by Paul Park
But what did that matter anymore? She wasn’t sure if it mattered. Was it possible for her to imagine living here like this, dressed in these clothes and living in these rooms, trying to learn the language of telling lies until she was old like these women? No, she couldn’t imagine it.
No, Peter was right if he meant what she thought he meant: Her purpose, the purpose her aunt had given her and she had chosen for herself, wasn’t in these false negotiations, these little increments. Her strength was in the hidden world, where enormous changes could be made.
Now she was aware the ambassador was speaking. “I am glad you’re listening to me. I heard perhaps that you were blind to reason, but I see it is not so. I have discussed this subject with your mother. Both of us agree that Nicola Ceausescu’s first proposal was inappropriate and indecent, because of the difference in your ages. In any case, she withdrew it yesterday. After next week of course there will be no advantage to such an alliance, because the woman herself will be in retirement, or perhaps on an extended tour of foreign countries with her son.”
What was she talking about? Her face seemed to have no expression. “With your mother’s permission I am able to extend half a dozen preliminary offers. Let us say this is a gesture of acquaintance. No reason must be given—these affairs are not subject to reason, after all. As I know, it is a matter of an eyebrow or a chin, the smell of some cologne. At least in my country, the time is past when a mother can compel her daughter in these situations. Any of them might be suitable, so much we are agreed. Because of the liberal traditions of your family, these are modern, forward-thinking young men. Also I admit, because of your age and the exotic circumstances of your life so far—these men are of a type to find that interesting and appealing, perhaps more so than their other choices. Naturally there should be no secrets between husbands and wives. But discretion also is a virtue, we can all agree.”
Now a man had come into the room from behind Miranda’s chair, a dark-haired man in a dark suit. Horrified, she imagined for a moment these two women had arranged a kind of demonstration, a sequence of forward-thinking young men who would walk a figure-eight around the room as if on a model’s runway. But no—he brought an envelope to Ambassador Moltke, who opened it, shrugged, smiled, nodded.
Shoes squeaking on the polished floor, the sevant or attaché now brought Miranda the contents of the envelope, a halfdozen large posed photographs, portraits from a studio in Berlin. Some were sepia, with a granular, soft texture. Some were black-and-white.
And as she gazed at the faces of the forward-thinking men, Miranda felt tears come. But then she made them stop. She read the biographical information printed on the back of each photograph: dates of military service or of graduation from the university. Some of the young men had long, complicated names. All of them were German, which came as no surprise.
She examined the face of a handsome stranger, heir to the Graf von something-or-other. At least he had a nice smile. What was he thinking when this photograph was taken? Did he know what it was for? Was he at that moment gazing at a photographic portrait of herself? And if so, what weakness or secrets—jail, maybe, or drug addiction—made her acceptable to him? An acceptable compromise: She wondered how her own biographical summary might read. It was obvious why there were only liberals and free-thinkers in this bunch. No kings or dukes or princes either, she noticed. But there were several bankers and the sons of some prominent industrialists.
“I haven’t any money,” she murmured. Suddenly she was convinced it was not true.
Ambassador Moltke had not stopped smiling. “We have something to say about that. A number of properties were confiscated from private citizens under the old regime. This includes a house in Bucharest, site of the Tears of Freya orphanage. Then there is the castle at Mamaia beach, the island in the marsh near Braila, and almost thirty thousand hectares around Mogosoaia, including the preserve. In documents we discovered your father’s elder sister willed all this to you in the case of a political change. Some of it was held in trust after your father died, and some of it was hers. Your father’s sister had no heirs but you.”
Miranda turned to look at her mother, whose expression also was unreadable. Then she spoke. “Aegypta never married. There was no need. It’s a sad story. There was a man, of course, an older man. A widower, I think, or else divorced. He was killed in a hunting accident.”
“Everyone has a misfortune,” murmured the ambassador. Then after a moment: “So. Shall I write to Ferdinand? I know his family well.”
“Who?”
She nodded toward the picture in Miranda’s lap, the liberal, progressive, gold-digging young man with the nice smile. Startled, Miranda shook her head. He looked a little like Peter, she decided. Again she felt tears come but made them stop.
But the sadness returned later. Back in her own room after dark, she opened the long windows to the balcony and stood looking out. She didn’t light the lamps, but stood in darkness. Again she reminded herself of where the battle must be fought.
Then she took her clothes off and got dressed for bed. She lay down in the dark. “Come to me,” she said, and in a little while she was dreaming.
At first her aunt was in the room, she knew. But she couldn’t see her. She had no peripheral vision, and when she moved her head her aunt was gone. But she could imagine how she looked, queen of the dead, maybe, with a crown or coronet on her bony brows. “Don’t believe what they tell you about me,” said a bony voice.
Miranda didn’t want to hear about that. Bones aside, she had no desire to talk to Aegypta Schenck, who occupied so many different holes inside her mind, and about whom her feelings were so mixed—no. She was aware she was dreaming, and she was aware she had some kind of incomplete control. After a while the dark room was empty.
Then there was a mouse in the armoire again, and Ludu Rat-tooth came out from behind the curtains to stand by the bed. Maybe it was because of Miranda’s new lucidity, her new sense of power over events, but she wasn’t so threatening this time. Nor was she in need of comfort, but almost the reverse. Yes, the Gypsy girl was naked, but the details weren’t as expressive or as clear. Yes, she was wounded, but the blood no longer flowed. Lying on her back, propped up on her elbows, Miranda could see the girl’s throat shining with a green and purple light, glowing from the tourmaline inside. This time it didn’t choke her or cause her pain. She stood beside the bed, a tentative smile on her face, although her lips were shut. That had also been her habit when she was alive.
“Are you ready?” she said in the Roumanian language, and Miranda caught a glimpse of the corner of her tooth.
Dressed in her underwear and nightgown, Miranda slid out of bed. The girl followed her with blind eyes. They moved around Miranda’s face without taking purchase anywhere.
“The door is locked from the outside,” Miranda said. “They lock it unless they know where I’m going.”
Another small, closed smile. “Take me to the balcony.”
Miranda led her through the French windows. They stood looking over the stone balustrade with the warm wind in their faces. “Be my eyes,” the Gypsy said. “Tell me what you see.”
So Miranda described the interior courtyard with the formal garden and the small statue in the middle of the hedges and gravel paths. She saw it all clearly under the big moon, though from above she had not yet been able to determine what the statue was. Some days she saw a man playing a violin. Other days he was a hunter with a crossbow, depending on her mood.
Surrounded on three sides, the courtyard debouched onto the street, visible beyond a sharp, tall, wrought-iron fence. Then there were streetlamps, and a soldier’s guard box near the gate, and carriages, and muted noise from the Piata Enescu. Above them the stars shone, small and weak around the moon, of course, where also there were milky clouds.
Smaller than she, holding her by the upper arm, the girl moved around behind her back, then reached up with both hands to cover her eyes. Miranda thought she could feel the pressure o
f her face against her shoulder blade. “Close your eyes,” said Ludu Rat-tooth.
“We’re in the open air,” she whispered, and Miranda could feel her lips move against her shoulder. “Let me tell you,” she said, and then haltingly, inexpertly, she began to describe a different landscape. Miranda saw a wavering line against the black background: “It’s the high rocks. And we can see a long way … .”
Each word lightened the darkness, brought a new detail. In time Miranda could see something. In time she could see it all from where they stood on a rock escarpment over the Roumanian plain. The moon shone on the fat, coiled river many miles to the south. Beneath them there were stands of trees, some alive. But some stood stark and dead with the water at their knees. And there were flat streams of grassland to the horizon, where the ground rose into the Carpathians, a glittering, sharp range of snowfields and granite walls that seemed to rise up forever against the sky.
All that was pure and cold and lifeless, but below them Miranda could smell the humid marshland and the plain. In the tall grass below her everywhere she looked she could see creatures crawling around, insects and reptiles and animals. The ground was thick with them. Birds chattered in the trees. But she stood with Ludu the Gypsy in the high rocks.
“I suppose we should go,” she said.
“Miss, they’re waiting.”
This was the part of the dream she felt she could control. She climbed onto Ludu’s naked back, which was covered with moles and discolored patches of bumpy skin. She twisted her hands into Ludu’s coarse, wild hair, and then the girl fell out of their stone perch with her arms and legs spread out. At first she dropped straight toward the ground but then she flattened out over the trees with Miranda on her back, gripping her hips between her knees.
In her lifetime of powerful dreaming, Miranda had never dreamed of flying before now. And when the first sickening drop was over and she felt the girl rise under her, then the experience was all she imagined it might be, the sudden swoops and falls, the rushing wind. Not knowing what it was, from high up she could see the burning storm that lingered over Chiselet. Then they turned over the river and then rose north and east over the marsh. There was the sea on her right hand. And the delta below her, full and stuffed and struggling with life, and they crossed into Moldavia. There also she could see the line of the tempest, the lightning flashing through the mist, the thunder like distant guns.
But this she recognized from other people’s talk: the section of the line where the Roumanian sixth army held the fords of the Bug River south of Kiev, and the bloody Fedorivka Salient. Now she could see the line itself under the storm, a blasted piece of ground and a wide, shallow trench of slithering white snakes or fish or tangled worms, or so it seemed as they flew low through the sudden rain. Thunder and lightning and they fled from it, turning west and north into the mountains, riding the updrafts higher and higher until they reached an elemental landscape of snow and shattered rock and ridge after ridge of barren peaks. Miranda saw no life or movement, and the air was cold.
That spring she had come from Dobruja on the coast, riding her black gelding over some of the same country. The first two days she had been aching and sore—not just her thighs but her whole body, until she got used to all those hours in the saddle. Now she found some of that soreness had returned as, finally, Ludu Rat-tooth paused above a horizontal shelf of gleaming rock, then settled down. Unsteadily Miranda climbed from her back and almost fell.
The air was sharp in her lungs, and there was gooseflesh on her bare legs and arms. They stood on the shores of a pool of ice. Above them rose the higher peaks.
“This is Borgo Pass,” murmured the Gypsy.
Miranda shivered. “Why are we here?”
For an answer, Ludu pointed up the slope. There, silhouetted against the lighter moon-filled sky was a new ridge—spires of rock, Miranda had supposed. But now she saw some of the stonework was artificial, some of the rock towers were inhabited. Light shone from high, narrow windows. Smoke rose from a chimney.
“Castle Dracula,” said Ludu Rat-tooth. “The dragon’s lair.”
This was far-fetched even for a dream. Miranda had watched her share of vampire movies, read her share of graphic novels. She thought she had disposed of all that nosferatu crap with Zelea Codreanu’s corpse. But here it was again or else some other version of it, recycled out of some deep place inside herself or maybe not so deep.
Now as she looked up she saw details she hadn’t noticed, solid steps leading up through a tumbled slope of scree. A collapsed wall of masonry, a line of headless statues. A rock halffinished in the shape of a dragon’s head. Everywhere was ruin and neglect.
“Miss, I’ll wait for you. Tell me what you see.”
No—ruin, certainly, but not neglect. The place looked better than it had in years, Miranda thought for no reason at all. She didn’t know anything about it. But the light was cheery in the windows and in the open door, and the rubble had been cleared into heaps on both sides of the path. Someone was standing above her on the stair, and Miranda wondered with mixed feelings if she were going to see the ghost or woman she had last seen at Insula Calia or in tara mortilor, and before that in the Mogosoaia train station and a dozen dreams—Aegypta Schenck. No, this was a younger woman standing barefoot on the square rocks, a woman in a ragged dress and shawl. But she was pretty and plump and yellow-haired, and not much older than Miranda, however old that was tonight—fifteen or twenty or twenty-five, or else some mixture of the three. The moon cast long soft shadows underfoot.
“Come on up, now, there’s your girl,” said the blond-haired woman in English. She spoke loudly, confidently, quickly, but in a strange accent. And all her words and phrases seemed a little distorted. “Come, is that your person there? Call her to be warm behind the fire. There is food. But there’s not a stitch on her. Is she a real Gypsy? She will catch death.”
Miranda looked back. Ludu stood naked by the ice. The jewel was shining in her throat. But she didn’t move, didn’t come closer even when the woman yelled and beckoned. “King Jesus keeps her warm, I must suppose,” she said. Then, “Hey!” She stripped off her shawl and held it up, then wrapped it in a ball and threw it down the steps.
“Now give me a look at you,” she said. “You will meet the others in some moments, so.”
Miranda continued up the steps. She kept the odd composure she was used to in these dreams. But she knew that she’d wake up and her memory would be incomplete, no matter how much she tried now to capture every detail—the feeling of the cold stone underfoot, her own stiff awkwardness as she was pulled into an embrace—“Ah, at last!” Plump and soft and smelling of dirt, the woman had two yellow braids.
As always, Miranda felt herself a witness here as much as a participant. She reassured herself that even if she saw terrible things, they would mean nothing. Symbols, maybe, symptoms of anxiety, or a reaction to other people’s pain and trouble. She herself was safe in bed, wasn’t she?
“I am Zuzana Knauss,” murmured the woman. Now she drew Miranda up into a stone courtyard. Battered gargoyles clung to the wall above her, and there were bats flying around.
The door was big and thick and studded with iron nails. It was made of many layers of splintered wood, as Miranda saw when she got close; it hung ajar. Firelight spread from the opening across the stones, and in it stood another woman—gray-haired, older, yet giving an impression still of beauty and elegance. “My name is Inez de Rougemont,” she said. “Please come in.”
Her English was careful and correct, and her voice was soft. She didn’t touch Miranda as Zuzana Knauss had done, but stood aside to let them enter a room that seemed not to coincide with the broken walls of the stone fortress. Miranda was expecting a cavernous drafty hall, but instead the room was small and comfortable. Nor were there any doors or corridors that led to other places in the building. But it was as if suddenly they had stepped into a single-roomed cottage with overstuffed embroidered pillows and old but serviceable
furniture and painted plaster walls. Light and heat came from a fire on a raised hearth.
And there were several other women standing or sitting around the room, knitting, or mending clothes, or pouring out tea on the brick hearth, or toasting scones. “Please come,” said Inez de Rougemont, and then she was introducing all of them. Even as she heard them, Miranda could feel their names slipping away, replaced instead by a general impression of spectacles and smiling faces—this was something Miranda remembered from her adoptive mother’s dinner parties in Massachusetts, this tendency to forget important information even as it was offered her. Often when she was a child she would ask for directions or instructions, then stop listening the moment they were given.
But she understood the women came from different countries: France, Bohemia, Sweden, Russia, Bengal, and the Turkish Empire. One tiny old lady in a silk jacket was from Japan. All spoke English with differing amounts of fluency. The Indian lady, dressed in a pink and purple sari and a lot of gold jewelry, said, “Please sit down here beside me. You are taking tea? It is from Assam! But I must inquire, one lump or two?”
She spoke in a melodic sing-song. “What am I doing here?” Miranda asked. In her mind she was comparing this place with the strange cold restaurant in tara mortilor where all the food was papier-maché and all the cups were empty. But here the tea was real and fragrant, though intolerably sweet.
“Oh yes, I thought you must be wanting to know.” The Indian woman laughed. Mrs. Chatterjee, her name was. She had a dot in the middle of her forehead, and the part of her black hair was lined with red.
Inez de Rougemont sat at a worktable, where she was piecing a quilt out of a basket full of scraps. She had put on steelrimmed spectacles that glittered in the firelight. “You must understand how we are curious,” she said. “It was a grand experiment, and we desire to know how it turned out.”
“Excuse me?” Miranda asked. In her dream she was on her best behavior, perched on the edge of an upholstered chair, her teacup in her lap.