by Paul Park
Still she rubbed his hand. He stared down at her fingers and made no move to pull away. And he did understand a little bit. Maybe there was another way of thinking about what happened that didn’t involve werewolves and the supernatural. He was curious about that, but at the same time he was wondering why he was letting Waile touch him so easily. Then he remembered something.
When his mother had been sick, at the very end he had sat with her at the hospital. And she stank from the cancers that broke open on her skin, and she’d tried to cover them with makeup and sweet perfume, and because of the medication she had railed at him in a soft whisper, and he’d been both disgusted and brokenhearted, because he was missing her already.
Now he thought about his father working in the nursing home or sitting by himself in the house on White Oak Road. He thought about Miranda standing alone on the beach of the Black Sea, her golden bracelet around her wrist.
“But I seem to remember reading something about a bracelet,” said Waile Bizunesh as if she’d read his mind. “And Popescu, Ceausescu—all these names ending with ‘u.’ I read about it in a magazine or else the Cairo Mail. You understand Roumania is closed to travel from my country. The Germans have a client government in Bucharest. Some kind of tiger. It is a ceremonial title, I believe. But a beautiful woman, so everybody says.”
Peter felt his heart ascend, then climb back down. “What did you hear about it?”
The girl laughed. “I think it is five years from now. Always five years, at least on that side. A scientific constant, these little jumps in time.”
Once, visiting his mother in the hospital, Peter had walked through the pediatric ward. Now he remembered a girl he’d met there who also had seemed older than she was. Suffering had made her older. She’d worn makeup, too. Because her hair was thin, Peter had been able to see the shape of her head under her curls.
Now he looked across the tent, over at the sick boy. Still he was staring back at them, though too far away to listen. “I describe it in my dissertation,” said Waile Bizunesh. “But I want an explanation—is that too much to ask? That’s for the real scientists, I suppose. I’m interested in what you say because I didn’t think the labyrinth could stretch that far along the river—where did you say you were? But perhaps your friend discovered a new entrance to the well. Was there some kind of excavation where you stopped? Tomorrow if we live, maybe you and I could go upstream again, visit the place where your friend disappeared. And you could chase after her if you don’t believe me. Maybe tonight I will be forced to show you the way if those men come again, though it is not my preferred direction, naturally! Do you know, there is no trace of me in Aegypt now. I’m an archaeologist who came back after five years in America, got sick and died. It’s not true—it’s not true! I came back through the dig, east to west. Twice more, five years and five years. What would become of me—no, I’m joking. That would be quite an adventure, to live beyond my birth!”
“You read something in the newspaper?” interrupted Peter.
“Yes, last time I was in Heliopolis. News out of Roumania—don’t look so stern! You know I trust you and I know you’ll help me—isn’t that odd? Another sign of childhood, and I’m not used to it. It’s just a few months I’ve been like this.”
Peter unwrapped his right hand, and with his dark, big fingers he pulled her fingers away. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I was in Aegypt four months ago. And I was in disguise, you see. Big, flopping hats, though I need not have worried. They think I’m dead, you see. Died of cancer. The problem is, why is there a child in the excavation? I have to sneak in past the guard at night. The next time I shall take Fiona as a nurse!”
Peter sat up. “And this was…?”
All trace of giggling or girlishness now left her. Waile was almost sullen as she murmured, “Five years from now. Almost…”
What was this new bullshit? Was she laughing at him? Is this what she’d been trying to say all this time? He sat up and swung his bare feet over the side of his wooden cot.
“What’s wrong, Peter?” asked the girl. “I’ve hurt you.”
Nauseated suddenly, he crossed his arms over his cramping stomach. “I told Raevsky I would find him when I had something to eat.”
“I have hurt you,” she repeated as he fumbled with the new wool socks she had put out for him, the leather boots only slightly worn. “Is it what I said about Roumania? You know it is a superstitious country. I read these stories in the newspaper about the vampire there. It is just a story. But I didn’t…”
Queasy, bowels in rebellion, Peter stumbled to the canvas door. “I’ve got to go to the latrine,” he told her truthfully. But once outside he was unsure where to find it, though she had described the place.
Round huts flanked the tent, three on one side, four on the other. Behind, a rough scaffolding rose against the cliff face, and Peter could see there were petroglyphs carved into the rock, large winged shapes. Between the tent and the scaffolding the ground had been excavated to reveal low stone walls.
In the middle of the dig there was a circular wire fence. Peter headed toward it and unhooked the gate. There was a rough wooden ladder to the bottom of the pit, and he was halfway down before he realized this was stupid. No one would build a latrine down here in the middle of where they were working, and to get there you had to climb a ladder, nailed together and reinforced with twine. This was another part of the dig. The well was lined with beautiful blue tiles. Some were decorated with a pattern of what looked like hieroglyphs. What was it that Waile Bizunesh had said? Altogether the well looked out of place in those woods, along that shore, as out of place as a modern bathroom with flush toilets.
He paused on the ladder about halfway down. He looked up and saw Raevsky’s head silhouetted against the light. It was the middle of the afternoon.
“Get up!” he said. “Get up! Come out of that!”
“Why?”
“You do not smell garbage smell? Toilet smell? Conjuring? Pah!”
Later, after Peter had gone to squat in the woods, Raevsky showed him the defenses of the camp. On the other side of the low cliff, the rocks dropped to the water. There was a stone bridge down there. From the clifftop they could see it and the guard, a woman standing among the trees, holding one of the old man’s guns.
“Is where they came across,” he said.
He meant the wild men, the Englishmen. Afraid of smallpox, they’d attacked the camp, which they imagined was the source of the infection. “Stronger tonight,” Raevsky said. “Leave to Albany is better.”
They climbed down a narrow cleft in the rock, a hundred feet until they reached the riverbank. The stream was loud and narrow here. Among tall pine trees the bridge crossed into the woods on the opposite side. The stones looked old and solid, yellow sandstone, Peter guessed, and not the local granite.
“No dynamite,” Raevsky said. He shrugged, spit over the bridge.
But it was probably all bullshit, Peter thought. Why would anyone attack a hospital, a bunch of women and kids?
“I told her, but…” The old man shrugged. “A respinge.”
“Refused,” Peter muttered.
“She refuse. She not leave this place.”
“Why not?”
“Is her temple. Is her work. She pay much money to these people. I hear stories of a room of gold.”
And a little later, grudgingly: “It is her conjure place.”
They stood looking over the parapet. Over the sound of the rushing stream, Peter listened to the old man, one of his muttering monologues. And Peter substituted words he couldn’t hear or couldn’t understand: “Is enough, I think. One boy, sick, I put in bed. I stand here with my gun. They will not take that boy away. I am with Pieter de Graz—that’s all—simple thing for an old soldier. Bored with life, and so I say my lady I can find this girl, daughter of von Schenck the traitor. I tell them, Gulka and the others, is a simple thing and good money, though it was not so important, not with
me. I am Ceausescu’s man in the old days! So I tell them, Gulka and my sister’s son—a little thing to find this girl. Now they swim in the dead river and that girl is gone! And I cannot go home! Not see my beauty, smell that smell. I cannot fail like that. And so one more little thing, de Graz and me—is not so much, I think. Is not so much…,” on and on.
Whenever he said that name, “de Graz,” Peter felt a lurching in his stomach. After a few minutes he turned away, climbed the path again and Raevsky followed him. When they got up to the top, he saw a woman gesture to them from the doorway of one of the huts. Inside, a second woman tended the fire while the first opened a can of soup and put a pot on the stove.
They were in a raw wooden building about twelve feet in diameter. Waile Bizunesh came in the door as they sat at the trestle table and took off their coats.
She sat beside Peter and picked up a wooden spoon. A little girl with grown-up gestures—“I apologize,” she said. “I want you to believe me. I don’t want you to run away. Let me explain from the beginning,” she whispered shyly. “There is a building in the desert outside Heliopolis. And there is a carved frieze along the pediment on each side of the square. Each frieze represents a line of worshipers before an altar, which is piled with animal sacrifices, and in fact there is a marble table in each corner of the building.
“Because of the inscriptions, we know that each procession represents a different historical moment. There is a coronation festival along the north façade. Opposite, a wedding ceremony. East and west, the military triumphs of Psamtik and his son Necho, pharaohs of the twenty-sixth dynasty.”
Because the windows in the hut were obscured with canvas shades, light came from a carbide lantern in the middle of the table. The red-haired woman who had challenged Peter as he came into the camp had put her mask aside, revealing an unpleasant, misshapen face. Now she laid out wooden bowls and served. The soup was some kind of beef stew. It smelled good.
“But in another sense, each procession is carved precisely to resemble all the others—the clothes, the faces, the gestures, the offerings. So you see a single line of celebrants around the entire building. No, a repeating line. The illusion is that all these things occurred on the same day.”
Peter was eating slowly, savoring each bite. Andromeda slumbered underneath the table. Raevsky finished two bowls of soup, and now he put down his spoon. As Peter watched, he lowered his head onto his forearms, crossed together on the surface of the table.
It was warm in the little room. Peter watched the old man settle down, watched his thin grizzled cheeks, his jaw clench and unclench. His neck was covered with red spots, an irritation or a rash. When he yawned, you could see where his teeth were missing.
“But from the inscriptions we know the sequence covers twenty years at approximately five-year intervals. There, you see? When we arrived, the building was entirely submerged in sand. There’s also been some flooding long before. It wasn’t until the second year that we discovered the tiled shaft, again, that led us to four chambers. Three of them were broken in—you see? Here also there are many rooms we must dig out.”
Peter listened to her carefully, but he told himself he still had no idea what she was talking about. And still he found himself disgusted for reasons he didn’t understand. Why should this bother him, out of all the crazy things that had happened this past week? Andromeda was a dog, for God’s sake. She was sleeping underneath the table.
“My mother was in a survivor group,” he said, louder than he’d intended. “Weren’t you sick before?”
It was because of the girl in the cancer ward. And because of something Waile had said. She stared at him a moment. She raised her hands, displaying her pink palms. “Aren’t you a clever boy?” she murmured, then smiled and clapped her hands together. “I tell you as a last resort,” she said. “Why I don’t want to use it.”
She spoke softly, swallowing her words, so Peter had to look at her. “I told you I went back from here, west to east when I first found the way. Five years older and I almost died. I had to find my way back from the hospital, back into the dig.”
This was something Peter felt he knew about. “Pancreatic cancer,” the girl said. “In Asmara we have a department of chronology. It is still in its beginning. I have heard a lecture on this topic—this we know. Why is it, for example, that in one country enormous changes can occur all in a moment? While in another place time is silent for a thousand years and nothing happens there. Evolutionists see big changes in morphology, then nothing more. In our own experience, one day can last a minute or a week. For young girls and old women time is not the same. That I know.”
She sat beside him on her stool. She reached for his left hand and he allowed her to touch him. He could feel time begin to slow. She spoke: “Now in this place we see woolly mammoths and sword-tooth cats, animals not seen in Europe for millennia. West across the Henry Hudson, the map is blank. Also east of Edo in the deserts of Japan. A bald spot in the world. People go there and they don’t come back. Large expeditions, all are lost.”
“I could draw you a map,” Peter murmured. He’d been to Denver. “We drove along 1-70,” he said. His father had taken him camping in Black Canyon. Where was his father now?
The girl ignored him. “So there are a lot of theories. None of them make sense. Maybe there are currents of time that shift over the world. Last night we saw the northern lights. Did you see them?”
This question irritated Peter, and he moved his hand away from her. “It’s not the same thing. Time is something you can measure.”
The girl shrugged. “Maybe there are different kinds of time,” she whispered. “Clocks are one.” Her brown hand was near his hand on the surface of the table. He was keeping his other one, de Graz’s hand, rolled into the belly of his flannel shirt.
“Or you can think of it like an archaeological dig,” she said. “You have your own system of tunnels. Then you break through into another system from the past. It was like that when they excavated the Knossos maze.”
Raevsky snored with his cheek on the coarse, raw wood. It was a soft, liquid sound. His mouth was open, his lips pushed out of shape. “West to east when I went through,” said Waile, “that first time I could feel my sickness grow. East to west it left me. But I’m afraid if I stay here it will catch up. It will chase me back. So when I think I feel it, then I take the boat to Alexandria. And I come through again—it is five years each time. I measure—sometimes less, sometimes more. It is a pattern. So last time I read in a magazine about this name, Miranda Popescu. She had shot a man in Braila, I think. Along the Danube river. And she was hiding from the police. That’s where she is, I think.”
“It can’t be the same.”
“A policeman, yes.”
“It can’t be the same,” said Peter. But now he knew what the girl was talking about: the shaft in the middle of the dig. “Why are you telling me?” he asked.
She clapped her hands again, a small soft noise. “I want to know about the book that burned up in the fire! I want to know about your silly story!”
Then in a moment her voice had changed, and she was serious and grave. “And I want you to know our option to go back. To retreat, you call it—the captain will not listen. He makes the sign of the evil eye. So I’ll tell you. A final resort, you understand. If you come back here, I will have gone. The cancer, I will have to risk it.”
She put her fingers down. Beside his splayed left hand, they moved. They caressed the table’s surface. Peter watched them from the corner of his eye. “We have six patients here with that young boy. All resting. And they will survive the smallpox. So you see it is important.”
Peter felt a bead of sweat run down his ribs under his shirt. “Why me?”
The girl smiled. But in her face there was some hint of embarrassment or sadness—“Last night three men crossed the bridge with torches. They are frightened of this place, so Anna and Fiona scared them off. But I have never fired a gun. I have no training.
Anna says more will come tonight.”
“Why me?” Peter repeated, but he knew why. His stomach, which had been quiet, now felt sour again.
Waile’s hand moved near his own. “The captain says you are a famous soldier in your country. So young! But I also am young for my accomplishments—perhaps we are the same! This is not your fight, I know.”
But it was. These wild men had been with Peter in the cave. He’d been crazy with fever. But he remembered them pulling up his shirt, poking at the hard bumps along his stomach, which had cleared up the next day.
Now Peter clenched his left hand into a fist. “I see you are injured,” the girl said, nodding at his right hand, twisted in his sweater, invisible in his lap.
“No.”
She smiled. How many times had she gone through the tunnel from the Egyptian side to here? Three times, had she said? Crawling back in time away from her disease …
The air was hot and pungent in the hut. He couldn’t wait to get outside. He shook Raevsky’s shoulder, kicked at Andromeda and listened to her growl. But they followed him out.
In the late afternoon the weather had turned cold again. There was a crust on the surface of the shallow snow. They climbed down through the rocks to the bridge, where Fiona was standing guard.
Rested from his nap, Raevsky was in a good mood. “Is like old time! Old time in Nova Zagora when we fight the Jews. I am with Baron Ceausescu and Ninth Hussars. You and Prince Frederick in middle. Dead river—fight with dead. No one can touch.”
“I don’t remember,” Peter said. It was the truth. But all day his body had felt strange to him. Faint with hunger, carrying the boat, maybe he hadn’t noticed. But now he watched his feet punch through the snow. His walk, his gait seemed unfamiliar, splay-footed, swaggering. He let his arms swing at his sides.
Raevsky had one of the long guns. They crossed the bridge and poked around on the other side. Andromeda ran off into the woods over there among the outcroppings of rocks.