The Tourmaline (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  Now everything was quiet. Miranda watched the toes of a pair of black boots in front of her. The leather was worn, carefully polished.

  When she raised her head, she found herself looking up into the face of a tall soldier. His hair was black, and he wore a small black moustache and beard. His face was long and showed his bones. The shape of his black eyes showed some Asian ancestry. “We came in time,” he said, smiling, in Roumanian. “You are not hurt?”

  “No.”

  “That is good.” He spoke fluently, without an accent. “We were looking for this criminal. You have my thanks.”

  Behind the soldier, to Miranda’s surprise, two others were kneeling over Alexei de Witte, and one was carrying the water bottle. The other had stripped off his jacket and was bandaging his shoulder with strips of gauze that were already wet with blood. A third stood at a distance near the crushed place in the grass where Miranda had spent the night. He was carrying the rifle.

  “Now I am here to give you the thanks of my government and to ask if you’ve been harmed. What is your name?”

  “Miranda.”

  “Ah, like the queen from your history books—Brancoveanu, is it not? Surely you are as beautiful as she was said to have been. Did this man say anything to you?’

  Miranda wished she’d thought to have invented a new name. Anna? No, that was the woman she was supposed to find.

  “No,” she said. “He attacked us as we slept.”

  “Who?”

  “Me and my friend.” Another soldier now appeared at the edge of the clearing, leading a subdued Ludu Rat-tooth.

  The Eurasian man—an officer, Miranda supposed, though she couldn’t tell it by his uniform—spoke a crisp command in German and the soldier took his hand from the girl’s elbow. Smiling again, he reached down to help Miranda to her feet. She brushed his hand away as she got up.

  “He did not say anything to you, or give anything to you?”

  “No. We were asleep.”

  “And so the gunshot that we heard…?”

  He glanced down at her belt, where the butt of her pistol was protruding. Miranda said nothing—“This must have surprised him!” continued the man. “Please!”

  He reached out his gloved hand. Miranda laid the gun into it. He raised it up, inspected it, spun the barrel so the bullets dropped into the grass. “Where did you come from? Why are you sleeping here?”

  Miranda thought a plaintive tone was best. “Mamaia Sat. Two nights ago our house was burned. This was my father’s gun. My uncle lives in…”

  “Where?”

  “In Carcaliu,” said Miranda. The name rose from a hidden place.

  One of the soldiers stood beside them, and the man asked him questions in German. He answered in the same language, and Miranda caught some proper names. Mamaia Sat. Zelea Codreanu.

  The man with the moustache had been smiling all this time. But now he grimaced and screwed up his mouth. He snapped the revolver closed, then raised his hand, and the soldier broke off in midword. Behind him, the two others were still kneeling over Alexei de Witte, who was not conscious.

  “Ah, I am sorry,” said the man with the moustache. “On behalf of my government—these men are criminals. Believe me, you will not suffer long under their hands. In Bucovina we have thrown these scoundrels out.”

  Plaintive and defiant was the attitude Miranda wanted. She stared up at the moustached man, and he stared back. “My name is Arslan Lubomyr. He did not give you anything?”

  “When?”

  “After you shot him? Ah, I see. It is a joke.”

  The man grimaced, and turned to look at the black horse. A soldier—the one who had brought Ludu back—had stripped off the saddle and bridle. The horse stepped back. His head dipped down, and Miranda could see he was lame in his back foot.

  With a pocketknife the soldier was ripping into the back of the saddle, splitting all its seams. He cut into the seat from underneath and ripped the small blanket in half. At the same time the two other soldiers tore the lining from de Witte’s jacket, stripped off his boots, undid his pants.

  Miranda wondered if the last time de Witte had grabbed her, wrestled with her, it was because he knew the noise of the gunshot would draw these men. He wanted them to think she was his enemy. Maybe the robbery, all of it was just his playacting—was it possible? So Lubomyr wouldn’t search her. So he would let her go.

  The soldier beside Miranda was talking again. Lubomyr raised his hand. “Why was she running?” he commanded, nodding at the girl.

  “She was afraid.”

  The man frowned. “She was leading two horses and Telemonian Ajax. Ah, of course—she is a Gypsy! That explains it! You should be careful with your friends.”

  He strode over to where she stood and spoke to her for a few minutes. Miranda couldn’t hear what they were saying. She watched the two men search under de Witte’s clothes, while he lay unresponsive. She watched them rip the heels off his boots.

  Then the man with the moustache was at her side again. “She says she lost her father. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  He clicked his teeth, then shook his head. “So you give me your word—Miranda,” he said. “I do not allow my men to touch the women, and I will not allow them to touch you.” He stared at her for a long time.

  “I myself do not believe,” he went on. “And if so, why give it to a girl from Mamaia Sat? He is a dangerous man. Anything he told you is a lie.”

  Sulky and defiant, Miranda shook her head. One of the soldiers spoke in German.

  “He says maybe you took it,” said the moustached man. “This was why you were fighting. But why take something of no value when you leave his money?” He held up the leather pouch from de Witte’s belt.

  “We can ask him,” he continued. And as if listening to him, the soldier who had bandaged de Witte’s shoulder now splashed water in his face and pulled open his eyes. He struggled, but they held him down. Now, weakly, he started talking in Roumanian, words Miranda didn’t recognize, though she assumed they were obscenities when she saw Lubomyr smile.

  “No,” he said. “This is as you told us.” He nodded at Ludu Rat-tooth. “You, she, he all say the same.”

  Then in a moment he continued. “I am sorry for this. And we must take your strawberry pony to carry this man. In return I will give you the black horse—keep him.” He raised his hand when the soldier beside him started to speak. “He belongs to Captain Richter, who sits like a sack of apples. Now this man has ridden him to death—he was a valuable horse. But you’ll get a few drachmae—here,” he said. “Money means nothing to us. We do not rob or harm you, though if your soldiers were in Germany I would not say as much for them. You understand this—tell your friends. Maybe one day I will come see you in Carcaliu.”

  He threw the leather pouch into the grass.

  11

  Irony and Luck

  TWO DAYS AFTER his arrest, Peter received a message. He stood in the courtyard of the Eski Seray in Adrianopole—a huge, square, crumbling structure, a fortress in the old Roumanian wars, and mostly ruined in the bombardment that had preceded the Peace of Havsa.

  Portions of three stories had fallen in. Peter sat against a rock in the hot sun. The fortress was now used for prisoners awaiting questioning. Conditions were not good. Peter had no money. There was nothing to eat.

  But now the guard brought him a hunk of bread and a bowl of cold soup, and as he ate, he found a scrap of paper in his mouth. He spat it out into his palm and then unfolded it. In Andromeda’s slashing and elaborate handwriting, it read: Upper West Window Before Dawn.

  Not very precise. But there was a window that was higher than the rest among the ruined galleries on the west side of the building. A little after midnight Peter climbed the choked stairs. The window was barred with an iron grille set into a deep embrasure. In the darkness he climbed into the dusty space. Balanced on the narrow, sloping shelf, he did not sleep.

  He put his arm through one of
the rusted squares and held himself against the grille. All was in darkness inside the fort. Rats, lizards, and men crept among the rubble. Outside there was a little light, though the moon itself was not visible. Peter looked down to the wire fence, and after many hours he saw the dog come out of the small wood and dig a hole under it. Then he saw her cross the bare ground to the bottom of the wall a hundred feet beneath. A tree of ivy grew there.

  Peter wondered if it was possible for Andromeda to climb so high. But in time he heard a rattling, and near his window the leaves trembled. Then there was a movement, a shadow clinging to the larger trunk that grew against the wall.

  “Are you there?” she whispered. Peter could see her fingers on the window ledge. Then she jumped and he leaned back suddenly, almost tumbling out of the embrasure. The ledge was narrow on her side and she clung to the bars. She squatted on the ledge with her knees splayed. With both hands she had grabbed hold of the grille in front of his face. All was in darkness. She was naked, Peter knew.

  “I’ve got something for you,” she mumbled, because her mouth was full. She had hidden something in her mouth, and now she was spitting it out. Something was hanging down her naked chest. He hesitated, then reached his left hand through the bars. He felt her mouth on his palm, felt her disgorging something from her throat. Then he drew back a greasy package: coins wrapped in sausage casing. Then there was a tiny, slippery bottle—the size they use on airlines—covered in the same substance, and finally a slab of meat, slightly chewed. “It’s not as disgusting as it seems,” Andromeda whispered. “Trust me.” Her voice was clearer now.

  Peter said nothing. Wedging the crook of his right arm into the grille, he began to eat with his left hand. He couldn’t help himself, he was so hungry.

  He was close to her. Her face was close against his face, separated only by the rusted bars. He heard her long, low, whistle in his ear. “Boy,” she said. “You’re all banged up.”

  It was true. Peter’s face was scabbed and puffy.

  “People don’t have anything good to say about this place,” Andromeda whispered. “Don’t eat too fast—you’ll choke. There, that’s the good stuff,” she went on, as he uncorked the tear-shaped bottle with his teeth. “Twenty years old. Finest of the fine.”

  He couldn’t answer her. There was no reason to describe how he’d had to fight for the watery tepid soup that was his breakfast. And it hadn’t been a fair fight. Eyes wet, he shook his head. Trying to chew, drinking little burning sips, he pulled himself closer to the bars where she clung like a monkey. He pressed his cheek against the rusted iron near her hand, and examined her long, dirty fingers. Then they were gone; she had jumped back, settled back out of sight, and the leaves and branches shook and rattled. He was afraid she would leave him. Then he saw a glow and smelled her cigarette.

  Over the months he’d gotten used to her physical peculiarities. But at that moment she appeared to him like a magical being, a kind of angel, almost. How could she have carried all that stuff up in her mouth and throat—and then a cigarette and matches, too! Had there been some pouch around her neck he hadn’t seen? Or did she have powers that could help him? He couldn’t speak. He sat watching the orange glow, which came and went. Then he heard Andromeda’s voice. “It’s not so bad.”

  It was as if these words gave him a kind of permission. The tears were on his cheeks. His mouth was full, and he tried to keep himself from making any noise. He was afraid someone might come and try to take away his scrap of meat, his little brandy bottle, his eleven silver piastres. He didn’t want to fight, although he knew he would. He’d kill someone before he let them take these things away.

  There was too much meat in his mouth and now he coughed some of it out; he couldn’t help it. He thought he’d never been so miserable. All night before Andromeda had come, he had been murmuring poetry to himself. But then he’d thought about his mother in the hospital and when she came home to die. His father was a nurse’s aide, and he knew what to do with medications and to keep her comfortable. But one night he’d fallen asleep on the cot in the guest bedroom where she was staying.

  Some of these poems he had not spoken since then, since he had sat beside the bed during the late night. His father lay asleep with his mouth open, and Peter was not sure whether his mother could even hear him or even understand him. Too late he regretted learning so many long poems about wars and fighting—“The Congo,” “The Revenge,” and so few of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English love poems that were her favorites. They flee from me that sometime did me seek.

  Intent on his misery and his remembered misery, at first Peter didn’t notice that Andromeda had started talking. Even after he began to listen, it took him several moments to begin to understand the words, whispered at the limit of his hearing. “… But you must understand the knowledge is in you someplace in your heart. So you must trust me when I tell you that these things are true. And you must let me tell you about the Chevalier de Graz, how he won the Star of Hercules at Nova Zagora, not by going back to burn the bridge. But when the Ninth Hussars were broken in the woods, and the Jews chased us all day through the rain until we crossed the river—fifty men were drowned and a hundred horses. I tell you when the prince came riding through the camp looking for you, then I was glad. My friend Dionysus Lopatari was shot through the jaw, and that night I hated you. When we were out with the pickets I saw you climb out of the mud. And you had a calf clasped in your arms, a little Bulgar calf you’d rescued from somewhere. I saw the prince’s face, and I tell you I cursed God. You were an arrogant fool, eighteen years old, and the next year you were a captain in the guard—what was their motto? ‘Loyalty and Iron’? How we would laugh at you and your parades! I had a drinking club in Floreasca.”

  Peter watched the end of the cigarette glow bright and then subside. Then the voice came, low and rough. “My friend, it’s loyalty and iron after all. When the prince was dying and he called us in, and he asked us to fight for Clara Brancoveanu and her unborn child, I knew he was thinking about that morning when he watched you drag that calf out of the mud. It was wounded in the eye, and we could hear it bleating from half a kilometer. There was a broken rail fence and you clambered over. What the prince was thinking in my case, I have no idea. I had no desire to babysit that little snot-faced girl for those years in Mamaia. That little lump-cat with her horses and her schoolgirl crush. But when we failed with Princess Clara, we could not fail with her.”

  How had she brought the cigarette up dry? Peter asked himself. He was watching the orange glow. Still he said nothing.

  “But this is what I wanted to tell you,” continued Andromeda. Her voice seemed to speak to him out of the past: “When I saw de Graz drag himself out of the mud, and he was wounded in the head after that stupid defeat, and he was lifting the calf up, and I could see into his eyes, and he was glad of it. Wet with joy. Not just glad to be alive, but happy in that place. All night I had nursed Dionysus Lopatari and damned God and wept for home.”

  Peter watched the end of Andromeda’s cigarette. He didn’t speak for a long time. “Last night I was dreaming about home,” he said at last. “Then when I woke up, I was thinking about my dad, what he’s doing now. And I was thinking about the ice house, and Christmas Hill.”

  He watched the glow of the cigarette. “I don’t expect you to understand,” said Andromeda. “You’re just a weak American boy in part of you. It’s your choice to live with dreams, but the man I knew,” she said, “would have been happy here. In two days the guards would have been begging him to let them keep some of their pay for the sake of their wives and children. Let me tell you one more story: You think I’ve been lazy. Drinking and gambling—I tell you it wasn’t time. We came early to Aegypt through that spider hole. We were following Miranda Popescu, but we must have passed her on the way—that girl was not in Great Roumania. Not yet. What was there to talk about?

  “Now, I think the world has changed. Last night I saw the prince’s sister in a drea
m—Mother Egypt as the Gypsies called her. She showed me Mamaia Castle all abandoned. She showed me Miranda Popescu on a black gelding. She told me another game had started—listen to me! I tell you this because you have to know it is important to get free. Loyalty and iron, my friend. Do you remember after the prince’s death, and Clara Brancoveanu was locked in Ratisbon, and Antonescu sent his men to clean out Mamaia once for all, and put down the traitor’s sister as he called her, and the traitor’s child? We brought the people from the village to block the way, and kept them twisting for six days while old Aegypta got the order reversed—just us and our fists and my stupid arguments, while the nurse kept the baby in her arms—not one man was killed. Remember that. Tomorrow night I’ll come again.”

  Below the window, the sentry was crossing the perimeter. He disappeared around the edge of the building. Then there was a rattle in the branches of the ivy tree. Andromeda was gone.

  But she would come again at nighttime. The day seemed to stretch out like a desert until then; already in the east the sky was turning pale. But Andromeda would come and tell him stories that were not exactly comforting.

  These were the stories men told each other before battle, Peter thought. No comfort, but loyalty and iron. Maybe he’d have something to tell Andromeda. One thing he promised himself: He would not let them take his soup away.

  Leaning into the embrasure, his cheek against the bars, he looked away north where the clouds were bruised and dark. Unlike Andromeda, he’d had no dream, no vision of the future or the past. He scarcely knew which way to look.

  * * *

  NOR, PERHAPS, WOULD he have recognized her at first if he had seen her, a short-haired woman on a black horse, two hundred and fifty miles north-northeast, cantering uphill into the town of Braila as the sun rose.

  This is what had happened. The horse was not lame. But Ludu Rat-tooth had wedged a stone into his hoof and picked it out when the Germans were gone.