The priest said, “All I can say is that it’s a good thing we’re the only planet in the galaxy with life on it. There’d be plenty of trouble if we weren’t. There’s plenty of trouble as it is.”
I looked up and all around me again, as the good father had done earlier when he was searching for inspiration. I was admiring the celestial community of seraphim, cherubim, and glowheads. I had a question too, which I’d been holding, and since there was a lull in the proceedings, I thought I might go ahead with it. I said, “I’m wondering what seraphim and cherubim do.”
Father Tamas looked relieved. “The seraphim and cherubim,” he began, “are agents of the Lord. Messengers, really.” He looked up into the rafters with me but didn’t finish. Attila looked up as well.
Shuttling up to heaven and back was surely what made you a glowhead. The seraphim, cherubim, and glowheads floating up into the air—these must be added to the things that fluttered.
Father Tamas rubbed his eyes and head in the headachy fashion of adults. “Excuse me,” he said as he rose from the golden chair. I rose too. Attila was already standing. “I know you boys have been traumatized. You’ve lost your homeland and friends; you’ve left behind so much that you love.”
“Oh,” Attila said.
What the father didn’t understand was that, for my brother, everything was a game, one in which the players always hoped they were running loveward but couldn’t be sure. The best thing was that all the players got to ask as many questions as they wanted.
On the way back, my brother stopped to tell me, “It’s a good thing God was a realist. You could have been designed by Picasso and had your ear nailed to a wall and your dick hung up on a fluffy cloud.”
The lack of answers from the priest had upset my brother. “Let’s face it,” he said. “God was the Creator, and he created something, but the rest was a mess.” He was whispering too loudly. We were passing the nuns’ rooms, glancing into each one. “He was the Creator. He was not the Maintainer. You have to wonder sometimes why the Lord got started in the first place,” he said. “Why bother? Especially since he could foresee everything. I guess he had to. It would be sad if you were Creator of the Universe but decided not to go ahead with any creations.”
“Try to be quiet,” I said as we stepped up our pace. I was peeking into each room to look for a slightly more glamorous one, maybe one with gold curtains or festive lighting or even just a pair of red gloves left on the little table.
And then Attila stopped in the corridor. “Do you know what?” he said. “The Lord must have foreseen the Boogeymen, as I said. He must have foreseen the Statue Graveyard. He must have foreseen Hitler and Stalin. He could have hurried along the process before the lion and the lamb got to lie down with each other and saved people so much unnecessary suffering. He could have made some white mothers give birth to black babies, but not always. It would be random. Maybe she gives birth to a giraffe. Do you see what I mean?” I shook my head no. “Why don’t dogs give birth to cats?” he said, and he slapped me on the chest with the back of his hand—quite hard, actually. “Do you see what I’m saying? Help us out a little, O Lord. You already had a good idea by making people have to mate to have a child. A very good idea, actually, possibly your finest one. But why not go one step further?”
I tried to continue walking, but my brother wasn’t having any of it. I said, “And what happens once the lion and the lamb lie down together?”
“You wouldn’t need to mate with anyone anymore, that’s what. It would all be quiet and serene.”
“And would that be the end of all species?” I asked. “Would that be paradise or death or whatever—the end?”
My brother considered my proposition. We walked five more steps, but he stopped us again. “Good one, my tiny brother. No, we wouldn’t need to mate. We’d be perfect by then. We could be self-pollinators, like some plants, I believe. You could just make yourself pregnant, lie around all day, and feel up your own special places.”
“That would be paradise for you. But then there would be no one to impress.”
“Don’t be rude, my tender and small brother. It’s just another plan, a suggestion, that’s all. We’d be in a place that would not require a redeemer. We would never need another flood to wash away the filth and degradation.” Attila was still thinking very hard.
“Then why would we need more babies?”
“Oh, dear Lord, we wouldn’t,” he said. “We have babies to steer us toward perfection. We wouldn’t. No cross-pollination, no self-pollination. I have taught you well, my ever-present darling.” He gripped my face like a vise and kissed the top of my head.
Then it came to me. “Maybe God is still a baby,” I said.
My brother froze. He gripped me even tighter. “What did you say?”
“I said”—my voice was distorted as I squeezed another thought out of the vise—“maybe there’s a ratio of years between Creator and human, a million to one, say.” We had just completed ratios in school. “Possibly the Lord is a little older. Kindergarten Lord. It would explain some things.”
My brother further tightened his lock on my face, if that was possible. I couldn’t say another word. He kissed me on the forehead this time. “What thoughts you have, my raven-haired beauty.” And he kissed me again on each cheek.
As the blood returned to my face, all this talk about life and death made me think that I would never see Judit again or the grim ladies with their bright tree in the painting called Christmas 1903. I might not even see the girl with the delicious mouth or the tall woman with the caper eyes, and a man with combed hair might swing through my dreams for quite some time to come.
When we got back to the big hall, many people, including our family, had returned and seemed to be packing their few belongings. I noticed that the cot next to mine, where the girl had sat that morning, was stripped of its linens and that the girl’s little sack of belongings was gone. Her mother’s cot was also bare. I was quite sad about it. I wished my brother hadn’t said anything to her. I never did see the gangling woman again.
Our parents told us that we were making an early start tomorrow and that we should eat our entire dinner before getting ready for bed. Andras wouldn’t be traveling with us, our mother told us. He would be going somewhere else. We saw them, Andras and his daughter, with our grandmother at the far end of the hall. He was bouncing the little redhead too hard, I thought. Our grandmother took over the baby.
“Where are they going?” Attila asked.
“Somewhere else,” our mother said again. “We won’t be traveling together.”
“Where are we going, and where are they going?” he said again, huffing. The question was powered by his annoyance with Jesus and Father Tamas.
“We’re going to Paris first,” she said. Our father glared at her. “But just for a visit,” she quickly added. She was fixing Attila’s collar.
“What about them?” I asked this time.
“They are going to Israel, my love.” She turned to fix my collar too, though it was already fine.
Attila and I went over to our cousins to say good-bye, and for the first time I was stabbed by the blade of this departure, wounded more deeply than by our escape from home. Maybe at first all the excitement of it—the minefield, the hot darkness—had distracted me.
I couldn’t even look at Gisela. Andras gave me a snapshot of Judit, who appeared rosy, even in black and white. I hugged him around the waist, and he clasped the back of my neck with both of his hands. I made my way to the bathroom, where I stayed, staring at the photo of Judit until I could be sure that Gisela and Andras had left.
Later, in the big room, I waited stupidly for the girl with the delicious-looking mouth and her tearful mother to return, but of course they didn’t. They’d fled, after taking the trouble to banish Judit from heaven.
Attila asked our grandmother why anyone would go to Israel, but when his head met the pillow, the question got switched off. What a freak of nature my b
rother was. He was awake or he was asleep, a Hungarian one second and Tarzan the next, winter one day, summer the next. Spring and fall were not his seasons. There was nothing gradual about him. No dawn, no sunset. But to me big things seemed gradual. Winter didn’t just switch off. Neither did the sun. It took the sun a whole evening to hand over the light to the moon. Sometimes I don’t know how the two of us could have been brothers, Attila and I. We were the Adjective Brothers: Sudden and Gradual.
When the lights went out, I waited, as awake as I could be, among the breathers and snorers. I got up and snuck over to the window. I looked up at the clear, star-flecked sky, following its dots and joining them into the dippers and the butterfly of Hercules and the braid of Ally. Just then my grandmother put her hand on my shoulder, and I jumped. She was like a stealthy assassin. She whispered for me to be quiet, crossed out her mouth with her finger. She gazed out the window with me, seemed to be studying the stars, as I’d been doing.
She said, “Some of those stars out there are gone now.”
I turned toward her to see if she was mocking me, possibly, but she had a tender look in her eyes. “Just how do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean they’re so far away that they sent out their light many, many years ago, and the light is only just arriving, even though the star has extinguished itself since. All the light you see is old at the very least, but more likely ancient.”
“Ancient light,” I said.
“And other light, new starlight, is being sent out right now, which we can’t see—which, by the time it gets here, we won’t be around to see, not even you.”
I asked what that meant. Did it mean that Ursa Major’s leg was older than its other parts, that some of it formed earlier, before it was a bear? Was there another bear or a fish up there still waiting to be born?
“Yes, possibly,” my grandmother whispered into the crown of my head. “Now, why don’t we go to sleep? Why don’t you go to bed?”
“I will,” I said, gazing up at the prickling darkness. “But what about the North Star? What if it goes? How will sailors find their way across the sea?”
“I don’t know,” my grandmother said.
“What about people in love—lovers—walking along as they do, holding hands as they look up at the stars? Do they know it’s old light they’re seeing, that the source of the light is gone?”
“I don’t think they worry about it,” she said.
“What about the sun? What about our star?” I said. “Will people in some distant place be seeing its light long after we can’t see it anymore?”
“Maybe, yes, maybe.”
I wanted in the worst way to wake Attila to tell him what I had just learned from our grandmother. But I didn’t want to stir him up, so I decided not to.
Seven
I woke up to piano music. My grandmother was sitting on my cot, holding my hand, her eyes closed, swaying to the lilting sound. Beautiful Sister Heidi, the one who’d given me the hat, sat with her back to us, playing the upright piano at the front of the hall. Attila was still asleep. My grandmother’s pinkie ring was digging into one of my fingers. It was the famous old turquoise ring I had always admired and twirled whenever I could.
“It’s Beethoven,” my grandmother whispered. “His Waldstein sonata.”
I sat up, and she squeezed my hand. “Listen to it,” she said.
“I’m listening.”
“Wait for it.”
Sister Heidi’s shapely form moved inside the bag of her habit, her body stirring the rough cloth from inside. But the playing was as nice as the player.
My grandmother was still squeezing my hand—too hard, I thought, which is what people seemed to be doing to me lately. “Listen to it,” she whispered again. “Beethoven is saying, ‘Behold the mountain, delight in the rose, rise out of yourself.’” My grandmother closed her eyes again as the sister turned the keys into thunder makers. “Listen to it,” my grandmother said with closed eyes. “Listen to the man.”
“The woman.”
She opened her eyes. “The man and the woman both. The truth of it. The truth of the composer. ‘Crush your enemies,’ it is saying to some people. ‘Rise up,’ it is saying to others. ‘Believe in yourself,’ it is saying to still others. You can see why the composer sometimes sent these fists of music flying at you. And not just fists—his lips, his eyes, his heart. Great sounds are like that. They have their own language. ‘Behold the mountain’ sometimes sounds like ‘Be the mountain.’”
I kept staring at Sister Heidi, listening and staring. And finally, when she rose from her bench, she looked shy, alone, as if Beethoven had left her. For a moment, she didn’t turn to face us, but then she did. She smiled, bowed her head, and left too suddenly. My face felt hot. Attila had slept through it all.
My grandmother went to get me a roll with cheese and jam, together with a cup of warm milk. Then she took her seat beside me again while I spread apricot preserves on my roll.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
I shook my head. It felt very warm in the room. I could feel myself salting up again and stuffed some of the warm roll into my mouth. Finally, I said, “Mamu, that man we saw hanging at the Oktogon—”
“Please try not to remember him, my darling.” My grandmother’s eyes were caramel and soft.
“He was the eighth dead person I’ve ever seen,” I said. “The first seven were hanging men too. And then there was the ninth, the smoking man. The tenth was Judit—maybe the eleventh, if you count the foot that hit Attila. The person it would have been attached to.” I looked down into my lap, took another bite of my sweet roll.
“That is far too many,” my grandmother said. “Even one is too many for such a young man to see.”
“How many dead people have you seen?” I said with a full mouth.
“I’ve seen too many too.”
“How many? Who?” I took another bite out of my crusty roll, stuffed my mouth.
“My dear parents,” she said. “My dear husband—your grandfather, whose name you have. How he would have loved you, especially. You look just like him. But let’s stop. Please, try to forget these dead people, especially that sad last man hanging, and especially Judit. I know it’s hard, but try, my darling.”
“Did the people who killed the man that was hanging know who he was?”
“Please eat your breakfast.”
“Did they?”
“How could they? They killed him because of what he stood for, the colors he was wearing. Those land mines in the field were intended for anyone crossing the field, not because someone was saying, ‘I don’t like you, Robert Beck,’ but because to them you are one of the others. It’s just the colors they were hanging at the Oktogon.”
I looked outside the window at the bright sky and the clouds. What if clouds reflected things, carried pictures of things, pictures of souls entering into them, one at a time, each adding a drop of color—red Judit, red combed hanging man, brown smoker—until they rained down on other places?
A diesel bus soon pulled up in front of the convent. It was to take the rest of us to Vienna, and from there another bus was to get us to Paris, where my great-aunt Hermina, my grandmother’s sister, was waiting.
I was feeling as if I could have stayed a little longer among the nuns. I thought I could have continued with school there, possibly, found the right skypiece, like the one worn by Father Tamas, and learned how to make speeches. Some of my friends might eventually join us to fill out the class.
Sister Heidi appeared again. Her presence cheered me up. Her eyes were cornflower blue in this light. I was glad I had put on my hat. When she saw me staring, she stepped over to hug me, and I took extra long over it. She seemed as soft as I’d imagined under the habit, but smaller, and she had a clean fragrance. I wanted to know about her. I wanted to know if she had red shoes stashed away somewhere, or red gloves. I wanted to ask her if she thought Judit had made it to heaven, at least to her section of it, but I didn’t
have the nerve and wasn’t ready for the answer to be a disturbing one.
Heidi was wearing her coif but not her white neck band, and for the first time I got a good look at her neck. It was the whitest, most supple neck I had ever seen. It was what marble was trying to be when it was trying to be flesh. My eyes traveled up and down the soft white column. What messages could it be carrying from her heart to her head and back to her heart again? What messages flew in through the blue windows of her eyes?
My own heart danced wildly in my chest.
“Where are you going to go?” Heidi asked.
It took me a moment to find my bearings. “I don’t know,” I said. “Paris first, but then Canada, I think. I wish I could stay here and have my family send for me eventually.”
The Afterlife of Stars Page 7