The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  “Sir?’

  “Don’t play the fool with me. You could be his son. He won a war for us on the wrestling ground on Sarayici Island. This was years ago.”

  “Sir, I am not the Chevalier de Graz.”

  “That is clear. But you will have to do. You will have the Order of Hercules and the thanks of a grateful nation. Do you understand me?”

  “Sir.”

  “I have spoken to your colonel. We’re pulling your men back for two weeks’ restitution, anyway. The Eleventh has been shot to pieces. You will report to battalion headquarters in Brasov. It is your home.”

  “No—”

  “It is your native place. You will not deny it in the newspapers.”

  All this time he had not looked at Peter, but had sat on the back legs of his chair, his boots propped on the grate. But now the wet leather started to smoke, and so he pushed himself away, rose to his feet. Peter looked up at his big, brutal face, whose expression nevertheless was complicated, and contained small elements of anxiety. “It is a matter of recruitment, and you are popular with the men. Otherwise there would be nothing to discuss. Count yourself lucky, Captain Gross—there’s not much about you in the record. Peter Gross—I’ve heard your name before. In Bucharest, I think, before the change of government. Complicity in the murder of Felix Ceausescu—was that it?”

  “Sir, it sounds to me as if that didn’t matter anymore.”

  Small elements, now, of surprise and anger, but then Antonescu laughed. “Maybe you’re right. De Graz’s bastard son—we could at least hint at such a thing. I’ll ask the liaison man. The adjutant will have your documents.…”

  One hour later, Peter rode back toward Staro Selo in the back of a cart. His company was bivouacked in a field outside the wall, two rows of tents. But he asked to be left at the courthouse in the center of the town. Most of the wooden and brick structures had been destroyed in the barrage. Across the square, the courthouse was a smoking ruin. Though its dome had fallen, the stone temple was still intact. Light gleamed behind its broken windows, patched with pieces of oiled paper.

  This was the field hospital for the region, a dismal place where Peter spent as much time as he could. All day they’d been evacuating patients in horse-drawn farm carts lined with hay, removing them to positions farther back. Peter had come from headquarters in one of these carts on its return trip; he had sat down on the wet bales. Now the cart joined a line of others waiting for more cargo along the north front of the building, while he climbed the steps on the other side, past the broken statue of the goddess of the harvest in the porch. Demeter of the wheat fields. She had lost her head, but still carried her bronze scythe, which struck Peter as ironic under the circumstances—a heavy, stupid piece of irony that matched his heavy mood.

  Brasov—who wouldn’t want to go to Brasov, two hundred kilometers away? And from there in his new capacity he could visit other villages up in the Vulcan Mountains. The general had confessed as much: No one cared about the death of Felix Ceausescu. Since the baroness’s death, no doubt everyone had learned the truth, that she herself had shot him from the balcony overlooking the amphitheater.…

  Maybe there was no longer any reason to keep away from Miranda Popescu. He looked around the porch, but his heart refused to lift. In Massachusetts years before, he had learned many poems about war. He had particularly liked long battle epics, written by Tennyson and others. But to please his mother he had learned some other kinds of poems, too. Even they served to romanticize the truth, though they were written by angry, wounded men:

  What candles may be held to speed them all?

  Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

  Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes …

  No, the rhythms were all wrong, the idiotic rhymes. How did it go?

  What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

  Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

  Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle …

  No, absurd. Another way to glorify these deaths. There was nothing onomatopoeic about any of this here, under a gray stupid drizzle in the gray afternoon.

  And the stench was intolerable. There was another cart in the stone porch where all the bedpans were emptied. It had almost disappeared in a mound of shit. Fully loaded, it was impossible to maneuver down the steps, so it was left up here. Fat, green-backed flies rose as he passed, a sign of spring, he supposed.

  He went through the wooden postern into the nave. The pews were all gone, but some of the statues and paintings had remained, the tribulations of the goddess’s life. A florid oil of her mourning over Persephone’s tomb—no tears, but just a wise, pensive look. He could see it in the lantern light, and some long tapers were still burning over the prie-dieux. The side chapels were full of cots, or blankets laid out on the tiles. “Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes.” The boys turned their faces to him as he passed.

  But the whole central part of the nave was empty now, the doctors and the patients gone. Peter’s boots rang on the stones. Those left behind, he imagined, were the ones least likely to recover—gas victims, many of them, burned in their lungs. Or they were still bleeding through their bandages. But they watched him if their heads were uncovered—where were the orderlies, the nurses? Where were the men from Theta Company, whom he had seen laid here together at the base of this round column and then all the way back? Some had died, of course. He stopped a boy, fifteen years old, maybe, but with the white cuffs of the staff—“Where is Steiciuc and Dion? Where is Sabau? Where is…?” but the boy knew nothing and was in a hurry. Peter let him go.

  Some were left in the corner of the wall, wrapped up in blankets on the stone floor. Ioan Bratescu was there, eighteen years old, thin as a stick. A cup of water on the floor beside him—how could he eat? The whole top of his head was wrapped in grimy bandages, which covered his eyes and nose; Peter sat down beside him. He took the boy’s hand in his left hand. More poetry occurred to him, a sad, stupid poem:

  But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land,

  Men from something in something, very carefully and slow,

  And he laid them in the ballast down below.

  “Captain,” whispered the boy.

  He squeezed his hand. Peter gave him some water through a piece of reed, but he couldn’t talk. He was too stupid with laudanum. But Peter talked to him anyway, and told him how they were being sent back to Brasov to wait for reinforcements—it wasn’t true, of course. So far as Peter knew, he was the only one to go, the only one, also, who didn’t have a mother or father or sister or brother or friend in the vicinity of Brasov. To him it was a town like any other.

  Bratescu squeezed his hand. Across the chapel, a pile of blankets moved, and another face turned toward him, a man he recognized. It was the black man from the Fifty-third, the Abyssinian spy, still in his black uniform. What was he doing here? He had a broken leg. Even these butchers could reset a broken leg.

  At intervals during the previous week, Peter had wondered what had happened to this man. For his part Peter had said nothing to his commanding officer, who disliked him anyway. Since Andromeda had stolen the hieroglyphs, there was no point, he’d told himself. He would have had to acknowledge where he’d been—for what? And of course the push had come that night.

  “You are going to Brasov?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brasov,” repeated the man, the corporal from the Fifty-third, and the way he said it suggested a grand, perfect place, a shining city in the mountains, walls of spun sugar, narrow spires that reached the sky. Not, in any case, an ordinary provincial capital. “My grandfather had a dairy farm outside Sacele,” he said. “That’s by the stream. I used to go out in the mornings and spin round with my arms held out. I’d fall down and the sky would spin around. Not so long ago.”

  “How long?” Peter asked, uncurious.

  “Oh, I was there last night.”

  Peter could believe it. He had seen these do
ctors with their teaspoons and syringes. Laudanum was what they knew. Laudanum and amputations. Now he saw the foreshortened leg, the weeping bandage, and his right arm ached. “Why didn’t they take you?” he asked. “Was it because…?”

  “I have a fever,” said the man.

  He had a fever, but his teeth were chattering. Lying beside him, Bratescu squeezed Peter’s left hand. His other arm itched and ached under the prosthesis, a phantom sympathy. “I don’t mind,” said the black man across the way. “I took a risk for peace. These others have risked everything for war, is that so different? But I am being punished. You don’t think I am a traitor, Captain Gross?”

  “No—”

  “I’ve seen you come here for the others. You are famous here. I wanted you to stop for me. My spirit or my angel—I have prayed, isn’t that foolish? We are in a temple, and I wonder what will come out of me. Men die, and there are vermin everywhere—maggots, lice, rats. Am I crazy to hope for something better? Do you think I am a traitor? I worry so much—”

  He was delirious. Ioan Bratescu squeezed Peter’s hand. “But I think God is good,” murmured the corporal from the Fifty-third. “Not these stupid gods, but the God who hears our prayers. My friends would be ashamed to hear me talk like this. And yet here you are, going to Brasov on the next train. And I wonder if you will do something for me.”

  Peter wondered, too. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You see it’s wrapped up in the bandage. It’s the last place they’d look. I have seen them rob the dead; I don’t want that. You could have robbed me yourself, or had me shot. You see I am sparing you the trouble—this is the price of my death, and I want you to bring it to my sister in Brasov, Chloe Adira in the Strada Cerbului. She and my mother have no one but me. Please, I think you are my angel or a ghost. Will you go to Chiselet and find this terrible weapon? Just you and no one else—it is not something for the soldiers. No, no—Brasov. Strada Cerbului—will you do this for me?”

  Lying beside him, Ioan Bratescu squeezed Peter’s hand, a soft, tiny pressure.

  It was not true that Peter had no memory of Brasov, or of Sacele either. His father had had a hunting cabin in the hills. Sacele was a pretty place, a Transylvanian village on the east side of the stream.

  His knees ached from squatting, and he longed to stand up straight. The temple was dark now. Dusk showed through the narrow windows. He had to go. He didn’t want to get caught in the sunset.

  But he was too late. Just a few guns at first, and Peter could imagine the high arc of the rockets. Then the thunder of the howitzers, a giant walking in the town. It wouldn’t last long. An hour, maybe two. The attack would come at dawn.

  With aching knees, he stayed for several minutes more. When an explosion shook Bratescu’s fingers open, he removed his hand, rose to his feet. The corporal—Janus Adira, the name came back—had stretched his leg straight out across the gap. The bulge under the bandages was easy to see. The money was hot and damp. A stinking wad of reichmarks. There was a letter, too.

  “You didn’t betray me, did you?” said Janus Adira. “My angel—in the hospital I was expecting the police. And I asked myself—what happened to the message from Addis Ababa? Do you still have that letter? It cost my life. Promise me you’ll see it is delivered. Chloe will know.”

  “I promise,” Peter said, feeling foolish. God knew where the man’s hieroglyphs were now. “I promise,” he repeated as he stood up straight.

  What had Antonescu said—that he had no room for cripples in his army? Other cripples were demobilized and sent home. Peter walked back to the porch without looking around. Where was Miranda now? What was she doing now? Would he see her soon?

  He stood for a moment under the columns, looking at the fires. Then he turned up his collar, pulled down his cap, used his teeth to replace his glove. A priest or monk slipped from the doorway, took him by his right arm. “You can’t go out in this.”

  The noise was deafening. “It’s okay,” Peter said in English. Then he ambled down the steps into the rain.

  8

  A Puncture Wound

  RADU LUCKACZ RETURNED to the city in time for Elena Bocu-Bibescu’s funeral, though he did not attend. The Rezistenta men—what remained of them—had been dispatched from Stanesti village and escorted as far as Rimnicu by a detachment of reserves. There they’d been permitted to reclaim their carbines from the baggage car, and immediately the lieutenant had put Luckacz under a sort of unofficial arrest. Once they had descended from the Gara de Nord, he’d brought him straight to the People’s Palace.

  There they had waited for a long time in an antechamber to one of the reception rooms on the ground floor. Luckacz sat in an uncomfortable armchair while the lieutenant paced the polished floor. Still aggrieved, he clapped his hands together, scratched at his thin sides, a dark expression on his narrow face. He did not look at Luckacz, who sat with his hands in his lap, wondering if he’d be put in the same cell as before, wondering if they’d let him keep his clothes this time.

  He had lost his hair quite suddenly the year before. He had had to shave his black moustache. Now for the first time he felt an itching on his scalp and upper lip—there was some stubble there. It was eveningtime. Light flickered in the glass chimney.

  Or was it possible he might be put to death because of what had occurred? The lieutenant hoped so, had hinted at it on the train. If you believed the rumors, one entire wing of the enormous palace had been broken up into interrogation cells, and there was talk of secret graveyards and mass graves.

  He had not managed to see his wife or Katalin, had not even managed to send them a postal card. Surely there’d be no reprisals. He couldn’t stand the thought of that.

  Bocu made them wait. Luckacz sat back in his armchair in the overheated room. As often when he wanted to doze or fall asleep he thought about Nicola Ceausescu’s face, brought it to mind in various moods and casts of light. Often his dreams would begin with her turning toward him, acknowledging him, saying something. “Ah, my dear old friend.”

  Sometimes she would appear to him naked as he had last seen her on the boards of the Ambassadors, the blood dripping from her breasts. She had leapt over the smoking footlights as the crowd scattered and made way, until she had imprisoned him in his fauteuil. Her hands were on the armrests, and she leaned over him.

  Or else sometimes she appeared in all her splendor, arrayed as if for battle in some perfect evening gown, her face as beautiful as Diana’s or Cleopatra’s or any of the warrior goddesses under their helmets of copper-colored hair. Now in Bocu’s antechamber, as Luckacz fell asleep, she assumed the shape most poignant to him—as he’d last seen her in her chamber in the People’s Palace, the small lines around her mouth and in the corners of her eyes. She had taken off her gold-rimmed spectacles to look at him. “How could you doubt me?” she said now. “How could you accuse me of these terrible crimes? How could I have harmed these boys—I loved them. I protected them. And is that what you actually think, that I lay down with a woman as if with a man?”

  Sick with remorse, Luckacz opened his eyes. He had been startled by a noise. Colonel Bocu entered the room, laughing and chuckling, his cravat undone.

  He had an unlit cigar between his teeth, which he removed, examined, and threw into the unlit grate. Shards of tobacco were in his teeth; he spat onto the hearth. It appeared he had been interrupted in the middle of a conversation. Lively companions, it appeared, had been abandoned on the other side of the swinging door.

  “Don’t get up. No, you’ll appreciate this,” he said, still laughing. “A man leaves his house the morning after his wedding night, and goes directly to a certain establishment, where he’d been known to visit before his marriage. And the proprietress, I suppose you’d call her, takes him into the parlor and tells him, ‘Was it just as I said?’ And he says…”

  Like the last time Luckacz had seen him, he was carrying an open bottle of champagne and two glasses, all in his left hand. It was as if he had not
put them down since then, though the wine itself was always for other people, Luckacz guessed—Bocu himself was never drunk. His sloppiness, his untied cravat—it was all part of a game he played.

  He arranged the bottle and the glasses on a square table near the hearth. “‘Practice makes adequate,’” he said. “Isn’t that priceless?” The lamplight glinted on his square, even teeth as he turned toward them—“Now. Tell me what happened. A fiasco, as I understand.”

  Luckacz stared at the hat in his lap. Because he was a prisoner, he supposed he was not expected to respond. And the lieutenant seemed eager; he had leapt to his feet when Bocu entered the room. He had thin lips, bad teeth. “Chief, everything would have been perfect if we had followed our plan. But this fellow ruined everything. He gave away our positions when he barged in the door. He broke into the place, ruined the moment of surprise. I didn’t even know where he was. When we finally stopped searching to approach the premises, the alarm had already been raised. The old woman had already managed to send a message to the village. It was bad luck that a company of infantry reserves…”

  He was interrupted by Bocu’s laugh. “Come, lieutenant, don’t be so severe. Yes, I know. Antonescu has sent word we are not welcome even in Rimnicu from now on. What do you think of that? I swear, if this keeps up, you won’t be able to wear your uniform outside your own water closet. Does that concern you?”

  “Sir—”

  “It’s all right! You must be calm. We will prevail, you understand. Do you know why? Because we have the people on our side. These setbacks…”

  He shrugged. As he was speaking, he had approached the young lieutenant to stand in front of him eye to eye. They were almost the same height, and Luckacz could see how terrified the young man was, the sheen of moisture on his skin. But now Bocu smiled again, and he reached out and grabbed hold of the lieutenant’s shoulder with his big hand, squeezing him, catching him in an awkward half-embrace. “Don’t worry! This man Andromedes, we will catch him another time. I have something planned.”