The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  But because she was an artist and a professional, she gathered herself together. And with a breaking heart she danced a last unaccompanied rondeau to Kevin Markasev, the brave hero of Great Roumania, whom she had saved from death and then delivered to it—yes, that was it. Death had waited for a little while. Death could not be cheated after all.

  Streaked with sweat and artificial blood, she looked out and saw tears on the cheeks of the gentleman with military decorations. He would not forget this night. Neither would she.

  Then she fell into a lull or trance, which happened every night. Later she would not remember what she’d sung or where she’d moved upon the stage. Often this lasted to the final blackout, but not now. Now she came to herself suddenly, recognizing the man who stood against the wall at the back of the house, half-hidden in shadow, Vladimir O’Brien.

  God in heaven, how could she bear it? Should she call the manager, the police? What would she say? There he was, and he was waiting for her at her dressing room when she came off.

  Policemen ordinarily kept the backstage corridors free from her admirers and provided her protection when she slipped into her coach. O’Brien must have known someone or else have shown someone his badge of identity. The dresser was in the green room, but O’Brien stood beside her door, and he followed her inside when she pushed by him without a word.

  She wore a cloak over her costume. For a moment she stood watching herself in the big looking glass, watching also the man take shape behind her. Always she was drained, vulnerable, receptive after a performance, but she would not let him speak. He had a bouquet of flowers in his hand.

  She would not let him say what he had to say. She turned around, her back against the table, and she started in: “So did you see him? Did you give him the money? He must be far away by now!”

  Confused, he paused and licked his lips. “He’s far away,” he said at last. The monster actually smiled. “Here are some flowers from his nightstand.”

  He was a tall man with a discolored face and red hair slicked back. Or no—close—cropped since she’d first seen him that day. What was wrong with his mouth? His lips were too big, puffed up like a bruise, and he wet them with his tongue as if to soothe them.

  “What did he say when you told him he must leave the city?” she asked. “If he sends me his address, I will give him a remittance of two thousand marks a month. What I sent with you was a down payment. There was a yellow-haired man with him. You did not … hurt him?”

  Disgusted and confused, the fellow shook his head. His mouth slid open. “I took the money as a payment for myself,” he said. “As for the rest—what was it? ‘All the reward that a desperate woman can bestow?’ I’ll take that now.”

  And he actually put his hands on her, opened up her cloak and grabbed the leather strap between her breasts. He threw the flowers at her feet.

  She would have struck him or cried out, except for the weakness she felt from her performance. Shivering and sweating, she felt his hand clutch at the strap between her breasts as he pushed her back against the table and the mirror. “Please,” she said. “Let go. Please go away.”

  He smiled and licked his lips. “I don’t think you’ll be calling for help. Not tonight. I’ve got your letter in my pocket—look at you! Is this what you offer the entire city? I’ve seen dancers in a Turkish brothel with more clothes.”

  He kissed her then and forced his mouth against her mouth. Nor did she cry out. But even in her fragile state, when her skin felt as delicate as eggshell, still she had something to fall back on, some little conjuring. Onstage she disdained to use it, except for small effects at transitional moments, to ease an entrance or provide a misdirection. But here she remembered it with the monster’s lips against her lips, and she allowed her tongue to flicker out between his teeth. At the same time she spoke a word she knew, and let a little poison slip out of her mouth, so he fell back, bewildered, rigid, and exhausted. She pushed him over onto the floor, and he slid down. She squatted above him, and he lay with his back bent, his jaw clenched, and for good measure she kissed him again, slipped her tongue into his mouth again. At the same time she was searching in the pockets of his dinner coat for the letter he had mentioned—the few lines of her handwriting. Where was the tin medallion? Searching, she drew out the rumpled envelope, and what was that? A pair of driving gloves, still damp with crusted blood.

  She stripped off her cloak, wrapped everything into a bundle. Then she flung open the door, called to the dresser and the stage manager: “He must be drunk!” But the monster was already coming round.

  9

  Ghosts

  THERE WAS A bookcase against her bedroom wall, and after Jean-Baptiste had left, Miranda tried to read some pieces of French novels, and later on some poetry.

  Near the bookcase stood a writing desk with gilded cabriole legs. Sometime during the day a servant had delivered some personal items that had been found in a barn near Mogosoaia. They included Miranda’s diary, which she had brought from Mamaia Castle on the coast—her childhood diary, which ended when she was eight or so. Now past midnight, after she had tried to sleep and failed, she lit the lamp, unlocked the metal clasp with the metal key, stared at the blank pages at the end of the book. There were pens and pencils close at hand; what could she write? Itemized lists occurred to her: one, two, three—lists of mistakes, beginning with the night she had surrendered her aunt’s book to that boy Kevin Markasev on Christmas Hill. Like a passive idiot, she had sat cross-legged while he dropped it in the fire—no, that wasn’t it. She had thrust it into his hands, practically begged him or demanded that he burn it. No, not passive, but destructive, self-destructive, destructive of a whole world.

  She was paying now for her rebelliousness or curiosity or whatever it was, and Peter was paying, too. Still, since then she had saved his life not once but twice, apparently. A third time would pay for all, maybe. Jean-Baptiste had told her, after she begged. They meant to hang the Chevalier de Graz.

  Maybe so, but Peter Gross was the man she wanted to save. All other goals now seemed flimsy and far away, impossible to put into words. Instead of plans, she was filled with longings and regrets, which involved her mother, her dead aunt, and the elusive search for justice and some rational or independent government in this strange country. But she would save Peter’s life; she would prevail upon the baroness; she would send a message to Madame de Graz in Herastrau, or she would use her own power. In Mogosoaia through the cave she had come into another, hidden world, and she’d been able to transform events because of her own strength. In that shifting, symbolic landscape she had had an instinct about what to do, an instinct that was failing her now.

  There, for a moment or a day she’d been the white tyger. Here she was Miranda Popescu, and she had not even been able to protect the life of the girl she’d brought with her from the coast, a single Gypsy girl. In the corner of the blank page in her diary, with her pencil she found herself drawing a small picture of a rat eating a piece of cheese. Often at her desk in her high school in Berkshire County, she had filled pages with her doodling.

  And when she tried again to fall asleep, Ludu Rat-tooth came to her, a ghost in the middle of her dream. She had opened the windows to the noise of the distant street, and lay on top of her damp bed in a ridiculously frilly nightgown—part of a whole new wardrobe of princess clothes. In her dream she imagined herself in her room in Massachusetts, the dark armoire looming at the bottom of the bed, full of unworn dresses her adoptive grandparents had sent her from Colorado.

  Now the door to the armoire was ajar, and a scratching and a scurrying came from inside it, a little animal among the delicate pink clothes. Then Ludu Rat-tooth was there, coming toward her out of the shadows—“Oh, miss, I’m glad to find you. Let me hold your hands.”

  Miranda raised herself up on her elbows, and in the dream she wasn’t frightened, but concerned. “Come here,” she said. “What happened to you?” And she was relieved to see the girl wasn’t dead af
ter all, even though she knew she was, must be. But she sat up to embrace the girl when she got close. And though there was no smell to her body or her hair, still Miranda found a comfort in the sight of her rough, spotted face, her crooked nose and sharp teeth. But, “What’s the matter with your eyes?” she said or only thought.

  Ludu knew what she meant. “I’m blind now,” she replied. “You’ll be my eyes.”

  Then the dream was over. Miranda was waking up. And when she was awake in her bedroom in the People’s Palace, twisted up in her sweaty sheets, some of the relief still clung to her, along with a new sense of hopelessness and sadness. And when she heard another scurrying in the darkness, she was preserved from fear by an impression of unreality. For a moment she thought she’d fallen asleep again, and this was another dream, or else a continuation of the old one. Because Ludu Rat-tooth was with her once again. In the muted streetlight through the long windows, the light fell on her heavy hips, the shadow of her pubic hair.

  Unsure whether she was awake or asleep, Miranda went up on her elbows again. But then with a rising sense of horror she watched the Gypsy stumble toward her over the polished floor; she couldn’t move. The girl was close to her now, standing beside the bed, and Miranda could see her breasts all smeared with a black liquid. In the light, Miranda knew, it would be red.

  “Oh, miss, I can’t see you. I’m so cold,” Ludu complained in a well-remembered whisper, which nevertheless had something new in it, a dry, choking gurgle. Stiff with horror, Miranda watched her. But the pity she felt, together with her guilt for the girl’s death, mixed into a combination that was a little like courage. And anyway, if she’d learned anything in this bizarre world, it was if you just breathed deep and waited around for a few minutes, everything seemed normal. Fear and horror are not to be sustained, which is why they must be constantly renewed.

  So she took one of her sheets and threw it over the girl’s shoulders, and that made things better. There was nothing ghostly or ethereal about Ludu Rat-tooth. Her body was as solid as it ever was, which helped. After a few minutes Miranda found herself kneeling on the bed with her arms around the girl, touching her rough hair and her cold face, comforting her as she often had after Insula Calia—a night, after all, no stranger than this one. Miranda found if she held the girl close, concentrating on her nose or cheek or bleared blind eyes, she felt braver than if she looked at her whole face, whole head, whole body, braver than if she’d stepped away, something that was “interesting because counterintuitive,” as Stanley, her adoptive father, had often said. How ridiculous to think of him now here in this place!

  “Miss, don’t laugh,” Ludu reproached her. “There’s no reason to laugh. I’ve had a hard time since I saw you in Mogosoaia.”

  She gulped and gurgled for air, then continued. “Let me tell you, I crawled out on my hands and knees. I thought King Jesus would find me. I crawled down on my own through the dark with no one. I could smell and see the animals but that’s all. And the small rocks and then sand. I could smell the salt. It was like Dobruja again, and I was coming down the sand near Mamaia Sat. I thought I’d see my father or my brothers. But at the water’s edge the woman told me to go back. I couldn’t get onto that boat. I heard the gangplank drawn up. They left me on my knees in the warm water.”

  Miranda knew what she was talking about, the ferry into tara mortilor. “Why?” she said, combing the girl’s hair between her fingers, examining the cold, pimpled skin.

  “Miss, don’t you know? It’s because of the stone in my throat. I found it in the forest, hanging from a branch. It was meant for the white tyger, but I took it. That’s what she said, the woman on the shore. I had no right to it, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “The stone, miss. The tourmaline. I got it caught in my throat and it won’t come out. Mother Egypt meant it as a gift for you. But I took it. Now I’m punished. Do you see it?”

  And Miranda did, a glimmer of a green or purple radiance in Ludu’s neck, pulsing below her jaw—a small effect. And when she opened her mouth Miranda could see a stronger glow.

  “I was hungry, that’s all,” said the girl. “Now I can’t eat or drink or sleep. My eyes—it is like light and shadow, not all the time. You know there is another world outside of this one.”

  “I know,” Miranda whispered.

  “It takes a blind girl to see it. Now I know where you were in Mary’s cave.”

  She meant the shrine in Mogosoaia. “It’s a terrible place,” she said. “The white tyger lives there and all the animals are afraid of her. They creep in the grass and hope she won’t notice—I didn’t see her. But I thought she could help me cut the stone out of my throat, tear it out with her strong claws. So I came here.”

  None of this was what Miranda wanted to hear. Eyes closed, she pressed her lips against the girl’s cold forehead. She listened to her try to swallow, try and fail, a strange, glugging noise. “I’ll go down to the docks again by the porpoise rock. When the boat comes, I’ll climb over the side. When I come into the kingdom, my King Jesus himself will meet my boat. He’ll bring me ashore into a white tent. I’ll marry him like all the girls. He’ll fill me up, and I’ll have twins and triplets. My father told me. I didn’t believe him then.”

  Interesting because counterintuitive, Miranda thought. She smiled without joy, imagining for a moment her adoptive father’s long, thin face. A king in the dead world—what should Miranda do? Her aunt had written her about the tourmaline, she didn’t quite remember what. That crazy brute O’Brien had taken her aunt’s letter.

  “Can you show me the other world?” she asked.

  “Oh, miss, it’s all around you. I’m the one who can’t see. Where am I now?”

  So Miranda described the room to her, and described its position in the People’s Palace as best she could: just the pattern on the coverlet at first, and spreading out from there. She looked at things as she described them. Now she studied the blotched bloodstains on the sheets. In the morning, what would she say? That she’d had a nosebleed, or gotten her period during the night?

  Thinking her own thoughts, hearing her own voice wavering at first, she took courage as it grew more certain, its descriptions more sure. Then after a time she got off the bed and led the blind girl around the room and out onto the balcony where Miranda could see the courtyard under its pattern of lamps. A cat walked down one of the gravel paths and paused near a park bench.

  Beyond, on the open side, Miranda could see deflected moving patterns from the Piata Enescu, between the palace and the Athenée Hotel. “What about the hidden world?” she asked again.

  “Oh, miss—close your eyes! I’ll show you.”

  ELSEWHERE IN THE building, overlooking the Piata Revolutiei, Nicola Ceausescu lay restless on her narrow bed. Unerotic by nature, sometimes she was troubled by erotic dreams, as now. Moaning, she threw off her sweaty sheets. Sometimes the god of love would visit in her dreams—not so often, lately, but here he was again. Half-awake, she clutched her pillows, watching him take shape against the windows, a massed silhouette. But where was Mintbean, his assistant? And where were his stag’s horns?

  Then she recognized him, standing in the gray light: Markasev.

  Later she couldn’t tolerate it, the uncertainty above all. Before dawn, dressed in a cap and working-man’s overalls, she slipped out one of the tradesmen’s entrances and made her way circuitously to the Strada Camatei. She did not grimace, change her face, or do anything except tuck up her hair. But she was unrecognizable. The clumsy stride, the stink of cigar smoke, all was perfect.

  There were policemen in uniform on the street, and even in the half-light of morning, a crowd had gathered opposite the steps of 351. Traffic was closed off. She was in time to see the body brought down, wrapped in oilcloth, carried on a stretcher. Radu Luckacz was there, and also the stranger, the yellow-haired stranger she had seen twice before, a face in the crowd, an image in her glass.

  With some of the citizens she moved acros
s the street to stand next to the steps behind a police barricade. Because she could not bear to watch the wrapped-up body loaded on a cart, she watched the stranger. He moved with an animal grace that was interesting to her, even though his hands were locked behind him. And even though his arms and shirt were bloody, and even though men and women in the crowd were already cursing him and calling him a murderer, his face was calm, enigmatic; the baroness stood near him now and saw his gray eyes flecked with blue—eyes that betrayed, she thought, a concentrated suffering, although his face showed no emotion, nothing but contempt. His clothes, she noticed, were expensive.

  In that crowd she felt invisible, but he was watching her. And she could not tell by any change in his face, but she thought he knew her suddenly, recognized her, understood she wasn’t as she appeared. Abashed, she pulled at the brim of her cap, looked down at her feet, and then glanced up again. He had turned his back. Radu Luckacz had him by the elbow. They disappeared into the crowd.

  Whom had she come to see, him or Kevin Markasev? Ashamed, she looked away and watched Kevin Markasev’s body loaded in the horse-drawn cart—so small, he seemed, a small wrapped bundle. Tears in her eyes, she hoped his death had been quick and without pain. God curse those, she thought, who had made this necessary. God curse the monster who had committed this crime. In her hand she grasped a paper bag. Before she could reconsider, she dropped it into the gutter, kicked it with the heel of her work boot into the accumulated refuse. It contained the gloves Vladimir O’Brien had forgotten in her dressing room.

  She muttered a prayer to Argos, patron of the ever-watchful metropolitan police. She prayed they might be competent enough to find her gift to them, prayed also (because this was always her sad, dual nature) they would not. As always this was a dangerous game she played.

  By the risks she took she could define her life and her success. Shuffling back toward the palace, hands jammed in her pockets, she cast her mind forward to the job of insinuating herself into the stream of tradespeople underneath the Brancoveanu Gate.