Tourmaline
Page 43
But after another moment, standing in Corelli's exhibition chamber as if on a stage, she changed her mind. And she remembered standing in the lights at the Ambassadors during the first production of Cleopatra—oh, she had begged and pleaded with the director and the costume mistress. In the last act, vulnerable and exposed, alone on stage she had looked out over the audience, feeling her humilation and her shame. Then as her little, croaking voice had started on the final aria, she had imagined something else: a sudden power. That night she'd had no tourmaline. That night she'd seen her husband for the first time, captured him and the whole city of Bucharest.
Now as then she stood on her own feet, feeling a sense of vertigo that was nevertheless exhilarating. What was it the baron had said the last time she had seen him? "It is confidence you lack. Faith in your own power. Faith to see yourself as others see you."
No, she told herself as if aloud, and for a moment she believed it: Everything she had accomplished she had earned and paid for. If men and women hurried to obey her, it was because of what she was and what she'd done. She was the white tyger of Roumania. Who would take that away without a fight?
The Corellis—no—it didn't matter. She would see Radu Luckacz at the station in forty minutes' time. She would feel his love for her, and she would tell him her desires, and together they would plot the third act of her opera, The White Tyger. In the meantime, she had a train to meet. And she would see her son!
THE STREET DOOR TO CORELLI'S house stood open and the little bird veered out and up into the sky. She flew in a circle around the chimney, then streaked away north toward Constantin's Ford. She carried something in her beak. It was a fondness for grapes that had given the bird her name.
Earlier that same day, farther south, Andromeda had stood with her hand on the marble counter in a cafe in the town of Chiselet. She had finished her own cup of brandywine, which she'd had served with a bowl of ice. Once or twice in the past hour she had laid her cheek down on the stone countertop, taking comfort from its coldness. She was wearing the Abyssinian technician's clothes.
This was the town where Andromeda had wandered after the wreck of the Hephaestion. The technician had had money in his trouser pocket. Now, several days later, Andromeda had spent the last of it.
Always when she found her human shape again, she was hectic and hot for a few days. Always she retained some of the dog's temperature. But this time she'd felt something new when she had come to her woman's shape again. Her eyes itched, her cheeks burned, her heart pounded in her chest.
And she was not the only one in Chiselet to feel these indications. The old woman who took her last coin in the cafe, the boy who wiped the stone-topped counter where she stood, too excited to sit down, looking out into the dusty street—both of them felt much as she did, as if a sickness had spread from her.
In the days that followed, the German health authorities would sequester both the old woman and the young boy, place under quarantine the wreck of the Hephaestion and the entire district of Chiselet. They were monitoring the effects of radiation. They were puzzled by the symptoms they observed. They had little knowledge of the facts, and there was little to be done in any case.
The situation was more serious than they supposed. Nor at first could they rule out the effect of some separate contagion, a sickness spreading everywhere Andromeda had passed those first days of her homecoming, a fever of forgetfulness and change, moving everywhere away from her like a new, blank page.
Table of Contents
The Hoosick River
Saltpetre Street
After Five Years
The Water's Edge
The Castle on the Beach
A Ribbon of Moonlight
The African
Prisoners in Ratisbon
Ludu Rat-tooth
De Witte
Irony and Luck
Insula Calia
The Wrestling Match
The House on Spatarul
In Mogosoaia
A Derailment
Truth-telling
Reunions
The Tourmaline