by Paul Park
"It is true," remarked Andromeda, smiling and cool. "That man was Jacob Golcuk."
Mejid Pasha leaned down to look at her. "And you are . . . ? Bah, I don't care—this is insanity. What motive could he have?"
Mehmet the Conqueror, as he approached, seemed to have trouble walking. His big hand was on the barricade and he limped with every step, favoring his left leg. Though tall, he was bent over and his chest was sunken in. His hair was red and gray, as was his beard.
"So we must catch him to find out," retorted Aristophanes Turkkan. "In these past months I have signed several warrants for his arrest. There are reasons he would want to seem as dead."
"Then why give his name to this stranger? Why would he come here?"
Andromeda said: "He gave me a false name but I recognized him. He's not the only man who cannot stay away from these matches. I believe he makes his money here."
"You shut up! You have no standing in this place. Am I right to think you are a subject of Roumania?"
"He's a pickpocket," added one of the policemen.
Peter was looking at Mehmet the Conqueror. Now he had left the barricade and was crossing the bettors' circle to the grandstand. He was dressed in evening clothes, and his lapel was adorned with a commemorative ribbon and a crescent moon. Now Peter could see a cane in his left hand, and he leaned on it as he limped slowly through the crowd, a smile on his face. "It is the Chevalier de Graz," he said. "By God, it is the Chevalier de Graz."
Tears stood in his eyes. He made one final push and flung himself onto the railing in front of Peter. Then he brought up his cramped, massive hands and seized Peter by both forearms above his manacles. The gold-headed cane clattered to the ground.
Peter looked into his bleared, rheumy eyes. The old man's hands were still powerful, and they pulled him forward so that Mehmet the Conqueror could kiss him on the cheeks. "Why is this man chained like a criminal?" he asked in English. His teeth were yellow as old ivory, and his breath was flavored with mint or fennel.
The crowd had gathered close now. They pressed against the railing where Peter sat. Even the naked wrestlers had come out of the pit. Mejid Pasha spoke to one of the policemen. "You must take him into custody to the Saraclar station house. Tomorrow he is off to Trebizond."
The crowd pressed against the railing. "No," said Mehmet the Conqueror. "I will see him fight again." Again he pulled Peter down to whisper in his ear in English . "All my life I never took but three falls."
Now there was a lot of shouting. Turkkan had his hand upon his gun and made a broad pantomime of drawing it. The janissary police, who'd seemed so numerous before, now were scarce in their black uniforms. But Mejid Pasha had not given up. "I tell you he's a criminal. He is the butcher of Nova Zagora—does anyone remember? Am I to let him go on the word of a drunken fool and a Roumanian thief? Captain—"
Now a blacksmith was coming to the rail with a big hammer and a chisel and an enormous pair of shears—a bolt-cutter with handles several feet long. The policeman and Mejid Pasha stood together in earnest conversation—the policeman was unarmed, Peter saw. And now suddenly Mejid Pasha pressed his way out of the grandstand, and the police retreated to the edges of the crowd. "He'll come back with a company of soldiers," said Andromeda. Then to Aristophanes Turkkan: "Sir, there is a night train to Bucharest, I beg you—"
The blacksmith had the bar of Peter's lock in the small beak of his bolt-cutter. But he could get no purchase on the hardened steel. Then Mehmet the Conqueror pushed him aside and took the ends of the bolt-cutter in his massive, cramped, arthritic hands. Four hard snaps and Peter was free. Once the manacles were off, he could feel how much the chains had hurt him. His wrists and ankles were chafed raw.
Turkkan reached to shake his hands. "My friend, I am glad for you. You see in their own way these people can appreciate our art."
Again Peter found himself staring into the face of Mehmet the Conqueror. And he felt something inside of him as he looked at the old warrior. It was not sentimentality. Instead it was a wave of ferociousness that filled his mouth with spit. "I want to fight," he said, words which astonished him. "You'll let me fight."
There was a sudden silence as all the chattering around them ceased. Then Andromeda raised her voice. She spoke to Turkkan, "Sir, there's no time. That man will return in half an hour."
"Bah! What are you talking about? We are here as watchers only."
"I want to fight," Peter said. The words sounded less strange at the third repetition.
The cadi shook his head. "But it must be impossible. You are my guest and you have seen these people. There are no champions here."
"I know the rules," Peter said, surprising himself. "Isn't there a spectator's challenge?"
"Yes," confirmed Mehmet the Conqueror. Several people in the crowd nodded their heads. Then no one said anything until Andromeda interrupted the silence once again:
"Sir, you must know that man will come with soldiers. If you could lend us some money, there's a train to Bucharest—"
"He can do nothing! Mejid Pasha! I am the judge in this case."
Now suddenly Turkkan had changed his mind. "Bah, if it will give you pleasure! A friendly match, a single fall, if you are sure. Afterward you come back to my house to celebrate. All Roumania will be my guest."
The crowd, who had been so eager to free him and protect him, now was eager to see him in the pit. Peter stood at the rail, squeezing his wrists, looking over the expectant faces. Of course. They had been raised on stories of his skill. He would not disappoint them and dishonor himself.
Andromeda grabbed hold of his arm. He leaned down to listen, and she whispered in his ear. "What is your problem? What do you think happens when you lose?"
He shook off her hand. He looked up to see a man step into the pit. He was dressed in a towel-cloth robe, which he now dropped. Naked, he put his hands on the barricade—"I am Roderick of Burgos. Champion I may not be, but I have heard of Nova Zagora. Even in the Spanish Empire we've heard these stories. Now I stand here for the honor of my adopted country, against a man who has stepped out of a children's fairy tale and a pagan sorcery that has kept him young and strong. I, too, am strong. So now I spit. . . ."
Peter understood none of this. But he understood the language of the Spaniard's body. He recognized the formal, measured, flowery phrases that indicated an official challenge. The recognition came from far inside. The crowd had opened up in front of him, from the railing of the grandstand to the barricade around the pit. Without thinking, Peter spat into the dirt.
Andromeda reached to take hold of his arm again. She pulled him down, though he resisted. He could see the golden hair that glistened on her cheeks. She whispered in his ear. "You've got to know you're not the Chevalier de Graz."
"Shut your mouth," he said, and his voice was light, harsh, ugly.
"All right. I'll put my money on the other guy."
She let go when he swatted at her, pushed her away. "One thousand piastres on my friend!" shouted Aristophanes Turkkan. The crowd was shouting and cheering as Peter ducked under the railing and stepped down. The bettors in the circle now were haggling and calling. Folded banknotes stood out from between their knuckles as they gesticulated and made their calculations.
For a while Peter stood there in the gap. The lights seemed harsh and glaring now. The crowd was massed along an open corridor between the grandstand and the pit:
Thousands of their sailors looked down from their decks and laughed, Thousands of the soldiers made mock at the mad little craft,
Running on and on, 'til delayed,
By the mountainlike San Philip, of fifteen hundred tons. . . .
From the grandstand, Roderick of Burgos had not looked so big. Peter judged he was about thirty years old. He was clean-shaven and his hair was black and curly. Scars and welts stood out on his shoulders and biceps. But his legs were small, Peter noticed, and he had a purple bruise over his right knee.
As if by reflex as he stepped forward
, Peter found himself measuring and judging each characteristic and detail of the man in front of him, from his high-arched, hammer-toed, broken-nailed feet, to his heavy, scarred eye ridges and forthright stare. His nose had been broken at least once, and he was missing a tooth. His knuckles, also, were thick and bruised. He'd had a couple of falls in his career, Peter thought.
There was a feeling in his stomach that was not fear but a species of relief. Since his arrest and long before—perhaps since that terrible night with Raevsky on the bridge, perhaps since the morning he had woken in the snow with his new hand, or perhaps since his first school days at home—in various parts of his mind he'd been afraid. To function he had had to live with fear. To close out fear had been to close out sections of himself. But now the barriers were down. Air moved through him end to end. As he stepped between the two masses of spectators, he felt the world under his feet, the paths that led to him and away. Behind him stretched the Aegyptian desert, and in front of him the earth curved north into Roumania, and there were the mountains, valleys, great rivers, and forests, and there was work to be done and wrongs to be set right. And there was a dream that was languishing in danger, and a woman he had sworn to protect. And his way to her was at that moment blocked by a rickety barricade. And behind it stood a broken-down Spanish fighter named Roderick of Burgos whom he'd beat with one hand because his left hand was weak—that was his shame, his secret to hide. He felt no anger or urgency. He saw himself duck under the rail. Roderick of Burgos had retreated to the center of the pit.
The crowd made a noise like the sea. Peter stood testing the sand under his feet. Then he stripped off the pumpkin-colored shirt, the pumpkin-colored trousers. The boy came with the oil but he waved him away. He would fight in the Roumanian fashion, ungreased, though he might give up a small advantage. He disdained any stretching or preparation. He stood with his legs splayed, his eyes closed, listening to the directions of the umpire—they would fight a single fall, apparently.
The ending of the poem now occurred to him, as clear as if he saw it on the page:
And the water began to heave and the weather began to moan,
And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,
And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags, And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd navy of Spain . . .
At the same time other images occurred to him as he stood with his eyes closed. They were like a series of photographs or flash cards, changing as he looked at them: faces, stone buildings, landscapes, horses, dogs, none of which had been part of his life in Berkshire County. They came in such profusion he could not make sense of them. They did not combine into a net of stories. They suggested nothing to be put in language. But each one brought with it an emotion, which he experienced as waves of hot and cold, dark and light.
Then he felt a blow upon his chest and he almost fell. Roderick of Burgos was there. Peter opened his eyes and saw the great heavy hand come swatting at him again. But it seemed to travel slowly as if pushing through an obstruction—Peter himself at that moment was not capable of moving quickly. But he could move faster than the ponderous hand that seemed to make a noise as it pressed through the air. Around him was the roaring of the crowd.
Laboriously and sluggishly, he ducked and turned away. Another hand now came to seize him by the shoulder. It moved with absurd slowness and he turned away from it. Burgos's leg was at the level of a stool, but he stumbled over it and almost tripped. Then he pushed his foot under the man's heel and lifted up, expecting him to jump away. There was all the time in the world. But he was as awkward as he looked. He lost his balance. Peter seized him by his waist, and twisted him, and flung him down.
The Spaniard fell onto his back. Then there was time for him to roll away and get back up before Peter, after long deliberation, knelt down on his chest. He pressed the man's head into the sand. Holding his left hand hidden behind his back, he grabbed hold of the man's chin in his right hand and pressed his head back, and then released him, and then pressed him back, and then released him. And every time the back of the man's head struck the dark surface of the sand, it was as if a new part of the story was shaken clear in Peter's mind; the man grabbed and flailed and tried to twist under Peter's weight. "De Graz!" shouted the crowd. "De Graz!" And de Graz paid no attention either to the crowd or to the struggles of the man, but instead he was listening to the stories in his head as they arranged themselves and joined themselves together. Slippery as expert wrestlers, they moved away as he approached them, but they were there, and he knew them after all, and Roderick of Burgos was beaten, and with him Peter Gross had also taken a fall, after fighting long and stubbornly and valiantly to keep upright:
. . . and the little Revenge herself went down 'mid the island crags,
To be lost evermore in the Main.
ANDROMEDA HAD CLIMBED INTO THE grandstand to sit in Peter's seat. She'd not waited for an invitation from Turkkan. Now she hunched her shoulders and slid down, and leaned back on the empty bench behind her. Her pale eyes were closed to slits, and her long boots were thrust under the railing.
She was the first to sense the change in the man in front of her, even before Peter himself. When he released the Spaniard and let him up, he stood splayfooted in the sand while the people cheered. Naked, legs spread, he stared at her with eyes as unself-conscious as an animal's. He didn't blink. In the language of his body there was no shame or awkward diffidence, nothing that suggested her old friend Peter Gross, who had stepped into the pit a few minutes before. Instead in his tense body and proud face the part of her that was Prochenko recognized a comrade and well-worn adversary.
No, it was not right to call him proud. That was the mark her envy put on him. He was too innocent to be conceited, too unaware of the world's attention. He was a man of action and desire and one other thing, a glimmer of irrationality that was apparent in everything he did.
Andromeda slouched in her seat. Though it was a hot, humid night, she felt gooseflesh on her skin. There was, however, work to be done, and so she turned to Aristophanes Turkkan, who was chuckling and clapping. "Hum? Did you ever see such a thing? Less than one second! And he was not in the best condition, I can tell you. Stuffed with food and drink. And for three days he has had the chains on his hands."
"Do you think there are some clothes he could borrow?"
"Hum? Yes—I should think he'd have some clothes. I will give him my own coat. Tonight he is a guest in my house."
With her long fingernails Andromeda scratched her forearm underneath her French shirt-cuff. "Sir, I think we will refuse your offer. Mejid Pasha will be here. I think this man should cross the border."
"Mejid Pasha—bah! I am the presiding judge."
All this time Pieter de Graz had been staring at her. But now he turned and rubbed his face in the towel that the boy held out for him. Andromeda found herself admiring his muscled back and buttocks—she was worried for her friend. She knew that she and Sasha Prochenko were similarly made. Both had a layer of bravado and a layer of embarrassment around their hearts, as her father in Berkeley had once poetically described her. But Peter and de Graz were miles apart.
"Even so," she said.
The crowd began to move around the betting circle once again. The bookmakers were collecting money and paying it out. Men came out to rake the sand for the next match. Aristophanes Turkkan got to his feet, yawned, stretched, scratched his chin. Then he pushed his way off the grandstand and stamped down the steps. Andromeda got up, too.
She found him urinating beside the scaffold in the back. She waited until he was finished. "Please."
Buttoning himself, he turned to face her. They were in the shadow of the stand, away from the lights and the pressure of the crowd. They could hear the muted sounds of the barkers. "I don't want to speak to you," said Aristophanes Turkkan. "The Chevalier de Graz will be my guest. But you
—with you Roumanians there is always trouble. So you must go away and then we will have peace again. I give you this, and you must not be asking for another gift. Hah!—and one thing more. I will not ask for witnesses from the bazaar."
"Sir, Mejid Pasha must not find us. The chevalier and I must leave this place. You can't let Mejid Pasha overturn your wise decision."
The old man's attention was now divided by an announcement from the umpire in the pit. But he turned back to look at her. "Why are you always mentioning this man? You must not insult me. This is justice and not victory. I am having some demands upon my time."
His expression of disdain was eloquent. And something else: Quite suddenly he was drunk. He swayed on his feet as he stared down at her. Andromeda imagined he was disgusted by Prochenko's effeminacy. She stepped closer so he could smell the perfume on her skin and see the gold hair on her neck. "Sir, I'm grateful. I'm appealing to your love of justice. What's the good of giving him his freedom if tomorrow he is locked away? My government will thank you. When he gets home you will receive an invitation from the Countess de Graz."
Aristophanes Turkkan reached out his big hand. He brushed the shoulder of her silk shirt. Then he seized hold of her earlobe as if to find his balance. He pulled her to him by the ear, and she could smell the liquor on his breath. And something else when he had belched, some hint of vomit. His hand was powerful. She did not resist him. "Do I care for the thanks of my enemies? I tell you I would never enter such a country of devils!" He shook her once and let his hand drop to her arm.
You old goat, Andromeda thought, as he caressed the ball of her shoulder.
He was a tall, big-chested man. He drew her close and whispered into her ear. "What do you want?"
"Sir, the loan of your car. In four hours we could cross into Roumania."