by Paul Park
“Yes.”
“Sometimes there’s a traitor close at hand.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, are we coming to the border now? I’m afraid someone has telegraphed ahead.”
“It is possible.”
“Please, just one more question. What is the mood of the people on the train? I believe I can hear music playing.”
Dr. Theodore grabbed hold of the brass rail that closed in the ornate upper bunk. He rubbed his mouth. “They are happy that a larger war has been averted. Our victory came so rapidly because of the attack on June the seventh. We have you to thank.”
* * *
THEY WERE COMING into the station. The half-moon was behind the mountain peaks. But in the secret world it shone in the cloudless sky above Christmas Hill. The snake was coming, winding down the pasture. Then it slowed as it reached the bottom and moved toward her. Miranda could see the burning fire, smell the stink of it, and she could hear the scream.
She stood in the open with her sword. Moonlight glinted on the snake’s silver back. Close at hand, though, she could see it wasn’t as big as she had feared. But it was breathing fire from its terrible mouth, and she found herself surrounded by a cloud of burning steam. Its eyes shone out of the fire, but she stood her ground.
In front of her it slowed now, stopped, raised itself up. She felt the burning on her skin. But as the head came swinging toward her, as the beast reached out to touch her with its claws, she saw the unprotected place on its pale belly. As it came down she struck the blade into its flesh, then jumped aside.
It wasn’t finished. With a shrill whistle of rage, it raised itself up. So she hacked at it again and again while it poured out its smoke and steam. Blinded, she stabbed at it until the sword fell from her hand.
Then she was alone in the dark wood. The cold silver body lay inert. But she was burned and bleeding. She scarcely had the strength to limp away. Now more than ever it was important to find the ice house where Peter used to wait for her after school. Sometimes she stumbled on the rocks, scratched herself as she pressed through the brambles. But she recognized the contour of the ground, heard the murmur of the stream. She could see the little cottage up ahead, its windows glowing among the pine trees. How comfortable it looked as she crept toward it, holding her side! She felt drained and weak after the long dreaming, but as she came close she could see the glowing of the fire, and Ludu Rat-tooth was there, and Peter Gross, her friend. How strange he looked! How he had changed! He was a man now.
Peeking over the sill, she could just see the bed of quilts and blankets near the fire. She could scarcely hear the Gypsy’s voice. “Shh, she’s waking up.” But she had one more task before she rested.
Inside the cottage, in the glow of the fire, they were trying to rouse her. They didn’t know the danger, and so in the gray light of dawn she put out her claws. She moved down the slope toward the little stream. She jumped onto a log. She could still smell the blood of the hurt monkey, and she knew the fox could smell it, too. And so she slipped into a cleft between the branches and waited for him to come. With his bottle-brush tail and his curious, stiff-legged gait he ran up from the stream; his legs were black. He was a fast, vicious little creature, but even hurt she was still faster. She took him behind the head.
The fox was Ernest Dysart. Later the police would find him in the woods, mauled as if by an enormous animal. By that time, hours later, the cottage would be empty. Miranda Popescu and the others would have escaped into the safety of the deeper woods.
But with the sunlight streaking through the straight trunks of the pines, the white tyger crept up toward the house again.
For a while she stood guard under the windowsill, hearing the Gypsy girl inside. Ludu Rat-tooth—the little rat wouldn’t dare to show her nose over the threshold. But the ape was there, lying on its back in a pile of black needles, its big eyes closed. It was de Graz’s animal, the symbol of his house. Miranda didn’t recognize it. But now she found herself overjoyed to see an insect on the monkey’s long, pale lip, the prettiest bug in all the universe, she thought. Once she’d had him in a little box in tara mortilor. Now here he was again, with his flame-colored carapace and long head.
She put out her hand. The bug crept into her palm. Never had she felt so pleased to see a bug of any kind. It opened up its wings, revealing the blue shell underneath.
She brought it closer to her face. She yawned, then lay down in the underbrush below the sill. Hurt and exhausted, she closed her eyes, and then she was waking with a pain in her side.
And Peter was there with her, grown into a man—had it been five years for him? She was astonished by how happy she felt to find him sitting next to her among the quilts. Happy, shy, and awkward, because he looked so grown up, and because there was something in his face she didn’t recognize. Doubtless he had lived through an ordeal, as she had. He would tell her about all of it. He would have stories to braid together with her story, and braiding them would make them stronger. He and she had come a long way from the woods along the Hoosick River where she’d last seen him in the snow.
Oh, but she was glad to see him, and she scrambled up to put her arms around his neck and hug him. He was about to say something, and she put her fingers to his lips, and at the same time she was squeezing him to see if he was real, squeezing his shoulder and arm until he winced. “Çela fait mal,” he said.
His right hand was covered in a mass of bandages, which nevertheless were crusted and leaking. Ludu Rat-tooth was standing in the broken corner where the logs and shakes had fallen in, looking out at the sun in the long trees, the mist rising through the branches.
“Where have you been?” Peter asked in French, and again she put her fingers to his lips—she wanted him to talk to her in English.
She wanted to touch him and squeeze him, though she was exhausted, weak, with scratches and burns on her arms and hands. She pulled herself up so she could whisper in his ear, “I’m glad to see you.”
He frowned.
“You know,” she said, “it’s not what it’s cracked up to be, this princess thing.”
She said this to let him know nothing had changed, at least as far as she was concerned. “It’s amazing what you can tolerate,” she said. “It’s amazing what you can put up with.
“Especially with friends,” she said when he said nothing, to let him know they could continue as before because nothing had changed. But he frowned and pulled his head away. He wasn’t happy she had hugged him. He wasn’t happy she was touching him now. And so she took her hand away. “How are you feeling?”
He shrugged.
“Where’s Andromeda?” she asked.
He shrugged.
And she knew suddenly and with foreboding that it was stupid to imagine even for a moment nothing had changed.
Later, when she’d had time to think, she realized it was stupid to console yourself. Because nothing ever stays the same, and everything is always different, and Peter was different, and she herself was different, and everyone is simultaneously rushing toward someone and rushing away, especially people who care about each other after all. And the past drops away and has no meaning for the future, except for moments we look back and say, “Yes, I remember that.” Or, “Yes, I felt that.” Or, “I believed that.” And those images of ourselves are bound to us as if through secret threads of glass.
But if we could forget our disappointment, and if there were something to shatter those tough, sharp threads, sever them, how happy we would be! And the past would recede from us, and we would turn from the people we have known and stumble forward, and meet them coming the other way.
19
The Tourmaline
IN BUCHAREST, AT twilight on the day Miranda woke, the Baroness Ceausescu read this opinion column in the Evenimentul Zilei:
TRAGEDY ABOARD THE HYDRA—The mystery has deepened surrounding the death of Theodore von Geiss und Ratisbon, the hereditary elector of that town. The facts are not at iss
ue. He was found in his first-class sitting room, and the door was locked on the inside. Rather it is the mystery of what pushed this man, a rising star in German politics at one time, to despair and suicide. Doubtless he was aware that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, and the police were prepared to take him into custody at the frontier. When discovered, he had opened his veins with a brass paper knife and could not be revived. But the deeper mystery remains: What is the identity of the corpse that was discovered in his garden in a shallow grave? And how was he able to slip away from the police, leaving two of them mortally wounded? And most of all: What of the presence of Princess Clara Brancoveanu on the same train, traveling with young Felix Ceausescu? They are expected to be met by cheering crowds, when the train crosses the Hungarian border as early as today.…
Since the night when she had seen her husband’s ghost, the baroness imagined she had felt the unmediated pressure of the world. She imagined she had made decisions, put in motion chains of consequence whose effects now she was powerless to resist. She had scarcely left the People’s Palace except to travel under guard to the National Theatre, where before small audiences she had sung a few songs, practiced a few moments, muttered a few spells. And if she had left her people delirious with rapture, she had not been satisfied—she was too old, too brittle to achieve what she most craved. It is difficult for any artist to survive an absence of twenty years—my dear!
But in her private struggle with the third act of The Tourmaline (or The White Tyger, as she sometimes called it), the baroness imagined she’d achieved a breakthrough. Of course it is when times are blackest that true worth shines through. Everyone knows that. And if after years of trying she had finally broken her husband’s heart, what could it mean? Except that she was able to stand on her own feet for the first time since she’d been a child.
She stood in her husband’s laboratory. No, he wouldn’t be with her any more, strengthening her hand, showing her what to do. She had lit the lamp on Cleopatra’s altar, and by its light she examined the newspaper article, where it continued:
… as early as today. What official reception they can expect from the German Authority, or from the white tyger of Pietrosul, fresh from her triumph on the boards of the National, is unclear. In the meantime there are rumored sightings near the capital of the woman who calls herself Miranda Popescu, and whose claims or pretended claims this paper continues to regard with grave suspicion.…
It was the baroness’s intention, of course, to meet the train at the station as it steamed in from Germany. Yes, she would see her son again. She burned with anticipation. And she would see Clara Brancoveanu once again. And she would offer her shelter in the palace. A penniless refugee—it was an act of simple charity. And it would give a secret pleasure. When the baroness was a child, homeless in the streets of Bucharest, once she had been taken in by the Brancoveanu orphanage.
What had her dead husband said? For the sake of her own power and strength, it was important to find someone to replace Kevin Markasev. Her husband had always kept her from her own accomplishments, but he was not a fool—it was for this reason, she realized now, that she was attempting to revive her career upon the stage. The baron had stripped her of everything when he had forced her to give that up, as had been doubtless his intention.
Now she would take that power back. And she would hold her son, Felix, and Princess Clara, and maybe even Miranda Popescu too, in time, under her roof. What had Hermes Trismegistus said about the need for hostages? But it was not enough. Now more than ever she needed Kepler’s Eye to see her way forward in the struggle against Germany. This was the crisis of the last act of the play. To resolve it she needed the tourmaline, the real one, not the fake. Mlle. Corelli had told her where to look.
All that day she had been reading in her husband’s books, trying to find out about the jewel. The language had been difficult, abstruse, and she’d lacked the patience to decipher it entirely. Even so, she had come to the conclusion that the baron hadn’t really understood the power of the stone. In love himself, he had thought only about love. Kepler too, and that fool of an elector—the sentimentality of these men had blinded them. It took a woman to use power wisely, not in a frivolous manner, nor for the sake of her own vanity.
She had only a few hours before the train arrived at midnight at the Gara de Nord. She had Captain Corelli’s address. Now he was a professor at the university. How had he enjoyed his treasure all these years? Was he a fool like these others? Had he used it to lure prostitutes into his room?
Now she heard the ringing of the bell, which Jean-Baptiste employed to summon her. A guest had come—no, three rings and then silence. It was Radu Luckacz, doubtless with news about the Popescu girl.
She had dressed modestly for her interview with the professor, a waistless gray smock with a Parisian hemline at midcalf. It was a cool night, and she wrapped a gray, fringed shawl around her shoulders as she left the room. She passed through her bedchamber and then into the more public apartments, until she found at last the little sitting room where Radu Luckacz waited for her.
She opened her shawl so he could see the fine bones of her neck. She came close to him so he could smell the fragrance of her perfume, mixed always with her own body’s smell—she was careful not to cover it completely. He stood with his hat in his hands, looking more than ever like a rusty old crow.
“Madam,” he insisted after an agonized silence. “I have good news. We have surrounded Miranda Popescu in the forest above Mogosoaia. You understand it is in the old preserve where those monkey-faced barbarians are living. You know they were protected by Aegypta Schenck and then forgotten by us, neglected for too long. I have spoken to the German ambassador, who agrees it might be time to harvest those old trees. They will bring a good price in Germany.…”
“Surrounded?” murmured the Baroness Ceausescu.
“Yes, ma’am,” Luckacz persisted in his shrill, nasal, Hungarian-accented voice, too loud for the little room. “We have her in a circle. She has left all human habitation, and there is only one more place to look. We will take them at Constantin’s Ford. She is with that fellow only, and one Gypsy servant.…”
“She is not to be harmed,” murmured the baroness.
“Ma’am, your compassion is well known.…”
She put her hand out toward him, pausing a few centimeters from his coat. The lamps were low. Shadows flickered around them. “I will bring her here. I will reunite her with her mother. Perhaps she and Felix…”
“Ma’am, she is a murderess!”
Ah! And is that really such a bar? the baroness thought. Then she spoke wistfully, sadly: “Please, I want you to bring an honor guard to the station. And a brass band. Could you manage a brass band?”
For a moment she felt overcome with sadness, imagining herself in Clara Brancoveanu’s place. “My friend, you’ve helped me,” she whispered to Radu Luckacz. “And one more thing—have you found Markasev, the boy who escaped from us? You remember I asked you.…”
“Yes. So far I have discovered nothing. We must be discreet. I have people in the hospices and shelters. You know the German government has opened up some houses for the indigent.…”
The baroness shrugged her shoulders, wrinkled her nose. “Thank you, my old friend.”
She could not bear to think of Kevin Markasev in any of those places. Since her husband had told her how the boy was made, she had felt the attachment even more strongly. Now she regretted her rashness in the house on Spatarul, mourned her lack of foresight. But what use were any of these regrets—Aegypta Schenck’s murder, or the lies she had told her husband? Looking backward, you assumed a burden that you couldn’t carry, that you must dispose of if you wanted to move forward. Because in another sense these mistakes were part of what made her strong, her passionate, impulsive nature—she could not help herself!
And she need not have worried, because Kevin Markasev was not at that moment in some dismal dormitory for the homeless. As she came
out one of the side doors of the palace under the porte-cochère, Kevin Markasev was waiting by the gate. He was in a crowd of people waiting in the cold, misty evening to catch a glimpse of her. As her footman handed her into the carriage, he was one of only a few who did not wave or cry out. Only he stood with his hands in his pockets, a woolen cap pulled low over his forehead; as she scanned the faces of the crowd under the streetlight, Nicola Ceausescu didn’t recognize him.
Nor was he in her thoughts as she sat back against the leather seats. She was thinking of her interview with Professor Corelli. Maybe she should have walked along the Strada Floreasca in disguise, knocked on his door. Maybe she should have summoned him—no, the jewel was in his secret place. And from his house she had to go directly to the station to meet Radu Luckacz and the train. So she had decided to pay an official visit—unannounced—in her coach and four.
At a corner of the street, she pounded on the window with her gloved hand. The footman saw her and called to the postilion up ahead. The coach slowed, stopped, and at the entrance to an alley between two brick buildings, a woman stepped from the shadows.
A hooded cloak obscured her face. In the deserted street she stepped over the coach and stepped onto the rung. The baroness opened the door for her and she slipped inside.
“Oof,” she said, and giggled, turning down her hood to reveal her long nose and big mouth, big teeth. She smelled of liquor. “Ma’am, are you sure this is a good idea?”
* * *
AT TWILIGHT PIETER led the general’s daughter into the old-growth section of the Mogosoaia woods, enormous oaks and beeches that had never been timbered, and they crunched through layers of acorns and beechnuts underfoot. Often he found signs of bears—scratches in the tree bark at about eye level. But of the forest people there was no longer any trace.
“Nous ne pouvons pas rester ici,” said de Graz. “Il faut que nous…”