by Paul Park
The rioters pursued no strategy. Businesses were looted, the traditional scapegoats were hunted down: civil servants, government functionaries, aristocrats from the old regime, Jews, Gypsies, leaders of industrial concerns. Conjurers above all—recently pardoned and forced to register by President Bocu—were harrassed with something that approached discipline, because they were thought to be complicit in his death. Rumors had spread after the interrogation and subsequent suicide of the president’s valet. The disgusting facts seemed to suggest no other explanation.
But more than anything the rioters possessed a moment of opportunity. General Antonescu was at the front, and it took several days for him to grasp the urgency of what was happening in the capital. In any case he had no troops available to reassert control, at least until the Eleventh Mountaineers arrived at Snagov Portal and the city wall.
But Peter Gross was no longer with them. The previous morning he’d left Brasov with the rest of the regiment. North of the city the Rezistenta had blown up the railway tracks near the village of Buftea. By the time Peter’s train had crawled into the station, the regiment had already disappeared down the Snagov road.
Peter stayed with the support staff, with Lieutenant-Major Crasnaru and Sylva and some others from his team. In the afternoon they set up camp in the woods near the Colentina River. Peter shared a tent with Crasnaru, who had not spoken to him all day on the train—they had left Brasov before dawn—or before that since the trip to Sacele.
Even so, it seemed to Peter that the man was always with him, watching over him, guarding him. Crasnaru was in his sixties, a career officer with a scoured, wrinkled face that seemed both fierce and tired. His teeth were old and yellow under his waxed moustache, and that day he smelled of onions. Peter smelled onions around him all day long, because the man kept so close.
When it was half dark, Peter spread out his bedroll in the tent and lay down fully dressed. He unstrapped his steel prosthesis and laid it out. He could see the campfire beyond the canvas wall, and the major walking back and forth. The tent was a large one—a man could stand upright. In time, Crasnaru stood in the flap and looked down at him.
“We’ll be in the city tomorrow,” Peter said. “What do you think we’ll find?”
Because of the man’s unfriendliness, he did not expect a reply. So he was surprised to hear him laugh. “What makes you think you’re going to Bucharest?”
“I assumed—”
“Is that why I’m your nursemaid tonight? I don’t suppose. You’ll be straight to Tutrakan.”
The major was in silhouette against the firelight. Peter couldn’t read his expression. “What do you mean? The orders—”
“What do you know about orders? Just for your convenience—it was not difficult, the duty I assigned to you. Well within a cripple’s power. A few conscripts and deserters. I thought to use your reputation for the good of our regiment. Did you understand that?”
Peter rose up on his elbows. “Tell me what you mean.”
“Don’t answer me. Let me say I had to speak to the colonel about you, because I find you are unable to follow even these simple commands. It was no surprise to him. He told me about an Abyssinian agent in Brasov in the Strada Cerbului. Of course she is under the protection of a foreign government. And she is the wife of a hero of the Polish campaign. You should be ashamed. Is it too much for me to expect my officers not to be concerned in something like that?”
“Sir, I—”
“Don’t talk to me. I would think you had more pride. What about old Tanda’s son—the farmer?”
This was the boy Peter had been sent to collect in Sacele, the boy he’d seen in the barn with his crippled brother. “Sir, there was no one at the house. I tracked him to an empty cabin in the trees. He must have escaped onto the mountain.”
“You’re a liar! I had to bag him myself. He said you’d stood inside his barn, not six meters away. Now he’s at the Tarlungeni subprefecture. They’re not too proud to do their job—the great Captain Gross, who’s been in all the newspapers! By God, I’ll enjoy taking you down.”
He wasn’t enjoying anything about this, Peter thought. He was nervous or else frightened—his body stiff, his weight on the toes of his boots. With careful nonchalance, Peter lit a candle, twisted it into the mud floor.
Now he could see the man’s features, his lined face and stringy gray hair. “So…?” he said.
“So that’s what I told them,” answered Crasnaru. “This is not a matter of a court-martial or a reduction to the ranks. They’ve allowed you to represent the honor of the Eleventh Mountaineers, which means they cannot break you as you deserve. They’ll find a way—you’re a hero, see. You’ll die a hero down in Tutrakan.”
Crasnaru seemed to begrudge even this. “The colonel’s got a story worked out. You might win another medal. It’s for morale. The reputation of the army. My morale’s never been higher.”
He was lying, Peter knew: his brave words, his nervous gestures. And he wanted something. That was why he’d said all this, which was surely not part of the colonel’s plan.
Crasnaru had an automatic pistol on his belt. Bravado and uncertainty—there was no reason for the man to be afraid of him, Peter thought, an unarmed cripple at his feet. But he was afraid, and now Peter guessed the reason. Crasnaru had followed him at Sacele. That’s how he’d figured out about the farmer’s son.
“You know my secret,” Peter said.
He was watching the old man’s body as a wrestler might, searching for advantage. Crasnaru’s black eyes shone, ferocious in the candlelight. But at the same time he seemed eager to learn something, solve a mystery whose explanation he dreaded. Maybe he thought this was his only chance, before he had to turn Peter over to the military police.
In which case, Peter decided, something might be done. “You saw where I went.”
“Don’t play games with me! I had a bet with Filimon. That was the hunting cabin of the Count de Graz.”
Then it all came out. He took a step into the tent, close enough for Peter to see the lines on his tired face, smell the onions. “By God,” he said, “what story are you going to tell us now? Look at you—not a mark on you.”
Peter let him go on: “Once I saw the Chevalier de Graz. He was with von Schenck and the cavalry. When did you ever see a dead horse-boy from either army? Look at you—not a mark! Do you think I’ve changed since then?”
He drew the pistol from his belt. Peter rose to his knees, then rolled onto the balls of his feet, his hand raised. “What are you doing?” he said.
But he did not think the man would fire the gun. Crasnaru would not lose control. There was something else in his face beside anger. Fear, perhaps, or awe. Even standing over him, two meters away, he couldn’t quite look Peter in the eye.
“So what do we get?” said Lieutenant-Major Crasnaru. “One shitty world is good enough for the rest of us. You should see the alchemical laboratory that we found in the People’s Palace, in Nicola Ceausescu’s bedroom. Oh, but it takes years of study, I know. They didn’t teach those sciences where I went to school. Now they’ve done in Bocu, everyone who stands against you. Who’re they looking for? I’ll tell you—the wife and daughter of General Schenck von Schenck! A conjurer named de Rougemont and her friend Magda de Graz! I hope they hang them!”
At first he had been shouting. But now his voice trailed away, as if his grievance was so hopeless and so old, it bored even himself. “Tell me the truth,” he pleaded. “Where were you for these twenty years, while the rest of us got old?”
Peter spread the fingers of his hand, as if in supplication. He was in no danger, he decided. “Please, sir, what are you doing?” he repeated.
But Crasnaru didn’t want to answer that question. He wanted to talk about the Chevalier de Graz. What would Peter say? That he had stopped in the village of Buftea, where in the old days there had been a hunting preserve along the Colentina River? This was on the opposite side from the Mogosoaia woods—he knew this p
lace. Years before, he had pitched his tent in a hayfield fifty meters from here, close to this same fringe of trees.
Then he’d been on horseback, chasing stags. He’d been here with Prince Frederick in the old days, and had crossed the river at Constantin’s Ford. The crossing would be harder in this season.
A wind from the river touched the canvas wall, made the candle flicker. The campfire outside had died down. Crasnaru wanted to know about the Chevalier de Graz. Peter would show him. All day Peter had been thinking about how to find his way to Bucharest, what he would do when he arrived there.
“Please, sir,” he murmured, flexing the fingers of his left hand.
“Madame de Rougemont died of a tumor fifteen years ago,” said Lieutenant-Major Crasnaru. “That was what was in the newspapers. My mother used to tell me stories when I was a child, and my wife told them to my son. Witches and warlocks and their schemes. They meet in secret places in the mountains. Soldiers march and politicians argue, but that’s not where the power is. Do you think that’s fair? That there’s something else controls us, makes us do the things we do…?”
He held the gun out in front of him, but he was already defeated. Hand held out, fingers splayed, Peter rose to his feet. He wondered if the man would let him go, walk out the door. The conjuring he spoke of, maybe it was not so complicated.
But then a shudder of hatred passed across his face, and the gun twitched in his hand. Peter sprang at him, knocked the barrel away. Crasnaru fell back against the canvas wall as the tent collapsed along that side. Peter hit him underneath the chin with the stump of his arm, and pulled the canvas over him as he struggled and flailed. The gun had not discharged.
Peter stood up through the tent flap. He disentangled himself, then stepped out past the fire pit and through the darkness and the little branches toward the river, which he could smell through the trees. He broke into a run. He knew where he was going: Constantin’s Ford, where the river made a turn. It ran shallow over an abandoned stonework, marked on this side by the base of a ruined tower.
After three hundred meters through the woods, he came out on the bank. The river was wide and dark and quiet, full of the spring flood. There were no lights on the far bank, nothing but black forest. Upstream? Downstream? He guessed, then ran south as the woods came to life behind him. Lights and voices shouting. But he would find his way. He ran along the edge to the steep bank. The river was full and smooth, black under the black sky. Sometimes he slipped and fell.
In thirty minutes the abandoned tower rose out of the trees. Pinpricks of light shone through them. Peter slid off the bank and down into the rushing, silent stream, which rose above his knees. He groped under the water, found his footing, the stone dam or causeway under the surface.
Halfway across he climbed onto a rocky pier. Clinging to the rocks, he rested while the cold water slipped around him. Once he’d found the three flat stones and the cattails on the far shore, he told himself, he would follow the river downstream and approach the city from the north, one of a thousand other demobilized soldiers, fresh from the military hospital, perhaps. He would shave his new beard. No one would recognize him from those crappy rotogravures.
Once again his road had led him in a circle. But he would not stop in Mogosoaia or the woods. He would not visit any of those places from the previous year. He would not pass the grave of Aegypta Schenck—what for? He would not find the stand of trees where he had said good-bye to Miranda. He would not penetrate the thicket where Ludu Rat-tooth had died, after she had seen the white tyger in the dark.
He wasn’t the same man who had visited those places. He had changed. Now he stepped into the river again, and past the rocky pier the water was slower and shallower. He squelched among the rocks and under the dark trees.
He would follow the river downstream, keep to its bank. He’d make faster time that way. Night had come, and no one could see him in the dark, though men with torches searched the far shore. He would wait for a while until the lights went out.
But a man stood up and shouted, pointing. Crouching among the cattails where the bank was steep, Peter slipped and fell. He clattered down onto the stones. There were more shouts from across the river.
When he stood up again, they saw him. The bank was undercut, the stones unsteady. He grabbed hold of some roots and pulled himself up, amid cries from the far shore and a few gunshots. Maybe they had even seen where he had crossed, or else they’d known about it all along; he scrambled up the bank, pushed into the black undergrowth, where he stood among the little trees just for a moment.
But he could not follow the stream down to the city walls, not now. That was no longer possible. Instead he would break through the woods in a straight line until he found the fields of Mogosoaia and the lake.
Another gunshot, and he turned away into the shelter of the forest. At first he moved slowly, feeling his way. But the dark trees seemed to contain dangers that were conjured or animated out of the past—ape men, other creatures. After fifteen minutes he was hurrying as quickly as he could. He did not want to be in these same woods, which in any case he revisited constantly in his mind, and which had come to represent his failures and lost opportunities.
After half an hour he was almost running, just as he had on the Buftea side. The immature pine trees whipped at his face; he didn’t want to be here. He couldn’t understand what had prevented him from taking Miranda into his arms and kissing her in any one of a hundred moments in these woods.
Why had he let her escape from him in the brick gazebo in Cismigiu Park? Madame de Graz had reminded him of his duty to her father, the oath he’d sworn. But now he remembered listening to her with something that approached relief. He had not trusted Inez de Rougemont, but he had let her take Miranda to Stanesti-Jui, while he had run away south to the frontier, pretending to draw the hounds away. And he had gone to earth, and he had hidden there until the Turks crossed the line.
Out of breath, he paused among the trees. Figurative hounds—the Baroness Ceausescu’s policemen and soldiers. But before that he had stopped underneath these massed, pale trees—yes, here he was exactly. This was the place. He couldn’t avoid it, as it turned out. He had stopped here and embraced Miranda under this beech tree, and they had listened to the baying dogs. Then he had left her, because he had been a coward then as well. What if the two of them had crossed the stream together that night, by that same ford, and had come to Herastrau the other way?
No, he’d been afraid, and had taken refuge in his own kind of heroism. But surely he had changed, and if he had been able to go backward to the moment when they had stood together here in this swale, and then further back to Christmas Hill or even to the icehouse where they first had spoken, he would have known what to do. Two kinds of strength were now available to him, because Pieter de Graz and Peter Gross had made their peace at last.
People change and they don’t change. Continuing on past the beech tree, past the thicket where Ludu Rat-tooth had seen the white tyger, he felt he was exploring and escaping the same landscape, a place he could not but inhabit in his mind. He walked and ran and shuffled through the woods and the open fields, and he would find the house at Lake Herastrau where de Graz’s mother lived. There was a fig tree. Seven steps led to a door painted red. He would find Miranda there. At the same time he was possessed by an anxiety that would not stay away, that had another source—what had Crasnaru told him? The police were looking for accomplices to Bocu’s murder. The crowd was hunting down the list of conjurers.
The police were looking for accomplices, and after tonight they would be looking for him, too. What he had told himself the year before—that keeping with Miranda would endanger her—was more true now than then. It didn’t matter; he must reach the city. He could not afford to wait. If he thought about Miranda now, if he punished himself for things he had not done, words he had not spoken, if he pictured to himself her black hair, big forehead, small chin, ears that stuck out, etc., etc., maybe all of that wa
s a backward way of comforting himself, and quelling an anxiety that grew and gathered as he approached the city from the northwest side. Maybe that was a way to avoid grieving about what he was sure to find, and what he did find after the sun rose, as he stood outside the burned-out house for the first time in many, many years, however you wanted to reckon it.
There was the stone statue of Demeter with her empty bowl, standing at the bottom of the dirt road. There was the fig tree above his head, its leaves dry and singed. Seven steps to the door painted red, only it was gone. In the stink of the burning he could not smell the lake, nor see it over the rear of the house, which still rose like the back wall of a stage set. The front of the house was fallen in.
And like the back of a stage set, there was flowered paper on the rear wall, and intact pictures, and a glass-fronted cabinet full of books, and a doorway that led nowhere. The house stood in a block of peeling wooden houses with carved fretwork and wooden gutters. The fire had spread to the houses on both sides. Their roofs, though, had not collapsed.
And now his thoughts spread back to lick or touch the suburbs he’d been walking through since Mogosoaia, and which he’d scarcely noticed, so consumed he had been with worry and regret. Now as the sun finally rose into the dirty, heavy sky, he saw the long lines of warehouses he’d walked through in the dark, and then the silent streets. He had passed many houses that were burned like this one, fences broken down like this one. Barking dogs, and no sign of people anywhere, no lights in the windows before dawn. They were afraid of the soldiers, he guessed.
His thoughts spread backward into the damaged streets, then forward into the uncertain future. It was a way of neglecting the consumed and ruined present, protecting himself as he climbed up the broken steps, across the collapsed timbers of the porch. He stepped over the gap until he stood in Madame de Graz’s sitting room among her broken piles of things.
There was shattered glass and plaster under his boots. He brushed the dust from an upholstered armchair and sat down in his damp trousers, staring at the wrecked piano and a viola or a violin that had been split in half across the back. Staring also at the remains of a framed photograph of himself, taken God knew how long ago, and yet still recognizable. So: a homecoming. But there was no one home.