by Paul Park
“Well, I supposed we might look at you and judge for ourselves,” continued Inez de Rougemont, smiling in a way that seemed both skeptical and encouraging. “Aegypta had such unusual theories. We would argue for hours, but none of us were convinced. No, sometimes I could see, but it helps to have an illustration. You must have guessed—we told her to make a model to try out. Darwin, Copernicus, Einstein, Marx—you see I know these names. I read the manuscript as it was first prepared. Most of us heard some of her lectures here in this place in the old days. That what you might call truth would follow from a theory. For her the idea always came first, facts afterward.”
Already Miranda felt hot and flushed. Mrs. Chatterjee sat by her right hand on a low bench, and there was a plate of cookies.
Maybe outside in the icy rocks, Miranda could imagine she had climbed up to a place of pure ideas. But not in here. “What do you mean?” she asked.
De Rougemont’s spectacles glinted in the firelight. Now Miranda could see she wore a lot of makeup. “Well, it is obvious. She wondered how the world could be improved if she improved the theory—these were her ideas, or partly hers. It is all in Newton, really, and the other English scientists.”
“I thought it was for me,” Miranda said.
Mrs. Chatterjee gave a trilling laugh. “Now you see that is the solipsism of childhood,” she said. “Now you are older, and you must admit that all of this was slightly too elaborate for what you say. All these invented countries and so on. Invented continents, invented histories.”
De Rougemont nodded. “These were failed experiments. Models for evolution, heliocentric … what is it? Fairy stories. A world where dreams mean nothing. Where the dead are dead. Where dreams are not the portal to another world, no matter what this fellow says, this Sigmund Freud and others. Where stars are only balls of flaming gas and planets are dead rocks, and so we are only responsible to our own selves—do you think she would invent all this for you?”
The solipsism of childhood. “Probably not,” Miranda muttered, and around her the women smiled and nodded. Some of them seemed to want to speak, but Inez de Rougemont wouldn’t stop: “It was an afterthought, I tell you. Protecting you, it was an afterthought to her experiment. I’m talking about during the catastrophe, when she was arrested the first time. Then she did need to protect you from the empress, and she had the model close to hand.”
“Catastrophe?” Miranda asked.
“I mean when the Baron Ceausescu was deputy prime minister. When he drafted the first anti-conjuring laws. At first it was a joke, though there were circus magicians who were imprisoned. But then Aegypta Schenck was arrested in her house. Later she was questioned in the Palais de Justice before a judge. I myself …”
Mrs. Chatterjee laughed again. “Yes, dear …”
“I myself had to remove myself into a quiet life. I myself had to make a pretense of disease and death. I myself must find a place to hide—it is not amusing!”
Her painted cheeks shone. Miranda sat between the two of them, de Rougemont at her table, and Chatterjee on her bench with one leg tucked up under her. Her feet were bare, the soles colored red. She wore golden toe rings.
The rest of the women had begun their own circle of conversation. But when de Rougemont raised her voice, they quieted down: “It is not humorous to live in a secret place with only some friends you have informed. To read my own obituary, it was disgusting. I had none of these cancers in my family.”
Miranda heard clucks and sighs of sympathy. But Mrs. Chatterjee was irrepressible. “Yes, you see we are all suffering for our art. It is not dancing only we give up, or visits to the theater.”
Zuzana Knauss was sprawled out on the carpet, lying back against some pillows. Her hands were folded on her belly, and Miranda saw how dirty they were. Her nails were chipped and lined with dirt. “Ach, shut up,” she said. “This is not what we agreed on talking. Not the questions we must ask. Tell me—” she said.
But Miranda interrupted. “Why was it a failure?”
“What, child?”
“She said that the whole world was a failure.”
“Ach, that’s too big, too hard. She also saw the difficulty in overmaking … what is the word?”
“Overdetermining,” suggested Mrs. Chatterjee.
“Yah, sure. Social or political building. Engineering. Your aunt described the danger. What could she do? It was one great engineering project. One from many. Now we see in Europe also there are many politicians who think like this.”
“One must not seem immodest,” murmured Mrs. Chatterjee. “But our dear Aegypta’s experiment could only fail, because you see she always was attempting to maintain her own authority. There was no place in it … for us.”
She had golden earrings in the shape of little parasols. Also a quantity of facial hair; lilting and musical, her voice drifted away. Miranda turned her head, and then she found herself studying the black lines under Zuzana Knauss’s fingernails, studying also her ripped and dirty smock.
Suddenly tired, she had almost stopped listening. Idly, without much concentration, she wondered what would happen if she dozed off in her seat in this comfortable warm room. Would she penetrate down deeper into something else? Or would she wake up in her bed in her third-floor room in the People’s Palace? Or would she wake inside the failed experiment and stumble downstairs to eat some breakfast before the school bus came? No, but it was summer vacation. She’d missed almost the whole year.
Now she realized the room was quiet. And when she looked up she saw everyone was looking at her. Some of them seemed curious and some beseeching. But she felt a kind of urgency that did not dissipate, and so she cast her mind backward to grasp hold of the last slippery words before they disappeared. “There was no place in it … for us.”
“What do you mean?”
The silence continued for a moment. Then Zuzana spoke. “So, it is for contemplation and for guidance when we come together. Some from many countries, though many other places have no voice. That is obvious. But we sit and make these horseswapping bargains. Now you see the world is on the blade of war. One step, then we fall. But now you see Olga Karpov takes the Russian part.”
Here she nodded toward a black-haired woman in the corner, an ugly woman with a sharp, emaciated face. She had enormous, hungry, haunted eyes and lips that were oddly scarred. She did not smile.
“Now that snake of Ratisbon is dead, so I must take the German part,” continued Zuzana Knauss. “It is my blood. And there are others who help—Inez, of course. Now the cannons have stopped firing and all wait. All are quiet, while in this room we are making the political alchemy. Shit into something—well, it is not gold. Not yet. But General von Stoessel is dead and the czarevich will also die. This war was his father’s gift to him to make him happy. So, a bargain.”
God’s sewing bee, Miranda thought. Every other Thursday evening her adoptive mother in Massachusetts had gotten together with some friends. It was something Miranda and Andromeda had never failed to mock. Now in this room there wasn’t any sewing or knitting or quilting that was actually going on. They had paused over their work. Everyone was staring at her.
“Of course she knows about Stoessel and Ratisbon,” said Olga Karpov. Listening, Miranda had an immediate sense of something mean and sour and cold.
“Yes, of course,” repeated Inez de Rougemont. “She has been part of this. But does she recognize me from this river in the snow where I stood with my plate of waffles? Belgian, I believe. I was there to guide her for Aegypta’s sake—she made me promise. This Ratisbon, he could move pictures only. He could not carry in his mind a living creature over the sea, just in one blink. Mental picture—I gave him a mental picture of myself while he sat dreaming in his chair.”
Miranda had no idea what to make of this. For several minutes she had wanted to ask a question. Now seemed like a good time. “And will my aunt … come here?”
Nobody spoke until Mrs. Chatterjee said, “My poor child—she
is dead.”
“And the dead never … come here?”
“No, child.”
“But she knows all this,” interrupted Olga Karpov in her cold, insinuating voice. “Because of what she did, because of this we have these problems.”
Others protested, but Karpov kept on speaking. “Of course she knows! You let a bird out a cage, it flies away. It is no mystery.”
Now Miranda knew what they were talking about. In a previous dream like this, a lucid dream, she had taken the boat across the water to the land of the dead, to tara mortilor. She had followed her aunt’s instructions. And if finally she could not do what she’d been told to do, still she’d managed to free a little bird—her aunt’s soul or spirit, as she’d thought. Not till this moment had she imagined she’d done wrong.
“But you see she does not know,” said a new voice. A girl or woman not much older than Miranda sat in a rocking chair. Her name was Jeanne Petite, and she was wearing a skirt much shorter than anything Miranda had seen in Bucharest. She crossed one knee over the other and then clasped her hands together over her stockinged shin. Her fingernails were painted pink.
“But it is by chance she comes like this, par hazard,” she said. “Permit me, it is not a place like this. Death, le mort, we call it many names. In my country as you know it is Les Champs Elysées, like the Parisian boulevard. Perhaps for some of us it will be a street like this, with shopping also! Disons que, let us say it is a dream, different every time. It is part of us! We make it for ourself. And so sometimes you see it is a boat, so many creatures! I think you know about this. Sometimes it is a palace like Versailles where King Jesus reigns, or else some other fellows also—” Here she nodded toward Mrs. Chatterjee. “But it is not always like this … .”
The others smiled and shook their heads as Jeanne Petite went on to explain how there were some who could not enter tara mortilor until some new conditions could be met. “Because they have destroyed themselves!” The Baron Ceausescu, apparently, still roamed the hidden world, as well as the Elector of Ratisbon, who had held Miranda’s mother prisoner.
Others had crossed over and then had managed to return. Aegypta Schenck was one of these, as shown by her appearance in Insula Calia and some other places.
“For this, my dear, you must assume responsibility,” continued Mrs. Chatterjee, holding up a cookie. She had ivory bangles on her wrist that clicked together as they fell toward her elbow. Her dark arms were thin as sticks. “This is why we are coming here, you see. And we are assuming that there can be a great suffering in death, because these people have become more mad or crazy after all, if they were not mad first or fantastical—your aunt, I knew her. We all knew her. It is thinking too much about the interest of her own family—well, we can forgive these things. Now it is worse, and she has caused a terrible weapon to come into the hands of a terrible person, who might employ it to undo all of the benefits that we are making here, especially Olga and Zuzana with the compromise they are developing—now do you understand?”
“I … I think so,” said Miranda, and she almost told the truth.
Inez de Rougemont made a gesture with her hand. “It is the gun,” she said. “Set one way it stores up death with every firing. Death and death’s power in a type of reservoir, I think, in the bone handle. Set another and the creatures feed on it as they come out, one after another. I did not think it was possible what she accomplished.”
One wire hook at a time, she stripped the spectacles off her ears. Her gray hair was pulled back tight. Unsoftened now by the lenses, her face was thin and painted and intense. De Rougemont stared at her, and Miranda couldn’t meet her eyes. Once again, obviously, she’d made a terrible mistake.
She had known her father’s pistol was important. Gregor Splaa had told her about it before he died. Her aunt had hidden it for her to find and left her clues as well as some detailed instructions. At least that was probably what they were. Who knows? Miranda had lost them without reading them through a perverse carelessness, she told herself now.
She felt tears on her cheek. She imagined she must ask these women what to do. But when she spoke, it was to ask another question, which took shape slowly out of her chaotic thoughts. “I don’t know what I want to say.”
She faltered and went on. “Evolution, Copernicus, the big bang. These were the things I learned. Fairy tales. But they were what I had, even if I didn’t understand them or even pay attention. They were the explanations. So now what?”
She looked around the room. No one spoke.
“I mean,” she said, “what takes their place? Failed experiments. But what are the explanations that are true?”
Again nothing. The heat in the room now seemed oppressive. No one had fed or tended the fire, yet still it flared up in the hearth. Miranda saw the reflection on the ceiling, which seemed lower now, a burden that pressed down.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Chatterjee at last. “We were hoping that you could be able to tell us. Do you see?”
Miranda bowed her head, but not so quickly that she didn’t see the woman indicate, with a sidelong glance of her almond, black, kohl-lined eyes, the bracelet on Miranda’s wrist.
“You are the white tyger,” she continued humbly.
Jeanne Petite had lit a cigarette. She blew the end off it and then examined the smoke as it spiraled upward. “You see we are always searching for truth in the secret world,” she said. “Le monde secret. We think there is the key, or many keys, I suppose. When we learn there is someone who can travel to this place, we think she can tell us many things. The nature of the planets or the gods. If the aether is a liquid or a gas. If the sun moves in the sky—we argue about these things. People argue, and they publish books that say one thing or else another. But the truth, perhaps, it is like a fruit hanging from a tree in a dark forest. People tell a story how a god was tricked and captured by these Germans in their scientific explorations, locked up in a tower. And either you must think this is a great event, and all these new discoveries and experiments and alchemical conjuring, it is all possible from this, the modern world, or else you must think also that it is the source of all our difficulties—already this was several hundred years ago. But in the secret world I think that time is not the same … .”
“I thought this was the secret world,” Miranda cried. “Where we are now!”
Some of the women smiled. Zuzana laughed aloud. Inez de Rougemont shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, this mountain has many names. There is nothing secret here, but you can see the place we spoke of from the crest. Down in the dark, where the creatures live. You came up from there, flying. We saw you.”
Miranda started to protest. But she was interrupted by the pleasant voice of Jeanne Petite. “Please, enough of this. I want to verify that she will understand what we are asking—I think she is not such a clever one. But this adversary is quite clever, I think, and she is capable of desperate acts to save herself, as we have seen from the burning fire over Chiselet. I want to know that she will understand what she will do, that is to take this weapon and destroy it, perhaps, or hide it or bring it to us here. She must owe us this. She has been careless in the past.”
“I understand,” Miranda said. She could not look at Jeanne Petite. So she watched Olga Karpov, dressed in a wool cardigan and a fur collar, regardless of the heat. Then she turned her head, and found herself looking into the face of a woman who had not yet spoken in that group, the Turkish woman who had sat the whole time without moving in an upholstered armchair. Or she had not moved her body, but her hands were busy, knitting or crocheting an unusually ugly afghan. Now they paused. Looking at her flat, stolid, pock-marked features, Miranda thought she felt a gust of something nevertheless, a breath of some hostility or some anticipated triumph.
Troubled, Miranda tried to stare her down. “I’ll do my best,” she murmured.
Mrs. Chatterjee’s jewelry made a jingle as she moved. “My dear, we are not asking more than that. After all, this is a question of y
our family’s property. This is a weapon that was handed down—”
“Not for this purpose,” interrupted Olga Karpov, her chin sunk in her ratty white fur collar. And then there was a light bickering as Miranda’s thoughts moved elsewhere, back to the question she had asked before.
The Turkish woman’s head was round, her neck was fat. She dropped her eyes back to her lap again, and Miranda could hear the click of her knitting needles as she resumed.
What is the mountain with names in many languages? Miranda thought. Peter had told her about the cave or hole he had found in time and space, that had brought him from the snowy woods into an archeological dig in the middle of the Egyptian desert—the Aegyptian desert, she corrected herself. He’d told her some ideas about how time was different in different places, how it moved slower or else faster at the edges, where it was like the waterfall that poured off the circumference of the flat earth. That was his comparison. She didn’t know what she thought of it—half the world seemed abandoned, dark. West of the Hudson, east of Japan, people said there was nothing. What did that mean? Literally nothing? Or no place you could go?
In Massachusetts in Miranda’s house, no one had really believed in God. They’d gone to church sometimes when her adoptive grandparents showed up from Colorado. But even they seemed to be Christians more for political reasons, to be part of something here and now.
Or there and then. But was there a God here? Mountains that rose up to heaven? Circles of ether—aether, she corrected herself impatiently. Planets that were alive like watchful eyes. Time like a bowl or an inverted bowl—which way? And if there was a God here, an actual God, maybe that explained why all the churches seemed so feeble, and no one believed in anything.
The Turkish lady had ringlets of oily red hair. Her chest was huge. Click, click, click, came the sound of her needles.
Later, when she was safe in bed and Ludu Rat-tooth was gone, Miranda sat up wondering. Later still she went onto the balcony and looked up into the sky.