The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  These words, these revelations were delivered without any force as Madame de Rougemont moved around the room. Because it’s all so old, Miranda thought. Who cares anymore? Clara Brancoveanu was asleep upstairs.

  “Who stole your mother from you, and your father, and your childhood?” continued de Rougemont, as if she were discussing something not so very important.

  Tears dripped down the outside of Miranda’s glass under her finger. “I cannot prove these things, but they are true,” said the woman. Her glass, close to Miranda’s, had lipstick smears. “So it is not a terrible thing to fail or disappoint such a one. Great leaders, as we see, bring great wars.”

  Maybe all this was possible to listen to, Miranda thought, because it complemented something inside of her, a suspicion from long ago. At any rate, true or not, nothing was completely true. That’s one thing she had learned. Baron Ceausescu might have had his heart broken, but he was still a bad man, from everything she’d heard. Aegypta Schenck might have done all these things, but she had loved Miranda, too. Or at least she had valued her and wanted to protect her. Tried and failed. What did love mean anyway?

  “So. What gifts?” said Inez de Rougemont. She sat down again, put her sharp elbows onto the table. There was something clownish and hectic about the circle of blush on her cheek. When Miranda didn’t respond, she continued, “You said your aunt gave you clues and gifts. I see the bracelet of Queen Miranda Brancoveanu. What else?”

  “Well, there’s my father’s gun. Jean-Baptiste brought it from the palace. I told you…”

  “Yes.” De Rougemont sighed. “It would have been better if it had not fallen into Nicola Ceausescu’s hands. Two of the secret chambers are already empty. And in the normal way, this was what she used to murder her own son, de Graz told me.”

  So this lady had seen Peter, Miranda thought. Where—at Cismigiu Park? What had he said? Had they spoken about her?

  Though Inez de Rougemont lived here in hiding under an assumed name, she had often gone away on secret errands. Throughout the winter she was often gone for weeks at a time. Had she seen Peter and said nothing? What did it mean exactly, that the condesa and Miranda’s father had been … intimate?

  De Rougemont smiled. And it was as if she’d read Miranda’s mind—“Madame Magda de Graz,” she amended. “Who heard it from her son the chevalier. Whom I myself have never met. You do not trust me. Let me show you what I mean.”

  She fumbled underneath the embroidered placemat, and drew out something she must have hidden there just for this purpose: a photographic print. It showed a young woman dressed for a costume ball. Beside her was a man in military uniform—Miranda’s father, she supposed. His face was indistinct, because he had shifted during the exposure.

  The condesa stroked the edge of the photograph with her brittle finger. Her face took on a hungry, rapt expression. And everything that was sharp or dry or ugly in it nevertheless found its exact counterpart in the young woman’s beautiful features.

  “Then there were some smaller things I lost, money I spent,” Miranda said, to change the subject. “I gave money to my friend Andromeda. Nothing’s left.”

  De Rougemont shook her head. She covered the photograph with her white palm. “But that is not quite true. There is a reason why we are here. I was waiting for your health to improve.”

  Miranda said nothing. She was of two minds. Madame de Rougemont had plucked her out of danger, given her a home, probably saved her and her mother’s life. An old friend of her father’s—why did she feel so defensive and begrudging? It was obvious what they were talking about.

  “It’s an object, but you can’t touch it or hold it,” she admitted finally. “I’ve got it hidden.”

  “But this is quite a riddle. Where?”

  Miranda didn’t want to tell her. She thought in half an hour this woman had taken valuable things from her and given her nothing except beet soup and parsnips and some wine, none of which she’d tasted. “In my mind,” she said, which seemed safe and ambiguous, and at the same time she was reaching down into the crevice in the rocks where she had kept the tourmaline. “I don’t even know if it’s real,” she said, and for a moment she was digging around in the wet moss, heart in her mouth, because it was gone. But no, there it was in a different place. And when she touched it, held the pulsing, soft-skinned jewel in her hand, then something new shuddered to life inside of her.

  Madame de Rougemont squinted across the table. Miranda could tell she knew something about what was going on. She was no fool. “What do you see?” she said.

  Miranda stood on the hillside, the tourmaline clasped in her hand. In the hidden world her sinuses were not congested, and she took deep draughts of the cold air. But of course she was also in the farmhouse library among the glass-fronted shelves. She sat in an old wooden chair with a cane seat.

  The mountains rose above her, and the sun was bright and harsh on her cheeks. She thought she could climb up the chute of rocks behind her, away and out of sight. It wasn’t possible. The door to the library opened, and her mother stood there. “Miranda, comme j’étais inquiète—how worried I was. Are you all right?”

  She came into the room and stood in the middle of the carpet. Her hair was tidy, curled up under tortoiseshell combs. She spoke in French, which was enough in itself to break the mood. “You left without waking me,” she said. “How are you feeling? Would you like an aspirin? This is not proper food for you.”

  Ever since Felix Ceausescu’s death, Miranda’s mother wouldn’t let her alone. “I’ll ask Jean-Baptiste to bring hot broth and chamomile tea. What are you talking about? I can tell that I’m intruding.”

  Miranda dropped the tourmaline into the moss. She was relieved and grateful to see no trace of impatience on Inez de Rougemont’s arch and brittle face. Her hand was on the photograph beside her plate, and now she slid her napkin over it. And everything about her seemed to soften as she spoke. “Clara, come in—of course, how silly of me. I thought we might need this breakfast for an expedition, but I was premature. Some chamomile tea—it would be lovely.”

  “What do you mean? Miranda is in no state to go outdoors.” Clara Brancoveanu stood rubbing her hands together, her face full of anxiety. “Why don’t you tell me anything? Please, I want to know.”

  Ever since Felix Ceausescu had died in her arms, bled to death on the stones outside the People’s Palace, she had been intolerable. Miranda often found herself consumed with irritation, which made de Rougemont’s gentleness even more impressive, she thought grudgingly. There was nothing in her voice but tenderness and concern—this for a woman, if Miranda had understood, who had married her lover, stolen him away.

  “We were talking about Nicola Ceausescu,” said Inez de Rougemont.

  “Oh, and doubtless you were telling terrible things! You have no kindness for her. But I have told you many times how she saved us, freed us—me and Madame de Graz, when we were in prison. It was an act of kindness, and a day later she was dead—don’t tell me that was a coincidence. But in this house all I hear is terrible accusations of murder and worse, things that no one can know for sure.…”

  She was not capable of understanding even this, Miranda thought: that Nicola Ceausescu had murdered her own son. Now she stood in the middle of the room, rubbing her hands. Inez de Rougemont waited for her to stop speaking. “Clara, you’re right,” she said. “How could I disagree? It is not prudent to curse the dead.”

  5

  An Unexpected Visitor

  IT IS NOT wise or prudent to curse the dead, because the dead can hear us. Often they don’t care. Many are able to lay down their grudges with their abandoned bodies. Many are able to forget their struggles and animosities. Nicola Ceausescu was not one of these.

  People say the ghosts of suicides are especially dissatisfied, especially unquiet. Some of the thousands who had visited her catafalque in the nave of Cleopatra’s temple, had reached past the velvet ropes to touch it and say a prayer, or had followed her c
offin through the streets to Belu Cemetery, took a peculiar pleasure in imagining her among the restless dead. They saw her roaming the dark stages and concert halls in Bucharest or abroad, where she had seen so many triumphs. They saw her stalking the galleries of the People’s Palace, or else lighting candles in the upper windows of her old house on Saltpetre Street. For years she had filled the little theaters of their hearts and heads. How could they think of her as vanished, gone?

  They might have been thrilled to imagine the truth. The baroness’s coffin had not contained her body, but only a small quantity of ectoplasmic slime. But they would have misinterpreted the cause: Nicola Ceausescu had not killed herself. She had not cut her own throat, as all the newspapers had reported, on the boards of the Ambassadors. She had not cheated the police as they reached out to arrest her for collaboration with the Germans and other more sinister and private crimes. The struggle between her self-love and self-hatred, always the secret of her artistic success, was too violent and elemental to have been resolved that way.

  No, it had been a cold simulacrum that had collapsed onstage, animated from a distance. Nicola Ceausescu had died in the People’s Palace, torn to pieces by a monster that was only partly human. She retained the burning rage of the murdered dead. Only two living persons were exempt from this. One of them was her loyal steward, Jean-Baptiste, who had found her despoiled body, wept over her, gathered her up, washed away the blood.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON he was fussing in the kitchen. Just as Radu Luckacz boarded the train to Pitesti and Rimnicu, Jean-Baptiste came in through the double doors carrying toast and marmalade, some of which was on his sleeve.

  Since the untasted breakfast of parsnips and white wine, the library had become Miranda’s favorite room in the house. As Jean-Baptiste hovered above her, eager to speak, she put down her book.

  “You don’t have to bring me coffee and these things. You don’t get paid for it. And it makes me uncomfortable.”

  “Miss, I do what pleases me. That’s how you know I’m not your servant.”

  “Did Nicola Ceausescu pay you?”

  “No. Sometimes I had to give her money in the old days.”

  He stood above her, still dressed in the baroness’s personal livery, which he had worn the whole time Miranda was imprisoned in the People’s Palace. Then she had thought his disheveled appearance in the ornate rooms had suggested some kind of ironic statement or attitude. Now she was less positive. His shirt had come untucked along one side. His jacket, decorated with threadbare scarlet piping, was too small, and pulled his narrow shoulders into a perpetual shrug—he was an old man with a high, bald forehead. He had shaved that morning for the first time in days, and had cut himself in several places. His Adam’s apple showed a shiny new scab.

  He dropped the plate onto the table and then stood above her as she nibbled at the toast. She thought it was the least she could do.

  “What are you reading?” asked Jean-Baptiste.

  “It’s a history book.”

  “My mistress used to read poetry in the morning. She was a brilliant artist. There was no one like her.”

  “So you say.”

  Unexplored between them was the memory of Miranda’s last night in the palace, when the baroness had forced her to read the palindromes in Isaac Newton’s black book, and had fired her father’s great revolver in the dark, releasing two powerful demons into the world. That night the baroness might have killed Jean-Baptiste, shot him or else had him shot. “She had an artist’s temper,” he continued lamely, picking at his nails.

  After the baroness’s death, he had come up from the city with the gun and the book, too. So it must have been somewhat on his mind, Miranda thought. Maybe the way he stood above her and praised the baroness now, under the circumstances that might have been part of the same ironic impulse. He and Miranda’s mother never missed an opportunity to praise her. Stubbornly denying her worst crimes, they gave her the benefit of every doubt, though they lived in a house of people who had suffered from her malice.

  “Yeah, that’s great,” Miranda said in English.

  “Artists and geniuses are different from other people. Ordinary rules don’t apply to them. Because they give us so much pleasure.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she murmured.

  The book she had been reading was about an earlier war, Miranda Brancoveanu’s struggle against the Turks. This was Miranda’s namesake, the first of the white tygers and the first person to wear the bracelet that now clattered wearily against her cider glass. And at least in this narration, it seemed as if she’d had an easier time. Whatever her tribulations, the victory had always seemed inevitable. And the forces of evil, the forces of good—all that was clear.

  But maybe that was the thing about history. The pattern of events, of causes and effects, only was obvious when you looked backward. Nothing that happened had any predictive value. No doubt that white tyger, also, had been struggling in the dark.

  Miranda closed the book, sipped the cider, nibbled the burned toast. Everything was murky now. Again Roumania fought the Turks, this time along an enormous battlefront south of the Danube River. But the Turks had mobilized against their wishes, according to some reports. They had been dragged into a war because of a secret treaty with the German Republic. When the Germans had occupied Bucharest, there had been no reason for this war.

  And for a while there had even been a truce between Roumania and Russia—Miranda had had a hand in that, as Inez de Rougemont had acknowledged. But in almost her last official act, the Baroness Ceausescu had broken the truce in a spectacular double-cross, and peace had slipped away. Now the Germans still occupied the Bucovina and the Transylvanian oil fields, and there was a bloody stalemate along two gigantic fronts. The worst of everything had come to pass.

  Needless to say, the first white tyger had had her own setbacks. From time to time, Miranda had read in her book, she had found places of refuge in the middle of some disaster. Once she had spent a winter here in these same mountains, prior to some new indomitable push.

  And in those places of refuge, did she talk and think and argue about what should be done? Or was everything obvious and plain? Over the winter, during her illness, sitting up in bed to read Madame de Rougemont’s books, Miranda could not fail to wonder what she was going to do next, after she was well—first things first, as Stanley, her adoptive father, might have said.

  “She could be a model to us because of her passion. You must understand that.”

  Jean-Baptiste was still talking about Nicola Ceausescu. He stood beside the breakfast table with a teapot in his hands. His voice was anxious and aggressive, because he did not quite believe what he was saying, Miranda thought. If he believed it, why was it necessary to say it over and over? But a woman he loved was dead, that much was true.

  And maybe she really could still be a model to us because of her passion. Maybe he was right about that. Miranda sighed, glanced out of the window at the long, dun fields. She had slipped out of the world into this village, but now it was time. Spring would be here soon, and she could walk into the mountain without coughing or losing breath. Even her cold had cleared up. For a week it had made her dull.

  “You must seize hold of what you want,” said Jean-Baptiste.

  When she had first come to this world from Berkshire County, Miranda had pretended that she had a choice. She had believed or had attempted to believe she did not need to be concerned with all these problems, these people she didn’t know, mothers and fathers she’d never met, intrigue that did not concern her. And when that turned out not to be true, she had thought that she could learn to dominate the world of guns and horses and heroes, because she was a princess of Great Roumania and the daughter of General Schenck von Schenck. When that led to disaster, she had retreated here, where what remained was access to the hidden world.

  “Courage, that’s what there is,” said Jean-Baptiste. “That’s what she showed me.…” What
was he talking about? But it was true that Miranda had not used her strength, especially not here in this refuge. She had kept it secret and she had not shared it with the Condesa de Rougemont, who had saved her and protected her, protected her mother, too, a woman she had every reason to despise. Miranda had not thanked her. She had not given what she so obviously wanted.

  The previous evening the condesa had left the house after supper, as she sometimes did. So when she next returned from wherever she was, from her own secret world, Miranda thought, maybe there was something to be done.

  And it was not just because Miranda owed her something for her kindness. But maybe she could help Miranda to discover the strength of the white tyger, accomplish the task she had been brought here to perform. Which was—what? Oh, the usual. Peace. Stability. Justice, and the American Way. Though maybe those things would not turn out to mean what her aunt had intended—peace above all. Maybe her father’s friend could be trusted, as she had never even tried to trust her own mother or Aegypta Schenck.

  And as if conjured by her doubt, Princess Clara now appeared at the library door. “I thought I smelled some coffee. My, doesn’t that look good,” she said. But even in the middle of these banalities, her eyes were nervous, sad.

  “Miranda, how are you feeling? You look flushed,” she said. “Do you have room for us? We don’t want to interrupt.”

  Damaged by suffering and her long imprisonment, as always she seemed close to tears. Behind her came Madame de Graz, up from Bucharest for a short visit; she had arrived that morning. Her shoulders were hunched, her back was bent from osteoporosis. Her eyes were milky with cataracts. She walked with a small limp, one hip higher than the other. But even so she moved with purpose and deliberation, a small woman with white hair and a thick neck. Physically frail, she gave an impression of mental energy that was different from the princess. Eschewing small talk, she marched into the room and sat at the long table. She unrolled the newspaper, the Roumania Libera, which had come up from the capital on the first train. She pressed the pages flat and then peered carefully at the headlines out of the sides of her eyes. It was her morning habit. She would not allow anyone to read to her.