by Paul Park
“What do you mean?” asked Miranda.
“You told me what she said. That dream you had. You said all the bad things in history were just a way of protecting you. Historical projections, but it’s not that simple. This was a clever woman. Prochenko knew her as I did. Everything was for two reasons. Maybe all those things—Vietnam, civil rights, Iraq—were like a lesson about what could go wrong. But maybe some of it was an example.”
“I’m not sure,” Miranda said. She was flushed, and her skin was damp in the heat. As Prochenko watched, she drew back a lock of hair and pressed it behind her ear. But it was too short to stay.
“You can’t assume,” said Peter, “that’s what your aunt wanted, some kind of return to the past—queen of Roumania—wise and kind and powerful. All your enemies crushed. Maybe she was trying to give you a different model. I mean in America.”
“You mean like in civics class. The New Hampshire primary.”
“Sure, maybe.”
They smiled at each other. Prochenko felt sick, ready to throw up on his shoes. It would be a pity, because he’d scarcely yet been able to clean the blood out of the leather. When he’d knelt beside the bed in the Strada Camatei—what were they talking about? Prochenko had come in and they’d been holding hands. This was easy for them, he thought.
And he remembered standing in Queen Sophie’s guesthouse in Mogosoaia with the Chevalier de Graz. This was before Miranda was even born. That day he’d given his parole, made his promise. General Schenck von Schenck was standing by the window with a book in his hands. He’d been wearing boots and dress trousers with no jacket. With de Graz beside him, Lieutenant Prochenko had told him he’d protect his wife and unborn daughter—this was half a year, maybe, before Prince Frederick’s death. Prochenko had sworn with his hand over his heart, and the prince had interrupted him, concluded matters with a handshake. In every way he was the enemy of false formality. But Prochenko had asked himself, Why me?
That was a question that had changed his life. No doubt de Graz had never asked himself. It had never occurred to him he wasn’t the bravest and the strongest. It had never occurred to him he didn’t deserve whatever he wanted.
Now Miranda and Peter Gross were going round again. Their conversation made a small, tight, optimistic turn. Miranda was talking about her mother, and Prochenko remembered how the princess had taken the train without them after Prince Frederick’s death—she hadn’t liked them or trusted them, her husband’s aides-de-camp. She fled across the border to Ratisbon and started all this.
It was Aegypta Schenck who’d brought Miranda back, put her in their care. Years later, when she’d come up with her last, desperate plan, they had not hesitated. They had not known or guessed or been told how much it would cost them. Death was preferable to this magic, triple life, this triangle of lines that divided you from everything you were.
“You want to make it so no one is using you, so you’re not beholden to a bunch of assholes,” Peter said—good advice, actually. “My father told me that.”
Miranda frowned. She was making plans, Prochenko thought, but what plans would make a difference to him or her—Andromeda—or it, the cage of creatures and experiences inside his skin? It was jealousy that let him understand, he thought, and now the sobs burst out of him, softly, silently at first.
“A., what’s wrong?”
“You don’t need me,” he said. “You’ve got it figured out.”
And he was A. at that moment. He could feel the girl inside of him, conjured into existence by the English language. “You’re still talking about this as if it is a game or an adventure. A game you can win.”
Then he told them about coming up the steps of the house in the Strada Camatei and finding the door open. Kevin Markasev was on the floor next to the broken window. Prochenko had gathered him up, lifted him up, laid him on the bed, wiped the blood from his mouth and eyes so he could see a little bit, talk a little bit before the end. And the only thing he’d talked about was Christmas Hill and sitting by the fire on Christmas Hill.
Prochenko had listened to him as he’d tried to stanch the blood. And in his mind he had climbed down the hill into the town to find the people there.
BUT, “YOU ARE dirt from a dog,” he had said not long before. “Filth from a dog, spread on all these floors …”
“Oh, domnul, you must not talk to me this way.”
But this was not, the baroness decided, because she had any power over him, or because she was giving him a warning. She leaned back against the wall as he stood over her, his face near her face. And it was odd, the phrase he used, because when he opened his mouth she could see his shiny teeth—too many of them, it seemed, for his mouth. And she could smell his warm, carnivorous breath. His skin was dusted with brown freckles. Close as she was, she could see the soft white hair along his jaw. His gray eyes, flecked with silver and sky-blue, never seemed to blink.
She felt she could disappear into those eyes, that they were searching and examining every part of her, and yet at the same time dismissing her as something of no interest. “Your secret is safe with me,” he said.
She felt a crushing sense of gratitude. What was the source of this unexpected gift? Bathed in his breath, which suggested to her a luncheon of ground meat, she tried to understand the expression on his face, to understand him and penetrate his heart—this was not usually so difficult for her. This was a skill she had, developed over long years of working as a prostitute when she was small and then later on the stage or in the inmost chambers of power. It was a skill she had—to give an illusion of transparency while holding something back, a guarded central core. It was a skill she had—to discover other people while pretending to show herself.
Now in the empress’s Peacock Room, leaning back against the carved panels of the wall, she felt exposed as never before. Perhaps not even in the performance that had made her famous, when she’d stood onstage at the Ambassadors, nearly naked in Klaus Israel’s Cleopatra, had she felt this sudden vulnerability. At the same time she imagined she could not penetrate this man who stood above her now, could not crack him open, or penetrate beyond his skin, or reveal anything of the mystery she knew was hidden there—a complicated nature, only she could tell, that struggled with itself.
Above all it seemed to her that she could sense an artist’s soul, an artist like herself. By an artist she meant one of the small circle of the cursed and blessed, whose gifts made immaterial all moral laws and social conventions. Instead they could be judged only by the pleasure they gave, the beauty they achieved. They could be judged only by the unflinching honesty that was their mark, and which they pursued for its own sake whatever the risks. Dog dirt, he had called her—dog filth, a murderess, here in the People’s Palace of Roumania! Oh, he had touched her heart!
As he leaned over her, she had felt the burden of his presence like a weight pressing down on her, a weight that made it difficult to breathe. When he was gone—and later she didn’t even quite remember seeing him leave—she felt giddy and intoxicated, floating, as she imagined it, a few centimeters above the ground. In his presence she’d felt vulnerable and sapped of strength, but now alone, moving through the corridors and up the stairs to her own apartment, she was full of power and resolve. “Not now,” she murmured, “not now,” to the importuning gentlemen who clustered near her antechambers, including the severe and disapproving German diplomats who always seemed to talk to her these days—potato-eating fools!
Once inside the doors of her hot, somber, airless, pungent, comfortable room, she paused. Stripes of shadow fell obliquely from the blinds. Soon she must be dressing for the theater for her evening’s performance.
She unbuttoned her gown and stripped it from her shoulders. There was no time to waste and yet she wasted it, standing in her darkened bedroom in just her slip, staring at herself in the upright mirror, examining herself as she imagined Domnul Andromedes had examined her, like an object and not a person, an object with certain flaws.
She pushed her hair back from her forehead.
Now suddenly the image of Miranda Popescu came to her as if floating on the mercury-coated glass. Andromedes had praised the girl, called her beautiful. Before she left from the Spanish Gate, the baroness would reiterate her standing order to the kitchen, though, to prepare her special chicken and potato soup—potato for the girl’s German half, needless to say. The drug she’d mixed in it had yet to take effect … stubborn girl! She was tougher than she looked. Perhaps a double dose tonight, and her dark hair would come out in clumps. Let her play at the white tyger then!
MIRANDA, IN PETER’S prison cell, stood watching her friend. Oh, A., she thought. Andromeda was in tears and Miranda felt them, felt them inside of her as well. As she listened to Andromeda tell her story, as she imagined her kneeling by the bed where Kevin Markasev lay dying (how strange all of this was! How could he be the same boy they had known so far away, the first one who had spoken about people and places that were now familiar—Mogosoaia, Aegypta Schenck?), she remembered also the dark night in the muddy woods, and Ludu Rat-tooth dying in the dark, alone. These things were like sores that had scarcely healed, rubbed now by abrasive memory.
“Oh, A.,” she said, her heart too full to state the obvious, that here they were. After everything, now here they were, and they must look forward to move forward step by step. First things first. And yet …
So in the hot, filthy cell she stood watching her friend and envying her. She looked good as a man. Her big eyes and disconcerting teeth, her freckled skin that seemed nevertheless to glow. Her yellow hair. Standing in her tailored suit, her leather boots, she seemed older—but of course they were both older. Only Peter seemed now closer to the boy she remembered, closer than when she’d first seen him again in the Mogosoaia woods. He seemed to have lost some years, cut off with his amputated hand.
Okay, so she was sympathizing and remembering, but feeling a little impatient, too. It was more important to figure out what happened next—to figure out a strategy, say, for Pieter de Graz’s trial, which could start any day. Or figure out a strategy for what to do, how to compel Jean-Baptiste to let them go, escape out of this place, and her mother, too, she supposed. Or else make a deal with the Germans for de Graz’s life—he hadn’t killed any of their men after all, or had he? There had been that incident in the woods before he found her again.
And if they left this place, what would they do? Where would they go? One thing was for certain. She wouldn’t wear these clothes again.
But Andromeda couldn’t talk about these things and didn’t want to talk. Later, when Miranda had sat down on the straw bed again, she paced back and forth inside the room, from the door to the barred window, in tears or close to tears. And when those had dried up finally she didn’t want to talk, only glared at them as if angry—wasn’t there room for some small kind of celebration here? Or maybe not: Miranda suddenly remembered the odd, triangular tension of that last night of Christmas Hill, the odd tension on the Hoosick riverbank, though there were no words then, no possibility of an explanation.
So finally Andromeda announced she was off to the Moskva bar to have a drink. When she was gone, Miranda almost felt relieved—it shouldn’t be like this. Peter didn’t notice or else pretended not to notice.
And so she sat down in front of him cross-legged on the dirty straw, flushed and sweating. And together they talked reasonably. They still had an hour or more. Jean-Baptiste waited outside. The guards were gone somewhere. He had persuaded them a change was coming, that the Baroness Ceausescu would soon be living a reduced, private life and that Radu Luckacz, also, would not remain their chief.
Jean-Baptiste had hinted at this and Miranda had understood. Needless to say, it all depended on the Germans and on Ambassador Moltke—a tall, impressive, white-haired woman. Whatever Miranda’s long-term plans, she must continue to make herself available to her, to come out gradually into the public eye as she had advised. For her reward she would request the life of Pieter de Graz.
Or was it possible they could claim some kind of mistaken identity, that Peter Gross was not the man who had killed those soldiers in the wood? This they also discussed, sitting cross-legged on the straw pallet—certainly he didn’t look the same. Maimed, his right hand lost, he no longer carried de Graz’s identifying mark. And he looked smaller, diminished, less threatening, softer, though as Miranda looked at him, it was suddenly unclear to her how to characterize those changes. Already the way he’d been in Mogosoaia, even the way she’d felt about him, had faded a little bit, supplanted by this new reality. What had Berthe Moltke said about her people? “We are heirs to an enlightenment that never penetrated here.” The Germans above all would be unable to accept the claims of Luckacz and the others: that this man was the fearsome Chevalier de Graz, famous in the army more than twenty years ago?
Much could be done. In the meantime as they spoke about these things, Miranda sat and watched him in the greasy cell, wondering how she felt—how strange this was! Here they were, alone together and unsupervised almost for the first time—what should they do? Now painfully she was aware of what she was, a girl in a woman’s body, and what he was, a man inside a boy. Because he was not the Peter Gross she remembered; she could see that even in the way he moved, a language of his body that seemed powerful and grown up. Or even in the way he didn’t move, the way he sat, as now, leaning back with his eyes half closed, as if he was thinking about other things—as she was, obviously, whatever they talked about.
A girl in a woman’s body, a man inside a boy. But maybe everyone always felt some version of that. Suddenly Miranda felt exposed and vulnerable, and she wished Andromeda was there again. In the hot room she could feel the gooseflesh on her arms, a tightness in her chest. What would she do if he, you know, tried something? What would she do? In the woods he had kissed her. Then he’d been a man.
Too much thinking, maybe. “C’mere,” he said now. And then they kissed for a while and groped each other for a while, but that was as far as things went before Jean-Baptiste knocked at the door. Even that seemed like a lot, though.
RETURNING FROM THE theater, the Baroness Ceausescu caught a glimpse of the girl at the other end of the Corridor of Disenchantment—so named because of the nighttime walks the second empress used to take there in the years following her marriage. Jean-Baptiste was with her—Princess Brancoveanu-Popescu Schenck von Schenck, as the potato-eaters called her. He had a taper in his wrinkled hand. The light shone on her dark hair. She glared at the baroness over twenty meters of parquet floor before she turned away.
Nicola Ceausescu’s own footman left her at the door of her apartment. She wouldn’t let him inside. She took the taper from him and lit the gas. And when the door was shut and she was alone, she made a leisurely circuit of the room, touching various objects for good luck. She ran her hand down the keys of the pianoforte. With her forefinger, she picked out a tiny theme. Still invigorated from her performance, she paused to pour a glass of Abyssinian whiskey from a decanter. She lifted up the crystal tumbler, a gift to the former empress from a Spanish count. She held it up against the light. More than sensitive, more than alive, she imagined she could see the odor rise until the smell of the liquor saturated the entire room.
She was always like this at these moments. It was as if she trembled on the edge of some revelation, or else some sexual ecstasy. She had changed quickly in her dressing room, departed as her audience was departing. But while they were spreading out over Bucharest to late suppers in expensive restaurants, bottles of champagne, romantic liaisons from which they would rise sated and happy, still she stood here, trembling, close to breaking, like a crystal goblet struck too hard.
But at these moments, also, she could feel her power. At these moments she felt an intuitive command of the conjurer’s art. Others—her husband, the Elector of Ratisbon, Aegypta Schenck von Schenck—had been more knowledgeable. They had studied for years, made experiments, learned arcane languages,
pondered translations, weighed ambiguities, all that. Where were they now? Dead and buried, because they had not possessed what she possessed.
Now she opened the door to her bedroom where she paused to throw open the windows over the Piata Revolutiei. With the muted sound of traffic, the soft night air came in. With the whiskey in one hand, she filled her lungs with it, receptive at that moment to subtle emanations borne on the night wind—so she imagined.
She took a sip of the burning liquor. Fortified, she changed her clothes, stripping off her clothes, replacing them with a silk robe over her underwear. Then she made her way past the ornamental screen and into the small chamber where the planchette of the ouijah board still moved from letter to letter, sliding over tracks cut through the dust: DEMON DEMON DEMON HORE. With an impatient shove, she sent the planchette skittering across the table onto the floor, until it fetched up in a corner between two pieces of laboratory equipment. It would lurk there, she imagined, like a mouse, motionless until she turned her back.
She lit the candles by the altar, and carried them to the long table and the pyramid. Now its sides were burnished, opaque, solid as adamantine. Soon they would be clear as glass.
Behind her was the battered ansible, painted with scenes of exploding stars. She laid out the charts and tables, then typed in the coordinates on the round, ivory keys. A faint mutter of ionic dust rose from the lacquered horn.
Then she sat back in her leather chair and waited, sniffing at the whiskey in her glass. While the machine sputtered and hummed, she imagined herself as fine-tuned as a wireless receptor, sensitive to tiny particles or waves that came to her through the open window and the open door, filtered through the carved screen. She let her robe fall open, spread her knees, unsnapped her garter belt; the planchette was on the card table again. It must have crawled up one of the legs.