The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  So much the better. The baroness returned to her husband’s book. Turning the page, smoothing it over, she saw the first of the six powers the gun could conjure into substance—no, that was not the one for her tonight.

  From one of her husband’s worktables she retrieved a screwdriver and reset the tiny screw. Influenced, perhaps, by the image of the goddess, as well as other forces she scarcely understood, Nicola Ceausescu opened the top of her bodice in the hot, still air, revealing her slip. It was at the moment when she realized how she was betrayed, that Cleopatra revealed her bosom to the asp. As for the baroness, who would be her Marcus Anthony? Who would be her Octavius? Would it be Luckacz, or Eulenberg, or Schnibbe? Certainly now she walked along the dagger’s edge, because of her impetuosity and the cargo of the Hephaestion. And if the time was coming when the German government decided to replace her, whom would they choose to live in these high rooms? Princess Clara, perhaps, or her daughter, or else Felix—this would be impossible to bear!—the baroness’s only son. So perhaps this was the actual reason she had gathered them under her roof, and generosity had had nothing to do with it.

  Now already she realized how foolish and how sentimental she had been—a wedding march! There could be no negotiations with these people. Already she regretted having sent Luckacz away with the bracelet—no, it was better this way. The people of Roumania would lay it in her hand.

  Soon it would be time for her to go to bed, and she would take a few bites of Jean-Baptiste’s sandwich, and brush her teeth and wash her face and climb among her pillows as the sun rose. But now she turned to the description of the third power, closed the gun and set the drum so that the corresponding chamber was in the barrel. She blew out the candle by the lectern, then turned and faced the altar at the entrance to the room. Like a sharpshooter at the circus she extinguished the flame when she pulled the trigger. The room and everything inside was swallowed up in darkness. But then immediately she saw another figure in the room, illuminated as if by gunfire.

  No doubt it would have made sense at that moment of summoning for her to have chosen some powerful and warlike ghost—Sennacherib, for example, the angel of destruction Aegypta Schenck had used against her. But almost to her own surprise she found that she had chosen from a different category altogether. Her strength as a performer had always been her spontaneity; when she saw the phantasm take momentary shape in her hidden room, she imagined she had caught a glimpse of some new, soft part of herself.

  It lingered for a moment before it disappeared into the darkness, the likeness of a naked boy about nine years old, crowned with leaves in his curling hair. Nor was there anything violent about the image except for the feral, savage eyes that the baroness could not see; the boy was turned away from her. Delicate wings spread from his back, the merest tracery. She saw him as if leaning over a rock, staring at a reflection in a forest pool. Then he disappeared.

  The spirit creature was named Mintbean. He was a cherub attendant upon Eros, or Cupid, or Dionysus, according to different texts. Even in the darkness after the firing of the gun, the baroness could feel his presence close to her. If she had known the words, she could have summoned him—the words of welcome that were missing from her husband’s manuscript.

  In the darkness she caught sight of another image, lit this time by a spark of memory. Mintbean, perhaps, had left it as a gift, the memory of the fireworks above her in the Champ de Mars, and she standing in the back of the empress’s carriage, and the crowd calling her name. Behind her, as she turned, a scuffle had broken out. A man in a wool cap struggled with a bareheaded man, fashionably dressed in a camel hair coat, and as she watched, he turned to look at her.

  His face was lean and wild. He had yellow hair, light eyes under dark eyebrows, eyes that saw her, she thought, saw who she was, or just a glimpse of her before he turned away. Oh, but that was all it took, as she had read about in plays and poems, and everybody knew, perhaps, and everyone had always known, perhaps, but she.

  6

  Captives in the People’s Palace

  IN THE MIDDLE of the morning two days later, Miranda woke in a small bedroom with cream-colored wallpaper, decorated with a raised pattern of silver fleurs-de-lis. Light filtered through gauze curtains, pulled back to reveal long windows with ornate brass handles. One of these windows—more of a door, really—opened to a stone balcony. Miranda could see a row of squat stone balusters.

  She felt the warm breeze on her face and listened to the muted sounds of traffic, filtered also as if through the gauze, or else coming from far away. In Berkshire County where she’d grown up, she’d had a little room on the third floor of her parents’ house, and it had overlooked the green, and from it she could hear the sound of cars braking and accelerating for the traffic light. On summer mornings when school was out, she would wake up late and lie on her back against the pillows without moving, as now.

  And now especially that vanished time felt close to her, because of her dream. Once Stanley, her adoptive father, had told her it was wrong to imagine dreams had a duration in time, and you could dream the same dream throughout the night. Instead, he told her, they were manufactured instantaneously as you woke up, minted like money or else burned like a CD. He had said money, but she’d imagined a CD, imagined also sliding the new disk into the machine of her memory, while at the same time wondering if Stanley really believed what he was saying. Sometimes it was hard to tell. Sometimes he would experiment with far-fetched theories he had read or heard, reciting them as fact to see how they sounded.

  And of course, inevitably, this morning in this room that reminded her of her own childhood room, she had dreamed of Stanley and Rachel and all that. She had thrown off her blankets during the night. Now she lay propped up on pillows under a fragrant, freshly laundered sheet, replaying her memories, which did not have—at least now as she remade them in her mind—any of the distorted, altered quality of dreams. She had been sitting with Rachel and Stanley at the kitchen table, having some kind of argument or discussion about where she might like to go to college, a subject that had always interested Rachel but exhausted Stanley and her. And so as usual they had teamed up to make fun. “I hear there is a marine biology program in Tierra del Fuego,” Stanley had said.

  And Miranda, giggling: “Isn’t there a community college in Novisibirsk?”

  And Rachel: “That’s just great. Remind me to laugh when you’re flipping hamburgers at Burger King.”

  This mattress was softer than the one at home, too soft for her taste. The bed itself had four posters and a canopy—how long was it since she had slept in a proper bed? Not since the castle at Mamaia—no, there had been a few depressing, fleabag inns around Braila and Macin, where she had woken lumpy with mosquito bites, and Ludu had said …

  Now suddenly she sat up, remembering Ludu Rat-tooth as she lay on the muddy ground, blood on her face and shirt, sticky under Miranda’s fingers. Nor was it possible, once she’d pressed the button, to pause that CD. “Oh, God,” she murmured, hugging herself, feeling with surprise her naked shoulders—she was wearing some kind of linen nightgown. How long since she had not slept in her clothes? “Miss, here’s your breakfast,” Ludu had once said, bringing her a plate of peppered oatmeal, tepid and congealed.

  “Are you hungry?” said a soft, low voice. Who was there? The canopy, tied back on the window side, fluttered free on the other side, obscuring a portion of the room. Leaning forward now, pulling the soft material aside, Miranda saw a woman beside the bed, between the bed and a closed door. How long had she been there?

  “Oh,” Miranda said. Now suddenly she caught a whiff of tobacco smoke. She kicked her legs free from the sheet and put her bare feet on the floor. She knew who this was, where she was. She had heard enough of Captain Raevsky’s crazed descriptions. And of course that sadistic pig O’Brien, in the Mogosoaia police station, had told her where she was going.

  “Are you … hungry?” the woman repeated, her voice low and harsh and toneless. She wa
s dressed in a tight yellow gown that broke above her ankles and displayed her slender waist, her slender arms. She wore no jewelry, and her hair was cut straight at the level of her jaw, a helmet of red and brown. At that moment Miranda saw her as if through the scrim of her anticipation, and because of that she did appear as something mystical and lovely, as Raevsky had described at bleary moments on the Hoosick riverbank.

  Miranda even remembered some of the language he’d used. She caught a backward glimpse of some of the images she had supplied when he was talking. But that was then, and this was now, and it was time to forget about all that. The baroness wasn’t so much younger than Rachel, after all. And she was just Miranda’s height or even a bit shorter, as Miranda saw immediately when she stood up.

  “I want to see Peter,” she said. “Where are my clothes?”

  She had come from Mogosoaia the previous night, and she now wondered if she had been drugged, so incomplete her memory seemed. She had come in some kind of a covered vehicle, a cart or a truck, and had seen the lights of the city as she dozed. Her wrists had been cuffed in front of her. That had been uncomfortable.

  Now she rubbed her hands over her wrists—still sore. But her bracelet, which had been taken from her, was in its old place. She fingered it, pulled it out of the raw marks; she had not seen Peter since the night of their arrest. Where was he now? He hadn’t been in that cart. He hadn’t stumbled out with her into the courtyard of this enormous pile of buildings, that was sure.

  But this woman didn’t appear to understand what she was talking about. “Where is the Chevalier de Graz?” Miranda asked again.

  Nicola Ceausescu shrugged. And it was true there was something unnatural about her, some weird articulation that made you look at her and try to guess her thoughts. Every small motion seemed significant, as if she were an actor on the stage. Puzzled, she lifted up her hand, spread her fingers by her face. Ah, now she understood! She smiled, swallowed back a laugh that had no appearance of joy or good humor. “There is someone I imagine you would like to see first.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, I think you do. She is resting, but is eager to see you after twenty-five years.”

  Suddenly panicked, Miranda glanced around the room. For a moment she recalled another fragment of her dream. She saw Rachel, her adoptive mother, at the kitchen table rubbing her nose, which was her signal that the coffee was too strong again. Stanley had made it and he never got it right.

  “Where are my clothes?”

  “I had them burned,” said the baroness. “You won’t need them again. They were unsuitable. I believe a chapter of your life is over,” she continued as Miranda saw for the first time, laid out over a complicated wooden dressing frame, some kind of long blue dress or gown. It was ridiculous.

  “There was a time,” said Nicola Ceausescu, “when I too often dressed like that—in a man’s clothes, I mean. Because of the convenience. Oh, for all sorts of reasons. But no longer. My dear, you are a princess of Roumania.”

  Unrolled over a spar of the dressing stand was a pair of bluish stockings, embroidered with forget-me-nots. On the floor there were some shoes, also blue. “You’ve got to be kidding,” Miranda said. “They’ll never fit.”

  “We measured you when you were asleep.”

  For reasons that she couldn’t analyze, this information brought a lump to Miranda’s throat. Self-conscious suddenly, she was aware of the polished floor under her bare feet. Here she was, standing in her underwear and someone else’s nightgown, waiting to see her actual birth mother … .

  “I’ve put out no jewelry,” murmured the baroness. “I didn’t know your taste, though there is a great deal of it here. Pieces that belonged to your own family—you will consult with Princess Clara when you see her. To tell the truth, it is the fashion now to go without, because of me. Once I had a gold ring from my husband, but I don’t wear it anymore. I thought I would leave my wrists bare, so that people would notice a gold bracelet when I put it on. Also I imagined a single tourmaline in a platinum setting around my neck, or else having it cut in pieces because it was too big. For the moment I’ve abandoned those ideas. Please, it’s late. I have written out a schedule for you today.”

  “I won’t wear these,” said Miranda.

  The baroness smiled. “You have no choice.”

  And as Miranda glared at the dressing frame, she continued, “Would you rather stand a trial for murder like your friend de Graz?”

  The sunshine and the soft, warm air came in the window. From where she stood, Miranda could see past the stone balustrade and down into the square. At the mention of Peter’s name, Miranda felt like weeping—this ridiculous dress was not the total of her difficulties. There was much, after all, she had to learn.

  She slipped the dress off its wooden frame. “Will you give me some privacy?”

  The baroness laughed. “Now that’s an antique idea! I had expected you to be quite up-to-date. God knows I’ve had no privacy since I’ve lived here.”

  She stood with her arms crossed over her chest. And it was true—she obviously had no intention of budging as Miranda held the dress up and smoothed it over her front. There was no point in delaying once the decision was made, but was it possible this horrible woman was going to watch her the whole time? She walked around the bed to stand in the shelter of its canopy, then, businesslike, slipped off the nightgown so it puddled on the floor.

  “Now that is not so bad,” murmured the baroness. “You have a pleasant shape.”

  Clenching her teeth, Miranda stepped into the dress and pulled it up. But of course it fastened with a row of buttons down the back. However she bent her arms, she only got a few.

  Beside the bed on this side was a large free-standing mirror in an ornate frame. Abruptly she remembered a series of greeting cards Rachel had used, Weimaraners dressed in human clothes and placed in all kinds of undignified poses. “I look like a dog in a prom dress,” she muttered.

  The baroness laughed. “Not a dog. Here, let me help you.” Then she was behind Miranda, touching her. “Now it is true you have a lovely waist—a benefit, perhaps, of two weeks in the country without food. I suppose I should try hiding from the police in Mogosoaia! What are you, twenty-five, I think? The silk is too tight over your … breasts.”

  She gave a vicious emphasis to the word. Stung with embarrassment, Miranda watched herself in the mirror, the baroness indistinct behind her. “Now the stockings,” she said. “You are a virgin, are you not?”

  “What?”

  They spoke in French. The word the baroness used, “pucelle,” was not familiar to Miranda in this context, and it took her a while before she understood. “Oh, don’t be a prude! But of course you are public property now, and these things are important. And you have been wearing trousers and sleeping in the woods with a grown man, a dangerous criminal—you understand there’s much to overcome. But twenty-five is high time, past time really. I was a mother by your age. You have not met Felix, my son.”

  While the baroness was speaking, Miranda’s emotions had pursued a small, tight circle from embarrassment to anger, then to sadness. Was it true she was twenty-five? How could it be true?

  No, it was not true. That was just the time gone by. In the mirror she saw tears in her eyes. “Now, stop,” cried the baroness. “I’m sure you will like him. Everybody does, that’s what I hear. Of course I myself have scarcely seen him, because of the potato-eating Germans—oh, I know. Sometimes I have wet my pillow with my tears.”

  She was hateful, Miranda decided. But it was a peculiar kind of hatefulness that seemed deliberate. Now the baroness stepped away beyond the end of the bed and crossed her arms, again, over her chest. Miranda watched her in the mirror. “You must brush your hair, but it’s good you’ve cut it in my style. You will see it is the fashion because of me.”

  “I’ll wear the shoes, but I won’t wear the stockings,” Miranda said. “Can you take me to Peter now?”

  The barone
ss ignored these last words. She pursed her lips. “Suit yourself. The dress is long enough. We will not experience your legs. Luckily there is no hair upon your ankles, not that I can see. Later we must powder it or else we scrape it off. It’s a pity you’re so dark.”

  Then she continued as Miranda stared at herself, tried to make the image in the mirror correspond to something she was familiar with, or liked about herself: “When I took your clothing to be burnt, I found a letter in your pocket from Aegypta Schenck—the policemen had already given a report. My dear, your aunt was some kind of alchemist or conjurer, for which she lost a high position in the household of the former empress. It’s not wise for you to read or own such things, but I must ask you: Was there another letter—no, how shall I ask? Sergeant O’Brien also recovered a revolver, I believe it’s called, something from your father’s family. Let me ask you. Who gave you such a thing?”

  “At Mamaia Castle,” whispered Miranda impatiently. She watched her lips move in the mirror.

  “And was there another letter with it? Perhaps there were some references you didn’t understand …”

  Maybe that’s where it started to go wrong, Miranda thought—the letter from her aunt that she had found with her father’s gun and had not read. Later it had been destroyed because of her carelessness. Maybe if she’d followed the directions in that letter, she would never have ended up this image in this glass, her tanned, chapped arms and shoulders.

  “So if there is such a thing and you would like to show it to me, perhaps we could puzzle it out. But I tell you it’s not wise to get mixed up in this sort of language, these superstitions about ghosts and whatnot, though at one time it was the fashion among wealthy families. This did not protect your aunt, and you see your position is precarious already. So I will keep the letter for you, though there is no place you could keep it now. Alas, there is no reticule or pocket in that frock.”

  Miranda turned from the mirror so she couldn’t see herself. “My face I don’t mind it because I’m behind it,” she thought, something Stanley had quoted more than once. Words to conjure with. Besides, what did any of this matter now?