The Tourmaline (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  At the mezzanine she turned and stood looking out over the long gallery. But her feelings were genuine, she thought, and she surrendered to them until her slender shoulders heaved with sobs. What had she done? She was incorrigible. Yet surely it was these Germans’ fault to have hurt her and driven her to such extremes. And her own opera or oratorio was to blame, because the music never failed to bring her crudest emotions to the surface. Where was her son now? What was he doing now? Several times Behrens and the others had assured her he was well. But she’d had no response to any of her letters.

  Jean-Baptiste now came to her. The gaunt old man was dressed in expensive clothes—the tyger’s personal livery. Still he looked awkward and unkempt, and he spoke with his usual lack of ceremony. “We followed your instructions to put some kind of potato in every dish. Did you notice? The pastry dough was fluffy, wasn’t it?”

  He was trying to comfort her. She shook her head, smiling through tears. “Their bodies crave it,” she sobbed into her handkerchief. “But we must not be too obvious. What about the sherbet?”

  “Burnt potato dust. A sprinkle.”

  Cheeks wet, she laughed. “Potatoes have an aphrodisiac effect for them,” she said. “That’s what I’ve heard.” Then she wiped her face and blew her nose. “Was there something else?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll go to Domnul Luckacz, then.” She paused. “Thank you, my friend.” Jean-Baptiste did not reply. He was already tottering down the stairs.

  Or was it possible she was lying to herself? Sometimes days went by and she did not think about her son. Sometimes she couldn’t even bring his face to mind. In which case she’d been reckless for no reason—no, she’d worry about that tomorrow. Now she was tired.

  She continued up the stairs to the small sitting room. Always at the end of every evening she sat down for a minute with Radu Luckacz, chief of her police. As she entered the chamber, she saw him at the window looking out over the lights of the Piata Revolutiei. “Ma’am, are they gone?” he asked.

  He was a fussy man. He wore his gray hair long, brushed from his forehead. His moustache was absurdly black, as if he’d smeared it with boot polish. He had not removed his overcoat or gloves. His hat was in his hands.

  Often when she saw him Nicola Ceausescu felt a stroke of pity. He needed a woman to take him in her hand, to smooth away his nervousness. It was obvious his wife and daughter couldn’t manage it—as always, he seemed anxious and depressed. He had been standing almost in darkness; now she moved to the table to turn up the lamp. He stood facing her, turning his hat in his hands, avoiding her eyes because he loved her.

  In the days since she had first acquired Kepler’s Eye, the baroness had come to be familiar with many kinds of love. This was not the small frisson of the German ambassador (if indeed she was right about that, and if indeed she had not ruined everything with her stupid recklessness), but a deep and desperate feeling. As she approached him, she could see him cringe. Always she took care to stand a little close.

  He took refuge in officiousness. He listed his agenda for the following day. Then at the end he hesitated. “Ma’am, as you know I have kept several persons in the area of Constanta, among whose duties is the continued observation of the castle at Mamaia beach, which passed from Frederick Schenck to his sister. Tonight I have received a telegram from one of those men. He tells me he has seen a light burning in the tower, and so I have asked the provincial commissioner to investigate. This would not be worth mentioning except I know the local people are frightened of that place. Aegypta Schenck was a conjurer, as you know.”

  The baroness smiled. “You amaze me.”

  “Ma’am, there is no need to make fun. These phenomena are real. It is my duty to protect, but first you must believe there is a danger. We have not yet seen the victory of science over superstition.”

  “To be sure.”

  In fact it was easy for the baroness to think the worst. Part of her was as she seemed that night to Radu Luckacz, superficial and trusting, but there was another part. A blackness could come over her as sudden as a storm.

  She listened to Luckacz a few minutes more. “A hailstorm destroyed the fruit trees outside Ploiesti,” he was saying. “Also as you know there is continued drought in the Dobruja region—” It was too much. She scowled at him and clapped her hands.

  Later she’d apologize. “That’s enough,” she said. “Don’t bore me.” And to efface his wounded expression, she gave him her hand to kiss. “Please,” she said. “I have a headache.”

  Again, as with the Germans, she found herself eager to be gone. Full of an apprehension that was as sudden as an attack of nausea, she slipped out of the door, then climbed the steps to her own small apartment.

  A light was burning on the side table. Beside it on a Chinese porcelain dish, a ham sandwich lay in wait. The light gleamed from the surface of the jeweled mustard pot, a gift to the former empress from the Sultan of Byzantium.

  Nicola Ceausescu scarcely glanced at it, though she was hungry. She passed instead to the inner door that led to her private boudoir, a small, square, empty space, along one wall of which stood an iron bedstead. There she slept most nights. When she was powerless, she had been hungry for luxuries, had slept in silk sheets among silk pillows.

  But that night she continued past the rice-paper screen. In a hidden corner of the room there was a hidden door that led to a garret underneath the eaves. The former empress had used the space for storage. But Nicola Ceausescu had furnished it secretly. She had had transported there in sealed boxes the contents of her dead husband’s laboratory from the house on Saltpetre Street.

  She lit a candle in the doorway. On her left hand there was a small altar assembled out of Valeria’s bric-a-brac: some gilded Egyptian statuary on the flat surface of a carved and painted Russian box. A sphinx knelt with her hands outstretched, and on her palms she held the tourmaline, Kepler’s Eye. Now the baroness lit the lamps on either side of it, and admired the green and purple surface of the gem.

  Usually she liked to keep it hidden on her body, touching her skin. But the dress she’d worn that night had not allowed it. Now she reached out her forefinger and touched its surface. It was the source of the people’s love for her, she knew. She took a dolorous, fierce pleasure in reminding herself. Without this jewel she was nothing, the most worthless and miserable of women.

  Farther on in the garret she found her husband’s ironwood table. With a piece of cloth she rubbed the dust from the surface of the four-sided adamantine pyramid. Now there was a tiny light that burned in it while she sat down and began her meditations.

  A light in the tower window high above the beach. The image brought with it a frisson of unease as the baroness cast her mind abroad. Fingering an unlit Turkish cigarette, she lay back in her armchair with her eyes closed.

  Often she was able to convince herself she was the guardian of her people, a bulwark of protection in these difficult times. Then it felt good to pinch the noses of the German oppressors, who rode through Bucharest as if they owned it, and managed the resources of the country like a private bank. Other times, as now, she understood how much she was dependent on her benefactors in Berlin, who had established her and kept her and would doubtless dispose of her if she offended them too much. She depended on them even more than her own people, and when she sat in her leather armchair thinking about that, in her bedroom in the center of her palace, she felt cold and vulnerable. Then she was disturbed by images of failure, and when she opened her eyes, she saw one of these was taking shape inside the pyramid, a figure of a girl.

  She was sitting on a child’s wooden chair, looking into the inner surface of the pyramid as if into a mirror. And she was weeping. Tears fell from her dark eyes. She leaned forward with her shoulders hunched, her arms clasped over her chest as if hugging herself or keeping herself warm, though it must have been a warm night in Constanta by the sea. A half-empty bottle stood upright by her foot.

  It was Mirand
a Popescu, home at last. The baroness had seen her in a photograph taken years before. A girl then, now she was a woman. From what the baroness could see, she had some of her mother’s shape, though her face recalled Prince Frederick: rather pale, with heavy, dark eyebrows and large eyes. Quite plain: Her mouth was too large, also, though her lips were thin. Her dark hair was on her shoulders, and she had small, protruding ears.

  As the baroness watched, she pulled a lock of hair back from her face. The sleeve of her shirt slid down to reveal the golden bracelet that had belonged to Miranda Brancoveanu in the ancient days—just a trinket of worn beads, each carved in the shape of a tiger’s head. But it was also the mark of the white tyger, the savior of Roumania, and the baroness coveted it.

  Where had the girl been for these five years? She’d imagined her dead, or living her life out in the North American wilderness. But at the same time she had always known this day would come. Now here she was in Europe. Miranda Popescu was in Roumania itself, and immediately the baroness could see some complications.

  As she sat in her small garret, she too felt tears come to her eyes, and she found herself weeping for this young woman, alone and in such danger.

  * * *

  SHE SAT WATCHING a long time. She watched Miranda make her bed and snuggle into it. Lulled from her loneliness by the sound of the waves, the girl fell asleep, and when she woke, the sun was high over the water. The light slanted from the east window.

  Thirst and hunger made her rise. Her tongue was thick and sweet. She stood looking out the window at the water. Then she went downstairs.

  In the garden she found herself walking back to the cottage where she’d first arrived. Or else where she’d returned, she had to keep reminding herself, in this place where everything seemed familiar and new at the same time. How had this miracle occurred? Just yesterday she had been floating on the Hoosick River with her friends.

  The cottage on the riverbank had not been like this one. It had resembled it the way a dream resembles life. Now she had awoken in the real place, where doors and windows did not reform and disappear. But where were Peter and Andromeda? Where were they now?

  Light-headed and weak, she climbed the steps of Juliana’s house. In the dream she had remembered scrabbling at the floor, looking for the secret place under the boards where Umar kept his gun. She had not found it. In the dream it had not been there. But now she knelt and searched again through the dirt and accumulated leaves until she uncovered the little ring that Juliana’s niece had shown her. Roxana, her name was, or had been—a fox-faced, slit-eyed girl.

  And the ring twisted and the panel pulled up, and there was something underneath wrapped in an oiled rag. It was a gun, a revolver with a long, octagonal barrel. The handle was made of white bone.

  The gun was familiar to her. Miranda’s adoptive grandfather—Rachel’s father—had something just like it in his house in Colorado Springs. It was the pride of his collection, and he’d unlocked his glass case and shown it to her every time she visited.

  Miranda held it up, and it was heavy in her hand. There was something else, too, wrapped in the oiled rag—a tin box of soft-nosed bullets. And something else again, an embroidered bag with a leather drawstring.

  There was money inside. She could feel the shape of the coins inside the cloth. This was good, because she’d lost her purse of silver beads. She’d left it in the pirogue. She hoped Peter would get some use out of it.

  These gold coins, as she saw when she opened the bag and shook some of them out, weren’t like the ones she had spent in tara mortilor. They were more recently minted, hard-edged, uniform, with double-headed eagles on one side, Cyrillic letters on the other. She looked for a date but could not find one.

  And there was a piece of paper folded many times. As she unwrapped it she saw a worm had eaten a meandering hole. Then she was reading her aunt’s minuscule handwriting. “My dear niece, it is my pleasure to present you with this weapon that belonged to your father and his father, and which I know you will use wisely. This is the first of the treasures I have left for you if there is a break in the rope and I am not there to guide your hands. First I tell you you must leave this place because it is not safe and full of robbers and murderers and spies.…”

  Miranda sat back, looked up at the peaceful sky. She felt a wistful kind of irritation. How long had the letter lain under the floorboards? Robbers and murderers—there’d been no one here for years.

  She read a few words more. “Here I must tell you what to do without delay. If the worst has happened and my enemies have buried me, then go to Insula Calia, where you will receive more precise directions.…”

  She stopped reading. Why had she expected anything different? Why had she expected some piece of comfort, maybe, some acknowledgment of how hard this was? Or maybe some story or information from the years that had gone by, some tiny vision of her father or her mother or her life in this place? Maybe some answer to a question that Miranda didn’t even know enough to ask, an answer that would come as a relief—nothing like that. More precise directions.

  Part of her craved them, even though it was hard to imagine how they still could be of use to her, now so long out of date. But in her mind’s eye she caught a glimpse of her aunt’s unyielding and unsentimental face, whether a memory or a projection, Miranda couldn’t tell. This much was clear: Even after death Aegypta Schenck was not yet done with guiding and criticizing Miranda’s every step.

  So what was wrong with that? Why did she resent it? Surely she could use a little direction now. Was it just the tone—you must do this, you must do that? That was part of it, but there was more.

  Her aunt didn’t trust her enough, obviously, to give her information rather than commands. She didn’t trust her to come to the same conclusions as herself, and maybe there was a reason for that. Because when it came right down to it, Miranda didn’t trust her, either. Nothing that had happened reassured Miranda that her aunt always had her best interests at heart.

  Maybe it was true what the scar-faced, smallpox-pitted man had told her on the riverbank, and she was like a pawn on its last move, poised to become a queen. But she knew her aunt was trying to win the game and not protect her pieces. If Miranda’s death would profit Great Roumania, she suspected what her aunt would choose.

  Now, perched on a briar near the Magdalena fountain, a brandywine bird strutted and preened. Miranda had seen one like it in her dream of tara mortilor—the land of the dead. It was the spirit creature of Aegypta Schenck, though doubtless its presence here was a coincidence. Slowly, languidly, she picked up the revolver and pointed it. The gun was heavy in her hand. She pulled back the hammer, closed one eye in an exaggerated pantomime. The bird cocked its head, ruffled its feathers, and disappeared into the bush, leaving a single iridescent feather floating to the ground.

  Miranda folded up the letter along the seams without reading the rest of it. She’d look at it later. The night before, desperate for anything, she would have pored over every word. No doubt tonight as darkness crept across the terrace she would feel the same; she put the letter off till then. In the meantime, some of these decisions were surely her own. The sun was warm, the grass was green, and the gun, now, she examined more carefully.

  Most summers Rachel and Stanley had taken her out west to Colorado, to the suburban house where Rachel had grown up. Now Miranda wondered whether her aunt Aegypta had deliberately placed this gun in Rachel’s father’s collection so Miranda would be familiar with it now; it broke apart in a familiar way. But she was surprised to find it loaded. She shook out the bullets and felt suddenly safer. Stanley had always disapproved of guns in people’s houses. He had always made fun of Rachel’s parents.

  That had been in the false America. Even now Miranda thought of it sometimes as the real America, with its shopping malls and nuclear bombs. For a moment the gun was like a bridge between the worlds. Miranda rubbed the steel with the greasy rag, seeing how the surface of the metal was inlaid with brass or
bronze or gold, in any case a yellower metal that decorated the barrel and the drum with an ornate pattern of winding leaves and thorns. On each side the plate where the firing mechanism fit into the stock was incised with a yellow rose. In contrast with this pattern, the white bone of the stock was smooth and plain.

  She slipped the purse of coins into her pocket and wrapped the gun, unloaded, into its rag. Stanley had always told her that guns by themselves caused more havoc than robbers or murderers or even spies, she supposed—statistics proved it! But the weight of the revolver reassured her. And the money would be useful, she told herself.

  Standing up, she felt the blood rush from her head. It was obvious she must get food, and she could buy it now. Should she walk west along the carriage road to find a house or a town? Or should she walk among the dunes, north or south? North, she decided, because the abandoned boat in the inlet was the only sign of humanity she’d seen. Briars had overgrown parts of the garden and the back end of Juliana’s house, but the berries were small and green and hard. In a month they would be ready.

  She followed her tracks from the day before until she found the boat. It had been drawn up along the striped and pebbled sand among dried scraps of seaweed. And it was clear that something bad had happened recently. What, in fact, did her aunt have to say about enemies and spies? She’d read over the letter as soon as she got back to her room. With its help, she’d figure out a plan. And in the morning she’d get out of here—as soon as she had pushed the boat onto its keel, Miranda could see how the bottom had been broken out, either with a head-sized rock that now rolled against the front compartment, or with a rusted hammer that was stuck into the sand. There was a tangle of torn clothing. Amid pieces of a broken oar, brass shell casings were scattered along the high tide line. Above the line the sand was trampled, and there was a V-shaped trough as if something heavy had been dragged away.

  Hungry as she was, she refused to think about what might have happened. Instead she rummaged for things she could use. The compartments underneath the bow and stern were latched with iron hooks. One was empty, but the other held a hot, stinking package of tarpaulin. Opened, it revealed a folded, circular net, weighted along its edge with pieces of lead. There was also a short, dull knife with a broken blade.