The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  * * *

  IN THE STRADA Cerbului it was Miranda who had taken away Peter’s nightmare, replaced it with another kind of dream. She had healed him by surrendering. But now the dream doubled as it disappeared, as Chloe Adira stirred, raised herself up, leaned over him, let her naked breasts brush against his chest. But he was not happy to wake, nor could he lose the sensation of being in two places at once.

  At first he was not happy to wake up. But he responded to her as she reached for him, and teased him and tickled him. Later, he searched the intimate recesses of her body as if looking for something and not finding it—she didn’t seem to care. She had strategies to prolong the search, stop and start it again in another place.

  She kissed him as he lay on his back, then got up, as he supposed, to find the water closet. He turned away from her, rolled over, looked for his dream again.

  Exhausted, he closed his eyes and there it was, miraculously, waiting for him. Miranda sat cross-legged on the bed, wrapped in a sheet up to her neck.

  But because this dream was not just a gift to him, but also under his control, in bed was not the only place they were. But they sat together outside the icehouse in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on the flat stones above the little stream. His harmonica was in his lap. And she was talking just as she had in the old days, her forehead bunched and serious. She pushed back a strand of hair.

  “How do you know what you are going to do?” she said. “I mean there are voices around you that tell you everything about it. And then inside voices that aren’t so different, usually. Because the outside voices have sunk down in.”

  This was the kind of thing she would have said, and maybe she even did say it. Back then she would have been discussing her parents, or else what was going to happen after high school. Now in the dream she wasn’t talking about those things anymore. Because everything that had happened since had changed her. He also had changed, and if his right hand was still gone, it was because he had had it and lost it. If he still could not play the instrument in his lap, it was because he had lost the skills of his right hand. So there he was again outside the icehouse, a journey that had taken him a long way.

  “I know what you mean,” he said, which also was different—he hadn’t then, all the times he’d sat with her. He did now.

  She looked up into the heads of the summer trees. “Oh, look,” she said, and her face lightened and cleared. She made a gesture with her hand. He knew she saw something above them on the branch, a bird or a squirrel, something like that. But he was looking at her. He wanted to reach out with his left hand and touch her on her cheek and lips—he was almost close enough for that. And though he could still feel the fear that made such a thing impossible, in another part of the dream he knew she was there with him, sitting cross-legged above him on the messed-up bed, and all he had to do was look up to wherever she was pointing.

  Later, he woke up alone. The dream had already receded from him, not the fact of it or the vividness of it. But he could not longer remember all the things they had talked about, the turns of their conversation. He lay in Chloe Adira’s bed, or else in some other downstairs bedroom of her house on the Strada Cerbului. Morning light poked through the shutters, made a ladder on the floor.

  Peter blinked. The walls were dark blue plaster and the ceiling was white. Framed photographs were on the wall beside the bed.

  Peter turned his head. The painted walls were coarse and rough. They deadened sound. It was so quiet here. Street noise barely penetrated.

  For days after he had left Staro Selo, his ears had rung and buzzed. But how astonishing it was to sleep in a bed like this! The mattress was hard, the sheet pulled into ridges. There was even a pleasant smell, a perfume that hid a darker odor.

  An image of Miranda floated through his mind and disappeared, disturbed by the memory of how Chloe Adira had looked as she rolled away from him, stood up. A groggy gasp, and she had held the coverlet against her breasts. When she turned, he could see her bare back in the lamplight, the swell of her hips, her dark shoulders with the whorl of hair that curled down from the nape of her neck—that was something he knew about. It hadn’t taken him long to learn.

  She had left him, come back to bed, left him once more when he was asleep. Now he lay with his left hand behind his head, remembering also the way she had unbuckled his prosthetic, rubbed the chafed, sore, dimpled, tender stump of his missing hand. She had kissed it with her dark lips. Or was that Miranda in his dream?

  On the train to Brasov he had been half-afraid he might not feel anything again. Thinking of the men he had left behind, he had imagined himself and all of them as victims of a long, slow-roasting fire. He imagined ridges of scar tissue forming on his ears, his eyelids, his nose, his mouth, his fingers, re-forming harder and sharper every time they were scraped away. He imagined himself deformed in an army of deformed men—it wasn’t true. Now he lay bloated as if with exquisite sensation, his fingers as subtle as a pianist’s as he moved his left hand over his face, pinched the bridge of his nose, felt the stubble on his cheeks. Time slowed.

  He had duties later in the day. Hours from now. More than once the sergeant-colonel had suggested he go find a woman, and that’s what he had done, hadn’t he? Just what he said. What was Chloe Adira to him? What was he to her? She had a husband in Poland.

  Peter had someone else as well. Miranda Popescu was in Stanesti-Jui, in the house of the Condesa de Rougemont. He had kept away from her—he was a wanted man, after all, suspected in the murder of Felix Ceausescu. And by the time he realized no one cared about that, he was trapped at Staro Selo in the mud.

  Now, lying on his back, he thought about the dream he’d had. Where was Miranda now? Had she forgiven him for the way he’d left her in Cismigiu Park? But if he could just leave this place, find her and ask her—what had General Antonescu said, that he had no use for cripples in his army? Peter rolled over, got out of bed.

  If he couldn’t find a way to visit her in Stanesti-Jui, maybe she could come to Brasov—he would write her. There was no reason not to. Andromeda must have already delivered the one letter. There was no hiding the contents of it now.

  But he was in Chloe Adira’s house. He got up to go in search of her, to find her and say good-bye. He wanted to be gone—out the door into the street; he didn’t want to get trapped here like in the mud of Staro Selo. There was a linen robe decorated with chain-stitching, a style he associated with North Africa. It lay across the end of the bed. Maybe she’d left it for him. But he put on his clothes instead.

  He heard voices in the corridor. There was an open doorway at the end of the passage. The passage was windowless and dark, but the shutters were open in the small square room beyond. Chloe stood there, framed in the light, talking to a man—the servant, Dumitru, who had served him tea the night before.

  Peter thought to clear his throat or make a noise with his feet, but then he paused. Dumitru had a big chest and beard, and he was standing close to his mistress, glowering down at her. And though his precise expression was indistinct, the language of his body suggested a change from his surly deference the previous night—the deference had gone away. “Monsieur Janus was a fool,” he said.

  Then he grimaced. Except for the single French word, he spoke Roumanian with the German accent that was common in the town. “I suppose there is no choice what to do. They will know where he is gone. They will be watching the house, I think.”

  “It is not like that.”

  “Hah—I wonder. Why would Antonescu send this fellow out of all of them? What kind of spy will get his picture in the paper? And why would he … make this kind of occupation with madame—just a little recreation? Why not just knock down the door?”

  Was it possible, thought Peter, that the man was right? Was it possible that Peter had been watched, or manipulated, or had the police after him? He wanted to say something to deny it, to announce his presence. But he was puzzled by the servant’s truculence, curious also to know what Chloe A
dira might say. He had no desire to cause trouble here. So he stood quiet in the darkness, his hook dangling from his hand. He had not strapped it on.

  “It is not like that,” Chloe repeated.

  “Hah—what is it like? He came here with a letter from your brother. He came right to the door. Madame brought him in, and they talk about the war. Madame tells him about Chiselet. Just so—like that. Do you know who this man is?”

  “Friend, everyone in Brasov knows who he is. He is Captain Gross from the Mountain Regiment. He’s in the newspaper. I had to earn his trust,” said Chloe Adira.

  “I can see that,” said Dumitru. “And so how many times did madame earn this trust? We have no use for services like that—”

  She tried to slap him, but he caught her hand, pushed her away. Peter dropped his prosthesis and stepped toward them, angered by the look of brutal satisfaction on Dumitru’s face—the man smiled. He was enjoying this.

  “Oh, here’s the hero,” he said. “The wounded hero of Staro Selo.” He stood in the middle of the hallway fumbling under his shirt for a weapon, a snub-nose Meriam—Peter saw when he drew it out—from Eritraea. Let him feel like a man, Peter thought. He had no intention of confronting him. His raised his hand, then took a few more steps to where Chloe stood. She was dressed in a long linen robe.

  “You are finished, both of you,” Dumitru said. “You are no use to us. You are dabblers in this, rich men and women—Monsieur Janus, too. You won’t be with us when we march to Bucharest, I promise you. We will be boatmen and shift workers and farmers. We will be workers in the oil fields and mines. No Africans and no rich men—you will see.”

  After such a speech, Peter thought, he could have no intention of firing the pistol. Peter studied the man’s heavy, bearded face, looking for clues. With the gun at his waist, Dumitru backed through the doorway into the lighted room, then disappeared around a corner. Peter let him go. He listened to the clump of his footsteps, the muffled crash of the front door.

  Chloe Adira was upset, and so he reached out his hand. When she came to him he held her close as she struggled gently in his arm. “Trust me,” he murmured—what did he mean? Why should she? In what way was he deserving of her trust, or anybody’s trust? She put her hands against his chest. He held her for a moment and then let her go.

  But he couldn’t leave her like this, now. Later, in the bedroom, they spoke about what had happened. Agitated, Chloe walked back and forth next to the bed while he stood by the shuttered window. She clapped her pale palms together, lightly, repeatedly, while she told him what she’d learned from her brother’s letter, which he had written in the hospital, and which Peter had delivered with the reichmarks—“He broke his leg coming back from the Turkish lines. He stepped into a hole. He had delicate bones. He met a man who had crossed over from Constantinople, an Abyssinian, there between the armies. The hieroglyphs you took from him, that was a code. My brother told me what it said.”

  “He said he couldn’t read it.”

  “Then he lied to you! Why would he tell you the truth? These are important subjects. As for that letter, don’t tell me you have given it to the authorities.…”

  Peter shook his head. Since the night before, he had tried not to think about these things. But now the question must be asked: What was the connection between this household and the wreck of the Hephaestion? He had wondered about it on the train to Brasov. Now, standing by the wooden shutter in this quiet room, he asked himself another question: What was he doing here? This was not just a matter of his duty to a fallen soldier. This was not just two lonely people reaching out to one another. What did Chloe Adira want from him?

  He went to sit down on the bed. “Please don’t speak,” she said. “It is hard for me. Show me your hand.”

  He brought it up and opened it. “I will trust you because my brother trusted you,” she said. “I will trust you with my life and this house, because I have no choice—you heard what Dumitru said. I am so afraid.”

  He did not comfort her this time. He waited for her till she began: “I told you about the weapon in Chiselet. I know about it from my father.”

  She clapped her hands together, then continued. “You must have been a child, because it was before I was born. When Prince Frederick was attempting to form a government, then Abyssinia gave up its diplomatic and commercial ban—just for a few years, until the coronation of the empress. That was when my father was here as part of a trade delegation, and my mother was beautiful, although you wouldn’t know it. But then he had to leave the country, and he could not take us with him, because of the miscegenation laws in Africa. He used to send us money—he still does, although with Janus’s death…”

  Peter listened. In fact he had not been a child when all this had occurred. Or rather, the Chevalier de Graz had not been a child, but a young officer. He had not been interested in politics. But Peter was interested now, in spite of his impatience, in spite of his desire to leave the house and not come back: “… So there is information that comes to us over the Turkish lines. Messages we pass on. My father is in the government in Addis Ababa. It has been many months since he first told us about the cargo of the Hephaestion, which he had tracked on behalf of his ministry—pitchblende from the Congo, as well as other more conventional weapons. These were things the Baroness Ceausescu meant to use against the Germans, and which she purchased from two retired officers—criminals, of course, who now live in Berlin. The pitchblende was incinerated, which might have caused some of the radiation sickness in that area—”

  “I was there,” murmured Peter.

  “—in Chiselet. But there was something else.”

  All this time she had been speaking quickly, softly, swallowing between her sentences, clapping her palms together. “This was something so important and valuable, they sent a man, an engineer. His body was not found.”

  What was it Andromeda had said? When Peter had seen her in the orchard below Staro Selo: an Abyssinian fellow in a gray suit, south of the railway line. “Yes, I know. A dead oak tree in the marsh, two hundred meters south of the embankment. A lead-lined cylinder. What was in it?” he asked now.

  “I—I don’t know,” she said. “It is hard to understand. But they are using poison gases in Bulgaria?”

  “Yes.” Men retching in the mud, he thought—an image rather than a sequence of words.

  “This is like a poison gas, except it spreads like a disease. A germ that travels through the air. And it spreads from person to person, as it did across North Africa—oh, twenty years ago. Many died.”

  “And?”

  “I—I don’t know. The hieroglyphs are difficult, because they don’t go word to word. And I didn’t see them—this is what Janus wrote to me. I let you sleep when I was reading it, Dumitru and I—blood in your brain, and then it bursts out through your eyes and ears.”

  Men retching in the mud, Peter thought. Chloe Adira walked back and forth. “It is what my father told us,” she went on. “The Germans accounted for every cylinder except one. So my father thought that someone like Bocu would use it as a weapon against the Turks. He might think it was a chance to win the war all in a moment. The chlorine gas, it kills men on both sides, doesn’t it? This is like that. It cannot be so easily controlled.”

  She sat down beside him on the bed. She put her hands over her knees, then turned to face him. He closed his eyes. Men retching in the mud, and so he opened them. “My father says he is worried because Bocu will be desperate. There is a faction in my father’s government that is supplying the Turks, giving them whatever they need. And so the military situation will get worse.…”

  “I have a military duty here,” Peter reminded her.

  “Oh, but it is urgent. Now Dumitru—I’m afraid.… If the Turks cross the river east of Tutrakan…”

  “Then the war is lost,” Peter said. He shrugged. “The police searched Chiselet after the wreck. The Germans were there, too. This was a year ago.”

  “Oh, but it can
’t wait! Every cylinder but one—that’s what my father says. The Turks also will find it if they cross the river below Staro Selo and the bridge. He said they have their barges in the water not ten kilometers from Chiselet—in hieroglyphs a picture corresponds to an idea. So there are turtles, he says, turtles with broad backs. And then an animal from Africa, a wild dog or a hyena with a long muzzle and enormous legs.”

  I’ve seen worse, Peter thought. But there was such anxiety in Chloe’s face, he did not feel relieved. “You must help me,” she said. “This canister of germs—you must bring it to me now that Dumitru has gone. You know where it is, by this oak tree! You must put it in my hand. I’ll do the rest. I will send it to my father. You will be recompensed, and not just with money. You owe me this at least after last night.”

  She didn’t know him very well, Peter thought. How could she know him well? Suddenly he was desperate to be gone. Was this the only reason she had taken him into her home? So she could seduce him and enlist him for some cause? Miranda’s face occurred to him, not just for a moment, as before. But Miranda stayed with him when he left the house. She stayed with him in the street outside, and all the way back to the barracks in the Strada Castelului.

  15

  A Landscape of Desire

  IT WASN’T JUST that there were rumors in the city, because there were always rumors. The police investigation was perfunctory and brief, but the Roumania Libera was able to discover the name of the dead girl. In a series of small articles on page seven, one of the metropolitan reporters was able to track down her employers in the Strada Batistei, and to suggest that on the night in question she’d been seen getting into a government motorcar. The proximity of the body to the People’s Palace was also mentioned, and there was a dark, irresponsible suggestion that this wasn’t the first time. In the same issue there appeared an editorial letter on the subject of the modern demimonde, the collapse of public morals since the start of the hostilities, and the abuse of African cocaine in the University district. The victim’s age was much discussed.