The Afterlife of Stars

by Joseph Kertes

  Attila waited for me. Once I made it to the lip of the boot, I was surprised to see how cavernous it was inside, taller than I was and much darker than the bright day. My brother gestured to me to raise the rope ladder—pull it up with all my might—and let it fall inside the boot. I watched him do it first with his ladder, then I did mine. The ladder was bony and heavy. I didn’t think to use it once I had dropped it in and instead slithered down into the boot. I took quite a spill, landing on my shoulder at the bottom. I’d heard my brother sensibly drop feetfirst into his boot.

  What now? I was quaking, my teeth clacking. I looked up into Stalin’s blue heaven. I was overcome with dread that we would soon become the Brothers Corpse and that it would have been a more glorious death to be strung up in the Oktogon. If we were to come out of this alive, my father would beat us, as he must. The inside of the boot darkened for a moment, and I thought what a good idea clouds were. I wondered what paintings of the sky would look like without them. We’d have to use a very rich blue without them, very pure, and without any brushstrokes showing. And what about rain? My brother always questioned whether things had been created or had evolved.

  “It is interesting to think about things evolving,” he once told me. “But it’s more dazzling to think of them as being created.” He said, “People want there to be a God. They need it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you can’t pray to evolution.”

  For me, at the time, the difference was only a matter of gradual versus sudden. Though I struggled with such things, I was less concerned about them than interested in just the fact of them. What, I wondered, must it have been like to be the first person to experience rain? What are these? There’s a heavenly river, and it is breaking up. These are pieces of river. Pieces of lake. What is going on? Am I going to shrink or expand or drink or drown?

  A shot clanged against my boot or Attila’s. My teeth clattered like mad, like something loose inside me, a box of buttons.

  Then, just as suddenly, a calm settled over me like a gossamer net. Was this the end? Would they find us in these boots? Would Attila jump out like the warrior rebel he was and take the bullet he was born to take? Would the Hungarians come to finish Stalin and complete their triumph? Would the Russians come first and fill the boots with concrete instead, monuments to Stalin, the Ever Standing? If they found my brother and me, would they make examples of us, chain us to the boots until the vultures came to peck out our eyes? Was there honor in that?

  The soldier of the Oktogon dangled before my eyes like a clear statement, and I knew that Attila and I would not die like legends but like jokes, the Brothers Grimm without a tale, our family shaking their heads, not allowing our names to be uttered again.

  Attila was quiet in his boot. I wanted to call out to him but felt it best not to. I edged my way into the dark front of the boot, where Stalin’s toes would have been, and then Attila loudly whispered my name. I crawled away from the toe, and he was there at the top of my boot. He must have pulled himself up.

  “Let’s go, my tender love,” he said. “It’s all clear.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Look at me. I’m not being shot at.” He climbed down into my boot and lifted me onto the rope ladder, pushing me up before climbing out himself.

  We flew down Damjanich Street and almost ran into a tank clattering to the right of us. These beasts bruising around the streets were less like vehicles and more like instant buildings plopped down in the middle of the street, daring you to pass.

  A squad of young men and a single young woman, a brunette with a determined look on her pretty red face, turned a corner and came toward us. They were chanting, “Szabadsag! Szabadsag!”—Liberty! Liberty!—and waving a Hungarian flag with its familiar bars of red, white, and green, but with the Communist insignia at its center cut out, leaving a hole.

  More shots were fired from somewhere, clipping the stone face of a nearby building. The squad of young people scattered. My brother grabbed me by the shoulder and yanked me into a doorway guarded by two stone lions. They stood on their hind legs, holding up the entrance, seeming to hold up the whole building. Sometimes it was angels who watched over an entrance, sometimes shapely stone maidens. But these were lions. It must have been a very heavy building. Stone lions will do things for you that real ones won’t.

  We waited several minutes, waited for quiet, before tiptoeing out and veering swiftly to the left until we got to Rakoczi Street. I could not catch my breath—I didn’t even want to try. I could breathe later, I told myself.

  Up ahead, a man stood calmly outside the Urania movie theater. He was dressed in a brown gabardine suit and wore a matching brown fedora. He was lighting a cigarette, turning away from the wind that brought us. The Urania was white and had Moorish windows. It always beckoned like a foreign land, like an exotic Arabian bazaar laden with wild and exquisite gifts, gifts with horns and warm gems.

  We caught up to the man just as he exhaled his first full puff of smoke, and a shot sounded, taking off his hat. For a stark and childish moment, I tried, in my own mind, to trace the path of the bullet through the man’s head as it knocked over everything in its path: his day, his night, his next puff of smoke, his dinner plate of veal paprikas, his smiling daughter holding up a glass to the light to see if it was cracked, his wife entering the dining room with the wine, wiping a damp hand on her apron.

  The bullet might as well have struck us too, my brother and me.

  “Let’s go!” Attila snapped. He pulled me straight through the doors of the Urania, the white doors splattered now with blood.

  An unsuspecting young woman, no bigger than a fawn, sat in her ticket booth. She smiled at us.

  I was gasping, panting. “A man has been shot,” I said.

  “A man?” She rose with a creak from her chair to look out, raised her hand to her heart. “Oh,” she said. The hand went to her mouth. She started to cry, sobbing, then hiccuping.

  “This way,” Attila said.

  “What?” she said. She was still looking outside, probably at the blood on the glass.

  “Now!” snapped my brother. “Now,” he repeated, more gently. He was pointing into the theater, the promised darkness.

  My teeth were clattering again. The fawn girl’s white skin had turned blotchy with fright, her eyes wide and a crazed white. She pattered to the front of the theater near the screen and straight out a side door. I thought we were going to follow, but my brother pulled me down low into the seat beside him.

  There, in the darkness, Tarzan unleashed a sound like a jungle aria. The Urania was showing Tarzan the Ape Man. The theater was majestic, with its tall Arabian arches. A young couple sitting in a private box above us ignored Tarzan and Jane. They were making a meal out of each other’s ears and lips. Would their love shrink when they found the fallen man outside? Would Tarzan have stopped to help the man in the brown suit?

  Attila stared at the screen.

  So we were going to sit now and watch a movie? We had just seen a real man’s head explode, but now we’d watch Tarzan the Ape Man? There was an absoluteness to events as Attila lived them. It is sleep time, and now I will sleep. It is eating time, and now I will eat. It is ducking-into-a-theater time, and now I will duck. Once in the theater, I will watch a movie, which is what we do in a theater.

  I could not draw one deep breath. Tarzan fought a lion. Jane was pretty. Tarzan swam with crocodiles. Jane loved Tarzan. Tarzan trumpeted through the jungle. Cheetah cringed. But where was Kaiser Laszlo? Where was the man in the brown hat? Who would carry him away? What time was it? Had the Russians expelled our parents? Did our parents think we were dead?

  “I’m going,” I said and got to my feet. Attila couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. “I’m going,” I said again, and marched toward the front of the theater, where the fawn had disappeared.

  Attila slapped at the armrest but followed. I took a last look up at the solitary couple in the box, but they had
no interest in the world beyond their faces. Attila heaved open the side door with his bum. The sun’s yellow smack blinded us, but we ran through it toward home as a cool wind blew up from the Danube, flecked with dust and leaves. Soon enough we could make out the familiar landmarks of our neighborhood and let down our guard a little. It was not until then that I finally found the meat of the air and gulped it.

  I stopped for a moment. “Why did they shoot the man with the brown hat?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” my brother said. He took my hand.

  “What was the man doing?” I asked.

  “He was lighting a smoke.”

  “And he got shot for that?”

  I stopped, but Attila pulled us along. “Not for that,” he said. “For stopping where he did, for being a standing target. For sport.”

  We got home just ahead of the Russians, who were late. When we slipped through the door, we were met by our father. I’d never seen him in such a fury. He was a snorting bull. He lifted Attila by the collar of his shirt, a mighty act, since my brother was almost full grown.

  “You Russian!” Attila shouted at him.

  Our father banged Attila up against the wall. But the matadors swooped down on them: Andras, Judit, our mother and grandmother. My father let Attila down but raised his fist like a biblical figure at both of us.

  “Don’t hit them!” Judit said. She embraced her swollen stomach, gasping and looking as if she might faint. “Oh,” she said to her belly. She staggered back into the living room with the help of her husband.

  But our mother had already slipped between our father’s raised fist and my brother’s golden head. Our mother hugged and kissed my brother and me strenuously, squeezing too hard. “My lambs, my lambkins,” she said.

  Our grandmother stood behind her, the disappointment on her face equal to my father’s fury, as if her faith in life had been shaken, her faith in love. Just as she hugged me hard too, Attila broke free, bellowed like Tarzan, pounded his chest, and flew off to our room. I lost my breath again. My heart took off without a runner. The dead man in brown rose up in front of me.

  My father snorted and slapped at his sides. “We have to go.”

  “Simon,” my mother said through her tears. “We have our sons back.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And we have to go. Now!”

  We went to get our few things. When we returned to the vestibule, we could hear Judit in the living room with Andras. “The Russians are distracted just now,” Andras was saying, “but not for long. They’ll send in reinforcements, and when they do, we’ll be stuck here. Our baby will be born here and grow up here.”

  “Is that so bad?” Judit whispered. “We grew up here.”

  “It will be bad, worse than we have known.”

  A short while later, Andras and Judit joined us in the hall. We were all leaving together, Andras and Judit included. They had brought their bags to our apartment, including Andras’s dentist’s case, as well as a rolled-up carpet, a very old Persian one featuring a bird of paradise, which they treasured. My father pulled his leather satchel, which contained his tool-and-die instruments, onto his shoulder.

  Minutes later, the Russians came, not a friendly group like the first one, and they pointed the way outward, out of our home.

  Two

  My father had arranged for a small Hungarian army truck to take us to the Keleti railway station. The truck was waiting for us at the corner of our street, where the statue of Mor Jokai gazed out at Andrassy Avenue. Judit and Andras climbed into the back. Andras asked Attila and me what had taken us so long.

  “We went to look at something,” Attila said right away.

  “Come, get in,” Judit said. “Come, boys.” She was patting the bench seat on either side of her. She looked shiny red and bursting. A couple of Hungarian soldiers helped us load our belongings into the back.

  It was not far to the station. People were cheering and chanting. A tank with the familiar red Russian star sat dead but still fuming in front of the station. Teenagers danced around the steel beast, waving the flags of Hungary with the holes cut out of the center. “Out, tyrants,” they were singing, and chanting. “Freedom, freedom, freedom.”

  Behind them rose the Keleti station, as great and grand a palace as any ever made. Here, the train emperors and empresses rolled in and out, in and out, welcomed by the great glass eyes and arms of the building. A stone angel sat at its crown, flanked by attendants and steeds, blessing the path.

  But when we stepped inside, the imperial trains were already choked with people. There was such a frenzy in the station that it seemed as if everybody wanted to take flight, but we were all pinned down by gravity, penned in by the way-high roof and rafters. I looked around for some of my classmates. It would have been nice to see Mary now, just to know she was heading out too, her notes about decimal points stashed in her bag. I couldn’t see anyone I knew. A man walked by us with a small table upside down on his head. Its legs were smooth and curved like a lady’s. We pushed in, and I found someone my age. He was gripping a dog—too tightly, I thought—a terrier, who looked at me with furry eyes. I wanted to pet the dog, but he was having none of it—nor was his owner, who moved away.

  “Sold out,” we started to hear. “Sold out for today and tomorrow. No seats. Sold out.”

  The last of the ticket windows was closing. A single uniformed attendant weaved through the crowd, telling people they could spend the night on the cots around the sides of the building, where the soldiers used to sleep. “Find yourself a cot,” he was telling people, “or please return home.”

  Beside us, Judit groaned.

  “Can you not find two seats on the train?” our mother asked the attendant, gesturing toward Judit and Andras. “Just for them?” She smiled her radiant smile.

  “Please,” Andras said to the man.

  “I have no seats,” the man said. “I don’t even have standing room.” He hurried away.

  My father had on a look like someone overcooked, ready to burst into flame. “We need tickets!” he shouted to no one in particular. The attendant hurried away from us. “Tickets! I’ll pay double for tickets!”

  “Simon!” our mother said to him.

  “We’ll be stuck in this place forever.”

  “I have gold,” Andras said. “Let’s offer a ring, earrings.”

  My grandmother put an arm around my brother’s shoulders, mine too, but Attila slipped free.

  “I can get us tickets,” he said. “Give me the cash and jewels.”

  Andras looked at my father. He seemed to be awaiting some kind of instruction, but then a woman approached us. She was wearing an apron embroidered with folk colors, but she also wore a brooch pinned to her sweater just below the shoulder, a big gold brooch in the shape of Hungary, with jewels where the cities were and a snaking blue line meant to be the Danube. Her two front teeth were gold too.

  “I have tickets,” she said to us. “How many do you need?”

  “How is that possible?” our mother said.

  “Seven,” our father said. “How much do you want for them?”

  “I want the gold ring and earrings,” she said, glancing at Andras, “but I want more.”

  My father was shaking. I thought he was going to hit the woman—punch her in the gut, possibly, and rob her. “What else?” he said through the cut of his teeth.

  “I want your address and the key to your house.”

  “No,” our mother said.

  “One Jokai Street, second floor,” our father said, standing very close to her, the brooch of Hungary bending between them. He found the key in his pocket and held it up high in the air.

  “There are Russians in our house,” our mother tried.

  Our father glared at her.

  The woman counted out seven tickets. She appeared to have as many left over. “The ring, the earrings, and the key,” she said.

  Our father snatched the tickets from her and handed over the key while Judit removed h
er ring and earrings.

  Even waiting to depart on board the westbound train, we thought we would be stopped. Attila said he was ready if we were. Everyone looked around expectantly, but no Russians came.

  The train was to leave in two hours, but it was easily three before it did.

  At last, we rolled out into the evening. There weren’t enough seats, and there was hardly enough standing room. My grandmother held my hand as we stood in the corridor and jiggled along, my satchel clamped between my feet. Attila helped our grandmother with her bag. He asked if she was taking a boulder to Utah or Canada, and a man nearby told us that during the war there was a building called Kanada in a camp at Auschwitz. Kanada was where all the valuables, like gold jewelry and gems, were stored. I wondered whether Christmas 1903 was headed there.

  Attila poked me in the back. He spoke right into my ear so the others wouldn’t hear. He made me promise that if I were the first one to be strung up in the Wild West, I would stick out my tongue for him.

  Then someone clasped me around my knees, and I saw a little girl in a frilly pink dress standing there. Behind her, crawling on all fours, was her baby brother, and behind them both was their red-faced mother. I looked down and asked the girl how old she was.

  “I’m three,” she said.

  “And what about your baby brother?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t have a number yet,” she said, very serious, and I tried not to laugh or even smile.

  The three of them pushed on toward the toilets.

  The train lurched, and Judit gasped and held the side of her stomach. Andras embraced her. He had his dentist’s case with him, and some clothing and bedding in another sack. My father was carrying Andras and Judit’s rolled-up Persian rug along with his tool bag.

  The countryside outside our window was dark now. Only a single bomb lit up the glass, but I could not hear its pop.

  Before long, the train squealed to a halt, but not at a station, just somewhere between stops, a place surrounded by fields. The conductor told us all to get off, and we helped Judit and my grandmother down before we started walking, the whole mob of us heading off in the same direction. The scent of night was heavy around us.