The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” Peter murmured.

  The condesa smoothed her hand down the page, studying the diagrams. “You don’t know,” she said.

  A little naked woman, Peter saw from the picture, hand-drawn in red on the spotted paper. “It’s an infection. A disease,” said the condesa. Watching her despair as she puzzled out the script of the black book, Peter caught some of her urgency. “It’s a contagion,” said the Condesa de Rougemont. “We cannot let it free. Oh, God—”

  Miranda had sat down with her mother now, and was holding her hand. Peter thought he would not disturb them. “This will spread,” continued Madame de Rougemont.

  But how could the little creature get away? Peter took a lamp and searched the corners of the floor. He looked in the cupboards and the crevices, while at the same time he was beginning to imagine where the demon might go, the force that might draw it onward—not so far away.

  It wasn’t until Ana Cassian came in the door again that he realized what had happened, how the demon could have managed to escape. The girl had gone out for a doctor. Now she was back—she hadn’t found one. “The streets are full,” she said.

  Breathless, she stood on the threshold, the empty stairwell behind her. “And the temples,” she said. “The Turks have crossed the river below Tutrakan. They say from the suburbs you can hear the guns.”

  But Peter looked toward the pallet below the window, where Miranda sat with her mother. As he watched, he saw Madame de Graz lean over Clara Brancoveanu’s body, close her eyes.

  22

  In Chiselet

  IN THE MEADOW below Kepler’s tower, Miranda stood among the wildflowers. Peter Gross was with her, a scarlet bug lost in the high grass. A hummingbird darted among the blossoms and then disappeared. Lower down, at the bottom of the hill, the ground was wounded by the great trench of the war.

  A little creek ran through the stinking piles of refuse. And there were turtles in the mud, she was sure. She could feel the presence of wild beasts on the far side, not these little animals in the trees and grass, but wolves hunting in a pack—she could smell them. No, not even wolves, but some exotic, deadly, African hybrid, hunting and scavenging far from home. Down in the great slough, the garbage pits at the bottom of the valley, they lingered at the dirty stream into her territory.

  In the hidden world Miranda gave the tourmaline a squeeze. And in the fourth-floor apartment in the Bulevardul Republicii she stood not in the room where she had lain asleep, but in the adjoining room.

  This was where the fugitives had laid out their belongings. She selected from one of the valises some of the clothes her mother had brought down from Stanesti-Jui. Indirect light spread from the doorway. Miranda stood against the wall, in darkness. She stripped off her nightgown, then dressed herself in the shirt and trousers and boots her mother had hated but had packed just the same.

  She crossed into the kitchen, where there were sausages laid on the board. She picked one up and ripped into it, spitting out the casing. Peter stood at the threshold, the candlelight behind him. “It must have been the shock,” he said. “She wasn’t in any pain.”

  “Is that what they said?” She meant the others, Madame de Graz and the condesa.

  Peter grimaced. “Not exactly. They said it was her choice. They said it’s a blessing to give your life for your child.”

  Peter stood with his hand held out. “That sounds rehearsed,” Miranda said.

  “It was rehearsed. I can’t believe I—”

  Miranda shrugged. “You tried to save her.”

  Peter shook his head. “She told me to look after you.”

  Miranda said, “I woke up and I thought she was dying. I pictured her like Blind Rodica at the icehouse. Do you remember, with the candles around her head?”

  “I remember.”

  “And now she’s gone, and they are lighting the candles.”

  Peter nodded. Could he understand her? Could he understand what she was feeling when she scarcely knew herself? Here she was in Bucharest. And Bocu was dead, and Ludu Rat-tooth was dead, and Blind Rodica was gone and Clara Brancoveanu was gone, and Andromeda was gone.

  They were all dead. Miranda shook the golden bracelet on her wrist. She took another bite of her sausage, spit out the casing. How long since she had eaten? The air was hot and close, a humid pressure on her skin.

  In the hidden world she stood among the wildflowers, and in the failing light she could see animals crossing the river far below. And maybe the hummingbird was above her, and maybe the scarlet bug was somewhere with her in the grass. But they couldn’t help her. In every essential way, she was alone. She stood hugging her arms, watching the animals among the garbage pits, observing their odd, powerful shoulders and enormous snouts, their little, vulnerable legs—top-heavy machines, they looked like, awkward and ungainly in the marshy ground.

  “There was a hummingbird inside the room,” Peter said. “It was caught next to the window, knocking against the glass. I pulled up the sash. It’s gone now.”

  Miranda wiped her mouth. “A hummingbird. I guess that’s right. I guess that was a change in her.”

  “I asked her what she was doing on the Hoosick,” Peter said, meaning the condesa. “She said she was helping you. She was trying to help you. She never meant you any harm.”

  “Like she helped my mother,” said Miranda.

  Peter shook his head. “Don’t think of it like that. Your mother—she had already made up her mind.”

  He was right—not that it helped, which was something Peter also seemed to understand. He was staring at her with an intent expression. What was he trying to say—that it was not necessary to blame someone, to feel better? She’d see about that.

  In the meantime she was eager to get started, eager to leave the stifling apartment. She would climb down the hillside and down the stairs, the first steps on the road in front of her. “I never want to see either of them again,” she said. She would shut the door on these old women in the other room, leave them behind.

  Now suddenly it was as if she had broken through the last dark thickets into the open meadow, and all the tangled stratagems lay behind her. The road was straight, and in the real world Peter Gross would go with her, just as he’d gone with her over Christmas Hill so long before. He wasn’t smiling, and there was no false encouragement in his face—he was growing a little beard!

  “I like the beard,” she said.

  He scratched his chin.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said.

  He smiled.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  He moved toward her, would have touched her, she thought. But Inez de Rougemont stood behind him in the doorway, and she was holding something. It was Miranda’s father’s gun, the same one she had used to shoot the policeman in Braila. Miranda didn’t want or need it anymore. But the old woman broke it open, showed Peter how she’d reset the mechanism. She’d loaded it with ordinary bullets. She nodded and whispered, pointing with her long, brittle finger.

  Peter shrugged, always an odd gesture with his missing hand. He tucked the revolver under his tunic, into the waistband of his wool pants. And maybe that was all right, because he had different enemies. He was not with her in the high meadow, or else she couldn’t see him there. But here he was, standing at the door of the apartment on the Bulevardul Republicii.

  “It’s not for them anymore,” Miranda said, meaning—vaguely—the people and powers that had brought her to this place. “And you?”

  “Because of you,” he said.

  It didn’t even matter that Madame de Rougemont was still there. He came to her and touched her hand. It was true what she had said—she had missed him very much.

  But there was a way in which she scarcely knew him, because the past had been so long and complicated, and he had changed so much. And she had changed, she supposed, or at least her feelings had.

  Behind Madame de Rougemont in the other room, Miranda’s mother lay on the
pallet and Madame de Graz stood over her, leaning on her cane. The candles were lit. But the door was open, and the chamber was unsealed. Miranda stood with Peter in the doorway. “I have to get out of here,” she said.

  “I’ll come.”

  Of course he would. But it wasn’t enough just to go out the door. Stanley, her adoptive father, had once told her it was more important to have a plan than to stick to it. And of course there’d been a plan all along. There was a place in the real world, a destination that corresponded to the bottom of the hill where the African hybrids had crossed the stream.

  Now she tried to describe it to Peter, but he already knew. “It’s just behind the lines,” he said. “There’s some kind of secret weapon hidden in the marsh. Beside the dead oak. Andromeda told me.”

  “Chiselet,” Miranda said, grateful that he had known the name of it—the place her aunt Aegypta had laid out and determined for her, placed in her future, in the middle of her path.

  She was grateful he was going with her, grateful he’d known where without being told. But there was no need for him to read her mind. “My aunt Aegypta told me about it,” she said. “It was the last thing she wanted me to do.”

  She didn’t have to go alone. It seemed unprecedented, a piece of luck. And the small pressure of his hand seemed lucky to her also—nothing heartfelt, not yet.

  All her journeys in the hidden world she’d been alone, or else surrounded by versions of her friends that were not real. And as she climbed down the splintered steps of the old square stairwell, Miranda thought about how solitary her decisions had been up to this time—solitary, or else thrust on her by ghosts and other people she did not trust. Even if what she wanted was not so different from what those ghosts or people had demanded, still that was not the point. There was no reason to resist out of mere stubbornness. That was in the past as well. And there was every reason to choose freely what needed to be done: a series of desperate chances.

  Up until now she had used her powers in the hidden world to destroy what craved to be destroyed. But surely it was more important to preserve things, keep them intact, not because they were perfect the way they were. What was the alternative to struggling forward with what you had? And to fight for these imperfect things required the rupture, finally, of your own container, the constraints that had protected you. She put her hand on the worn post at the bottom of the stairs, then stepped down through the archway past the Atlas statues, down into the street.

  “Ana Cassian will take care of them,” said Peter, behind her.

  He meant the brown-haired woman whose name Miranda hadn’t known. He meant the old women upstairs in the sealed rooms—Miranda wasn’t anxious about them. “Hush,” she said.

  “They’ll be safe till we get back,” he continued. Why was he even talking about that? The way led forward, down the side of the dark boulevard, which was not so full of crowds as she expected. No one recognized them, the last of the Brancoveanus, the celebrated Captain Gross, as they pushed down the street. Their hands touched sometimes, their shoulders bumped.

  Once he drew her toward him at the corner of the road. He put his hand against her back. For a moment he seemed strange to her—she scarcely knew him. But that was all right. There is a kind of ignorance that holds an expectation, as in the ordinary way a friend or an acquaintance or a stranger could become something new, on some special night when there was everything at stake.

  “I had a dream about you,” he said.

  “Me, too,” she said, remembering how she had touched him in the secret world, how she had kissed his lips.

  “We were sitting at the icehouse,” he said. “You were telling me about some things that you had done.”

  Someone you knew could become someone you didn’t. Or else just as suddenly a boy could become a man. Peter Gross seemed like a man to her, his clipped brown hair, his beard cut close. Scratchy against her cheek. So: some trepidation also. Someone jostled against them. “We’ll take this road,” said Peter near her ear. “Then to the left at the corner.”

  There was the boulevard and the big crowds. Even though they spoke to no one else, still they were able to gather rumors as if out of the air. Rumors of collapse had come into the city on a wave of refugees. The bridge had fallen, the army south of the Danube was cut off, the war was lost. General Antonescu had been taken unaware. He had pulled back several regiments to squelch the riots in the city. Spies and traitors had sold their information to the Turks.

  But above all there were rumors of the new armored machines that chewed through the barbed wire and ran across the trench, propelled by metal treads like a bicycle chain. Peter and Miranda knew an English word for them. The Abyssinians had named them after something else: some terrible huge creature from their country’s highlands. Or a combination of creatures—part hyena and part lion. Miranda knew about those beasts as well.

  This information came to them in half-heard snatches on the wind. But as they approached the Bessarabian Gate, the crowds grew less. Instead of words and voices, they listened to the sounds of the cathedral bells, the roar of trucks and private motorcars. What had the woman said? You could hear the cannons from the southern gates? Yet after an hour here they were, and they heard nothing.

  “It will start again at dawn,” Peter said. “Before dawn. You’ll be able to hear it then. Not till then.”

  They came out through the old city wall. In this direction, they found themselves immediately among the onion fields—the dirt track over the dike, parallel to the main road. Southeast of Plataresti they found the seam Peter was looking for, the abandoned slot behind the front lines. These villages had been empty since the air attack on Bucharest.

  “It’s colder here,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You know the way?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  It was a relief just to walk together mile after mile, on the same road. He told her about Brasov and what he knew about Stanesti-Jui. “Where were you? What happened to you?” he said. And she found herself talking about the hidden world, and the high hill, and the tower, and the things that she had seen. She had not spoken to him about any of this before. Nor had she said anything to Andromeda, who had no patience for such things.

  In the farmhouse library, in all her dealings with Madame de Rougemont she had felt such stinginess, as if she were afraid that something might be stolen from her, used against her. But not now. She told him how the tourmaline had come to her. She told him how she’d used it, and the mistakes she’d made. And in all this she imagined she was sharing not just the experience of the past weeks, but something more revealing, some internal landscape or topography. Because the secret world she talked about was different for every person. Even inside one person, moment by moment it would change as a sudden breeze pushed through the grass, and the clouds turned in the sky, and the seas and valleys shifted and transformed—she should know. She stood in that world with the jewel clasped in her hand.

  “Hush,” she said, and stopped in the middle of the dark road among the onion fields. “Do you hear something?”

  “No.”

  But then he put his arms around her. Part of her was alone in a high meadow, and part of her was there with him. That felt like the bigger part, especially when the tears came out of her, tears for Rachel and Stanley and Andromeda, and Ludu Rat-tooth and Clara Brancoveanu and Aegypta Schenck—a surge of feeling that she didn’t explain to him. She didn’t say anything about it. But this was where her tears fell, on the road to Chiselet, and after a while she wiped her nose on his shirt, took his hand, drew him onward.

  They passed through Fundeni, Sohatu, and Nana on the Mostistea plain. These were deserted villages, collections of broken, ransacked hovels, grouped around a central shrine, or temple, or statue. Above them the sky was clear. Quite suddenly they could see the moon.

  “You thirsty?”

  “Yes.”

  They shared water from a stone trough and a public pump. They walked
side by side along the dirt track through the fields. The main road went through larger towns, and once they saw the houses on fire on the other side of the embankment. Nana and Lucia and the track to Chiselet. The moon rose into a cloudless sky.

  And by its light they could see what they’d been following: naked footprints in the dust. Maybe in the city there’d been nothing to see, on the cobblestones or the slate walks, just little wet patches where the demon had pulled itself along, tiny hesitant marks, easily lost, easily obscured. But the creature had increased among these villages in the dark. Now she had a child’s footprints, and the traces she left were wet with slime.

  “I think I know where she’s going,” Peter said, and their hands touched.

  She didn’t answer. These creatures, she thought, were his concern. He was carrying her father’s gun, and he would track this demon and her mate—Miranda could rely on him. He had throttled Treacle in the upstairs room. Miranda couldn’t help him, not here. She had her own task in another version of the world.

  Past Lucia, larger still: a woman now. Miranda imagined her according to the description in the black book. Long, straw-colored hair. Pale, dimpled skin. For a long way she’d been dragging one foot. But now her steps were long, longer than Miranda’s own. Soon the print of the heel and arch were lost, leaving only the toes. Something was calling her. Something was dragging her on.

  Side by side with Peter Gross. Sometimes their shoulders bumped together. Now they could see the woman’s footprints, they fell into a kind of silence. In the hidden world she climbed down the long meadow. In that world she’d always been a solitary creature. She stopped by the last tree.

  For a moment she stood with the cool wind against her skin, listening to the grass seethe in the long light, the heads turning over. The sun lingered over the western peaks; the stars were not yet visible. But in the east, in the gap between two icy pinnacles, one of the planets glimmered into view—which one, she could not say. Stanley might have known, or not. Maybe she would see Stanley soon, if the worst came to the worst.