A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  What was it Monsieur Spitz had said, that it had been dug out of the brain of Johannes Kepler? She had heard that story before, heard it dismissed, also, as a fantastic lie. But the Elector of Ratisbon had called it one of his country’s treasures and she possessed it. She was not like these beggars here smoking their cigarettes, waiting for their soup.

  She had heard part of the story. During the previous century, during the forty years of war, the Roumanian army had occupied the city of Prague. They had burned the castle of the Austrian emperor, who had been interested in curiosities and miracles. Kepler’s Eye had been part of his collection. Mlle. Corelli’s ancestor had been an officer in the Roumanian army.

  Snow drifted through the marble columns. It had started to snow. The dry flakes landed on the sleeves and shoulders of her jacket, just a few, then more.

  Now what was she to do? There was no point now in asking for a German visa. Soon the police would come to her house. Too many people knew about Claude Spitz, and it was likely the elector would find a way to denounce her, if only for the names she had called him. In her pocket she had Kepler’s Eye and Spitz’s cheque.

  But she had not brought the princess’s money. And what about her son? No, no—she mustn’t run away. She would clear out the laboratory. Explanations would be found. Gypsies had killed Spitz. He was still breathing when he left her house, unless Jean-Baptiste had finished him.

  * * *

  AS THE BARONESS Ceausescu went over these considerations in her mind, the Elector of Ratisbon exited the little restaurant on the Esplanade. He had stopped for a while inside the door, chatting with the manager and one or two of the patrons. Once outside, he also felt the need for solitude, and so he wrapped his white scarf around his neck, pulled down his silk-brimmed hat, and struck out on foot toward his hotel, the Athenée Palace on the Piata Enescu. Herr Greuben followed at a respectful distance.

  An old woman’s death, a girl’s reappearance on the stage of the world—surely these things were related. Herr Greuben had sent a message the night before. He had seen Kepler’s Eye strapped to the forehead of some Roumanian debutante. No, she was the daughter of Professor Corelli, whose house had been invaded unsuccessfully five times before. It was unfortunate that laws must be broken. On the other hand, the stone was German property, stolen long ago.

  A philosophic man, the elector was nevertheless conscious of a certain frustration, because this time too, if he had not taken a painkiller and retired early, doubtless he’d already have Johannes Kepler’s eye. But by the time he could be roused, the girl had already left the empress’s reception. Not that it mattered. She didn’t possess it anymore. Why else would she have gone to purchase an artificial tourmaline in the Strada Stavropoleos; why would she have done that, if not to fool her father? Herr Greuben had been right to follow the jeweler’s cabriolet—it had stopped at the house off Elysian Fields, and Spitz had followed the baroness inside. An hour later a servant had bundled him out, had driven the cab himself down to the river. Herr Greuben found it with the horse cut loose. He’d thought the man was drunk. No, unconscious with his head broken in. And the stone was not there, though the setting was loose among the pillows, a strap of chased silver that Mlle. Corelli had worn around her head. The stone had been pried out of its socket.

  Greuben had not notified the police, though it was obvious Herr Spitz had been assaulted. How difficult it was for the elector in this barbaric foreign capital to find himself constrained by diplomatic niceties! In Munich or Berlin he would have access to the chief of police.

  That afternoon he had been careful not to mention the stone to the Baroness Ceausescu. He had talked about the girl, though the stone had been uppermost in his mind. Now as he walked across the square under the streetlights toward the massed pile of the hotel, he scanned the sidewalk for a trace of his Roumanian agent, or else some employee of the German embassy. But there was no one, and in an instant he was surrounded by a pack of beggars. Derelicts and orphans always waited around the double revolving door under the statue of the Goddess Minerva, which was carved in an irritatingly muscular fin-de-siècle style.

  The elector, famed for his generosity, paused under the streetlight to allow the beggars to come close. The children, of course, needed no invitation. Already they surrounded him in a circle and pulled at his sleeves. But it took a while for the older men and women to shuffle out of the ornate doorways and come toward him with bleared, hopeful eyes. Who were they? Military veterans, perhaps—that one had a wooden leg. Unfortunate women, more sinned against than sinning. In Germany there was nothing like this. Especially not in such a place. As he searched his pocket for his roll of coins, he looked up at the hotel’s overdecorated façade. Above him in the first-floor ballrooms, a party had spilled out onto the balconies.

  It was his custom always to carry several rolls of five-franc pieces. Now he peeled back the paper and brought out the coins. He pressed one into the palm of each child, then reached out to find the hands of the adults, some of whom still hung back. One in particular, an unfortunate, drunken woman with no hat or shawl, whose cheeks were dark with broken blood vessels, but whose eyes still glittered with intelligence—he took her cold hands in his, murmuring some encouragement as she flinched away, appalled by his ugliness.

  All this will change, he thought. Bored now, he pushed through the crowd into the revolving door. Inside the lobby he stood stripping off his gloves next to the elevator, under the crude, gold, faux-Byzantine mosaic of the vault. He looked again for his Roumanian agent and saw a man separate himself away from the people at the desk to approach not him but Greuben, who was close behind. The elector removed his topcoat and slung it over his arm, then rode up alone in the wheezing cage.

  Later, in his suite on the fifth floor, listening to the hiss of the steampipes in the overheated room, the elector waited for Greuben’s knock. He stood by the French windows, looking out over the lights of the city and the dark expanse of public gardens. When the man entered, he didn’t turn around.

  “Sir, they found nothing,” said Hans Greuben, “though I admit they didn’t have a chance to search the entire house. She was still gone when they left, but the servant only went out for an hour. They searched her bedroom and the obvious places.”

  Without turning, the elector sat down into an armchair, set so that he could continue to look out the window. He stretched his short legs out in front of him. He frowned as he examined his shoes. “Where does she do her work? Her husband’s laboratory—did you find that?”

  Greuben shrugged. He stood in the middle of the rose-colored carpet, a young, handsome, worried man, dressed in a black overcoat which he did not take off. “Do you think,” said the elector, “that she had the jewel with her at the restaurant?”

  “I wasn’t aware of its effects.”

  “Were you not? Were you not, indeed? Tell me, Hans. Is she an attractive woman?”

  Again Hans Greuben shrugged. “No more so than yesterday. In any case, those stories are just superstitions.”

  The elector pressed his palms together in front of his face. In the past, he imagined, the baroness might have had the capacity to inspire many emotions—lust, envy, admiration, perhaps. But loyalty and selfless love were not among them. The jewel had the power to change that, for her and for him also.

  “A superstition, is it? An old wives’ tale. Hans—no doubt you think you are a modern man.”

  “Your grace?”

  “I tell you, the properties of the stone are a matter of scientific fact. Science, you understand. I asked you whether you had found Ceausescu’s laboratory—yes, it is true. There is a lot of superstition connected with those primitive alchemical experiments, and so it is a good policy to ban them by law. But you mustn’t forget, even the great Isaac Newton was an alchemist, and it was to form an alchemical laboratory that he was invited to Berlin after the destruction of the British Islands. You see even that is an example of what I mean. To the vulgar mind, a moral and spiritu
al catastrophe, a proud nation destroyed by vengeful gods. As scientific men we know the cause: an earthquake along the Great Grampian Fault, a natural occurrence, and yet the effect was the same, a tidal surge that destroyed London. Now here we are in a primitive country, and we see women like Aegypta Schenck with her charms and prayers and potions—that is the oldest and least effective way of organizing these phenomena. Then we see Baron Ceausescu and his experiments—more efficient, certainly, because he was a man. So we can place his thinking at an intermediate point, and even admit he might have been capable of great things, if he’d had a German education. But you and I, Hans, have the benefit of much research, and if we are able to do more, it is because the scientific foundation has already been laid. The experimental stage, you might say, has already been concluded, leaving us as its beneficiaries, leaving us free to summon its conclusions and refine them into scientific principles, and then manipulate them at a distance, like Plato’s philosopher kings.”

  Behind him, the elector could sense Greuben’s skepticism, hear his disapproving sniff. So perhaps he’d been overoptimistic to include him in a category with himself. Perhaps he was just a servant after all.

  And perhaps, the elector reflected, there was no one in such a category, which left him with a lonely duty. “I should like a whiskey-soda,” he sighed. Confused with melancholy, he sat back, then allowed himself to press his fingers first against his lips, then against the hot, broken surface of his cheeks, ravaged by smallpox when he was just a boy.

  “These anti-conjuring laws,” he went on, “are against superstition only, a way of discouraging false principles, false explanations. You must see the distinction. On one side it is all hocus-pocus and darkness, though admittedly certain tricks have been discovered—no, not discovered, but stumbled on by chance. And they’ve been passed along in secrecy, not subject to public scrutiny or experimentation, because the thinking behind them is all wrong—that’s what the enemy is. And on the other side we have the modern science of conjuring, and there is nothing about science that should be hidden or concealed—when I am in the government, you will see these are the first laws I will repeal, because they have outlived their usefulness.”

  Even as he said this, he felt a twinge of doubt. Darkness and hocus-pocus, but for twenty years Aegypta Schenck had managed to confound him. Superstitious nonsense, irrational and female, and yet if she’d not died, doubtless she’d still be thwarting him—“Aegypta Schenck kept me from this place,” he murmured as he listened to Greuben at the cabinet, the reassuring clink of the bottles, the rattle of the ice. “Or rather when I came here I was not myself. Now here I am, and I can’t think what to do. Miranda Popescu is in America—do you think so? Or is that another trick? It occurs to me we have no confirmation of any of this, but just our beautiful friend’s word, which is not, I fear, to be trusted.…”

  Herr Greuben stood behind him, holding the glass. “But your grace—”

  “Yes, this is sad and exhausting work. Clara Brancoveanu’s daughter. She is just a girl, you understand. Just a girl. And is there no one on God’s earth who can protect her from me? No one. No.”

  There was a small table beside the elector’s armchair. Herr Greuben laid the glass down on it and stepped back. Impassive, the elector sat with his fingers pressed together as the ice gradually melted and he fell asleep.

  * * *

  HIS HEAD FELL BACK, and his mouth fell open slightly, revealing his small, clean teeth. His eyelids trembled from the movement of his eyes. His hands were clamped together now, folded on his flat belly. From time to time his feet, stretched out on the hassock, twitched and shook.

  Hans Greuben stood behind him. Bored, he examined the painted wallpaper beside the door, a motif of Egyptian landscapes: palm trees, crocodiles, and the dome of Kufu’s great synagogue. He examined the portrait on the opposite wall, a beautiful woman dressed à la paysanne, as if for a country ball. She wore a peasant’s embroidered vest, and her skirt was carefully torn. She had a hungry, wild expression on her face—Hans Greuben stared at her for many minutes, waiting for instructions.

  If the elector had dozed off, what should he say, what should he do? Should he cough discreetly into his hand? Impatient, he approached the side table. The woman in the portrait was called Inez de Rougemont, he learned from a label on the gilded frame. A debutante from the previous generation, dead from a cancer in middle age; he thought he remembered reading her obituary. Now he leafed through the evening papers on the table, looking for news of Claude Spitz’s murder. But the stories were painful to read, and so he stood for several more minutes examining the medallion on the carpet. It was intolerable to have to wait like this, and so finally he approached the elector’s chair, intending to wake him and announce he would be going. When he got close, he heard some muttered words, and when he looked down he saw to his horror that the elector’s eyes were open, that his pupils were trembling—the sign of a waking trance, as all the world knew and every child was taught. At that moment it was clear to him that the elector, despite his money and connections, was a criminal, was at that moment committing a crime, and all his lofty talk of science was a fraud, or self-delusion. And if Greuben stayed, then he’d be implicated—is this why he had killed a man, to suck up favor with a conjurer?

  As he rode down in the elevator cage, he felt claustrophobic and afraid, desperate to be outside in the cold night. And once he reached the square, he couldn’t imagine shutting himself up again inside a cab. So he walked home along the Soseaua Kiseleff, past the Institute for Mental Deviation, a large brick mansion set back from the street. He walked a long way to his small apartment in the north part of the city. And even when he reached it, he preferred to sit outside smoking cigarette after cigarette rather than go in.

  He didn’t understand the elector’s preoccupation with Miranda Popescu. Cut off and alone, what did she matter in the clash of nations, the courses of destiny? Just one girl. The entire Brancoveanu family was finished, gone, destroyed. The elector, he thought, was a superstitious man. More than that—a conjurer, a criminal, not to be trusted. And Greuben, by accepting money, had made himself a criminal’s accomplice; there was no chance now that he’d be able to break away. The elector was too powerful, and he knew about Herr Spitz.

  Above Hans Greuben the stars glittered, clearly visible in that area of large lawns and dim or broken streetlights. When he was too cold to sit, he walked stiffly back and forth. When he was too cold to walk, he went inside and lay down sleepless in his overcoat, his heart full of thuggish misgivings and regrets. He was not a murderer, he told himself. He refused to imagine that he was. Herr Spitz would have died anyway from the wound on his head. If he could have brought him back to life again, he would have. It had been merciful to end his suffering. Still he was afraid that night the Jew would come to him while he was sleeping.

  * * *

  AT THE INSTITUTE FOR MENTAL Deviation, a lamp burned on the second floor. There, a boy sat in his dormer window, which he had opened through the bars. He was small, fair-haired, the only child of Baron and Baroness Ceausescu. He was named Felix, after the baron’s father.

  Often in that room he would sit without speaking, almost without moving for hour after hour, staring at the lantern flame. That night he could scarcely sit still.

  His hands were stroking the windowsill, scratching at the bars. He understood there was a change in the atmosphere. He didn’t know where it had come from, that it had gathered above the towers of the Athenée Palace Hotel and now was spreading over the city. But he thought he could feel in the steel bars of his room the tingle of an electric spark. He could feel a new sharpness to the air, a new thinness to the membranes that keep us from each other and the world, keep this world from the realm of spirits, devils, gods.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT THERE was no space between the living and the dead. In the wooden church on Elysian Fields, in the small, subterranean chapel of St. Simon the Fisherman, two men sat waiting. They
had broken open the coffin of Aegypta Schenck von Schenck, had taken out the body, wrapped in its shroud, and laid it on the stone table in front of the altar. They had put into her hands the Brancoveanu crucifix, made out of the nails of the true cross. They had pulled away a corner of the cloth.

  One man got up now. Holding up the brass candlestick, the long white candle, he studied for the nineteenth time the part of her face he could see: the coarse gray hair, the big nose, the sunken eyelid. Was it moving? Was it moving now? He could not but imagine the eye underneath, trembling and motile. Was that a tremor of the cloth over her lips? For the nineteenth time he took the brass hand mirror and slid it under the shroud, drew it back, examined it. Surely soon there’d be some mist upon it. Or else they would wake up to find the shroud was empty, the body gone. Surely this was all still part of the princess’s design, the instructions she had left for him.

  * * *

  NEARBY, IN THE HOUSE on Saltpetre Street, Kevin Markasev lay still. Hourly he had expected the lady of comfort and tears. Now she had come, and he pretended sleep so as to watch her. She had lit the lamp. She sat in the leather armchair next to a dusty table. Markasev watched her through the bars of his cage. Nor was it possible to tell by any movement of her shoulders or contortion of her face, any sound or quickness of breath, that she was weeping. Only once she turned toward him, and he could see the tears on her face.

  That night he too was aware of a new beginning. Often at intervals during the past few months, he had felt the presence of the ghost in that house, tasted in his mouth the strange sulphuric taste that ghosts bring with them. But that night with the skin between the worlds nearly effaced, he was aware first of a snuffling creature. He imagined it nosing in the shadows, the red pig of Cluj.