The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  Except for her adoptive grandmother in Colorado, Miranda had not spent much of her time around old ladies. But these three—four, if you counted the ghost of her aunt—she had gotten to know well, their little similarities and differences. All of them were joined to her and to each other by her absent father, General Schenck von Schenck—the lover, the wife, the sister, the political patron and confidante. Old vines hanging from a tree, and even when the tree was cut down they maintained some vestige of its absent shape, their static struggle.

  “Here is the news from Staro Selo,” came Magda de Graz’s quavering voice. Miranda listened for a while. She knew that she and Madame de Graz were interested in the same piece of information, but they weren’t likely to find it in the newspaper. If what the paper said was true, the war was almost over, almost won, the road almost open to Byzantium itself.

  But there had been a victory. A great assault had been beaten off. Miranda glanced down at her book again, then closed it and sat for a while with her mother while Jean-Baptiste bustled around. Rude to the rest of them, he always treated Peter’s mother with a dignified courtesy. The contrast made Miranda smile. In time she made excuses, said she would go lie down.

  But she didn’t, didn’t feel like it. She didn’t need to lie in bed worrying about Peter Gross. It was a bright day outside, and she wanted to take a walk, prepare herself for Madame de Rougemont’s return. Her lungs were clear today, and she felt strong enough to climb up into the hidden world, up the chute in the rocks that she’d discovered, where the air was thin. She went out the big wooden door. The dogs came to her, and she set off along the edge of the field toward the evergreens in back of the house.

  It was a bright, windy day. Clouds scurried over the mountain peaks, still capped in snow. The air was colder than she’d thought, but Miranda didn’t want to go back for more clothes. Instead she hugged her arms and put her head down, kicking at the mud with her black boots. She found herself hurrying, stumbling away from the house as if she chased the dogs. In retrospect, later, she imagined she might have known where she was going. Or else below the level of conscious thought she had received some clue. The crows screamed and scattered across the field. Lucius and Lionel were investigating something at the edge of the trees. When they shied back, panicked and whimpering, she broke into a run.

  She found Andromeda curled around herself in a nest of last year’s pine needles. Her hindquarters were streaked with blood, and she was licking at herself with her long tongue. There were clumps of coarse hair in the hollow in the bank. Her face seemed bruised and malformed, and her eyes started open—gray with patches of blue and darker blue. Heart-struck, Miranda watched for a sign of recognition. The voice, when it came, was queer and airless, pushed out of shape by the distorted mouth: “Go away. Fuck you. Leave me alone.”

  Then: “Can’t a girl get some privacy?”

  Miranda, who had already turned her back, stood hugging her shoulders, as if to keep herself intact and untransformed. She raised her sleeve to wipe her face, wipe her eyes, before she turned around. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  Her friend lay curled up in the little hollow, her naked bottom streaked with red. Now, despite her words, she untucked her arms and legs and stretched out languorously, making no effort to hide herself. Her mouth opened and her tongue lolled out. She licked her shining teeth. Her whole body seemed to shine. Her hands and feet were filthy and abraded, black with grime.

  “You don’t look so good,” Andromeda said. She yawned again, stretched her arms out straight. “I don’t feel so good. What’s for lunch?”

  “Coffee, toast.”

  “Yuck.” But then she smiled, got to her feet. “Sounds good. I had a rabbit yesterday—hey, stop that. You look all freaked out.”

  Miranda smiled. Then she turned to watch her mother stumbling across the field, fashionably attired in a fur-lined overcoat, and carrying a rolled-up bundle of tweed—Miranda’s coat. “This is great,” she murmured.

  Already she had imagined smuggling Andromeda indoors up to her room. Already she’d been reminded forcibly of stuff they’d done when they were younger. Once Andromeda had gotten so drunk at a party she had almost passed out, and Miranda had had to drag her, giggling and laughing, upstairs in the house on Syndicate Road at two o’clock in the morning. Then as now, maybe it was appropriate that mothers should get involved, and that they should bring unlooked-for understanding. Andromeda’s mother, after all, had known what it was like to have too much to drink.

  “What happened to you?” said Princess Clara. “How could you come out without your coat? What’s the matter with the dogs? They were barking to come in, and then they hid under the table—oh!”

  “Mother,” Miranda said. “You remember Lieutenant Prochenko.”

  “Ma’am.” Andromeda stood up straight, arms at her sides. Miranda could see the deep, long scratches on her belly and her legs.

  A flicker of anxiety crossed the princess’s face. But then she closed her eyes and opened them. “Yes, of course. How do you do? Lieutenant, it’s been a long time.”

  She kept her eyes fixed on Andromeda’s face and head. And then she reached out her gloved hand. In her other arm she held the bundle of cloth. “I brought this for my daughter, but you might have a greater necessity.”

  “Madame la princesse.”

  Andromeda took the silk-lined tweed and swung it around her shoulders. Princess Clara grunted with relief. “I have not had the opportunity to thank you, lieutenant,” she said, “for your loyalty to my daughter and the protection you gave her all those years when I was a prisoner in Ratisbon. A mother could not wish for more devotion over so much time.”

  She spoke carefully and slowly. Andromeda bowed her beautiful yellow head. Her hair was longer than Miranda had ever seen it. “I had a duty to your husband, ma’am.”

  “As did we all. But we were not all able to fulfill that duty. As for my daughter, you see how she’s grown up. I could not be more proud and grateful.”

  So it was with her mother’s help that Miranda brought Andromeda upstairs to her own room, bundled up, her face hidden, the dogs whining and whimpering on their beds under the grand piano. Miranda brought wet towels for her to clean herself, clean the blood out of her private parts (“Can you give me a little space here, for Pete’s sake?”). Then she coaxed her into bed, and went downstairs to make sandwiches out of bread and meat. When she returned with a plate on a tray, as well as a cup of hard cider from the barrel, she was surprised and touched to see her mother had entered the room when she was gone. The princess was sitting on a stool beside the bed, talking in French about old times. When Miranda approached from the other side, Andromeda turned her head on the pillow and rolled her eyes, an expression so familiar and yet so faraway and gone, it almost hurt. Miranda smiled and hoped the princess hadn’t seen; a minute later she stood up to take her leave.

  “Oh, A.,” Miranda said when the door closed.

  Andromeda licked her lips. “Do I have a tale to tell,” she said, also an expression from the long-ago time in Berkshire County where they’d been girls together. Then, half gleeful, half condescending, she would use it to introduce the story of some romantic escapade. Boys had always been crazy about her, and not just high school kids but college boys, and even men older than that on one memorable occasion. Then she had burst suddenly and uncharacteristically into tears, as she did now, led to them, maybe, by the same chain of reminiscence.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Miranda had said, then as now in her upstairs room, dragging her half out of bed to embrace her, and she’d been right. But now she didn’t think she was. The tray that she had balanced on the coverlet fell to the floor. The cider spilled. Miranda could see the cuts under her hands, under the soft yellow hair, bleeding on the sheets.

  The tears dried up. Andromeda pushed her away. Kneeling on her heels beside the bed, Miranda waited for her to start talking. But she didn’t, and so Miranda changed the subject, rearranged th
e tray, picked up the cup. “Give me that,” Andromeda said, and she reached down to seize the piece of beef from the plate. Scorning the bread, she brought the meat to her mouth, ripped into it.

  “Something I don’t understand,” Miranda said, standing now, looking out the window at the mountain and the windy afternoon. “It was a dog at first, a yellow dog. Some kind of Labrador mix. Now that’s changed.”

  “Sure. Haven’t we all grown up a little bit?”

  “But you’re hurt.”

  Andromeda laughed, a sound and an expression unconnected to any kind of levity or joy. “Wolves, you know,” she said. “They scratch at each other and they bleed all over the place. They do it when they—you know.”

  “What?”

  “When they … you know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Then she told Miranda about something else, a creature who had bitten her, a little demon on the wind, its wings as fine as spiderweb. It was the demon from the big revolver: It had bitten her along her arm and neck, and she hadn’t been able to get her hand on it. But in some kind of enclosed space she had managed to pinch it between her fingers, crush it. “There was a lot of blood,” she said. “I wiped my hands on my leg. I couldn’t get it off. It had a perfume, or it made me bleed, you know, like an animal. Estrus, you know. I’d stop whenever there was a stream or a puddle all the way here. I’d try to wash away the stink, which brought them howling. All the way out of the city, or else through the woods. You used to tease me back at school. This was worse than that. Whatever.”

  “Oh, A.” Miranda turned from the window, took a few steps toward her friend. But there was nothing in Andromeda’s face that suggested she would welcome or accept any type of comfort or contact. She’d pulled back her thin lips to show her teeth.

  Miranda had seen the little demon tumbling into the air off the barrel of her father’s gun, a tiny figure of a naked boy. She’d said the words that had released it, while the Baroness Ceausescu pulled the trigger. There was another demon, too, a toad with a flap of skin under its fat arms, so it could fly or glide. Abcess, it was called. Where had it found its home, what section of muddy trench? Had it followed Peter Gross to Staro Selo?

  She had thought obscurely she had helped release these dangers into the world, some kind of love, some kind of violence. But she had not imagined they would follow her friends, chase them down.

  Abashed and guilty, she went to stand next to the window again. She watched the clouds blow over the mountain peaks. When she turned around, she saw Andromeda had gone to sleep as suddenly as an animal.

  It was probably the best thing. Before she left, Miranda pulled down the sheets to examine the long scratches where scabs were already forming. She wondered if her mother had seen any of this, seen what was before her, when they had all stood together under the trees.

  6

  Luckacz Makes an Arrest

  RADU LUCKACZ CHANGED trains at Rimnicu to the narrow-gauge railway that led into the hills. One of the palace secretaries had telegraphed ahead, and the men were waiting for him on the platform. They were dressed in the pale uniforms of Bocu’s Rezistenta party, as Luckacz was himself—baggy and drab, without any specific indication of rank, save for the discreet party badge on his lapel.

  Rimnicu was on the border of the tara Romaneasa, the heartland of Great Roumania. It was still in Bocu’s country, within his circle of control. The National Assembly, dominated by his political party, still had some influence here, though that would weaken as they moved into the mountains. The Carpathians and Transylvania belonged to General Antonescu and the army, except where the Germans had reoccupied the country north and east.

  Hostility between the colonel and the general had lessened over time, smothered in the war effort and their mutual need. But it still burned dark and smoky in these border towns. The party cadres and off-duty policemen, recruited from the capital, moved uneasily along the station platform. A young officer of the Brancoveanu artillery had accompanied Luckacz from Bucharest—a narrow-chested braggart, like most of Bocu’s private militia. Yet even he seemed to droop under the cold scrutiny of ordinary soldiers in their black and green uniforms, waiting for their trains.

  Luckacz had his hands in his pockets. Then he took off his hat and wiped his bald head with his handkerchief as he stood under the signal board. He cast his mind forward to what he was going to do and why—it was not a question of personal revenge, he told himself. Nor was it an issue of Bocu’s private, secret affairs, as he’d confided in the People’s Palace—a personal favor for the president of the republic. Nor was it primarily a matter of Luckacz’s own safety and ambition, or the safety of his wife and daughter, who were under Bocu’s hand. There was no possibility that Luckacz ever could regain a semblance of his old rank—no, nothing like that. Still, it was good to be free in the open air.

  It was a matter of principle. There was nest of traitors in Stanesti-Jui, aristocrats, republicans, and conjurers who could not be tolerated under present exigencies. The Baroness Ceausescu had given him the address, sent him on an errand, but he had failed her. Burdened with anger and jealousy, he had disobeyed her and been punished for it—he would not make that mistake again! But he would redeem himself by carrying out her last commands. If Andromedes was there, he would turn him over to Bocu’s men. It was no concern of his. Anger and jealousy had made him lose his way.

  No, he was after Miranda Popescu, the traitor’s daughter, the alchemist’s niece, who had killed a policeman. And the conspirators who had hidden her, refugees from the anti-conjuring laws and the collapse of von Schenck’s political intrigues—these were the people he would bring back to Bucharest. He would act in the interest of his suffering country, as the Baroness Ceausescu would have wanted, and from heaven she would look down on him and forgive him for abandoning her, abandoning what he loved. Bocu had been right to seal him in that dungeon, which was not after all as bad as he’d deserved. Bocu had been right to give him time to purge himself, consider his mistakes.

  And Luckacz would take the golden bracelet of the Brancoveanus from Miranda Popescu’s wrist. And he would buy a little coffer from a jeweler, a miniature strongbox in golden filigree. He would take the bracelet to Nicola Ceausescu’s tomb. He would lay down his offering among the flowers and candles, the simple keepsakes from all the people she had touched. And if Bocu took Sasha Andromedes, or Alexei Prochenko, or whatever his name was, and disemboweled him or tore his body into pieces, or set him up before a firing squad in the Piata Victoriei, Luckacz would make no effort to attend the ceremony. He would be with his wife and daughter. He would have better things to do.

  Now, finally, the whistle blew, the little train steamed in.

  * * *

  IN STANESTI-JUI, ANDROMEDA was out of bed. Miranda had found clothes for her among the grooms. She stood in Miranda’s room looking out the window, full of bravado that was about an inch thick; she wouldn’t show her nose outside. But she would pace the floor or sit on the settee, wincing at every sound on the stairs. And she seemed to want to talk girl talk like the old days, as if they were still kids together in high school, or in Miranda’s room in Stanley and Rachel’s house. As if nothing had happened since—it seemed stupid to Miranda. Stupid and poignant at the same time. She knew why it was necessary. It disgusted her to find herself drawn in, especially when they talked about Peter Gross. “A certain you-know-who,” Andromeda called him. “I had a letter from him. I had it in my coat pocket, but I lost it after I came back from Tutrakan. You know, Staro Selo.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Yes. He sent you this letter that he kept over his heart—it was really sweet. But I lost it in my clothes. I’m sorry.”

  Was he safe? How did he seem? What did he say? What was he like? Miranda thought. And then aloud, because she knew she wouldn’t get a satisfactory answer to these questions: “What did the letter say?”

  “I didn’t read it! Besides, what do you care? Didn’
t he break up with you that night in the park? Cismigiu Park? Or did I get that wrong?”

  “There was nothing to break up.…”

  In these conversations, Miranda felt about as genuine as an actress onstage, rehearsing dialogue that could not express or uncover what she wanted to say. But if words and intonations failed her, still her emotions were real enough. Andromeda was jealous, she supposed. Jealous and sad—her beautiful eyes glanced nervously around the room. But then she gripped her hand, and said in another voice entirely, “I’m not telling you the truth. There’s more of Peter Gross in him than my old friend. You’ll like him better now. We all have changed—how could we not have changed?”

  After that she turned away and would not speak, even when Miranda coaxed her. She answered in monosyllables that faltered entirely, while Miranda made up her mind.

  Steps must be taken. Full of a new determination to confide in Inez de Rougemont, she went downstairs.

  Since their first conversation in the farmhouse library, Miranda had learned a good deal more about her hostess’s life—from Madame de Graz, and, circumspectly, from her mother, and from her own inferences, and from the condesa herself: four separate pieces of information, which overlapped.

  Before her love affair with Miranda’s father, Inez de Rougemont had lived a life that had not satisfied her. Daughter of a banker, married to a Spanish diplomat, she had been a popular and fashionable hostess among the embassies and drawing rooms of the old regime. All that had ended with her surrender to Frederick Schenck von Schenck, who had introduced her to republican politics and, through his sister, to conjuring and alchemy.

  But the general married Clara Brancoveanu, then died in prison on a fabricated charge. When Aegypta Schenck was first arrested and the conjurers rounded up, Madame de Rougemont found it impossible to return to any version of her former life. She manufactured her own death from a disfiguring disease. Then she retired to her secret farmhouse in the mountains, shortly after her obituary was printed in the Roumanian and foreign press.