The Afterlife of Stars

by Joseph Kertes

  I sat and listened. It was cool in the lunarium, but the amber lamp warmed the room like a hearth. I sank into a soft, ample chair.

  “This record is Handel’s Teseo,” my great-aunt said. “Dame Martha Bolingbroke plays the part of Medea.” Hermina was already swaying again, though she had not yet found the song she wanted. But she stopped herself, came over, and took my face in her bird hands again. The whites of her eyes were big and silver. I didn’t know what to expect. “Do you know who Medea was?” she asked.

  I shook my head, freeing my face from her clutches.

  “Medea was married to Jason, the leader of the ancient Argonauts. She had two children with him, but he betrayed her.” Hermina was shaking her head but saying yes. “Oh, yes, he betrayed her. He left Medea for another woman, and when he left, Medea murdered her own children so that he could not enjoy them either. It was the ultimate revenge.”

  I sat up in my chair, wondering if I should leave, feeling I might. My great-aunt turned her shining face away from me and found the song. “This is the only recording of this sublime opera, made in 1915 in London, right in the middle of the Great War, some two centuries after Mr. Handel himself premiered it in the same city. Listen,” she said, her face glowing. “Medea is addressing her children after she has slashed their throats.”

  I put my hand up to my own throat and sat up straight. “What are their names?”

  “They are called Mermeros and Pheres.”

  I repeated the names. They sounded musical.

  My great-aunt said, “She wants them to have a sweet sleep—a dolce riposo. Listen to Dame Martha. Her voice is as dark as a well.”

  Dolce riposo, ed innocente pace…

  The dark voice sang the words as Hermina’s humming rode aboard it. The song was beautiful, sad but beautiful. I was riveted. I felt carried back to a time before letters and reading when, like the ancients, I could remember every word that was sung or spoken, in whatever language—the sound of the words, if not their meaning—just by hearing the song.

  “Oh, yes, Medea,” my great-aunt said to the record. “Yes, yes, the one and only Medea.” She was swaying and swooning again. “Oh, yes, revenge.” My great-aunt turned to me. “Sweet revenge. How can I ever repay you for your acts of cruelty?” Hermina held up her curved hands to the moonlight. “Look at me,” she said. “Look what you have done.” She was gazing up in the lunarium. “How glorious it would be to exact such revenge.” I didn’t know who she meant, who she was talking to. “Single-minded Medea,” she said to the record. “Can there ever be a cost more dear than the lives of your children? Did you taste their blood, the iron in it, all the lamb they’d been eating, the sweetness of the red grapes?” Hermina was alone now with the song, alone in the room. “It is the best drink in the world,” she said. “Better than Hitler could drink, better than Stalin and Mussolini and Genghis Khan and Vlad the Impaler put together. Did any one of them dare gas himself, starve himself, freeze himself, cut off his own head, impale himself? Not one. But you dared, Medea. You drank your own blood’s blood. You humbled them all. You dared.”

  And then someone coughed, someone in the middle of the crackling recording made in the middle of the First World War, someone in that London concert hall, someone listening to Dame Martha sing tenderly about sweet sleep to her murdered children, coughed. Then he coughed again, a cough as loud as the song. Did the man have a cold, back there in 1915? Was he a smoker? Where did he take his smoke? Maybe he took it in a café like Gerbeaud, over a hand of cards, or in a tavern over a beer and a conversation about the world coming apart, or maybe it was in a room like this, a salon after dinner, while he was drinking brandy with men who wanted to talk about the Terrible War. Maybe he passed out Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes with the gold foil filter, the kind Hermina smoked, and sometimes Mamu too. Maybe he kept them behind a garter in a monogrammed silver cigarette case, just like my grandmother’s. And then one night the gentleman traveled with his darling by carriage to the opera in London to listen to Dame Martha sing this song of horror, the song of Medea, and heard for the first time in this dark voice that even a murderer could be tender.

  The song was just finishing. “What happened to you, Aunt Hermina?”

  She turned. She looked at me calmly. I was a little scared.

  “What happened?” she repeated.

  “Please tell me what happened to you, to your fingers.” Her bare fingers looked curved and red, but nothing more, nothing horrible. “Why do you wear all those gloves?”

  She smiled at me, took my face into her hands again. “You know,” she said, “it’s not a story for the ages.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “I’m not asking for a story for the ages. I’m asking what happened to you.”

  She let my face go and looked down at her hands, held them up to the amber light of the tulip lamp for both of us to look at, as if they belonged to someone else. I glanced at my own hands and wanted suddenly to hide them, to sit on them.

  “Before you and your brother were born, back in 1941, we had it just so, back in Budapest, my Ede and I. There were the anti-Jewish laws, of course, and we had lost some things—Hungary was allied with Germany, as you probably know.” I nodded. “But Ede had been able to keep his posting as a doctor, and so there were deprivations, but we had it better than most. We had our circle of friends; we had my brothers and sisters—your grandmother—and their families; we had our walks in the park and our coffees, our celebrations, if a little quieter than before, our weddings, births, our holidays, the usual.” She looked down into her lap, at her hands. “That’s partly because your uncle Ede was invaluable as a surgeon. He wrote the book on it—books. They are used to this day in German and French and English teaching hospitals. So we, especially, had it just so. And then one day in the winter of 1941—December sixteenth, to be exact—they came to get us.”

  “They came to get you? Who did?”

  My great-aunt put my hands in the warm claws of hers. “Germans, German soldiers. They burst into our home near the river—you know, near the Elizabeth Bridge.” Hermina swallowed. “They came in the middle of the night, turned on the lights, tore us out of bed. They would not let us get our things, would not let us dress. I was still in my nightgown. They took us down, out into the freezing wind, to a black car, a Mercedes, waiting in front of our building. Then they injected us with something. I barely had time to see where my Ede was sitting before I lost consciousness. When we woke—it had to have been seven or eight or nine hours later—we were pulling up in Munich, in Germany, at a military hospital. It was colder there than in Hungary, as cold a day as I can remember, but they hustled us inside. They put a surgeon’s gown over Ede’s pajamas and told him he had to operate on a wounded officer, who turned out to be Josef Dortmund, Colonel Josef Dortmund, of the Alsace region. I stood there in the cold corridor in my nightgown, trembling and humiliated. I thought that we were finished, that we had no hope. I told Ede, in Hungarian, of course, not to operate on him, not to make these German officers well so they could go back to their killing, starting with us. And I said it without even knowing the full extent of their killing yet. We had no idea. Only an inkling.”

  My great-aunt was looking down again at her lap, her hands. She was trying not to show me that she had begun to cry. I wasn’t sure what to do.

  “They took us to a window overlooking a courtyard with an iron cable strung across it. The sky above it was gray. One of the German officers said to me, in fluent Hungarian, that he had heard what I’d said. He looked Ede in the eye and told him that they were going to hang me out there in the yard by my fingertips while Ede performed the surgery and would not let me down until he was finished. He begged them not to. He promised he would do the surgery. The same officer said, ‘Yes, you will do it, and you will do it while your wife waits for you out there.’ And so they made Ede watch as they pushed me out onto a platform, fastened my fingertips to the cable with steel clamps, pushed me out t
o dangle above the winter courtyard, and even ran water along the cable to freeze my fingers. It was so methodical, as if they were just hanging out laundry. At first I was in shrieking pain. I kept looking up at them, imploring them. I trembled violently. I begged my fingers to release me, let me fall, let me shatter on the cobblestones below me.

  “And then something happened. I don’t know if it was minutes or an hour or two hours later. I’d been shaking, everything about me clattering, my bones, my stone body, when all of a sudden I felt myself calm down. The noise and violence, the ringing in my ears, it all stopped, and I actually felt at peace—warm, if that were possible.”

  Hermina looked at me, the lamp lighting up her face, scaring me slightly. I couldn’t get a sound out of my throat.

  “I went to a place beyond things,” Hermina said. “Beyond the sound. It was quiet and painless. Even the sky seemed to soften. I believe I smiled. Can you imagine how I must have horrified my tormentors!”

  Hermina stopped talking. Her breath evened out. She took my hands in hers again. I gazed down at her fingers, searching for the evidence, imagining the scene of the crime.

  “Please go on,” I said.

  “That was not a story for a young man,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She looked me straight in the eyes, a tender look, one I recognized. My grandmother had that look.

  “But I’ve never been young. That’s what you told me.”

  “When I woke,” she went on, “I was in a hospital bed, quite a nice one. My Ede was beside me, kissing me over and over, speaking softly to me. I could hear his voice even before I could wake. I thought I might have been elsewhere. When I was fully awake, he looked so happy, relieved. My hands were in bandages, and for whatever reason my forehead and cheeks were too. It was days later—several days. A few minutes later, in came the German colonel in a wheelchair, pushed by a nurse. ‘How is the patient?’ he asked, as if I’d had a fall, an accident. I was back, Ede said. I was alive. The colonel told me he was a great admirer of mine. ‘You have a strange way of showing it,’ I told him. The colonel was going to say something else, but he couldn’t. He clasped his hands together. He looked down and then away before retreating.

  “By Christmas Day I was a bit better. I was sitting up, taking meals, with help, of course. I was asked by a nurse, who spoke a little Hungarian, if I was well enough to move a little, to leave my room, perhaps. I answered in German that I was. She wheeled me down to a small chapel attached to the hospital. The colonel was there in full regalia with his wife and his beautiful boy, maybe half your age, and several other officers. A piano accompanist, a young woman not much bigger than a sparrow, awaited me. And of course Ede was there, and he stood to assist me. He whispered to me that the colonel had asked for a song.” Hermina was shaking her head. “Imagine. Maybe I was dead after all and in heaven. But what was the colonel doing there with me? I was to sing now. One day, I was to be hung out by my fingertips to freeze or to die, and now I was to sing. I looked around at the chapel, and, strangely, there were no Christian symbols to be seen. Jesus on his cross behind me was covered over with a bedsheet. Even the altar was draped over.”

  “Did they do that for you?” I asked.

  “No, of course not. They would never have done that for me. They covered up Christ for Hitler. His kingdom was a one-man show.

  “So the young pianist came up to me and gently asked what I might like to sing. I studied the faces of my little audience and told her that ‘for Christmas’ I wanted to sing an English carol. Did she know ‘Once in Royal David’s City’? She said she did. And so, with my Ede by my side, my voice smaller than usual but as strong as I could make it, I sang. Do you know the song?” she asked me. “We sing it in Hungarian. I’ll do it for you.”

  Hermina closed her eyes, placed her hands on her heart, and sang the song for me with the same small voice.

  Once in royal David’s city

  Stood a lowly cattle shed,

  Where a mother laid her baby

  In a manger for his bed;

  Mary was that mother mild,

  Jesus Christ her little child.

  And our eyes at last shall see him,

  Through his own redeeming love;

  For that child so dear and gentle

  Is our Lord in heaven above;

  And he leads his children on,

  To the place where he is gone.

  Not in that poor, lowly stable,

  With the oxen standing by,

  Shall we see him, but in heaven,

  Set at God’s right hand on high;

  Then like stars his children, crowned,

  All in white, his praise will sound!

  “And then do you know what I did, my darling boy?” She opened her eyes so wide it was like extra sound was coming from them. She was beaming. “I was looking straight at the young blond boy, who seemed very pleased with my song. My Ede bent down, I whispered a request to him, and then he marched over to the Jesus on the cross and pulled the drapery off him with a flourish, like a magician.”

  Fourteen

  I woke with the weight of the world on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. We have a heavy planet. I opened my eyes. Attila was sitting on my chest.

  “Wake up, mon petit chou.”

  “Get off me.” I tried to push him off.

  His head was right up against the bookcase. He was already fully dressed. “Wake up, my little plum dumpling. I want to show you something.” He gave me a Pez for breakfast, one from his Scarecrow, very generous.

  “Are we going to see Paris?” I asked.

  “Not yet, my pumpkin loaf,” he said. “Just come with me.” I put on yesterday’s clothes while Attila told me I had an important mission ahead of me. Then he said, “You were born twelve thousand years after the last ice age, twelve thousand years since the end of the Pleistocene epoch.”

  “Exactly?” I asked. “So were you born eleven thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six years after the last ice age?”

  “Come, my little imbecile, my birdling.”

  My brother led me downstairs. We stole toward the back of the house, past the bright solarium and outside. It was still damp after the night’s heavy rain, but the sun was shining.

  Attila took me to a small white house, which had gables ornamented with gingerbread trim. It looked like a fairy-tale house, but it turned out to be a shed. He pushed open the door. The lock had been jimmied. I examined it for a moment and looked at my brother.

  “When did you find this place?” I asked.

  “While you were sleeping,” he said. “Wait until you see what’s in here.”

  “What is it?”

  “I just said wait, my frolicsome puppy.”

  The shed was full of household objects: a tarnished silver tray, several vases, lamp shades, shelves of things, overloaded like the bookcases in the library, a chaise longue, as well as old lamps, a small writing desk, like a student’s slope-top desk, with its lid unhinged on one side, and, sprawled out on the floor, a grand crystal chandelier, waiting to rise again.

  A doctor’s bag stood by the door. We opened it to find it loaded with good things: a stethoscope, a thermometer, syringes, reflex hammers, a blood-pressure cuff, a nifty flashlight, which Attila beamed straight into my eye, a brilliant assortment of scissors, one of which he clacked menacingly near my ear, and a small silver saw.

  “These are great,” I said. “I wonder what Uncle Ede used this for?” I was holding up the gleaming saw.

  “To cut through bone, probably.”

  I gazed in horror at the instrument in my hand, tried to spot traces of blood on it.

  “This is not why we’re here, though,” my brother said. “Not for this stuff. I’ll do a full examination of the rest of it later, with your cooperation, naturally. Though this could come in handy,” he said and pocketed the flashlight.

  Attila led me to the room’s main treasure: a great black leather chest sitting in the far corner. It too had a lock, and it too ha
d been jimmied. The surface of the chest was carved with images of men wearing safari hats, riding camels. Lions, zebras, and gazelles watched as the parade of humans went by, one man wearing spectacles, one smoking a pipe, one with his arm raised, holding forth about the world, it looked like. I ran my hand over the figures cut into the soft black leather. My brother lifted the lid. Inside were packets of things, including several thick sheaves of papers and photographs bundled with ribbon.

  “Are we supposed to be going through this stuff?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—you decide.”

  He handed me some official-looking papers, like passports, but they were yellow and blue. They were written in a strange language, and each had the word Schutz-Pass on it, and, below that, the word Schweden topped with three crowns.

  “What are these?” I asked as I looked at a photograph of an unfamiliar face on one of them. It was a man, looking slightly bewildered. The next one had a photo of a woman, again unfamiliar. I didn’t know what to make of the documents, though it did feel exciting just to be holding them, especially here in the secrecy of the shed.

  “Are you ready for these?” Attila said. He handed me four other documents, blue and yellow like the others.

  At first I didn’t know what he expected me to notice. I felt I was being tested. But then my eyes fell upon the unmistakable face of our father. I flipped to the next Schutz-Pass. It was our mother’s. Her name was there in plain sight: Lili Beck. And then Attila’s! “Son: Attila Beck,” it said, along with his birth date.

  “There’s no picture of you,” I said.

  Attila shook his head. “I was just son of then. It was before I became a Titan.”

  I turned back to my father’s picture, stamped with a royal seal, glanced again at the three crowns and the word Schweden below. There were two other such documents with photos of our grandparents. Mamu was a little younger and even thinner, more like Hermina now, and my grandfather was older than in the photos I’d seen. His hair, here, was white.