by Paul Park
“Yes, ma’am.”
Artist she might have been, famous throughout Europe at one time. But this was not her most effective speech, the baroness decided. She needed Luckacz to come toward her, sighing, wringing his hands or holding his hands out. She needed to feel some heat from him because the room was cold. Instead he scratched his ear, scratched his jaw, and looked down at the drawing of the mausoleum that she’d planned for Belu Cemetery. “Go,” she said. “You must not keep me like a prisoner. You have hurt me and disappointed me and kept me from my work tonight—my life’s work, though whether it’s a comedy or tragedy is not so plain.”
Why was he so stubborn? Why did he cock his head and peer at her, curious as a crow? This much was clear—she’d lost his love for her, and she’d lost Kevin Markasev’s love, and she had lost her people’s love.
And now Antonescu had robbed her of the weapon she had bought from the Abyssinian colonels. Broken the treasury to buy them, or at least she’d emptied the discretionary account the Germans permitted her, except for the money Jean-Baptiste had secreted away. That weapon had figured in the third act of her play, when she’d decided to become the white tyger in more than name alone. She’d decided to throw out the potato-eaters and redeem her country; now that option was closed to her. Or was this just another obstacle to overcome?
She picked up the sheet music from the piano stand. She made a show of studying it as Luckacz bowed, let himself out. There was another reason why she’d chased him away, why she’d wanted him gone. She looked at the square clock on the sideboard. It was almost eight o’clock.
She had prepared something for this night, a conjuring. If she’d managed to receive the weapon, it would not have been necessary. But without the weapon, she felt she must know something, or else what? She’d go mad—no, that was not true. That was the kind of sentimentality she’d always tried to avoid in her work. But she had lain awake the previous night, and she had thought of it like this: There were things she wanted to know, and felt she must know if her life was going to achieve the shape of a great piece of art.
If she was to overcome the obstacle of the derailment, she must find out the truth about Johannes Kepler’s Eye. Had she been blessed by the great sorcerer or stumbled forward on her own? Who could tell her now but her own husband, the red pig of Cluj, dead for thirteen years? He was the one who’d given her the secret, spelled it out on the ouijah board in her house on Saltpetre Street. That had been a long time before, and already his soul was in the circle of brass. It would require a great conjuring to reach him now.
That afternoon she’d given a matinée, but cancelled her evening’s performance. At nineteen minutes after eight, the God Saturn, caught in his dark, frozen round, would pass over the point of Cleopatra’s spire near her temple in the old court. Things were possible at that moment. A word in the proper place might brush against his cloak, might catch there like a burr, might travel far. It was a chance, but it wouldn’t do to prepare for it. No rehearsal was the best rehearsal, as she’d learned from her years on the stage. So she studied her sheet music a little bit more, calming herself, waiting for the chimes of the small clock—they didn’t come. She looked again. The gold hands hadn’t moved, still marked three minutes to the hour. The clock had stopped.
Then all her calmness left her in a moment and she fled the room, calling for Jean-Baptiste, hurrying up the stairs. The clock on the first landing told her it was twenty minutes past. But when she was running down the hall toward her personal apartment, she saw an ormolu timepiece on a small table—ten minutes after eight. It wasn’t until she’d crossed the threshold of her bedchamber, pushed aside the rice-paper screen that hid her secret alcove, that she saw she still had time. Her absolute chronometer stood on a lacquer table, a gift to the former empress from the Maharajah of Singapore. The spheres were turning. She had ninety seconds left.
“What do you want?” called Jean-Baptiste, rude as always, from the hall outside her room.
“I have a headache. I must not be disturbed.”
“I don’t believe you. Who’d come see you anyway on such a night?”
“Go!”
While she spoke she’d been commencing an internal prayer, the kind that an experienced practitioner can set revolving among the lobes of the mind, a perpetual machine, and sometimes it took hours for it to slow and stop. It was a prayer to the goddess. At the same time she was fussing with Cleopatra’s altar, a small brass statue she’d erected on an inlaid bench.
The statue was a clockwork one, and she wound it and got it moving with four seconds to spare. Now she was chanting out loud, a different prayer in contradiction to the first. For though the silent words were full of self-abasement (“Have mercy on me, forgive me, I am mud under your shoes.…”), the spoken words sounded presumptuous and proud: “I am the best-loved of your servants. Here I command you to help me to this terrible…” For it was only in the frictionless space between the prayers that the goddess’s arrow might fly. The brass statue, which now was turning on its base, showed Cleopatra in the shape of the great huntress of the Nile on the day when she had overcome the crocodile. Dressed in padded armor, her beautiful head encased in a padded helm, she drew her bow and tilted backward as the crocodile swam through the arc of the heavens. It would become the brightest constellation of the summer months. It was not figured in the statue, though the goddess stood on a trampled nest of eggs.
But on the tiny brass arrow that would shoot a meter or so toward the ceiling, the baroness had affixed a tiny scroll. She had curled it and tied it around the shaft. It was not true she’d not prepared. On the scroll she had inscribed these words in minute letters: “My dear husband, please, we must adapt to the new times.…” It was the message that the goddess had dispatched to Julius Caesar after his death, begging him not to punish her for taking Marcus Antony for her second husband. But he did punish her.
That day the baroness had sent her steward, Jean-Baptiste, to Cleopatra’s spire in the city. And in the secret, top compartment she had asked him to deposit a small bucket. On the handle of the bucket was the burr that she’d prepared, a sphere of wire hooks. In the bucket was the small silk nightgown she had worn throughout the previous week until it smelled of her. And pinned to a rosette of folded fabric in the center of the bodice, there was a piece of paper torn from the corner of an envelope, and one word in purple ink.
Jean Baptiste had unhatched the section of the roof over the compartment. That evening, at 8:19 and twenty seconds precisely, watchers in the square below might have observed a small, unsteady beacon rise into the sky. But in that spitting rain there were no watchers. In any case the beacon was soon lost among the clouds. Even the baroness, peering south through her bedroom window, saw nothing. Alternately gnawing on her cuticles and smoking her sobranies, she settled on her iron bedstead and commenced to wait.
Past eleven she undressed and went to bed. But she left a single lantern burning on her nightstand. When she awoke, disoriented, in the middle of the night, she lay quiet for a moment, watching the shadows turn and dance over the ceiling. At first she thought they came from outside her window. Lights from the traffic in the Piata Victoriei, although she couldn’t hear anything. No, the lights from the carriages and trams had never reached into her room.
But perhaps there was some new brightness in the square. She remembered the bonfire lit by students on the night the Empress Valeria had left the city, while train after train of German soldiers unloaded in the Gara de Nord. Was it possible that she had seen the shadows dance across her ceiling from the light of that big fire? No, the window was dark, and when she raised herself onto her elbow, she could see the source of movement. The brass statue of the goddess was turning on its base, tilting backward as if shooting at the ceiling, though the quiver was empty and no shaft flew.
Now the baroness could hear the trigger in the statue’s outstretched arm snap uselessly, over and over. She sat up in bed. “Are you there?” she called out.<
br />
She had left the window open a small crack, and now she felt the narrow wind that had managed to squeeze through. It troubled the flame of her lantern. “Are you there?” she cried out, already a little bit impatient at these histrionics, even more so when she smelled the barnyard odor that had always clung to the red pig, the smell of mud and food, excrement and death, that now was unmistakable.
What form would he take after so long? Surely he was trying to frighten her. It was intolerable—she slipped out of bed and ran to the window, closed the casement, turned the latch. The windowsill was wet. Below her the piata was deserted in the rain.
So she was not prepared to see him as she most remembered him, dressed in his velvet smoking jacket and his old-fashioned trousers and stockings, curled up in a corner of the big leather armchair she had brought from his laboratory in Saltpetre Street. His linen was white, and he had shaved. His eyebrows were thick as always, and his forehead shone. His long, sensitive fingers played always and forever with the medal pinned to his lapel, the eight-pointed Star of Roumania that Valeria IX (who now lay dying) had given him for his testimony against Prince Frederick. His face was covered with fine wrinkles, and his large ears were as delicate as bats’ wings. But his eyes were as always, generous, calculating, kind.
“My dear,” he murmured, “it has been so long.”
“You startled me.”
“Did I? I beg your pardon, but you should not be surprised.”
On the rough matting, her bare feet were cold.
“And not because you sent for me,” he said. “These tricks”—he gestured toward the statue, quiet now—“would not have hurt the slumber of a mouse. I must insist you should be studying my work more closely. Though I’ve often come to help you, too, if you must know. That business with Monsieur Spitz and Livia Hirscher!”
Always she had found his condescension irritating. But she was surprised to discover she was glad to see him. With the lantern light behind his head, he seemed to glow around the thin, flushed ridges of his ears.
There was a time when she’d respected him, even perhaps loved him a little bit. He’d been the deputy prime minister, after all. And some of those feelings still persisted after her marriage. Now suddenly she remembered the first time she had run her hands under his shirt, touching the puckered scars where he’d been wounded in the Turkish wars. He’d been a hero and Prince Frederick’s friend, until he turned on him.
“What brought you, then?”
“My dear, I never go where I’m not wanted. I’d see you every night if you would let me. Sometimes I have spied—I’m glad to see you’re still wearing my ring.”
She drew it off, clenched it in her hand, surprised by her own pettiness. In some ways he had been an impressive man. In other ways he had been disgusting. “Let me tell you why you’re here,” she said. “I’m glad you remember Monsieur Spitz.”
He smiled, showing his false teeth. Sometimes they had given him pain. It irritated her to have to remember, but then suddenly he closed his mouth. When she said nothing more, he spoke. “My dear, I was proud of you. That night you took the first two steps. Now you have much more than I gave you. I regret that.”
How odd this seemed after so long! It was almost as if he’d never died. He seemed so lifelike, sitting in his chair. “Tell me about Kepler’s Eye,” she said.
He yawned, covered his mouth with his long hand. “You know everything you need to know.”
“Johannes Kepler had a thousand lovers. Once I thought I had a million. But the girl tells me the jewel is false.”
Now in death she found him easy to read. Easier than when he’d been alive. There was a sadness in his pink and wrinkled face, and also some impatience. “I am not a jeweler. It was good enough to fool Claude Spitz. That should be enough for you, I think.”
But it wasn’t enough for her. Honesty had always been her power and her strength. “Please, I must know.”
Again a small, impatient look. “Here you are living in the Winter Keep. Surely you have won the game. Why trouble yourself now about the rules?”
But she must trouble herself. This was the night of Saturn’s festival, a night for uncomfortable truth. In the countryside, among the common people, no one would tell lies on such a night. “What about the white tyger?” she asked. “I saw it in the pyramid one time and never again, although I looked and looked.”
“I see you are an idealist,” he said after a moment. “This is true: I wanted to help you. Perhaps you remember how unhappy you were.”
She remembered.
“I tried to give you things,” he said. “The stone, the boy.”
What boy? But she knew.
“I was happy to see you,” the ghost continued. “Was I wrong to let you see yourself as others see you? Love yourself as others … I thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I still think so.”
In a moment he went on. “It was confidence you lacked. Faith in your own power. Was it so terrible to lie to you?”
The baroness felt tears come to her eyes. “What about the boy?”
Sadness and impatience—“Dear, it does no good…”
“I want to know.”
Uncomfortable truths are told on the night Saturn crosses over the city. Perhaps a sense of that tradition lingered in the ghost. He smiled and sighed. “He was my gift. A prisoner for you to make you strong. To help you in your conjuring.”
When she said nothing, he went on. “Let me tell you. When our son Felix was born, I resented the time you spent. I was angry at night because your door was closed to me. So I took him away, and I regretted it. Later in the power that comes from death, I wanted to replace the son I took. I wanted to give you someone to love you every day. Someone to do everything you needed. It was my way also to be close to you and see you through his eyes. Please don’t look so horrified! I think my two gifts made you what you are.”
He was talking about the false stone and the false son, Kepler’s Eye and Kevin Markasev. After a moment he went on again. “Did you think it strange he had no past, or that his past was whatever you suggested? Or he did everything you asked? I put him in your hands in Cluj. He was like a puppet that I made and gave to you, though I kept hold of the strings. Dear, you look so angry. Don’t tell me you never guessed. What is a child, except something you create through miracles?”
The baroness turned away to hide her face. She glanced out of the window. If she’d been able to concentrate, she might have seen a moving shadow between two government buildings on the other side of the piata. But she couldn’t see farther than the windowpane. The reflection cast her back into the room.
“How do you think a man can make a child?” the baron continued. “No, that is true alchemy. After Felix was sent away, I had no opportunity. I mean in the normal way. I had some of your blood, some of your hair. Some part of myself and a connection to me. Then I put him with a farmer in the country. But I almost lost him several times. Always I could see you though his eyes. Do you want to know where he is standing now? Right now?”
She closed her eyes. “Why did you?” she asked.
“My dear,” murmured the ghost. “You must know the reason.”
It was because he loved her. She knew from the peculiar simper in his voice that he was primed to talk about how much he loved her. Every day the subject had dripped out of him the last months of his life. Death had not, apparently, exhausted it.
But she couldn’t feel anything but anger, a sudden rage. It burned away all caution. High up in her palace room, she made one of the unbalanced, daring leaps that were the secret of her creative art. “A miracle? It didn’t feel that way. You must know Felix was not your son.”
This was a lie. Now she opened her eyes, saw her reflection. Was it possible for a ghost to feel pain? She thought if he could love, then maybe he could feel some jealousy. Oh, he had robbed her, and she would rob him, too. “Do you remember there was a Danish ballet company at the Dinamo that spring? Do
you remember the lead dancer, Koenigslander? We had fun, I tell you!”
This was a double lie on a night of truth. Never with anyone had she found pleasure of that kind. Miserably she stared at the glass pane.
If she’d been able to look past the reflection in the window, she might have seen a moving figure under the streetlight. It was Kevin Markasev in the rain, looking up at her window. She couldn’t see him, even though she was thinking about him at that moment. How could she have treated him so cruelly for so long?
But instead she saw her sour, small-featured, beautiful face as if in a mirror. She couldn’t see the ghost in back of her beyond the armchair’s studded wing. As she stood at the window examining her expression, she smelled the odor of the pig again redoubled—a hot smell of garbage.
She didn’t want to turn and look. She saw fear in her own face. She imagined the ghost was changing, and she didn’t want to see the pig itself, or some devil, or some rotted corpse. She thought if she didn’t look, then she’d protect herself. She was waiting for the ghost to speak.
“Turn around and look at me,” he said, and his voice was not the grunting of a pig, the wheezing of a corpse. But it was soft, sweet, and hesitant, a young girl’s voice, and maybe that was worst of all. The baroness squeezed her eyelids shut. She dropped the golden ring and put her hands over her ears, but still could hear the words. “Dear, you were always crude, a country girl, a peasant from the mountains. The white tyger? No. Turn around and tell me to my face.”
In a moment he went on, “But if you could have seen yourself on the stage of the Ambassadors in that performance of Klaus Israel’s Cleopatra—do you remember? In the last moment with the snake in your hand, your bosom was entirely uncovered. I went three times a week and von Schenck laughed at me. He said you’d never look twice, a broken-down old soldier.
“Tonight is the night to confess these things. I admire your bravery, as I admired it then—I proved him wrong. I thought you’d look at a deputy prime minister and better things to come. I thought—you see? The court-martial, the testimony against my friend. It was the price I paid. It made a beggar out of me. Look behind you.”