by Paul Park
Still Turkkan was smelling the absinthe in his glass and had drunk none of it. He lifted it up, inspected the green glow.
“They took him for questions and he said nothing. You cannot imagine the impudence! So I was sent for, because I was a famous wrestler in the camp—I had received the silver cup from General Fernandes-Cohn. The general told me to make a fall with him, and so I did, in the stadium of the Janissary Corps. I tell you I was the stronger man, but it was like struggling with water, or like Menelaus and Proteus in the story. I called him the Proteus man. Never could I hold him or catch a grip until I found myself straight on my back. I saw the mark before my face and I bit him—so, I am not proud of that. And I will try to make it up! Tonight I will try, my friend.
“So you must understand the arrogance of this man as he stood under the torches on Sarayici Island. A crowd of many thousands, and they wanted Mehmet to tear him to little pieces. It was the only reason we allowed it, to see the enemy beaten like this. In the army our spirit was low, though we had the stronger position—every day the stronger position as we retreated from von Schenck. We knew this man was a staff officer, aide-de-camp—we knew his reputation. This story of Nova Zagora, it was one of many! So the sultan promised Mehmet the Conqueror a diamond ring from his own finger.”
“I don’t remember,” Peter said. He drank the absinthe in little sips. And sometimes he looked down and touched the sketches of unknown dinosaurs.
Now again he felt burdened and suffocated by the weight of this new story, though he longed to hear it: “So they stripped down naked in the pitch, and the boys came out to grease their bodies with the olive oil. I tell you, the Chevalier de Graz did not stand up to the shoulder of our champion. I alone thought he had a chance because of my experience—I kept my opinion to myself! I put some money on his head, though, in a bet, because I felt shamed by my loss, and shamed to see this one man standing against death in the city of his enemies, and a crowd of many thousands as I said. I put my money as a token for his courage, and I’m glad I did! In those days I was only a poor soldier. My father would not live in a house like this and send his son to school as I have sent my daughters. So my friend, I owe you many good things. I ask you, why did you kill this thief and criminal, Jacob Golcuk? If not for that, I would put you on a train to Bucharest with my own hands.”
It was true, the intolerable green licorice taste hid another bitter flavor, which now touched Peter on the tongue. “So I beat the champion,” he said.
“Three falls! Three falls! The first, we thought it was an accident, though I made double my bet. It was over so quickly, we thought Mehmet had slipped. But I knew he had not gotten his grip, this man who could squeeze a brick to powder in his hands as I have seen him do. De Graz slipped through his fingers and then turned him so he fell.
“The next pass, it was the longest, and we saw the strength on both sides. Mehmet was careful now. I think he saw the diamond ring on one side of his mind, and anger and contempt of all the Turks upon the other—this for a man who had never lost a match. Who had never taken a fall, but now had taken one. In the crowd we thought he slipped, but he knew better. I thought I saw it in his eyes as they grappled and broke apart. Still he was always off-balance or stretched too far, and he was never in a place where he could use his strength. I tell you it was like fighting water or a nest of snakes, because he turned so quickly. But then his foot was behind the giant’s knee, and the giant fell. Even though he rolled right up to continue fighting, there was no doubt of it. There was no accident this time. There was a terrible moaning from the crowd, and the princes of the court stood to go.”
Peter’s glass was empty and he put it down. Still Turkkan had not taken the first sip of his liquor. Still he frowned, and examined it in the light.
“I was in the seventh row. Right then as I stood there, I knew the war was lost. Not just the pehlivan competition, but the war with the barbarians, which we had fought for so long. In my great-grandfather’s time our soldiers had reached the gates of Bucharest. Yet here we were, beaten by a boy as it occurred to us. I tell you, that fight was worth a brigade of soldiers to the enemy, and von Schenck knew it. Four weeks later he broke through at Havsa and the sultan gave him peace. And he was happy to take it, because he had no army left, as we found out when it was too late. I tell you he was a devil, this man with his tricks and stratagems. And now his daughter has come to life in Braila! I tell you they will never catch her. Ceausescu the white tyger is finished now, I tell you.”
These words broke unexpectedly into Peter’s thoughts. But he didn’t want to talk about Miranda with Aristophanes Turkkan. “And the third fall?” he asked.
“Was over in a minute! Less than that! I was in the seventh row, and I could see Mehmet’s face. This was a man who had never lost! When the judge gave the signal, he threw himself immediately on de Graz, hoping to take him by surprise. Once more he hoped to crush him with his strength, but the boy turned under his arm. He stepped behind him and struck him in the back between the shoulder blades. It was the first time he had struck him.”
Now Turkkan drank his whole glass in one gulp. “I know!” he said, after he had wiped his mouth. “I tell you these things and they mean nothing. It is a story that has made you melancholy, I see. But it was something I wanted to set against the story of the calf, for we have all done terrible things. Because we are men upon this earth. Now tell me, why did you kill Jacob Golcuk? How could you take a fall from such a one? This is our last night and you must tell me. Tomorrow there will be a penal convoy to the east.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
The old man stared at him and shook his head. “Alas, my friend, I don’t believe you. But if it gives you pleasure to say nothing, I will understand. We have one night only, and it belongs to you. Where will we go, what will we see? If you like, my girls will come talk to us on the subject of their researches. I can see you are interested in these great lizards.”
As he spoke, one of the girls came toward them across the open floor, bearing a sprig of paper in her hand. And despite what he’d said, her father seemed embarrassed she was in the room. “Please,” he said, “you must see that we are busy!”
It was the first bad-tempered remark Peter had heard from him. But she came forward unabashed, the sprig of paper in her hands, until she stood with them—a tall young woman with two circles of fat braids. She was the one who smelled of citrus. Her face was freckled and her features were strong, and she stared at Peter out of her intelligent, small eyes. She smiled as she was speaking, and her tone seemed to suggest a trace of mockery both for her father and for him, although her words were straight enough. “Please sir, a man came to the door with a message for our guest. When the steward questioned him, he went away.”
She spoke in English, and her father answered. “And what business is that of yours?”
“I thought it was important, so I came. I wanted to greet our guest and make him comfortable in our house. My name is Mariamne Turkkan, and you are welcome, sir. My sister is too shy.”
In her left hand she had the sprig of paper, and she held out the other one to shake. Her grip was strong and hearty. She paid no attention to the clink of Peter’s chain. “I see you are looking at my drawings of the thunder lizards. Do you like them?”
“It is enough!” said her father. “You see he does not suffer for adventures. Now I must ask you for the message as a matter of law. You must put it in my hand.”
“But Papa—that is rude. It is for Domnul Gross.” Still she was smiling, as if at a joke Peter didn’t understand.
“Not so rude as this man is,” grumbled her father. “You forget he is a prisoner of the courts. Now you remind me of my work. Give it here!”
“Papa, I’m not sure what you’re saying. The steward will tell you—”
“Give it here.”
“Well then, of course we are all curious. I am sure Domnul Gross…” and she gave Peter her frankest smile.
Th
e sprig unrolled in Turkkan’s big palm. Three words were written on it in Andromeda’s slashing script. World Wrestling Tonite.
“There, you see?” laughed Mariamne Turkkan. “Papa, I’m not sure what you suspect.”
“I do not suspect, except daughters of mine will behave like gentle ladies in my house. Is that too much?” And he went on in Turkish while Peter watched his face. He didn’t seem especially angry, nor did his daughter seem embarrassed.
“Do you like the drawings?” she asked.
“You are very skilled,” said Peter
“Enough!” bellowed her father. “Get away from here!” As the girl retreated, still smiling, he crushed the paper in his hand and threw it to the floor. “Where were we? You must forgive her. She forgets you are a prisoner under sentence.”
But the next moment he forgot it, too. “My gazelles’ horns,” he sighed. He poured himself another glass of absinthe and held it up into the light.
He had left the crumpled message lying in a corner of the floor. Peter looked at it, and looked again around the room at the upper windows, now dark, the slow fans, the litter of food on the small table. The girl’s appearance and Andromeda’s note had combined to lighten his mood.
Turkkan drank his liquor. He put down his glass, and with a napkin he wiped his moustache and his bald, sweating forehead. He took off his glasses to polish them. His eyes seemed suddenly mournful, until he replaced them and turned into the light.
He talked for a few moments about his daughters, about how difficult it had been to raise them since his poor wife’s death. This led him to a brooding silence as he stared at the closed door at the far end of the room.
“Enough!” he said at last. “We must find some more amusement for this night. We have many hours before you leave us. What must you do? Mariamne is a chess player, and her younger sister can play and sing.”
He seemed to have forgotten he had just chased Mariamne from the room. Peter dreaded the idea of sitting up with him, drinking absinthe. Besides, there was Andromeda’s note. “Is there a wrestling competition?” he asked.
“Ha! It is impossible.” Turkkan shook his head with something like amusement on his face. When Peter persisted, he cut him off: “You forget your situation.”
But later, when they had sat in armchairs and Turkkan had smoked his pipe, then abruptly he changed his mind. A servant had come with more cups of coffee, and Turkkan told him to prepare the car. “Why not?” he said, his spectacles glinting fiercely. “Am I not a man? Is this not your final night? Is this not the sport of emperors?”
He stood up, put down his demitasse, and stripped off his embroidered gown. Underneath he was dressed in his khaki uniform. Around his waist was a leather belt, from which hung a long holster. He unbuckled the flap and showed the handle of a gun. “I will be with you every moment. I will not stop to shoot you dead.”
“I understand.”
“You think you will try something? Maybe you will meet your accomplices—go ahead! There will be soldiers there. At every competition there are many officers of the janissary police. De Graz, we are not afraid of you!”
Now quickly he led the way, while Peter took mincing steps because of the chain between his ankles. When they came out of the room, Turkkan held the door for him. “My friend! This will be a pleasure! This will be a privilege to see some matches in your company, even though this is the ordinary Friday competition and there will be no champions. It will be something for me to tell my daughters’ sons. I mean when they are married and have sons, and are not such a worry to their father.”
“They are lovely—”
Turkkan glared at him. “My friend, you do not laugh at me! What is beauty in this world, when compared to the love in a good woman’s heart?”
Touched in spite of himself and his own troubles, Peter now preceded Turkkan down the long hall. Once he felt a sudden jab in his ribs, and turned back to find the old man had poked him with the muzzle of his revolver—“Shoot you dead!” he whispered. “I shall not stop to shoot you dead!”
A steward met them at the bottom of the hall, carrying his master’s tarbush and fly whisk. The tarbush was a red pillbox hat with a black tassel, and Turkkan slid it onto his bald head while he was talking to the servants who now clustered around. He had replaced the revolver in his holster. The fly whisk, made of white horse hair at the end of a carved, ebony stick, he put under his arm. “Is the Pharaoh ready?” he asked.
* * *
THAT SAME NIGHT in Roumania, far from the civilizing influences of Adrianople, Bucharest, or even of Brasov, General Ion Antonescu sat in his hut in the Carpathian mountains. This was north of the village of Nucsoara in the Doamnei valley, a high, lonely, uninhabited place, where the partisans of the former empress had their camp. Valeria Dragonesti lay sick from a wasting fever. Doctors had come.
Long accustomed to the luxuries of the Winter Keep, she now lay on a rude mattress of pine needles in the hut’s inner room. Outside her door the general sat before the fire reading a letter. Light came from the oil lamp on the surface of his writing desk, a rough-cut plank between two stumps. It shone on the woodpile and the dirt floor, the hearth and chimney. Antonescu sat on the only finished piece of furniture, an upholstered armchair taken from the wreck of the empress’s hunting lodge. The fabric was now ripped and stained.
That spring, after five years of fighting, the fortunes of Antonescu’s partisans were in decline. The previous summer, after the success of several bold raids, the German military governor of Transylvania had organized a response. He had pushed Antonescu back into the most inhospitable regions of the mountains, and had allowed him to suffer there over the cold winter.
Communications were difficult, which gave the letter he now read a double importance. He pored over the fine stationery, the elaborate, cursive, feminine script:
… I have information I must share with you regarding the importation of proscribed armaments under the protocols of the African States. As you know, those protocols have forbidden the sale of any kind of automatic weaponry and advanced rockets, for fear of unbalancing the European powers. But I have reason to believe that the usurper has made an expensive purchase, leaving Constantinople on the train to Bucharest, hidden in a shipment of caviar and fruit preserves that will necessitate the ice-cooled car. The name of the train is the Hephaestion. It will cross the border at Dobric at two o’clock at night.…
And here the letter named the date.
The general had received this letter many days before. With characteristic energy he’d made his plans. If it had not been for the empress’s illness, he personally would have supervised the derailment, whatever the risk—because of his huge size, disguises were no good for him. But he would have journeyed by night from safe-house to safe-house. The cause needed a victory, and he needed to find one, if only to come back and whisper news at Valeria’s bedside, words of encouragement and hope.
General Antonescu sat in his armchair with his long legs sprawled out, reading and rereading the precious letter. There was nothing left to be done. It was not his fate to be there when the train crossed the Danube at Silistra and made its lonely progress through the Lalomitei marsh.
From the inner room he heard the empress cry out. There was nothing he could do about that. She was in the care of her devoted nurse who soothed her forehead and pushed back her hair, which in the past year had turned a lustrous shade of white. There was nothing he could do except upset her with his awkward movements, bump his head among the rafters. But he could not sit and listen to her cry, and so he pushed himself upright. Ducking his head, he stamped out of the door and stood outside, breathing in the cold air. The last light of the evening vanished from the rock face of the mountain, visible above him through the tall firs.
And though he stretched his arms and hands, though he stamped among the rocks in his high boots, though he opened the neck of his old uniform, still he could not shake the feeling of confinement.
* * *<
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NOR WERE THE chains of need, frustration, and anxiety that hampered him less strong than the chains around Peter’s wrists after they’d been checked and rechecked by the soldiers. In a luxurious neighborhood outside the city of Adrianopole, he got into the rear seat of the cadi’s Pharaoh motorcar, a long, open, stylish, internal-combustion vehicle. The air was wet and hot. A soldier sat in the front seat next to Ezekiel the chauffeur, and Turkkan squeezed in beside Peter in the back. Outside the wall of the cadi’s house a narrow lane passed through a grove of fruit trees, some of which were still in flower.
The chauffeur turned the car onto the road. Cautiously peering ahead through the small windscreen, he opened up the pop-pop of the engine to a grumbling roar. Then he was off down the small hill through the deserted roads, until after fifteen minutes he came in through the old brick gates into the crowds. Still tinged with the colors of the sunset, the sky above the city was a soft, heavy purple, shredded and pricked by the carbide lanterns of the shops.
Now the chauffeur pressed his horn and flashed his headlights. They caught intermittently at the legs of people in the streets, who turned aside to let the Pharaoh pass. All roads led to the Hurriyet Meydani, the old town square beyond the synagogue. There a pitch had been laid out for wrestling. There the car came to a shuddering stop, and its clouds of greasy smoke drifted away.
At the opposite side of the square, Peter could see grandstands and a temporary barricade. The pitch was laid out under a four-cornered skeleton of wooden poles that supported the lights. Around it moved a crowd of spectators, vendors, and pickpockets, waiting for the next match.