Our grandmother and mother tended to little Gisela, and my father signaled for Andras and me to come and be pallbearers. The four strong men, the fence makers and grave diggers, brought Judit to the door of the convent, and we took over from there. Judit lay on a board and was covered with a blanket. She seemed to shift underneath it.
I was near the front as we marched toward the waiting grave. I struggled like mad to hold up my end, had to reach up high, though I believe I could have let go altogether without much effect. I spotted a lock of our dead cousin’s copper hair, which had fallen out of a gap in the shroud. Then a second lock broke free, and the two together flickered like a flame.
My class had taken a field trip not a month before to the Museum of Natural History over on Toth Street. The museum had an exhibit featuring bog people unearthed from the Great Plain, people who’d lain deep in the earth for ten thousand years. A glass case stood at the center of the exhibit. It contained two figures who lay back-to-back in sweet repose. The small man had ancient sprigs of brown hair still clinging to his bony head. But the woman! The woman had flaming hair, lots of it, molten hair, like Judit’s, drawing heat from deep down in the earth.
And the flame now passed to Gisela, who wailed with such a redness and fury that, when she got to the bottom end of the wail to take in a breath, the silence burned.
The grimy man leapt into the grave, followed by his partner, and the rest of us were to hand Judit down to them. But Andras wouldn’t let go. We all let go, and the board fell into the grave, but Andras clutched his wife like a big rag doll. He seemed to be pleading with her, mouthing words. He turned her upright as if to dance with her, but she was stiffer than I had realized, and he almost lost his footing in the crumbly earth, almost fell into the hole with her. Then the bishop and a nun pulled him back, gently, gently urged him away. Several of the men, including my father and brother, rushed to take over so that Judit could be laid to rest. Andras stared into the earth’s black heart as it waited to receive his wife.
What a sound rose out of Gisela as her mother was lowered into the ground! It was a volcano of sound, like the first wail of the world, the wail of the wild, from the land before birth. The sound was so true and pleading that she could have been taken from funeral to funeral to set the tone. A nun, the mournful singer from the night before, tenderly pried the baby girl out of my mother’s arms and carried her back into the building, where a warm room and warm milk waited for her.
We were all given hats, and a pretty blond nun named Sister Heidi, who looked like a movie star playing a nun, gave me a Tyrolean hat with a blue feather jutting out of the band. When I didn’t take it from her, she placed it on my head herself and tucked my hair under it, as if she were doing a fitting. Her face distracted me from the proceedings.
“Yodel something for us,” my brother said. He had on a French beret with one of those little wicks at the top, like a candle.
Even the bishop sported the impressive skypiece he’d worn when he first addressed us, the one that seemed to top off his robe. But he did not have the robe on today, just a long dark coat. My mother and grandmother held on to Andras. We gazed down at Judit, and the waterworks began in earnest. How could they not?
The sun, the captain of the skies, blazed away as Father Tamas stepped up. He waded right into the crying sounds. In that voice of his, he said, “You want to ask, ‘Haven’t I believed in you, Lord? Is the message not getting through, coming from my impure mouth? All this mystery. All this tragedy. What can it all mean?’”
In this place, a priest who had survived and escaped made as much or as little sense as a rabbi who might or might not have survived.
“A true heart,” the priest said, “has been laid to rest today even before it was too tired to carry on, long before it was used up. May the Lord bless it, and may he bless ours.”
Father Tamas bent his head in silent prayer and stepped back. Andras broke free from my mother and grandmother and approached the grave. I thought he might be hiccuping, but even so he whispered the Kaddish: Yit gaddal, ve yit kaddash, she mei rabba.
Several people said “Amen,” and Andras was the first to shovel dirt into the grave. Others followed suit with shovels, which the grave diggers handed us. Attila hurled down heaping loads and for too long. He had to have the shovel taken away from him and passed to the next person. Sister Heidi dropped in a small bunch of colorful fall flowers. After my shoveling, I stood close to the edge of the grave and didn’t want to move. I could make out only the shape of the body by then.
Maybe Judit would be unearthed in a hundred centuries, her hair as red as it was today. Maybe she’d descend with one of the statues—maybe with Raoul Wallenberg, an unlikely couple—searching down in the deep for the earth’s pilot light.
Six
The next afternoon, the girl whose mother had cried midnight-blue tears told me that Judit was not going to heaven. The girl’s soft brown hair was tangly, and she kept sweeping it away from her face on both sides. It was hair wishing it could be something else: drapery, possibly. I was hoping she would smile after what she’d said, which might have meant she’d been joking, but she didn’t. She just moved her hair away some more. Her gray eyes flickered through the veil of hair.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked.
“Where’s yours?” she said.
I told her my parents and grandmother were making arrangements for us to leave.
“Oh,” she said, her eyes turned down, as if I’d said she and her mother were being left behind.
“We’re all going,” I added. “No one’s staying here with the nuns. They were just being nice.”
The hall was all but abandoned. There was a feeling of movement everywhere else, as if we were at the still center of a carousel.
The girl and I were sitting on our own cots, quite close to each other. She had a powdery scent. Talcum, possibly. But something in addition to the talc that smelled like celery. What the girl had said about Judit still hung between us. She stared with a directness that seemed to give her some kind of authority, as if she was the Commander of Souls.
“Where is Judit, then?” I asked.
The dampest and darkest part of the girl’s face was her mouth. She had good fleshy lips, too big for her face but delicious looking. It was the first time I remember wanting to taste someone else’s lips. I wanted to take out my marzipan Kaiser Laszlo to show her. I wanted to share my matryoshka doll with her. I wanted to put on my Tyrolean hat at a jaunty angle. I wanted to show her Attila’s drawing of the fighter plane, possibly pass it off as my own.
“A priest can’t send Judit to heaven,” she said. “Only a rabbi can. Only a rabbi can send you to heaven. Only a priest can send me.”
“But then we’d both end up in heaven,” I said, “starting out in the ground.”
And now the girl’s eyes had turned into luscious mouths too, dark and wet, wanting to say something to me. But they didn’t. Instead she huffed herself onto her feet and went off to look for her mother, taking her moist lips with her.
A moment later Attila appeared at the front of the hall and called to me. He was almost hopping, bouncing from foot to foot. It looked urgent. When I joined him, he said, “What? Are you falling for that girl with the banana-string hair?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Attila shook his head.
I didn’t know what to say. “She has nice lips,” I mumbled.
And then the girl reappeared. I was worried she had heard what I’d said or, worse, what my brother had said, but she had a warm look on her face, and I felt relieved.
She sat down on a cot and indicated the one opposite for us to join her. She seemed extra friendly. I saw her smile for the first time, her small, white, even teeth, which seemed to grow out from behind the luscious lips like guards.
“Where’s your mother?” my brother asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Has she found some quiet corner to shed a tear in?�
��
The girl bit her lower lip. She was looking down, but soon she looked up and was smiling again. “You don’t look like brothers,” she said, but in an approving way. “You look so different.” She reached her thin arm forward and touched a small lock of my brother’s hair. “It’s so pretty,” she said. “Handsome, I mean.”
Attila pulled back from her admiring fingers and eyes.
“I don’t mean…” But her voice trailed off again. She must have been thinking that when the time came my brother would get special permission to share her part of heaven.
Attila saw me staring at the girl still, saw the longing in my foolish eyes. “Give your lips to my brother,” he said.
“What?” the girl said, straightening up.
“He’s a Beck. He has very distinguished lips. They’re better than mine. You’d be lucky to kiss those lips.” He was pointing at me, at my mouth.
I wanted to dissolve. I wanted to vanish. Was it possible to die of shame?
The girl saved me the trouble. She stood up and left us in a hurry.
“I’ll throw a lock of my beautiful hair into the bargain,” my brother said, but the girl was gone. Attila got to his feet. “Now, come with me, my alabaster darling. Come.”
“I never want to go anywhere with you again,” I said. “If I can help it, I never want to speak to you or see you.”
Attila actually looked hurt. He turned to leave the hall the way the girl had.
“Where are you going?” I called after him.
“To the chapel,” he said. “The bishop has agreed to chat with us. Stick with me, my one true love. You might learn something.” I didn’t budge. “I promise never to embarrass you again,” he said.
I followed my brother down some dark hallways with many doors, all of them open and the windows in each room open too to let in the fresh autumn air. There was a cot in each room, not much bigger than ours in the big hall, as well as a wardrobe and a small table and chair, as if for a child. There was also a wooden cross on the wall with a bronze Jesus nailed to it. “These are the sisters’ rooms,” Attila whispered. I knew how hard it was for him to whisper. “This is where they sleep.”
We followed a corridor that ended in a great stone chapel. It seemed that all the glorious fervor in this community had been saved up for this building. It was grand, like our temple on Dohany Street in Budapest, but grayer, flutier in shape and tone, flutey like Matthias Church, up in Buda.
The former bishop of Szeged was waiting for us, sitting on what looked like a throne. He looked especially unsuited for the golden seat, as he had on just a charcoal suit and black shirt with a white collar, but no robe, no rings, no skypiece.
He beckoned us with his hands. “Approach, approach.” He pointed to a couple of plush footstools, and Attila and I pulled them up and sat before the father.
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Attila said, “for the service you gave for our cousin yesterday.” He was still almost whispering, but his voice rang out here. “It was special, unforgettable.”
I gazed up and all around at the brilliant windows. What a festive place this was. It was raining droplets of light and color—not just over us but over the many paintings featuring glowheads.
Attila said, “My brother and I are here to ‘seek the Lord while he may be found.’”
“Your people have been through a terrible time,” the bishop said. “We all have, but your people especially.” The father always spoke in an inflated, wondrous way, as if he were trying out new verses for the Bible, as if he knew that God was monitoring everything he said. “We can comfort ourselves with the thought that many who passed nevertheless remain forebears to a new generation. Some, though, I’m sad to say—families whose children perished with them—never got to transect their lines with the other lines of humanity. May the Lord our God look after them especially.”
“Judit’s line transected,” I said, mostly to confirm that I had understood what he was saying. “Isn’t that right?”
“It is,” Father Tamas said, and he looked up at her in the rafters. I felt reassured. “Still, you’ve taken a blow,” he said and smoothed the hair at the back of my head. His hand was warm and dry. “You’ve had to leave your home behind.”
“I got to say good-bye to Kaiser Laszlo, the monkey, at Gerbeaud,” I said. I didn’t want to mention the hanging men or the man in the brown suit who’d stood in front of the Urania. Another chill came over me as I thought of the brown hat exploding, the man with the nicely combed hair and very green eyes, the foot that had struck Attila in the dark.
The priest smiled. “I’m glad you got to see the kaiser.”
Attila piped up. “Your Honor, may I ask you some design questions?”
“Design?” the priest said. He looked ready to smile. “I don’t know if I can answer them, but I’ll try.”
“When the Creator was designing us, at what point did he decide that the various parts would have more than one function, that he would group functions together in one part?” Attila raised a hand to the side of his mouth, as if he were confiding in the father. “If you think of the parts down below, for instance, they have multiple functions—transecting, as you were just saying, being one of them.”
“Yes?”
“And then they are also used for peeing. And they are our alarm clocks. If you didn’t have to pee, you could sleep for a week. And it’s the other kind of alarm too.” He raised his conspiratorial hand to his mouth again. “If you didn’t get aroused now and again, there would be very little transecting. If you’re a girl, a whole baby has to live and grow in those parts. It’s really quite ingenious.”
The priest gazed upward toward Judit and the Lord, up into the sprinkling light and color, then down again at Attila, glaring at him now, but with a holy look still.
“Take the mouth,” Attila went on. He was pacing back and forth in front of us. “You use it to eat. You use it to breathe. You use it to speak. You use it to smile. You use it to kiss on the cheek, and kiss on the lips and kiss wherever…” He paused.
“And?” the priest said.
“And all I mean is that when God was cataloging the various functions of things, I wonder how he came up with these groupings, that’s all. The nose smells and sniffles and holds up glasses. I mean, the mouth could just as easily have been used to smell and the feet to reproduce. The brain could have been placed inside the throat, so that each time you swallowed you’d have a thought. How did these functions get grouped in the ways that they did? Then there are the ingenious groupings having to do with color. Take brown, for instance. You get brown hair, the brown ground, the brown trunks of trees, yellow bananas browning, brown—you know—brown excrement. How did the color get chosen for it? Except that I guess it had to have a color—why not brown? But was it a random choice? Conversely, what an ingenious idea to have the same thing come in different colors: brown eyes, green eyes, blue eyes, white carnations, red carnations, and such.” Attila shrugged his shoulders. “I even wonder if the Lord broke things up into color groups, and if so, how did he do it? Did he start out by breaking them up in other ways? What I mean is, at what point did the Lord decide that grass would be green rather than Mondays being green?”
“Did you say Mondays?”
“I mean, having come upon the concept of colors, did he start out making everything green on Monday, say, then everything red on Tuesday, everything yellow on Wednesday, but I mean everything, like a baby God coloring over the lines?”
“A baby God?” the priest said.
“Or maybe it was God’s brother.” This time the priest did not repeat Attila’s speculation. “What about that?” he said. “A brother, maybe. Maybe the less creative one in the family.”
The bishop’s face was flushed. I thought, possibly, that he was going to leave us. He huffed and was about to say something, but Attila wasn’t finished. My brother was like that. His many thoughts lined up at the gate, jostling to get out. He said, “I love the common de
sign of things, like wings, arms, and fins. They all propel creatures, but they also flutter—they enable things to flutter—do you know what I mean? Hummingbirds, black mollies, ballerinas.
“Also,” my brother said, rubbing his chin, “did the Lord think up everything at once because he is omniscient? I guess I’m saying, how does that work—being omniscient, I mean? Did he start out, as a baby God, being somewhat omniscient? Did he start out as God of the Milky Way, only later to become God of the whole universe?” The priest looked at me. “I guess,” Attila went on, “what I’m struggling with is this concept of always as opposed to gradual. Was it always thus and so?” Attila had a fierce, determined look on his face, a look that said, Help me with these riddles or I shall surely die. “I commend the Lord,” he went on, “for his choice of color for blood, an impressive crimson. It says, ‘Alarm!’ It says, ‘Stanch my flow. I cannot be a river flowing out into the round red sea.’
“And then there’s the centipede—the millipede! Surely this is someone’s idea of a joke. All right, eight legs, like a spider, or eight tentacles, like an octopus, or none, like a snake, but a hundred, a thousand? They were created with holy tongue in cheek, were they not? As was the giraffe. Hmm…let’s give an animal a three-story neck and decorative little body. And the ostrich and the warthog—they’re more in the humor column. And what about the snake? Is that really a finished animal? It’s just a tail attached to a head.”
My brother raised his inquiring arms to Judit and the Lord. “If heaven is so fascinating, why do God and his angels spend all their time staring down at us? What would they do without us? What did they do before us? Is there such a thing as before?” He dropped his hands to his sides the way the priest had done during his sermon. And then Attila raised a “eureka” finger in the air. It was his finest performance. “Before all this got under way,” he said, “if there is a before, whatever this is, God must have been looking out at nothing, and he must have thought, ‘Why not have something?’ And what a thing to dream up, too. Life! Life’s the most clever currency of all, isn’t it?” Attila closed his eyes, but then he opened them again. He looked first at me and then at the priest. “Oh, yes. It’s because everyone who has it—every thing—wants to keep it, if they have any sense left. So it’s powerful to make life, powerful to risk it, and powerful to destroy it. Yes, it is,” Attila said, “as you yourself were saying, sir.” He paced back and forth in front of us again. “Very powerful, very tempting, very delicious in a way. If you can’t put things right—if you can’t make your own life work—then taking someone else’s life makes a lot of sense. And it gives you the same kind of thrill, the same kind of power—almost—as someone who can make life, make babies, make countries. How great it is to knock them down.” His voice quieted down. “Gellert,” he said. “The hill in Buda is named after him. Gellert Hill. The bishop in Budapest. He was like you, sir, a bishop. He brought Christianity to Hungary, but they put him in a spiked barrel and rolled him down his hill, filling him full of holes. Think of how clever it was even to invent the spiked barrel. Think of how pleased his tormentors were to have come up with the idea. You have to be smart and inventive to devise evil deeds, just about as inventive as when you devise good ones. That’s all I can say.”
The Afterlife of Stars Page 6