by Paul Park
As he spoke, one of the girls came toward them across the open floor, bearing a sprig of paper in her hand. And despite what he'd said, her father seemed embarrassed she was in the room. "Please," he said, "you must see that we are busy!"
It was the first bad-tempered remark Peter had heard from him. But she came forward unabashed, the sprig of paper in her hands, until she stood with them—a tall young woman with two circles of fat braids. She was the one who smelled of citrus. Her face was freckled and her features were strong, and she stared at Peter out of her intelligent, small eyes. She smiled as she was speaking, and her tone seemed to suggest a trace of mockery both for her father and for him, although her words were straight enough. "Please sir, a man came to the door with a message for our guest. When the steward questioned him, he went away."
She spoke in English, and her father answered. "And what business is that of yours?"
"I thought it was important, so I came. I wanted to greet our guest and make him comfortable in our house. My name is Mariamne Turkkan, and you are welcome, sir. My sister is too shy."
In her left hand she had the sprig of paper, and she held out the other one to shake. Her grip was strong and hearty. She paid no attention to the clink of Peter's chain. "I see you are looking at my drawings of the thunder lizards. Do you like them?"
"It is enough!" said her father. "You see he does not suffer for adventures. Now I must ask you for the message as a matter of law. You must put it in my hand."
"But Papa—that is rude. It is for Domnul Gross." Still she was smiling, as if at a joke Peter didn't understand.
"Not so rude as this man is," grumbled her father. "You forget he is a prisoner of the courts. Now you remind me of my work. Give it here!"
"Papa, I'm not sure what you're saying. The steward will tell you—"
"Give it here."
"Well then, of course we are all curious. I am sure Domnul Gross . . ." and she gave Peter her frankest smile.
The sprig unrolled in Turkkan's big palm. Three words were written on it in Andromeda's slashing script. World Wrestling Tonite.
"There, you see?" laughed Mariamne Turkkan. "Papa, I'm not sure what you suspect."
"I do not suspect, except daughters of mine will behave like gentle ladies in my house. Is that too much?" And he went on in Turkish while Peter watched his face. He didn't seem especially angry, nor did his daughter seem embarrassed.
"Do you like the drawings?" she asked.
"You are very skilled," said Peter
"Enough!" bellowed her father. "Get away from here!" As the girl retreated, still smiling, he crushed the paper in his hand and threw it to the floor. "Where were we? You must forgive her. She forgets you are a prisoner under sentence."
Bat the next moment he forgot it, too. "My gazelles' horns," he sighed. He poured himself another glass of absinthe and held it up into the light.
He had left the crumpled message lying in a corner of the floor. Peter looked at it, and looked again around the room at the upper windows, now dark, the slow fans, the litter of food on the small table. The girl's appearance and Andromeda's note had combined to lighten his mood.
Turkkan drank his liquor. He put down his glass, and with a napkin he wiped his moustache and his bald, sweating forehead. He took off his glasses to polish them. His eyes seemed suddenly mournful, until he replaced them and turned into the light.
He talked for a few moments about his daughters, about how difficult it had been to raise them since his poor wife's death. This led him to a brooding silence as he stared at the closed door at the far end of the room.
"Enough!" he said at last. "We must find some more amusement for this night. We have many hours before you leave us. What must you do? Mariamne is a chess player, and her younger sister can play and sing."
He seemed to have forgotten he had just chased Mariamne from the room. Peter dreaded the idea of sitting up with him, drinking absinthe. Besides, there was Andromeela's note. "Is there a wrestling competition?" he asked.
"Ha! It is impossible." Turkkan shook his head with something like amusement on his face. When Peter persisted, he cut him off: "You forget your situation."
But later, when they had sat in armchairs and Turkkan had smoked his pipe, then abruptly he changed his mind. A servant had come with more cups of coffee, and Turkkan told him to prepare the car. "Why not?" he said, his spectacles glinting fiercely. "Am I not a man? Is this not your final night? Is this not the sport of emperors?"
He stood up, put down his demitasse, and stripped off his embroidered gown. Underneath he was dressed in his khaki uniform. Around his waist was a leather belt, from which hung a long holster. He unbuckled the flap and showed the handle of a gun. "I will be with you every moment. I will not stop to shoot you dead."
"I understand."
"You think you will try something? Maybe you will meet your accomplices—go ahead! There will be soldiers there. At every competition there are many officers of the janissary police. De Graz, we are not afraid of you!"
Now quickly he led the way, while Peter took mincing steps because of the chain between his ankles. When they came out of the room, Turkkan held the door for him. "My friend! This will be a pleasure! This will be a privilege to see some matches in your company, even though this is the ordinary Friday competition and there will be no champions. It will be something for me to tell my daughters' sons. I mean when they are married and have sons, and are not such a worry to their father."
"They are lovely—"
Turkkan glared at him. "My friend, you do not laugh at me! What is beauty in this world, when compared to the love in a good woman's heart?"
Touched in spite of himself and his own troubles, Peter now preceded Turkkan down the long hall. Once he felt a sudden jab in his ribs, and turned back to find the old man had poked him with the muzzle of his revolver— "Shoot you dead!" he whispered. "I shall not stop to shoot you dead!"
A steward met them at the bottom of the hall, carrying his master's tarbush and fly whisk. The tarbush was a red pillbox hat with a black tassel, and Turkkan slid it onto his bald head while he was talking to the servants who now clustered around. He had replaced the revolver in his holster. The fly whisk, made of white horse hair at the end of a carved, ebony stick, he put under his arm. "Is the Pharaoh ready?" he asked.
THAT SAME NIGHT IN ROUMANIA, far from the civilizing influences of Adrianople, Bucharest, or even of Brasov, General Ion Antonescu sat in his hut in the Carpathian mountains. This was north of the village of Nucsoara in the Doamnei valley, a high, lonely, uninhabited place, where the partisans of the former empress had their camp. Valeria Dragonesti lay sick from a wasting fever. Doctors had come.
Long accustomed to the luxuries of the Winter Keep, she now lay on a rude mattress of pine needles in the hut's inner room. Outside her door the general sat before the fire reading a letter. Light came from the oil lamp on the surface of his writing desk, a rough-cut plank between two stumps. It shone on the woodpile and the dirt floor, the hearth and chimney. Antonescu sat on the only finished piece of furniture, an upholstered armchair taken from the wreck of the empress's hunting lodge. The fabric was now ripped and stained.
That spring, after five years of fighting, the fortunes of Antonescu's partisans were in decline. The previous summer, after the success of several bold raids, the German military governor of Transylvania had organized a response. He had pushed Antonescu back into the most inhospitable regions of the mountains, and had allowed him to suffer there over the cold winter.
Communications were difficult, which gave the letter he now read a double importance. He pored over the fine stationery, the elaborate, cursive, feminine script:
. . .I have information I must share with you regarding the importation of proscribed armaments under the protocols of the African States. As you know, those protocols have forbidden the sale of any kind of automatic weaponry and advanced rockets, for fear of unbalancing the European powers. But I have reason to be
lieve that the usurper has made an expensive purchase, leaving Constantinople on the train to Bucharest, hidden in a shipment of caviar and fruit preserves that will necessitate the ice-cooled car. The name of the train is the Hephaestion. It will cross the border at Dobric at two o'clock at night. . . .
And here the letter named the date.
The general had received this letter many days before. With characteristic energy he'd made his plans. If it had not been for the empress's illness, he personally would have supervised the derailment, whatever the risk—because of his huge size, disguises were no good for him. But he would have journeyed by
night from safe-house to safe-house. The cause needed a victory, and he needed to find one, if only to come back and whisper news at Valeria's bedside, words of encouragement and hope.
General Antonescu sat in his armchair with his long legs sprawled out, reading and rereading the precious letter. There was nothing left to be done. It was not his fate to be there when the train crossed the Danube at Silistra and made its lonely progress through the Lalomitei marsh.
From the inner room he heard the empress cry out. There was nothing he could do about that. She was in the care of her devoted nurse who soothed her forehead and pushed back her hair, which in the past year had turned a lustrous shade of white. There was nothing he could do except upset her with his awkward movements, bump his head among the rafters. But he could not sit and listen to her cry, and so he pushed himself upright. Ducking his head, he stamped out of the door and stood outside, breathing in the cold air. The last light of the evening vanished from the rock face of the mountain, visible above him through the tall firs.
And though he stretched his arms and hands, though he stamped among the rocks in his high boots, though he opened the neck of his old uniform, still he could not shake the feeling of confinement.
NOR WERE THE CHAINS OF need, frustration, and anxiety that hampered him less strong than the chains around Peter's wrists after they'd been checked and rechecked by the soldiers. In a luxurious neighborhood outside the city of Adrianopole, he got into the rear seat of the cadi's Pharaoh motorcar, a long, open, stylish, internal-combustion vehicle. The air was wet and hot. A soldier sat in the front seat next to Ezekiel the chauffeur, and Turkkan squeezed in beside Peter in the back. Outside the wall of the cadi's house a narrow lane passed through a grove of fruit trees, some of which were still in flower.
The chauffeur turned the car onto the road. Cautiously peering ahead through the small windscreen, he opened up the pop-pop of the engine to a grumbling roar. Then he was off down the small hill through the deserted roads, until after fifteen minutes he came in through the old brick gates into the crowds. Still tinged with the colors of the sunset, the sky above the city was a soft, heavy purple, shredded and pricked by the carbide lanterns of the shops.
Now the chauffeur pressed his horn and flashed his headlights. They caught intermittently at the legs of people in the streets, who turned aside to let the Pharaoh pass. All roads led to the Hurriyet Meydani, the old town square beyond the synagogue. There a pitch had been laid out for wrestling. There the car came to a shuddering stop, and its clouds of greasy smoke drifted away.
At the opposite side of the square, Peter could see grandstands and a temporary barricade. The pitch was laid out under a four-cornered skeleton of wooden poles that supported the lights. Around it moved a crowd of spectators, vendors, and pickpockets, waiting for the next match.
Soldiers and black-uniformed janissaries made a passage for the cadi. With his hand over his holster he led Peter up the stairs into the grandstand. It was mostly deserted, as was the one across the way, for reasons that were soon apparent. Men bet money on these matches and the odds would change even when the fight was on. It was a complicated process and required an open area for negotiation—the bettors' circle around the pitch itself.
Even when the match had started, it seemed to Peter no one paid attention. Instead they hunched over their calculations, calling out numbers, paying out money, arguing among themselves. Peter sat between Turkkan and the soldier in the front row of the grandstand directly over the railing. A hundred feet away over the heads of the crowd, two enormous naked men, their skin greased and slippery, grappled and fell back.
The umpire blew his whistle. "Who are they?" Peter asked.
Turkkan shrugged. "It's not important. They are condemned prisoners. If one of them will win eleven matches, he'll be free. It has never happened."
He glanced back at Peter and smiled. "You must not think about this. This is not for you. This is by special permission only. In the morning you are gone away. No, I am sorry to remind you! Tonight we are friends—watch! Watch! Would you like some lemon sherbet? It is very good."
Turkkan bought some sherbet on a stick, as well as some sugar-cane juice. "This will chase away the green serpent," he said. "These are the simple pleasures—look at that black man. But he will take a fall!"
After a moment Peter found himself watching the fight, and then the next one, and the next. He could not take his eyes away. The men fought on a bed of black sand that stuck to them. Some of the wrestlers were subtle and quick, others relied on force. When they grappled there were many tiny tricks of balance, and Peter found that he could soon predict the outcome just by looking at the wrestlers' hands, the placement of their feet.
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "Ho, you find it interesting, our little display!" Turkkan said. "I'm sorry you will not be here for the yagli-gures—let me give you some pistachios. And let me ask you, do you see that old man across the way? In the place of honor in the front. That toothless old man with the red beard—do you recognize him? No? I'll tell you that is Mehmet the Conqueror who is always coming to this place. Men shake his hand, boys ask for his blessing—what about you? In this city he is a great man."
Peter followed the pointing finger. There in the first row of the opposite grandstand on the far side of the pitch, the man sat. His red hair was streaked with gray. To call him old and toothless was not fair. He was smiling and talking to his companion, who shook his head.
Embarrassed in a way he didn't understand, Peter raised his eyes. A few rows up in the grandstand there was almost no one. But Andromeda was there as he had hoped, carefully dressed as a young officer, and she also was nodding and smiling to her companion, a squat, fox-faced little man in a leather cap and an old leather coat, decorated with patches of fur.
"By God, who is that?" muttered Turkkan beside him. He pointed with his fly whisk and then spoke rapidly to the soldier on Peter's other side, who stood up to get a better look. Peter was still watching his friend, who now appeared to see him for the first time; she smiled and blew a kiss.
"By God, who is that?" shouted Turkkan. He stood up in his seat as the soldier hurried down the steps. Now janissaries were pushing through the crowd. Peter saw Andromeda slide underneath the seat of the grandstand. She must have dropped through the scaffold underneath, but it was no use. The guards caught her at the barricade. They led her back into the bettors' circle until she stood under the cadi with an insolent smile on her face.
"Not that one!" shouted Turkkan. "You idiots—where is the other one? Find him for me." But in the confusion of the crowd, the fox-faced man had disappeared.
"This is the one," said a policeman. "This is the pickpocket of the Ali Pasa Carsisi. I am sure."
But Turkkan interrupted him: "It is not the man I want. By God, don't you think I know the difference between a dead man and a live one? Have I not seen him in my court since he was ten years old? Imbeciles—that was Jacob Golcuk!"
All this time he had been speaking Turkish and Peter had not understood him. But he understood that name and now he realized he had recognized the man in the leather coat. Turkkan stood up in his seat, waving his fly whisk— "This is a catastrophe! How dare you answer me? Release this man!"
The policemen stood away from Andromeda, but Turkkan was not satisfied. "No, you fools—this one! This o
ne here! Strike off his chains!"
"Sir?"
"I will answer for it. This is on my authority. Is this a nation of laws?"
Red-faced, spectacles glittering, tarbush slipping from his forehead, Aristophanes Turkkan shouted and gesticulated to the crowd. The wrestlers, who for several minutes had been pushing at each other halfheartedly, now stopped altogether, though the umpire had not blown his whistle. Covered with black sand—for each had taken a fall—they stood uncertainly under the lights. Janissary policemen gathered near the barricade, but not one moved to do as Turkkar had suggested, not even the soldier who'd come with them in the car. They seemed anxious for another authority, and then they found it. Adnan Mejid Pasha was striding through the crowd.
There was a language of gestures, and Peter understood it. But then he looked into the faces of the people where he saw a range of passions. The wrestlers stared up at him with piglike eyes. Across the way, Mehmet the Conqueror had struggled to his feet.
Andromeda stood close to Peter on the other side of the railing. When he looked ather, she winked. Alone in that gathering, she did not seem excited or upset.
Adnan Mejid Pasha had climbed into the grandstand. Now he pushed forward to where they were, in the middle of the first row. It was obvious to Peter what he was saying, though it was in Turkish: "What are you doing? Are you drunk? How can you bring this prisoner here?"
"He is no prisoner! My friend is a free man. The Chevalier de Graz is free to go!"
Peter's name caused a ripple of sensation as it was flung into the crowd. "What is this madness? Turkkan—I command you. Lower your voice at least."
"I will not lower my voice. I will proclaim this. I have seen Jacob Golcuk—you have all seen him. I am the judge in this case and I declare that I am satisfied."
"Where did you see him? What does this mean?"
"He ran away. It doesn't matter—I was not mistaken. Ask this man." And Turkkan pointed to Andromeda below the rail.
As interesting as this was to try to interpret, Peter only gave it half of his attendon. For he was watching as Mehmet the Conqueror pushed slowly through the crowd, his right hand on the barricade around the wrestling pit.