The Afterlife of Stars Read online

The tree man paused, but then he entered the vestibule, parted us, and stepped up to Judit. He stared at her, gazed down at her belly, then bent down to listen there. No one knew what to do. He pointed a long finger at her stomach. Andras was ready to lunge at the Russian, and so was my brother behind him. Judit whimpered.

  The man laughed as he straightened all the way up again. His mouth was like a jewel box, full of gold and glitter. He pushed past us and marched straight to our clock on the sideboard in the front room as if he knew right where it was. We followed him, and he waited for us to gather. He pointed to the clock, circled his long brown finger a number of times past the 12, and motioned that we were all to leave. Then, to our relief, he marched out again and slammed the door.

  “We have until three o’clock,” our father said to us. “And then we have to be gone.”

  “For how long?” I asked him.

  “We don’t know,” my grandmother said gently.

  “For about two centuries,” Attila said, “before we check back in with them.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “They want us to get out,” Andras said. “Not out of the country.” We weren’t supposed to leave the country, weren’t allowed to, actually. We were just supposed to find lodgings elsewhere.

  “But we’re not doing that,” Attila said.

  “Be quiet,” our father said.

  “We can’t leave now,” Judit said in a whisper. I could hardly hear her.

  “We have to,” her husband said. “Now is our only chance.” The Hungarian rebels were rising up, he explained. There were breaks in the border. It would be the only time.

  “But Andras,” our grandmother said, putting her arm around Judit.

  My brother looked straight at me. “We’re leaving,” he insisted. “Forever. I told you—we’re going west.”

  “Why can’t we just get the Russians to like us instead?” I asked.

  Attila shook his head. “Lambkin, you’re not too bright.”

  But my remark made Judit tear up. She embraced me and kissed me on the head before leaving with Andras.

  The Russian was back within an hour, and he had brought other soldiers with him, two women and one man. But the original one with the beard was obviously overseeing the proceedings. They worked their way through our home more like movers than invaders. They acted as if we weren’t there. From the china cabinet, they carefully pulled out Herend porcelain cups, saucers and platters, and a silver sugar box and teapot, wrapping them in cloth before placing them in large canvas sacks. Attila and I watched from the sofa.

  They took down the paintings one at a time, leaving rectangular blond ghosts on the gold wallpaper. The largest of these was called Christmas 1903. It depicted two women dressed in dark coats and fur hats, one bent over a walnut secretary desk, writing a letter, the other looking out and down at us. Between them stood a potted Christmas tree on a table, festooned with bright ribbons and baubles and a star at the top. I always wondered why such a cheerful tree did not manage to spread its joy to the dark women in the parlor, who had most likely decorated it. Now the women were gone, together with their tree.

  One solitary picture still hung on the wall among the ghostly rectangles. It was a drawing done by my brother of a Spitfire fighter plane tearing through the skies, spitting impressive bursts of fire. In the corner of the picture was the sun, and it too fired off spikes instead of rays of light. It was a sketch Attila had done in school, and our mother had had it framed in gold and hung over the gilded clock, in the shape of a double-headed eagle on the sideboard, which stood guard over the room. The fierce-looking bird was the emblem of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  I had done a picture I knew my mother would like too, a watercolor of a weeping willow, but it was still at school. My teacher, Mrs. Molnar, had hung it up where the photographs of Stalin and Khrushchev hung, but on the opposite side of the classroom’s wall clock. My tree was surrounded by other trees that also wanted to weep. I had given them their own tears in many colors flying off the leaves. My classmate David thought the other trees might have been sweating after a run, but I explained my intent. A year before, I had done another picture, in crayon, of sunflowers. It wasn’t a field of sunflowers, exactly, but sunflower after sunflower, quite a few of them. My brother seemed to admire the picture. He said my flowers looked like the handiwork of God as a child, trying out designs for the sun. That wasn’t my intent either. I didn’t know where that picture got to, exactly.

  One of the Russian women carrying a canvas bag looked at the Spitfire twice as she passed by us. We watched her closely. She removed her snug army cap to reveal straw-colored hair tied back tightly, giving her head the look of an onion. She paused by the drawing but walked on. The eagle watched with its four sharp eyes. On her third trip by, she picked up the eagle clock with a strong arm and wrapped it up like a mummy before bending over to make room for it in her heavy sack.

  Attila studied the operation, kept glancing up at his own drawing in its precious frame, waited for her to leave our home with the sacks, and then tore off madly to our room.

  I tiptoed to the dining room to see if the Russians had taken our bowl of rose cream chocolates. I cared less about the red crystal bowl than about the chocolates themselves. They were still there. I wondered if it would be all right to sit at the table and steal one. I took a chance. I peeled off the red foil wrapper and put the chocolate into my mouth whole, let its creamy sweet heart enjoy its new home. I didn’t want to chew, to take a single bite. I laid my cheek against the cool surface of the dining-room table. My grandmother had bought this table for my parents for their “wood” anniversary, she told me. She said it was made of walnut by Sebastyan Balaban, the famous furniture maker. He had told her it would last a thousand years. We had had it for eleven, just 1.1 percent of its life span, meaning some nice Russian family could enjoy meals and chocolates off it for 989 more years. I took another chocolate to eat in my room and one for my brother.

  But I had a second table to visit first. It was the round-topped pedestal table in the front room. It was the one I always hid under when I was very young. Made of heavy black maple and standing on beastly wooden lions’ paws, it sat between two dainty ladies’ lamps in all its manly glory. I ducked underneath. I wanted to sit in its darkness for what might be the last time. When I was younger, I thought that this unlucky lion had grown a tabletop instead of a head, but when my brother taught me the facts of life, I realized that a lion and a table had lain down together to make this child. I hoped it was the table that was the mother. I ran my fingers through the carved fur and the hard claws and said my good-byes.

  Something fell in the kitchen, but not a dish, because it didn’t shatter. I jumped out and ran back to our room. My brother was holding his june bug collection up to the light of the window, but then he shelved it again. The collection had won him a science prize a couple of years back.

  After that, things moved quickly. Our father told us we could each take what we could carry, no more. I snuck out again to the front room, peered in, making sure there was not a single Russian in the room. Then I ran to the sideboard, no longer watched over by the two-headed eagle, and removed a golden cup and saucer. They looked as if they might have come from an old palace, but they were small, like children’s dishes. My parents drank espresso out of them when we had company. I hid them in my shirt and slunk away toward the bedroom. I dashed out again, one last time, snatched Attila’s Spitfire drawing off the wall, opened my shirt, slipped it past the buttons, and slid it all the way to the back above my belt before buttoning up my shirt again.

  I ran into the Russian soldier in the hall and thought I’d been caught. My face burned. Instead of stripping me of my booty, he handed me a Russian nesting doll—matryoshka, he called it—and I bowed, feeling the corners of the picture frame claw my skin, before retreating to my room. I slipped the picture under my bed. The brightly painted matryoshka doll came apart, and a series of smaller dolls lived i
nside, all the way down to a puny one. She was a colorful wooden bean, little more.

  As I admired them, Attila said that I was a girl. I countered with my cowboy hat, spurs, cap gun, and holster, all of which I placed in my satchel with the reassembled matryoshka. With my back to Attila, I rolled my cup and saucer each into its own sock, pulled his drawing out from under the bed, and finally added my marzipan monkey, still blanketed in the linen cloth from Gerbeaud. The cloth had a G monogram.

  “Come with me, my one true love,” Attila said behind me. “I want to show you something, over by Heroes’ Square. I hear something is happening there.”

  “Where the big Stalin is? The statue?”

  “Just come,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t we tell somebody we’re going?”

  “Not if we want to get out of here. We’ll be back before anyone notices; don’t worry.”

  Of course we wouldn’t be, but I knew better than to argue. From the hard look on my brother’s face, I had a hunch he was taking me to where there were twice as many hanging men as I had seen and that his hanging men would be Russians, not Hungarians.

  We slipped by the commotion in the kitchen, and Attila led me on a trot through the confused streets of our city, streets full of people not going about their business as they usually did, but acting alarmed, whispering rather than talking to one another. Nobody looked tired or bored, as they did on other days.

  Attila had me by the hand. Everyone was pulling hard on my arm these days. We were rushing down Andrassy Avenue, the same way I’d come with my grandmother, when a tall woman came out of a white building, a woman with long, straight black hair, wearing a black hat as wide as an umbrella and a black satin cloak, which flowed and fluttered with each strong step she took. She was heading straight toward us. My brother wanted to pick up the pace, but I slowed us down. I was staring.

  “What do you want with her?” my brother asked.

  The woman had black eyes, black eye shadow. I had stopped altogether now.

  “Do you want to take her home with you? She’s a black limousine, rearing up on her hind wheels.”

  She saw us, saw Attila and me gawking, and glared at us before crossing the street, though she could easily have run us over.

  When we turned a corner, we just about ran down a man ourselves, a beggar holding out his hand. Attila stopped. He seemed to be out of breath for some reason. The man was a Gypsy, one-legged, one-armed, propped up against a bakery whose window had been shattered. In the window, a single dingy lace curtain clung to its rod, shaking its head no in the breeze. A loaf of bread sat inside on the counter, along with a cake that looked blue in the light.

  The poor man stood out of the wind on his only leg and held out his only hand. He was like a badly designed tree, with a single branch held out to catch rain.

  “What about today?” the man said to us.

  “Today?” Attila asked.

  “Yes,” the Gypsy said.

  “I don’t know,” my brother said.

  A crutch lay behind the man, together with a battered violin. “Are you back now?” he asked, his hand still held out to us.

  My brother looked at me. I expected him to say, “Let’s go,” but instead he wanted to stay.

  I found a single coin in my pocket, put my hand around it. I stepped up and said, “Yes, we’ve been away, but now we’re back. Have you been waiting for us?”

  “Oh, a young girl,” the man said. Attila grinned broadly. “I have been waiting,” the man said. “Lucky girl.”

  My voice hadn’t broken yet was the problem, and if it didn’t soon, I was going to take a rock to it. Compared to me, my brother sounded like a grown man, a man of the world.

  I looked into the milk of the man’s blue eyes and realized he couldn’t see. “How do you play that violin?” I asked. “How do you manage?” I picked it up for him. It still had its shapely f holes, but it was battered—an I and an O plus some punctuation marks had punched their way through too.

  “I haven’t played for years,” the man said. “The old girl is like a pet I don’t have to feed much,” he said, laughing. “Are you two musicians?” We didn’t answer. “No, of course you’re not,” he said. “You’re someone I stopped on the way to something. That’s what I do, stop people on their way to something else.”

  A young woman flew by us, the whites of her eyes blazing. She turned down an alley between two tall gray stone buildings. She scared me. I had thought she was coming right at us. It was impossible to tell whether people were running to something or from something.

  “Actually, I am a musician,” my brother said. He was grinning again.

  The man lowered his begging hand and said, “What do you play?”

  “I play piano,” he said, “and my sister sings.”

  “Do you?” the man said, genuinely pleased.

  I pulled on Attila’s arm now. I felt we should give the man a coin and go.

  “What sorts of things do you sing and play?” the Gypsy said.

  “We can do ‘Pur ti miro’ by Claudio Monteverdi,” my brother said.

  “Ah, the duet.”

  The man began to hum, and though I had never heard it myself, I said, “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Can you do anything by Bizet? Can you perform some songs from Carmen?”

  “Yes, my sister can, some of them.”

  “Can you sing ‘Habanera’?”

  I wanted to tear Attila to pieces. I felt my breakfast coming up.

  The man started to sing himself, with a sad, raspy voice. If he had not been blind, I’m sure he would have closed his eyes. Now my brother wanted to leave, but I stood firm. I felt suddenly warmed by the song, warmed by the poor man. My grandmother had played the record a hundred times. I started singing along with the man, every word, without knowing what the French words meant.

  L’amour est un oiseau rebelle

  Que nul ne peut apprivoiser,

  Et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle,

  S’il lui convient de refuser.…

  L’amour! L’amour! L’amour! L’amour!

  I stared into the man’s face. I was sure I could see the thoughts moving behind his eyes like bits of glass.

  He said, “You have nice tone, young lady.”

  “She does,” Attila said. “That was nice,” he said to me, and I think he meant it.

  “Now, listen,” the man said. I was still holding his violin, and he pushed it up against me. How did he even know I’d been holding it? “It’s magic: listen.”

  I put my ear against one of the extra holes in the instrument’s belly, as if it were a seashell.

  “Can you hear that?” I heard nothing. “Can you hear the song?”

  I could hear a wet wind now and was sure I could hear the river. “What kind of wood is it made of?” I asked.

  “Violin wood,” he said. “From the violin tree.”

  I offered it to Attila to try, but he declined. He wanted to go. I set down the violin where it had been. The torn awning flapped above our heads. I reached for the Gypsy’s hand to give him my coin, and his hand closed greedily on mine.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  He brought my hand up close to his lips. “I hope you have a very good reason for coming back, young lady,” he said to the hand before letting it go.

  I glanced at it to see if it had been soiled. I wanted to wipe it on something. “I do,” I said.

  “Yes,” my brother said.

  Another cold breeze blew up, and I shuddered.

  The man still aimed his blind gaze at us. “It must be good,” he said. “You must have a very good reason. Life and death.”

  Attila turned away from the man, suddenly panicked. He gave me a painful yank this time, and we took off toward Heroes’ Square.

  I felt a little strange, but I could hardly wait to see the square again. It had been some time since I’d been there. I had come with my class on a clear day last spring. Stalin had stood like a Titan
in the square on a high stone pedestal, a bronze man more impressive than a building. (If you want to make someone look like the Lord himself, my advice would be to make him big, his right arm raised high, his hand upturned, focusing the blue lens of heaven.)

  When Attila and I turned the corner from Andrassy Avenue onto Dozsa Way, at first I thought we’d come to the wrong square. Perched on Stalin’s pedestal were two boots the size of boilers, but no Papa.

  “There!” Attila said, clapping his hands and hooting. We ran like mad toward the pedestal. Attila hooted again and jumped.

  Stalin lay toppled behind his high stone platform. He was entangled in ropes and chains, like a colossus hoisted from the sea. But his big bronze boots still stood. Rope ladders hung from them.

  There were surprisingly few people in the square. They covered their open mouths when they saw what we saw and hurried away, as if the fallen god’s dark angels were still hovering, about to take revenge.

  But Attila was fearless. He pulled me along like a dog toward the fallen father.

  There was a shot, dinging something. I checked the windows all around the square, the trees, the moving shadows. Another shot pocked the pedestal.

  My brother’s tone sharpened. “Come!” he said. “Hurry.” He was several rungs up one of the rope ladders. “Come!” he barked again.

  I followed him. We scrambled up the sagging ladders. Who could have invented such a thing? I banged my elbow on the stone, scraped the knuckles of my left hand.

  Attila was already on top. Several Russian soldiers came running toward their bronze leader from the other side.

  Attila helped me reach the top of the pedestal. “We have to get inside.”

  “Inside what?”

  “The boots. One each. There’s a ladder up the far side of that one. You take that. I can get up this ladder.”

  “We’re going inside the boots?”

  Attila was hoisting himself up the ladder, moving his hands and feet like a monkey.

  I clambered up the second ladder. “What are we doing?” I grunted.

  “We’ll be like Mother Goose. We’ll be the Brothers Goose.”