by Paul Park
Some of these rats had been cornered in an empty cellar, surrounded by a circle of beasts. In the hidden world, the dog or wolf could hear the sound of squeaks and angry cries. Elsewhere, the young lieutenant on the high street in Chiselet showed no reaction to the news that a crowd of angry townspeople had set upon a detachment of German soldiers.
Intent on his own miseries, the lieutenant staggered on the cobblestones until he reached the road out of town. This was a gravel highway on top of a raised embankment through the marsh. Hungry, thirsty, hands in the pockets of a gray suit that neither fit him nor belonged to him, he stumbled along under the noonday sun, sweating in the cold north breeze.
The leather boots were a size too big. The suit was an expensive one. He had stripped it from the body of the commercial traveler who had been the sole casualty after the wreck of the Hephaestion. Streaked with dirt when he’d found it, now he’d been wearing it for several days. The underwear, full of excrement, he had left with the corpse.
Nevertheless, he made a prepossessing figure. His pale skin was sunburned, chapped, sprinkled with liver-colored freckles, hidden in a layer of hair that was almost white, and so fine and silky that all of his exposed skin seemed to glow. His body was slim and muscular, his face both pleasing and unusual: dark eyebrows under a mass of yellow hair, gray eyes that were flecked with blue and green, dark lips that seemed gray or purple rather than red. He wiped them often with the back of his long hand.
After several kilometers he came across the scene of an accident. The embankment had descended almost to the level of the ground, which was not flooded here. Rich smells of mulch and fertilizer came to him. Green fields of some anonymous crop stretched north to the horizon. The young man had no experience with agriculture. At the limit of his vision ran a line of poplar trees.
These trees described the boundaries of an isolated monastery whose turnip dome rose above a cluster of brick buildings. Sacred to the goddess Demeter, this monastery marked the end of a road that now joined the highway at an angle. Along the same road, hidden in a patch of woodland, stood the cottage of a large estate. An expensive motorcar had driven from its brick gates to the highway and had slid into a ditch.
Within the past few years, African companies had opened branches in Europe, in collaboration with German tool-and-die manufactories. They had produced competing lines of private automobiles, all of which, however, showed traces of Abyssinian design. This model, a Duesenberg Assegai, had a long, distinctive pointed bonnet that was wedged now in a bush.
In a flat, grassy place beside the road, a man and a woman crouched over a second man, who was laid out on his back. Now the woman, dressed in a long traveling coat, stood up straight and waved, or at any rate made a gesture with her gloved hand. The young soldier on the highway crossed down the embankment to the level of the road until he stood beside her.
“It’s our driver,” she said without preamble. “He was taken ill.”
Now Lieutenant Prochenko could see that the man on his back was dressed in some kind of domestic livery, a doublebreasted coat with silver buttons, which the other man was loosening. The chauffeur was a man in his sixties, with gray mutton-chop sideburns and rheumy blue eyes. As without stooping the soldier examined him, he recognized some of his own condition. The man’s face was sweaty and flushed, and his hands trembled.
“He’s had some sort of a stroke or seizure,” said the woman—girl, really, as the soldier could see when she took off her shaded glasses. She wore a straw hat with a violet band, and a quantity of transparent veil around her hair and neck.
Now the third man looked up, and the soldier could see he was as young as the girl and just as ineffective; he had been scarcely able to undo the first of the chauffeur’s buttons. Elegantly dressed in a dark suit, he looked up helplessly. And so the soldier squatted down and ripped the coat open with his fevered hands, ripped open the gray shirt and neck cloth, exposing the old throat and withered chest; he could see the flutter of a pulse. He could smell the sweat from the old man’s body and could see also he was choking. He knew the symptoms of the illness that affected the citizens of Chiselet. White drool had forced its way into the old man’s whiskers. So he rolled him onto his side and pulled the vomit from his mouth.
“Here comes Sorin with the horses,” said the girl.
A man led a team of Percherons through the gate onto the muddy road, pulling the lead horse by the cheek patch. His wooden-wheeled cart was piled with fat canvas bags. When he saw the accident he left the cart and came running, holding his skullcap to keep it from blowing off. He wore a dirty, short-sleeved undershirt and cotton breeches.
The girl had been speaking French. But she switched to Roumanian when Sorin approached: “He took his hands off the wheel. He just fell over on the seat.”
The old man had retched up a little phlegm and now was breathing easier. As the crisis appeared to have passed, the soldier stood up. He put his hands in his pockets and let the others take over, the carter and his boy, who now loaded the chauffeur into the back of the wagon among the dusty bags. The elegantly dressed young gentleman was with them, and the soldier took the opportunity to study his sister, as he assumed—the resemblance was strong. And the girl, aware she was being watched, did a sort of self-conscious pirouette. She was a lovely creature, with brown hair and brown eyes, pale skin dusted with powder, and plum-colored lipstick. She was younger than the lieutenant, perhaps twenty or nineteen.
Prochenko caught the scent of her perfume. She wore a pearl-gray cravat and a lavender coat past her knees. She was slender, and tall enough to look him in the eyes. For ten seconds she attempted to hold his gaze and then gave up, smiling and blushing as her brother came back from the cart. “C’est ennuyant, mais je te remercie … .”
He spoke in the easy, informal way that was just then the fashion among young Roumanians, particularly since the outbreak of the Russian war. Now he put his hands on his hips as he surveyed his car, which appeared unhurt. The carter had already pulled his horses around. “I’ll help you,” said Prochenko. And not caring about his clothes that were ruined anyway, he stepped into the mud of the ditch. When the young gentleman released the clutch, he seized hold of the grille and muscled the car up its own skid-marks, a display of strength that surprised even himself, although the car was light and small for a four-seater. It gave the soldier an odd pleasure to strain and sweat to his uttermost, abuse his body as the wheels came clear. It was an odd kind of relief from the fever that otherwise was making his hands shake. He understood the nausea and faintness that had struck the old chauffeur. For the first time that day, straining in the mud, he didn’t feel it.
“My goodness, you’ve destroyed your jacket—look at you,” said the girl. She and her brother had both helped him by tugging on the car, and she had taken off her gloves. But his hands were bloody as he pulled them from the grille and wiped them in the handkerchief of the Abyssinian commercial traveler.
“I am Valentin Bibescu and this is my sister, Elena,” said the young gentleman.
Lieutenant Prochenko smiled, revealing teeth that were very white.
“I also had an accident,” he said.
Predicting something like this, he had been wondering over the past days what he would come up with, whether he would invent a name, a history for himself. His thoughts had been tangled up in sickness, and now the moment had come and he was unprepared. The name Bibescu also had confused him, because it was famous in Roumania. And also because he had known a man during the Turkish war, an infantry officer who had been wounded in the trenches at Gurkovo and lost part of his face. In Roumania he had died bankrupt while Prochenko was still in Constanta with Aegypta Schenck—were these two his children? His niece and nephew? And while naturally there was always a split between the infantry and cavalry, still it was not impossible that these children might have heard of him—it was absurd to think of them as children. Surely now he had to find a way to reconcile what he was, a soldier in his middl
e forties (though in a way this was the least believable of his three options), with what he also was. Doubtless, Pieter de Graz was having the same difficulty.
It occurred to Lieutenant Prochenko suddenly and for the first time, standing in the muddy track in leather boots that were too big, why Frederick Schenck von Schenck had chosen the two of them to protect his daughter and go with her wherever she went. Perhaps it was because in different ways the chevalier and he were not encumbered with other people—dependents, relatives, friends—though de Graz’s mother might be still alive. She had a wooden house in Herastrau. But maybe Prince Frederick and certainly Aegypta Schenck had predicted this transition back. “I was in the Hephaestion when it derailed,” he said. “I must have hit my head.”
No, it was not just because of his loneliness, his and de Graz’s. It was also because of other qualities: courage, perhaps, or loyalty—where was Miranda now? Where was she at this moment? And maybe an odd capability that had allowed him to adapt to all these amazing changes: “It is strange to say, but I don’t know. But I had a ticket stub to Bucharest. I thought if I could find my way …”
Valentin Bibescu stared at him. “You don’t know your name?”
“As I say, I must have hit my head. I woke up in the marsh.”
“But they sent a special carriage for the passengers of the Hephaestion. Couldn’t you find anyone … ?”
“I woke up in the marshland, half a kilometer from the derailment … .”
With any luck they had not heard of the Abyssinian commercial traveler whose naked body lay beyond the wreck. Or if they had, they would not make the connection; Prochenko heard Elena Bibescu’s trilling laugh. “A mystery! How exciting! Was there anything in your pockets?”
He turned toward her, and again her beauty surprised him, her sweet smell, the dusted powder on her cheek. He stared at her a moment until she dropped her eyes. “I found no papers, which was strange because the train had come from Constantinople. We must have passed through customs at Silistra.”
The girl clapped her hands. “But you are not a Turk!”
Prochenko smiled, then went on as if self-consciously. “My mind is not entirely effaced. No, it is full of many things, my memory also. And in all these most vital areas, it’s as if I almost remember. My name, it’s as if it’s on the tip of my tongue, as the English say.”
He spoke in the French language. The carter’s boy was hurrying down the road from the brick gate. He had come to help them with the car, and between him and the lieutenant they got it on the road again. “Now I think your jacket is completely ruined,” said Elena, as her brother spoke to the boy about the chauffeur’s care, whether they should send for a doctor now or when Valentin returned from Bucharest.
“Have Mihai make inquiries at the German clinic,” he continued, while Prochenko wiped the dirt from his fingers.
In the meantime, Elena Bibescu chattered gaily on. “Herr Doctor Beck might refer you to a specialist—no, you must come with us to the city. Valentin, please!”
“It is the least we can do,” admitted the young man, smiling. “I am pleased to go, to tell the truth,” he said. “It is unhealthy here.”
“Oh, it will be fun,” said his sister, clapping her gloved hands. “I swear we will discover the truth by the time we get to Spantov. Were you going to walk to Bucharest along the road? Do you have any money?”
“Some.”
“And what else is in your pockets? I swear, you must be ill as well.”
Lieutenant Prochenko had been swaying on his feet. Now the girl stripped off her glove and made as if to touch his face. Her fingers hovered a few centimeters from his forehead. “How hot you are! Valentin, please help me. Were you struck on the back of your head?”
Valentin had opened up the doors of the Duesenberg, and now he labored with his sister to slide Prochenko into the soft seats. Though the lieutenant had never felt stronger, still he allowed the two of them to handle him, because in that way he felt his face close to Elena Bibescu’s face, and he smelled her body and sensed its coolness even under her long coat. “Valentin is back from Russia with all sorts of new skills,” she breathed next to his ear. “To drive a motorcar is nothing. We are going back to Bucharest. Time is short before he must return to his regiment.”
Prochenko caught a glimpse of the carter’s boy, standing in the road and waving. Then with his face very briefly against the front of Elena’s traveling coat, he must have lost consciousness, if only for a few seconds; when he came to himself he was in the rear seat of the Duesenberg and Valentin was in the front, signaling with his hand through the driver’s side window as he pulled onto the road. Then he wound up the window as they joined the highway.
The car smelled of leather, oil, and tobacco. The motor made a large popping noise. They jolted along at perhaps thirty kilometers an hour. But Lieutenant Prochenko was comfortable in the plum-colored backseat, which was soft and richly upholstered. Elena had put down the armrest between them, but she was leaning over it, her hat askew.
After a few minutes, as he said nothing and lay back against the seats with his eyes half closed, she undid the veil from around her neck and pulled the hat off entirely. “How hot it is!” she complained, shaking out her brown hair; now he could see it soft around her face. Her brother, by contrast, was wearing a hat, though before he’d been bareheaded. And he gripped the wooden steering wheel with leather driving gloves, at the same time his sister had lost her gloves entirely; was it possible they were twins? In the rearview mirror he stared back at Prochenko with frank, assessing eyes.
“Well, do you remember your given name?” asked Elena beside him. “What do you know about yourself?”
He shrugged. “There is something—Sasha—Alexei, I suppose.”
“A Russian name!” protested Elena, and the lieutenant was aware, again, of Valentin Bibescu’s scrutinizing eyes. The mirror was mounted on a vertical wooden dashboard. “But you are not a Russian, either. What languages do you speak? French, certainly, and Roumanian without an accent.” How did she know this? He must have said something to the carter or the carter’s boy.
“So, a Roumanian and also a gentleman, anyone can see that,” said Elena. “What is in your pockets?” To his surprise, she fished into his jacket pocket and produced a wristwatch: rectangular, moderately expensive, and with a leather band. “It is from Abyssinia,” she announced. “What did I tell you?”
What indeed? Prochenko had a hard time remembering. His thoughts and feelings roamed over a landscape that had no point of similarity with the scenes of rural peace that now surrounded the car on all sides, the pairs of yoked oxen, the wagons piled high, the green and flooded fields. Or else the point of similarity was in the lieutenant’s burning, nauseated body.
“I think you must be pulling our legs,” said Elena Bibescu. “Again as the English say. Do tell me—it’s not kind. I am so gullible.”
“What?”
“I don’t believe you are—what is it called? Amnesiac? Where is this bump on your head?” And she put her hand up as if to touch him behind the ear, fluttered her fingers a few centimeters from his scalp.
No, but to collect his thoughts, to prevent himself from coming apart, the lieutenant took a kind of refuge in a mental exercise. And so while he spoke to her and tried to make himself charming, and tried to appeal to her in any way she wanted, at the same time he scarcely listened to what he said. But with a savage single-mindedness he tried to clear his consciousness of anything except the physical sensation of sitting next to Elena Bibescu and feeling the proximity of her body. He tried to eliminate all smells from the inside of the compartment that were not her smell. And with an interest that was both clinical and desperate, he examined the delicate curl of her ear, the line of her neck as it disappeared into the collar of her coat, the purple mole above her clavicle, the smell of her hair and the shine of the long curls that hung down near his shoulder.
Because of the noise of the road and the dust and
stones that were thrown up by the wheels, the car windows were all closed. And at moments, the bucolic scenes outside appeared too perfect to be true. At moments the lieutenant imagined how they might be painted on the glass, and if he wound down the window crank he might reveal a different reality, and feel in his face the hot, gritty, irradiated wind. Or else if he reached out with his fingernails he might be able to scratch ribbons of paint from the glass, revealing … what? “My brother and I are nineteen,” said the girl. “I think you must be a few years older. No more than that!”
In time they bumped onto a side road and came to a halt next to a field of grass. Prochenko flung open the door and stood up next to the car. Yes, the air was warmer now, and the sun shone bright in the middle of a cloudless sky. Squinting up, the lieutenant imagined it sucking all the color out of the landscape, a relentless hole of light.
They had stopped for a picnic. Valentin opened the boot and brought out hampers and blankets, which he laid out on the grass. Elena unbuttoned her coat as she sat down. There was cold chicken, potato salad, and champagne in crystal glasses. Smells came to Prochenko as he sank down to his knees. He drank.
“You are in Russia?” he asked Valentin Bibescu.
“In Moldavia. On Thursday morning I must take the train. So we must celebrate while there is time and make new friends. Sasha—it is good not to remember. I myself …”
Moodily the young man pulled up strands of grass. “Valentin, please,” his sister begged. “There will be enough time for that, and I shall worry every day. But don’t let’s think about that now. Look, we have cornichons in brine and duck pate, all thanks to my husband … .” Suddenly embarrassed, she also let her speech trail away.