The Afterlife of Stars

by Joseph Kertes

  A week after we buried my brother, we boarded a ship called the Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Nantes, an old slaving port, my grandmother told me. She held my mother’s hand quite a bit of the time. The two sat staring at a radio in our cabin, though the radio was not on. Sometimes they bobbed like someone rocking a baby. My mother had taken to not speaking to my father at all, so I was concerned about both of them. My father spent hours in the ship’s bar, but thirst was not the issue, so the one-eyed drink stared up at him, neglected, the whole day through.

  I heard my grandmother whisper to my mother in the dark one night that Attila’s death was senseless, like the deaths of my mother’s parents and brothers and sisters in the Hitler war. But what death was sensible? In my 9.8 years on earth, almost 9.9, I had not yet encountered a death that made sense. It was hard to understand what Adam and Eve had set in motion. Even they must have had trouble understanding once Cain and Abel went at each other.

  Now and again, I picture my golden brother lying there in that box in the ground at Père Lachaise, the worms nibbling away at his thoughts and questions, and not even silkworms.

  I’d added my brother to my Afterlife Portfolio, elevated him to the head of it, above the sheep and the dead men and Judit, not to mention Medea’s children, Mermeros and Pheres, as well as Castor and Pollux, the Brothers Goose, the Brothers Grimm, the Brothers Karamazov, and even the stars.

  Attila and I didn’t mean for the fish to take wing or the stars to tell us old stories. We didn’t want to offend anyone. We meant only to ask questions.

  When we were boarding the ship, my parents let me take my brother’s satchel along with my own. A porter helped with our new suitcases, and my father carried both of the satchels for me. He also carried a cloth bag holding the two Mark Twain books together in their leather case. It wasn’t until we were in our cabin that I opened my brother’s bag for the first time. In it, he had several items, including his Scarecrow Pez, the letters to Hermina from Mamu, the Schutz-Passes, and his cowboy gun, belt, and spurs, of course, plus a hunting knife. But I was surprised to find that he had also stashed away my crayon drawing of the sunflowers, the one I thought I’d lost.

  Maybe my brother had been wrong about the sun. Maybe the sun’s aim was to set fire to the sky, but it wasn’t strong enough. It was very strong, but not strong enough to do that. The sun could have been a fluttering thing just as easily as a ball, fanning out waves of light and gusts of warmth. I kept taking out my brother’s picture of the Spitfire and the sun firing out rays in the same way, and holding it next to my drawing of the sunflowers.

  The very first night at sea, my father asked if I wanted to get some air. He still had his black eye, but it was fading to purple and violet now, like smeared makeup. We stood out on deck together. At last he was going to say something, I could tell, and I wondered what I’d answer. But there was that blue film again—we were both looking through it—and he didn’t say a thing. He just took hold of the back of my neck, put a soft clamp on it, and then walked away, leaving me alone.

  I turned back to the ocean, and for a second I thought I’d seen a shape out on the water. I couldn’t make out what it was or who it was. I wanted to call out to it, but then the shape folded itself into the dark water again.

  I wondered where my brother was at the moment. I didn’t really believe he was in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Had he stopped off on the moon for a break from his long journey? But there was hardly any moon that night. It was black out, a deep black, as black up and down and ahead and behind us as it must have been the day God had decided to switch on the light. I thought of all that unmade light, all the unmade eyes waiting to receive it, and wondered where the Lord must have bundled it.

  But even the black was tinged with blue, and in this bluing over of things, I thought again that I spotted something out on the water. I was certain it was my brother, a good-size tail glinting up behind him. He was a blue merman except with golden hair, even in this light. I felt a rush—was he waving to me? Mouthing something? I was desperate to answer. I called out his name like mad. He mouthed something else, but I could not read his lips. Still I felt strangely uplifted.

  I don’t know what’s next after humans. I was hoping Attila could ask the Powers That Be and send me a signal.

  There was a cooing behind me. When I turned, a young woman was sitting on a bench under the glow of a deck light, feeding her nipple to her excited infant, who could have passed, with its black fuzzy hair, for a monkey. When the little thing had latched on finally, the woman babbled joyously at her baby, and I thought, at first, she must have been Hungarian. But it was only the sounds that were familiar, not the words.

  Her baby was as content as could be—and what a clever size it was! You’ve got to wonder: What came first—the design of the womb or the size of the baby? Should it be just big enough to take up shelter inside its mother? What an interesting challenge it must have been for the Lord. Should I make the baby small, the size of a guppy, make a thousand of them at a time? Should I make it bigger but still small enough to grow inside an egg until it can break free? How about a full-size newborn—have it grow until it’s as big as its mother, turning her inside out to break free? Or how about unfurling it from her mouth, like a magician’s mouth, like a long ribbon remaking itself before her eyes?

  After realizing that the young mother was not Hungarian, I’d given up hope of seeing anyone I knew when, walking on deck the next evening, I ran into the tall boy who’d been on the rival swim team from Saint Hilda’s School in Budapest, the boy whose name my brother had forgotten and who had forgotten my brother’s name. It turned out the boy’s name was Sandor. I wished I could tell Attila.

  “Where’s your brother?” the boy asked me.

  “He didn’t make it,” I said. I told him the story, and Sandor shrugged, looked down a distance at his feet, then asked if I wanted to see something. “Sure,” I said.

  He took me to his cabin and pulled out a radio from under his bed. “It’s a shortwave,” he said. He plugged it in and fiddled quite a bit with it and then said, “Listen.”

  There was static, but a man’s voice, a radio announcer, broke through the crackle.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a radio station from Canada,” Sandor said. “Ontario. He’s saying the weather.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know some English. My mother is English.”

  “What’s the man saying?” I asked.

  “The man is saying snow—there’s a lot of snow falling. It’s a weather forecast, and he’s naming the Ontario counties and towns. An early blast of winter—in November!”

  “Snow,” I repeated, my new English word.

  We listened. The radio man’s voice sounded soft and calm. I did not know the names then, but I have heard them many times since, lying alone in my room, listening to the feathery snow tick against the window as I wait for sleep: Essex, Kent, Lambton, Elgin, Middlesex: snow, high of twelve. Huron, Perth, Grey, Bruce, Waterloo, Wellington, Oxford, Brant: snow, heavy at times, high of eight. York, Durham, Belleville, Quinte, Northumberland: snow, mixed with freezing rain. Peterborough and the Kawarthas, Parry Sound, Muskoka: heavy snow, whiteout conditions through the night, and bitterly cold, high of minus twenty-two. Algonquin, Renfrew, Pembroke, Barry’s Bay: periods of snow, clearing in the morning, high of eight. Ottawa, Prescott, Russell, Cornwall, Morrisburg: light snow, but very cold, high of minus seven. Wawa, the Sault, Cochrane, Timmins, Lake of the Woods: whiteout conditions, high of minus twenty.

  It sounded as if the gentle radio announcer were calling each of his children to bed, by name, one by one.

  I went back out on deck after that to watch the great beast of a ship sloshing along, clearing a path through all those fluttering, quivering, and slithering things in the deep waters below us, a path through all that striving. The sky was a clear black but flecked with stars, like notes flung over the hood of the Atlantic, glowheads each and ev
ery one. I swear I could hear them twinkle. Twinkle is too childish a word, but look at them. How else can you say it? It’s what they want you to say.

  Acknowledgments

  I am deeply grateful to Byrd Leavell and Julie Stevenson for taking a chance on me, and to Mike Sacks for recommending me to Byrd. I thank my editor at Little, Brown, the inimitable Ben George. What hours and love he put into this novel! I also thank Ben Allen, Ashley Marudas, Tracy Williams, Sarah Haugen, as well as the many other good people at Little, Brown.

  I thank the people who gave me advice on earlier versions of the manuscript: foremost among them Ken Ballen, but also Richard Bausch, Barbara Berson, David Bezmozgis, Andrew Clark, Trevor Cole, Margaret Hart, Peter Kertes, and Antanas Sileika. I thank two eternal fans: Athena Papageorge and Vassiliki Daskalaki.

  I thank my dear Helen, Angela, Natalie, Peter, Jordan, Rob, and now Dylan, who have cheered me on all these years.

  About the Author

  Joseph Kertes was born in Hungary but escaped with his family to Canada after the revolution of 1956. He studied English at York University and the University of Toronto. His novel Gratitude won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction. Kertes founded Humber College’s distinguished creative writing and comedy programs. Until recently, he was Humber’s dean of creative and performing arts.

  @josephkertes

  josephkertes.com

  Also by Joseph Kertes

  Gratitude

  Boardwalk

  Winter Tulips