The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  It was not inevitable. But when they came into the high chamber, the woman did seem pleased—pleased and angry and melancholy all at once, if you could judge these things by her expression, which was always under her control. She sat on a throne carved from a block of purple amethyst. She was naked and her legs were spread, her perfect body on display in the empty hall. Her flesh was seamed with gold like the flesh of the mountain itself, and her hair shone like copper.

  Light came from globes of illuminated crystal around her head. In the soft light Princess Aegypta saw the boy was wounded, shot through the buttons of his yellow pajamas. And to one side of the throne there was a cage with silver bars, and another boy lay inside, a boy with a swollen face; Aegypta recognized him even so, although they’d never met.

  “I know why you’ve come,” said Nicola Ceausescu.

  She stepped down from her amethyst throne. She came toward Princess Aegypta with her hands outstretched, not to embrace her or to greet her but to pull her veil aside, adjust her fox-fur collar so she could see the marks of the cord that had choked her in Mogosoaia long before. Aegypta Schenck stepped back, watching the expression that troubled her—self-satisfaction? Despair? Or else a combination. Nicola Ceausescu turned on her bare heel, led her beyond the throne, into a smaller chamber hacked out of the rock and decorated as if for an expected guest. There was a bed, a basin on a stand, a table and stool, all of it made of the cold stone. Felix Ceausescu came in—“Whose room is this, maman?”—but Aegypta knew. It had been prepared and arranged for her brother’s aide-de-camp, the handsome young officer of the Ninth Hussars, who was not there.

  “Do you think he will come quickly? How long will he take?” asked Nicola Ceausescu. But she didn’t expect an answer. “I know why you’re here,” she said. Smiling a little, she moved her right hand around the different parts of her body, as if caressing herself—her breasts, her thighs. Nothing could be concealed there, but even so she wiggled her fingers like a conjurer, and at moments Princess Aegypta could see the jewel between them, glistening and winking and then disappearing. As a conjurer might amuse a child, she reached out to produce the jewel from behind Aegypta’s ear. Then she brought it up to her own face—a purple and green gemstone, Kepler’s Eye, which she now placed over her own. “I’ve got a chamber full of tourmalines. They mine them here,” she said. “What’s this one to me?”

  Her expression was both mocking and indulgent, but now it changed, transformed by grief or else some sharp physical pain. “Ah, God,” she said, “it took me years of searching to find it. I thought I would use it to look for my love in Bucharest, or else wherever he wandered under the sun and stars. How was I to know that he would come search for me here?”

  She glanced around at the stone and crystal chamber, empty but for the three of them, the two women and the boy, who had skipped to the other side of the stone bed. “I took it from that girl—that whore, who did not understand its value—no, excuse me. She is your niece, I know. I’ve given you such suffering, I don’t mean to cause you any more. I don’t mean to insult her. She was traveling in the hidden world to do your work for you—yours and de Rougemont’s—dutiful girl! Dry as dust, these political manipulations. Do not tell me love does not claim precedence. Not even death could sever us, I thought. And if sometimes he was cruel to me, I know what it’s like, to be cruel! It was nothing I didn’t deserve, hadn’t earned ten times over—oh, I am sorry for what I’ve done to you. I apologize,” she said, and with her left hand she reached a second time toward the welt around Aegypta’s neck, half hidden by the fox-fur collar.

  19

  The Amethyst Throne

  IN ANA CASSIAN’S fourth-floor apartment, the afternoon wore on. Peter had not budged from where he sat beside Miranda’s bed. Sometimes he looked at her, examined her pale, thin face—how long had it been since she had eaten? Ana Cassian had brought food, bowls of watery soup, and Peter had been touched to see Miranda’s mother try to feed her little spoonfuls. She would stroke Miranda’s throat, encourage her to swallow in her sleep. Then with a napkin she’d wipe up the mess.

  “You must learn to do this,” she said to Peter. She gave him a hesitant, shy smile—what had changed? “She’ll need someone to protect her after I’m gone.”

  What did she mean by that? With a growing sense of uneasiness, Peter watched Madame de Rougemont as she made her preparations. She’d arranged three hollow glass balls about twelve inches in diameter, balanced them in a line on the surface of the table. The glass was spotted, thick, and green. And there were two holes in each ball, one on either side. Each hole was surrounded by a heavy circular ridge where the soft glass, Peter supposed, had pulled from the glassblower’s pipe.

  Peter watched her fit the muzzle of the revolver into the holes one after another, so that it protruded into the middle of the sphere. “We must allow the pressure to escape,” she said to Madame de Graz, who stood with her, leaning on her cane. “But not so as to let the creature go. Magister Newton has given his precise instructions.”

  She had prepared some melted pitch or tar, which Ana Cassian had brought from the kitchen in an enamel pot. The smell of it filled the room and made it hot—the windows were all closed. The curtains were drawn.

  Peter squeezed Miranda’s hand. Sometimes he thought he felt her move, return the pressure. He was sweating in his wool uniform, which was still damp. So many tedious little operations at the wooden table, and the two old ladies murmuring to each other as Inez de Rougemont slipped the muzzle of the gun in and out of the glass spheres. She could not intend to fire it, Peter told himself. He wasn’t even sure it could be fired. The general, who’d had his superstitious side, had kept it as a talisman.

  “You’ll take care of her,” said Clara Brancoveanu. “You have proved your loyalty, like your friend Lieutenant Prochenko.”

  What did she mean by that? Ana Cassian had told him about Prochenko’s death. Prochenko … Prochenko—wouldn’t the glass shatter even with a blank cartridge? But the gun appeared unloaded—what was the point of this?

  “I’ll take care of her,” he said.

  Inez de Rougemont was reading from the black book, and then suddenly, as if she’d mustered up her courage to do something dangerous, she thrust the barrel of the gun into one of the open spheres and pulled the trigger. There was a flash of light, the crash of a discharge, softer and more muffled than Peter anticipated; he started to his feet. Madame de Rougemont pulled the gun out of the hole and laid it on the table. She took a wooden spoonful of the tar and patched the smoking holes, her gestures quick but unhurried. She laid the sphere of glass into a nest of folded cloth, so that it wouldn’t roll. Then she repeated this procedure with the other two spheres.

  Now she stood with the last sphere in her hand. Peter could see movement in the swirling smoke inside of it, little struggling hands and feet. And there was no mistaking the triumph in her voice. “Rotbottom,” she said.

  * * *

  “HOW COULD I guess,” said Nicola Ceausescu, “that he would come look for me here among the dead? Do not think I meant him any harm! Please do not think ill of me. Domnul Andromedes was a young man, a handsome man with his gray eyes. I didn’t care about that! But I felt he was the only honest man I knew, surrounded as I was with sycophants. An artist craves sincerity above all things! Honesty above all things. Andromedes could never punish me as much as I could hurt myself—not more, and you have no idea how I have suffered for what I’ve had to do. Because I think if only I had not used your niece’s little body for my games, then he would not have gone to find her in Victor Bocu’s bedroom—‘Beau-cul,’ we used to call him. But was I wrong to think I could entice him that way? I meant to offer him a present. Hadn’t he loved the girl? I don’t see why.”

  Seeing the distress on her face, little Felix had crossed the room again—“Is everything all right, maman?” he said. “What a pretty stone! May I touch it?”

  And the baroness smiled a false smile. She shooed him
away, sent him skipping out into the larger room so she and Aegypta Schenck could talk alone. “That is one of the ironies of the world,” she philosophized. “You scheme and work for something. Then when you achieve it you don’t need it anymore—I will not go to Roumania again. It has lost its … charm. It is full of … memories and regrets. Should I climb up to the mountain villages, the houses where I lived when I was young and innocent? Don’t look at me! There was such a time! You have no right to judge me. Why should I prowl the corridors of the Ambassadors, or the National, or the People’s Palace, thinking about what I could have done, or should have done? Should I go to Mogosoaia, where I burned you out of your little house? Or to Mary’s cave, where I snatched your life away—you see I remember these things! Perhaps that’s what you’re counting on, that I would wish to make amends.”

  A shiver of suspicion passed over her beautiful features. “Is that what you thought?” she said, and shifted the jewel in her hand, wiggled her fingers as if preparing to make it disappear. “I owe you a great deal,” she said, “but you have robbed me, too. Robbed me of everything, everything I loved, everything that made my life tolerable, you and your niece—what did he see in her? Andromedes—what does he see? Oh, sometimes I’m afraid that he will never come, and I will wait here forever, and he will stay on the hillside where he can look down and watch over her—was it just that she was young? Or inexperienced? Is that the most important quality, after all?”

  Her eyes glittered, the same color as the jewel. “Or is it because she is a better woman than I am, not heartless, or selfish, or cruel, or a murderess. I tell you I was like her once! And I tell you also there are many ways to commit murder: Felix and Markasev—they died for her. For her sake, protecting her, or else because of choices that she made. Andromedes also, and behind her there was always you, the author of every piece of tragedy or bad luck in my unhappy life—you knew my artistic temperament! You goaded me to do what I did to you, mocked me with my hands around your throat—do you deny it? And now you have the impudence to beg me for my greatest treasure, the only treasure that remains to me. I suppose you think you can come into my house and take it because you are what you are, a princess of Great Roumania, and I am a poor peasant woman from the mountains, whose mother was a whore as everybody knows—this means nothing to you, the pain of ordinary people! It was my skill and destiny to give that pain a voice, dance it on the world’s stage, while you sat in your darkened boxes, plotting your schemes.…”

  She was in a rage. Her skin, white and pure as polished marble, now showed a roseate, agate glow. And the seams where the wolf had scratched and bitten her now burned like gold. She squeezed the tourmaline in her right hand, and she stepped forward with her other hand outstretched. She seized the princess by the neck as if she meant to murder her a second time. Aegypta Schenck fell backward through the entrance to the larger chamber, sprawled onto her knees behind the amethyst throne. “Never,” whispered the baroness next to her ear.

  * * *

  “THEY WILL SUFFOCATE,” said Inez de Rougemont, holding the glass sphere in her hand.

  But at that moment, Miranda came awake. “Sweet Goddess,” murmured Clara Brancoveanu. “Here it is again.”

  Peter turned back in time to see Miranda’s eyes start open, see her throw the bedclothes off, swat her mother’s hands away. “Never,” she said, her voice hoarse and soft, unrecognizable after her long illness. “You will not steal this away from me.”

  She staggered to her feet, standing in her nightdress on the sweaty pallet, glaring at them, furious. “What have I to do with your plots and schemes?” she said.

  Then it was as if she came alive to her surroundings, left whatever dream she’d brought with her into the room. “Princess,” she said, “don’t touch me.”

  She saw Peter for the first time, stepped down onto the floor in her bare feet. “Here I am,” she said, “I’m your little whore. A perfect fit for the Chevalier de Graz,” she said, touching her body as if offering herself up. She spoke in a soft, compelling voice he could not recognize in her small mouth, and he stepped back, horrified, away from her as with one quick gesture she shrugged the straps of her nightdress over her shoulders so that it fell down around her feet. Naked, she made a little pirouette across the floor. “What have you got for me? I’m hungry. Eels, are they? Lamprey eels—that’s what I think.”

  Now she turned her attention to Inez de Rougemont. “What are you doing?” she hissed. “He will die like that.” And she jumped forward with her hand held out, just as Peter recognized her voice at last, not from his direct experience. But he remembered the scratchy sound of a wax cylinder that one of the officers had played at Staro Selo in a portable machine—one of the recitatives from The White Tyger, which Nicola Ceausescu had recorded in the days before her death.

  “Be careful, mademoiselle,” said Inez de Rougemont.

  She held the glass sphere above her head while Miranda reached for it, laughing now, it seemed to Peter—“What do I care? What do I care? It is my gift to you!” Peter seized her from behind, pulled her away, just as she succeeded in knocking the ball free. It rolled along the floor in a little trail of smoke, while at the same time Miranda collapsed backward in his arms.

  * * *

  “WHAT DO I care?” cried Nicola Ceausescu. But then the words faltered in her throat. Together she and Aegypta Schenck had fallen close to the silver cage, and Kevin Markasev had reached out through the bars. His swollen features were unreadable. His mouth was toothless, red. But he took hold of her neck. At the same time Felix had come back to stand above them as they rolled across the smooth floor. His pajamas had a bloody hole in them, and he had his ball of polished quartz in his hands. He raised it up, then let it fall onto his mother’s head. She slumped away from him.

  Aegypta Schenck had lost her hat, her dust-choked veil, her collar. She had collapsed onto her hands and knees. But now she crouched over the baroness’s naked body, searching for the tourmaline, while at the same time Felix wept and wrung his hands—“Oh, maman, what have you done?”

  The jewel had fallen away from Nicola Ceausescu as she fell, rolled away from her. The princess retrieved it and then found herself trapped, as the baroness grabbed at her legs. She had her fingernails in the filthy velvet, and she scratched at it until it ripped. Aegypta Schenck came free, not in the shape of the old woman outside Mary’s cave in Mogosoaia, and not in the shape of the woman who had pressed The Essential History into Miranda’s hands years before that, in the train station in the snow. It was a little bird with iridescent feathers that freed itself from the torn cloth, while a mangy old marmalade cat jumped after it, snatched at it as it leapt into the air. It had a nut or a berry in its claws, and it veered wildly through the chambers of the mine and the rocky tunnel before it found the entrance. And even when it burst into the light, the old baron in his beggar’s clothes was there to snatch at her, grab at her, swat at her with his old hat before she darted up into the desiccated wind.

  20

  The Bargain

  AT MOMENTS DURING her journey, Miranda imagined climbing uphill toward Peter Gross. This was one of her strategies to force herself to keep on going. She trudged step by step out of the deep recesses of the hidden world, up onto the rock pass and the border country below Kepler’s tower, where she was to meet her aunt. As she climbed higher, she thought about Peter more and more. “I do not quibble like a dressmaker,” she murmured to herself, a phrase that had become a talisman.

  But at long last, as she clambered up out of the rocks, she was conscious of a growing sense of disappointment. She paused among the granite boulders at the top of the pass—a way station, as she imagined, on the track to what she wanted. So why should every step feel more dispiriting?

  And when she saw her aunt Aegypta waiting for her as she had promised, she felt no happiness or relief. As she trudged up through the grass into the rock pile, as she watched her aunt give a little wave with her gloved hand, Miranda wo
ndered what would happen now. If she took the tourmaline into her palm, if she came to herself in her bedroom in Stanesti-Jui or wherever else her body might find itself (had she been moving and talking and laughing and living this whole time?), would she discover a reality as insubstantial as a dream?

  No—she would not let herself make that mistake. The sun was on the ridge of pinnacles above the tower. Aegypta Schenck came down to meet her through the rocks. She was dressed in her velvet dress and little hat, her fox collar—all of it ripped and muddy and askew. Miranda didn’t ask. Miranda also had come a long way. And any urge to know was stifled when her aunt began to talk. She started in at once: “Oh, my dear child. Did you bring me what I wanted?”

  Her coarse face, yellow eyes, thin lips, big nose—she was angry—she seemed angry. Miranda reached into her pocket for the token of success, the tip of the monster’s withered and grimy ear, which she had brought from the plain of Chiselet. “I’ve done it,” she said.

  “Oh, my dear—”

  Miranda’s adoptive father in Massachusetts had once told her how it was possible to transfer your emotions onto others, observe in others what you were feeling. Love was like that, he suggested. And maybe anger, too—“I held him down while she ripped out his throat. Andromeda and me. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  Aunt Aegypta, standing in the rockfall, tried to arrange her collar, brush the dirt from her dress. “You mean Lieutenant Prochenko? I misjudged him. Oh my dear, it was a glorious victory.”

  “Good. I’m happy you think so. You have something for me.”