The Afterlife of Stars

by Joseph Kertes

  I asked my mother about the phonograph records, why our father had broken some of them. On came the smile again, with enough amps to light a room.

  “You know he gets worked up over the smallest things,” she said, “not to mention matters of life and death.”

  “But we were alive. We’d made it already.”

  She hugged me hard. “It will be all right, I promise,” she said. The hug felt strange, possibly because of where we were and what had happened, all the excitement. It felt new, as if we were inventing the gesture. We floated up, both of us, on the suds of her hair. And then she kissed me and left, pulling the warm air with her.

  When the lights went out, I could still feel the coolness of my mother’s kiss on my cheek. It was very dark in the room in an absolute way, like space without stars. People sighed, snuffled, grunted, and snored, some nearby, some far across the room, comforting sounds.

  But then came a cry from a distant room, followed by a muffled wail, a surrender to full crying. It was a baby. Gisela. Maybe not knowing exactly what she was missing but knowing that it was something. And calling out for it. Andras oh-oh-oh-ed her, and I imagined him jiggling her, as he jiggled his own voice to soothe her.

  When a nun rolled up a couple of window blinds, the moon entered, lighting up the carnival of sound and silvering over the sleeping figures like old film. And it hit me finally. The green eyes of Judit, green as the hanging soldier’s eyes. They would never again take in that light. All the switches were off now. I began sobbing again like a baby. I had to pull the covers up over my head before the X-ray moon exposed my unmanly state.

  Four

  The next morning, we were given fresh napkins, and the nuns spread out across the big room to serve us warm rolls and tea with lemon. I could not see the girl and her mother with the midnight eye shadow. Their cots were empty, the blankets neatly folded. Nor could I see Andras and Gisela. Or the gangly brunette with the caper eyes. Where had they all gone?

  My mother and grandmother had left us a little while earlier, and now they came back dressed as nuns, but without the white collars or head coverings. They hadn’t brought black clothing to wear for a funeral, so the nuns had helped them out. They were even allowed to tear the garments at the neck to show their grief, as long as the tears weren’t too big and my mother and grandmother promised to sew them back up afterward.

  I thought of where Judit would end up—all those lively colors browned over and dampened down. I thought of how still she would be, the stillness of her in her grave.

  Our father came in with bleary-eyed Andras, who was holding Gisela and feeding her a bottle while rocking her gently. He told us the mother superior had asked the groundskeepers to make a little fenced-off area in the graveyard especially for Judit.

  “Fenced off?” my mother said, looking a little fearful.

  “It’s a Catholic cemetery,” Andras said, his voice uneven. “This little section will be her own. A little Jewish section, I guess.”

  Our grandmother took the baby from Andras and continued to feed her the milk. Unlike the night before, Gisela seemed as content as could be.

  “I suppose that’s what the bishop was saying yesterday,” said our father as he raised his hands in the air. “The land is mine, saith the Lord.”

  “Please, Simon,” our mother said.

  “It’s in the book of Leviticus,” he said. “I’m sure it’s all right to be quoting the Bible here.”

  “Can we go see?” Attila asked.

  “Yes, but don’t wander away this time,” our mother said.

  Outside and just down the path from the convent walls, a couple of men were driving wooden fence posts deep into the soil, capturing a corner of the graveyard, while two others were digging a hole for Judit to lie in. The black earth gave off a dark fragrance.

  “I guess they couldn’t take her back home,” I said to Attila.

  “Of course not,” my brother said. “There are Russians there. What I don’t know is why we can’t go up ahead somewhere to bury Judit. Take her with us—to Vienna, maybe, where there already is a Jewish section.”

  “Because she died here,” I said. “How could we carry her?”

  “We won’t be walking from here,” my brother said. “I’m sure we won’t.” He closed one blue eye to the sun. He was always doing that: closing one eye at a time in the bright light.

  The men working were strong, like soldiers. One was as big as an army truck. He was already down in the hole he’d made, tunneling away, flinging dirt up to the surface. He looked powerful enough to dig a hole for a dozen people to lie in. The man felt our eyes on him and poked his head up. He was coated with an old grime—natural grime that seemed to come from inside him, like a spewing black heart and lungs rather than the dirt of the world.

  I soon found myself watching alone. When I turned all the way around, my brother was already halfway across a field beyond the graveyard. He stopped to call to me. “I want to show you something.”

  “Again? I’m not sure about this. What can you show me?”

  “Something,” he said. “I know this place.”

  I trotted through the grass toward him. “How can you?” I asked when I got close. “We just got here.”

  “I know this place,” Attila said again. “Trust me.”

  I couldn’t tell where we were heading—back to Hungary, it seemed like. I wouldn’t have put it past my brother. The October sky was summer blue, and the sun was extra yellow and hot. I wondered what it would look like in reverse: a blue sun and yellow sky. I preferred the original choice. And the shape of the sun too. Better a sphere than a triangle, say, pointing its light this way and that, searing into things.

  As if it had heard me, the sun reared up in the cool sky now and roared. It was too hot.

  I remember that moment, that exact moment. Just two days earlier I had been getting over that Septembrous feeling—the end of summer, the beginning of school, the new girl in class, the two new boys, one named Karl, the decimal points, the adjectives: blue, nice, sudden, gradual. Now the sun was spread-eagled across the sky, roaring away, and we had left our home and were running toward something, and I didn’t know what.

  The field was overgrown but turning to straw and raspy. It felt as if no one had ever walked this way before, no Hungarians, no Russians, no Austrians. But when I caught up with Attila, he said, “There must be as many skulls underneath this land as in the graveyard, if not more. There must be army buttons and spearheads, doubloons and shields, going back to kingdom come.”

  “Are there girls down there too?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Attila said. “Think of all that pink love in the ground. Think of it, gone to waste.”

  There was a little mound up ahead. Attila bent down, his straight stiff hand shaped like a scythe, and chopped the grass, as if he were scalping it. He studied the clear space to see what might be lying below it.

  I stopped and considered letting him continue on his own, but he grabbed my hand. “Don’t worry, my ever-present darling,” he said. “You’re safe with me.”

  Sheep baa-ah-ed in a neighboring field, a shadier, greener one, watching us. They were thick, fluffy creatures, chewing and chewing. Little did they know they were getting themselves primed for sweaters and pots, clumps of them spun into yarn, bits of them lying down with potatoes and carrots.

  I wondered what Attila was thinking as he watched the animals with his one eye closed. He held up a hand to block out the light, and the sun stenciled a perfect black hand onto his face.

  “Where do you think Judit is?” I asked.

  “Dead” was all he said.

  “That’s it?”

  “She’ll be going down deep into the ground, all that milk meant for Gisela wasted. She’ll be food for worms and little crawly bastards.”

  “And?”

  Attila opened his other icy eye and said to me, “Those sheep over there?” The creatures were still looking at us, even the ones that had t
urned their bodies away from us. “We are the afterlife of sheep,” Attila said, and then he took my hand in his and pulled me forward again.

  He led me toward a gate in a stone archway greened over with vines. The letters carved into the arch had worn down with the seasons. There was no one else in sight, no parents, no one. We could still hear the pounding-in of the fence posts in the distance behind us. We stopped before the old gate, but not for long. Attila yanked me along.

  “How do you know this place?” I asked.

  “I was here with Dad.” He was whispering for some reason. “Two years ago. Do you remember the trip he had to take to Vienna to order instruments for his company?”

  I recalled that our father had to get special permission to travel and could take only one person with him. I badly wanted to be the one. I remembered the poppy-seed cake I got instead.

  Attila was leading me to what looked like heaps and mounds of stones, but with human shapes. The sun was high and the grass even deader here, tall and thorny. We stepped up the pace, almost trotting.

  Birds erupted from the grass in front of us and flew off over our heads. I began to feel that it was time to go back, but Attila marched us on. Now I could see better: there were human forms scattered everywhere and piled up in front of us, but stone humans, marble humans, and bronze humans, some outsize, some fierce, some standing and some not, some sweet and loving, with beckoning arms—all of them frozen in whatever big action they were undertaking.

  As we approached, the shapes seemed to huddle as if discussing something. Some were toppled, some wore uniforms, their arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, looking as if they were leaving a tavern and singing when they had become suddenly encased in metal. One solitary guard lying on his side held up a steely flag ruffled by an old wind, a flag that might have pointed upward to heaven once upon a time but was now pointing instead at a stand of poplars.

  “This is the Statue Graveyard,” Attila said, as if he were pulling back a curtain. “This was part of Hungary not long ago, this little corner of Austria. Dad showed it to me.” He let go of my hand finally.

  Over to one side was another heap of bronze figures, and Attila guided me toward it. “I’m not feeling that great,” I said.

  “It’s going to be all right, sweet pumpkin. There’s no one alive here.” As we drew up to the mound of metal bodies, the head of a woman statue peered out at me from the middle of the pile. Her eyes were blank, the irises hollowed out, her hair in rigid curls, the bangs straight and even.

  “Look,” I said. “She must have just come from the beauty salon. What are they all doing here?”

  Attila put his arm over my shoulder. The ground was damp here, almost swampy. It oozed beneath our feet. He explained that these statues were the writers and leaders and warriors that the Germans hadn’t wanted gawking at people in the squares and parks and outside the museums after they invaded Hungary, and now the statues the Russians didn’t want had been thrown in with them too. “It goes on like that,” Attila said. “It always happens whenever invaders come. They knock down the statues. The Hungarians grabbed these all up and piled them here before they could be blown up. If the Russians ever leave, then we can knock down their statues—Lenin and his band—and put these back up. The powers shift, the borders move, countries rise and fall.” Attila tried to sound philosophical and wise as he said all this.

  “Is Stalin coming here too, the big Stalin?” I asked.

  “He can’t come here, because this is Austria now. It was the same during the last century and even before,” he said. “Anyway, now there’s this place here to save people the trouble of having to cast new hunks of metal every time someone is pushed back out of whatever country.”

  “Will there be a monument somewhere to the soldiers hanging in the Oktogon?” I asked.

  “Not likely. Not while the Russians are in charge.”

  We paused to study the monuments some more.

  “Imagine,” Attila said. “Here’s where the glories lie. You can have a triumphant battle one day, become hero of the land, get celebrated, have a day named after you, a brilliant funeral arranged for you with the entire nation turning out, have the number one artist carve a fierce and noble likeness of you, and have the square it stands in named after you, for God’s sake. Then that same square and the city and the country can be overrun by the Germans or Ottomans or Boogeymen, and suddenly you’re dirt. The square is renamed after one of the Boogeys, your chapter is torn out of the history books, the number one sculptor sculpts Lord Boogey, and he gets put up where you once stood. All the heroes who stampeded behind you to victory, who were also encased in bronze and stood in smaller squares and churchyards, get piled in a wagon, you get piled on top, and then you’re tossed here.”

  Attila stepped up to a great sitting figure plonked in the mud, wearing a hood, its arms spread out, a pen of some kind in one hand, a great big bronze book folded under the other, and he said to me, “Do you know who this is?”

  He climbed dramatically onto the monument’s slippery lap and took the hooded face in his hands, except there was no face in the shadows, or at least I couldn’t make it out deep inside the opening of the hood. “It’s no one.” Attila put his own face into the opening of the hood as if to kiss the figure’s lips. His voice echoed inside the small cave. “It’s Anonymus,” he said, “that’s who. It’s a sculpture by Miklos Ligeti of no one. Of Anonymus, if you can believe it. Anonymus was the guy who wrote about King Bela III, who lived in the eleven hundreds. But Anonymus was really lots of people who had to hide behind that name to get their work out to the world.”

  My brother slid off the lap of Anonymus and wiped himself off. He squelched through the mud toward me, then put his wet arm around my shoulders and with the other grandly waved over the looming figures. “Here they are, my beloved boy. Glory be to God and his creatures.”

  The sight of the noble metal and stone people, all huddled together as they never had before, made me light-headed, as if we had landed on another planet and the air was different, not meant for breathing.

  As we turned to leave, I took one last look at the statues all junked together and noticed something I hadn’t spotted before. Attila was looking at it too. It was an arm sticking out of the ooze like a sapling, just an arm, and the hand held a bronze book, smaller than Anonymus’s book.

  “I have to pee,” Attila said. “I have to pee violently. Here, come this way.”

  He escorted me behind the heap of bronzes as if we were sauntering through a salon. When we found just the right spot, Attila went straight to work. I became giddy as I unbuttoned myself and joined him. I started cackling, my pee flying in all directions, but my stream was juvenile compared to my brother’s. Attila aimed as high up as he could, on a badly soiled marble shoulder sticking out of the ground, and I joined him.

  As we buttoned up, my brother said, “I have one more thing to show you, my turtledove.” He led me all the way around to the other side of the hill of bronzes and marbles, then stopped. “Look,” he said. He was sober and serious. “Look!” I was already looking. “It’s Raoul Wallenberg.”

  Together we gazed at the man. He was not gesturing, not pointing, not looking at the heavens, merely standing tall, facing us directly. The bronze had blackened. The figure was simple and thin, dressed in a long trench coat.

  “Who is Raoul Wallenberg?” I asked.

  “He saved everyone. He saved Mom and Dad and me—I was an adorable babe in arms. You weren’t even born yet. He was a Swedish diplomat who saved people—Gypsies, Jews, you name it.” My brother explained that Wallenberg had issued fake Swedish passports to people, especially Jews, so the Germans wouldn’t take us. He had saved thousands and thousands of people. And then he disappeared.

  “What do you mean he disappeared?” I asked. “Do you mean he left?”

  “No; he was taken. By the Russians.”

  I stared again at the statue and wondered whether any Russian statues might en
d up here beside him. I thought about Papa Stalin without his boots.

  “Mr. Wallenberg had helpers, and one of them was Dad’s cousin Paul.”

  “Where is Paul now?”

  “No one knows. It’s like with Wallenberg. No one knows what became of Paul. He just went away one day and left no forwarding address, but I don’t know why, and no one will ever tell me.”

  I wanted to ask more, but it was too quiet here suddenly. I couldn’t even hear birds chirping, and there was something fierce in the bronze eyes of this statue. These things prevented me from going ahead with my questions.

  Five

  We didn’t bury Judit until late in the afternoon. My father said we were waiting for a Rabbi Brandt from Stein, a nearby town, but the man never came. A couple of the nuns weren’t sure that the rabbi had survived the war, but a third one said that he had, that he’d returned from a camp, had a small congregation, and was active again.

  The former bishop of Szeged, naturally, had heard the news of Andras and Gisela’s loss and had offered to conduct the service on behalf of the missing rabbi. He even helped to find six more men to add to Andras, my father, Attila, and me to form a minyan. Attila asked whether he and I counted as men. Our father said that we might not, but Andras said it was all right. We counted as men in his book.

  Our father looked at his cousin. “They crossed the border on their own feet,” Andras said. Our father put a hand on the back of my neck, then the other on Attila’s. He gave us a squeeze before smiling at us.

  The girl whose mother had been crying the night before appeared at the graveside. The mother, behind her, looked as if she was waiting for the right moment to spring a leak again.

  They were joined by a dozen other people, as well as several nuns, and they all gathered around. My father said it was the smallest Jewish graveyard in the world.