The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  He affected an optimism he did not feel. In Massachusetts, Markasev had been a different person, bold and reckless. He had lit the school on fire, for Pete’s sake. Now he could not be budged, and with foreboding the lieutenant promised to go out looking for a new room in another part of town, and bring back some beer and sandwiches. Under cover of darkness, they would move.

  “Please, don’t go.”

  But he had to go. The little room seemed airless, stark, uncomfortable. In Berkshire County he had had a mountain bike, had ridden all over town. He couldn’t stay here with a half-naked Kevin Markasev or whatever, complaining about his dreams. Prochenko’s dreams were weird enough.

  AT A LITTLE before six o’clock, Jean-Baptiste paused before the baroness’s bedroom, dressed in his disheveled livery with the red piping. Because of his long service, and because he had known her in both wealth and poverty, he took liberties without asking. Now he pounded on the door and opened it. He spoke into the half-lit space. “There’s a man to see you as you said. A dirty scoundrel, if you want my plain opinion.”

  Through the half-open door there came a hiss. Then in her lowest, softest, throaty voice: “What is he like?”

  “Well, he’s dressed in a green jacket and he’s sweating. He’s a big man, and his clothes are new. Red hair. He’s not a gentleman, of course. What do you want with him?”

  “A simple errand. Don’t come in. I’m dressing for the theater. Is my carriage ready for the National?”

  “It’s at the Spanish Gate.”

  “I’ll be down. I have something for that fellow.”

  “If I were you, ma’am, I’d do nothing about that. He’s got narrow eyes. I wouldn’t send him on any errand of mine.”

  “Do you think so?” came the low voice behind the door, tinged now with sadness and anxiety. “But would you trust him if you were alone in all the world?”

  Jean-Baptiste was accustomed to his mistress’s exaggerations. This one might have made him laugh, were it not for the sincere misery in her voice. “Ma’am,” he said, “I wouldn’t trust him to break an egg. You have other men to help you. I mean Domnul Luckacz first of all.”

  “And the other?”

  Her voice was so close, she must have been standing in the darkness just inside the door. What had she said—that she was dressing for the theater? Surely all her costumes were already at the National. Why wouldn’t she open the door?

  “Ma’am, you know who the other is. Sometimes you’ve relied on me. I’m referring to the money in Geneva. And of course those boxes on the Hephaestion …”

  It was a mistake to mention this. Jean-Baptiste was interrupted by another hiss. It wasn’t fair: He’d done his part, which was to negotiate in secret between the Abyssinians and the Central Bank. Radu Luckacz had known nothing about it. Jean-Baptiste had been preparing to receive the boxes when the news arrived that Antonescu had blown up the tracks.

  “My friend, I do not blame you … .”

  Which meant she did. What was in those boxes? he asked himself, not for the first time. Just as important, where was the baroness now? Was she standing barefoot, perhaps, or in just her slip, inside the shadow of the door? Perhaps there was a candle burning on her bedside table, something he couldn’t see.

  “My friend, some things must be hidden from even you. I mean for your own sake. Take this. Go.”

  And her naked arm snaked through the gap in the door. Her bitten, stained fingers held an envelope.

  “Have my coach ready in four minutes,” she said. That was the errand he attended to first. Only later did he make his way back to the servant’s door, the baroness’s letter in his hand. The sealing paste had softened in the humid air, and the flap of the envelope had come unstuck. In the Corridor of Mirrors he held it to the outside window where the long light streamed in, pressed it against the glass.

  Then the envelope was open in his hands. There were two banknotes inside, each for a thousand marks. And then a note he didn’t stoop to read, except for several lines and phrases that stood out. “He must not be recognized … 351 Camatei”—it was in the university district. “Anything it is in the power of a desperate woman to bestow …”

  And there was something else inside the envelope. It felt like a large coin, but lighter. A button, he thought, and then it was in his hand, a medallion of pressed tin. There was a time when everyone had had one.

  It showed in profile the face of Kevin Markasev the martyr. This was a boy who’d lived in the house on Saltpetre Street years before. After the baron’s death, Jean-Baptiste had had his mistress to himself there until the boy came. But the old servant hadn’t begrudged him anything, an indigent the baroness had discovered on the streets of Cluj, before she’d had to sell her country house to pay her debts. No, in a way the old man thought the boy had brought them all closer together, an odd family in that cold house, but suitable for three people who had had no families of their own. Most of the time the boy had lived upstairs in the baroness’s attic, in a cage that Jean-Baptiste had labored to make comfortable—he’d always felt strange about that. He’d brought him food sometimes he’d made with his own hands.

  Then at the time of the German occupation, when the former empress fled the city, Jean-Baptiste had been imprisoned in the old court. There he had thought more about what life must have been like for Kevin Markasev, and had resolved to do better when he was released. He’d resolved to adopt the boy or find a home for him. But he was already dead when the murder case collapsed against Jean-Baptiste.

  So—what was this nonsense? He sealed up the envelope again. Then he delivered it to the red-haired man in the green coat standing in the alley. He watched him read the note and lick his lips. What would he make of the phrase, “ … anything it is in the power of a desperate woman to bestow”?

  Jean-Baptiste turned away and climbed the stairs. How sad he felt! How melancholy in the dying afternoon. Once he had been willing to give his life for Nicola Ceausescu.

  And yet there was nothing to be ashamed of. He gave his orders to have dinner in his own apartment. There it was already waiting for him in the lower kitchen, cabanos prajit with cartofi, and he asked one of the scullions to pack it into a bundle along with two bottles of beer. Holding a bag of greasy paper, he climbed to the upper floors again.

  When he passed Miranda Popescu’s door, he could hear her weeping. Sensitive to the sound, he put his ear against the cream-colored door, decorated with a discreet pattern of rosebuds. He reached for the glass knob, but then he hesitated.

  That afternoon, following her interview with her mother, Jean-Baptiste had escorted Miss Popescu back to her own room. Then also she had been quite obviously upset, had closed the door without a word, which had irritated Jean-Baptiste. What did she have to complain about?

  Now, coming back dispirited to the upper floors, burdened with thoughts of Kevin Markasev, Jean-Baptiste found himself more sympathetic. Surely it was not an unmixed pleasure to discover as a full-grown woman the lost mother you had never had. Surely it was not an unmixed joy to find yourself in this enormous building, separated from your friends. Surely this was a cage for her, just like Kevin Markasev’s. Standing at the door, Jean-Baptiste grew philosophical: Surely this is what we all do at the end. Find ourselves a cage and a locked door. If we’re lucky we can procure nice furniture, comfortable quilts, good food.

  Miranda Popsecu had refused supper. Jean-Baptiste had learned that in the kitchen. Now he rubbed his hand against the door, wondering if he could coax some difference from the sound of grief inside, a lessening, a pause.

  The door was locked from the outside, he knew. But he had keys to most rooms in the People’s Palace. On this upper floor, in this east wing, the locks were interchangeable; his own key, which he was already clutching, would open this door. He slid the bar into the hole, and twisted it, and listened for the snap of the bolt.

  Miss Popescu was on her knees, bent over the bare mattress of the bed. She raised her tear-stained face
. Light came from a lamp on a high chest of drawers, a piece of furniture solid enough to be intact. Most of the others—the chairs, a bedside table—had been overturned, though the washbasin on its metal stand had not been smashed. The curtains had been torn down, the pillows thrown around the room.

  “Oh,” he said. “I’ll send a chambermaid.”

  Miss Popescu, as he’d come in, had gotten to her feet, hands clenched, jaw set, as if expecting some continuation of her struggle with the room. But his words took the spirit out of her. Her shoulders slumped. “Please don’t,” she said. “I’ll clean it up.”

  This surprised him more than anything she might have said. In the baroness’s service he’d become accustomed to displays of temper. He was accustomed to picking up smashed glassware, crockery, and Dresden figurines. “I’ll clean it up myself.”—Nicola Ceausescu never would have used those words, even if she didn’t mean them, and even though she had been born to peasants in a mountain village as all the world knew.

  Seeing the armchair on its back, Jean-Baptiste immediately had wondered at the similarities between his new mistress and his old. His mind had leapt ahead. But now he wondered at their differences. Miranda Popescu stood with her back against the dark chest of drawers. The light was in her hair, cut short in the baroness’s mode.

  Her eyes were dark blue, which she had from her mother—Brancoveanu eyes, common among the rows of portraits downstairs. She was a woman of middle height, broad-shouldered and strong, but with a pretty bosom that was well set off, he thought, by the blue gown she wore—Jean-Baptiste was a judge of such things, though his own clothes were often stained and creased, his jackets perpetually too tight. Her skin was chapped and sunburned, which had never been the style, and yet was no doubt appropriate to the life she had led, sleeping out of doors or in the woods, all day on horseback, all that.

  Like everyone in Bucharest, Jean-Baptiste had stood in the crowd to watch Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck ride up the Calea Victoriei after the Peace of Havsa, his white horse curvetting to the grandstands. The old Baron Ceausescu had been there, too, before his marriage. But all eyes were on the prince; watching his daughter now, Jean-Baptiste saw some of his sharp features and high-born ugliness, but softened through her mother’s beauty. She had her father’s small, protruding ears.

  But what was most remarkable, he thought, was the dissonance between her woman’s body and her childlike face—no, not childlike, that wasn’t the right phrase. But there was an innocence to her, a vulnerability, and a sincerity to her expression that contradicted the reports of the Gypsy’s life she’d led, and formed the greatest single difference with the Baroness Ceausescu, whose ability to mimic all those things was legendary. But Jean-Baptiste had known her a long time in many circumstances. She couldn’t fool him anymore, he thought wistfully.

  “Please,” he said. “They told me you had nothing to eat. I have some sausages here.”

  This is what he missed above all, the informality of his life with Nicola Ceausescu in Saltpetre Street when she was poor. It was true she never paid him, and he had to rely on his own meager sources of income sometimes to buy food for her as well. The reward was the simple pleasures they had shared, not like here in this enormous building. At first, though, even here they had lived in one small wing. The Germans had allowed only a single candle burning above the Piata Revolutiei, a vigil for Roumanian nationalism.

  Now, as in imperial times, the whole façade of the Winter Keep was set ablaze with lights, this time to welcome back the Brancoveanus, allied throughout their history with prominent German families. New majordomos had been hired, answerable not to Jean-Baptiste but directly to the Committee for Roumanian Affairs, which was run out of the German Embassy. They in turn had hired dozens of new servants Jean-Baptiste had never even met, dressed in clean linen and brass-buttoned uniforms.

  Tomorrow, he thought, he would walk down to Saltpetre Street and open up the house. He had a suspicion the baroness would soon be needing it.

  “Is that a bottle of beer?”

  The girl—woman, he corrected himself; why did he persist in seeing her as younger than she was?—spoke Roumanian with a French accent, which he found charming. But there was something else as well, some odd intonation that still lingered from the life she’d led, the prison world her aunt had invented for her, and from which the Baroness Ceausescu had delivered her.

  “Two bottles. Would you care for one?”

  And so, incredibly, he found himself sitting with her on the Turkey carpet in the wrecked room. He thumbed aside the wire-and-ceramic stoppers and let the bottles froth. After a while he unwrapped the sausages, which she ate with her fingers. They even talked a little bit. Later he couldn’t remember. She wouldn’t look him in the face at first. But then she turned to him, her eyes wet and blue. “Please, you seem like a nice man. I must see my friend, Peter Gross. We must bring him some food, too. I’m afraid he is … no, I’m worried about him. I—I must see him. Will you do this for me?”

  Jean-Baptiste was familiar with the name “Peter Gross,” an alias the Chevalier de Graz had used in foreign countries, and under which he’d crossed into Roumania. “Miss,” he said, his heart aching, “put him out of your mind. Don’t give him what he doesn’t deserve. This should be a time of celebration.”

  But she wouldn’t let it go. Again and again she found different ways to ask him.

  THAT SAME EVENING, at that same moment, the Baroness Ceausescu stood alone behind the footlights. For this performance she had chosen the most intimate of the four spaces in the Roumanian National Theatre, a beautiful small stage, reopened with great fanfare the previous winter. The German government had provided funds for the refurbishment, and German touring companies had played in the main hall. But this stage was off-limits to foreigners, a circular platform and three rows of steeply banked seats. It was a venue designed especially for soloists, either in the classical or folk tradition; that evening the baroness had preempted a Gypsy guitarist for her own performance, which she had transferred at the last minute from one of the larger halls. Much of her audience was disaccommodated, but she had wanted to feel them close around her. Besides, as a matter of public policy, it was preferable if the demand for seats exceeded the supply. Let the guitarist plink his tunes against the main proscenium.

  She had chosen a flautist, a violinist, an oboist—always for decisions like this she relied on instinct. She had at her hand’s length her entire classical repertoire, as well as her more recent and more personal compositions. Scarcely knowing why and scarcely caring, in her dressing room she had found herself stepping into an old and immodest costume, some crows’ feathers, some paste emeralds, some leather straps, some artificial blood. Dressed like this she had achieved one of her greatest triumphs in a part she’d played in many different versions. Medea had been a Roumanian princess, after all, from Colchis or Constanta on the Black Sea.

  She’d had herself raised through a trap door. The men and women in their evening clothes seemed close enough to touch, separated from her by a ragged screen of light. Already she was sweating in the hot circle of the lamps, the leather chafing at her breasts and thighs; she started to move.

  This was a style of performance she’d invented over the past few years. Now in most of the European capitals she had her imitators, but she was still the source, as even the most scandalized of the German, French, or Russian critics were forced to admit. Before her first retirement she had scarcely once received a negative review. That was different now, but they were fools, all those critics were fools, and she no longer paid attention to their idiotic opinions. The sacks of mail in her secretary’s office, the crowds of people who waited for her to show her ankle out of doors, the thousand men and women who waited all day in the piata on the chance of buying tickets—that was enough.

  Surely they understood what the critics didn’t: that they were witnessing a new and transforming thing. And because it was unfamiliar, whether they liked it or disl
iked it was not important; what are these words anyway but reflections of ourselves that our tastes and vanity throw back at us? When something is new, that’s the only time you can perceive it as if naked on a stage, unhidden by remembered or half-remembered versions, or similarities to other artists or performances.

  In another sense, of course, she depended on those scrims of memory. For she was always playing with her audience’s familiarity with the traditional repertoire, and even with her past performances. A phrase or block of words, barked or shouted through the veil of her accompaniment, meaningless or dissonant in itself, would nevertheless bring with it an entire scene from a half-remembered opera or libretto. A sequence of movements, furious or languid, but always extemporaneous, unprepared, unrehearsed, would nevertheless bring with it a half-remembered solo from an earlier ballet, even a pas de deux.

  So: out of ugliness and chaos, beauty and order, not so much onstage as in the mind.

  Extemporaneous, unprepared, unrehearsed. That way, each performance was a discovery not just for the audience but for the artist. Why, for example, that night had she chosen the character of Medea, who had murdered her own children? It was a collection of sounds, movements, and emotions that she hadn’t thought about in years. No, but now was the moment when the body of her son was discovered—Kevin Markasev—the name cut through her. Of course. That was it. There was always an explanation.

  She paused, frozen and immobile on the stage. She let the musicians go on. Confused, finally, they stumbled to an end. If she just stood here without moving, how long would it take for that man with his boiled shirt and military decorations in the first row to whisper to his companion that he couldn’t understand this? How long before he left the theater in disgust; how long before the manager would summon medical assistance? Ah, God, the pain of this terrible night! What was happening right now at 351 Camatei? At least Medea had had the strength to do the work herself!