The Tourmaline (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  Lubomyr stared at the elector’s hands. On the smallest finger of his left hand, the man wore a signet with an intricate seal. Between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, he held a nut. It was odd, strange, almost spherical, covered with white dust. Then it disappeared into his mouth.

  The elector coughed and wheezed. “It is up to me to protect these men. If—” and he was silent.

  There was a flicker in the lights, a strangled groan. Arslan Lubomyr glanced up, and for a long minute he couldn’t guess what had happened. The strangeness of the elector’s face made all expressions difficult to interpret. But then he saw the man was choking, gasping for air. His hands rose to his neck, clutched at his throat.

  As the light spread out of the inlaid map, Lubomyr had been conscious of the servants gathering around to watch. Now he sat horrified in his chair, his hands squeezing its carved arms, hoping for them to intervene until he saw they couldn’t. They were also stricken. Two collapsed onto their knees on the carpet—they were not groaning or scratching at their necks. Instead they settled onto their hands and knees, and as Lubomyr watched they seemed to shrink into themselves, dissolve as the gaslight dimmed, and the darkness grew opaque around him. Still the red light spilled out of the brandy glass, and Lubomyr could see his host, see the left hand gesturing—help me, oh my God. But nauseated by fear, he found he could do nothing except rub the arms of his chair with his greasy palms, while at the same time staring into the elector’s limpid eyes, which now were saying, “You are a dead man. I will not forgive you.”

  But the Elector of Ratisbon was so ugly! How could Lubomyr touch him, touch his flesh? How could he touch this mad, dangerous, misguided man, who had half stood from his chair, and who was rocking back and forth, clutching at his throat—the light flickered and dimmed. The room grew dark. And at the last instant Lubomyr flung himself from his chair and grabbed hold of the man, forcing his face down onto the darkened table. Now it was possible to touch him, now he could no longer see.

  The servants had been swallowed up in darkness. The room was completely dark. Lubomyr felt his fear rise up; he could not help himself. In any case the nut wouldn’t budge out of the elector’s throat. As he squeezed and pressed and flailed, Lubomyr could feel the man’s heart racing under his hands. It seemed to shudder in every part of him.

  The table was broken, overturned, and the young man staggered up. Stumbling and panicked, he groped his way across the floor, banging into furniture until he reached the stairs.

  * * *

  SEVERAL FLOORS BELOW at close to the same moment, Clara Brancoveanu was thinking about cucumber sandwiches, sardines, and a bottle of Riesling—the luncheon she had mentioned to the air that morning, as she imagined it was. She stood in the parlor, waiting for the dumbwaiter’s second bell. Already she had drunk a quantity of tea. She leafed impatiently through the afternoon papers, an afternoon five years before. Still she called out brightly, “I see there is a surge upon the stock exchange!” This kind of joke had become a ritual.

  Melancholy in her middle age, crazy with fear that she would meet her death in those comfortable rooms, nevertheless she almost missed the opportunity to escape. It was Felix who first noticed the flickering of the lights. It was Felix who first heard the click of the dumbwaiter’s lock. He ran to the double doors and opened them; the bell had not rung, and there was no food inside. Nor was the box there. But he could see the double rope and the empty shaft.

  “Mother,” he said. He reached in and pulled on the counterweight, and the box came up from underneath. Never before had he been able to control it.

  “Come,” he said. He was a sensitive boy, and in the prickling of his skin he could feel a change. Just a small thing as the lights dimmed and then extinguished themselves one by one. He knew something must be done. The roof of the box was below him.

  “Come,” he said to the princess. And when she made a motion to resist, he grabbed hold of her arm and bundled her through the doors, onto the top of the dumbwaiter’s box.

  “What are you doing? Please, let go of me!” Felix Ceausescu had never touched her before. He held the double rope in his other hand, bracing it against her weight.

  “Didn’t you ask for this one chance?” he said. And the box sagged down to the floor below, as far as he would risk. “Kick open the door. The locks have gone.”

  What was this energy that possessed him? He was not a powerful boy. But he hung onto the rope as she pushed through into the room below. Then he surrendered it and climbed down, hanging by his fingers from the sill as the light failed completely.

  Above him on the staircase, Arslan Lubomyr clattered down the five flights to the entrance hall and groped his way across the marble floor. He was terrified of the pitch-darkness, but even more terrified after a few moments when the lights began to glow again, weakly, fitfully at first. He ran to the great door and fumbled with the bolts and pounded on the oak beams until they surrendered, and he pushed out into the night. But in the yellow gaslight that shone from the pediment, he saw the smiling and officious face of Dr. Theodore, a pair of Dr. Theodores who took him by the arms and brought him back into the hall. Nor did he struggle when they pulled him up the stairs. If he had struggled, if he had taken up any of their time, perhaps Felix Ceausescu and the princess would not have found the front door open and unguarded when they peeked out from the servant’s hallway underneath the stairs.

  At first they hesitated on the threshold, astonished by the darkness and the open air. Felix wondered if a thunderstorm had come. Princess Clara imagined for a moment that the world had been transformed during her long captivity, the sun darkened in the sky. But when they recognized the night for what it was, they staggered out into the park and hurried down the cobblestones into the town.

  18

  Reunions

  ANDROMEDA IN HER dog shape had disappeared after the derailment. Nor had de Graz bothered to look for her. He’d come to Bucharest, riding in the special horse-drawn coaches sent for passengers of the Hephaestion. He’d been taken to the bureau of railroads to receive a commendation. Later there was a memorial for the mysterious commercial traveler from Abyssinia, the sole casualty from the wreck. There was a reception given by the police commissioner of Bucharest. By that time Pieter had already left the hall. Pleading tiredness, he’d gone to his hotel, paid for by the grateful bureau. And at first in the beautiful summer weather he had thought he would be happy to explore the streets of Bucharest and see what had changed after so long. But after two nights he slipped away to Mogosoaia, his heart in a chaos that he didn’t understand.

  Peter Gross had understood. Now it was as if his conscious and subconscious selves had been reversed. And de Graz had little interest in self-examination. It was true he’d given his oath to protect Miranda Popescu. He’d promised her father on his deathbed, and there was a cold self-satisfaction in thinking that his word of honor was still good after these years, these complications. But why did his heart thump in his chest as he approached Mogosoaia on the train? Why did stanzas of English poetry come unbidden to his mind? Why did he think often of the girl’s face? Or a woman now of course, grown up from the days he’d taken care of her at Mamaia Castle on the beach. Less of her father in her looks now. More of her mother—why did he drum his fingers on the leather seats and on his pants? Though he’d refused all money, he’d allowed some passengers from the Hephaestion to buy him a suit of clothes.

  The train emptied at his stop. The platform was full of people. Since the events at the Venus shrine, many had come out to pledge their loyalty, though to whom or what it was not clear. Miranda Popescu had disappeared. Her followers had been arrested. The shrine itself was occupied by the police and there were soldiers in the woods. But curious people came and went. Some had packed chicken or ham sandwiches and come out with their families for the day. The weather had turned after a cold spring, and it was summer after all.

  Young men slept out in the fallow fields around the Brancoveanu
palace, hoping to be part of something. But de Graz was not like that. He had a plan.

  Or else it was half a plan and half a memory. When Frederick Schenck von Schenck had been denounced and arrested, he was staying in the Brancoveanu guesthouse with his pregnant wife. And he was already sick, that was the ironic part. Or not so much ironic—de Graz was an uncomplicated man—but sad. He had a cancer in his bowels. He’d said nothing to the princess for fear of alarming her, but he was already making his arrangements. Later, when the news came that he’d been shot in an escape attempt, people said he had been murdered. De Graz himself had thought so. But Prochenko disagreed. The prince would have had no wish to die in prison.

  Pieter thought about these things as he walked up the cinder roadway from the station. The soldiers in the crowd were dressed in green uniforms, and they wore on their shapeless wool berets the insignia of a Targoviste sappers regiment that had fought well at Havsa. At the stone gate of the park they leaned dispiritedly on their rifles, unchanged since the Turkish wars. The guns were older than they were.

  Though they had mounted their long bayonets, they made no attempt to stop the people streaming through the gate, even to check their papers, which was a relief. Pieter had none, either in his own name or in the name of his alias, Peter Gross. Andromeda—Prochenko—had purchased a false set in Adrianopole. But Pieter hadn’t seen her since the wreck.

  It was a lovely summer morning, bright and sunny after an intermittent rain. Shrubs and briars had been allowed to grow under the oak trees, though the paths were clear. Though he was not a romantic person, Pieter rejoiced in the smell of the earth, and he found himself paying attention to the birds and squirrels, even the insects as he walked. And when the great bulk of the Brancoveanu palace came into view, he felt suddenly giddy, not because it was a beautiful building—no one had ever claimed that. Nor had he himself ever been inside it. Already during his service to the prince, it had been abandoned, boarded up.

  But in the distance in a grove of pines he saw the tiled roof of Sophie’s guesthouse, built for the prince’s grandmother in an Oriental style. There he had stayed once, and there he had promised to defend the prince’s child. That promise, sworn on his honor as a patriot, had taken him a long and weary way, first to Mamaia Castle and to Massachusetts, where he’d gone through school and high school in the body of a crippled boy.

  Later he had come to Heliopolis with Prochenko. He had lived through many follies and stupidities, but now here he was again, standing in his flesh, the road now looped together under his feet, tied into a knot.

  His trail had come full circle here, but where was hers—Miranda’s? Days before, she’d been here. It was the talk of Bucharest. Even the director of railroads had mentioned it half wistfully, as if he too had been tempted to give up everything to march under her banner, white-haired and portly as he was, and dressed in a cream-colored waistcoat. “If I didn’t have responsibilities, Domnul Gross,” he’d said, as they stood together looking at the woodblock caricature that was posted on the wall of his office as on every wall in Bucharest—one thousand marks reward for news leading to the capture of the woman who called herself Miranda Popescu.… Even then, reading the text, de Graz had imagined that Miranda’s army would contain a great many poets, lovers, women, and old men, but few professional soldiers beside himself. It didn’t matter. He was enough, if he could only find her.

  Some lines of English poetry came into his mind, “Let us be true to one another, for the world which seems…” Seems what? What indeed? But she was here somewhere in the forest. He walked through the overgrown gardens, following his nose, understanding only where he would not go. Not to the guesthouse where the path would be muddied with sad memories. Not to the Venus shrine where Radu Luckacz was searching with his men.

  Pieter de Graz was a man of impulse. Always he was searching for a sense of rightness that went beyond words. How could that be accomplished except through faith and trust in his own destiny? God spoke to men who did not contradict. Always he had been unpopular in the army, though he’d won more ribbons and medals than he could wear.

  Now in his brown coat and trousers, his laced-up leather shoes, he stood at the border of the forest next to the old barn. Though there was a path under the trees, he didn’t take it. Instead he struck immediately into the woods, pushing through the undergrowth, stepping over the dead leaves and sometimes finding cart tracks and stone walls. This had been agricultural land two hundred years before.

  He pushed northeast through the brambles for many hours. He had no weapons or water or supplies. But in other ways he was prepared. His trail was as straight as if drawn with a rule. In time he came into the older forest, never cut.

  Toward evening he crossed some rotten strands of barbed wire and stood beside the ruins of an old tower. Baron Ceausescu had sequestered the entire area in the old days, a circle of ancient trees held in the long curve of the river. Now those laws had been relaxed, more through inattention than design. There were still some notice boards nailed to the trees, but Pieter didn’t read them. Instead he peered up at the body of a rat, tacked to the bark of an enormous oak. Its belly had been split and stuffed with fetish objects to guard against bad luck. There were beads, medallions, coins, and other objects wrapped in cloth.

  He had stumbled out of the prickers now, his coat covered with green burrs. He plucked them off, looking in both directions down a muddy, leaf-meal path. For the first time he was unsure now how to go. The orientation of the path to the notice boards and tower was unclear.

  But one way led deeper into the old forest. Choosing it, Pieter walked for several kilometers without seeing anyone. Moving through his thoughts as if through a sequence of empty rooms, he took a long time to become aware of a creature beside him in the undergrowth, longer still to realize that the creature was staying with him parallel to the path. He heard a crashing in the brambles, stopping when he stopped to look. Nothing was distinct in the low light. But there was some lurking movement that soon disappeared until he saw a figure up ahead. Something or someone was on the path in front of him, and without thinking Pieter thought that if he just broke forward in a run, shouting, shaking his fist, then the animal would blunder away—it seemed timid enough. But when it started coming toward him, he found his pretended anger swelling into something real; he paused to pick up a broken stick. And when the creature leaped at him he jammed the stick into its ribs and twisted it. At first he thought it was a monkey or an ape. It leaped on him and locked its legs around his waist, its arms around his neck. He felt in his body an immediate reaction, as if a child had reached up to hug him. So he dropped the stick and put his hands around the creature’s knees, supporting it against his body—it was a female, he imagined.

  There still persisted in the Roumanian forest the remnants of an older race of human beings, the original inhabitants of Europe. Displaced in neolithic times by waves of immigrants from Africa, they had retreated to the lonely corners of the continent, where they lived on government preserves. The Chevalier de Graz had not paid much attention to his education, but he remembered a few things.

  Now he stood with his legs spread, supporting the woman with his hands under her rear. He had stabbed her with a stick and he could feel the warm blood, but she showed no reaction. Suddenly he felt the heat of the afternoon, and a small sensation on his neck where she was kissing him or maybe licking at the sweat under his ear. He glanced sidelong at her face and got a brief impression of long eyelashes and pale, hairy skin. But he couldn’t get much of a sense of her, because she was dressed in strips of cloth wound around her arms and legs and body. The hair was clipped short on the back of her head.

  A female, he thought, because he knew the males were shy and large, much stronger than a man. Driven out from the Carpathians, some family groups had been resettled by the Brancoveanus on their private land.

  The air was hot and still. Pieter felt the tickling under his ear and listened also to small murmured words i
n a language he didn’t know. The woman was talking to him. Or else she carried on a laughing, whispered, singsong conversation with herself. She couldn’t have expected him to understand. She didn’t seem embarrassed. In time she released her grip and climbed down. And he could see where she was wounded in the side, though she paid no attention. She took him by the hand and pulled him off the track into the undergrowth, finding a deer path through the brambles, and he followed her.

  Pieter de Graz felt none of the aggression that comes from curiosity. As always, the part of him that thought about things was separate from the part that acted. Without thinking he imagined that the woman was taking him to Miranda Popescu. Perhaps she had found refuge in the dangerous small villages of these creatures, or in the caves they once had decorated with painted animals, where the Roumanian police would search for her last of all. The woman was laughing and chattering as she dragged him along, and in the speckled sunlight it was hard to see her face. This was partly because she was in front of him, and partly because he found himself glancing away when she turned back, made uncomfortable by her big eye-ridges and sloping forehead, her big jaw and teeth.

  In the woods in front of them he heard a gunshot.

  The woman’s skin was pale, her hair was gray, not thick enough to be called fur. Though most of her was covered in dirty strips of cloth, her forearms were bare past the elbow. And though she was smiling, Pieter sensed from her an impression of urgency and danger. She had let go of his hand as the land started to rise, and she moved quietly and quickly through the undergrowth, bent almost double. Quietly and quickly Pieter followed her. It was a skill he had from Berkshire County. Was Miranda hurt?