Tourmaline

by Paul Park

  Miranda Popescu was wearing a loose cotton shirt and undershirt, a leather belt and riding pants, although her boots were gone. Now he could see her face, her pale cheeks chafed and roughened by the sun. He could see her small chin and dark, heavy eyebrows, her beautiful hair. Around her neck was a silver locket and around her left wrist was the bracelet of the Brancoveanus. "I could carry her," he said in ordinary peasant's language for the first time.

  "Yes, you are a powerful man. On your back, perhaps? I think she is drugged or in a trance."

  All this time the soldier had been speaking. He had dragged the stretcher closer to the house, and now came back to stand above their heads, cursing and gesturing. He was a big man with a big, fleshy face. The man with the black moustache got up to talk to him, and whatever he had said about potato-eaters, now he seemed anxious to please. Together they went to the house and led out poor Lieutenant Schneider. All his bandages were soaked with blood, as well as the front of his fine uniform. He staggered and fell down. They laid him on the cot.

  And he was lucky he was not particularly heavy. Otherwise they'd not have managed it. Even so they had to rest often as they carried the man away, following Pieter under the cliffs and down the track. And at first he would wait for them, perhaps leaning with his back against a tree. But he never put the girl down because of the promise he had made to her father. Nor did he carry her on his back but in his arms, her cheek against his shoulder. She was hot and he was sweating in the cooling dusk, and as the shadows lengthened he walked faster, out of sight of the other two, nor did he pay attention to the drab little man when he cried out, begging, then commanding him to wait. Already they were behind him, and he was thinking about Captain Dysart, Ernest Dysart, who had fought with the general and was a different and more dangerous kind of man. When he got to the deer path that the woman had showed him earlier that day, he ducked down under the brambles and followed it with Miranda Popescu in his arms. As silently as he knew how, he circled back toward the village and the cliff. About dark, he reached where he had left his jacket, and the woman was still sitting, waiting. She was wounded in the side and his hand bothered him.

  NOW ALL PIETER'S LIFE, ALL his experiences seemed like a dream to him, a strange, chaotic rush. But because he was a man who'd never fed his own imagination, it was hard for him to understand how powerful a dream could be, how it could form a tunnel to a hidden world, a hole to crawl out through. Once you were out, your life inside seemed fragmentary and confused, remembered only vaguely or in the middle of the night.

  This was Miranda's experience when she had drunk the water from the pool and then pushed through the cave's new rocky egress into the bright sun. Now, days later, slumbering in Pieter de Graz's arms, her cheek against his shoulder or else her long neck hanging back, she was alive and wakeful elsewhere. Vaguely and intermittently she was aware of being carried and supported, as Pieter stumbled up the deer path to the ragged clifftop above the town. There the woman was still waiting, and she led him onward into the dark woods until they found a place of shelter in a cottage in the woods. There was Ludu Rat-tooth, who helped him put her down onto a bed of pine needles and old quilts, and took her temperature with a mercury thermometer—she had a fever.

  The Gypsy girl and de Graz sat down over her head. And when she struggled sometimes and cried out, the girl said, "Rest now, hush," and other small things. Intermittently she was aware of them as figures in a dream. But in the secret world she saw she'd fallen into a trap.

  And the floor of the pit had wooden tyger stakes protruding from the mud, their points reinforced with metal. She had fallen between them and was not hurt, but the pit was a deep one and she couldn't climb up the steep sides. She clawed down dirt upon herself whenever she tried.

  Above the circle of the hole it was bright day, a cloudless sky like a disk of painted tin. In her little prison she paced back and forth, back and forth, angry and coughing deep in her chest. How much time did she have? The men would come soon and they would shoot her.

  Above her in the side of the pit there protruded the bend of a tree root, and she wondered if she could climb that far. Or if she could scrape down enough dirt to fill the pit entirely. If she undercut the sides, there might be some kind of mudslide and something might change, and so she set to work digging at the soft earth and digging at the rocks.

  Then she heard a noise, and when she looked up there were other animals, the ones that sometimes followed her. Grass hung down over the lip of the pit, and she could see the little rat nosing around and hear its screaming. And she could hear the chattering of monkeys in the trees outside the hole. They were excited about something, a new creature who now climbed down onto the exposed root. At first the tyger thought it was a man, but the smell was wrong and she could recognize it now, a larger kind of ape, and tailless. It had brown hair, and it perched above her looking down, not chattering like the others, but staring at her until she stopped her pacing and stretched her body up the pit's steep side, reaching out with her big claws.

  The ape had brown eyes, curly fur. And he wasn't telling her to rest quiet and do nothing. Instead, wordlessly, he begged her to exert herself, and he had help for her, too, some tangled strands of vines and creepers that he was bundling over the edge, a net with one edge still caught in tree branches, because she tore at it and found it firm. But she was too heavy to drag herself up, though she was a good climber, lighter and more agile than her Asian cousins, and she would often sleep in trees or drag a meal up there. But in the pit she struggled and fell until another mass of knotted vines came over the edge, a mass that now filled much of the hole, and she pulled herself up a few feet at a time. And when finally she had dragged herself onto the grass, she saw the trees were empty and the ape was gone, and everything was still. Around a tyger in the forest there is always a circle of quiet, and even the birds stop squawking and calling.

  When she was safe in the long marshy grass, she pondered what she would do. Because her thoughts were slow and deliberate, she lay until evening in her nest of grass, licking herself and smelling the warm wind. She wasn't hungry, nor did she have an instinct for revenge. But this was her forest, or it had been until men and women had come and settled here in the richest valleys, people with no animal nature, or so they tried to persuade themselves. They had villages now everywhere, even in the forest itself, and more were coming every day.

  Toward dusk she got up, stretched, and shook herself. And when the moon came over the hill she started away down the valley over the wet ground. Always she was surrounded by a circle of silence, as if she were the only living creature in this teeming swamp. Once only she heard the high, nervous bark of a dog, one of several that followed her at a respectful distance when she was hunting, as now.

  The men had a city. For a long time they had not budged from it because they were afraid. But now they were sustained by a new kind of arrogance that allowed them to move freely.

  For many years they had built up the walls of their city so they couldn't be attacked. But the white tyger wondered if they still protected the old wall, or if the thinking that allowed them to venture out had also allowed them to neglect it. She wondered if there was some hole or broken slide of rubble or unguarded watchtower.

  Past midnight she came onto the plain and in the distance she saw the place lit up. Now this was dangerous, and she slunk from rock to rock beside the road. But in the silver moonlight she was hard to see, and so she continued mile after mile until she saw the gate of the city in front of her. Four roads came together there, and she had seen no traffic along any of them. But now suddenly she heard a clamor of movement and the blaring of horns, and the gates ground open, and a crowd of men and cars came out, an army of soldiers, tanks, and weapons of all sorts, regiment after regiment, all carrying the eagle flag of Germany, and they marched off to the east.

  Curled up behind a boulder on a low ridge half a mile from the road, the tyger watched them for several hours. When the last men were
gone, she climbed around the ridge to the west side, and there she saw a different army coming home: ambulance cars, mule-drawn carts, wounded men, an intermittent, oozing stream that trickled through a smaller barbican.

  The tyger was able to cross the road quietly, unperceived. Near the junction with the south road, she saw a teenage boy and a gray-haired woman cowering at the bottom of a small ravine. Had she seen the woman before? They were not worth her notice as she circled the walls, and they were gone when she passed the place again. She was looking for weakness and she found it in a tiny portal near the ravine. Perhaps the woman and the boy had escaped that way.

  The old stones had tumbled down and had not been repaired. The wooden door was split in half. And in the guardhouse the tyger could see a man sitting in the shadows, staring at the lantern on his desk. He had black hair and a bald spot, and the hair combed over. When he looked up, she saw his face had been much ravaged by disease. The window was unbarred and he saw her, but he raised no alarm when she slunk past him through the broken door.

  And maybe the city had been emptied by the emigrants who had left it to settle elsewhere in the tyger's home. Or else it had been emptied by the rush of the departing army. But she saw no one in the darkened street that curled upward in a mounting circle. From the wall, searchlights had shone out in all directions, casting garish shadows on the plain. But once inside the walls, everything was dark and quiet, and the tyger walked along the gutter, up and up into the summit of the town. There she found a little building separate from the rest, an altar or a shrine, she thought, made of white marble. The door was open, and everything was dark. And when she stepped across the threshold, she knew she had come into a place of secret power, and she could smell men sleeping in the little room, a family of brothers perhaps, drugged and unconscious in the hot stinking dark. There were three of them, and one was a little man, a soldier. And there were two others. Dysart had told her about these three men, when he was talking about the new elections in Germany. And as she moved among them she mauled them and bit them and they never cried out.

  IN HER BED OF QUILTS and pine needles, in an abandoned and overgrown log cottage in the Mogosoaia woods, Miranda turned and struggled throughout the night. In the morning in her shelter in the mountains, Valeria Dragonesti awoke for the last time. She'd rested badly and her nurse had despaired of her. Sometimes she had not been able to find a pulse or hear a breath. Toward dawn she'd sent for General Antonescu. But he didn't arrive until after nine o'clock.

  That year the weather had been cold. Summer had come late to the high mountains. But at dawn there were already swarms of mosquitoes in the meadows. Antonescu had grunted and slapped as he stood watching the sky grow pale. And when he climbed down the rock slope into the valley, he could see butterflies among the empty tents, and he was sweating. His boots were muddy and one leaked, so in the antechamber of the little hut he drew them off, rubbed his bare feet, warmed his toes in the sunlight from the open door. From his pocket he pulled out the long silver canister that he'd received from the wreck of the Hephaestion. It was blackened and burned from the ordnance that had blown up in the fire. The top of it was gone. He had been wrong not to go himself and take charge of the assault on the train, whatever the risks. Stefan had obviously made a balls of it. All he had brought back was this one empty canister.

  He heard the nurse call and went in, ducking his head. He sat down on a stool, prepared, as he'd been for weeks, to know the worst. He sat looking at the wasted face, reduced to its essentials, all puffiness gone. He reached his enormous hand, then hesitated as she woke.

  Her eyes were watery and blue, her eyelids tinged with red. She smiled at him. "I had such a dream," she murmured, her voice indistinct and hoarse.

  Later he would punish himself by remembering these words, the last she ever spoke to him. Knowing she was near death, still he could not gather his attention sufficiently to listen, because he had no interest in dreams. Instead he watched her as she prattled on—her cheeks were flushed. "And then . . . ," she said. "And then . . ."

  During his influential days in Bucharest and abroad, it had been the vogue for ladies to write down their dreams and then discuss them in the frankest language, as if they held the key to everything, as if their waking lives had no importance. And maybe he was just a coarse old bumpkin but he couldn't listen to these fairy stories, even when he tried to be polite, even when, as now, he realized he would look back later and reproach himself.

  For a moment he forced himself to pay attention. He was glad to hear that she was saying something hopeful, enumerating a list of things that God would say to her or she to God. Her blue eyes shone. "That's good," he murmured, tapping his bare foot on the raw wooden boards—he couldn't stand it. It disgusted him to think of her dying in this humble shed, her only company a rough uncultured soldier and an idiotic nurse who should have called him sooner. He'd been up waiting the entire night, or only dozed off in his armchair once or twice. He'd had no dreams.

  Now he allowed his anger to grow strong—he would not weep like a girl. He found himself turning over in his hands the silver canister from Abyssinia, blackened from the explosion, lead-lined, he could see. What had Nicola Ceausescu wanted it for? Was this the terrible weapon that could make Europe tremble? More than ever he regretted leaving the derailment to Stefan, who had blown up the baggage car—what did he think was going to happen? Along with these canisters (were there any that had not burst open?), the car was packed with ammunition, guns.

  Maybe if he'd manage to salvage this mysterious weapon, he could have made Roumania regret the day they'd driven their rightful empress into exile. No, it was too late for that. In his indignation and grief, General Antonescu didn't notice the exact moment when Valeria Dragonesti stopped speaking, when she closed her eyes, and when her breathing faltered, then subsided. Nor did he notice a little creature at the corner of her mouth, a silverfish or else a worm.

  By himself in the hut, he could not keep from weeping. Grief shook him and then left him, as the wind might shake the branches of a tree. He squeezed his eyes closed, put his fist against his mouth, and tears would still come out.

  How repulsive it was for a strong man to sit bawling like a child, his eyes red and his nose running! Surely something could be done—he would ask for a meeting with the German governor. He would ask for his men to be released to their own homes. "Go away," he would tell them. "Get married, go on home." Maybe the Germans would permit it if he surrendered to stand trial.

  Maybe they would permit it if he brought them the canister, evidence of— what? Some plan of Nicola Ceausescu's. The ordnance in the baggage car was nothing, a diversion or a ruse. That much was clear. These canisters—Stefan had seen dozens of them scattered about—they were the important cargo. Whatever they contained, it was obvious (wasn't it?) that Ceausescu planned to use it against Germany. Otherwise, why all the secrecy? No doubt she had already cleaned up the site of the accident. Perhaps this was the last canister left.

  But Ceausescu was nothing without the Germans. In which case, had she gone mad? It didn't matter. What was important was what the German governor might believe.

  Antonescu turned the silver tube between his hands. He rubbed away some of the black ash. There were markings on the base, hieroglyphs and then some European translations—nepenthe. He could just make out the letters.

  Vaguely he remembered something from his school days, a classical reference. Nepenthe, a medicine administered by gods, a cure for all unhappiness. If the canister had been intact, maybe now he would have broken it open in his hands, sprayed it around the room where the empress lay dead.

  But no, he thought as he sat blowing his nose. My miseries are too precious to give up.

  MIRANDA STARTED AWAKE. She was lying in a tangle of quilts and blankets in a corner of the floor. Around her stood three sides of a log cabin, and the fourth side was broken in. Most of the roof was still intact above her. There was the ape lying in a corner. There was
the rat, curled up in its armpit. The ape was moaning in its sleep and Miranda could see why. It had hurt its paw, wrapped in a bloody bandage.

  "Wake up," Miranda said. "Wake up!" and she clapped her hands. She could tell they were in danger. There was a scent of urine around the place, a fox, she thought. It wasn't safe to sleep like that. She picked a stick from the ground and climbed out through the broken wall into the forest light. Above her in the trees some monkeys screamed. They knew a fox had come. They knew he'd walked around the cabin once. With the stick in her hand she followed it, hoping she'd find nothing. The fox might have been scared away by her human smell. The woods were beautiful in the bright summer sunlight.

  It was a pine forest. Light sifted through black needles onto the thick ground. Her feet made no noise. In front of her on a fallen log she saw a little bird whose feathers glistened in the sun. When she came close she saw the bird was made of precious stones. Diamonds glinted on its breast, rubies and sapphires on its wings. Its beak was made of gold.

  As soon as she had seen this bird, Miranda wanted to touch it and capture it. She thought she'd weave a cage out of willow branches and carry it away. So she came up behind it with the stick. But at the last moment the bird hopped a few feet farther along the fallen trunk, and turned back as if to say, "I know what you are doing!" So Miranda slipped into the shadow at the other side of the tree, and with all her strength and swiftness leaped onto the little creature.

  But when she held it cupped between her fingers, she could feel its jeweled heart beat. And when it opened its golden beak, she was astonished to find that it could speak. In a soft, small voice it begged her to let it go. And it had guessed Miranda's plan. "If you put me in a cage I'll die," it said.

  So Miranda opened her hands and let the bird fly away. It rose above her to the bough of a tree. There it perched with the sunlight on its throat, whispering and singing, cocking its head, winking its pretty emerald eye.