A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  “What?”

  “The bracelet. What you have.”

  She held up her wrist, and he poked at the bracelet with his forefinger, never touching it. “What does it mean to you?” she asked.

  The old man’s eyes opened wide. “The tyger fought the dragon at the beginning of the world,” he said. “The dragon was the god of the dead, and the tyger chased him. When the flood came to London, she built her castle on the high ground. She took her boat over the water and saved the people who were drowning. She put her veil over the sun.”

  “You asked for it,” whispered Peter from where he lay among the rocks.

  Nothing was more depressing than to listen to the accomplishments of Miranda Brancoveanu. But these stories were so exaggerated, they made Miranda want to laugh. Instead she pressed her lips together, nodded sagely as the recitation of miracles went on.

  After a while the old man got up and tottered away. When he was gone, Miranda heaped some more wood on the fire. Peter hadn’t eaten much of his supper, and there was meat left in his bowl. She picked it up, and then she clambered back over the rocks to where Captain Raevsky sat by himself.

  She had taken a knife from the hunters’ camp, and now she pulled it from its sheath. Raevsky held up his wrists. Miranda watched the tears run down his cheeks, from under the swollen lid of his right eye. He rocked back and forth. “Multumesc,” he said—thank you. She knew that much at least.

  Miranda bit her lips and said nothing. She would not talk to this man. She put the bowl down on the rocks.

  “Multumesc,” he said again, though she’d done nothing.

  He tried to wiggle his fingers. She stood above him with the knife, watching him fall over onto his side and crawl painfully to the bowl that she’d set down. She watched him grovel with his face in the bowl. Then finally he rolled away, rolled onto his back.

  “So,” he murmured, “never have I failed so much.”

  She didn’t want him to talk. She stood above him with the knife in her hand. “Always I am thinking of the Baroness Ceausescu,” he said.

  Miranda didn’t want to hear about that. She clambered back over the rocks. She imagined she might bring a blanket for Captain Raevsky, perhaps one of the blankets that Peter had cast off.

  He was lying on his side, and there was sweat on his face. Miranda put the back of her hand against his forehead. “How are you feeling? Can I get you something?”

  In just a few minutes he looked worse. He grabbed at her with his right hand, and she sat with him, examining the strong fingers, the black hair on the back of his palm and wrist. “What’s happening to me?” he murmured. “Is it my hand? My dad once told me how a body can resist a transplant. Is that what’s happening? And why is Andromeda a dog?”

  It was as if this question was liberated by his fever—they had never spoken about it, because it was too large a subject, and because it led directly to his hand. “I think my aunt made a mistake,” Miranda said.

  Peter murmured, “Sure. No one could have asked for this.”

  Just because she hadn’t spoken about it, didn’t mean she hadn’t given it some thought. “Do you remember that first day, when Blind Rodica brought that little animal out of the soldier’s mouth? And then when Gregor Splaa was on your back…”

  She hadn’t told him this but now she did, how she’d seen that lizard drop from the man’s mouth. “I think Andromeda had a dog inside of her. Don’t you think that’s appropriate?”

  When she came into the hunter’s camp, she’d told them all about Andromeda, how she had seen Andromeda. That was how the talk had gotten started about the wendigo, or whatever it was. But she hadn’t told Peter about the man with the tobacco smell and the cologne. She didn’t want to think about some strange man growing inside Peter like a tumor, making him foreign among all these other foreigners, making him sick—no, he was the one who had said that. Anyone could have caught a cold in this cold storm.

  Now she stopped talking, because he wasn’t paying attention. She took off her sweatshirt and rolled it up into a pillow for him—it was warm beside the fire. Then she lay down beside him and listened to the wind roaring outside, and watched the dirty snowflakes falling from the roof.

  Peter tossed and turned all night. Miranda lay beside him, but in the morning when the gray light crept over the boulders from the entrance of the cave, she felt she had scarcely slept at all. Her thoughts had been so disordered, though, in retrospect she understood they must have been dreams.

  For a moment she lay wondering about Andromeda. Again she pictured in her mind the shelter that Andromeda had found under some fallen branches. Then she opened her eyes to the sound of someone calling her name. Peter sat wiping his face. “I have a fever.”

  His eyes were ringed with red. His cheeks were pale. Miranda gave him water from the bowl, then wet one of Rodica’s handkerchiefs and washed his face. She couldn’t think of what else to do, and so she sat holding his hand, talking to him about this and that, listening while he talked. “Three summers ago my dad rented a cabin in North Carolina in the woods near Hot Springs. It was when my mom was still going to be okay. She was in remission, so my dad was teaching me how to shoot. He always said he was going to wait until I was strong enough to aim with one hand. He bought me a twenty-two, and then he set up Coke cans on the fence. He had a brother in Greeneville, so we used to go swimming in the river, the French Broad. I started to do all those things sort of late. I couldn’t even swim until that year. The good thing about my cousins was you don’t have to prove anything. My dad had lots of relatives in Greeneville.”

  Miranda didn’t know what to do. She sat holding his hand, his big new hand, with its heavy knuckles and black hair. She examined the birthmark in the shape of a bull’s head. She was waiting for the old man to come, and finally he did, carrying a bucket of hot water and a burning stick, with which he built another fire. “Is it still snowing?” Miranda asked him, though she could tell the wind was less.

  He didn’t answer, because he was looking at Peter’s face. “He has a fever,” Miranda said. The old man glanced at her. Then he turned to Peter and was poking him with his stiff fingers, taking his pulse, then bending over him to smell his skin and his breath. “Open,” he said, and when Peter opened his mouth he peered inside, peered at his tongue and at the whites of his eyes, which were now pink. Then he tottered away without a word, leaving Miranda to wash Peter’s face and hold his hands; he was lying down now, and Miranda had made as comfortable a bed for him as she could.

  “I met a girl that year,” he said, “and she wrote me a letter when we got back home. Then the next summer we drove down that way…”

  Miserable and sad, Miranda listened to him without listening. She was cold without her sweatshirt, but Peter didn’t feel it, and at times he would throw off all his blankets. Parched, he would call for water, his face streaked with sweat. At other times he would complain of the cold and his teeth would chatter. Then she would wrap him in blankets and put her arms around him until he stopped shaking and could talk again. He told her about the time he’d been chosen for the soccer team. Later, though, he’d had to quit because his grades were poor. He told her one night he had broken into the college chapel and slept on the altar. At the same time he was reciting scraps of poetry, most of which she didn’t recognize. “‘But since I am a dog beware my fangs’—I knew it all by heart, every line. Then I went in and failed the test, though I knew it better than they did. Were they stupid, that they couldn’t tell? It was my secret. I knew the entire play line by line. That was my diamond cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfort. I worked on it all week. I had it in a box without a key.”

  She couldn’t stand listening to him. She got up and left him, and walked back into the cave. She took the knife and threw it underhand into the shadows. She imagined Raevsky inching toward it over the rocks, groveling and struggling with his face in the dirt. She said nothing to him, but went back and sat near Peter with her arms around her k
nees.

  Later the old man brought soup. But Peter pushed the bowl away and spilled it. Some others of the wild men stood around, including the big man who seemed to be their leader.

  He watched, but didn’t come close. The old man had some kind of medicine, some bark or powder that he’d mixed in hot water in a tin cup, but Peter wouldn’t drink it. He didn’t seem to recognize where he was. His face was flushed and red, his eyes ringed with red. Patiently, the old man poked at him with his stiff fingers; Peter’s shirt had come undone, and the old man pulled it back to reveal some sores on his side, a rash of hard red bumps. He grunted when he saw it, pursed his lips. After a while he got up and tottered away.

  But Peter let Miranda hold his hands. He let her wash his face. The light in the cave grew stronger, and Miranda realized the storm was less. No more snowflakes came down. The wind no longer whispered in the rocks. Miranda lay down beside him with her arm around his neck, his head against her chest. After a while he was still and seemed to sleep. Rocks dug into Miranda’s back and side, but whenever she tried to shift her position, he stirred. She imagined if he could get some rest, then he would wake up and his fever would have broken, and so she lay without moving for as long as she could. She also must have dozed off for a little bit, for she imagined her aunt standing over her in the cave, dressed in her gray clothes and saying, “It is time now. Come to meet me. Death can be defeated. Do not fear.” But Miranda was sick of her damned aunt, and in her dream paid no attention, and her aunt bent down to poke her or shake her, and she woke up and saw a shadow was blocking the light, and it was Raevsky.

  Startled, she raised her hands. “They are gone,” he said.

  She didn’t know what he meant, but then she struggled up and saw the cave was empty. The fire was out. Sunlight came in through the rocks. She moved, and Peter stirred, but he wasn’t better. There was blood in his face, and his skin was burning. Sunlight came in from the mouth of the cave, and she and Raevsky carried Peter forward into the light that shone over a landscape transformed by snow.

  They set Peter up in the entrance to the cave, lying against some rocks that had been put there for the purpose. This was where the wild men had stayed, and the sticks of their fire still glowed. Miranda held Peter’s burning hand. He was talking again, but she didn’t understand him. “It is Roumanian,” Raevsky said.

  Miranda didn’t want to hear anything about that. She stood up in the entrance to the cave and called for Andromeda over and over. And then Andromeda came picking her way through the snow, along the track the wild men had left. She came to lick Miranda’s hands. “Your father had two friends,” Raevsky said. “And so, they disappeared. People said were murdered.”

  Miranda shook her head.

  “No, but is true. This is some kind of spell. At first I think this is de Graz’s son—but is not so. I recognize this face. Is like a child now.” He pointed to the mark on Peter’s hand. “I recognize de Graz’s mark. But that is twenty years before, the year your father died.”

  Miranda dug her hands into the thickest fur of the dog’s neck. “Fifteen years,” she murmured. Then she stood up, tears in her eyes. Raevsky was still talking, but she interrupted him. “Do you know where we are?”

  “I can find the river. When they took me I was sleep like a fool.”

  His right eye was blackened, swollen shut. He sat rubbing and chafing the welts on his ankles and his wrists. “We’ll stay here today,” she said. “If Peter is no better, then we’ll go down. You’ll take us to Albany—will you take me there? You won’t make any trouble?”

  Raevsky bowed his head. “No boat.”

  So she told him about the boat she had hidden among the balsam trees. “There,” she said. “Now you must promise.”

  “The Baroness Ceausescu will not hurt you,” Raevsky grumbled. “She will be your friend. The Carpathia will wait. Also, this boy—de Graz—it is the variola. La petite vérole—what you say. The small spots. Me, it will not hurt. But you have an immunity?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He jumped up, astonished. “But you must not touch!”

  Later he built a fire and went out to find food. He staggered out from the cliff face and in places the snow was around his shins. Peter sat with his eyes closed and fell asleep again. Miranda and Andromeda sat with him, watching the sun sink through the thin trees.

  “Don’t leave me again,” Miranda said.

  She had been cheered to see the sun, the shadows on the snow. Peter was resting, and she was happy about that, too. Andromeda sat with her, whimpering sometimes. She herself felt very tired. She sat cross-legged, and fed the fire with chunks of birchwood, a quantity of which was stacked against the wall.

  She had a name and a place: Ion Dreyfoos, in Albany. But it was something to strive for. What had her aunt said? Death could be defeated? And then something else. Follow the cave to the end under the yawning wall.

  Raevsky didn’t return at sunset. They had no food. Light-headed, exhausted, hungry, she made up a bed for Peter and then laid him down. She had melted some snow in a broken bucket, and she gave him water to drink. He didn’t speak to her; his skin was flushed and burning. His eyes couldn’t focus, and he couldn’t speak.

  “It’ll be all right,” she said to him, an assurance she did not feel. It had been stupid to tell Raevsky about the boat. He’d never give up on his obsession, but she would force him to take Peter with them, that was all. And if he didn’t come back, then in the morning they would follow his tracks. Why was she so stupid all the time?

  She lay back against a boulder by the fire, where she didn’t have to look at Peter anymore. As darkness filled the world outside the circle of the fire, she closed her eyes.

  Immediately it was as if she had fallen into the middle of a dream. But it was a dream that was like the waking world in every specific part. In the dream she lay against the boulder with her eyes open, watching the yellow dog who had run back deep into the cave and now returned. The darkness was complete, and the fire had burned down, and the dog started to whimper more insistently. She took the cuff of Miranda’s coat between her teeth and pulled. She let go and whimpered again, and took a few steps into the cave. With one foot poised over the ground, she looked back over her shoulder.

  Outside the dream, Miranda hoped Raevsky was mistaken, that the wild men were mistaken, and that Peter had a fever that would break. But in the dream she saw him gasping for breath, his face a mass of discolored spots, and she knew that he might die. “What is it?” she asked. She didn’t want to leave him alone, but with part of her mind she imagined for a moment that the yellow dog had found something, some new cache of food, perhaps. She got up and allowed herself to be led into the back of the cave. The dog stopped there to scratch at her leather backpack where it lay.

  With the other part of her mind, Miranda was remembering her aunt’s words, as clear now as if the old woman was whispering in her ear. Follow the cave under the yawning wall. The gold is for the boatman and the sphinx. Meet me in tara mortilor.

  Miranda slung the pack over her shoulder. The dog led her on past where she had seen Raevsky, where the cave was narrow and black. The dog was barking softly, scratching at something in the dark, and Miranda reached into her bag to find the cigarette lighter with her father’s initials on it, and which Stanley had put into good working order years before. She saw the sparks, and then it lit, and she could see a cleft in the rock where it was just possible to squeeze through.

  In the pack she also found the coins, which had been shaken from the box into the bottom seam. She pulled them out, examined them, slipped them into her pocket, where she felt also the rings from Andromeda’s ears. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she murmured. But Peter was sick, and the dog had already entered in. The flame from the cigarette lighter burned straight and blue. And perhaps there was a glint of some other light on the other side of the cleft, and perhaps the cleft was wider when she started to push through. In fact none of this wa
s real. She stood with her hand on the rock and it was warm under her hand. The dog had disappeared up ahead, and she could hear it barking.

  * * *

  IN BUCHAREST, PAST midnight, the Baroness Ceausescu walked along the esplanade. A fog had drifted in along the river. In it the streetlights seemed to glow at many times their size. The baroness walked beside the iron railing, which she touched at intervals with her gloved hand.

  In Bucharest, also, there was a warmth in the air, a wetness to the mist. The baroness’s hair was wet with beads of condensation. One hand was on the railing, and the other grasped the tourmaline inside her glove. That was where she kept it now, in the nest of her palm.

  Kevin Markasev followed at her heel. She walked through the warm mist, and around her the city seemed deserted.

  * * *

  BUT IN NEW ENGLAND, as she came out of the cleft into the country of the dead, Miranda sensed immediately that she was not alone. There was the dog in front of her, barking at something. In her left hand she held her father’s cigarette lighter, engraved with his initials and his family’s coat of arms. In the mist the small flame made a glow many times its size. Her wool cap was wet with condensation and she pulled it off, stuffed it with her mittens in the top of her pack. She stood peering into the darkness, then stepped forward into the open air beyond the cave. She raised the lighter, and by its flame she saw she was in a forest of birch trees. At her feet she recognized a round stone in the shape of a skull, and farther on there was the body of a woodchuck nailed to a tree trunk, stuffed with money and photographs. Around her, here and there she saw the gleaming eyes of animals, but she wasn’t frightened. She knew they couldn’t hurt her. She knew they were curious about the light, and as she stepped forward now they moved around her legs, the spirits of the dead in their animal shapes. There were otters and rabbits and wolves and snakes, all together, because in this land there was no hunter and hunted, no predator and prey. Some of them blundered against her ankles but then pulled back shyly, aware she was a stranger. Some whispered in sibilant voices to each other, and some spoke to her. One, a fat black lizard in the crux of a tree, recited to her the kings of Roumania. It was Gregor Splaa. “Miss,” he said, and his tongue flickered out. “Miss, what are you doing here?”