The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  There was the smell of a used chamber pot somewhere in the room. Bocu took a cigar from his inside pocket, clipped it, lit it at the flame. “Domnul Luckacz,” he said after a pause.

  He had the impression the man had been awake from the time the key had rattled in the door. Now he stirred, a bald man with a wasted, diminished face. Once, of course, he had been chief of the metropolitan police. That was during the German occupation, when the baroness lived in the People’s Palace.

  “Come,” said Colonel Bocu. With the cigar between his teeth, he twisted off the cork from the bottle of champagne. “I want to ask you a question.”

  He pulled out one of the chairs and sat astride it backward. He made a gesture toward the other chair, and Luckacz raised his head. “Your excellency, I must inform you. And also I protest. I am not given any clothes.”

  His voice was ugly, marred by a Hungarian accent. Bocu laughed, then picked a shred of tobacco from between his teeth. He crossed his arms over the back of the chair. “We don’t stand on ceremony here. Do you have any complaints?”

  “Excellency, I am permitted nothing but underclothing!”

  “But it’s not as if you entertain. When it comes to me, I’m always having to choose a different shirt. And the cleaning bills…”

  He smoked his cigar. Then he couldn’t resist: “You must admit this is a convenience. No, I mean do you have any complaints. You remember why you’re here.”

  “Yes, your excellency.”

  “It’s because I asked you to do something. I gave you the responsibility.”

  “Yes.”

  “I asked you to arrest Madame Ceausescu and I gave you the men to do it. I specified the hour, not some other hour. Not some other day. You understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Instead you made your own decisions, with the result that Nicola Ceausescu was able to escape her crimes, destroy herself in a public theater in this city. You understand that was not a fortunate result?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then allow me to let bygones be bygones. Have some champagne.”

  He threw his cigar into the corner of the room. Then he poured the frothing liquor into the crystal flutes—two of a set that had belonged to Nicola Ceausescu, as it happened, a gift from the German ambassador. With a glass in each hand he went to sit on the metal bed, whose occupant had pulled himself upright. He sat cross-legged, huddled in his blankets.

  “To your health. Now, I want you to remember what you said to me that day. It was about Mademoiselle Popescu, Miranda Popescu, von Schenck’s daughter—do you remember? The baroness sent you on an errand, is that so?”

  “Yes, your excellency.”

  “But you did not obey her—Domnul Luckacz, this is a custom with you! The baroness sent you to find this woman, this girl. She gave you an address, the name of a small town.”

  Luckacz groaned.

  “Now I must ask you. I was remembering General von Schenck. I was thinking about his daughter. There are very few photographs of the general, but I found one. Let me show it to you.”

  Bocu drew a strip of photographic paper from the inside pocket of his coat. He angled it away from him so it would catch the lamplight. Von Schenck was posing with a group of officers, members of his staff. He had moved when the exposure was taken. His face was blurred and indistinct. The entire print was dark with age. The general had been dead for over twenty years.

  But the faces of the younger officers had all come clear. Obviously they had been used to posing. “Do you recognize that man?” asked Bocu.

  He lifted the champagne to his lips but did not drink. While the policeman examined the photograph, he replaced the glass on the little table. Then he produced another document from his pocket, a folded ration card with a photograph attached.

  “That is a person who calls himself Andromedes,” said Radu Luckacz.

  Bocu cocked his head. Luckacz’s voice, nasal and foreign and therefore difficult to decipher, contained a trace of something—was it rage? The strip of paper was trembling in his hands.

  “It is not his actual name,” he went on.

  “You astonish me. And is he an acquaintance of Mademoiselle Popescu? Is there a reason why he would be carrying a letter for her? You see in this exposure, the name is printed down below. Lieutenant Alexei Prochenko, Ninth Hussars. But you admit it is the same face on the ration card, the identical expression, clipped from another example of this same photograph. Don’t you think so?”

  Luckacz shrugged. The paper trembled.

  “And if I were to look for this man, maybe I would look for Mademoiselle Popescu first. That would be logical. And maybe I would ask the help of someone who had no complaints. Someone who was eager to show he could be trusted. Especially if this was a private, secret matter. A personal matter—you have a fat wife and daughter in the city, don’t you? Maybe you haven’t seen them in several months, but they’re still living at the same address. They are not permitted to go elsewhere.”

  Bocu smiled. Radu Luckacz, his face skeletal, turned to look at him. What was he thinking? He was hard to read. “Mademoiselle Popescu is a dangerous criminal,” said the colonel. “Didn’t I hear that somewhere? Didn’t you tell me that?”

  Radu Luckacz’s lips were thin and bloodless. “She killed a policeman in Braila.”

  “Yes. So will you drink your champagne? And will you help me, do you think? Will you help me bring her back to Bucharest, to stand trial or at least answer our questions? There are a number of people who are interested in her, a beautiful woman, I suppose, the last of the Brancoveanus. At least I hope she is a beautiful woman—this is a duty you might owe to the republic. And you must tell me if you remember this name—Inez de Rougemont. I believe she was a figure in society.”

  The policeman shrugged. His face was expressionless. “She has been dead more than fifteen years.”

  Bocu smiled. “Maybe not so long. And so we come full circle. Will you tell me where to find this little town?”

  * * *

  EARLY THAT SAME morning in Stanesti-Jui, Miranda was on the mountainside. The dogs ran back and forth below her as she retraced her steps toward the farmhouse.

  The Condesa de Rougemont had provided a refuge, not just for Miranda after she had escaped from the People’s Palace, but for several others: Miranda’s own mother, and even Jean-Baptiste, who had been the Baroness Ceausescu’s steward.

  Miranda was grateful. But she did not think that Inez de Rougemont was motivated only by generosity. No, she was another woman like Miranda’s aunt, a dabbler in the hidden world, and someone who had dreams for Great Roumania. Miranda had seen her in a coven of strange women on Borgo Pass, a place that had been only partially a dream. If Miranda had not mentioned anything about that up to now, it was not because she hadn’t thought about it. What could she say? “I saw you in Dracula’s castle in the mountains, where you were dividing up the future of the world. I rode there on a Gypsy’s back.…”—events that hadn’t necessarily occurred in any normal sense.

  Surely Madame de Rougemont should be the first to mention that, explain it. Without an explanation, what was there to say? It was not enough to know she was a friend of Madame de Graz—Peter’s mother—and she lived in retirement in this mountain village, and she kept a number of connections from the old days.

  When Miranda came down through the meadow into the garden, there was a light in the cowshed and the dogs scampered away. Miranda came in the front door and walked down the stone-flagged corridor. The fire was lit in the big kitchen, where there would be café au lait and slabs of dry toast.

  Now that spring had come and she’d recovered from her illness, there were decisions to be made, explanations to be found. Perhaps Madame de Rougemont thought so, too, because she was sitting at the oak table near the window. In the half-light she seemed dowdy, her gray hair struggling to free itself. As always, she had some powder on her cheeks, some artificial color. Of these women, she was the one who worked to main
tain an artificial connection to her youth. She wore lipstick. She was dressed in a flowered gown and a lace shawl.

  She had been reading next to the window, and her eyes when she took off her spectacles were dark and bright. “You must not go out like that,” she said. “I am pleased you’re feeling better. But you must not go out by yourself.”

  Miranda shrugged. “Madame Ceausescu kept me locked in my room.”

  De Rougemont frowned. “I think we could chain you to the wall,” she said. “You’d still be free.”

  Was she referring to the tourmaline, and Miranda’s expeditions in the hidden world? She had poured a cup of coffee from the silver pot. Now she reached for the sugar bowl. “There is always part of this that is a game,” she continued. “Let me remind you men are dying in Bulgaria and the Ukraine. It is hard to imagine it when we are sitting here.”

  Yes, it was hard to imagine. Miranda saw a furtive image of Peter’s face as he had appeared to her in the brick gazebo in Cismigiu Park. She shook her head; what was remarkable, she thought, was how much sugar the old woman used. She had not noticed in the overheated kitchen on Borgo Pass. But now she watched, fascinated as de Rougemont poured milk into her big cup, then stirred in four—no, five—teaspoons of sugar. In the meantime, of course, she was completely right. “That’s not what I meant,” Miranda said. “I know I have a great deal to be thankful for.”

  This was not, however, what she felt, especially at that moment. She washed her hands in a basin of cold water with some yellow soap. The skin of her palms was chapped and raw.

  Madame de Rougemont stood up. “The others will be coming,” she said. “I want to talk with you alone.” Carrying her coffee cup, she led Miranda down a different corridor into another room, a library with glass-faced shelves, furnished in a more elegant and cosmopolitan style than the rest of the house. There was a carpet on the stone floor and a table set for two.

  She lit the petroleum lamp as Miranda came in, using a long wooden match that made her fingers, wrists, and forearms look unnaturally thin. Miranda imagined she could snap them between her hands. She imagined them catching fire in some terrible accident and burning down to stumps.

  But the condesa had been nothing but kind from the beginning. What was the source of Miranda’s anxiety and irritation? She knew Madame de Rougemont would want to talk to her about the tourmaline, about the hidden world, about her father. Didn’t she also want to talk about these things? Didn’t she want to trust this woman who had been so kind?

  Now the old lady moved from lamp to lamp. And maybe she felt some of the same anxiety, because she seemed so tired, dry, pallid, and brittle-boned. Her head was small and thin and bloodless, her lips red. “We don’t have much of a table here,” she confessed, shaking out her little flame. “But there is wine.”

  It was from Georgia, yellower than water, sweating in a glass bucket of ice. Breakfast was already served, bread and butter, cold beet soup, and parsnip salad. It was too much to eat, too much of the wrong things. Miranda blew her nose on her handkerchief and then sat down. She was thankful, at least, that she could smell the soup.

  She felt a current of sadness in the still air, a sensation of loss that included many people, many things. She had come to this house with nothing, in borrowed clothes. How many times had she had to stop and start again?

  “Come eat,” said Madame de Rougemont as she sat down across the table and poured a glass of wine for both of them—who drank wine at breakfast? “It will give you strength for your journey. Do you still feel like a prisoner?”

  Miranda thought she’d always been too easy to read. Andromeda wasn’t like that, or even Peter, as it turned out. “I’ll tell you this,” she said in English. “If you’ve got an idea I’m going to help you fight some personal battle or something, I’m not interested.”

  De Rougemont smiled, a faint, wan expression. She answered in the same language. “Why would you think something like that?”

  It was because Miranda could not fail to be aware of the tiger’s-head bracelet on her wrist. Now it glinted in the lamplight next to the gray window. It made a noise as one gold bead moved against another. “Forgive me—someone always wants something. Why else would you keep me here?”

  “I was a friend of your father. Madame de Graz and I were both friends of your father. That’s why Pieter de Graz was on his staff.”

  No, don’t say it, Miranda thought, but she did: “You remind me of your father in some ways. But there is something else from your mother’s side. You understand your father was a modern man. He had his superstitions, of course, but even that was a substitute for something deeper. You must know I mean this in a technical sense. He had no interest in alchemy or conjuring. He was not like his sister, your aunt Aegypta. In many ways they were not … close.”

  “I had a dream about my aunt,” Miranda interrupted. She thought she would introduce the subject of what had happened in the castle on Borgo Pass, broach it indirectly. “Do you remember once you told me how she wrote that book about America as an experiment? An exercise in moral philosophy, or a utopia, something like that? Then it was an afterthought to put me into it, to protect me. Two nights ago she told me that returning when I did, none of that was what she wanted. I was supposed to leave home, go to college, marry, have kids, die of old age—I don’t know. The whole thing was supposed to be more gradual. I was supposed to be older, an adult. Which is why she hadn’t given any thought to the consequences, or to what might happen to me or Peter or Andromeda—”

  She stopped. It was a relief to talk about all that. But what the woman had remarked about her aunt and her father was beginning to penetrate. They were not close. How could they not have been close, or at least on the same side?

  But Miranda was still in the middle of what she wanted to say. And so after a moment she continued. “I know you want me to be like him—my father. A hero. General Schenck von Schenck. Someone to grab hold of this world and force it to make sense. I know that’s what my aunt Aegypta wanted. Your old pal. She gave me all kinds of letters and directions and clues and gifts. And you know what? I’ve failed at all of it. Things I tried on my own, things she told me to do…”

  For some strange reason this felt good to say, although she didn’t quite believe it. It was a relief just to be talking in the English language.

  Madame de Rougemont interrupted with a faint, soft laugh. “Perhaps it takes a hero to fail so much,” she said. “Besides, I don’t think that you give yourself so much credit. An enemy of Great Roumania is dead because of you. And for a moment there was a truce in this terrible war.”

  She was talking about things from the hidden world. Actions Miranda had taken, choices Miranda had made—how had she known about all that? No, but it was important to remember she had her own secret access to these things.

  Miranda reached out to touch her wine glass, and then paused. “‘Grab hold of this world,’” de Rougemont said. “‘Force it to make sense.’ Isn’t that what Nicola Ceausescu was attempting?”

  She got to her feet, drifted a little way across the carpet. “Mademoiselle—I think there are a few things that you ought to know. “I knew your father … intimately. But I was not a friend to your aunt.”

  A bead of moisture slipped down the side of glass where Miranda had touched it. Yuck, she thought, if she was right about what this lady was implying. Then she let go of her reaction suddenly, hungry for what might come next.

  “Mademoiselle Popescu—do you sometimes wonder why your father wanted that name for you? The most common name in all Roumania—it was not your mother’s idea. Your father was a republican, according to the German model that he learned when he was young. Do you know what that means?”

  “I … guess.”

  “It means he was not so interested in someone who would force things to make sense. He was interested in dull projects—land redistribution. Taxation reform. The abolition of hereditary titles. Not so much the glory of Great Roumania, or—God he
lp us—the restoration of the Brancoveanu family. That was your aunt’s design. That’s why she killed him. No. These are things we cannot know for sure.”

  Miranda said nothing. As if just from touching the outside of the wineglass, she felt a little drunk. Inez de Rougemont moved back and forth across the carpet, rubbing her long hands as if they itched. Then she examined her painted nails. “That is why she took him from me,” she amended. “Drugged his wine in Brasov—I don’t know—when we were secretly engaged. Made him marry your mother—I can’t prove any of that. These are more hard things to verify. It doesn’t matter. I have had twenty-five years to say them to myself.”

  “But…”

  “She wanted the pure Brancoveanu blood. The day after his wedding, he came to me.”

  “But…”

  “I know what you want to know. Your father was arrested on a charge of treason. He was said to be plotting a separate negotiation with the German-speaking regions of Transylvania. That was a lie, I know it. But the documents were real enough. Baron Ceausescu believed in their authenticity, at least at first. You understand—I knew him, too. He was your father’s oldest friend. Comrade in arms. This broke his heart.”

  Miranda had heard parts of the story from Captain Raevsky, Blind Rodica, and Gregor Splaa. Her father had died in prison after Ceausescu turned on him. “Where do you think those letters came from?” said Inez de Rougemont. “Who wrote them and forged your father’s signature? Who abandoned your mother in Ratisbon hours after she gave birth to you—she could have brought her out. She wanted you all to herself. A weapon, I suppose. A hero, as you say, for Great Roumania.”