by Paul Park
The boy looked up at her. “Mother, will you give me my piano lesson tonight?” Then in a moment, “Did you have any children besides me?”
She tried to smile. “Haven’t you been listening? She was living in Mamaia with my sister. She’d be a woman now if she were still alive. Where is she lost in the wide world? I saw her only once when she was one day old. Aegypta said it would hurt less, but she was wrong. We smuggled the paper in her nappy! Oh, how we tweaked him by the nose! In all my life it was one thing to be proud of—haven’t you heard this story? Haven’t I told you this?”
“No, mother.” Felix pressed his cheek against her hands.
“Now I wake up and I cannot breathe. Buried alive, that’s what I am. And I think I’d give up everything if I could find my way to Great Roumania again. If I could see the lake at Mogosoaia or smell the salt air. My family had a hunting lodge outside Braila—oh, it was beautiful in the old days. And then of course the house in Kronstadt—Brasov—in the mountains. That’s where I saw my husband for the first time, when he had come back from the military college in Berlin.”
After a moment Felix squeezed her hands. “Mother, will you give me my lesson now?”
Princess Clara smiled. Pulling away, she dried her eyes with her thin knuckles. “Yes, I’d like that—never mind about me. Aegypta said I’d have to be the bravest, but it’s never felt so brave to me. Just that I am dying, and I’m afraid I will die here. You won’t let that happen, will you, child?”
* * *
THAT DAY THERE were others who were thinking of Roumania, if only as an image of freedom or a place far away. They coveted the sights and smells and sounds. In Adrianopole in the courtyard of the Eski Seray, Peter Gross backed slowly from a big man who was dangling a chain. Across town, not far away, in a restaurant with covered windows, Andromeda sat back against the wall. Sick to her stomach, she examined the dealer’s jeweled hands as he laid a line of cards upon a green baize surface. Her pale eyes were closed to slits.
But in Roumania itself, there were some who wanted to be elsewhere. In a room at Third Army headquarters in Dobric, Lieutenant-Major Arslan Lubomyr, dressed in the dark blue uniform of the German general staff, stood holding a square of mirrored glass. By this means he had sent his message to the elector, but now the words had faded. The reflection showed his thin, ascetic, Tartar features; he put his hand over the glass as if to block them out. Then he raised his eyes to the map on the wall, where the Cosmesti bridge north of Focsani was circled in red ink. From there his gaze slid up the Russian border a thousand kilometers to the town of Sestokai in Lithuania. That crossing was also marked in red.
12
Insula Calia
IN ADRIANOPOLE, IN the justice house on Sarayici Island, Peter stood in a line of prisoners. His hands were tied behind him. Men shuffled forward one at a time to stand before the cadis, the judges in their cubicles at the front of the high room. Peter thought briefly of the line in the airport terminal, once when he’d flown with his father from Albany to Raleigh-Durham.
At the front of the line he had to wait. In front of him three wooden cubicles protruded into the hall—the offices of the three judges who decided these cases. Around the perimeter, next to the open doors and glassless windows on the north and west sides of the hall, stood old men in brown uniforms. They wore bandoliers of cartridges and carried old-fashioned muskets. Veterans of Roumanian wars, Peter imagined. Maybe a generation ago they had fought against the Chevalier de Graz. Peter found himself staring at one, a thick-jowled man with a gray crew-cut and a bristling gray moustache. He had a belly, and between the stretching buttons of his tunic Peter could see patches of his undershirt.
It was a sweltering morning. Drops of sweat ran down Peter’s sides. Before dawn he had been brought here with a dozen others in a covered, horse-drawn cart. He had been happy to leave the prison, and that happiness had lasted to the front of the line.
In the days of his imprisonment, no one yet had told him of the charge against him. Always he had reassured himself it must be something minor—stealing a chicken, improper documents. Or they’d question him about Andromeda. Already he had had his punishment. No sane judge could disagree.
So he was optimistic as he waited, and it was only as he approached the front of the line that he began to worry. Who knew what was going to happen, after all? In his mind, to soak up nervousness, he had been going over a long poem he had learned when he was young. But he couldn’t quite remember the final verse. A thought occurred to him—was he the only person in this world who knew this poem? And was the end of it now gone for good? And if he fudged the ending, and wrote down the poem, and tried to sell it as his own, would he make enough money to cross the border to Roumania? If so, why stop at Tennyson? He could do Shakespeare, e. e. cummings, Yeats.
The guard beckoned. Squaring his shoulders, Peter crossed to the middle of the three rooms. Under his breath he was reciting:
Half their ships to the right and half to the left were seen,
And the little Revenge ran on down the long sea lane in between.
His hands were tied behind him with three strands of chafing twine. Peter imagined he could break them or twist his wrists so that they fell away. He stood now at the door to the cubicle and looked in.
Thousands of their sailors looked down from their decks and laughed,
Thousands of their soldiers made mock at the mad little craft,
Running on and on till delayed,
By the mountain-like San Philip of fifteen-hundred tons,
Up towering above us with her yawning tiers of guns …
There was a big man sitting at a large carved wooden desk. The room was lined with bookcases and leather-bound books. In one corner on a table stood a statue of Moses carrying the tablets of the law.
The big man looked up. He had enormous, powerful, sloping shoulders, on which his bald round head seemed to perch without the disadvantage of a neck. He wore thick, wire-rimmed spectacles that made his eyes seem huge. In spite of this, and in spite of his fatness, he gave an impression of energy and power. He leaned forward in his chair, his pencil like a toothpick in his huge fist. There were no books or files on his desk, but just a folded newspaper on the blotter, held down by a brass paperweight. A small current of air disturbed the pages. Peter looked up and saw a fan, previously unnoticed, hanging from the faraway vault. It turned slowly, whether by hand or by machine, Peter couldn’t guess.
The cadi stared at him for a long time. “Why is it that I recognize your face?” he said finally, in English. “Do you know me? I am Aristophanes Turkkan.”
“No, sir.”
“I could swear,” murmured the cadi, and he stood up so suddenly his chair almost fell over backward. He came out from behind his desk to peer into Peter’s face. He had big arms and a big chest.
“Peter Gross—you are Roumanian, no?”
The cadi was dressed in a loose red jacket and military pants, brown with a red stripe. A red tarbush stood upon a stool in the corner. “I was just reading what has happened in your country. Now you come back with a face out of my dreams—where is it? Here, look, let me read it—do you know my language?”
“No, sir.”
“Yes—let me read it. It is from this morning, see!” He snatched up the newspaper and shook it open with one hand. “Now let me tell you what this says. It is a story from Braila on the coast—two days old already. No one cares about it here. No one cares about Roumania since our German friends are there. But that is a mistake. These people are not beaten yet, I tell you.”
He kept his pencil in one hand, brandishing it like a tiny weapon. He shook out the paper and folded it back, creasing it against his chest while at the same time standing close to Peter, who could smell liquor on his breath.
The newsprint was so thin it was almost transparent. The paper was called The English World Tribune, and its pages were ornamented with black woodblock illustrations set slightly askew. On the top of every page
was a portrait of a Roman orator in a toga.
For a long time since Miranda’s disappearance and especially since his arrest, Peter had felt vacant and unoccupied except for small, scurrying presences: loneliness or worry, vermin in an empty room. Except when taken up with the small tasks of survival he would sit by himself, clasping and unclasping his hands.
Waiting for what? For this newspaper article? Waile Bizunesh had mentioned a story in a newspaper or a magazine. Certainly as Peter stood listening, arms tied, he felt a door open and slam. He imagined himself grabbing hold of the newspaper and snatching it away. And if the cadi objected he would shake him till his teeth chattered.
“Let me see now—here it is. Here it is. Braila—you know that is headquarters of the fleet. ‘A legend came to life in these past weeks, and now this picturesque little town is all abuzz.’—what does that mean? ‘From the waterfront to the pagan statue in the square, people are talking about events that have left a policeman dead. Dressed in Gypsy clothes she rode her horse into the town, and went immediately to the house of the Russian consul, where she gave her name as Miranda Popescu. The office of the governor has issued this description that has spread throughout the province. Everyone is looking, whether to arrest her for murder or to crown her queen, for there are feelings on both sides. The Baroness Ceausescu has dispatched an investigator who arrived in Braila last night.…’ I tell you it is all the same with these people. Always the same. It was like this in Kara Suliman’s time, when Miranda Brancoveanu came out of the hills. God willing, they will find her. Look, there she is!”
The cadi pushed the folded newspaper in front of Peter’s nose. He could see the illustration—the black hair and protruding ears, the straight nose and heavy eyebrows. The artist had made her more beautiful than she was, which irritated Peter. “Let me see,” he said.
“No. There is nothing more of substance. Innuendoes and rumors—it is always violence with these people—”
“Please.”
The cadi stared at him. Under his spectacles his big, distorted eyes were oddly penetrating. “It is not your place to give me orders. You will not give your orders to Aristophanes Turkkan. It is the same with you as well—I know your case. It is because you have no law to guide you. You pray to false gods and they give you violence—what are the details? You killed a man under the Kanuni bridge.”
When Peter was arrested, the officers had spoken Turkish, which was no help. Until this present moment he’d assumed that they’d been looking for Andromeda. She was the one who’d robbed the market stalls, cheated at cards, raided the hencoops. He’d been prepared to answer the judge’s questions, pay for the dead capon.
Now, excited by the newspaper story, his mind moved quickly—he was innocent. The man under the bridge was not dead—how could he have died? Peter had not harmed him. There’d been a struggle, and a gun had misfired, and everyone had run away. That’s the way it was; Miranda also couldn’t have killed anyone. She was also innocent, falsely charged.
All this time he had been testing the knots of twine behind his back. “Please let me see the paper,” he said, but the judge held it up. Again he had come close, and there was sweet wine on his breath. He was a tall man, taller than Peter—“Who are you?” he murmured. “I have seen your face.”
Then he continued in a different tone. “You’re accused of shooting Jacob Golcuk to his death. I saw the report of seven witnesses who all agree. You tried to rob this man. So let me ask—are you a race of devils? They say it was this woman who shot this policeman in Braila. And do you know who her father was? The devil himself—General Frederick Schenck von Schenck.”
Peter tried to pull his hands apart. “I’m not a thief,” he said. “I was looking for my dog under the bridge.”
“Your dog!” The judge was in high fury now. “And that makes it all good, to shoot a Turkish citizen in cold blood? ‘Yes, certainly,’ says Domnul Gross, if he was searching for his dog! But let me ask, where did you dispose of your gun? We searched your room.”
“I didn’t have a gun. I tell you the man was still alive.” Peter raised his head, shook his shoulders, and the judge stepped back. “It was his gun and he fired it.”
For a moment the judge seemed disoriented. He stood against his desk, his eyes wide under his spectacles. Peter seized the time to tell his story of that night. When the men came to attack him he took hold of one of them—he had a leather coat with patches of rabbit fur. And when the watch had come the men had scattered, leaving their friend still groaning when Peter ran away.
He tried to tell this story as convincingly as possible, as if to a reasonable man. “Why would I attack eight men under a bridge in the middle of the night? Jacob Golcuk—was he rich?” But the cadi stared at him, shaking his head as if distracted, though he did not interrupt. Peter wondered if he was listening. Above their heads the fan turned slowly. Surely he could get his hands free from this stupid twine. What then?
But as the great San Philip hung above us like a cloud,
Whence the thunderbolt would fall, long and loud,
Four galleons drew away from the Spanish fleet that day …
“Tell me where I’ve seen you,” murmured Aristophanes Turkkan. “Is it on the wrestling ground?”
Then he continued in a different voice. “You say you’re not a thief, yet you share a room with a known pickpocket. You are here with forged papers, and this name Peter Gross is evidently false. It is true what you say about Golcuk, but I think maybe this is a disagreement between criminals, which does not excuse you. I have spoken to the governor of the Eski Seray, and he says you are fighting all the time these past two days over money and illegal contraband.”
This was unfair. Tired of being beaten, he had tried to defend himself, that’s all. He’d let Pieter de Graz out of his cage for a few minutes, that was all. With Andromeda’s piastres he’d attracted a new class of tormentors.
Behind his back, now he yanked at the twine and felt it give. “I swear the man was breathing when I left. Isn’t it more likely that these other men attacked him and then blamed me when the guard arrived—a penniless Roumanian? Show me the witnesses’ reports. I have a right to see them—”
But the cadi shook his head. His eyes were huge. “It is not for you to bully Aristophanes Turkkan, as you bullied these poor prisoners in the Eski Seray. It is up to me to judge the credibility of these accounts, and I have done so. Penniless, you say. But in prison you’ve been drinking liquor and eating chocolates. As for your dog, where is your dog? No one has seen this dog—where is it now? What kind of dog is it?”
He had stood up again, approached Peter again. But now abruptly he turned away behind his desk. As he was sitting down, as he was pulling out a wooden drawer and rummaging through the papers, Peter found himself staring at a brass cup on the bookshelf behind him, carefully polished, and engraved with the outline of two struggling, naked men.
“You are barbarians,” muttered Aristophanes Turkkan. “What do you know of justice? It is obvious we do our job here, and we decide both sides. ‘Where is your dog?’ I ask him and he says nothing. What can he say? He knows this case is finished, yet still he wants to argue.”
The cadi lapsed into another language as he pulled out a slip of parchment filled with calligraphy and carrying an impressive wax seal. Still muttering, he pulled out a pen, a brush, a jar of ink. He was asking himself questions in Turkish. Peter didn’t try to understand. He had an idea. The man had laid out his paint pot, and was beginning to sketch out an ornate signature. “For your official document,” said Peter, “maybe you’d be interested in my real name.”
The cadi looked up, goggling at him with his huge, blinking eyes.
“It’s true I offered you an English version of my name. Perhaps you would be interested.…”
More goggling. Then, “No, no. This is sufficient. The place is already filled in.”
The cadi bent once more over his signature. Peter noticed there was sweat on his
bald head. It gathered in the V-shaped creases on his forehead.
“Pieter de Graz. The Chevalier de Graz.”
The scratching of the pen nib on the parchment slowed and stopped. The cadi glanced at him and Peter imagined that he saw a look of fury cross his broad face, before it crinkled up and he began to laugh. This also was short-lived, and changed almost immediately into scowls. “De Graz! Another lunatic! And now I am an old man. Do not trouble to lie. De Graz died long ago.”
After a moment he replaced his pen on the pink blotter. “The resemblance is true,” he said. “What of it? If you are the son of such a father, you have shamed him.”
He shouted out in Turkish and a guard looked in the door. It was the bristling man with the gray moustache, the double-barreled gun, and the white undershirt.
But anon the great San Philip, she bethought herself and went,
Having that within her womb that had left her ill content.
But the rest they came aboard us, and they fought us hand to hand.…
The words came unbidden into Peter’s thoughts. Aristophanes Turkkan was still muttering as he folded up his papers. “Who should know this better than I do? The Chevalier de Graz had a birthmark on his hand. All the world knows—do you have a birthmark on your hand? Hah, I did not think so.”
Peter yanked and twisted at the twine behind his back. He turned his wrists into the knot and the twine parted. The cadi kicked over his chair and came out from behind his desk. He was eager to fight. The guard raised his gun up by the barrel like a club, but Peter’s hands were free. He reached out his right hand, and shoved it in the cadi’s face so that he could not help but see the discolored birthmark in the shape of a bull’s head, in the lap of muscle between his thumb and forefinger.