Tourmaline

by Paul Park

  "And the boy?" asked Lubomyr. He was looking at the man's fingers, which had selected another nut.

  "Kepler's Eye! I wanted Kepler's Eye! Is that too much? Isn't that what every man wants—to try to change things for the better? Do you think there'd be a need for all this fighting? Without the stone, what am I? A national scandal and a joke, while Nicola Ceausescu uses it for her own vanity, a mirror for herself. I have heard she gives theatrical performances and the people cheer her idiotic self-indulgence—if there was any doubt of the stone's effect, then that should settle it. But what do you suppose that power would be worth in the hands of a dedicated and serious man?"

  Nicola Ceausescu had already been a subject of conversation earlier that night. The two men had already discussed her thwarted attempt to smuggle radium from Abyssinia. They had discussed the tourmaline, and in that context conversed easily and pleasurably about land reform, new rights for citizens, the abolition of hereditary privilege. But the elector was an unstable fellow after all, and with a growing sense of anxiousness, Lubomyr watched the movements of his hands.

  In his patent-leather case, as he had said, Lubomyr had brought an offer from the government, a possibility of rehabilitation. Now he wondered why he'd bothered to mention it. Arriving in Ratisbon the day before by train, he had not been prepared for the elector's ugliness. Now, glancing up at the elector's seared and puckered face, he thought a thousand tourmalines, a bath of tourmalines, a purple shower of tourmalines would yield only a minimal effect.

  "We are thankful for your patriotism," he repeated blandly.

  When he had spoken to his contacts in Berlin, he had not understood how isolated the elector had become, how solitary, how irrelevant—a rich man who lived by himself in a big house on a hill above the old part of the town. Daily his servant, Dr. Theodore, came shopping at the Kirchenstrasse market.

  From the squares and street corners you could see the overgrown terraces of the park. The gates were open to the lower garden. Children played and were not chased away. In the afternoon, Arslan Lubomyr had climbed the cobbled drive. The house was not an ancient one. It had a stucco facade. Dr. Theodore had brought him up after he'd rung the bell—the first of many Dr. Theodores. Now in the dark chamber at the top of the house, they clustered around him as the elector raised his hand. Unhinged by loneliness, sucking on a macadamia nut, he gestured over the tabletop. "My friend, this is not your fault, I know. But you must not allow yourself to be the errand boy for fools. If I have taught you anything in these five years, it is to look beneath the surface of the world. You can't doubt the reality of what I say, that after all this time I've still kept watch over my country. For years I have accustomed myself to only a few hours of sleep, so that the shield I have in place cannot be broken or disturbed. I have received no thanks for this, but only ridicule and abuse from those who have no understanding of the world. And now you've come to rob me and insult me at the time when I'm most needed. Do you believe your bombs and guns and your new tanks will be enough to protect you? All these things can be blown away like spiderwebs. Now in the Reichstag they are working to undo all that. And I tell you now I made a terrible mistake when I allowed you to let Miranda Popescu escape that day in the Dobruja forest. You should have shot her through the skull. I was in love with a sense of symmetry, that she would take our forged letter to the Russians. I thought she was a defenseless girl. But now she rises again to challenge us in the heart of Europe—this is the moment you have chosen to insult me. What if I refuse? Are you authorized to have me arrested, take these things of mine away by force? My friend, I wish you luck."

  Lubomyr couldn't look at the man's face. He found himself disgusted and repulsed by this long speech, angered by the suggestion that he might have been capable of murdering a beautiful young woman, a civilian—or not beautiful, particularly, as he now remembered her, but fresh and alive; it didn't matter. He passed his hand over his eyes, staring instead at the surface of the table in front of him.

  Now he saw a change in it, a pattern in the marquetry he'd not observed before. And the objects he had thought were placed at random, the bud vase, the incense burner, the small statues of Tsong Kapa and Kwan Yin, the ashtray, and the brandy glass now appeared like the counters in a game. And the board they sat on now revealed itself in alternating blocks of color, and stylized patterns that suggested rivers, rocks, mountains, seas—the continent of Europe, Lubomyr now saw. There were the thousand islands and the wreck of Britain, there was the submerged coast of France. There was the enormous white mass of the Pyrenees, six thousand meters tall, and then the verdant Alpine hills. There stood the abandoned ruins of Rome. There were the great capitals: Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest, Berlin, and Petersburg.

  Fascinated in spite of himself, Lubomyr leaned forward to look. Was this a pattern that had been there all the time, and now he was only just seeing it? Or was the elector showing him some aspect of the hidden world? As the gaslight dimmed along the sconces in the wall, Lubomyr saw more and more. A new light seemed to rise out of the brandy glass, set in the Hungarian forest. "These are the powers that protect the world," came the elector's voice. "It doesn't matter that the armies fight. We have achieved an equilibrium, though we struggle for advantage. There in Krakow is a professor of philology. There in Bratislava is a milkmaid in a barn. Her name is Zuzana, and she sits upon her stool, smiling and laughing to herself—I have seen her in my glass. There in Mogosoaia is the ghost of Aegypta Schenck—old enemies, she and I. For a long time I had her bottled up, but now she has escaped."

  Uncertain, feeling the alcohol that he had drunk, Lubomyr glanced up at the elector's ruined face. He tried to follow the gestures of the man's clean little hands, looking for the conjuring trick: His host was pointing toward the statue of Kwan Yin, slightly to the north and west of the Roumanian capital. The token of Aegypta Schenck, Lubomyr supposed, and now he looked for other tokens. Near at hand, in Germany, on a hill outside of Ratisbon there was a pebble he hadn't seen until that moment. Now it glinted in the light thrown by the brandy glass, diffused through the red dregs of the wine.

  "And I will tell you a secret that in time you'd have to know," said the elector. "Each one of us requires a prisoner. For the Baron Ceausescu it was his own son. And when he surrendered his son he lost his power. The milkmaid has a lover whom she tortures. Each of us in different ways has interpreted the texts of Hermes Trismegistus in his lessons to a young conjurer. And you see how effective they have been at least in my case. We feed on our prisoners in ways you cannot guess, and I think I am the honest one because I hold them under lock and key. Do you want to take away my strength, now of all times? You see there is no one to the west," said the elector, gesturing. "You see there is a wave of darkness rising from the west across the sea."

  His face, disfigured, hard to read, nevertheless showed traces of a new anxiety, a new weakness. "I need them," he went on. "Aegypta Schenk held her own niece in the palm of her hand. But when she let her go, when she let her escape into the real world, then she was defeated and killed by a minor adept almost the same day! It was because she was a woman, and she did not have the firmness to be cruel. . . ."

  All this time, Arslan Lubomyr had felt a mix of competing sensations: curiosity, drunkenness, anxiety, disappointment. This last reaction now was uppermost as he leaned back in his chair. He didn't know whether to interrupt. So that's why the elector had kept his prisoners all these years! For nothing— Lubomyr had read the new edition of the letters to a young conjurer, the annotations that explained the errors in all previous translations. Was it possible the elector was not aware of the ambiguities in the ancient text? Was it possible he had never read the letters in the original hieroglyphs? Or was he was using Trismegistus as a screen to hide some other more malevolent motive—revenge, perhaps, or sadism? If so it was a horrifying disappointment, and Lubomyr would put some version of it in his report, when he left for Berlin the following morning.

  As if he sensed some of Lubomy
r's disgust, the Elector of Ratisbon paused and stared at him, before he continued with his rant. "My friend, was it foolish for me to think you could learn some of my skills? Can you guess how you have disappointed me? I tell you we are in a delicate position in this country, and everything we've worked for can be stripped away. Yes, we've won a victory, but you must know this war is not popular. Bodies are returning on every train. Many are asking these same questions, now the tsar has offered peace. Should we press forward? Should we retreat? These things are in a subtle balance in the middle of a parliamentary election. But if von Stoessel fails, or one or two men are defeated, what will happen then?"

  Lubomyr stared at the elector's hands. On the smallest finger of his left hand, the man wore a signet with an intricate seal. Between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, he held a nut. It was odd, strange, almost spherical, covered with white dust. Then it disappeared into his mouth.

  The elector coughed and wheezed. "It is up to me to protect these men. If—" and he was silent.

  There was a flicker in the lights, a strangled groan. Arslan Lubomyr glanced up, and for a long minute he couldn't guess what had happened. The strangeness of the elector's face made all expressions difficult to interpret. But then he saw the man was choking, gasping for air. His hands rose to his neck, clutched at his throat.

  As the light spread out of the inlaid map, Lubomyr had been conscious of the servants gathering around to watch. Now he sat horrified in his chair, his hands squeezing its carved arms, hoping for them to intervene until he saw they couldn't. They were also stricken. Two collapsed onto their knees on the carpet—they were not groaning or scratching at their necks. Instead they settled onto their hands and knees, and as Lubomyr watched they seemed to shrink into themselves, dissolve as the gaslight dimmed, and the darkness grew opaque around him. Still the red light spilled out of the brandy glass, and Lubomyr could see his host, see the left hand gesturing—help me, oh my God. But nauseated by fear, he found he could do nothing except rub the arms of his chair with his greasy palms, while at the same time staring into the elector's limpid eyes, which now were saying, "You are a dead man. I will not forgive you."

  But the Elector of Ratisbon was so ugly! How could Lubomyr touch him, touch his flesh? How could he touch this mad, dangerous, misguided man, who had half stood from his chair, and who was rocking back and forth, clutching at his throat—the light flickered and dimmed. The room grew dark. And at the last instant Lubomyr flung himself from his chair and grabbed hold of the man, forcing his face down onto the darkened table. Now it was possible to touch him, now he could no longer see.

  The servants had been swallowed up in darkness. The room was completely dark. Lubomyr felt his fear rise up; he could not help himself. In any case the nut wouldn't budge out of the elector's throat. As he squeezed and pressed and flailed, Lubomyr could feel the man's heart racing under his hands. It seemed to shudder in every part of him.

  The table was broken, overturned, and the young man staggered up. Stumbling and panicked, he groped his way across the floor, banging into furniture until he reached the stairs.

  SEVERAL FLOORS BELOW AT CLOSE to the same moment, Clara Brancoveanu was thinking about cucumber sandwiches, sardines, and a bottle of Riesling—the luncheon she had mentioned to the air that morning, as she imagined it was. She stood in the parlor, waiting for the dumbwaiter's second bell. Already she had drunk a quantity of tea. She leafed impatiently through the afternoon papers, an afternoon five years before. Still she called out brightly, "I see there is a surge upon the stock exchange!" This kind of joke had become a ritual.

  Melancholy in her middle age, crazy with fear that she would meet her death in those comfortable rooms, nevertheless she almost missed the opportunity to escape. It was Felix who first noticed the flickering of the lights. It was Felix who first heard the click of the dumbwaiter's lock. He ran to the double doors and opened them; the bell had not rung, and there was no food inside. Nor was the box there. But he could see the double rope and the empty shaft.

  "Mother," he said. He reached in and pulled on the counterweight, and the box came up from underneath. Never before had he been able to control it.

  "Come," he said. He was a sensitive boy, and in the prickling of his skin he could feel a change. Just a small thing as the lights dimmed and then extinguished themselves one by one. He knew something must be done. The roof of the box was below him.

  "Come," he said to the princess. And when she made a motion to resist, he grabbed hold of her arm and bundled her through the doors, onto the top of the dumbwaiter's box.

  "What are you doing? Please, let go of me!" Felix Ceausescu had never touched her before. He held the double rope in his other hand, bracing it against her weight.

  "Didn't you ask for this one chance?" he said. And the box sagged down to the floor below, as far as he would risk. "Kick open the door. The locks have gone."

  What was this energy that possessed him? He was not a powerful boy. But he hung onto the rope as she pushed through into the room below. Then he surrendered it and climbed down, hanging by his fingers from the sill as the light failed completely.

  Above him on the staircase, Arslan Lubomyr clattered down the five flights to the entrance hall and groped his way across the marble floor. He was terrified of the pitch-darkness, but even more terrified after a few moments when the lights began to glow again, weakly, fitfully at first. He ran to the great door and fumbled with the bolts and pounded on the oak beams until they surrendered, and he pushed out into the night. But in the yellow gaslight that shone from the pediment, he saw the smiling and officious face of Dr. Theodore, a pair of Dr. Theodores who took him by the arms and brought him back into the hall. Nor did he struggle when they pulled him up the stairs. If he had struggled, if he had taken up any of their time, perhaps Felix Ceausescu and the princess would not have found the front door open and unguarded when they peeked out from the servant's hallway underneath the stairs.

  At first they hesitated on the threshold, astonished by the darkness and the open air. Felix wondered if a thunderstorm had come. Princess Clara imagined for a moment that the world had been transformed during her long captivity, the sun darkened in the sky. But when they recognized the night for what it was, they staggered out into the park and hurried down the cobblestones into the town.

  Reunions

  ANDROMEDA IN HER DOG shape had disappeared after the derailment. Nor had de Graz bothered to look for her. He'd come to Bucharest, riding in the special horse-drawn coaches sent for passengers of the Hephaestion. He'd been taken to the bureau of railroads to receive a commendation. Later there was a memorial for the mysterious commercial traveler from Abyssinia, the sole casualty from the wreck. There was a reception given by the police commissioner of Bucharest. By that time Pieter had already left the hall. Pleading tiredness, he'd gone to his hotel, paid for by the grateful bureau. And at first in the beautiful summer weather he had thought he would be happy to explore the streets of Bucharest and see what had changed after so long. But after two nights he slipped away to Mogosoaia, his heart in a chaos that he didn't understand.

  Peter Gross had understood. Now it was as if his conscious and subconscious selves had been reversed. And de Graz had little interest in self-examination. It was true he'd given his oath to protect Miranda Popescu. He'd promised her father on his deathbed, and there was a cold self-satisfaction in thinking that his word of honor was still good after these years, these complications. But why did his heart thump in his chest as he approached Mogosoaia on the train? Why did stanzas of English poetry come unbidden to his mind? Why did he think often of the girl's face? Or a woman now of course, grown up from the days he'd taken care of her at Mamaia Castle on the beach. Less of her father in her looks now. More of her mother—why did he drum his fingers on the leather seats and on his pants? Though he'd refused all money, he'd allowed some passengers from the Hephaestion to buy him a suit of clothes.

  The train emptied at his st
op. The platform was full of people. Since the events at the Venus shrine, many had come out to pledge their loyalty, though to whom or what it was not clear. Miranda Popescu had disappeared. Her followers had been arrested. The shrine itself was occupied by the police and there were soldiers in the woods. But curious people came and went. Some had packed chicken or ham sandwiches and come out with their families for the day. The weather had turned after a cold spring, and it was summer after all.

  Young men slept out in the fallow fields around the Brancoveanu palace, hoping to be part of something. But de Graz was not like that. He had a plan.

  Or else it was half a plan and half a memory. When Frederick Schenck von Schenck had been denounced and arrested, he was staying in the Brancoveanu guesthouse with his pregnant wife. And he was already sick, that was the ironic part. Or not so much ironic—de Graz was an uncomplicated man—but sad. He had a cancer in his bowels. He'd said nothing to the princess for fear of alarming her, but he was already making his arrangements. Later, when the news came that he'd been shot in an escape attempt, people said he had been murdered. De Graz himself had thought so. But Prochenko disagreed. The prince would have had no wish to die in prison.

  Pieter thought about these things as he walked up the cinder roadway from the station. The soldiers in the crowd were dressed in green uniforms, and they wore on their shapeless wool berets the insignia of a Targoviste sappers regiment that had fought well at Havsa. At the stone gate of the park they leaned dispiritedly on their rifles, unchanged since the Turkish wars. The guns were older than they were.