by Paul Park
“But I don’t understand. Monsieur Spitz examined it—”
The girl laughed. “I didn’t say it wasn’t a real stone. Since that night I’ve learned something about men. Sometimes men are not the experts that they claim.”
“My God.”
“Yes, and you know I had a narrow escape that night. The Germans killed that Domnul Spitz for it, that’s what I heard. So now the joke’s on them. The potato-eaters, as you call them. My father wasn’t going to say anything about it. He put in for the insurance and then hid the real stone in a secret place. Did you ever cash the cheque?”
“I owe you that money. Come to my steward as I told you. Now you must let me go. You must not say you saw me.”
She pulled away. She turned her back, didn’t look around, and the rest of the way down the street and up the Calea Victoriei, she walked without a thought in her head. But at Maximillian’s Fountain she paused.
The jewel was a fake. Of course it was. If it had been real, Markasav would not have said what he’d just said.
All these years she’d been a dupe, a fool, craving warmth from a cold stone. Impulsively, theatrically, against her better judgment, she threw the tourmaline into the shallow bowl under the spray.
The street was not deserted even at that hour. It was only a few minutes later that she returned, panicked, to retrieve it—what if the girl had lied, or else her father? What if Markasev had lied—surely he loved her still? And there the stone was, still waiting for her, glaring balefully from the water.
She stared back at it a moment, then abandoned it again. The third time she went back, and it was gone.
15
In Mogosoaia
THAT NIGHT MIRANDA sat among bales of the previous winter’s straw, in a thatched stable on the old Brancoveanu land in Mogosoaia, fourteen kilometers northwest of Bucharest. Confiscated after the arrest of Frederick Schenck von Schenck, the fields were rented out to farmers, though the palace of Constantin Brancoveanu stood empty across the lake, boarded up.
Besides Miranda and Ludu Rat-tooth, the stable was full of men. These were friends of her father, veterans of the Turkish wars. Since Zelea Codreanu’s death, since she’d left the marshes, almost every night had been like this—men gathering in out-of-the-way places, at Robeasca and Sarata Monteoru and Urziceni, all across the Wallachian plain. Coming so soon after the events at Braila, news of Codreanu’s death had spread throughout the country.
From Insula Calia, Miranda and Ludu had returned to the marshland around Caracalui, and there they’d met the first of the old men, Captain Dysart of the Emigré Battalion, which had fought with such maniacal fury against the Turks. Even the Gypsies treated him with awe, a small bow-legged man, blind in one eye, dressed almost in rags, with white hair down to his shoulders and a white moustache. Miranda was drawn to him because he spoke to her in English, avoiding Roumanian when he could. “Here you are, by God. The last time I saw you, you were in your little dress. But you look like your father!”
It was hard not to be touched by the tears on the man’s face, scarred with burn marks or acne. “Mademoiselle—miss, at long last it will be all right!”
He had a way of speaking that made it hard to take him seriously. “Dear miss, just to see you is to feel a new hope in my old breast. But touch my arm—touch it! You see there is still strength in these biceps.…” Then he’d wink at her as if she’d caught him in a joke. For in many ways he was a thoughtful and intelligent man, as Miranda found during that first day, waiting for darkness in Doamna Lyubitshka’s cottage in the reeds. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t curse. And he was clever about politics, not just in Roumania but Germany as well. He explained to her about the Committee for Roumanian Affairs, and the war party and peace party in the Reichstag.
He showed her the placard Radu Luckacz had hung in all the towns, a woodblock print of her on horseback, a long revolver in her hand. Though it offered a reward for information, it could have served as a recruiting poster—at dusk Dysart brought her up into the village, where he introduced her to the first gathering of toothless, old, and middle-aged veterans. Some of them proposed to help her. “Come with me to Bucharest—to Mogosoaia,” she’d said, because that’s where she was going. And they had nodded and smiled. Mogosoaia, where the grave of Aegypta Schenck von Schenck had already become a shrine.
Many of their sons, many of the young men in the delta were on their way north, conscripted by the Germans for their war in Russia. And many of the rest had land to work, lines and traps to check, families to raise. The ones that came with her were like Dysart, without wives or homes. Six men followed her that first night, and landed with her on the west bank of the Danube near the town of Gropeni. As they unloaded horses and supplies, all bought with her money, she saw they were a mixed bunch. Ludu Rat-tooth didn’t admire them.
It didn’t matter. The important thing was to move forward step by step. The important thing was to have a plan, and Dysart was helping her with that. As the stars were paling and they rode up a ravine onto the plain, Miranda let herself imagine all Roumania was with her, that all she had to do was stand up and speak for everyone to hear. What had her aunt said? To be a voice.
So every night she sat and listened, and people came to her. They touched her hands, admired her bracelet, and talked to her about the good old days before the generals conspired against her father, before they put Valeria Dragonesti in the Winter Keep, before the Germans had come to Great Roumania. As she listened, Miranda started to imagine what these changes had meant to ordinary people, at least the ones who spoke to her, at least in this locality. Up to this point it had been hard enough to piece together all that had happened, and understand it as a story about her own family, a personal story about her mother, father, aunt, and now herself. But now as old men and women talked to her beside the campfires, she heard a story that was always fundamentally about money and injustice—the corruption of the courts. How a class of local tyrants had grown up under the empress. And when the time came they had shifted their allegiance to the German authorities. The vampire had been one of many.
Miranda didn’t want to think about Zelea Codreanu. She didn’t want to think about the events of that night, though of course her victory over the vampire was the cause of her present reputation. But with a stubbornness that had become her method, she had consigned the events that had occurred on Insula Calia to a special mental category: that which could not be explained. And if she was to move forward step by step, she had to wake up fresh from those nights as if from a disordered dream, as she had woken in America and in her father’s garden.
When she had been a high-school student in Massachusetts, every morning she had eagerly gone over her dreams. And now just as eagerly she strove to put them behind her, keeping only the few things that she could not forget: “I thought you’d be a voice … for Great Roumania.”
On the first morning and the second morning she had wondered what that voice would say. But as the people came and talked to her, she knew. None of this was about her. Many voices could combine into one voice.
On the third day in the morning they were surprised by ten policemen after breakfast in the town of Ghergeasa. By that time she had almost forty men and the entire town had come to see her. But fewer than twenty continued with her after the fight, and not because of casualties—no one had been hurt. As before, she hadn’t understood much of what happened until later. Guns were fired. Dysart had his hand on her bridle until she slapped it off. The policemen had ridden away north.
But that evening and the next, around a fire outside a barn or in a copse of trees, she sat and listened to the stories about hunger, and hardship, and the usurper, and German tyranny. And sometimes stories about her father, because each of the old soldiers had his personal encounter to describe. In the gaps between them, she could catch glimpses of the man himself.
The general had not cared for distinctions between officers and ordinary soldiers. A gap-toothed man
named Sorin told her, “Once we were on the Strymon River north of Thessalonike. The Turks were on the other side of a high stream. We didn’t have anything but beans and hard green peaches in the trees. The word came that there was a run of some small fish, I never knew the name. We crept out of our holes when it was still dark. The general came too, and I’ve never seen anything like it. The fish—they jumped out of their holes in the earth. The stream had come out of its banks and flooded a small hill like a waterfall over the rocks and the tall grass. And you could find the fish jumping and sliding down. There was eels, too. We took our boots off and caught them in our hats, and the general was laughing like a boy. It was like a holiday or being out from school. We built a fire in the clearing and roasted those fish on sticks. I sat next to the general and he was telling jokes. But then we had bad luck because the Turks crossed downstream and cut us off—it was that devil, Kemal Bey.”
“What did he look like?” asked Miranda. “I mean my father.”
“Oh, he was no hero in his face, that much I can tell you. Not so tall and strong. A high nose like yours. Ears even bigger. Not much of a chin. You never saw him?”
“No.”
“Not a picture?”
“No.” Miranda wondered for the first time why this was so, why there hadn’t been, for example, a portrait in the castle on the beach.
“So, I can tell you about that,” said an older man, as though she’d asked. “The general had superstitions. The photographs were blurred because he’d always move. He said it was bad luck to stop in time. You know there were always things like that, never a fight on a Thursday. Never when Mars and Jupiter were in conjunction. I forget all of it. He used to get letters from his sister.”
It had been drizzling and raining since they left the river. Nevertheless this was a beautiful country, the flat plain of the Danube, the tara Romaneasa with the city of Bucharest in the middle. There were orchards, wheat fields, and pastureland with many cows and sheep. The small, thatched, wood-and-stucco villages were built around a graveyard and a temple of Demeter with a bell tower and a tiled dome. The straight muddy roads were lined with poplars.
Miranda rode the big black gelding, and Ludu followed close behind. Miranda could tell she found the landscape ugly and depressing. Every mile they came inland she seemed more distracted and sad. Before, she had been full of her opinions and judgments. Now she was mournful, silent, perhaps because she realized finally and forever that her home was gone, her family dispersed or dead.
But if that was true, why did she want to talk about them and nothing else? Only the mention of her house—burned now, probably—her father, her brothers, could bring even the smallest, sourest smile to her. And she still didn’t have anything good to say. As Miranda learned more about her own father, she learned about Ludu’s too, stories that made a kind of counterpoint. “Sometimes he’d drink all night and there would be no stopping. He’d send Gheorghe out with all the money in the house. When that was gone he’d pull himself around looking for things to sell—all the silver work he’d made during the winter. He never took any of our clothes, I’ll say that for him. This was for days, and we’d run off to sleep outside or with the neighbors—we’d leave him alone. Then he was tired out, and we’d go back and find him sleeping in his chair or sprawled out in the dirt if he had fallen and could not get up. He was helpless without us and he knew it. Then months would go by and he’d never touch a dram. I’m worried about him now, I’ll tell you that.”
This came out of her at Mogosoaia, where they had arrived during the day. Miranda didn’t know what would be kinder, to force the girl into the facts or let her continue in delusion. What was the use? And maybe she knew better after all. Miranda’s own memory of that night, when the vampire had squatted over Dinu Fishbelly, now seemed like a dream. So maybe somehow the old Gypsy had survived.
Now past midnight, they sat in the stable while the men were talking. And when Ludu fell asleep in the straw, Miranda got up to go outside and watch the mist come over the sky, hiding the stars. The stable was on the edge of a wood, tall beeches and oaks. She looked north over the knee-high grass toward the unlit bulky building across the lake. Nothing here looked like home.
She stood a few minutes in the doorway listening to the men, watching the carbide lantern shining on their faces. Where was Dysart? He must have slipped away when she wasn’t paying attention.
She saw Ludu start awake and look around. She’d woken up as soon as Miranda was gone. As they’d come farther from the coast, she was less and less able to stay alone, to leave Miranda by herself even for a moment. Sometimes that was comforting among these older men, and sometimes it was frustrating, as now. Miranda stepped away under the trees, and in a moment she saw the girl come out the door and look around. Then she came to stand beside Miranda in the darkness, and together they listened to the buzz of voices inside.
From near Ploiesti, Dysart had ridden ahead to find support in Bucharest among important people he had known from years ago. This revolution, or whatever it was, could not be achieved with these old soldiers from the marshes and the villages. Dysart had brought richer, better-connected people from the city to meet her, and they were harder to impress. One, Count Sfetcu, who worked in the treasury office, spoke for many when he said: “That she is the daughter of my old comrade Schenck von Schenck, I can see for myself. That she is a bold young woman and a patriot, no one can doubt. That she is responsible for the rain in the Dobruja, that she is the savior of Roumania—these are children’s stories. We already have one white tyger, and she is an agent of Germany. Why should we want another?”
Sfetcu was a goat-faced man who talked about her as if she wasn’t there. But he had a point. The problem, Miranda understood, was not with Nicola Ceausescu, or Radu Luckacz the police chief, or the Roumanian home guard, but with the German army. That was what mattered. And if no German soldiers had come to stop them yet, it was because so many had moved north to Lithuania, or east across the border into the Ukraine. Miranda had a little bit of time, but not a lot. The German governor of Transylvania had troops at his disposal in the oil fields.
But de Witte’s letter had given her some breathing space. That was the advantage she’d taken from the mistake she’d made. Now she listened to the forest sounds, the peepers and cicadas, even though it was a damp night. Ludu said nothing, an anxious look on her chapped, spotted face. Though the moon was hidden, there was still light enough to see. Above her rags of mist glowed faintly against the black sky. Worried and frustrated, Miranda turned away, took a few steps under the trees. Where had Dysart gone?
No doubt he had walked out in disgust, because when people started to talk about political or military strategy, it always seemed a little unreal. Not long ago Miranda had been a high school student. She was not the one to be manipulating armies. The fiasco in Lithuania had taught her that.
So if she stayed with the guns and horses, always she’d depend on other people, on Dysart or Sfetcu or the rest of them. Doubtless her aunt had understood, and it was why she was always leading Miranda to places like this one, where another way might be found. But if that was true and she had grasped the truth, why was she so resistant? Here she was in Mogosoaia after all, as she had gone to Insula Calia. It’s not as if she’d had a better idea. But why was it so hard for her to take what was offered? This was the Brancoveanu land, the forest where her aunt was buried.
As she came out into the open air, her mind was still occluded by the stable talk, the close, inside atmosphere. All this talking could not change the obvious. The Germans had no energy to spend on her because of the war in Lithuania—that was her strength. Her weakness was she didn’t know this place or these people, didn’t know whom to trust.
In the first days after Insula Calia, she’d wondered if her sole presence was enough to bring a change in a rotten and unpopular government, like the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia. And unlike what had happened in Romania, starting with the riots in Timisoa
ra and the murder of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife—it was all so complicated. That was the version of history she’d learned when she was growing up, that Stanley had made sure she learned, forced her to learn over her objections. It was her history, he’d said. No doubt it had been included in her aunt’s book as a cautionary tale and not a model to be followed, although who could tell for sure? This much was clear—for Dysart and the others she was just a flag to hold, an emblem of her dead father and their own dead selves.
She was tired of them and frightened of herself. All the way across Wallachia she had been pursued by nightmares and regrets. At moments when she closed her eyes she could see the neat, singed hole in de Witte’s shoulder. And if at times she couldn’t see the dead policeman, she could feel the gun’s recoil as she had shot him. She could feel the bruise in her palm. It was not enough to say she’d had no choice, at Queen Mary’s hermitage or in Braila, or Insula Calia either—no, she had traveled along a road, and the start of it had been when she’d fired on the vampire over the body of Dinu Fishbelly.
Maybe she had been seduced by the unreality of that moment. Then came the singed hole, and then the chaos in the garden of the Russian consulate in Braila—a man was killed, she’d later read. She’d killed a man—was it possible? She couldn’t imagine it, and if there were moments, like now, when she felt sick with remorse, there were also moments as if none of it had happened, not the vampire, not de Witte, not the policeman. And none of that craziness in the salt cave, which seemed now like a fantasy.
She didn’t want to feel again the place inside of her where violence seemed natural. She was her father’s daughter, as her aunt had said. Surely there was another way to control these events if she could learn it. Maybe it was like learning to ride Ajax, her black horse.