My father did not put down his cutlery. That would have been going too far. “Yes,” he said. “The Germans were the most cultivated people on earth, weren’t they, the highest achievers?”
No one spoke. Attila’s cheek was bulging with food, and he bobbed back and forth in his chair. His eyes, alive with questions, glittered in the lights of the room.
“The most cultivated culture we have ever known, the Germans,” my father continued. “Tell us what happened to you there, in the land of Handel?”
“Simon,” Mamu said, “why are you tormenting my sister? Why do the Beck boys always torment her?”
I was innocent, but my face burned anyway.
“Please,” Hermina said. She again held up her gloved hand, forest green on this occasion. “I haven’t had such lively conversation around this table since my Ede took his leave. I’m glad to have the dazzling Beck boys with me and, of course, the Beck girls.” She turned back to her nephew. “I’m not moving to Germany either, my dear,” she said. “But the Germans are going through their cycle of self-hatred after loving themselves too much, after needing to hate others to sustain their delusion. Hubris. It does in whole nations, whole empires.”
“Hubris. Is that all it was?”
Hermina shrugged.
“Yet Germany remains with us,” our father said. “You love your Handel, do you not?”
Our mother rolled her eyes.
“Handel belongs to all of humanity,” Hermina said, “not just Germany.”
“The same culture produced both,” my father said. “You can’t have one without the other. You can’t have Handel without Hitler.”
“You’re making my point for me,” she answered. “You need that darkness—a few drops of darkness—to brighten the light. Handel’s beauty has a darkness at its core, a sweet, incurable sadness.” We were all staring at our great-aunt. “That was his secret,” she said. “But we all have secrets, don’t we?” She looked first at our father, then at the two other adults, stopping at her sister.
“Please, Hermi,” our grandmother said.
“I once had white, supple hands, and now they are forever clothed.” She made fists and held them up to the chandelier. “I can still pack a punch, though,” she said, and then turned to Attila and me. “What is your secret, boys?”
I blushed hotly, though there was no secret I could think of that I had been hiding.
“What about it, Simon?” Even our father blushed. “Lili? Klari?”
“You’re tormenting us now,” Mamu said. “What is the matter with this family?”
“We all have our shameful deeds to forget.”
“And what shameful deed might that be in our case?” our father said. “To make it through one war to welcome the next one? Is that our evil deed? Fleeing a hostile country? Is that our evil deed?”
“I didn’t say evil.”
“Shameful, then.”
“Have you heard from Paul lately?” she asked.
“Hermina!” Mamu said, slapping the table and getting up from it.
Our father said, “I’m not sure what our crime was or our secret, Aunt Hermina.”
“You mean Paul Beck?” Attila said to our great-aunt.
“Yes, Paul Beck,” Hermina said. “You could have stopped it, all of you.” She looked at my parents, my grandmother. “You should have stopped it. But everyone stood by.”
“Stopped what?” Attila asked.
“Enough,” Mamu said. “Thank you, Hermi, truly.”
Everyone was getting up, except me.
“What could we have stopped?” Attila said.
Hermina had a smirk on her face I hadn’t seen earlier, as dark as I imagined Handel’s was, maybe darker.
I stayed for a dessert of chestnut puree with whipped cream—Attila too, but just for a few seconds. He scarfed his down, so I was alone at the table when Babette brought me cocoa. She smiled as if there was nothing amiss in the festive dining room. She seemed to be admiring me, and I admired her back. Everything smelled of cream—warm cream. And also chestnuts.
Thirteen
Attila and I were to sleep in the library. We each had a daybed right underneath bulging bookcases mounted on the wall.
“What were they talking about?” I asked my brother.
“I’m not sure, but we’re going to find out. Give me a day, my ever-curious darling.”
Hermina came in to see that we were settled. “I have something for each of you,” she said. She was holding a leather-covered slipcase with two books tucked into it. “I picked them out especially for you. Your first books in English. We can read them together, if you want to try. I don’t speak English the way Paul did, but I do speak some, and read some.” She pulled the first book out. “They’re both by Mark Twain, a writer who lived in the New World, where you’re headed.” She gave it to my brother. It was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
She then gave me mine, and I tried to sound out the title: “Da Udventoors of Hoockleberry Feenn.”
Our great-aunt smiled at me and kissed me on the forehead.
She was followed by our grandmother, who did the same, but on this night our mother didn’t come in. Mamu said she might later. I could hear her in a nearby room talking heatedly with our father.
I wondered who would get to keep the nice leather case for the two books. Wouldn’t the books have to stay together when they weren’t being read?
Once we switched off the lights I could think of nothing but the wall of books above me, the voices sealed in the pages, the heft of the books. What would happen if each book were given its own room, like the room it was written in? What a palace you’d need to house them all! I strained to hear my brother’s breathing, but he was as quiet as could be. Attila was such a warrior that I was surprised that he could give himself up to anything so abruptly.
Then I heard the sound of running water and someone humming, a woman, but very faint. I crept out of the library. At the far end of a dark corridor, a crack of light shone against the wall. I moved toward it as quietly as I could. The carpet was prickly and warm beneath my bare feet. As I got closer to the light, the humming grew louder. My heart seemed to be in a marching band but could not keep its beat. The floor creaked once, but the water and the humming continued, so I did too. When I got to the door the sliver of light was coming from, I held my breath as I peered in. What I saw could have cured blindness.
Babette was inside. She was drawing a bath. She barely looked real to me. Her form was soft and white. She could have been a sylph living in a myth or a fairy tale. Her robe slipped off her shoulders. I was not sure I was breathing, but my timpani heart took all the hungry air it needed. I wanted to flee or to faint, but I could not move. And then Babette looked over her white shoulder and saw me. She didn’t gasp, didn’t hide herself or even turn away but smiled her creamy smile. I was the one who gasped, who ducked into the shadows and dashed back to my room with a terrible racket.
I found my bed below the bookcase and tucked myself into it. I tried to catch a deep breath, but my heart kept pounding for several more minutes, expecting something, hoping Babette might visit, but possibly not, better not.
It started to rain, quietly at first, but then harder, louder. It rained tables and chairs, but strangely there was no thunder or lightning. It felt warm and dry in this bed in our great-aunt’s town house in Paris. I found myself hoping the man we’d left on the bench at the bus station had made it inside.
That first night in Paris, I dreamt about Gerbeaud. I was alone and walking through rain, but I could see Gerbeaud ahead through the wet light. I rushed toward it, skidding sometimes on the cobblestones of Vorosmarty Square.
But then a single skid winged me all the way to the banks of the Danube, where all of the bridges had fallen, even the Liberty, even the Chain Bridge! Only its central pillar punched itself out of the water. What had the Russians done? Or was it the Germans, the Ottomans, the Avars, the hordes? The destruction looked bigger, even, than
war. It looked biblical. It looked like a decree: I will smite you down. I will divide Buda from Pest, ever to remain so.
Small boats chugged between Buda and Pest. On the other side, wings of buildings were down, if the buildings stayed standing at all. The Hotel Gellert’s grand entrance had sagged into its thermal baths below. The mighty flagpole that stood on its high base in front of the National Gallery flew no flag, though I could still see the great bronze eagle perched on its stone mount, getting set to take flight, always poised in this same way but never managing to lift itself up. A row of elegant white town houses had fallen forward down the slope of the green hill, like backbones cut from their caps and tails.
I stood in the drizzle and thought I spotted my friend Zoli on the other side. I tried to call out to him, but I had lost my voice to the dampness. Where was he headed? He lived on this side, in Pest. Who was he running from?
A single motorboat throbbed in its slip below me. The riverbank under my feet trembled. I turned toward Gresham Palace, one of its shoulders damaged by a bomb. Russian soldiers floated in and out of its grand doors and windows—but not fluttering, strictly floating. These were not fluttering things. I had to get back to Café Gerbeaud. I went the long way, around Gresham Palace.
My heart flapped in its cage. I took off at full speed as if I were being chased.
I could not see the banner of Papa Stalin draped down over Kossuth’s department store. The store was gone, the building, even the corner it stood on. But up ahead, the beacon of Gerbeaud still stood, waiting for my return. It was guarded by a Russian soldier, the same soldier with the bushel of beard who’d given me the matryoshka doll. He glanced at me as if he’d been expecting me and waved me on. But there was no one else entering Gerbeaud or leaving it, no one in sight, and it was dark inside—in the middle of the afternoon.
I moved close to the window, lifted my hand to shelter my eyes from the rain. The monkey’s golden cage still gleamed in the center of the café, even with the lights out, but the cage was empty. The generous glass cases, which had contained the cakes and chocolates and marzipan figures, were empty. Not a crumb remained.
The kitchen door opened, and a rectangle of light imprinted itself on the room. There was a man back there, a baker dressed all in white, and he was talking to someone. He spotted me. I could smell baking. The aroma reached me like a warm hand. I scooted around to the side of the building.
The door opened, and at first I saw no one, until I felt a tapping on my knee and looked down at the monkey. He was not wearing his bellman’s cap and vest, but he showed me the way in, like a doorman. I was thrilled.
The baker beckoned. “Please,” he said, and he offered me a wooden kitchen chair. He was baking, had taken out a few loaves of golden braided egg bread from the oven.
“You’re still here,” I said. “And the kaiser.”
“We were lucky to get him back.”
I asked where he’d been. I felt steam rising from my back in this warm kitchen.
The baker whispered to me that Tarzan had taken the kaiser to his home in the jungle. Tarzan had wailed and the kaiser had wailed, and the man had called him Cheetah, but Cheetah could not swing through the trees like the man. He strained himself and hurt his hand on the jagged vines.
The kaiser reached for the baker’s hand. He’d heard this story before. Maybe it was the whisper that gave it away. The baker’s mustache was the exact same oak brown as the kaiser’s fur, and he and the monkey both had the same brown downturned eyes, like clowns’ eyes. The monkey was patting the baker’s hand and urging him on.
The baker said that it was then, after Cheetah fell to the forest floor, that a golden-haired beauty called Babette came out of the warm water, kissed his fingers, and made them well.
As if on cue, the monkey held up the healed fingers. I held them and looked them over.
The baker said that the kaiser had then found his way back to Gerbeaud, though it took some stealth on his part.
I compared the monkey to a cat and patted him on the head. The kaiser stood up, squealed, and leapt onto the baker’s board. He selected one of the loaves of egg bread and broke off a piece to offer to me. The baker asked me to accept it so as not to offend the kaiser. Of course I did. The kaiser tore off a good piece for himself too, bowed, and sat back down. I marveled at his opposable thumbs. Attila was big on opposable thumbs, often commending the Lord and Nature for coming up with them. I tasted the morsel, the warm goodness of it, the egg, the flour, the milk, fresh from the farms in the countryside around Budapest.
The baker said that it was the only thing the Russians allowed him to bake now. “No sweets. Only necessities, not luxuries. Bread is food,” he told me. “Dessert is a luxury. But I am mad with baking. I imagine painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and they give me the inside of a hat to paint instead. They’re even going to change the name of the place. Gerbeaud is too pretty, they said, too frivolous.”
I asked if they were going to call it Kaiser Laszlo. I was still chewing.
The man shook his head. He told me there was to be no kaiser there, no heads of state. He smiled at the monkey. “The Russians do love this kaiser as much as anything,” he said, “and he obliges. They pet him, and he pets them. It is the end of the Kingdom of Sugar, the Palace of Chocolates, the Royal Grove of Nut Trees—almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts—the fall of the Palace of Excess.”
I finally finished what was in my mouth.
Maybe the next time the kaiser returned to the woods, he could open his own place, treat his former friends to a little café life. He could bake tarts and breads for them, ask them to gather berries and nuts for his creations. After all, how many monkeys in the world had thought to have desserts? It would easily make him kaiser to monkeys large and small, as he had been to women and men, boys and girls. What I mean is, was there ever any going back to the woods for Laszlo?
What I mean, number two, is that it is desserts that set us apart. How many other species eat dessert?
The kaiser stretched himself out on the baker’s board. I patted his shoulder, but he moved my hand to his chest, his heart. The place was soft with fur, but most of all it was warm. Something happened, a current ran up through my arm like a rising sound, coming from a distant place, the notes of a long-gone composer, calling from a cave out into the light. I lifted out of the chair, floated up, and gazed back down at my hand on the furry heart beating under my palm like an unborn child.
My hand burned. My own heart yammered. I landed again and yanked my hand back. I stood up out of the lean chair. The kaiser stood too, on the baking board, and threw his arms around my neck.
“I have to go,” I said over his arm to the baker.
With some difficulty, the baker took down the clinging monkey.
“I’ll come back, though,” I said. “I’ll be back.”
I looked up through the Paris darkness into the bookcases above me. A sound-shadow passed over my ear, stirring the hairs on the back of my neck.
I sat up and shuddered. Down the hall, faintly, a woman was speaking and another singing. Was it Babette again? I hoped so. I got out of bed and made my way to the library door. This time the sound, a kind of twangling, was coming from the opposite end of the corridor, to my left. I glided along the corridor like a floating thing in the direction of the sound.
The lights of the creamy salon were on. I stopped to peer in, and the room seemed narrower. In place of the grand piano stood a slender white harpsichord. My great-aunt’s portrait had narrowed too, making her look longer. In fact, it was a room of slender things for slender things, for the spines of things rather than the things themselves, for sylphs and swans and splintered things, things to move among, not settle on.
I did not enter the room but moved on, resuming my glide. At the end of the hall, a door was ajar. It was the solarium, but it was mooned over at this hour—making it a lunarium instead, I guess. My great-aunt was inside, dressed in a primrose nightgown, her ha
ir still up but her face shiny with cream. A single lamp, a tulip looking down, cast the room in an amber light. My great-aunt stood and swayed to the pretty music, a soft aria. Her eyes closed, her expression swoony, her shiny face glowing, arms hugged across her and warped hands open and gloveless, each cupping a shoulder. She had become a glowhead. She spoke to the record as she swayed. She said, “Lie down in your own green meadow, your verdi prati, my Handel, my everlasting George.” I took an extra look around the room. She made me nervous. She spoke about the composer’s wig, asking him to lie down with her, calling him “my George F. H.” She asked him to lie down in the grass and sing one of his own sad songs. She said, “Has someone disappointed you, lambkin? Is that it? Who is your unfaithful woman? The woman who pulled a shadow over your meadow?” Hermina turned toward me but did not see me. Her eyes were silken. She said, “What young woman sat for you or what cut boy”—Hermina put her curved hand to her own throat—“sang your Messiah, intoning your ‘He Shall Feed His Flock’? And to what far meadow did that flock wander?”
At the end of the song, Hermina turned toward the door and finally noticed me. I expected her to yelp or jump with embarrassment, but she didn’t do either, not at all. She beckoned instead. “Come in, my dear.”
I hesitated at first—I was once again the one who felt embarrassed—but Hermina came to get me, hugged me with her bare hands. “Handel gave regret a sound,” she said into my head and smoothed my hair at the back. People spoke a lot into the top of my head. “Do you know what I’m saying?” she asked, holding my face now. “Can you hear it?”
“I am very young,” I said in response.
“Ha!” she said, releasing me. “You were never young. You were born old.” She approached the phonograph and found a record already out of its sleeve. “Let’s listen to a song together,” she said and put it on top of the one that had been playing. “My Ede would be appalled. His records were pristine, but I’m much too hungry to keep them that way.” She chuckled. I hoped she might replace some of the records my grandmother had lost.
The Afterlife of Stars Page 11