by Paul Park
“Ah.”
He told her about the last time he had seen her brother when the bombs were falling on Staro Selo. But there were no more tears in her. She shivered, rubbed her arms.
“My mother told me something,” she interrupted. “After we saw the article in the newspaper. My mother is not easy in her mind, you understand. But she told me a piece of romance from the town, I suppose, about another hero from the Turkish wars who disappeared long ago. I suppose it is a rumor that intends for us to think that even in these modern times there is a guardian, a defender of Great Roumania, like Mother Demeter or Miranda Brancoveanu or like Hercules himself, when he fought the Amazons along the shores of the Black Sea near Varna as they say. But in these stories I see something mythological in you, and something frightening as well—I’m sorry. I apologize.”
Peter placed his glass down on the metal tray on the low table under a bush that was just beginning to recover some kind of greenness. He had not expected to hear the name “Miranda” on this woman’s lips.
He sat back, put his shoulders against the silver bark of the tree. He put the back of his head against the tree and closed his eyes. He felt exhausted, and he wondered how long he could sit here with Chloe Adira. She was silent beside him, and he listened to her breathing until it changed. Then he opened his eyes to see they weren’t alone.
Someone had come out onto the balcony above them. Because the courtyard was small, she was not far away. Wrapped in a blanket or a quilt, she leaned over the wooden rail, peered down at them, an older woman with a soft, heavy body. Her hair was long, gray, unbrushed, unfastened, which gave her a wild look. “Dumitru told me you were here, but I had to see,” she said, leaning as far as she could over the balustrade, reaching out one pudgy hand. The other kept the blanket closed over her chest.
“It is my mother,” whispered Chloe Adira.
Then in a moment, because the gray-haired woman said nothing, she continued. “She has taken this so hard. He was her last boy. She is not herself—don’t expect her to be herself. The doctor has given her morphine, but I’m afraid—”
“I know you!” said the woman on the balcony. “It is true what they say! You’re the son, de Graz’s youngest son. He had a hunting lodge in Sacele near my father’s farm. I used to see you at the harvest festival before my marriage when I was fifteen. I know you—do you remember? When your horse lost a shoe outside our door?”
Peter closed his eyes again, just for a moment. No one yet in Brasov had told him this or any other story of the Chevalier de Graz. They had not spoken about it to his face. But now this old woman stood above him, accusing him—why did he feel so exposed? He rose to his feet as Chloe rose beside him: “Mother, please. Captain Gross is our guest. He has brought us news.…”
“But I know you,” said the woman. “You came and stood in the kitchen. This was before the Turkish war and Nova Zagora, I remember. You ate an apple. You had a birthmark on your right hand—no, that’s no good. You’re crippled now, I see.”
“You must forgive her,” murmured Chloe Adira. “She thinks she’s a girl again.”
Now Dumitru appeared on the upper gallery and led the gray-haired woman back into the house. She had stood above them for not more than a minute, but everything had changed. Though he had no memory of the day, Peter found himself imagining the Chevalier de Graz standing in his riding boots on the tiled kitchen floor, legs spread, chewing an apple with his strong teeth while a straw-haired farm girl slipped out the double door. And it was some vestige of the Chevalier de Graz who followed Chloe Adira inside the house, caught up with her in an inside room. “You must excuse us,” she murmured.
He put his hand out to touch her, and she raised her palm close to his own. They stood staring at each other in the little room. There were blue plaster walls, and the candles were lit. She said, “But it is clear to me that we must trust you, because we have no choice. No, please. Don’t … move.”
Then it all came in a rush. “I’ll tell you what I know. There is a weapon in Great Roumania, a terrible weapon. It is from my father’s country in Abyssinia and was brought here by Nicola Ceausescu on a train. Which was ambushed and blown up. And this weapon was not found. But my brother—don’t you see how terrible it would be if Victor Bocu or Ion Antonescu got their hands on this device or this ingredient, whatever it is—you must see that. You must forgive him. You must forgive all of us.”
Peter shrugged. “There is nothing to forgive.” And then after a moment: “I was on the Hephaestion at Chiselet.”
“Ah, God, how can that be so?”
“There was a baggage car in front of the train. We hit a barricade and Antonescu blew it up. It was on a raised embankment at the marsh’s edge.”
They murmured these things to each other in the place of endearments. She shook her head. “So—maybe you are a mythological creature. How can it be? Then there is no need to convince you.”
He smiled at her. “I was there.”
“Then you will help me, now my brother is gone. I don’t know much. Only you must…”
Her palm was centimeters from his own. And now their hands touched, and pressed together, and their fingers interlocked.
“You must not think bad thoughts of me,” she said after a little while. “Sometimes I imagine my husband in Poland, sometimes in a forest, or in the open fields. But he comes to a thatched cottage where a woman is living and waiting by herself. And he is hungry, and there’s a fire in the stove. And maybe he is lost and alone, or maybe there are men chasing him, but she takes him in, makes him take off his wet coat. Sometimes I see it. She has yellow hair, and braids, perhaps. She has a bigger bosom, wider hips, perhaps—what do you think? But if she helps him and gives him comfort, what harm is there? I pray for strangers to be kind to him. And if she kisses him, what harm is there? I could not be jealous of such a one. I would thank her with my tears. Or if she takes him in her hands—ah, I would not expect her to be so bold. She never had an Abyssinian father, whose name she kept, and who taught her women mustn’t tell such constant lies about what they want.…”
Just for a moment, again, Peter caught a glimpse of Miranda’s face. How far away she seemed, in a mountain farmhouse he had never visited except in his imagination.
12
Topography
SHE WAS FARTHER from him than he thought. Dawn came in a few hours, a foggy dawn as Miranda and her aunt climbed down the hill. At the crossroads, Aegypta Schenck peered into the dirt. She had changed from her clothes, though Miranda had not seen her change. She had lost her long gloves, fox stole, lace collar, high-heeled shoes, small hat—all of the old lady’s traveling attire that was part of Miranda’s first memory of Roumania, at Mogosoaia station in the snow. Instead she’d put on the hunting clothes from the framed photograph in Mamaia Castle, wool shirt and breeches, dirty boots. She knelt in the dry dirt, examining the little footprints. Her hair was tucked up and fastened under a leather cap.
The cat had come here with wet feet. Miranda could smell something too, a tiny bitter smell. But when she went to pass the cairn, her aunt stood up. “Don’t go that way. You cannot.”
Miranda could see her face now in the soft gray light, her big features, yellow eyes, wrinkled cheeks and neck. She had no eyebrows, but there were a few untrimmed hairs around her mouth. Out of the hat and veil she looked both dignified and fierce. “You cannot go that way. We’ve lost her.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged as if it irritated her even to be questioned. “The dead climb up this hill, up the back side. But they are not the only ones. It is unclaimed ground along the border. Down that valley, those paths to the left—that is their home. The road lies through a gate you cannot pass.”
“And you?”
Miranda’s aunt appeared to smile. “Do not worry about me. I have a home, never fear. A small house just for me, a long way from here. But there’s nothing for you, nothing I can share while you are still a living woman.”
Nothing was alive in that sandy bowl. They gray sky pressed down on them, a foggy ceiling a few feet above their heads. “Do you know what’s happening in Stanesti-Jui?” Miranda cried. “My mother and Andromeda—can you tell me about them? Am I walking around, or talking there, or eating breakfast, or climbing the hill behind the house?”
The rim of the bowl was lost in fog. The crossroads marked the exact center, the pile of rocks. There was no wind, no water, not a blade of grass. No part of what was happening felt real. “What difference does it make?” Miranda said again. “Alive or dead, it’s gone, slipped away. All those people and those things—isn’t that what it feels like to die? That something slipped out of your fingers?”
She felt light-headed, parched. The fog seemed to have no moisture in it, the air no sustenance. Aegypta Schenck rubbed some sand between her palms, and with an expression half impatient and half pitying she reached out her hand, exhibited her cold flesh.
“It didn’t feel that way to me,” she said, “when my time came.”
“Oh God,” Miranda cried, “it’s happening again! Is it happening again? Is this the second time I’ve lost everything? The fire burned up my book, and I put down my jewel, and each time I was to blame, my own stupid carelessness?”
Her aunt, evidently, had no intention of consoling her. “These things might be easier if you lived to an old age. If you lay in bed with your family around you. But in my house in Mogosoaia that was not my fate. I pray it will be yours. As for Stanesti-Jui, I believe you are asleep.”
Aegypta Schenck was an intimidating woman, and she spoke with sincerity and confidence. On that indistinct frontier between the hidden world and tara mortilor, Miranda was desperate to be reassured. Empty and vacated, nevertheless she tried to smile.
* * *
THE CONNECTION TO her body in Stanesti-Jui, in the farmhouse on the mountainside, had been severed when she lost the tourmaline. But she was capable of hope, because she had no other choice. So it was fortunate that she was spared the pain of watching herself come awake in her overheated bed.
The sheets were rank with sweat. But her fever had broken when her eyes opened and her body turned onto its side. “Comme j’ai rêvé,” she said—“What a dream I had!”
During her illness, in the mornings when Clara Brancoveanu had watched over her, the first words out of her mouth had always been in English. Sometimes they were very coarse. Once Clara had asked the condesa for a translation, but she had only laughed.
“Comme j’ai rêvé!”—the phrase itself seemed peculiar to her mother. But she only permitted herself a momentary doubt. It was morning time, a bright, sunny morning. Miranda had been woken by the sun across her face. Now she smiled—she was a pretty girl when she smiled, though it had been too long!
The condesa had gone to bed hours before. Clara had stayed awake, hoping against hope, washing her daughter’s face, chafing her hands. Aegypta’s letter had promised healing, though the words, now that Clara thought about them, were portentous and ambiguous. What does it signify to attack and extirpate the causes of disease? How is it possible to eradicate suffering? How is such a thing accomplished? Is it worth the price, the risk?
But now Miranda was awake. And perhaps Aegypta hadn’t know as much as she pretended, and perhaps the condesa’s anxiety had been misplaced, her harsh words. Perhaps those old women weren’t so clever after all.
And Clara Brancoveanu felt like weeping, she was so relieved. “How are you?” she asked, pulling back the coverlet, fussing with the pillows. In the evening she would take the carriage to the village and light eleven candles on the altar of the goddess of fertility, who had heard her prayers. Nor would she listen to any doubts or qualms, particularly since Miranda looked as contented as she had ever seen her, all marks of worry erased from her face as she smiled up at her from the damp bed.
* * *
“THAT’S MY BRAVE girl,” said Aegypta Schenck. “I will keep you safe. In the meantime there is work to do.”
Miranda’s smile changed. “What do you mean?”
At the crossroads, Aegypta Schenck looked up at the absent sky. “Sometimes our duty is forced upon us.”
She hesitated, then went on. “I did not bring you to Roumania to watch you stifle in your bed month after month in Stanesti-Jui. Inez de Rougemont was my brother’s mistress, after all. She was not a friend to me. She would always meddle in what didn’t concern her. I am not sorry to see you here out of her hands.”
Oh God, Miranda thought. Then she spoke, trying with all her strength not to show emotion. “This was your plan?”
“Plans mean less than you think. It is opportunities that matter.”
“Thanks. That’s good to know. I’ll salt that away.”
“Child, don’t be impertinent with me. It was not I who lost the jewel.”
Her gray hair was streaked with yellow. Her expression was neither cruel nor kind. She couldn’t control me in the real world, and so she brought me here, Miranda thought. But she could not deny the last thing her aunt had said, which made everything worse.
Aegypta Schenck continued: “Nicola Ceausescu has robbed you. That is clear. She has taken Kepler’s Eye through the brass gates. I can’t know what she plans to do with it. She has no flesh to return to. But she coveted it when she was alive. Perhaps that is enough.”
She touched her hands together, cleaned her dirty palms on her shirt. “I will go find her,” said Miranda.
“Child, you cannot. This is the boundary where all of us starve. I came here to lead you to your road, that’s all.”
They stood in the little barren bowl, rimmed with fog. They stared at each other. Aegypta Schenck didn’t blink—could not, Miranda supposed.
Like a sudden surge of nausea, doubt and anger overwhelmed her and she turned away, started to run, following the little path of the cat and then the human footprints leading on, high-arched and delicate. Miranda staggered over them with her leather boots. It was important to remember Nicola Ceausescu was not tall or strong. These zombies and ghosts could be confronted, beaten, tricked like the stupid baron. Or else destroyed like the idiotic elector on the mountainside.
She’d taken her aunt by surprise. She found the path and continued south, downhill, jumping from rock to rock as the fog closed in. She gulped at the thin air, which seemed to have a metallic taste. “Lead you to your road”—she wouldn’t be led like a donkey or a horse. There was no reason to trust anything her aunt said was true.
She felt the obstruction before she saw it. She heard it in a deadening of sound. And then the wall loomed out of the mist, an uneven cliff face, a metal barrier that reached a hundred feet above her into the clouds.
What she had said and thought and felt, what her aunt had said, their disagreement during which they had not raised their voices—all of it was in the mouth of the great gate that now rose suddenly above her between brazen towers. A sound seemed to come out of the earth, a frequency that hurt her ears as she stumbled and her aunt caught her from behind.
In her bed in Stanesti-Jui, Miranda had been smiling at her mother, a vacant expression on her face. But now she rolled into her pillow, sucking at the air, scratching at her sheets—a sudden seizure, and her mother knelt down over her and pried open her fingers, searched her mouth for her tongue, held her legs from shaking as she shouted for help. Miranda’s eyes had rolled up in her head, her backbone had arched away from the mattress. But now she collapsed just as suddenly, her muscles soft as Aegypta Schenck dragged her away into the dirt and rocks until the gate had vanished as utterly and suddenly as it had first appeared. The wall was hidden in the mist. The sound was still. And Aegypta Schenck was weeping her cold tears over her, fussing over her just as her mother fus
sed and wept, until Miranda woke, rolled onto her side.
Later, sullen and submissive, she followed her aunt up the hill. “It was the wrong way,” scolded Aegypta Schenck. “It was not the way for you, so close to the wall. It was a risk. Why must you always look backward, toward the past? How can you frighten me like this, punish me? Your way is east from here, forward, not back. Is that so difficult to understand? It is true for all of us. What is it about these past events that fascinates you? The tourmaline, that was a way to bring you here!”
They rose out of the clouds through the pine forest to the slippery grass below Kepler’s tower. They passed the stone where the jewel had lain, where Miranda had set it down to become the white tyger. She raised her eyes, looked up at the ring of snowy mountains. The configuration of the peaks was different now. A rocky spire now jutted from the mountain above the tower.
“This has changed.”
An impatient shrug. “Child, it remakes itself.” Aegypta Schenck scratched her big nose and then continued: “Didn’t I explain? Other people’s experience is no use. Our own experience is no use. You might look over a high cliff and see the water. The next day nothing but a desert. Do you remember the ship that took you into tara mortilor, when you came to see me that first time?”
Miranda did remember. Now she imagined what might have been different if she had left Aegypta there, a bird in a cage. Would she be with Peter now? Would she be walking on the mountain above Stanesti-Jui?
The sun had crept over the high white ridge. They climbed the rest of the way into the pass, through the rockfall. The place was not so frightening in the sunlight. But the pool was dried up, the reflecting pool. It was just a bowl of cracked, dry mud.
“Maybe I should have broken this open while I had the chance,” Miranda said. She circled the tower, laid her hand on the iron door underneath the stairs. “Expedite the inevitable.”
“What?”
“‘Expedite the inevitable.’ That’s what Stanley used to say.”