by Paul Park
But after that (honesty forced her to admit), Luckacz had managed everything. It was he who had contrived her freedom in the chaos of events. It was he who had produced the body that was buried in the grave meant for Markasev. And it was he who had suggested that she speak at his funeral. On that cold day she had stood with the tourmaline next to her skin, and the entire crowd had felt its power. She had wept over the tomb of Markasev and praised his heroism, his youth, his virgin innocence, his courage, because he had been the only one to strike a blow for Great Roumania when German troops first marched along the Calea Victoriei. He had seen a poor fallen girl in the piata, abused and then abandoned by a German officer—was it any wonder that his heart broke in his chest? Was it any wonder that he seized his gun? Etc., etc.—long had he been tortured by Roumanian collaborators in District Police Station Number Three. But he had gone to his death without revealing a single name.
And—she must be honest—it was Radu Luckacz who had engineered the rest, the songs, the flags, the banners, the cult of Kevin Markasev. Her role had been symbolic: the white tyger, sent to comfort her poor country, and what Radu Luckacz had arranged she did not want to know. He also hated the Germans. But perhaps it was his hatred that allowed him to be so cold. Certainly he’d had conversations with the German authorities and with General Stoessel—von Stoessel now. When the Empress Valeria had fled the city, Luckacz had presented a symbolic alternative to the German high command, while the Roumanian political opposition—the socialists and democrats—were arrested and gathered up.
No, it was obvious she’d been complicit in a crime. She’d allowed her face to be a mask upon the face of German tyranny, which was why she was permitted to mouth her anti-German slogans—it was proof of how little the potato-eaters cared. It was proof of how secure they felt. All that would change with the arrival of the Hephaestion. Even now it was steaming nearer with its cargo of dreams, of freedom from foreign occupation and the schemes of Radu Luckacz, who (it must be said) had done everything he’d done because he loved her.
Now she stood upon the steps of a small house on the Strada Spatarul. This night, she believed, was the crisis of the act, when she would either descend into tragedy or ascend into greatness. Was it any wonder that her hands were trembling and her stomach was full of knots? Onstage, what was the song she would be singing at this moment? Yes, she had promised herself that she would sing—she herself, and not some younger actress. She grasped at the curving, wrought-iron rail, knocked at the door.
Or else the performance would be called The White Tyger. At moments she imagined she would need no script or score or rehearsal or choreographer, but would dance and sing the story to her people on the massive stage of Dinamo Stadium or else the smaller, intimate National Theatre, or else even the old Ambassadors, the scene of all her early triumphs. It alone had not yet been refurbished with German money. Curse them all! She heard the heavy locks drawn back. The high, black, double doors split inward.
A white-clothed orderly pulled wide the door and bowed to let her pass. She walked through the hall and then immediately up the stairs. At the top there was an antechamber where she waited, where she changed her clothes. Markasev didn’t like to see her dressed as a man.
There was a cabinet, a clothes closet. The room was stuffy and overlit, the walls pale yellow with recessed gilt trim. The gauze curtains were restrained with golden tassels. It was a woman’s room. The baroness stripped off her uniform and hung it up, stripped off her shirt, trousers, boots—she was not too old for this sort of thing. She was scarcely thirty-nine. Her chestnut hair still gleamed like a helmet without a trace of rust or discoloration. Her complexion and her skin were still the same. As for her face, she’d never cared for her small features, though people made a fuss.
Only her hands were not beautiful, the fingers heavy-knuckled, the nails bitten down and stained with nicotine. She held them out, dissatisfied, then inspected her small teeth in a gilt-framed looking glass above the cabinet. At moments when she turned her head, she could see in the reflecting glass the image of her spirit animal, a slit-eyed and ferocious alley cat, even after all this stroking and cossetting. A calico or a marmalade—no, she was a tyger, the white tyger of Roumania, she reminded herself, as she had to every day. Once, years before, she had seen the image in the glass. Once she had seen her spirit image in the adamantine glass. But not since then, no matter how she’d tried.
From the cabinet she took a new frock, also of the pale yellow that best suited her complexion and her violet eyes. As always it was a simple dress that fit her closely, ending at mid-thigh. Under it she drew on ash-colored stockings. She wore no jewelry except her husband’s gold signet ring—too large for her, and with the pig’s-head seal reversed. Why she kept it, why she worried it constantly, was a mystery even to her.
The guardsman’s uniform she had thrown over a chair. From the pants’ pocket she now drew the tourmaline, Kepler’s Eye, glowing green and purple in its depths. Taken from the sorcerer’s brain, it was a natural crystal, flawless and uncut, she thought, although sometimes when she rubbed it she imagined she could see a trace of subtle faceting in the rondelle style—the surface was not rough, not smooth. Sometimes the shape reminded her of something, some kind of crouching, sleeping animal, perhaps.
She wore no cologne, but she took the jewel and rubbed it over her arms, her shoulders, and her neck. She rubbed it underneath her armpits. Then she laid it on the cabinet, shook out her hair, made a grimace in the looking glass, and she was ready.
None of this would have been necessary if she’d not made a terrible mistake. But Radu Luckacz and Jean-Baptiste had arranged a series of posed photographs during those chaotic days. If they had hired a model, if they had taken their exposures of the substituted corpse, all would have been different. Soon there were posters and flags with Kevin Markasev’s real face, medals cast in his honor and a mural at the corner of Dobrescu Street and the Piata Revolutiei. After that it was imperative to keep him locked away for his own safety! But because of her generosity she took time out of her schedule to visit him. No, that wasn’t it.
She turned the key in the lock of the inner door. With her hand on the knob she paused, trying to understand once more the problem of her cruelty. At moments such as these she felt the most alive, as if she could give and yet withhold herself. And as she turned the knob she felt the flicker of a self-justifying rage. Her own son was now a prisoner in Ratisbon, far from his mother’s arms. If she treated this boy badly, if she never let him out, surely that was no worse than what she suffered. Under the circumstances she did what she could. No doubt she’d have given him his own room in the People’s Palace if she’d been able to. What could she do—give him a mask to wear? Cover his face with makeup from the theater? It was impossible. But surely she’d have loved to walk with him arm in arm through the streets of Bucharest, in the students’ quarter as they had in the old days. Oh, she was robbing herself! Besides, wasn’t she right to use him in whatever way she wanted, because she had saved his life?
No, she must be honest with herself. Her strength as an artist and performer, it had always come from her sincerity—she was the one who had hypnotized him, who had manipulated him into attacking the German officer. Since the time he had appeared at her summer house in Cluj, he had always done everything she wanted. She had even sent him on a journey to Aegypta Schenck’s imaginary world, the town in Massachusetts where she’d hidden her niece. And Markasev had found the girl and brought her back. And if that fool Raevsky had been half as competent as this abandoned boy, by now she’d have the golden bracelet of Miranda Brancoveanu on her wrist. She’d have no need for any stupid tourmalines or any parlor tricks. She’d have no need for love or being loved.
She threw the door open. The orderlies had arranged Kevin Markasev for her visit. They had tied him to an armchair in the center of the room. He was gagged with a silk cloth, tied with silk ribbons that were nevertheless arranged so loosely, he could have free
d himself at any time. The gaslight shone on his long face, his single eyebrow, his clipped hair, and the strange marks on his temples. When she saw him her anger disappeared, replaced by a kind of tenderness. For here before her was the hero of the revolution, the angel of Bucharest, Kevin Markasev the pure, as he was known in songs she herself had inspired and performed.
“My dear,” she said. “What have they done to you?” She came toward him with her hands held out, tears on her cheeks. With her own handkerchief she rubbed the sweat from his forehead—“Let me help you!” She pulled the gag from his mouth.
He said nothing, but he rarely spoke at first. In front of him there was a table and several porcelain dishes. There was a pitcher of ice water and she poured a glass for him and held it to his lips. He did not drink.
“Here, let me serve you,” she said. And with her own hands she picked up some of the sweets and pastries from the plates—gazelles’ horns from the Turkish Empire. Slices of candied ginger. She held them up, but his lips were tight, his brow furrowed and disapproving. It didn’t matter. It was often like this at first. She held up one of the pieces of fruit. “Later we’ll have coffee,” she said. “Or would you like a cigarette?”
Unwillingly, mournfully, he opened his lips, and she brought up a ripe red plum. “This is for you,” she said. But when her hand was close, he leaned forward suddenly and took her index finger between his teeth. He had a good grip on it, and he bit down hard, as hard as he could until his teeth turned on the bone. She howled and struck him with her open palm, while he looked up at her and smiled, her blood on his lips. When she was able to rip her hand away, she had a cut below the knuckle.
Tears in her eyes, she wrapped her finger in a napkin while Markasev sat back. The blood seeped through the cloth. He had hurt her! How unfair of him! Surely he must realize she was not like other women. If he loved her, he’d indulge her for the sake of all the beauty she had brought into the world. She herself had never hurt him willingly. She had meant no harm.
Still he was smiling at her, though his cheeks still bore the flushed imprint of her hand. His teeth were stained with blood. And now he started to speak in a low tone that was quite unlike him. “Don’t touch me. You disgust me.”
How handsome he had grown during these years!
“You must not touch me,” he said, “not again. Now they visit me, not you, but others. Gently in the night and they don’t leave. I think I spent all day on my knees. I don’t eat—don’t offer me this food. Don’t tempt me with this, because you are an evil woman as they say.”
“Who says so?”
“They are all around us. Now you’ve left me weeks and years, and I’ve come to sit quiet as a stone. And then they come around you little by little.”
“Who?”
Now she looked at him and saw his face was gaunt, his cheeks thin. Still, how handsome were his burning eyes!
“Oh, they are goddesses. Aphrodite is there, and Cleopatra, and Queen Mary Magdalene. Sometimes birds come to my window.”
The Baroness Ceausescu was relieved. Sometimes the orderlies had given him devotional literature, which he read with difficulty because of his lack of education. Perhaps that made him even more susceptible. The previous year he had imagined her as the moon lady, come to visit her Endymion.
No, this was different. Always before he had confused her with the goddesses and made her one of them. But now they warned him against her. The blood seeped through the napkin. “Please let me help you,” she said. “My dear…”
“I hate you.”
He had said it. And not in violence or anger, but with cold simplicity. She had no doubt he spoke the truth, and how could it be otherwise? She deserved more than his hate for what she’d done.
Now he closed his eyes. And when she spoke it was as if he didn’t hear.
She stood for a few minutes feeling her anger grow. But she would forgive him and be as gentle as a goddess, because of the harm she’d caused. So when he continued to ignore her, she turned back into the anteroom where she saw Kepler’s Eye glinting on the cabinet top. He hated her? He’d never said that before.
One of life’s pleasures, the baroness knew, is to be cruel in little ways to those who love us. And who loves us more than our own selves? There can be no joy in punishing our enemies. The tourmaline shone on the lacquered top, one of the most valuable gems in Europe, glowing as if it were a source of light.
He hated her? How was it possible? The whole world loved her for the jewel’s sake. Johannes Kepler had had thousands of lovers. A hundred thousand others had followed his funeral procession, though he was an evil man. And besides, how could anyone explain the events of the third act of her drama, except through supernatural intervention? Surely there was something miraculous about the way she’d acquired the gem. She had taken it from the body of Spitz the jeweler, who had bought it from a debutante named Corelli, who had stolen it from her father’s vault because she’d wanted to escape to Paris and become as great an artist as Nicola Ceausescu! No, it was not through her own gifts that she had risen this far!
All this time she had been pulling on her clothes again, hurriedly, distractedly, her trousers over the gray stockings, over the dancing shoes she’d worn. She stripped off the frock, put the jacket on over her undershirt. All the time the eye stared at her grimly until she couldn’t stand it; she seized it up.
Then she was through the door again, the stone in her hand. Yes, she could be a goddess, she could be a maenad or Queen Agave, whom she had played to such acclaim on the stage of the Ambassadors. She pushed the stone against Markasev’s mouth, cutting his lips until he cried out, and she was trembling, weeping. There was blood on her hand as she ran through the door and down the stairs. When the nurse came toward her, she said, “I can’t bear it. This is the end—you can release him. Let him go wherever he wants. Give him this.”
She emptied her pockets on the side table. There were several hundred marks in coins and bills. “Give him all the money in the house. You promise me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The nurse was a respectable old woman and she spread her nostrils, wrinkled her nose as if she’d smelled an ugly smell. She suspected the worst—they all did. But there was nothing dirty about this after all. The baroness had never touched the boy—not in that way, or allowed him to touch her. Only she’d rehearsed for him, trying out songs and speeches she would then plan for the stage. Most of all she had indulged his love for her, which had been sweet until tonight. There is nothing sweeter than the love of someone you’ve misused.
“Do this and you’ll be rewarded. Do not play a game with me.”
“No, ma’am.”
And the baroness staggered out into the street. It was past midnight. She thought about finding a cab. When she reached the corner, she listened for the clop-clop of a horse’s hooves. But she had no money. She would walk, though she had left her boots in the Strada Spatarul.
She buttoned her jacket, then thrust the jewel into the inside pocket. “That is all,” she muttered to herself again, except it wasn’t. She took a different way, and in Lipscani Street, by the Old Absinthe House, amid some stragglers outside the glass doors, she felt a hand on her sleeve.
“Please, sir.”
It was an area for prostitutes and prostitution. The baroness found herself looking into a face she recognized but could not place. She pulled away, stepped back. A horse-faced young woman in her mid-twenties, in a brown, out-of-fashion dress. Where had she seen her before? She had a nice shape.
“Please, sir, would you like…?” But then the girl looked down at the baroness’s feet, at her dancing shoes and stockings. “Excuse me. So you’re not the type.” She smiled.
The lantern on the wall above the restaurant cast a semicircle of light into the road. The baroness stepped out of it. “Mademoiselle Corelli!” she hissed.
Again in this coincidence—the hand of fate. The girl peered at her, uncertain. Then she staggered forward and gr
abbed hold of her arm again. “Oh, ma’am,” she said.
Here was another person the baroness had destroyed. She had robbed her of her money and her jewel. No doubt the father had thrown her from the house, put her on the ladder where she now found herself close to the bottom. The baroness tried to twist away, but the girl was stronger. She was hurting the baroness’s hand, especially the finger that still throbbed. What would happen if she called the police?
“Thank you,” said Mademoiselle Corelli. “I saw there were tickets at the National. I waited for hours, but the performance … I will never forget you when I saw you that first time. You were like a goddess on that stage.”
The baroness pulled backward until she stood against the wall. The girl continued, “Thank you for everything you’ve done. You have been a model for my life, for all of us. Let me kiss your hands.”
She had the finger in her grip, and it had started to bleed and throb. The baroness shook her head. She couldn’t stand the silence. “What are you doing here?”
Mademoiselle Corelli shrugged as if to say, “It’s what you see.”
But the baroness couldn’t tolerate the silence. Yes, she was a model for all prostitutes, and suddenly she was afraid. “Come to my house,” she said. “Come to the servant’s gate. Come tomorrow and I’ll talk to my steward. But you must not ask for me. You must not talk about these things. I can arrange payment for the jewel you lost.”
“Ma’am, don’t concern yourself. That was a fake after all.”
In the narrow street, the baroness looked up at the sky. There was a mist above the city, come from nowhere over the half moon.
At first she didn’t understand what had been said. She stood dumbly in the road, trying to disengage her hand.
“That’s right,” said the girl. “I found out from my father. I didn’t know, but he would never have let me wear that tourmaline to that reception, not the real Kepler’s Eye, not after the Germans had tried to steal it so many times.”