’s switched off.”

  “We have a job to do,” he said, ignoring me. “If we don’t do something while Paul might still be alive, we’ll be banning him a second time from our lives.”

  “What if he doesn’t want us to find him? What if he’s had enough of us? It’s been more than ten years.”

  “We have to find him, maybe even Raoul after him, with Paul’s help. We wouldn’t be here, still roaming among the grasses and rocks, if they hadn’t come along. This is history we’re talking about, the making of history. History isn’t finished.”

  He took off his helmet, turned toward the trunk, and then, with a flourish, spun around again. A gun had appeared in his hand—an impressive one.

  I leapt to my feet. “Where did you get that?”

  The door of the shed opened. My brother shoved the gun behind him. Our mother and grandmother were standing there. “What are you two doing in here?” asked our mother. Then she noticed some of the items on the lid of the trunk. “Oh, no.”

  “We have to find Paul and Raoul and Colonel Dortmund,” Attila announced.

  Our mother gasped. “What are you saying?”

  Mamu was calmer. “Come and eat breakfast,” she said. “You still haven’t had breakfast.”

  “We can’t delay.” My brother looked at me. His fury fumes beat their wings around me until I would have to rise with him or against him. There was no middle ground.

  “We’ll have breakfast,” our grandmother said. “That long we can delay.”

  Babette was whipping up a fresh batch of omelets flecked with mushrooms. Our mother and grandmother sat with us. Our father was in the room that had been given to our parents, and Hermina was playing Handel in the solarium. I could hardly hear the music—my father had probably asked her to keep it down—but I could hear her voice, singing along with the record.

  “My sister’s replacing all my records,” our grandmother said, “the ones that were lost and even the ones I left behind at home. She’ll be shipping them to us, wherever we end up.” She sighed. I pictured the night my father had broken some of her records, the night Judit died. It seemed far away and long ago. Our mother put her hand over our grandmother’s.

  Babette smiled at each of us in turn as she brought us our eggs. My brother was brooding. He didn’t even take notice of Babette, much less breathe in the cream of her skin. Nor did he ask a single question of anyone. He didn’t roll out his thesis about mushrooms, even though we were eating some. He didn’t ask, “How many people, through trial and error, do you suppose, consumed mushrooms and then died before we realized which ones we could eat and which ones we couldn’t?” He didn’t say, “Since word traveled poorly in the first mushroom-eating days, in how many tribes, hamlets, or labyrinths of caves did bad-mushroom eating occur before the news spread and a conclusion could be drawn and then relayed back throughout the land? Also, was the mushroom an attractive item to consume compared to an orange or an apple, never mind a peach, even though biting into the first peach must have been a little like biting into a juicy cardigan?”

  Babette poured each of us a glass of milk. She swooped around my brother’s shoulder to pour, resting there too long, I thought. I was more than a little jealous. This was the first time in a long time that I had an inkling of a new category to be added to Fluttering Things and Glowheads, and to be called Creamy Goodness.

  Yet my brother was unmoved. A butterfly of light fluttered on his face as he drank. We were all waiting for something out of him. But all he did was stare down at his plate, picking with his fork at the lacy edge of his egg.

  Our father came into the kitchen just as my brother and I were finishing. The music stopped, and Hermina joined us too. Her curved pink hands were naked in the daylight. She had bought my brother and me matching sailor outfits, complete with caps, and she presented them to us now. My brother looked grimly at his outfit and wouldn’t take it.

  I put on my sailor’s cap to make Hermina feel better.

  Babette cleared away our plates and glasses as she smiled broadly at us all and said something sweet-sounding in French.

  “Boys, just because we’re refugees,” our father said, “doesn’t mean we can’t be tourists too. We are privileged, thanks to our generous relative. She has agreed to take us to see some of Paris’s legendary sights.”

  Aunt Hermina clapped her hands together, but instead they clopped, on account of their hollowed-out shape.

  Attila stood up, faced her, and said, “We have to find Paul. Robert and I know what happened. We know everything. We can’t wait. We have work to do.”

  A storm formed behind my father’s eyes. It was a look he shared with Attila. “How do you know?” He spoke calmly. He looked at the women. “It’s been more than a decade,” he went on. “We have tried, believe me. We don’t know what happened to the dear man, but if he ever reappeared I’d give him anything he asked for, anything I could, not that we have much anymore.”

  “He’s not just going to show up after all this time,” Attila said and slapped his side. “Especially after what happened. We have to search for him.”

  Our father took Attila’s shoulders in his grip. “You have to forget Paul Beck,” he said. “Paul is trouble. Wallenberg was trouble, and Paul might have followed him.”

  Attila shrugged free. He was shaking. “So you agree with that man on the bus. Is that what you’re saying, Father? That Paul was a menace? Raoul Wallenberg was a menace?”

  “Of course I’m not saying that.”

  “Paul’s not trouble,” Attila said. “He stood in the way of trouble, like Raoul.”

  Hermina clopped her hands together again. “But Paul was trouble. Thank God for his trouble, that darling man.”

  “Yes,” our father said. “Of course, Paul stood in the way of trouble.” He was speaking calmly. “Paul needed to assert himself. He needed to be who he was. And my father, your grandfather, needed to be who he was, to assert himself, to be the head of his household and assert what he thought was right. That’s all. We were past considerations of saviors—who was one and who wasn’t. Saviors often go unappreciated. It’s the nature of the calling.” Everyone stared at our father, but no one spoke. “Now, here’s what we are going to do today,” he said, taking hold of my brother again. “We are going into Paris to see one of the great European wonders. There is no other city like it. I don’t know when we’ll be back here. Certainly I will not be back.”

  Looking straight into our father’s eyes, Attila said, “Do you think it’s all right just to drop your cousin from your thoughts? I’m not talking about Raoul Wallenberg or Jesus Christ. I’m talking about Paul. He saved us. Without him we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now. The l
east we can do is find out what happened to him. We can’t be cowards now.”

  “I’m sorry to have disappointed you,” our father said with a steely evenness in his voice. “No one questions your suitability as a child. Why do you question mine as a parent?”

  “What?” Attila asked, and our father was about to answer, but our mother stepped between them. My brother turned and marched off to our room. My father had a murderous look. I thought of Medea and quickly followed my brother.

  Our mother brought our sailors’ suits to us. She did this right away, too soon. She said gently, “Attila.”

  “Please!” he snapped, and she withdrew.

  I got into my suit, including the cap, as my brother stared out the library window. He wouldn’t look at me or answer me, and when I put my hand on his shoulder, he brushed it away. After quite some time, I heard music again, not a record this time, but our great-aunt, singing softly down the hall in the solarium. I wanted to please her with my outfit, so I made my way down. She was swaying as before, hugging her shoulders with the claws of her hands, and dancing with herself. I walked boldly in. She noticed the outfit and smiled and took me in her arms to join in her swaying. My cap fell off.

  “What is it?” I asked, but she kept singing, smoothing the hair at the back of my head. I was very hot. The song was quiet and seemed, at moments, to stand still, the notes hanging there in the quiet.

  “It is by Rameau. Castor et Pollux,” my great-aunt said.

  Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux…

  She sang the lyrics to the aria, singing out the story to me as we danced. “Sad finish, pale flames,” she translated. “They’re brothers.”

  “Who are?”

  “Castor and Pollux. They’re brothers from ancient Greece,” she sang. “But they’re different in one important way. They have the same mother. Her name is Leda. But Castor’s father is a person, a human, while Pollux’s father is Zeus.”

  “The god,” I said.

  “Yes, the god of gods.” Hermina stopped singing. She was speaking now, too close to my ear, I felt, as we continued to dance, and she held me with her bird hands. “Zeus appears to Leda in the form of a swan and—” Hermina paused. “They unite,” she said.

  “With the swan?” I tried to pull back, but my great-aunt returned to her singing, the same haunting tune. “Why was it a swan? Why wasn’t it a serpent or a lion or a wolf, possibly?”

  “No, he is a swan, but a swan infused with the power and sorcery of Zeus. After a time, Leda lays an egg from which the brothers hatch.

  “One day on a battlefield, Castor is slain. Pollux lifts up his lifeless brother, holds him up to heaven, shakes the body, loose as a skeleton already. Zeus smiles down upon them, and do you know what Zeus does for the two brothers?” I shook my head. “Zeus raises the two brothers to the heavens in the form of the constellation Gemini.”

  “Gemini! I know the brothers. I know that constellation. And Castor and Pollux are the brightest stars in it!”

  “I thank you,” my great-aunt said, “for putting on the sailor suit.”

  I blushed as if I had been exposed, and she sang the soothing notes of the song again. I was moved by the song even more this second time. “I love this song,” I said, “those notes, how they go together, as if they’ve always been together.”

  My great-aunt was delighted with my remark but paused before answering me. She was still humming, singing some words.

  Then she said, “Those notes, those holy notes.” She put both hands on her heart. And she sang once more and hummed.

  “Aunt Hermina,” I said, after another moment, and I did so as warmly as I could, “why do you sing so many songs about dead children?”

  She stopped singing. She sat down on a chair and covered her mouth with the bowls of her hands. “Oh,” she whispered. And then she was about to say something else but didn’t. She looked distracted. I didn’t know what else to say either. I bent down to hug my great-aunt but couldn’t manage it. She was slumped over a bit, not in hugging mode, so I slowly backed out of the solarium instead.

  I returned to the library and sat on my bed. My brother was still there, his back to me, busy with things on the desk. But after a long time, he finally broke the terrible silence. He’d been studying maps he’d found in the desk drawers and turned to see if I wanted to go into the city, as our father had promised.

  “Yes,” I said, very happy about the change in his mood.

  He went out to the salon to ask our mother to ask our father if he was still willing to take us. Our father said he was not.

  “But you have to,” she told him.

  “I do not.”

  “Yes, my darling,” our grandmother said. “You have to. These are your boys, and they have a chance to see Paris, and we cannot leave until they do.”

  Just as he relented, someone banged at the front door quite hard and then banged again. It sounded like a fist. Aunt Hermina came out of the solarium, but Babette was ahead of her. We all followed. Babette opened the door with a smile.

  Two burly men dressed in suits and trench coats stood there, blocking out the light. They asked for my parents by name: “Simon Beck, Lili Beck.” But when Hermina asked in French what they wanted, we realized the men were not French. They were Russian. They said something in Russian, and each took one of my parents by the arm. Attila threw himself at them, but one of the men swatted him away. My brother went flying against the wall and crumpled to the floor. Our mother screamed, but they pulled a burlap hood over her head and another over our father’s head. They hustled our parents out to a waiting car and sped away.

  Sixteen

  “Where are they taking them?” I asked. I was sobbing, gasping for air. I was thinking about where the German officers had taken our Aunt Hermina and Uncle Ede.

  My brother was out cold on the floor. He had a cut over his eye, and Babette ran to get something for him. My grandmother and great-aunt, the calm and calming sisters, looked ready to pull at each other, to pluck out feathers if they had any.

  For a moment, only Babette seemed to know what to do. She arrived with a linen towel to hold over my brother’s eye while she cradled his head in her lap.

  Hermina seemed to want to rake her own face with her hands. “I’ll call a doctor,” she said. She said something else to Babette, in French, and Babette agreed. “I know the chief of police,” Hermina said. “I’ll call him. We’ll go straight to him. We’ll get your parents back. But first the doctor.”

  Mamu, Babette, and I moved Attila into the library and laid him down on his bed. He groaned but didn’t open his eyes. One eyelid had already swollen. Babette switched on the lamp above his head and kissed him on the forehead. She kissed me too, and she had me hold the cloth while she went to get other things.

  I stared at my brother and whispered his name, but he didn’t answer. Then I barked his name, but he didn’t even flinch. On the desk there were maps of France and Paris, along with a French-Hungarian dictionary. I pulled the chair back from the desk; underneath it Attila had stashed the German helmet from the shed, the war helmet with the eagle and the swastika. Inside it were the flashlight and the pistol.

  It came over me in a wave that our parents were gone. What if they were gone for good? What if Attila was going now too? I had to suck back a new round of sobbing, but in its place I uncorked a flood of hiccuping. I’d be an orphan. I’d be parentless, brotherless. Yes, I’d still be grandmotherful and auntful, but it was too much to consider all at once. Not one of the things that was happening so quickly seemed right or earned or natural. I was hoping we had sidestepped history by taking this detour into France, but I guess I was wrong. It probably would not have suited my brother, in any case, to sidestep history. If he had seen it looking the other way, he would have redirected its focus back on us in a hurry.

  I turned to him again. There he lay still in the lamplight, shiny, pink, appled up for the New World—he made no sense this way. He breathed in thinly and bre
athed out through the reeds of his throat. The books around us seemed to huddle in a conference over him, like a secret society. I gently pried open his unharmed eyelid—he had the dead glass look of the hanging man. I let the lid fall. I felt myself salting up again. There were bad omens floating in the air, soap bubbles of them, and I wanted to pop them. I wished my great-aunt would sing. I wished she would put on some music, something to distract me, to wake my brother, to lure an angel to slip in through the window.

  That was exactly what we needed. In what creature other than an angel did fluttering things, glowheads, and creamy goodness overlap? She’d be a wonder. My brother would spring straight up in bed if he saw her. He’d feed off her. She’d be humming a melody for all the ages, but my brother would want to know first why she looked like us. Why was she an extra-beautiful version of ourselves? Why did she have hair? Did she have hair in the other places too? In other words, was she almost entirely like us? Did she have internal organs or just airy ones, celestial ones? Did she have a scent, or was it something only Noseboy could detect? Never mind the wings. He would be pawing them like mad. He’d ask if they were designed only for shuttling up and down, or for flying to and fro as well, the way a bird does. She wouldn’t need to cruise like a gull, surely, or swoop like a hawk after spying the movement of a field mouse in the grass. What would be the point of it? Attila would inspect her closely, wanting to know how the wings attached to the back, wanting to pluck out a feather, keep one for later study, but then find that he couldn’t, that these were not bird feathers but something more durable—dateless feathers, feathers without end, wings without equal, something crystalline rather than feathery. He’d be touching the angel as she hummed, handling her overly, admiring her angelic boobs. What would an angel’s boobs be for except to admire? He would want to know if she was part of the cycle of things. Was she the afterlife of sheep or something more, a dead soldier in a field, the brass buttons on his coat, a toppled statue, or the light of an old star? What about numerals, the parts of speech—adjectives, adverbs, pronouns? And what about events? Could you throw a whole event into the makeup of an angel—the storming of the Bastille, the coronation of the Emperor Franz Josef, the first flight of the Hindenburg, the discovery of penicillin? How about events that had not yet happened to go with the timeless wings and airy organs—relocating Eden, having a picnic on Mars? Could you not—should you not—blend these all together in an angel so that she could carry down a melody from heaven for you to play?