My grandmother looked in on us. She kissed my brother and inspected his swollen eye. It was his right eye, the eye he most often closed to the sun. And then she sat with me on my bed to stare at him. For a giddy moment I wondered if my brother had just gone to sleep in an instant, the way he always did.
My grandmother held my hand, and a chill came over me. “I’m scared,” I told her. She was silent. She was having trouble looking at me. I realized she wanted to say she was scared too, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t supposed to. What a bind she was in. I could wallow and wail in my sadness and fear if I wanted to—but she couldn’t.
The doctor came to examine my brother. He was Hungarian, a friend of the family. All of us were in the room when another call came from the police to say that our grandmother and great-aunt could meet with the authorities at the station. The doctor had heard what happened and said he knew a member of the French National Assembly, if we needed him. He bandaged up my brother’s cut. He then lifted Attila’s eyelids, and his blue eyes still had the dead glass look in them. I felt I might get sick. I covered my mouth. The doctor said we’d have to keep an eye on him, but he didn’t say what we might or might not see. He also told us that Attila might wake up or he might stay down, depending—but he didn’t say what it depended on. He said he’d be back first thing the next morning and was gone.
Babette covered Attila’s forehead next to the bandage with a wet cloth and kissed him repeatedly just where the cloth met the forehead, as though she wanted to suck away the harm.
Hermina’s hands were trembling. She asked my grandmother to accompany her to the police—she’d feel better if the two of them could go together, she said. Babette was very capable of looking after us boys.
Babette smiled and said something to my brother in French as she held her place beside him and went on dabbing his forehead, careful to avoid the dressing beside the eye.
A few minutes after my grandmother and great-aunt were gone, Babette stretched out beside my brother on his bed and cradled his head in her arm. I stood and watched, enthralled. She signaled for me to join them. Attila had the bigger of the two daybeds in the room, but with three people in it I guessed we’d be cramped. She beckoned to me, though, and beckoned some more, smiling all the while, so I squeezed in on the opposite side and wedged my head in the other warm cradle.
A blue vapor rose in the room, blue being the color of creamy goodness in its gaseous state. I dozed off, or swooned, more likely. Whether it was a minute or an hour later I don’t know, but I was wakened by a slurping sound and turned to find my brother sucking like mad on Babette’s white neck. His eyes were still closed—had they ever opened?—and now he rubbed her stomach lightly before rising and taking the shape of her covered breast in his hand. His hand was trembling. I didn’t dare move, didn’t dare let on that I was conscious. Was my brother conscious? Was Babette? Everyone’s eyes, even mine some of the time, were closed in the lamplight. Babette had a love bite on her white neck as sharp as a tattoo, a purple carnation, possibly, the petals etched out by Attila’s teeth.
My brother looked at me now through the warm cut of his eye. Babette’s plump breast, the one nearest my brother, was out, taking in the light. My brother latched on to the thick nipple. Babette unleashed her second breast and offered it to me. She was a human pudding. I took the warm bud in my mouth. Babette made a French sound. The current running through me from the base of my spine told me that this moment would enter the boiler room of my memory, that even if there were ten of me, this memory would store enough fuel to last each of us a thousand years. I glanced over the soft creamy terrain at my brother. Babette’s flesh seemed to give off light, empurpled only by the shadows of our heads. I was sucking so hard that I thought I would bring forth milk.
If ever there was a time to review creation, this was it. Was that paradise up ahead? We could return to Eden. We could start again with darkness and light, the water and the land and air and fire, the sun and the moon, yellow and silver. But after that? Ban the serpent. Let there be fruit but no tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What good was it? What was wrong with staying stupid? Stupid was better than smart, if smart led to killing. We could then love the Lord as stupid people who loved him without thinking. After all, lots of stupid people loved him now.
Babette unlatched each of us and sat up fully. She kissed my brother on the forehead and smiled, seeing that she had cured him. And then she hovered over me too. I put forward my muscled lips for her soft ones, but she kissed me on the forehead as well. She got up, rearranged and covered herself, then switched off the lamp and walked lightly out, pulling all the warmth with her as she floated on air and then was gone.
“We have to go now,” my brother said to me in the darkness. He sounded drunk.
I switched the lamp back on. “Where?”
It was then that the wave rolled over me again. My mother was gone. My father too. But the wave always brought my mother first. How could they throw a burlap sack over light that bright? Surely she would smile and, seeing the light, they would let her go.
“Come, my boy,” he said. “We have much to do.”
“Why are you talking like this?” I felt feverish.
Attila was already getting up and fidgeting, checking his bandage, looking under the desk for the helmet. “Didn’t you hear, or was I talking to myself? Colonel Dortmund lives in Paris now.”
“What are you talking about?” I looked at my brother’s bandaged head.
“And they have them,” he said. “Or weren’t you paying attention to that either?”
“Who has them? What are you saying?”
“The Russians. They kidnapped Raoul Wallenberg, and now they want Paul too. They must think our parents can lead them to Paul.”
“But they can’t.”
“They won’t believe them. They’ll question them. They may even hurt them. The question is why they didn’t come for them in Budapest. Maybe Paul—wherever he is—has been pushing for Wallenberg’s release, and now the Russians want to find him and shut him up.”
“What can we do? Where would they be?”
“Where would you have taken them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never taken people.”
My brother grabbed hold of my shoulders. “They’ve taken them somewhere secret. They can’t take them to the police stations. They’re Russian. They must have gone underground.” Paris has a sewer system running underneath the whole of the city, he said. Les égouts de Paris, it’s called. He was getting out the map he’d been studying, together with the dictionary. “We have to find them,” Attila said and claimed to know of an entrance near a bridge named the Pont de l’Alma.
“But how can you know that? How did you find out?”
“Les Misérables.”
“What?”
“A novel, by Victor Hugo.” He was pacing again, all the while adjusting his bandage. He started proclaiming. “Hugo called the sewers ‘the conscience of the city,’” Attila said.
“Is Tarzan in the novel?”
“No,” he barked.
“Whisper to me,” I told him. “Whisper.”
My brother took a deep breath. “Let’s sneak out the back,” he said, “where the shed is. We can’t let Babette see us.”
And there was all this French coming out of my brother’s mouth now—the rue Guy de Maupassant and the Pont de l’Alma. “We won’t be seeing beautiful Paris,” he said, “the Eiffel Tower and the Mona Lisa and the Arc de Triomphe. We’ll be seeing ugly Paris. But first Colonel Dortmund.”
“What about the men who came here? Are we going to beat them up?” And now my heart was pounding.
My brother pulled the gun from underneath the desk and put on the helmet. He shone the flashlight in my face. “I’ll do the dirty work. Please, leave it to me. I can go alone, except I’ll need you to hold the flashlight for questioning.”
“Questioning,” I repeated aloud. “Will I need something? A helmet
or a sword or anything?”
“You will have the flashlight. You’ll light up things.”
He took out notepaper from the desk as well as an impressive black fountain pen. He wrote something on the paper: 6 rue Père Goriot. He said, “This is Aunt Hermina’s address. Have it with you, in case.”
“In case of what?”
“In case we get separated.”
“I’ll memorize it.”
“They won’t understand you when you say it, no matter how hard you try. Just keep the note.”
I shoved the paper into my pocket. Attila took off the helmet and put it back on, adjusting it around the bandage, tucking the bandage under the strap. The helmet was much too big for him, but he did something more with the strap to make it fit. Though he looked ridiculous, the helmet seemed to give him courage. A hard look came over him.
“We have to be very quiet now, my cloven-hoofed boy,” he said.
Before we made our way to the back, my brother pulled me in the opposite direction, toward our great-aunt’s bedroom. When we were inside, he closed the door behind us and switched on the light, a pink chandelier with floral stems, leaves, and petals holding the bulbs. The theme was repeated on the bedposts. They seemed alive, seemed to move when you half looked away from them.
The cream dressing table had blond wooden arms on it. The hands at the ends of the arms were held up, like greeting hands, waving hands, and each was wearing a long glove of a different color—pale green, pale yellow, pale blue. The gloved hands cast dramatic shadows on the wall.
Who made those wooden hands for Hermina? Did she look at them in the night or the half-light before waking and imagine her own hands whole? Pink lady hands rather than bird hands?
I kept picturing her out there in the cold, hanging. How can you hang out a singer in the cold by her fingertips, like hanging a nightingale? How about hanging someone by the fingertips who’s not a singer, who’s tone deaf? Or someone who only likes music? Or someone who doesn’t like music at all? It was hard to think of a person suitable for hanging by the fingertips.
My brother was staring at the same table. “There,” Attila said.
“The hands?” I said.
“Yes. It’s an old trick of the ladies.”
We approached the table, and he felt each of the fingers.
“Wait,” he said. He opened the only drawer, where other gloves lay sleeping and handless. He took out several, pulled on one pair after another, then clanged his helmet with a fist.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We need some French money. Mamu keeps money in the fingers of her gloves, or she did back home. Mother too. Where do you think I got extra cash when I needed it?”
“Why don’t we ask Babette?”
“Because she can’t know we’re leaving, my baby assailant. I thought that part was clear.”
“Very little of this is clear.”
My brother threw the gloves back in the drawer. What I wanted in the worst way was to steal a pair of the waving wooden hands themselves. I don’t know why. I would not have bragged about them or shown them to friends. I just wanted them to look at when no one else was around. I wanted to measure them to see if they would fit into my bag or maybe the small new suitcase Hermina had bought me.
But Attila said it was time to go. He adjusted his helmet. I had the flashlight. He had the gun.
We got outside as quietly as we could and waited to see if any sounds came from inside the town house before we moved on. Ragged clouds curtained over the moon, but there was still enough moonlight to see the shed. We headed out to rue Père Goriot and began our walk toward the concentrated lights of Paris.
Each time a car passed, we turned to see if it was a taxi. One did approach, but it zoomed by, possibly because the driver caught sight of my brother’s helmet. A few minutes later another slowed and then sped up again. When the next taxi turned the corner in our direction, Attila leapt into the road in front of it. He aimed his gun at the windshield. The car screeched to a halt. Its engine even cut out.
“Vingt-et-un rue Guy de Maupassant,” my brother said to the closed window.
The man was trying to restart the engine. My brother put his hand on the rear door handle.
“What are you doing?” I asked. I gripped his arm, the one holding the gun.
“Just watch me,” he said.
The driver was as terrified as I was.
We got in. “Vingt-et-un rue Guy de Maupassant,” Attila said more fiercely. He pointed the gun at the back of the man’s head. The driver screeched away even before we were settled in our seats.
I stared at my brother, the hard look of him, and for a single moment, I felt safe.
Paris was as beautiful as everyone said, with its river and its elegant buildings, each like an overgrown sculpture. Its lights were soft and amber like Hermina’s. They were like night embers, but we tore by them all, smearing the light.
When we arrived, the driver said something we couldn’t understand. But Attila, being Attila, now wanted advice from the man. He handed me the gun, unfolded his map, and seemed to be asking how we could get from the rue Guy de Maupassant to the Pont de l’Alma. It turned out it was right around the corner.
“Just as I thought,” Attila said to me.
I stared at my brother. “Who are you?” I said.
He snatched the gun back, and we got out. The car tore away even before I’d closed the door behind me.
We walked for only a couple of minutes before we arrived at a squat brownstone building right on the corner. We had to climb over a low wrought-iron fence and edge along a flower bed to get to the front. The town house was guarded by an impressive elm tree. It had tall windows, and lights were on inside. Attila and I crept toward a lighted window, crunching over some fallen leaves. Inside, a man sat in a leather chair reading a book.
“Colonel Josef Dortmund,” my brother whispered.
A trim middle-aged woman came in and set a cup of tea by the man’s side. Then a boy with hair as blond as Attila’s but a couple of years older looked into the room and said something to the man and woman, which caused them both to answer and shake their heads. The boy slapped at the door frame and marched away. He could have passed for Attila’s brother more easily than I did.
My brother aimed the gun at the window. “What are you doing?” I whispered.
“Exacting revenge.”
“You don’t even know what he did.”
“He hurt us.”
“So you’re executing him now?”
“No—just scaring him,” he said and fired the gun through the window. The man’s lamp shattered as well as the window itself, of course. Shouting and scrambling came from inside.
“Let’s go!” my brother said, and he pinched my upper arm hard. We leapt over the fence and raced off. “This way,” he said, yanking me down an alley and over onto another avenue.
My legs had noodled over. I could barely stand. I braced myself against a building, but the sound of a door closing inside caused us to rush off again.
“There it is!” Attila said, pointing with his gun. “The Pont de l’Alma!” And he laughed! He actually laughed.
We crossed another street, and then the stench hit us.
If you are ever searching for the a-hole of the world, search no further. My brother and I found it in Paris, by the Pont de l’Alma. There were houses all around it, and a romantic bridge. But what sort of romance was possible as lovers strolled over this bridge holding hands or went to their beds in the homes nearby? I bet there were very few babies made in this neighborhood.
I was gasping, trying to breathe right. The gate to the sewers was unlocked but clanged and squealed impressively as we pulled it open. We clumped down the iron spiral stairs, expecting to encounter rats and criminals and the abductors of our parents. Nothing and no one would have surprised me.
But the stench, the intensity of it. When we reached the bottom, we had to stop. We had to pause to
admire the dark river glubbing by, this wonder of the world. Lights down below lit up everything the city had expelled from the land above: leftover cabbage soup, even digested cabbage soup, fingernails and toenails, an earring, the nightly bathwater, a razor blade with a bit of face still stuck to it, cigar butts, the flow of a bad stomach, the flow of a good one, a gold wedding band, bones, knives, guns, vomit, dead goldfish, live mollies, hairs—blond, brunette, gray, auburn, true black, dyed black, dyed blond, dyed red—hairs by the millions and trillions, short hairs, long ones, curly ones, eyelashes, a mother-of-pearl button—What would Noseboy say? Was this where Noseboys came to die?—marzipan monkeys, a guitar pick, brown milk, teeth, handkerchiefs, a clarinet reed, a clarinet, creamy goodness, twenty thousand francs rolled up in the fingers of a long glove once white, possibly, red wine, white wine, clear water, juicy plums, red beets—the browning over of everything—pieces of salmon, petits fours, turnips, bits of toothpaste, the bleeding from gums, the tip of the finger of a glowhead, a gold watch chain, two pages of a book, thoughts of you washed off a face, a stillborn, a lapis lazuli to bring out your eyes, the testicle sweat of a wrestler, the testicles of a bloodhound, the spit of opinions, tens of thousands of trillions of Xs and Ys wiggling their way to battle.
“We have found the river of Hades, the river of the underworld,” my brother said.
A bat flew through, and then, as if on cue, a rat scrambled by, creatures traveling the sky and ground of this underworld in search of things they could use to survive. Was everything down here in the sewers expelled from somewhere else? Was it possible there were also splendid beings living here, or were even the splendid beings fallen versions of themselves?
The Afterlife of Stars Page 16