by Paul Park
Miranda sat down on the bed again and looked at all the small details of the room, especially the imperfections—the cracks in the veneer, the place where she had scratched her name into the surface of her desk. She pulled out the drawers of her bureau and rummaged through the clothes, which were not numerous. Who was this girl who had lived here? Certainly it was not she who had folded these small frocks so neatly. Her room in Rachel and Stanley’s house had been a mess.
She poked through the top drawer. There were pen nibs and dried-up ink bottles, some wax candles and some matches in a sealed tin candy box. There were some coins in a green glass jar. There was a small, leather-bound book—a diary, obviously, stamped with her name in gold and locked with a small clasp.
She held it, stroked its cover, then sat down in the chair before the desk. She pulled a lock of hair out of her face, perched it behind her ear, as if in preparation.
But she didn’t want to break that seal or read that book, not yet. Though doubtless there’d be clues to help her, still she felt she couldn’t bear it. So she laid the diary on the surface of the desk, lining it up neatly with the corners. Dizzy, suddenly, from hunger, she sprang up and went downstairs.
The diary was important, she told herself. But first things first, as her adoptive father would have said. For an instant Stanley’s face came back to her, his long hands gesturing out of the past. But more important was her situation now, as he would have been the first to say: There must be something to eat here.
Again, there was nothing in the ransacked kitchen, but she found the cellar stair. She struck a match on a strip of carborundum and lit one of the pale candles, releasing a beeswax smell. The candle was as big as her wrist, and the light gave her a flickering comfort. First things first. She picked up a poker from beside the cast-iron stove. In the cellar there were bins of potatoes and things, she now remembered. The dark stairs led to a stone hall that stretched the length of the house. It had been looted, of course. She found broken crates. Some of them had once contained some vegetables.
In a bin on the far side of the hall there were bottles that had not been broken. She put down the poker and held one up to the candle. Inside the brown glass was a yellow liquid: Hungarian wine, as she deciphered from the handwritten label, from Tokaj.
But there was nothing to eat. In the kitchen, which she now searched for the third time, there was nothing. She found a corkscrew, and as the sun was going down she climbed up to the room under the spire. She put the lighted candle on the desk, then cut through the wax seal over the mouth of the bottle and opened it.
All day she’d tried not to think about Andromeda, Raevsky, and especially about Peter. She had tried not to wonder where they were, what they were doing, whether they were searching and calling along the cold banks of the Hoosick while she explored this house. Whenever she had seen her thoughts disappear along that path, she’d called them back. Now she indulged herself, raised the bottle, drank.
4
The Water’s Edge
“LOOK,” RAEVSKY HAD whispered, five years and a few months earlier.
Night had come. There was no moon, and to the east the stars were hidden in a flock of clouds. To the west the sky was clear, and there was a gentle glow in that part of the heavens across the river, though the sun had long since set. It was like the glow over a town at night, but there was no town there, only swamplands punctured with dead trees and then the snowy, empty woods.
It was the aurora borealis, Peter decided, feeling suddenly happy, suddenly sad. More than once his father had taken him in the pickup to the top of Petersburg Pass. And once he’d taken a longer trip with both his parents to Quebec. They’d gone camping on a lake.
“Look,” whispered Raevsky. Andromeda was silent, poised on three legs. The yellow fur was high along her back.
Peter had allowed himself a kind of relaxation by the fire. Hunched in his canvas jacket, hands held out, he did not care to look. He’d been thinking about the days when he’d lain sick and delusional inside the cave. Miranda had stayed with him. It was miraculous how he’d recovered when his fever broke. Raevsky had given him up for dead.
But when he was most contagious, that was when Miranda had been most kind. She had fed him and given him water, hugged him with her cool arms. She hadn’t touched him after he’d recovered. When he was no risk to her, then she had left him and disappeared, just as the wild men who had taken them in out of the storm had run away, afraid of the infection. She’d left him on this pestilential bank, which under the northern lights had taken on a stark and eerie beauty. All day they had not seen a squirrel or a bird.
Now he turned his head. Below him down the slope, the boat was drawn up on the strand, out of the soft current. A flat-bottomed pirogue, heavily loaded with him and Miranda and Raevsky and the dog. Now it was empty.
An animal had come to it, a big animal. Making no noise, it stepped out of the shadows, a catamount or cougar of some sort. Its head was low along the ground, as if made heavy by the weight of two curved tusks that overlapped its chin.
“Ah, God,” murmured Raevsky. And then he continued in Roumanian. Already Peter could make out some words. It was as if inside him there was someone who was rummaging and exploring, someone who could understand Raevsky’s language, and he didn’t want to think about that person.
Sometimes at moments of crisis over the past few days, it had been hard for Peter to recognize himself. Instead he’d been possessed by something new, pulled from his interior as if by his new hand. He’d listened to a new vocabulary of feeling that was like the half-understood Roumanian words—a sudden rage first of all, which nevertheless had a kind of calming, numbing, narcotic effect, and which was also mixed with joy. In this mood he had confronted the wooly mammoth in the snow. Later he could tell himself that he’d tried to save someone’s life or else impress Miranda at the very least. Still he knew those reasons were a way of covering his joy, his guilty present to himself.
Now he felt it and the rage, too. Fleetingly, Peter wondered if the Chevalier de Graz had ever bothered to justify this feeling. Now he found himself rising, found a charred stick in his right hand.
Making no effort to be silent, he kicked through the dry stubble until he stood at the top of the bank, twelve feet or so above the water. Below him the slope was sandy and eroded down to the pebbly beach. A pink part of the sky was battling a green part along an undulating front. Big as a sheep, the animal had paused between the boat and the river. Under the glow its fur shone dirty pink, dirty green, and then a dirty white. It yawned as it stared up at him, displaying enormous ridged eyeteeth, each as long as his hand.
He found himself imagining a razor and brush set, made out of those teeth. Even though he’d never shaved but once, and then with aerosol cream and a disposable, he found himself coveting those teeth. Breathing slowly, he tested the strength of his stick against the ground. And then he would have flung himself down the bank, or else descended quietly step by step, except for a noise behind him.
The cat heard it, too. Almost imperceptibly it shifted its big, flat eyes from him to some other indeterminate place nearby. Peter also turned his head, intrigued by the new sound, one he hadn’t heard through all the difficulties of the past few days.
Raevsky was weeping. With one hand pressed around his cup of ouzo, the other over his face, he rocked back and forth on his old log, a small shuddering movement.
Peter saw no tears in the uncertain light. But the sound was unmistakable. When he looked down the slope again, the cat was gone.
Feeling suddenly foolish, he threw down his stick. There was something about the sound of weeping, tearless or not, that washed away the rage, the calm, the joy. He felt no urge to comfort the old man, and didn’t even know what he might do to comfort him. Or one thing: He stood looking away over the swamp and the dead trees until the noise subsided. Then he stumped back to the fire on his numb feet.
Raevsky was murmuring and muttering in Roumanian. When he
switched to English, the sense came clear. “Oh, I will tell you I go to Constanta for the white tyger. She is waiting in her castle. So I bring her to Bucharest, to the Ceausescu house, as it was my promise—no. It is talking only. Never any more. Can you see I am on the river of my death? Carl and Ferenc, Gulka and the others, Alexandru, my sister’s son. Near as we come down to the water, I think. The rest—brave talk. Not true. I will not see my lady’s face again! Not her face again.”
Peter stood with his hands in his pockets. As Raevsky spoke, he caught an image of Miranda on a terrace overlooking the beach. Listening to Raevsky’s desolate snuffle, he took comfort in imagining her there, her golden bracelet on her wrist.
5
The Castle on the Beach
BUT AT THAT moment Prince Frederick’s castle stood deserted. A shutter had worked loose from one of the windows at the base of the tower and was beating itself to pieces in the March wind. Five years and a few months later, when Miranda stood looking out, no trace of it remained.
Now in her upstairs room she put down her bottle of sweet wine. Almost she felt like weeping from sheer loneliness. Alone in this house except for ghosts and clumsy memories, she also was alone in this strange world, a single light burning along this whole deserted coast.
When she thought of Peter and Andromeda, soon she left them in the snowy woods, the boy with the man’s right hand, the yellow dog. Soon she brought them back in time with her, to before her aunt’s history book had been destroyed in the bonfire on Christmas Hill. She’d brought them all the way back to Berkshire County where they’d been friends: Peter with his missing hand, and beautiful Andromeda whom she’d known since childhood. She remembered Peter’s face as he’d shown her little places in the woods he’d loved. As for Andromeda, a hundred moments like a pack of photographs—her best friend on her mountain bike, or playing soccer, or walking together on hot summer evenings, the streetlights shining on her yellow hair.
These memories sharpened her solitude until it was intolerable. Now to take her mind away, she turned her small chair and set it toward the mirror. She sat down and studied her face again in the dark glass. The candle was behind her. But even in the uncertain light she could tell. In Williamstown she’d been fifteen years old.
She turned her face, lifted her chin, put her fingers to her upper lip. What was the difference? Peter had seen it right away. “What’s wrong with your face?” he’d said on that first morning in the woods. Well, what was wrong with it? Something lost and gained. She did look older now. Peter had said so and it was true.
Was it a coarseness, a thickening? Everywhere and nowhere—rougher skin, a darkness around her eyes? Or else she’d put on weight. Maybe it was to avoid perceiving these things that she’d been thinking so insistently about her friends.
She touched her cheeks and forehead, touched her breasts. Stanley had once told her, only half joking, that if you felt really bad about something, then you should find some other painful thing to think about, because that was the only way you could distract yourself. You should find some thing that hurt you and excited you, because here in this room when she was a child, now she remembered wanting to grow older. Many times she had looked into this same mirror, desperate to grow older so that Lieutenant Prochenko might look at her. And sometimes in Williamstown for other reasons, but that was over now. Here she was in her own country, an unfamiliar world that was the only world. And she was home at last in Great Roumania, not Stanley’s daughter but Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck’s. Prince Frederick, Princess Clara—strangers she had never known. And if that was true, then all of it was true. The white tyger, everything, all of it.
* * *
BUT THE WHITE tyger—as almost everyone imagined—lived in Bucharest two hundred kilometers away. That was the title the Baroness Ceausescu had recently adopted, publicly, semiofficially, to correspond with her private hopes. That evening at sunset she was eating dinner in the Palace of the People, which had been the Empress Valeria’s official residence. Under the protection of the German Occupational Authority, the white tyger had reopened and renamed it. Now in one of the small dining rooms her guests were the outgoing German ambassador and his wife, cloddish people on whom she nevertheless depended. Frau Behrens had been an admirer of hers when she was on the stage.
The Baroness Ceausescu sat forward on her chair. These days she kept early hours. Dessert and coffee were already being served. Her loyal steward, Jean-Baptiste, was at the sideboard, fussing with a bottle of Imperial Tokay. Surely this was the most delicious of all wines! But it was delicious also to refuse it, to hold up her hand as Jean-Baptiste poured the precious, honey-colored liquid into crystal goblets for these Germans. As he grasped the bottle, Nicola Ceausescu studied his fingers—old, wrinkled, but still strong. As he came close, she smiled, waved him away. Abstemiousness was a virtue now. When she was poor, it had felt like a vice.
Her guests sipped the wine, and she amused them with bright anecdotes. Exquisitely and virginally dressed, she touched her forearm to the tablecloth, while at the same time she told a story about the love affairs of a well-known Italian tenor. The words she used would have been vulgar in a man’s mouth. But with the part of her that always judged, she appreciated their effect when spoken by a charming and beautiful woman, as all the world agreed. Frau Behrens didn’t matter; she was besotted, starstruck, drunk. But on the ambassador’s poised face there was a blush of happiness that seemed to coat his cheeks. With his napkin he dabbed gently at his white moustache. And there was something else inside him too, a tremor of condescension that gave the baroness a secret joy. Yes, it was important for him to condescend.
Yes, she’d discovered in her life—it was difficult to scrounge a living from the streets. But it was easy to be powerful. She had learned her skill upon the stage, to give each member of the audience what he wanted. The corrupt men, she would enrich them. The generals, she would give them armies and machines. The poor, she would bankrupt the country if only just to feed them for a day. Even in this small exercise she could feel her power—first, it was already something of a scandal to invite this elderly, old-fashioned couple to her private dining room: just herself, two women and a man. Second, she had dressed with great simplicity, had smoked no cigarettes and drunk no wine. Third, she had conversed lightly and agreeably on many subjects. Fourth, she had ended the evening with this story, using language that bordered the obscene. Looking into the eyes of the ambassador, she felt she could imagine his disdain, imagine also that on their way home in the carriage the old man would put his arm around his wife’s doughy waist. And when they arrived he would suggest he might pay a visit to her bedroom. And she would lean against him and murmur, “Oh Gunther,” or “Oh Gunnar,” or whatever his potato-eating name might be. And the next day the ambassador would write in his dispatches without mentioning his wife: “I was honored by a private dinner with the ‘white tyger,’ as she calls herself. She is a delightful woman, but my dear…!”
Yes, she’d done everything perfectly and could allow herself a little recklessness. She wanted something from these people after all. When dinner was complete, she brought them to the parlor on the first floor and made them sit in small uncomfortable chairs. She stood by the piano and in the hoarse small voice that nevertheless had entranced Europe, she sang without accompaniment from her new opera, or ballet, or oratorio (sometimes her thinking about it changed)—a major work, in any case, that she herself was now composing from the incidents of her life. Many of the songs were already complete. This one, from the first act, was both plaintive and chilling, because of the honesty with which she probed her own ambivalence after her husband’s suicide—her guests were smiling and nodding.
She broke off in midword. Their reaction was not satisfactory. From the table she picked up the letter she had written to the German foreign minister. She glanced at the first paragraph and found herself dissatisfied by the dry diplomatic language. In no way did it do justice to her feelings. The wo
rds required an interpretation that she now found herself providing as she stared at Frau Behrens’s gloved hands.
“Please deliver this,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I’ve written—I make no secrets of the truth! It has now been more than five years since my son was taken from me by Theodore von Geiss und Ratisbon, who assaulted me in my own house. You yourself assured me he’d be punished—that was a lie, and my son was not returned. Maybe at that time the decision was correct, because of the violence in my country, and I myself was forced to live in hiding. Because of you and your government, order is restored. On my knees I thank you and kiss your hands, though they are wet with blood. Do not think we will consent to live forever conquered and abased! But on my knees I am begging you for the return of my boy Felix Ceausescu, now held by a criminal, and I ask you to imagine my torment. How can you keep him from his mother’s arms?”
It was a relief to speak so frankly. Nevertheless the baroness could detect a problem. In a single moment she had destroyed the entire effect of her dinner party. Part of her was glad—Frau Behrens had a shocked expression on her stupid face. And the ambassador nodded gravely.
“Please take this message,” continued the baroness as she crushed the letter between her hands. “I’ll send this after you tomorrow morning,” she continued as she dropped the crumpled paper to the floor and stepped on it.
Wiping her eyes, she left them suddenly. She told the chamberlain to escort them out while she climbed the great stairs. She was trying to maintain her equilibrium.