by Paul Park
“Yes, to Colonel Bocu,” said Valentin, lifting up his glass. “Our financial savior, without whom we would be eating dry bread and herring.”
“You are married?” asked Prochenko.
Elena blushed, and her brother answered, “Last December. Just in time—the bank would have foreclosed! No, he’s a good fellow, though his moustache is a trifle gray,” he teased. “And he is inclined to stoutness—no, admit it, dear. ‘Any man who walks under a weight of laurels must walk slowly,’ said our great aunt at the ceremony!”
But Elena wouldn’t look Prochenko in the eye. Her voice was low and sweet. “Today my husband is outside Soroca with the Brancoveanu Artillery. There are worse places and I’m glad. It is true—we all are grateful for his generosity.”
“And his pomposity!” exclaimed her brother. “Already he is calling himself Bocu-Bibescu. Need I say it was a match made in heaven? Even that was a godsend. You had no desire to go through life as Madame Beau-cul, no matter how appropriate … .”
“Valentin, stop!” said the girl, her cheeks on fire. Then in a moment: “I see you’ve made your mind up to be disagreeable. Sasha, please! You must not get the wrong impression. My husband is considerate and kind.”
She looked into the grass. The humility with which she spoke touched the lieutenant’s heart, affected him even through the shield of his illness. Now her coat was unbuttoned, he could see the tight dress underneath, cut low over her chest. In the car she had already stripped away her veil and silk cravat. Under the tight green fabric Prochenko could see the swell of her small breasts.
Between them they drank two bottles of champagne and two of mineral water. Prochenko got up to urinate and trudged a long way toward a tree in the middle of the field. Hidden from his companions, he pulled down his trousers and squatted behind the wide trunk in the high grass. Afterwards, coming back, he could see angry gestures, hear raised voices which subsided as he approached. But since the accident Prochenko’s hearing had been unnaturally acute. “Don’t talk to me,” said Valentin Bibescu. “It doesn’t matter—none of it matters. I’ll probably be dead in six months, before my next leave.”
Now suddenly in the warm sunshine he got up and began to stow away the remains of the picnic. Prochenko helped him under the hot sun. “I am baking—there is no reason to keep your jacket on,” Elena said, and she slipped out of her long lavender coat as if it were some kind of carapace or shell or suit of armor, revealing the light green traveling dress that fell to the middle of her calf.
Since the German occupation, hemlines had been rising in Bucharest. Even since the beginning of the Russian war there’d been a reaction in the dress shops of the capital, under the pretext of anticipated shortages and rationing—Prochenko could see the girl’s ankles and legs, encased in silk stockings. There was a ruffled slit in the material that came up almost to her knees. At the same time, her neck was bare.
Slowly, standing in the high green grass, Prochenko unbuttoned his gray jacket and drew it off. She was right, it was ruined, ripped and scuffed, streaked with mud and grease. Underneath he wore a cream-colored shirt without a collar, Turkish-style. The sweat was running down his ribs.
He disposed of his jacket in the boot with the rest of the detritus—empty bottles, smeared dishes. In his present state he was not feeling the wine. But Elena Bibescu was, he thought, as she slid into the car beside him; her brother was eager to be gone. He backed the car onto the track. Then they were on the road again.
They saw no other private cars, but only horse-drawn carriages and carts. Valentin sped past them, honking his horn. In the backseat, in the stuffy air, Elena subsided onto the padded armrest, and in twenty minutes was asleep with her mouth open and her lips out of shape. Prochenko could see her teeth, hear her breath, smell her perfume, all that. But he looked straight ahead out the windscreen. Sometimes he caught sight of Valentin’s eyes in the mirror.
Already he imagined there was some other creature inside the girl who slumped so close to him, as there was inside himself. As he had imagined scratching the paint from the windows, he thought he might reach out his hand and—not scratch her, no. But he would rub the delicate skin around her wrist and around her neck, and it would rub away and show some of the woman underneath, or the kitten or the fawn or the baby bird or whatever it was—would he reach out his hand? It was intolerable to stay inactive in this hot, closed space, with the high, muffled roar of the motor and the wind surrounding him as he plunged forward in exasperated stasis.
What had happened to him? What had happened when the Hephaestion derailed and the baggage car exploded? Surely the accident had changed him, not for the better. Or else—and at this moment his life in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, seemed immeasurably far away. But he thought about the silver canisters that had broken open, and he remembered movies and comic books that had described radioactive accidents in underground laboratories. Spider-man or Batman—a human being merged with an animal, melted or mutated with it. The result was a hero with terrifying strengths and vulnerabilities. But a hero nonetheless. That was important to remember.
In the plush seats of the Duesenberg, Lieutenant Prochenko rubbed his palms together, and then rubbed them on the knees of his trousers. In himself he felt a mixture of two people and an animal, a dog or a wolf whose tongue seemed huge and slimy in his mouth, whose nails seemed sharp as claws, whose heart throbbed unmercifully and whose fever seemed to heat up the entire passenger compartment of the car. A mist or film of condensation—it appeared to him—had crept over the window near his cheek.
In the afternoon they passed through Cernica. And on the other side of the lake they came gradually into the suburbs south of Vulcan’s Gate and the ancient city wall. Here there was more traffic: wagons, carts, and motorized vehicles. At times they crept along or stopped, once for ten minutes to allow a convoy of German army trucks to cross the intersection. Valentin opened his window and lit a cigarette.
Prochenko discovered he was holding the girl’s hand. Or at least her palm lay against his palm, and her fingers curled loosely against his. Prochenko now gave all of his attention to the small soft pressure that joined them, and which seemed to offer some chance at respite from the buffeting sensations of his body, some promise of calm. He tried to clear his mind of anything else. Even though he failed, still he could imagine the relief that might come out of success, particularly as he felt her come awake, pull her hand away and then, hesitantly, tentatively replace it. She did not look at him, but like him stared ahead through the front windscreen at the tramway yards beyond the Cernica Temple.
There must have been fifty trucks crossing the road. Valentin cursed softly and then turned back toward him, his arm along the back of the seat. Elena lifted her fingers, and then she also turned her head. “Well,” she said. “Do you remember anything?
“This is the Bulevardul Basarabia,” she continued after a pause.
“I—I don’t know.”
“Then we will take you to my husband’s house,” she said. “Valentin can lend you some clothes. I’ll send a note to our doctor, though it has gotten late.”
The weather had changed again. A cold wind came from the north, and a cold mist. Suddenly the air seemed saturated, difficult to breathe. The car started up again, and they drove slowly down the boulevard between the long brick walls of industrial buildings or warehouses. Prochenko examined a row of enormous posters, each one announcing a series of performances at the New National Theatre of Roumania. And though the posters did not specify the title or performer, each showed the same image of the same woman. She was alone onstage with her arms raised, the footlights shining off her helmet of chestnut hair.
“That is your head of state,” murmured the lieutenant. He had seen photographs in Adrianople.
“See, you do remember!” said Elena Bibescu.
And when the row of posters showed no sign of ending, her brother elaborated. “That is the white tyger, she calls herself. Really, she is just
a hired functionary for the Germans, whom she abuses in all her speeches—it is quite amusing, if it weren’t a question of one’s own country. But I must not say these things too loudly. My brother-in-law is an admirer, needless to explain.”
“Oh, Valentin, I don’t care what you say. You don’t have to …” Elena’s voice trailed away. Prochenko was conscious suddenly of her knee against his own.
“Well, you will see straightaway the level of absurdity,” continued Valentin. “We are coming into the Piata Markasev.”
Sure enough, after a few hundred meters the boulevard arrived at a traffic circle in a neighborhood of run-down apartment buildings. In the center of the circle rose a statue of a young man with a pistol in his hand, standing over the corpse of a defeated enemy. “‘Long Live the Patriotic Sacrifice of Kevin Markasev,’” quoted Valentin, reading from the inscription on the pedestal as they drove slowly by. “And there’s his portrait,” he continued, indicating a bronze profile in bas-relief.
“Tell me the story,” said Lieutenant Prochenko.
Valentin glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “Really, my friend, if you don’t remember that, now I am frightened for you. Was there anyone who did not learn that song in school? Kevin Markasev the brave, how he shot a German officer right at the start of the occupation, and then was tortured to death rather than reveal the name of his accomplices—really, it is idiotic. The statue was built with German money, naturally.”
“What are you saying?” asked Elena. “Are you telling us the story—?”
“—is false, is false, of course it’s false,” interrupted her brother. “Whoever heard of this person? Where did he go to school? What town did he come from? Obviously if nothing else you will agree that ‘Kevin’ is an invented name!”
“I don’t understand,” said Elena. “Why would the Germans—”
“Because they are a federal republic, with laws protecting the right of public discourse, as they call it. And because this officer, supposedly, was abusing a Roumanian prostitute. So they pay for the statue and pat themselves on the back and smile their sanctimonious smiles, and all the time it doesn’t matter because they own this country and everything in it—not because they conquered it. The army didn’t fight. But we sold it to them, and they paid good money, which we spend on patriotic statues and free performances at the National, which they rebuilt from nothing, let me remind you.”
Sasha Prochenko turned his face against the window, cooling his hot cheek against the glass. While the brother argued, and while he pressed his knee against the sister’s leg, the lieutenant indulged in his own memories. It was almost as if he had not lied, as if he were in fact a victim of amnesia. It had been twenty-five years since he’d lived in Bucharest. He and some other officers had shared lodgings in Floreasca, which they had given up the year Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck was murdered, the year Miranda Popescu was born. Afterward he had only come into the city once, during that final mad ride to Mogosoaia when the girl was eight years old. Certainly now as they drove into the city center, he could see much had changed. Much had been torn down and rebuilt. But surely down that road was the Apollo Carrefour, where he had gone to the Chameleon Club. And now they were coming into the Elysian Fields with its double row of sycamores. And here … and here …
So he was recognizing buildings and establishments he had not seen in a quarter century. And with another part of his mind he was somewhere else. He was in Berkshire County, behind the art museum on Christmas Hill, coming back from the burned-out high school in the middle of the night and seeing Kevin Markasev next to the bonfire, his handsome face under his single eyebrow, his expensive clothes. Even in the crude bronze profile in the piata, the lieutenant had recognized him. And this also was the exercise of an amnesiac, thought Prochenko now. In the cool autumn darkness under the birch trees and among the hummocks of wet grass on Christmas Hill, what kind of person had he been?
One thing was for certain: He was no longer the carefree officer who’d been thrown out of the hotel bar at the Karnac, whose hideous pseudo-Aegyptian façade they were now passing. Nor was he the same man who had made his oath of honor to Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck and then found seriousness in the prince’s castle on the beach, protecting with his wits a little girl and an old woman with the world against them. Nor even the same man who had consented to a desperate adventure he had barely understood, beyond the far side of the universe in Berkshire County. With the dog’s part of his mind he pressed his knee against Elena Bibescu’s knee, using that pressure as a way of focusing, of concentrating. Outside, in the Champ de Mars, people had gathered for some kind of parade.
“They’re starting early,” remarked Valentin.
“It’s odd,” Elena said. “Usually the feast of Athena is a small sort of affair. We came back because Valentin has to catch his train. Something must have happened. Look, there are musicians!”
But then the traffic started again, and they didn’t hear the news until they arrived at Colonel Bocu’s house in the Strada Italiana. Scarcely had the footman motioned the car in through the gate when Valentin, a cigarette in his mouth, asked for the afternoon newspapers. Obviously the servants had already read them. The type was blurred and the pages had been pulled apart. But, standing on the steps of the colonel’s house, Valentin glanced at the headlines and then threw his cigarette into the base of a potted palm. In a quavering voice he read aloud the story: The German government had fallen after a vote of no confidence in the Reichstag. The Teutonic Democrats had abandoned the war coalition over the question of whether to accept a peace proposal from the czar. General von Stoessel and several important ministers were dead under peculiar circumstances. And there were rumors that Felipe Romanov had been released as a gesture of good faith. The czarevich would soon be on a German army train to the frontier, where he would be reunited with his father.
Now suddenly, as if it had been released by the news, Prochenko was aware of the honking of car horns, which had penetrated even this quiet residential street. Valentin refolded the paper and laid it on the curled marble balustrade. Then he burst into tears.
In a moment his sister had followed him through the big doors without a backward glance. Unsure of what to do, Prochenko lingered on the step. Should he wander away out of the gate, try to find Miranda and the Chevalier de Graz? He still had some money in his pocket, thanks to the Abyssinian commercial traveler.
The door was ajar, and the footman stood beside it, a noncommittal expression on his face. Prochenko looked down, and found himself perusing the second article in the newspaper, how the Princess Clara Brancoveanu and Nicola Ceausescu’s son, both held as hostages in Germany for many years, were expected that evening at the Gara de Nord, arriving on the train from Buda-Pest. The Baroness Ceausescu would be there to welcome them, together with the German ambassador. So—Miranda’s mother, home at last.
There was no sound from within the house. Prochenko wondered if there was any possibility of retrieving his jacket from the Duesenberg’s boot. Then he realized he was happy to be rid of it, happy to feel the mist in his hair and the condensation on his skin. It was strange weather, unseasonable for the beginning of summer in Bucharest, and the strange cold breeze was a relief.
But now Elena Bibescu had slipped out the door again and grabbed hold of his sleeve. “Please come,” she said, ignoring the footman who was walking down the steps toward the car. And now the girl was pulling him through the high door and up the curving staircase, and through the small rooms of the residential portion of the house. At the same time she was talking to him about her brother, how he’d been part of an advance attack on the Russian lines. The experience had damaged him, apparently, and her husband had been kind enough to pull him from his regiment for a couple of days’ leave. “He’s not cut out to be a soldier,” Elena confided, news which Prochenko didn’t take as a surprise.
But he was confused when she kept mentioning the kindness and generosity of her husband.
For her visit to the summer house in Chiselet, he had even arranged for a petrol-rationing allowance. Valentin was nowhere to be seen. In an upstairs room with bruise-colored wallpaper and a row of open closets, Elena turned to face him. Now she was tentative, breathless, still more than a little drunk, perhaps, and the lieutenant could smell the liquor on her lips. She came toward him, suddenly abashed, glancing at him for a second and then looking away. “How bright your teeth are!” she said finally. “I must confess you are a little frightening to me.”
When he kissed her she made a sighing noise, a musical note that he pressed out of her from time to time, halfway between a hiccup and a song. She kissed him fiercely with her eyes closed, which was just as well, Prochenko thought. Nor did she resist him when he drew up her dress and slipped his hand into her underwear. She did not resist him when he pushed her down onto the daybed, covered with discarded clothes from previous days, he supposed, of choosing her wardrobe. She unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off his arms; the Abyssinian had worn an undershirt, thank God. Prochenko had no desire to expose his chest to her.
Next to her clean, cool, perfumed body he felt rank and filthy, feverish and hot. She ran her hands over his shoulders—“Oh, it is like fur,” she said, meaning the delicate white hair that covered him, and which in most light was not even visible. But it ran along his back in two heavier ridges.
Now her mouth was open to him as he kissed her. And though part of him was enjoying this, and grasped at her as if she presented the solution to some kind of mystery, there was another part. He was afraid of what would happen if she ran her hands over his small breasts, or if she found out what could not be hidden forever. Inside his trousers, if she opened them, she would not find a penis. She would find generative organs of the female sex, remnants of the girl he’d been in Berkshire County.