The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  It had been a favorite poem of his mother’s in Berkshire County, a battle poem from the First World War. Now he said it for effect, something Sasha Prochenko might be expected to understand.

  Jealous, he supposed, she smiled at him. “It’s true—you are the lucky one. I often think about what happened in Chiselet.”

  Standing in front of him, she took hold of his collar, brushed her fingers against his silver captain’s bars. She held his letter in her other hand, along with the hieroglyphic message, which she’d refolded carefully, replaced in its envelope. “No, give it back,” Peter said. “I changed my mind—it is not good for me to write to her. That’s not what I promised to her father. I said I would protect her, not…”

  His voice dribbled away. Andromeda supplied the rest. “… Care for her? It’s not the worst thing.”

  Was she teasing him? Peter turned his head. He stood looking out over the field. “Madame de Graz told me not to write to her. She told me it was dangerous, because I was a wanted man. She told me the police were looking for me. I haven’t seen any proof.”

  “I’ll take your letter,” said Andromeda.

  “No—I don’t want that,” Peter said. He reached out for the two envelopes and she came to him. She tucked them into the inside pocket of his uniform. She patted him over his heart, buttoned him up.

  Though he was uncomfortable to feel her so close, he did not step away or knock her hands away. He had refused her, after all, rejected her. Her animal scent came back to him, and he could smell the liquor on her breath.

  He turned back toward the trench. It was only a couple of minutes later, after she was gone, that he realized she had picked his pocket, taken both envelopes—the letter to Miranda and the pages of hieroglyphs. She’d left him with nothing.

  3

  Lieutenant Prochenko

  “I HAVE A Rendezvous with Death” was published in a chapbook with a dozen other poems after the war. Edited by “a captain of the Eleventh,” it included “Dolce et Decorum,” “If I Should Die,” and even, “When I Have Fears that I Might Cease to be.”

  Lieutenant Prochenko, though, riding back to Bucharest in a second-class compartment, hadn’t known what Peter was talking about. What kind of rendezvous? The lieutenant had never been a student of English poetry, either in his high school days in Massachusetts or at his boarding school in Chisinau.

  He would have had no patience for Peter Gross’s literary ambitions, even if he’d known about them. Caught in his own troubles as the train crept into the Gara de Nord, he had no inkling of events as they transpired: the second battle of Staro Selo. But already that night the Turks had used chlorine gas in their assault. An African invention, borne on the wind, it had killed hundreds on both sides.

  Prochenko had heard the barrage from the station and for hours afterwards. Now, thankfully, they had passed beyond the thunder of the guns. Anyone with a map could see that Staro Selo was the fulcrum of the war, ten kilometers from the bridge at Tutrakan, another sixty to Bucharest. Captain Gross would win the Star of Hercules for what he already had accomplished in his trench full of poisoned, dying men.

  Peering out the window at the city lights, Prochenko might have found himself consumed with jealous disappointment if he’d known. It had always been his habit to condescend to Peter Gross. But what could he do now? Every compartment, every station platform was full of men in uniform. All of them stared at him as if he were some kind of circus freak. At Vasilati he had given his seat to a man on crutches and gone to stand in the crowded corridor. There it was worse. Men pressed against him on either side as the train shuddered and swayed; couldn’t they tell he was different from them? Perhaps they could—that was what was so painful. When the track attendant in Bucharest unlocked the doors and pulled down the steps, Prochenko stood against the black cold windows to let them all past. But there was still a crowd when he followed. There was always a crowd. Men were waiting at a tea stall on the platform, dressed in mud-brown sappers’ uniforms, waiting for the train to take them south. He imagined what they were thinking as he strode through them in his calfskin boots, up the stairs and into the great hall of the station: weak heart, weak lungs, mentally deficient, a sodomite, perhaps. But if they only knew! Sometimes he was tempted to affect a limp or a damaged arm—no, he had too much pride for that. His wounds were on the inside.

  And so he faked an easy, casual saunter. Under the gleaming mosaic dome he paused to light a cigarette, hooking his wolf’s-head walking stick over his arm and stripping off his gloves. There was the row of itching bites along his wrist, where the demon had bitten him.

  He checked the times for the train to Rimnicu at the departure board, the first part of his journey to the mountains—all those old women together, and Miranda. In his jacket’s breast pocket he carried Peter Gross’s letter, which he would bring to her. He was tempted to read it—why not? Lazy curiosity—he had his own adventures. He scratched the sores along his wrist, making them bleed under the soft white hair.

  Hours to kill. The train wasn’t till late morning. It was close to dawn. “Domnul—sir. Are you looking for something? Vous cherchez quelque-chose?” The boy at the newspaper kiosk was talking to him. He had a sheep’s big eyes.

  Prochenko was looking for something. The world was falling apart. There was no news in the papers, but a clever man could see the shortages and misery in every story, even the most desperately optimistic. Elena Bocu-Bibescu, the president’s wife, had hosted a grand cotillion in the People’s Palace. In Poland, where the Germans and Russians fought each other in the endless woods, there was no progress of any kind.

  He strode out into the piata and the street. God, hours to kill. And because this was Bucharest, the sapphire city with its marble buildings and blue-tiled domes, and because he had just seen Elena Bibescu’s name in print, he knew the demon would find him. It was a question of time. A debutante’s cotillion with only seventeen names—how sad that was! The first time he had attended an event like that, in the dress uniform of the Ninth Hussars, there had been three times that number—long–necked swans with white gloves up their arms. But that was more than twenty years ago.

  He wore a light linen jacket and no overcoat, and in the raw, foggy hour before dawn he was not cold. On the contrary—he spat into the gutter. The train had been intolerable. Always when he was overheated, he found his mouth filling up with saliva. It wasn’t normal; he was always a couple of degrees warmer than the rest.

  For ten minutes the lieutenant strolled along the boulevard toward the center of town. These streets were deserted, dark. The shutters of the shops were closed. He would be easy to find. At a corner of the street under a portico he stopped to light another cigarette, a small, intermittent beacon, he supposed.

  What should he do? What should he do now? Almost without thinking he drew the envelope of hieroglyphs out of his inside pocket—why had he stolen it? Just out of malice, he supposed, and because sometimes he imagined that in Chiselet might lie the key to his triple nature.

  Now, disgusted with himself, he crumpled up the ornate pages, dropped them into the wet gutter. In fact he had no use for them. It was the other letter that concerned him, Peter’s letter to Miranda Popescu. If Captain Gross thought he could shame Prochenko into baby-sitting her in her mountain safe house, well, then maybe there was shame enough for both of them. And maybe Prochenko could bring Miranda something she cared about, something to share with her, some new piece of information. He wouldn’t let Peter Gross humiliate him; he broke the seal, opened the envelope. He held the cigarette between his lips, and by the light of occasional matches he read Peter’s schoolboy script—both he and Miranda wrote in the same childish cursive.

  It was a love letter. It was not long. There was nothing poetical about it. Gray wolf, Prochenko thought.

  But still, the letter filled him with emotion. And he would go to Rimnicu, and he would do what he had promised.

  How strange it was, though, that he had to act
as Peter Gross’s proxy in this matter, protecting Miranda from threats he could not claim to understand—he had no independent recollection of events along the Hoosick riverbank. Vague wisps of color and distress: no, Peter’s urgency had nothing to do with that. If, brooding at Staro Selo over the winter, he realized he had joined his regiment more out of panic than self-sacrifice or (God help him!) patriotism, now he was trapped just the same. Now, it was obvious from the letter, he was afraid he’d missed his chance to tell Miranda how he felt.

  Carefully, almost reverently, Prochenko refolded the single page and slid it back into its envelope. He replaced it in his pocket, and then stood smoking his cigarette. He was expecting his own small manifestation of love. He didn’t have long to wait. There it was above him in the round vault, perched on a protruding brick. It sat in a meditative pose, tiny fist under its chin, wings folded. Then it fell forward in a somersault, tumbling forward into the air, drifting down and down. Prochenko held his breath. He waited, a smile on his gray lips, and with his face inclined upward he let out a stream of smoke. Light and flimsy, the creature shied away, disturbed (as Prochenko imagined) by the small hot poisonous current of air.

  “Go!” Prochenko said. “Vas-y! You know what I want.”

  The creature, a naked boy just a few centimeters tall, made kicking, swimming motions and flapped its evanescent wings. Buffeted by every change of air, it started on its way. As it rose into the pale sky, Prochenko wondered (not for the first time) how it could fly so fast, so far on its unsteady course. This he knew: By the time he had reached Tineretului Park and Belu Cemetery, it would have crossed the city to the Strada Italiana, to Elena Bibescu’s house, or else found a way to reach her in the People’s Palace.

  And he had no intention of dawdling. Nor would he take a streetcar from the Piata Universitatii. But while the streets were still empty he would run the seven kilometers or so. It would feel good to run. He would not stop or draw breath. He would catch some pleasure from the strangeness of his body and arrive unwinded in an hour. Less than that, except he would take the long way round, find the empty industrial or residential streets. But first he stripped off his jacket, stripped off his boots and socks and tied them in a package underneath his arm, together with his stick and hat. His feet would be quick and clever on the cobblestones. He spat into the gutter, then started off down the alley toward the Dambovita River and the Promenade.

  At such moments his body felt like a furnace to him, flaring and dirty, needing no stoking. But inside there was a metal that could not be rarefied, that separated often into its three component elements. How was it possible, he thought, that Peter Gross could have found a way to keep himself whole? He was lucky to have lost his arm.

  How was it possible that Miranda had grown into a woman, while day by day Prochenko split apart? And yet in the beginning of this adventure he was the one who had found his way while they seemed helpless, even though his path was the most difficult. In time the separate parts of them had healed, and they had grown toward each other, too. What was in the love letter Peter Gross had given him? What was the feeling underneath the words? He thought he knew.

  There was a mist on the river as he loped along the embankment. The still water cast up reflections of the narrow gothic houses, built in the previous century. Their stone façades were pitted with coal and charcoal smoke. The wrought-iron fence along the Promenade was stained and green. People came trudging down the streets, their scarves over their heads—a city of women and old men on their way to work. Special streetcars would take them out to the suburban factories for the morning shift.

  Mouths agape, they turned to watch him as he ran past. If only they knew! He ran east along the Strada Lipscani, then turned south. By the time he reached the park, the light was in the sky.

  What was Elena doing now? What excuses was she making to secretaries and servants? Would she come in the limousine? But it would take time! And he was glad to be here early; he crossed the street under the trees. She would know the place. They had met here several times in the previous year.

  It was a pleasure, he admitted, to make her take such risks. Why should he be the only one? But he had learned to damage what he hated, damage what he loved. He was the one who had killed Nicola Ceausescu, after all, murdered her when she stood vulnerable and exposed outside her own apartment in the People’s Palace.

  At the time he had imagined doing what he did for the sake of Great Roumania, because the baroness had been an evil woman who had destroyed many with her schemes. Even so, because the czar loved her and the sultan might have learned to love her, perhaps she could have avoided this great war. And President Bocu was obviously worse, a criminal without a grain of sentiment.

  Prochenko stood before the gates of Belu Cemetery under the trees. Almost canine in his obsession with his own guilt, he had come often to this place. The gate was locked, but he knew a hole behind the bushes where the wall was broken down.

  First he found a park bench in a square of raked gravel. He wiped his bleeding feet, pulled on his boots. He swept his hair back from his forehead, affixed his hat at a precise angle, put on his jacket. And with his cane in his hand he climbed in among the headstones, once more a jaunty and dapper man about town. The light was breaking through the clouds.

  No one who had seen him running through the streets, his tongue protruding over his bright teeth, would have recognized him now. And no one would think, to watch him stroll idly down the rows of tombs, that he knew where he was going. But in a corner of the wall under the linden trees, a new mausoleum had been built.

  The first tomb in this plot belonged to the old Baron Ceausescu, once a deputy prime minister of Roumania, who had taken his own life fourteen years before. Loaded with debt, his widow had spared every expense. Not for him a grand celebration in the temple of his ancestors in Cluj. Instead she had trundled him in here under a simple stone that, nevertheless, took on a little dignity because of its surroundings now.

  The baron had died penniless and bankrupt, estranged from his own family. Now beside him lay his only child, the dirt still rough over his grave. But the statue was eloquent, an image of Niobe weeping for her children. And in the stone face of the unfortunate mother, a careful observer could discern an echo of the baroness’s beautiful features.

  One of the stone hands reached out to a simple marker, cut with the young baron’s name and dates—Felix Ceausescu, dead before his fifteenth birthday. But the other was thrown backward as if in a fit of grief, and the pointed finger indicated another stone, set against the bottom of the wall. There was no name or number there, and the lieutenant wondered whether there might come a time when no one would appreciate the significance of the gesture or the unmarked grave. How long would it take before all the witnesses to the events were dead? How long before it was impossible for any student of history to learn that the elaborate tomb of Kevin Markasev in Baneasa was empty, or else the wrong corpse was buried there under the wrong dates? No, the unfortunate boy lay here instead.

  The lieutenant closed his eyes. Would there come a time, also, when no one but he would know the truth of how Nicola Ceausescu died? That while her proxy had destroyed itself on the stage of the Ambassadors, she had been savaged in her own suite of rooms in the People’s Palace, torn apart, murdered by a wild beast?

  At moments he could not but remember the sight of Kevin Markasev bleeding in his rented room in the Strada Camatei, beaten out of recognition by the baroness’s hired assassin—though she had not paid him, doubtless. It was not her way. Doubtless also it was a kind of ironic masochism that had brought Prochenko here, made him choose this place for his rendezvous. What had Peter Gross said? “I have a rendezvous with Death.”

  To clear his mind of the bloody image, and to purge himself of any painful and embarrassing self-reflection, he turned now to the baroness’s mausoleum. She had set herself apart from the other members of her family, away from the wall. There was a circle of gravel around the structure
, and Prochenko sauntered around it, flicking at the pebbles with his cane. But little thoughts still picked at him: Why had he come here? Why had he sent that demon on its errand? Was there any part of what he did now that was motivated by love or loyalty? Or was he looking for people to suffer as he suffered? Sometimes he reassured himself by thinking he’d avenged Kevin Markasev after all, torn his murderer apart. But there was nothing noble in that either.

  It calmed him and cooled him to admire the little tomb, designed by the baroness herself. She was a woman of many gifts. The drawings had been discovered after her death. They depicted a high, domed circular structure, decorated with fluted columns and alabaster screens. Delicate spires gave the exterior a spiky and forbidding look, which was softened by a pattern of carved marble, a motif that suggested flowers and vines and shaded bowers without actually representing them. All the ornamentation was abstract, a complicated shell that was more light and space and air than stone, but which still served to protect the image inside. It was a life-sized bronze casting of the baroness standing naked and erect, head high, arms at her sides, legs slightly spread—there was no art or coquetry in the pose. The artist had worked from a sheaf of photographic images that the baroness had made during the last year of her life, standing naked before the big box camera with the bulb under her toe. She had made many hundreds of exposures without sparing the most intimate parts of her body or making any attempt to flatter herself.

  The photographs had not been reproduced or distributed. And the statue, though designed for public display, was perfectly concealed by the tomb’s ornamentation. The archways that pierced the structure were too narrow, the screens that surrounded it too fine to admit more than an occasional stray glimpse of a shoulder, knee, eye, or hand. Some onlookers imagined a mournful expression, some an attitude of brazenness that matched the metal of the statue. But it was impossible not to take away an impression of constraint, of an animal inside a cage or a prisoner inside a cell, which was the baroness’s intention, revealed in a letter that accompanied the design.