The Afterlife of Stars

by Joseph Kertes

  You felt as if you wanted a mighty wind to blow through, a driving rain. My brother suddenly held his head, held his helmet, actually. He had a strange look in his eyes. I didn’t need my flashlight to see that they were bloodshot. I shined the light all around us and at the pipes emptying into Shit River, trickling, gurgling, flowing out to the Seine to tint the ocean.

  All at once out of the far darkness came a yelp. A girl no older than I was, dressed only in a drab nightgown, flew at us. She grabbed on to Attila for a second. Her black hair was wild and her face crazed, even in the dim light. She couldn’t speak or catch her breath. Sirens sounded in her all the way down to her bare feet.

  We quickly knew the cause. An even wilder man, who could have passed for Rasputin, crashed into us and clutched the girl by the neck just as she let go of my brother. I thought we were finished, all of us. I was paralyzed.

  But Attila was not. He flashed his gun, and the girl squirmed out of the man’s grasp and flung herself at me, clinging, the way a cat might, all needles and softness and panting heart. Attila aimed the gun straight at the bearded man’s face and barked at him in Hungarian to let the girl go. The wildness shifted in the man’s eyes. I joined the assault with the beam of my flashlight, the girl took off, and, with a single brute shove, my brother toppled the man into the River Kaka.

  “Let’s go,” Attila said to me. “Now!”

  For a moment I couldn’t move, watching the girl go. I was in love with her already. I’d fallen for her as quickly as I’d fallen for Babette.

  Rasputin thrashed to the edge, left a wet handprint on the brick.

  “Let’s go!” my brother yelled again.

  I checked to see that the girl was gone—she was—and I ran after my brother, panting in the stench, strangely used to it. We ran and ran, down one tunnel then turned sharply into another. All of them somehow joined up, flowing together.

  As we slowed to a walk, we could hear the pipes whooshing, trickling, and flushing, all the garbage from above emptying down. It was like the march of water—water musicians, water clowns, water acrobats, water slaves, water killers, the childhood of water and the death of it.

  But there were no Russians there, no mother, no father, no Paul. We walked for hours. I was not hungry, only thirsty, but I would not have trusted any kind of drink available in this underground world.

  We came to a wall with a hole in it barely big enough for each of us to crawl through.

  “Let’s go,” my brother said. He looked more tired than I was. “I’ll help you through first.”

  It was even darker in this new chamber, and the water was quieter. As I helped my brother crawl through, my flashlight was aimed high at a sign: AVENUE DU COLONEL HENRI ROL-TANGUY.

  “Are we on a street?” I asked.

  “Below the street,” my brother said. “Everything here is below everything else. Look behind you.”

  I beamed my flashlight onto the walls around us and beyond us, down this new corridor, then dropped the light. I screamed like a girl.

  “The Catacombs,” my brother said. He slapped his helmet with his hand. “It’s an ossuary. I read about these.” I picked up the light again. My brother told me they were bones. The bones of the dead. Millions of dead. Moved here over the centuries from overloaded cemeteries. But also the dead of wars and street riots—the riots in the Place de Grève, he told me, and the rue Meslée. Many who fell during the French Revolution. People who died of the Black Death. And just people. Dead people. Dead French people.

  I gazed at the rows of bones. The wall of them went on far into the darkness. The bones had been arranged in a decorative way. On the top and bottom were arm bones and leg bones, laid out neatly in rows, like bone bricks. But above, below, and in the middle were the skulls, facing out in their own rows, as if they were watchmen.

  We followed a swath of red paint that rolled over a group of bones, but the bones nearest my brother had a heart painted over their surfaces, with an L and a G in the middle of the heart. L and G had come down here among the dead to be in love. I wondered if they had remembered that these bones were once other people, with flesh on their bones and eyes in their sockets, people who might also have been in love.

  To the right of the heart, against its swollen curve, an extra-small skull looked back at my brother and me. I thought of the little girl in the sewers. I took a step closer. I wanted to touch the small face, but it was not a face, only the bone behind it. I thought I might be taking a liberty, so I decided not to.

  “Attila, let’s go. Mom and Dad aren’t in the Catacombs. No one is here right now.”

  We climbed back out through the hole to the sewers. Their odors reminded us of their force.

  “Can we go home?” I said.

  “Not just yet. We can’t give up just yet. It’s a big network of sewers, and we have to keep looking, just for a while longer.” He put his hand on my shoulder, and I went with him to the left, where the sewers continued.

  I didn’t know if I believed Attila that our parents were in this place and that we would find them, free them, and beat a path back aboveground. But I felt I had no choice. I didn’t know how far we were going or where, underneath Europe, we were heading. I would not have found my way back alone, even on the streets above, and would not have known how to ask.

  The deeper in we wandered, the less I believed we would ever come up for air, and I don’t think Attila thought about it or even cared. He said we could stop again. He wanted to sit down on some stone steps leading up to a black steel door, but I stayed on my feet. From the building above us, water flushed into Poo River. Attila was holding his head again, rubbing the place near the bandage. I wished he would take off the helmet.

  And then the sound of voices echoed. They were coming this way.

  My brother said they might be Russians. “Finally,” he said. He got to his feet and took out his gun, but the voices sounded French. I was filled with a deep and sudden dread.

  Four boys, young men, French men—why wouldn’t they be French men?—turned a corner and walked right up to us as if they’d expected us to be there waiting for them. Two of them wore leather jackets. One of them was smiling. He lit a smoke with a lighter, and the flame flared wildly. I wondered if the sewers were flammable.

  A tall, thin man, one of two not wearing a leather jacket, slapped my brother on the helmet from behind and chuckled. He was slightly walleyed and appeared to be staring down Attila and me at the same time. He pointed to the swastika, and then he and the other one not wearing a leather jacket each thrust an arm straight out above them. They chanted, “Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!” and goose-stepped in a circle around my brother and me. The smoker released quite a cloud of smoke and then flicked his cigarette into the river. He joined the goose-steppers, and together the four of them circled Attila and me. Attila stood, trying to shield me from harm. I clutched the flashlight in my pocket. My brother raised his gun to the smoker’s face but took a terrible shove to the back, from somewhere above my head, and fell over. He sprang to his feet, and someone slapped him and said something to us in French.

  The only French words I knew were the words to “Habanera,” the song from Carmen, which I had sung to the Gypsy on the street in Budapest. I tried out a phrase weakly: “L’amour.” For my efforts I took a sharp slap. “L’amour! L’amour! L’amour! L’amour!” I said, chirping like a bird.

  A cloth-coated French boy—not the walleyed one—kicked me to shut me up, and I fell to one knee. My brother rushed to my side, then went mad and sprang with his gun at the smoking boy. He ground the muzzle into the boy’s cheek and screamed Hungarian swear words at him. Two of the thugs jumped back, but the one behind Attila walloped him again, and my brother pitched forward. The gun flew from his hand and cascaded along the stone floor. Attila started coughing, and when I went to embrace him, the last sound I heard was a wet thud at the back of my head.

  Seventeen

  I sank somewhere, possibly down into the
earth. I could taste grains of earth in my mouth, like poppy seeds, but then grains of light mixed in, and grains of sound. A woman’s voice. My name. I heard my name.

  It was my grandmother. “Robert. Oh, my Robert.”

  I opened my eyes and looked around me. I was in my brother’s bed in Aunt Hermina’s library, with a wet cloth on my forehead. This was the bed for head-injury cases, I guess. My own bed was empty. “Where’s Attila?” I asked.

  My grandmother’s face was grim, anxious. “My dear—you were brought back here by a guard in the city sewers. What on earth were you doing there?”

  “We were trying to rescue Mom and Dad. But where’s Attila?”

  My grandmother hesitated. “We don’t know,” she said. “We were hoping you could tell us when you woke up.”

  “Attila wasn’t with me?”

  “You were alone when the guard found you,” my grandmother said and took my hand. “Your parents are looking for your brother with Hermina. They’re down at the police station again.”

  I tried to sit up, but my grandmother wouldn’t let me.

  “Yes, your parents are all right, dear. They’re fine. A little shaken up, but they’ve been released. We were afraid we’d be sent back, but they couldn’t tell the Russians anything they wanted to hear. They were very lucky. If we can find Attila, we’ll all be very lucky.”

  I pictured my brother still lying down there in the sewers or dragged off somewhere by the thugs. I kept seeing that stupid helmet. Maybe the boys had yanked it off his head, kicked it around like a ball, kicked him again while he was down. Maybe he was walking the streets confused, not knowing who he was.

  Anything was possible. The idea blew up in my head. I gasped. I could barely catch my breath.

  Babette looked in on us then. She smiled broadly at me. I imagined she was glad to see me awake at last. She came over to stroke my cheek. I could see the love bite on her neck, the Mark of Attila.

  Over the following days, my parents and the kind Hungarian doctor were often with the police, down in the sewers, searching underneath Paris. My parents had gotten off lightly, as it happened. My mother was unharmed, and while my father had a black eye and a fat lip, both of them had come back alive.

  In bits of conversation between them and my grandmother and Aunt Hermina, I found out that my father did know something about Paul—a secret that he and Hermina had shared but hadn’t let on. There was a man they were calling a double agent, a Hungarian, who’d acted both for the Hungarians and for the Russians. Paul had been in the room in the Swedish embassy when this man warned Wallenberg not to meet with the Russians. He said they would take the Swede away, and they did. Then a few years later, after no one had seen Paul since he disappeared, he showed up out of nowhere in Paris at Hermina and Ede’s town house and stayed for a few days. Hermina said it was so he could meet with this same agent and try to find out about Wallenberg. She got hold of my father in Budapest to let him know, but then Paul disappeared again. Where was this man now, and where was Paul? And how had the Russians figured out that we were in Paris? We didn’t know the answers to these questions any more than we knew where my brother was.

  My grandmother and great-aunt took me all over the city to distract me from my distress about Attila: the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, out to Versailles, the Notre Dame Cathedral, with its fierce gargoyles, and café after café—Le Petit Château d’Eau, Les Deux Magots, over on Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and the Café de la Paix. I could have as much cake as I wanted as often as I wanted, and I did. I began to learn the names of the ones I decided I’d ask for again: éclairs, Jésuites, made with frangipane, madeleines, gâteaux Saint-Honoré, and a very favorite, bugnes, angel wings, ribbons of pastry sprinkled with sugar. In each place, I hoped to find a monkey, but not a single café thought to employ one.

  I fell in love with the Venus de Milo every bit as much as I had with the girl in the sewers and the girl with the lips at the convent, maybe more. Even as much as Babette, though possibly not Babette. I visited Venus three times. She stood there, in her lighted hall in the Louvre, and I loved the armlessness of her, the softness of her stone skin, the mad folds of her dress. She gave you the impression that a sculptor had begun a shape for her and then given her over to the wind and the rain and the moon to finish her, over time, over many years, but never aging her, never daring to. I wanted badly to bundle her up with me, offer her a pair of the long wooden hands of my great-aunt, and steal her far away.

  And each day when we got home, I raced in, hoping to find my brother. Each day, he was not there.

  One evening over dinner I said to my family, “I couldn’t stop him.” No one answered, so I said it again. “I couldn’t stop Attila.”

  “Why not?” my father asked.

  “Simon!” my mother said.

  “Why couldn’t he?” he said. He set down his fork.

  “Could you have stopped him?” my grandmother asked him. “Can I stop you? Can you stop yourself, once you get started?”

  My father got to his feet, squeezed my shoulder, and walked out.

  Aunt Hermina invited me into the solarium to hear something. “It’s my favorite show in English,” she said. “It’s from America. Come, let’s catch a bit of it.” She turned on the great wooden radio console and fidgeted with it to find the station. She even had to pull off a glove to get it right.

  A strange voice came on. He was singing.

  “It’s Jimmy Durante,” she told me. “Listen.”

  Jimmy was singing a sad song, but his voice was raspy, as if the dial weren’t quite set on it. I wanted to give him a candy for his throat, but his voice was as warm as could be. I wondered what my grandfather Robert’s voice had been like, whether it was raspy and warm too.

  When Jimmy wound down, the audience roared. He said, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”

  “What is he saying?” I asked.

  My great-aunt told me. I asked who Mrs. Calabash was, and she couldn’t say. “It might not be anyone, really,” she said, “or maybe she’s a friend, or she’s his sweetheart.”

  With a voice that warm, I wanted it to be his sweetheart, wherever she was.

  On the seventh day word came about Attila. It came in the morning by phone. I was having breakfast, the last one to do so, eating eggs again, poking the dark lace at the edge with my fork the way Attila always did.

  My brother had been found. He had washed up in the sewers somewhere, hardly identifiable, covered in sludge but still wearing his helmet.

  Eighteen

  Attila was buried right next to our uncle Ede in Père Lachaise Cemetery, over in the 20th arrondissement. The cemetery was an untidy gallery of sculptures, some of them angels, a single dog, some human figures, and some parts of humans—mostly hands and heads, praying hands or questioning heads and sad heads. They waited patiently for the wind and rain to take them away. But it was sunny on this day, and what wind there was whistled to the stones and visitors. My mother had lost her voice and her smile. She looked like someone sleepwalking. My grandmother took her by the hand and led her away from the grave.

  I remembered the Catacombs. I looked back over my shoulder to where we’d laid my brother, and I shuddered. Was it possible that we were just going to leave him there?

  My ears were ringing. I didn’t want my brother to have a headstone. I wanted him to have a monument worthy of the Statue Graveyard. But his statue wouldn’t wear a helmet like the one he had on in the sewers. Instead I’d have him sit in his own chair beside Mor Jokai at the head of our street back home.

  My father took my mother in his arms, and they swayed to and fro. They didn’t want to look back at my brother.

  My great-aunt said quietly to my grandmother, “Sometimes I feel more left behind than living.” Mamu looked at her sister as if to answer, but she didn’t.

  I hoped the going down of my brother was like everything else he did, just a switch—switch on, switch off. Sudden, not gradual.<
br />
  A bird zinged past us and landed on a nearby branch, where it began to sing like mad. What came first—music or birds? A question Attila might have asked. Did music live in the mind of the Lord up until the day he wrapped feathers and wings around it?

  Finally, we trudged out of Père Lachaise Cemetery, hanging on to pieces of each other. We must have looked scary, like a family damned, a family trying out for horror pictures.

  After that, Attila cast a blue light over everything. Every sight, every thought was tinged with it. And not the blue light of the sky but the blue of lanes and back alleys, where people meet in secret or pass through quickly on their way to better light. Sometimes the blue made a sound, a humming, and sometimes a soft ringing, which I tried to interpret just before it faded.

  I developed a rash. Often in this strange light I watched the blue flakes flying off me and studied them, considering whether any might be Attila, if I was what was left of the world. What would it feel like to die off and take flight, believing that a new cell would take your place, or not knowing for sure, not knowing anything for sure anymore?

  I picked at the blue flakes and asked them where they were going. Food for mites. Blue mite shit left behind to grow more things, upward toward the brighter blue sky.

  Nineteen

  It killed me that Attila never got to think and speak in English the way I can now. It was the strangest thing at first, like having a foreign invader living inside your head. If he could have, I know my brother would have asked his questions in English with the same force as always. He would be the cowboy rabbi. And he would have been the first to lead a search party for Mrs. Calabash.

  Mrs. Calabash was somewhere, if somewhere was anywhere. Somewhere was where Paul was. I wondered if we would ever find him, this man who had saved my family. Where would we begin to look and when? And would it matter?