Tourmaline

by Paul Park

  She threw the door open. The orderlies had arranged Kevin Markasev for her visit. They had tied him to an armchair in the center of the room. He was gagged with a silk cloth, tied with silk ribbons that were nevertheless arranged so loosely, he could have freed himself at any time. The gaslight shone on his long face, his single eyebrow, his clipped hair, and the strange marks on his temples. When she saw him her anger disappeared, replaced by a kind of tenderness.

  For here before her was the hero of the revolution, the angel of Bucharest, Kevin Markasev the pure, as he was known in songs she herself had inspired and performed.

  "My dear," she said. "What have they done to you?" She came toward him with her hands held out, tears on her cheeks. With her own handkerchief she rubbed the sweat from his forehead—"Let me help you!" She pulled the gag from his mouth.

  He said nothing, but he rarely spoke at first. In front of him there was a table and several porcelain dishes. There was a pitcher of ice water and she poured a glass for him and held it to his lips. He did not drink.

  "Here, let me serve you," she said. And with her own hands she picked up some of the sweets and pastries from the plates—gazelles' horns from the Turkish Empire. Slices of candied ginger. She held them up, but his lips were tight, his brow furrowed and disapproving. It didn't matter. It was often like this at first. She held up one of the pieces of fruit. "Later we'll have coffee," she said. "Or would you like a cigarette?"

  Unwillingly, mournfully, he opened his lips, and she brought up a ripe red plum. "This is for you," she said. But when her hand was close, he leaned forward suddenly and took her index finger between his teeth. He had a good grip on it, and he bit down hard, as hard as he could until his teeth turned on the bone. She howled and struck him with her open palm, while he looked up at her and smiled, her blood on his lips. When she was able to rip her hand away, she had a cut below the knuckle.

  Tears in her eyes, she wrapped her finger in a napkin while Markasev sat back. The blood seeped through the cloth. He had hurt her! How unfair of him! Surely he must realize she was not like other women. If he loved her, he'd indulge her for the sake of all the beauty she had brought into the world. She herself had never hurt him willingly. She had meant no harm.

  Still he was smiling at her, though his cheeks still bore the flushed imprint of her hand. His teeth were stained with blood. And now he started to speak in a low tone that was quite unlike him. "Don't touch me. You disgust me."

  How handsome he had grown during these years!

  "You must not touch me," he said, "not again. Now they visit me, not you, but others. Gently in the night and they don't leave. I think I spent all day on my knees. I don't eat—don't offer me this food. Don't tempt me with this, because you are an evil woman as they say."

  "Who says so?"

  "They are all around us. Now you've left me weeks and years, and I've come to sit quiet as a stone. And then they come around you little by little." "Who?"

  Now she looked at him and saw his face was gaunt, his cheeks thin. Still, how handsome were his burning eyes!

  "Oh, they are goddesses. Aphrodite is there, and Cleopatra, and Queen Mary Magdalene. Sometimes birds come to my window."

  The Baroness Ceausescu was relieved. Sometimes the orderlies had given him devotional literature, which he read with difficulty because of his lack of education. Perhaps that made him even more susceptible. The previous year he had imagined her as the moon lady, come to visit her Endymion.

  No, this was different. Always before he had confused her with the goddesses and made her one of them. But now they warned him against her. The blood seeped through the napkin. "Please let me help you," she said. "My dear . . ."

  "I hate you."

  He had said it. And not in violence or anger, but with cold simplicity. She had no doubt he spoke the truth, and how could it be otherwise? She deserved more than his hate for what she'd done.

  Now he closed his eyes. And when she spoke it was as if he didn't hear.

  She stood for a few minutes feeling her anger grow. But she would forgive him and be as gentle as a goddess, because of the harm she'd caused. So when he continued to ignore her, she turned back into the anteroom where she saw Kepler's Eye glinting on the cabinet top. He hated her? He'd never said that before.

  One of life's pleasures, the baroness knew, is to be cruel in little ways to those who love us. And who loves us more than our own selves? There can be no joy in punishing our enemies. The tourmaline shone on the lacquered top, one of the most valuable gems in Europe, glowing as if it were a source of light.

  He hated her? How was it possible? The whole world loved her for the jewel's sake. Johannes Kepler had had thousands of lovers. A hundred thousand others had followed his funeral procession, though he was an evil man. And besides, how could anyone explain the events of the third act of her drama, except through supernatural intervention? Surely there was something miraculous about the way she'd acquired the gem. She had taken it from the body of Spitz the jeweler, who had bought it from a debutante named Corelli, who had stolen it from her father's vault because she'd wanted to escape to Paris and become as great an artist as Nicola Ceausescu! No, it was not through her own gifts that she had risen this far!

  All this time she had been pulling on her clothes again, hurriedly, distractedly, her trousers over the gray stockings, over the dancing shoes she'd worn. She stripped off the frock, put the jacket on over her undershirt. All the time the eye stared at her grimly until she couldn't stand it; she seized it up.

  Then she was through the door again, the stone in her hand. Yes, she could be a goddess, she could be a maenad or Queen Agave, whom she had played to such acclaim on the stage of the Ambassadors. She pushed the stone against Markasev's mouth, cutting his lips until he cried out, and she was trembling, weeping. There was blood on her hand as she ran through the door and down the stairs. When the nurse came toward her, she said, "I can't bear it. This is the end—you can release him. Let him go wherever he wants. Give him this."

  She emptied her pockets on the side table. There were several hundred marks in coins and bills. "Give him all the money in the house. You promise me?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  The nurse was a respectable old woman and she spread her nostrils, wrinkled her nose as if she'd smelled an ugly smell. She suspected the worst—they all did. But there was nothing dirty about this after all. The baroness had never touched the boy—not in that way, or allowed him to touch her. Only she'd rehearsed for him, trying out songs and speeches she would then plan for the stage. Most of all she had indulged his love for her, which had been sweet until tonight. There is nothing sweeter than the love of someone you've misused.

  "Do this and you'll be rewarded. Do not play a game with me."

  "No, ma'am."

  And the baroness staggered out into the street. It was past midnight. She thought about finding a cab. When she reached the corner, she listened for the clop-clop of a horse's hooves. But she had no money. She would walk, though she had left her boots in the Strada Spatarul.

  She buttoned her jacket, then thrust the jewel into the inside pocket. "That is all," she muttered to herself again, except it wasn't. She took a different way, and in Lipscani Street, by the Old Absinthe House, amid some stragglers outside the glass doors, she felt a hand on her sleeve.

  "Please, sir."

  It was an area for prostitutes and prostitution. The baroness found herself looking into a face she recognized but could not place. She pulled away, stepped back. A horse-faced young woman in her mid-twenties, in a brown, out-of-fashion dress. Where had she seen her before? She had a nice shape.

  "Please, sir, would you like . . . ?" But then the girl looked down at the baroness's feet, at her dancing shoes and stockings. "Excuse me. So you're not the type." She smiled.

  The lantern on the wall above the restaurant cast a semicircle of light into the road. The baroness stepped out of it. "Mademoiselle Corelli!" she hissed.

  Again
in this coincidence—the hand of fate. The girl peered at her, uncertain. Then she staggered forward and grabbed hold of her arm again. "Oh, ma'am," she said.

  Here was another person the baroness had destroyed. She had robbed her of her money and her jewel. No doubt the father had thrown her from the house, put her on the ladder where she now found herself close to the bottom. The baroness tried to twist away, but the girl was stronger. She was hurting the baroness's hand, especially the finger that still throbbed. What would happen if she called the police?

  "Thank you," said Mademoiselle Corelli. "I saw there were tickets at the National. I waited for hours, but the performance . . . I will never forget you when I saw you that first time. You were like a goddess on that stage."

  The baroness pulled backward until she stood against the wall. The girl continued, "Thank you for everything you've done. You have been a model for my life, for all of us. Let me kiss your hands."

  She had the finger in her grip, and it had started to bleed and throb. The baroness shook her head. She couldn't stand the silence. "What are you doing here?"

  Mademoiselle Corelli shrugged as if to say, "It's what you see."

  But the baroness couldn't tolerate the silence. Yes, she was a model for all prostitutes, and suddenly she was afraid. "Come to my house," she said. "Come to the servant's gate. Come tomorrow and I'll talk to my steward. But you must not ask for me. You must not talk about these things. I can arrange payment for the jewel you lost."

  "Ma'am, don't concern yourself. That was a fake after all."

  In the narrow street, the baroness looked up at the sky. There was a mist above the city, come from nowhere over the half moon.

  At first she didn't understand what had been said. She stood dumbly in the road, trying to disengage her hand.

  "That's right," said the girl. "I found out from my father. I didn't know, but he would never have let me wear that tourmaline to that reception, not the real Kepler's Eye, not after the Germans had tried to steal it so many times."

  "But: I don't understand. Monsieur Spitz examined it—"

  The girl laughed. "I didn't say it wasn't a real stone. Since that night I've learned something about men. Sometimes men are not the experts that they claim."

  "My God."

  "Yes, and you know I had a narrow escape that night. The Germans killed that Domnul Spitz for it, that's what I heard. So now the joke's on them. The potato-eaters, as you call them. My father wasn't going to say anything about it. He put in for the insurance and then hid the real stone in a secret place. Did you ever cash the cheque?"

  "I owe you that money. Come to my steward as I told you. Now you must let me go. You must not say you saw me."

  She pulled away. She turned her back, didn't look around, and the rest of the way down the street and up the Galea Victoriei, she walked without a thought in her head. But at Maximillian's Fountain she paused.

  The jewel was a fake. Of course it was. If it had been real, Markasav would not have said what he'd just said.

  All these years she'd been a dupe, a fool, craving warmth from a cold stone. Impulsively theatrically, against her better judgment, she threw the tourmaline into the shallow bowl under the spray.

  The street was not deserted even at that hour. It was only a few minutes later that she returned, panicked, to retrieve it—what if the girl had lied, or else her father? What if Markasev had lied—surely he loved her still? And there the stone was, still waiting for her, glaring balefully from the water.

  She stared back at it a moment, then abandoned it again. The third time she went back, and it was gone.

  In Mogosoaia

  THAT NIGHT MIRANDA SAT among bales of the previous winter's straw, in a thatched stable on the old Brancoveanu land in Mogosoaia, fourteen kilometers northwest of Bucharest. Confiscated after the arrest of Frederick Schenck von Schenck, the fields were rented out to farmers, though the palace of Constantin Brancoveanu stood empty across the lake, boarded up.

  Besides Miranda and Ludu Rat-tooth, the stable was full of men. These were friends of her father, veterans of the Turkish wars. Since Zelea Codreanu's death, since she'd left the marshes, almost every night had been like this—men gathering in out-of-the-way places, at Robeasca and Sarata Monteoru and Urziceni, all across the Wallachian plain. Coming so soon after the events at Braila, news of Codreanu's death had spread throughout the country.

  From Insula Calia, Miranda and Ludu had returned to the marshland around Caracalui, and there they'd met the first of the old men, Captain Dysari of the Emigre Battalion, which had fought with such maniacal fury against the Turks. Even the Gypsies treated him with awe, a small bow-legged man, blind in one eye, dressed almost in rags, with white hair down to his shoulders and awhite moustache. Miranda was drawn to him because he spoke to her in English, avoiding Roumanian when he could. "Here you are, by God. The last time I saw you, you were in your little dress. But you look like your father!"

  It was hard not to be touched by the tears on the man's face, scarred with burn marks or acne. "Mademoiselle—miss, at long last it will be all right!"

  He had a way of speaking that made it hard to take him seriously. "Dear miss, just to see you is to feel a new hope in my old breast. But touch my arm—touch it! You see there is still strength in these biceps. . . ." Then he'd wink at her as if she'd caught him in a joke. For in many ways he was a thoughtful and intelligent man, as Miranda found during that first day, waiting for darkness in Doamna Lyubitshka's cottage in the reeds. He didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't curse. And he was clever about politics, not just in Roumania but Germany as well. He explained to her about the Committee for Roumanian Affairs, and the war party and peace party in the Reichstag.

  He showed her the placard Radu Luckacz had hung in all the towns, a woodblock print of her on horseback, a long revolver in her hand. Though it offered a reward for information, it could have served as a recruiting poster—at dusk Dysart brought her up into the village, where he introduced her to the first gathering of toothless, old, and middle-aged veterans. Some of them proposed to help her. "Come with me to Bucharest—to Mogosoaia," she'd said, because that's where she was going. And they had nodded and smiled. Mogosoaia, where the grave of Aegypta Schenck von Schenck had already become a shrine.

  Many of their sons, many of the young men in the delta were on their way north, conscripted by the Germans for their war in Russia. And many of the rest had land to work, lines and traps to check, families to raise. The ones that came with her were like Dysart, without wives or homes. Six men followed her that first night, and landed with her on the west bank of the Danube near the town of Gropeni. As they unloaded horses and supplies, all bought with her money, she saw they were a mixed bunch. Ludu Rat-tooth didn't admire them.

  It didn't matter. The important thing was to move forward step by step. The important thing was to have a plan, and Dysart was helping her with that. As the stars were paling and they rode up a ravine onto the plain, Miranda let herself imagine all Roumania was with her, that all she had to do was stand up and speak for everyone to hear. What had her aunt said? To be a voice.

  So every night she sat and listened, and people came to her. They touched her hands, admired her bracelet, and talked to her about the good old days before the generals conspired against her father, before they put Valeria Dragonesti in the Winter Keep, before the Germans had come to Great Roumania. As she listened, Miranda started to imagine what these changes had meant to ordinary people, at least the ones who spoke to her, at least in this locality. Up to this point it had been hard enough to piece together all that had happened, and understand it as a story about her own family, a personal story about her mother, father, aunt, and now herself. But now as old men and women talked to her beside the campfires, she heard a story that was always fundamentally about money and injustice—the corruption of the courts. How a class of local tyrants had grown up under the empress. And when the time came they had shifted their allegiance to the German authorit
ies. The vampire bad been one of many.

  Miranda didn't want to think about Zelea Codreanu. She didn't want to think about the events of that night, though of course her victory over the vampire was the cause of her present reputation. But with a stubbornness that had become her method, she had consigned the events that had occurred on Insula Calia to a special mental category: that which could not be explained. And if she was to move forward step by step, she had to wake up fresh from those nights as if from a disordered dream, as she had woken in America and in her father's garden.

  When she had been a high-school student in Massachusetts, every morning she had eagerly gone over her dreams. And now just as eagerly she strove to put them behind her, keeping only the few things that she could not forget: "I thought you'd be a voice . . . for Great Roumania."

  On the first morning and the second morning she had wondered what that voice would say. But as the people came and talked to her, she knew. None of this was about her. Many voices could combine into one voice.

  On the third day in the morning they were surprised by ten policemen after breakfast in the town of Ghergeasa. By that time she had almost forty men and the entire town had come to see her. But fewer than twenty continued with her after the fight, and not because of casualties—no one had been hurt. As before, she hadn't understood much of what happened until later. Guns were fired. Dysart had his hand on her bridle until she slapped it off. The policemen had ridden away north.