by Paul Park
Miranda had verified all this. She also understood that the condesa retained, even after fifteen years of isolation and the start of an enormous war, a web of duties and connections that often took her from the house. Some of her forays, Miranda guessed, must involve trips to the dream-landscape where they first met, meetings with Zuzana Knauss and Mrs. Chatterjee and Olga Karpov, efforts to reform the world.
Never, since Miranda had been in the house, had either of them spoken of that first meeting, in a place that, after all, did not exist. Out of some reticence or delicacy she didn’t understand, Miranda had not spoken of it. But now Andromeda’s arrival seemed to indicate a change in the weather and the time. The wounds and damage she’d sustained, the anxiety she’d brought with her from Staro Selo, now presaged a new urgency, a need for Miranda to puzzle her way forward once again. The safety she had found here was quite obviously an illusion, a bubble in the stream.
In any case she had no right to safety, because of the suffering of her friends. That suffering had made a trail that led her to the misery of her own country, and to her place in it: She had failed to safeguard her father’s pistol. One terrifying night in the People’s Palace, Nicola Ceausescu had used it to release two secret messages into the world, communications of love and war.
All through the winter the Turkish and Roumanian authorities had predicted imminent victory, imminent peace, though they disagreed which side was closer to surrender. Now, after more than six months the war had collapsed into a kind of stalemate—the worst outcome of all, as Miranda had learned from Mr. Oats in ninth-grade history. So something must be done, if Miranda could manage it, some intervention in the hidden world.
So: a change, and maybe the condesa also sensed a change, for she was waiting for Miranda by the long table in the library. The black book and enormous revolver, which Jean-Baptiste had brought up from the city, were laid out on the slab of oak. Miranda scarcely glanced at them, because of her failure and the guilt she felt.
In time Madame de Rougemont got up and locked the door. She lit the lamps. It was evening time. Miranda sat in the tall chair, and they played a game that wasn’t a game. They shared what they knew. Miranda said, “I didn’t want to speak to you about these things, because they sounded stupid and because I didn’t trust you. But now I know that trust is something I cannot afford. Why should I trust you, when you ask me to doubt the motives of my aunt? Everything I know—it doesn’t matter. I believe we’re searching for the same things.”
“Wise girl. And that is?”
“‘A cessation to the current hostilities,’” Miranda said, using a phrase from the Roumania Libera.
“All of them? Not just in Staro Selo?”
“All of them.”
And in just a few more minutes they were ready to begin. “Before,” Miranda said, “I meant I didn’t know what I was doing. There was no—I don’t know—volition, like a dream. I just did the things I did. Later I could see when I was in the world again. Things happened because of it. You know about this: A German general and a minister were dead. And that traitor Dysart and Dr. Theodore. And the Elector of Ratisbon. It’s hard to feel responsible for them.”
The tabletop was supported on two massive pedestals. There was no cloth on it, but the china and the glassware were delicate and fine. “I did things with no choice,” Miranda said. “Maybe because of my aunt Aegypta. Now it’s different. I’m in both places at the same time, and I’m awake in both places. Wanting things. Deciding things.”
Madame de Rougemont walked to and fro beside the long table. Light, brittle-boned, she seemed to float from one side of the room to the other. “Because of Kepler’s Eye.”
“Yes.”
“Describe it.”
Miranda frowned. “They call it a jewel, but it’s not like a jewel. It gives a little bit between my fingers. At nighttime there’s a glow. I feel there’s juice in it. Or blood.”
“And it is in your hand?”
“Yes, now.”
There was nothing in Miranda’s hand. It lay empty, palm-up on the wooden arm of the chair. But on the hillside, as she’d said, there was the tourmaline clasped in her fingers and it seemed to throb as she climbed up.
“I’ve left the swamp behind,” she said. “It’s way below. This is another place. It’s beautiful. Spring flowers. I don’t know their names.”
Yellow and lavender in the tall grass. She climbed up through a valley between two peaks, which she’d seen from far away. Sometimes she heard a trickle of water, or crossed a little stream. There were more rocks, and then the grass was shorter, coarser, growing in uneven tussocks as the way grew steep.
“Is there a path?”
“No path. No one has been here for a long time.”
She said this, but up ahead there was a pile of little rocks. Once maybe they had formed a cairn. The land had closed in, and she was in a sort of a chute about twenty yards wide. She was in the right place, she knew. One rock wall was in shadow and one gleamed in the morning sun.
And it occurred to her even then that there might be some things she wanted to hold back and not describe. At first there was a simple reason: In the comfortable library, the curtains had been drawn to push away the darkness, which still seeped in around the edges. Sitting there, how was it possible to communicate in words the place where she was standing in the sun? Purple flowers in a crevice in the rocks—should she describe them? The stony peaks looming overhead, the ice mountains beyond them? And as she turned around to catch her breath, should she describe the valley she had left behind? The air was dark and thick down there. Creatures strove and struggled with the mud around their knees. Which part of this landscape was important? Which words would she use to make it real?
“How do you understand which way to climb?” asked Inez de Rougemont.
“I’m just going where I want.”
She listened to the condesa’s exasperated sniff: “This is a journey that has been described. Who do you think has left those piles of stones? No, you must follow the path he made, although it has been a long time. But when you find the place, then you will know.”
Miranda didn’t like to hear any of that. Every word the condesa had spoken, Miranda sensed a change in her, a little more desire in her voice, a little more greediness in this gray-haired woman, her father’s friend—greed for knowledge, she hoped. De Rougemont didn’t understand how difficult this was. Miranda wasn’t even touching the tourmaline anymore. She’d slipped it into the pocket of her shirt, because more and more she had to use her hands in the steep chute, and the rocks were insecurely piled. She had to work even to breathe. Now every step brought her higher into a landscape where the air was thin and sharp and painful in her lungs, which had not recovered from her sickness. She knew that now.
Part of her wanted to stop, and it wasn’t because the way was difficult. But the condesa wanted something, that was clear. Probably she hadn’t told Miranda everything. Probably she also had held something back.
Miranda climbed the chute. There was always something greedy about this, she thought, this search for knowledge and secret power. No wonder her descriptions were sparse and stingy. Was she doing Inez de Rougemont a favor, offering her payment for room and board? Hand over hand in the thin air—the rocks had closed in around her and there was nothing to see. But even so, there was another part of her that wanted to keep moving, to discover … something. Something of her own. Here she was, though, trudging in the footsteps of some half-mad, long-dead philosopher—she was sure of the way now, even though she hadn’t seen a mark or a cairn in a long time.
In the valley behind her there were hundreds of thousands of things. There was the long trough of the war from Kula to the sea. The little ape and the scarlet beetle struggled in the mud down there. All that she’d left behind. But maybe now she could look forward to a new terrain, purified of everything that had grown over and obscured the four essential elements of rock, water, light, and air.
The
chute she was in began to level out, reveal a larger chunk of sky. The hummocks of grass came back, the little flowers. But every few steps, when she stopped with her lungs burning, she needed fewer words and a smaller vocabulary to describe it. Even so she found herself dissembling by holding back what she knew she could make clear. Who was this woman anyway?
“I’m at the top of the chute,” she said begrudgingly, looking back. She turned around. “And, oh—”
“What?”
“Oh—”
“Tell me.” Inez de Rougemont in her powder and rouge, in her old-fashioned yellow dress, paced back and forth along the library carpet.
“There’s a building up ahead.”
Maybe she shouldn’t say anything at all, Miranda thought, sitting in her chair in the dark room. Up ahead there was a little tarn, its surface smooth and polished as a mirror. It lay at the bottom of a bowl of rocks, and on the far side the peak jutted up. Below it, a snowfield fell into the lake, and the flat boulders made a kind of promontory. It led to a stone tower, which rose out of the lake.
It was not high nor especially well made, Miranda saw when she came close. A path led through the scree, although in places it had slid into the lake. Miranda picked her way through the unsteady slope until she stood on firmer ground. And she could see part of the rock wall had collapsed.
“What is it?” said Inez de Rougemont. Miranda caught the sound of her impatience as her little bloodless gray head peered into the dark corners of the farmhouse library. The tower arch had fallen in, and the coping stones from the high wall. There was an inscription cut in the uneven surface of the rock: I. KEPLER FECIT.
“Please tell me,” whispered Inez de Rougemont.
The tower seemed abandoned, but Miranda wondered whether there was something left alive, a brooding presence she could almost feel. She was not afraid, maybe because part of her was sitting in the safe black farmhouse far below. But it was possible the entire structure was waiting for this moment to collapse. She climbed in through the ruined stones and past a rusted iron doorway let into the rock. There was a stair to the top of the tower.
And maybe she should stop here, but she couldn’t help herself. She was not immune to curiosity, which is another form of greediness. She had a sudden sense she didn’t belong here, but still she labored up the stone steps. And when she stood on the stone platform above the lake, she could see many things. Above her the sun was blocked by the ice peak. Miranda could see stars in the sky. No, not stars but planets—Stanley had shown her the difference. Three or four were visible in the milky morning light.
She had the tourmaline clasped in her hand. From a new vantage point at the lip of the platform she could see far down the valley. She could see into the darker, thicker air. But there was no unusual detail. Maybe she needed some kind of telescope, a tool.
“Tell me what you see.”
And she reported dutifully, begrudging every word. She did no justice to the immense cracked landscape, the splintered rock, the walls of ice. None of that was what de Rougemont wanted to hear. She was interested in patterns. She didn’t care about the smell of the cold air.
“There’s some kind of chamber underneath me. Locked like I told you. Maybe that—”
“No. It is where you are now. He described it in his letters. It is where he made his observations.”
“Well, I’m not sure—”
“No, it must be there. Where you are standing. He described the place.”
Leaning over the parapet, doubtful, skeptical, the tourmaline throbbing in her hand, she turned her back to the valley and looked up. The tarn lay in a bowl surrounded by ice peaks and rock walls. No trail led away from it. If Johannes Kepler had climbed past this place, Miranda couldn’t see where he had gone. Maybe, she imagined, she would find a new path among the rocks, and she wouldn’t even be able to turn back and see the valley anymore.
Part of her wanted to leave the stone platform and go onward, in spite of her foreboding. What had her aunt said about her home in Berkshire County? “That town, those streets, those people—you might search for it and find it in the hidden world.”
But that was not the path of obligation, or the way to comfort Peter or Andromeda. To find that place, or even to search for it, was not a desire she would confess to Inez de Rougemont. No, she was in the here and now, looking toward the future. She looked up into the rock peaks.
But even so, she wanted to be silent. The words she had used to describe this place had diminished it somehow, stripped it of its beauty. She shivered, hugged her arms, drew the tourmaline up to her face, and then she saw what the condesa wanted.
It was in the little lake. When she peered over the broken edge of the parapet and down into the water, she realized she was looking at a map.
In the perfect light she could see under the water’s surface. She could see all the boulders, rocks, and stones that formed the bottom of the lake. And not only was there no distortion, but everything—all of it—seemed unnaturally clear and focused, as if the layer of water functioned as a lens.
After a long silence, she described it to Inez de Rougemont, or else she half-described it. “It’s like a map of Europe and the world. Then the boulders climb out of the water and they form the boundaries in North America, Southern Africa, and Japan, I guess—that’s the banana-shaped sand beach. So from there it slopes down like the bottom of a bowl. Lowest in the middle is Bucharest and Great Roumania. Those blue pebbles are the sapphire domes of the old city.”
“Where the time is deepest,” murmured Inez de Rougemont.
Peter had told Miranda about the sinkhole in the Aegyptian desert, and she could see the line of it, reaching from the Nile to the Hudson. Maybe it was a piece of grass in the water, because there were living things deep in the lake, and things that floated on its surface, and currents and ripples and reflections, also, of clouds and overhanging cliffs. From the lip of the tower, Miranda watched the surface move as if alive. That was what was so hard to describe. And at the same time she was conscious of some other living presence in the stones below her feet, as if she almost heard some grunting, whispering voice.
“It’s like—oh…”
“What do you see?”
Miranda had the tourmaline in her hand, which sometimes appeared as a stone to her, and sometimes as a plum or a grape or something edible and full of juice. But maybe that was because she could not bear to imagine the truth. She was holding something that had come out of the brain of Johannes Kepler the alchemist, who had made this place for his own purpose.
Carefully, deliberately she laid the jewel down on the parapet. And then she found herself sitting in the wooden armchair in the darkened farmhouse library, her hands open and grasping. Inez de Rougemont walked back and forth, back and forth, her face as fierce and eager as a hawk or an eagle or a bird of prey, set to seize up every little word in her painted nails, devour every little phrase in her lipsticked mouth—Miranda couldn’t stand it. Groping, blind, she put her hand out for the tourmaline again. It yielded under her fingers.
And there she stood on the stone tower with the planets above her, clustered together in the apex of the sky. The light was muted, the sun behind a cloud. Miranda looked down and saw a breath of air turn up the surface of the water north and east of Bucharest. She described it, because she understood what she was seeing—the great curve of the Russian advance, which had severed the German supply lines south of Minsk. But it had stalled now, stopped. And there were circular eddies where the armies had divided and sunk down in the mud.
Inez de Rougemont paused between the table and the armchair. Her eyes were staring, blind, yet she strained to see. “Tell me,” she said, and Miranda told her about the seven small fish that issued now out of an underwater crevice—Russian dreadnoughts in the Black Sea. And then a line of enormous turtles on the dry land farther south. They were near the river in the middle of the line.
“You have discovered it,” said Inez de Rougemont.
“People said Johannes Kepler could predict the future. Tell me all of it. Follow the borders of Great Roumania.”
Miranda found the mountain ranges and the Wallachian plain. “There’s a tree trunk that’s fallen to the bottom with all its broken branches—it’s the Danube. And I can see the battle front with Turkey south of Chiselet.”
Chiselet was where Peter and Andromeda had had their accident. Both of them separately had told her about that. The town was marked with a whirlpool, and dirty bubbles on the surface of the water. But on the south shore of the river, she could see the places where the water was churned up by the columns of horses and armored vehicles, she guessed—near Staro Selo and the Tutrakan bridge. That’s where the turtles were.
In the library, Inez de Rougemont pulled from a low shelf a dusty atlas. She opened it, spread the book across Miranda’s lap. “Mark what you see.”
Head splitting, Miranda tried to think it out—first things first. Step by step. The condesa gave her a lump of graphite, which turned her fingers silver. She felt danger all around her, and it wasn’t because of the Turks. But in the hidden world there was a cloudburst out of the cloudless sky, and the map disappeared into the lake, covered over by the stippled surface of the water.
“Do not stop.”
“I can’t see anything,” Miranda said. She dropped the graphite to the carpet.
“Please, this is important. This might be a new method to break though. Some new machine, a strategy to cross the river. There is a rumor that the Abyssinians have abandoned their neutrality. This is information for Antonescu if we can reach him.”
On the parapet, Miranda stared down into the map of Europe. The rain had stopped as soon as it had begun.
Because of its secret alliance with Germany, Turkey had mobilized and then attacked. This was after Nicola Ceausescu had let the Russian cavalry penetrate the German lines behind the Fedorivka Salient. And though an unofficial truce still held between the German and Roumanian Republics, elsewhere all of Europe had been drawn into the war, every country led by its alliances.