The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  Below her, the hyena-lions lifted up their heavy, spotted heads. They were not afraid. Their little eyes, their strange long muzzles—they made muddy tracks in the long grass. Soon they would bark and yowl and roar.

  * * *

  AS IF BROUGHT to him on the south wind, Peter smelled the antiseptic odor of the oncology ward at the Berkshire Medical Center, where his mother had lain. How tempting it was to think you could cut yourself loose from all that memory and regret—how tempting and how vain. These memories and regrets are who we are.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  They were standing on the dike beyond the road. Miranda shook her head.

  Before dawn, they came into the village of Chiselet. Miranda had never been there, Peter only once. There was the temple of Demeter with its turnip dome. There was the embankment and the railway line. The empty houses were lit with moonlight. They were twenty kilometers from Tutrakan.

  At this moment, the light on the thatched rooftops and whitewashed walls seemed beautiful to him, a calming pressure from above. There was an abandoned bicycle beside the ditch. Peter groped for Miranda’s hand, then released it. Oddly and suddenly, he felt the presence of a small hope, because the direst rumors in the city had not been confirmed.

  And because Miranda’s presence, in what surely was the lull before the battle, changed what he felt. In Staro Selo and elsewhere, he had grown used to the dead, dull, boring calm before the storm. Those moments, more terrifying than the confusion of violence, required a kind of vacancy to even tolerate, a separation from yourself. That was not an option here, with Miranda, on the outskirts of Chiselet. It was not emptiness that distracted him, but something else.

  “This isn’t so bad,” he whispered.

  She smiled. Footsore and exhausted, they walked down through the fields to the embankment. Because of the war, the railway line had been rebuilt and reinforced, a high gravel slope where Antonescu’s partisans, fighting for the Empress Valeria, had blown up the tracks. The toppled coaches of the Hephaestion had been cleared away.

  They would have to wait for dawn to search in the marshlands where the Abyssinian commercial traveler had crawled from the wreck. Or they could follow the spirit that had drawn them there, and would be searching also for the lead-lined canister. Or else the spirit knew already where it lay.

  Dividing the marshland from the plain, the embankment was the highest hill in all that flat expanse. “This is all new,” Peter said as they climbed up. Miranda didn’t answer. If he was exhausted, he thought, what must she feel, woken out of how many days’ sleep? Spoonfuls of broth and a single sausage—he was surprised she was still on her feet. And to have seen her mother die under such circumstances, to have held her in her arms—it was no wonder she moved forward like a sleepwalker, hands trembling, eyes almost closed. The moonlight fell on her black hair, pale skin.

  Or else, he thought, she was in the hidden world that she’d described. If part of her was there with him, there was another part that climbed a higher hill, anticipated a separate fight. Dangers known to her alone—with a surge of unhappiness he realized he couldn’t even guess what they might be, what form they’d take. And there was nothing he could do about them anyway. Or else one thing: He could offer the same comfort she provided him.

  They stood together on the top of the embankment. He looked back toward her, back the way they’d come. Then he heard the guns come to life along the southern front—in Staro Selo, he guessed, and in Tutrakan. He turned, and he could see the flashes of light on the southern horizon, the star shells, the high flares. He saw the storm front, the thunder, the lightning, and the fire. He felt the crash of the big guns, which had haunted his dreams. He knew what was happening along the ground. He reached to touch Miranda’s hand. Nor could he suppress a tiny hopefulness, again. Wasn’t it obvious? The Turks had failed to break through. The rumors in the city had been lies.

  Even so he felt a weakness in his legs, a lurching pain inside his stomach—what was happening in Staro Selo? What was happening right now? Was there chlorine gas in the trench, or one of the new mustard gases from North Africa? Did the men lie huddled in the craters with their mouths full of dirt?

  Part of him was there with them, but not the largest part. He stood on the embankment above the marsh, and from this distance he could even see a type of beauty in the crashing shells, muffled as they were, and far away. Inside the storm, a type of beauty and a small remembrance: Once with his mother and father he had visited an island off the Rhode Island shore, and on the Fourth of July they had stood on the beach, watching all the quiet fireworks displays rise from the mainland towns, sixteen miles away over the water.

  He looked at Miranda, and her eyes were closed. What was she watching in the hidden world? Or else maybe she had felt a premonition, because when he turned back he saw he’d been mistaken—there was reason to fear the worst. In the predawn light he saw a shape above the marsh, a heavy floating shape. He heard the thump of the motors. Then it was over them, an enormous black shadow with its cables trailing down.

  But the roar of the engines did not lessen as it passed. And from the top of the embankment, looking south and west toward Tutrakan, Peter could see what he had not known existed, a raised causeway through the marsh, straight as a yardstick from the river to the plain. And under the gray sky he could see a line of lights along that road, approaching at a speed that seemed impossible. These were the Turkish assault chariots, each with its long cannon and mounted machine guns. They’d crossed in barges below the bridge. They’d broken through the line, maybe because Antonescu had pulled back his soldiers to secure Bucharest. Or maybe this part of the front had always been lightly defended, because the river was wide and the marsh impenetrable.

  But the causeway ran through a tunnel under the embankment, a quarter of a mile from where he stood. Even if this was the only place where the front was broken, when the Turks reached the plain they would spread east and west, sever the road to the Tutrakan bridge, roll up the line.

  The airship throbbed above them. Miranda stood with her eyes closed. Already she seemed far from him in this catastrophe—what could one man do? He ran down the embankment and across the soggy ground, his left hand and the stump of his right arm raised. He shouted, then reached under his shirt to pull out Frederick Schenck von Schenck’s revolver.

  From the edge of the marsh he could no longer see the big tanks with their caterpillar treads. But he could hear them crashing through the trees. And there were aeroplanes, also—the first ones he had seen in this war—boxy, double-winged, their engines whining. He took a few steps into the marsh and sank over his boots, while at the same time he looked back to see if Miranda had followed him. He thought he could feel her behind him, close by. But when he turned, he saw he was mistaken.

  A woman stood at the edge of the wet ground. She was smaller than Miranda, with long powerful arms and hanging breasts. She was fleshy and naked, her skin streaked with moisture, her hair long and stiff and straw-colored. And her face was not vicious or irate. She had a melancholy look, until she saw the gun in Peter’s hand. Then she howled and came toward him.

  The tanks were smashing through the trees as the road approached the railway line. He could see the burning lamps and the green flares laid down to mark the road. Shadows leapt out toward him through the small trees and undergrowth. And then something more substantial, another creature that seized him and pulled him down. It was big, bloated, red, stinking of blood.

  It squatted above him now, more toad than human, its warty skin slick with grease. The woman was there, too, and she put her hand on its shoulder, pulling at the tufted hair. She pulled the creature onto its heels, and it turned toward her, distracted, so that Peter could twist away. He rolled over in the mud, slid through the reeds, and he peered back at them to where they stood at the water’s edge. He watched their faces change and soften as they took each other in.

  This was a marriage, he guessed, of demons kept too
long apart, united not just in malevolence. Even now, aware of a common threat, they could not avoid glancing at each other, the red face noseless or else all nose, the white face dimpled with fat, streaked with moisture that ran down her chin.

  On his knees in the mud, Peter raised the big gun. Maybe these creatures didn’t understand its ordinary use. Maybe they understood it only as the engine of their long imprisonment—the wide red lips flapped open and the red eyes bulged. Awestruck, with shaking hands, Peter shot the straw-haired woman in the chest, all the time while he was looking into the red face. He watched it change, distort with wrath and anguish as the gun recoiled. Ears ringing, Peter tried to bring it around for another shot, while at the same time he could hear the war erupt around him as if conjured from the creature’s rage: the boom of the long cannons, the chatter of the machine guns. Peter saw the flash of the explosions, and the ground trembled. When the heavy, spatulate, red fingers closed over his wrist, he twisted away, while at the same time launching himself forward with the last of his strength. He placed his head under the quivering red chin—an old wrestling move, which he’d last used on Sarayici Island long before. Then he reached up to dig his fingers into the staring, bulging eyes.

  23

  A Glimpse of Home

  IN THE HIDDEN world, on the borderland, Miranda paused beside the lone tree at the top of the meadow. Below her at the forest’s edge, the African beasts made creases in the high grass. They moved back and forth, gathering strength and confidence as more of them slipped over the stream.

  Their shoulders were heavy and brutal, but their backs sloped down to small, spotted hindquarters. They scratched at the earth with paws that were almost hands. They raised their long muzzles. Their heads swiveled back and forth. They had no necks, and their eyes were small and round.

  They were powerful beasts, but clumsy and disjointed, as if bred in a laboratory or constructed by machines. They moved back and forth, sinking down on their hind legs, while Miranda made her preparation, stripped off her clothes. Shivering, she hung her clothes from a low branch. In one of her pockets she’d buttoned up the tourmaline, which leaked blood or else some other fluid into the cloth.

  She was not afraid. It was not fear that tempted her to unbutton the flap, take out the jewel again, abandon this place and this fight once and for all. She stood in the twilight in the tall grass and the little yellow flowers, and the fact that she was here did nothing to stanch or alter what she’d come to think—that the secret patterns of the world were not the most compelling ones, not any more, maybe not ever. The world could not be fixed this way. And even if it could, the separation from herself—tempting as that was as well—remained too bitter a price for a grown woman, after all.

  But maybe one last time, because she had no choice …

  And besides, now her fingers were too clumsy to reach up. When she dropped to the ground, her nails dragged holes in the thick bark, slashed at it as she regained her feet. She turned her heavy head, stretched out her legs under the tree. She kneaded the ground, carved holes in the turf, then turned downhill.

  And the hybrid beasts ran back and forth, their little eyes gleaming in the last of the light. Above her head there was a sudden chatter of crows, and then one big vulture flying in a circle just below the clouds. The beasts were too stupid for courage or despair. They loped up to meet her in a single line. They cut a single line through the high grass.

  * * *

  DOWN BELOW, AT the edge of the marsh, Peter struggled in the mud. All around him he could hear the crash of gunfire. One of the aeroplanes, circling above him, lost part of its wing, burst into flame. One of the assault chariots crashed off the causeway and tipped into the swamp not far away. Peter was close enough to see its cannon plow into the mud, its jointed tread spin uselessly and then break free, smashing down the saplings and the old dead trees. He was grappling with the demon, but as time went on he could feel it weakening, feel its fingers slip and loosen as he moved. As the noise of the explosions built around him, Peter felt his enemy grow weak, felt the disadvantage of his single hand grow less. He could gouge his fingers, now, into the flesh of its neck. And even though the poison on its skin burned and stifled him, still he felt himself grow used to it, felt, even, that it strengthened him as time went on.

  And when the creature lay still, and he climbed out from underneath it, he found everything was done. The naked woman lay on her stomach, her yellow hair drifting in the shallow water.

  Standing at the bottom of the embankment, he guessed or he imagined, as if some kind of breeze or emanation had touched him from the hidden world, that Miranda had survived this battle, too. In the sudden quiet of the marsh, despite his anxiety he sensed a premonition of greater silence and the end of the hostilities. At least that’s what he told himself later when the news was confirmed: that he stood in the aftermath of a victory as total and as unexpected as Havsa Gap, when Frederick Schenck von Schenck had broken through the Turkish line.

  Later the historians did their work and listed the Roumanian regiments that had taken part. But when the bells rang for thanksgiving in the temples, the priests at the altars would suggest a different story. The land itself had risen up against the invader, the tara Romaneasa itself. Turkish veterans of the debacle would describe the battle in the marshlands as if they had fought not men but some malignant spirit of barbarism—the ghost of Miranda Brancoveanu, perhaps—who had conjured the destruction of their enormous assault chariots, disabling them in the mud. This was combined with more ordinary recriminations, an official complaint to the Abyssinian government and an accusation of sabotage. But the treads of the monstrous machines had broken from the wheels, and their armor had not protected them. Many of the gun turrets had been punctured, ripped apart as if with giant claws.

  Later, elements of the Roumanian Third Army would come from Calarasi on the train, would spread out through the marsh. But in the meantime, Peter staggered back the way he’d come, up the embankment. He found Miranda a little way along the track, collapsed above the tunnel where the causeway crossed the railway line.

  She was fatigued, as he was. He sat down beside her, took her hand, and they both winced from the contact. Peter’s uniform was saturated and torn, and he had lost the gun in the mud. He said a few words to Miranda, but she seemed stunned, unable to look him in the face. All in front of him along the causeway, the Turkish tanks lay scattered and destroyed. Along the horizon, the cannonade was still.

  “Wow,” Peter grunted. Who could explain it? He leaned toward her and let his forehead touch her head. She reached up to stroke his cheek.

  Then he looked up to see the man walking toward them, stepping along the railroad ties in the middle of the track. Peter recognized his big, sloping shoulders, his black beard. It was Dumitru, Chloe Adira’s servant or accomplice, dressed in a Cossack uniform and a lambskin cap, strolling along the track with a silver canister in his hand. If he was astonished at the wreckage in the marsh, if he was astonished to see Peter and Miranda on the embankment, he didn’t show it.

  “Captain Gross. So I was right,” he said in his German-accented Roumanian. Then he drew his Meriam revolver without another word. Peter staggered up, reached out, knocked the gun to the side—the shot went wide. And though he was angry, desperate, and strong, still the man was not a specialist in these matters. In a moment Peter had grabbed the gun from him. Peter had knocked him down and knocked him down again. The man roared like a bull, grunted like a bear, but it was no use. Even with one hand, Peter had him. He fell on the man’s big chest, holding the canister in his right armpit, the gun in his left hand.

  “Captain Gross,” said the man, “Captain Gross.” Out of breath, his lungs deflated, he would have continued talking. But Peter heard another sound from behind him, and he looked back to see Miranda rise to her knees. She was clutching her side, and her hand came away with blood on it, and then she fell back on the grassy slope.

  “Captain Gross,” whispered Dumi
tru. “Open it,” he said. “Nepenthe,” he said. Peter took his gun by its barrel and clubbed him to what he hoped was unconsciousness. Though if he killed him it didn’t matter; Peter knew what had happened.

  * * *

  ON THE BORDERS of the hidden world, Miranda had labored to stand up. She had left the carcasses of the African dogs. Bleeding and weary, she climbed back up the hill to the lone tree where she had left her clothes. Hands slipping and fumbling, she dressed herself. She felt the bulge of the tourmaline in her stained pocket—never again.

  Night was falling. Darkness had closed in around the ice mountains. She couldn’t see into the valley. But she studied the wildflowers close at hand, their pretty heads, their colors bleached by darkness. Then she reached into her pocket and drew out the jewel, which throbbed under her fingers.

  She would not go to where her own self couldn’t follow. She would not go where Peter Gross couldn’t follow her, even if he wanted—was that it? That was just one way to say it. She squeezed the jewel between her fingers till the blood or juice ran out, ran down her arm. She threw the empty remnant into the high grass, then tried to wipe her hand clean. She wiped her fingers on her shirt and watched the blood spread over her clothes and skin, while at the same time she heard the gunshot, felt the sudden crash of pain.

  * * *

  SHE CAME TO herself on the embankment. She lay on her back, looking up at the sky. Peter knelt down over her and took her hand.

  “Love is a thing that can never go wrong,” she murmured, part of the poem he’d first told her years before.

  “I’ve got it,” he said, meaning the lead-lined cylinder, which lay beside him on the rail bed. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “You’re not hurt,” he said, which was a lie. The bullet had torn her under the arm. She was bleeding, but he had pressure on the wound.