Trauma and Migration in Joseph Kertes’ The Afterlife of Stars

Part One of an Essay-Review by Michael Greenstein

Rainer Maria Rilke’s line, “Beware oh wanderer, the road is walking too,” serves as a fitting epigraph to Joseph Kertes’s novel, The Afterlife of Stars. For members of the Beck family who immigrate from Hungary to Canada, the landscape moves along with the wanderers, so that alignment, orientation, dislocation, and displacement go hand in hand. The novel’s cover design reinforces this mutual motion: brothers Attila and Robert Beck face the Eiffel Tower, a beacon of freedom between Hungarian origins and Canadian destination. The younger brother holds a sickle of the moon that lights their path. The afterlife of the characters corresponds to the post-traumatic migration of the road, the lunarium, and the stellar illumination covering the Beck family. In his fiction Kertes sickles the mirror along the roadway between Budapest and Toronto.

The novel begins on a numerical note that locates the narrator precisely: “On October 24, 1956, the day I turned 9.8, my grandmother came to take me out of school in Budapest’s 6th District.” His math class is in the middle of reviewing decimal points, and decimals scattered throughout the novel are a reminder of the wandering of meaning towards decimation. “My grandmother gripped my hand as we made our way down Andrassy Avenue, but a crowd had formed at the Oktogon, blocking our passage.” This linkage of generations is one feature of Kertes’s family saga, as is the crossroads of Budapest’s Oktogon, the site of trauma inflicted by Russian soldiers. “Everyone was gazing up instead at eight Hungarian soldiers, one hanging from each of the lampposts.” The site of trauma is inextricable from the sight of trauma because place and vision fuse in the frozen moment: “A couple of the Hungarians had stuck out their tongues as they dangled – one seemed to be smiling, four wriggled and bucked, and the one nearest us, straight above my grandmother and me, looked down on us with evergreen eyes, but there was no anger in the eyes, or even light.”

If the Eiffel Tower represents the goal of freedom, then the Oktogon serves as an origin for trauma, the memories of these eight bodies engraved upon Robert Beck and the reader. The dead eyes of the corpse are forever green, yet sightless in this grotesque scene. Robert’s grandmother, Klari, breathes into the crown of his hair in an attempt to offset the display of hanged Hungarians, to add clarity to this blinding event. Filling the silence, Mozart’s music plays from “a lacy café a half block away, the white tongue of a curtain fluttering out from the window.” This white tongue contrasts with the dangling tongues of the cadavers, the “Laudate dominum” opposed to the soldiers’ silence in Budapest’s walking road of history and fiction.

Kertes’s Dickensian details add significance to character and setting. As his grandmother takes him to Vorosmarty Square, he transforms the street: “The cobblestones made me think of a house lying on its side.” Trauma topples the child’s vision of dead soldiers and the house of fiction, for across the street two Russian soldiers unfurl a vast canvas portrait of Stalin. This larger than life and death picture is ubiquitous in the totalitarian state and traumatized imagination. “He had the same smile and mustache, a mustache that was three times as impressive as Hitler’s, which was little more than a black checkerboard square. I found myself smiling back at the giant face, like a circus face.” In this exchange of smiles and reduction of tyrants, Kertes’s satire and humour serve as a means to counter the trauma. History eventually lathers those diabolical mustaches and shaves them down to size, for the afterlife has the last sad smile.

The circus atmosphere carries over to the Gerbeaud Café where Klari and Robert try to obliterate politics by substituting a history that precedes Hitler and Stalin. From politics to patisserie: “I was as excited about poppy-seed strudel as I was about Kaiser Laszlo, Gerbeaud’s monkey in a golden cage.” A remnant from a gilded age, the monkey attests to the ironies of evolution in his blue cap and vest. When he tilts his head in an appealing way, he contrasts with the earlier hanging heads. The waiter brings the narrator a marzipan monkey with a cap like the Kaiser’s, as animate and inanimate objects interact. In an interplay between innocence and trauma, when the café abruptly closes, Robert asks his grandmother if they will hang Laszlo. As soon as Robert returns home, he introduces a note of gallows humour when comparing his height to his older brother’s: “Attila was also a head taller than I was … making me want to plop an extra head on top of mine, a freaky one, possibly.”

Robert tells his brother about the hanging men at the Oktogon. During this domestic drama Robert runs to the balcony to peer over the bronze head of Mor Jokai, the old Hungarian writer whose statue watches over the street. Mor Jokai bears witness to history’s atrocities. In a tragicomic episode Attila examines his adolescent body in the mirror: “We are experiencing the balding of the world, my small brother.” Attila’s inventive mind provides much of the wise comedy in the novel, as he tugs on a couple of hairs on his body: “But notice the apes are having none of it. They possibly know something we don’t.” The simian world offers comic commentary on human folly. As the brothers joke about bodily parts, their dialogue is interrupted by Robert’s thoughts in sobering narrative: “The image of the hanging men shot through me, this time the ones with their tongues hanging out.” As the plot migrates, Robert’s trauma is pulled backward through the searing memory. Attila’s verbosity contends with his brother’s reticent narration that cuts him off: “I was sure that with a noose around his neck my brother would keep his tongue in his mouth, just to prove his point.” In other words, Robert’s post-traumatic reaction takes the words out of Attila’s mouth.

Once Attila is asleep, Robert hears his parents planning their departure from Budapest: his father says that they will go to Nebraska or Utah or Canada, but first stop in Paris where Klari’s sister Hermina lives. The adults’ discussion ends with a shuffling of feet, to be followed by the narrator’s nocturnal vision. Afterlife and afterlight hang in the balance. “When the living room lights finally went out, I waded through the black milk of night.” In that darkness (of Paul Celan’s poetry) the trauma returns, the Freudian uncanny invading the bedroom from the public square: “I saw the green eyes of the hanging men up ahead in some woods, like the eyes of a woodland creature.” This visual exchange between the living and the dead is soon enjoined by an auditory experience, which is not Mozart this time. “I heard music – drumming – from the window and thought of Kaiser Laszlo, deprived all afternoon of his usual morsels.” The pounding comes from bombs falling in the distance, which compounds the trauma. After this cacophony the visual returns as a refrain: “Then the hanging man’s eyes floated up again, greening over my sleep.”

The trauma builds when a tall Russian soldier with a red star appears at their house with orders for them to evacuate. He marches up to their “empire clock” and circles his long finger a number of times past the twelve. He returns an hour later with other soldiers to remove paintings and valuable porcelain cups. The biggest painting, “Christmas, 1903,” depicts two old women surrounding a Christmas tree with a star on top. The Russian’s red star and the tree’s star decorate The Afterlife of Stars – one canvas of meaning tucked within the larger frame. Only one picture remains on the wall among the “ghostly rectangles” – Attila’s drawing of a Spitfire fighter plane. It hangs over “the gilded double-headed-eagle clock,” which stands guard over the room. “The fierce-looking bird was the emblem of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” one of many imperial emblems in the novel.

Emblem and empire permeate Kertes’s fiction. Robert paints a watercolour at school, alongside photographs of Stalin and Khrushchev, on the opposite side of the clock. His painting features a weeping willow. “It was surrounded by impressionable trees, which also wanted to weep.” Lost and last impressions play against the clock’s time. The trees’ tears signal sorrow, but Kertes often alleviates sadness with laughter. Another of Robert’s drawings features sunflowers, which Attila says “looked like the handiwork of God as a child, trying out designs for the sun.” Sun and moon orbit Kertes’s bittersweet afterlife.

While the Russians ransack their home, a female soldier pauses for the clock, as the eagle watches with its four sharp eyes. “On her third trip by, she picked up the eagle clock with a strong arm and wrapped it like a mummy before bending over to make room for it in her heavy sack.” If she mummifies her plunder, then another Russian soldier gifts Robert with a Russian nesting doll to compensate for his loss: “’matryoshka’, he called it.” In this exchange, the reader is offered the meaning of detail tucked within detail, hidden miniatures withing the larger narrative frame that contains the child’s trauma. “The brightly painted matryoshka doll came apart, and I found that a succession of smaller dolls lived inside, all the way down to a puny one. She was a colourful wooden bean, little more.”

Within the larger wars of Germans and Soviets, Kertes features the domestic battle of the sexes as comic routines insert themselves into the action. As Robert admires the dolls, “Attila said that I was a girl, so I countered with my cowboy hat, spurs, cap gun, and holster,” which he places in his satchel with the reassembled matryoshka. He also adds the marzipan monkey, still blanketed in the linen cloth from Gerbeaud, with a “G” monogram. The brothers leave the interior of their house for the public squares of Budapest where they encounter a blind Gypsy with one leg: “He was like a badly designed tree, with a single branch held out to catch rain,” in Kertes’s designs that interweave people and tree tropes in urban forests. The stranger thinks that Robert is a girl because of his young voice: “My voice hadn’t broken yet, and if it didn’t soon, I was going to take a rock to it.” Humour and gender are also intertwined in The Afterlife of Stars. After dismissing the notion that the brothers may be musicians, the Gypsy identifies them as creatures on the move: “You’re someone I stopped on the way to something. That’s what I do, stop people on their way to something else.” This Gypsy survivor arrests migration of character and migration.

In the midst of trauma and migration, a musical interlude: Attila informs the Gypsy that he plays piano and his “sister” sings. They can sing and play Monteverdi’s “Pur ti miro.” The Gypsy then asks them if they can perform some songs from Bizet’s Carmen. Robert sings “L’amour” with the man who then offers his violin, which has the magical sound of a seashell and is made of violin wood from the violin tree in Kertes’s musical forest. The brothers leave for Heroes’ Square where Stalin had stood like a Titan, bronze man on a high stone pedestal. Yet when they arrive, Stalin lies toppled like a colossus hoisted from the sea. Only his big bronze boots remain, and the brothers climb inside the boots. The situation is comic because Attila is compared to a monkey, and he says “We’ll be like Mother Goose. We’ll be the Brothers Goose.” In the menageries of monkey and goose, brother and mother, mechanical slapstick overtakes Stalin’s afterlife: Robert “slithered down into the boot, though I was not the best slitherer.” Robert narrates between Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian domains and dimensions along the road of trauma and wandering.

The joke’s on the reader, character, and fate – a laugh of omniscience: “The soldier of the Oktogon dangled before my eye like a clear statement, and I knew that Attila and I would not die like legends but like jokes, the Brothers Grimm without a tale.” The Beck brothers succeed on the road to liberty, entering a movie theatre to watch Tarzan the Ape Man, before they leave their home for good.

The migratory road out of Hungary is paved with minefields and mixed intentions. En route Judit, a member of the extended family, dies in childbirth, and nuns come to assist the grieving family. “When a nun rolled up a couple of window blinds, the moon entered, illuminating the carnival of sound, silvering over the recumbent figures like old film.” This lunar atmosphere belongs within The Afterlife of Stars to illuminate Judit’s green eyes, the hanging soldiers’ eyes, and the feminine side of the child narrator: “I had to pull the covers over my head before the X-ray moon exposed my unmanly state.” The witness learns to cope with trauma, as the chapter closes with his focussed eyes. Inside Robert Beck are the coping mechanisms with the Baby Psychologist and the Baby Diviner that offer comic relief throughout his precocious apprenticeship. He runs ahead of himself when he quotes George Herbert, the Metaphysical poet: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat.”

In Vienna the brothers visit monuments, and a comic moment is inserted when they both urinate: “I started cackling, my pee flying in all directions.” Then they come upon the statue of Raoul Wallenberg, who saved Gypsies and Jews during World War II, and whose presence lingers in the novel as part of post-traumatic migration. Kertes closes chapters on the right note, reconciling trauma, light, and gravity: “Maybe Judit would be unearthed in a hundred centuries…. Maybe she’d descend with one of the deposed statues – with Raoul Wallenberg -- an unlikely couple, searching down in the deep for earth’s pilot light.”

The novel nests statues and other silhouettes of history. It also braids history through the generations when Robert and his grandmother study the sky together – the celestial history with its own migration. She tells him about the stars’ extinguished light, ancient light: “And other light, new starlight, is being sent out right now.” For Robert there is a continuum between starlight and the trauma of lampposts: “this discovery fell into the category of the hanging men, or at least the one hanging man.” No matter which country he is passing through, Robert carries the baggage of trauma at all times.

Music enters the rhythm of travel and trauma when Robert awakens to piano music, Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. The listener beholds Beethoven’s mountain with its own sublime afterlife – “lifting out to distant lands that nevertheless looked familiar.” The repressed returns to Robert when he tells his grandmother about the men hanging at the Oktogon, and enumerates all the dead people he has encountered. Beethoven transcends border and boundaries. Just as she instructs her grandson in the ways of the stars, so she applies music to the human condition to counter trauma: “the hangmen and the hanged both – might hear the powerful piece of music we just heard and misread it, misapply it. A Russian might misapply Tchaikovsky and a German misapply Beethoven.” Music and nationalism – Stalin and Hitler, Shostakovich and Wagner. “When you hear the power of music, there is something delicious in the absoluteness of it, just as there is something delicious in the absoluteness of destruction.”

Music may be off the beaten track, while the Becks’ journey carries on from place to place. “We were not at a place where we could stay or even visit again. We were at a place from which we had to move on.” In the migratory no-man’s land, Canada is a mirage of the future, the flip side of “Kanada” as a storage place for valuables in the concentration camp. Canada “was just a sound, an unpopulated sound.” The sounds of music and country resonate throughout the novel from the “Brothers Karamazov” to the “two musketeers.”

In Paris the family settles in with another relative, Hermina, who sings opera, including Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea. The first night in Paris Robert dreams about Budapest, beginning with Gerbeaud, followed by the Danube’s fallen bridges, a bombed palace with Russian soldiers floating in and out, and the Kaiser monkey. The dream culminates with Robert touching the monkey’s chest: “The place was soft with fur.” At times the dream sequence approaches magic realism in its combination of music, place, and light: “Something happened to me, a current running up through my arm like a rising sound, emanating from a distant place, the notes of an extinguished composer, calling from a cave out into the light.” Then a transition between dreaming and waking: in the former state, “I felt a sound-shadow pass over my ear.” He floats towards music in the form of his great-aunt’s response to Handel’s Messiah: “Let us make an English child, leave ourselves behind, take our green sad selves to the Promised Land, the German and the Jew dissolved in the union of that ancient meadow.”

Hermina also plays a 1915 recording of Handel’s Teseo, about Medusa and Jason, her voice playing over Dame Martha Bolingbroke’s in a palimpsest of sound. The operatic experience of drinking one’s own blood surpasses the evils of history: “Better than Hitler could drink, better than Stalin.” Robert wants to leave the room, but he hears a cough from the audience in the 1915 recording. This cough is not comic because it is framed in historical context between two world wars. The opera is also a prelude to Robert’s questioning of Hermina about her fingers, which were tortured by the Nazis in 1941. She describes the trauma of torture: “The place beyond life. It was really quite peaceful, insensate. I floated up out of the courtyard. I went to a place beyond things, beyond the brutalities of men and nature.” Robert is schooled beyond his age in family suffering and the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg. Robert carries the name of his grandfather, and he considers this inheritance of identity as a branding, the Holocaust tattooed onto his soul.

“To be 9.8 and relegated to childhood and childish ways and questions was one thing, but to be a Hungarian – or maybe not even a Hungarian – a Jew, a child on the run, to have seen a redheaded relative die at the foot of a lamppost.” Subjected to a host of traumas, the child on the run ages quickly to gain wisdom along all moving roads. He descends with his brother to the underworld of Paris and the sewers of history. After that tour he sets sail across the Atlantic in a “great beast of a ship sloshing along, clearing a path through all those …. slithering things in the deep water below us, a path through all that striving.” Like Jonah in a leviathan, the Becks add ballast to the transatlantic journey under a sky “black but flecked with stars, like notes flung over the hood of the Atlantic.” Musical accompaniment is never far from the twinkling sound of the stars and this post-traumatic afterlife. The Becks’ family saga prepares for Kertes’s most recent novel, Last Impressions.

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About the Author

JOSEPH KERTES was born in Hungary but escaped with his family to Canada after the revolution of 1956. He studied English at York University and the University of Toronto, where he was encouraged in his writing by Irving Layton and Marshall McLuhan. His first novel, Winter Tulips, won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. His third novel, Gratitude , won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and the U.S. National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Kertes founded Humber College’s distinguished creative writing and comedy programs. He is currently Humber’s dean of creative and performing arts.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Canada; First Edition (Sept. 2 2014)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143191489

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143191483