The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  And it hopped in the slippery, fetid mud of the Fedorivka Salient a week later as the Russians began their new offensive. All along that section of the front there was discomfort and disorder, but no bloodshed. And there was hot weather and constant rain, which threatened to wash away the pontoon bridges of the Russian engineers. But there was no artillery barrage, no death in the barbed wire. The air stunk of petrol and exhaust as the new armored vehicles crossed over. The soldiers marched in their raincoats with their weapons on their backs, while the divisions of the Sixth Roumanian Army Group withdrew to their established positions farther west.

  15

  Throat Surgery

  THESE WERE ALL scenes from The White Tyger, the baroness’s opera or song cycle, plotted but not written down. Also plotted was the climactic moment when the German authority in Bucharest, stung with treachery and astonished by the Russians’ quick advance through the Ukraine, sent Colonel Maschmann to arrest the baroness in the People’s Palace. Their way was blocked by fifty thousand citizens, who sang patriotic songs and pelted the Germans with rocks and bottles until they were forced to withdraw.

  At five o’clock, Nicola Ceausescu stood on the balcony to acknowledge the crowd. In the opera, by then the bracelet of the white tyger was already locked to her wrist. The aria she sang there, performed as if upon the great stage of the world, marked the beginning of her third and final act.

  But on the night when, gun in hand, she picked out these same musical themes for Miranda and Jean-Baptiste, that hour of victory was still two weeks away. Now suddenly there was a noise in the corridor. Servants, alerted by the muffled sound of gunfire, had come to the baroness’s room. Despite the lateness of the hour they pounded on the door.

  “Come in,” said the Baroness Ceausescu. “You see I’ve found these two together. Take them away—no, wait. Take her to her room. Lock the door and post a guard. I will secure an order from the Committee for Roumanian Affairs. As for the man, leave him—no, take him away. Take him to the Gara de Nord. Put him on a train to Cluj. If you set foot in Bucharest again, you are a dead man.”

  These last words she spoke to Jean-Baptiste, who had risen from the armchair. “Please, ma’am,” he said. But then some rudeness and familiarity crept into his voice. “Don’t turn me out. It’s been too long. Too many tricks I’ve played for you.”

  Was that a threat? Miranda thought. He stood shaking and twitching with his hands held out. “Pay his ticket,” said the baroness. “I’ll give you the money. Nothing else but just his clothes. He came to rob me for his wages after all I’ve done—I’ve got no money here. You tell that to all the others. Here I live in my little room, for your sake and for Great Roumania. Take whatever you want. I’ve got nothing of my own.”

  “Ma’am,” said the underfootman. “On whose authority? Ambassador Moltke says …”

  “On my authority,” murmured the baroness. “Go find Radu Luckacz. Wake him out of bed. Tell him to bring some men with him. I’ll show you. Are you Roumanians?”

  She stood by the window with the gun in her hand. Miranda could see how she was agitated and upset, and when the old man started to weep, a complementary tear ran down her perfect cheek. “Oh, Jean-Baptiste, what have you done to me? What have you made me do? No—I can’t stand it. You see I will not cheat you. I will make you rich. Then you won’t look at me like that.”

  Beside the window stood an ornate looking glass atop a narrow cabinet. “You were in my bedroom,” she said. “You didn’t find anything there. There’s nothing to find. People give me precious jewels and I put them in these drawers—these are things from the Empress Valeria’s time. Here, take this,” she said, reaching into one long compartment and taking out a strand of diamonds and then another and another. With tears in her eyes she came to the old man and looped delicate gold chains and diamonds and rubies around his neck—“Oh, my friend,” she said, embracing him, the gun clasped in her hand. “If you come to Bucharest again, I’ll put you up against the wall at Jilava, I swear to God. But this will be enough, won’t it? For your little house?”

  “Ma’am,” said the underfootman. “This is the property of—”

  “No,” whispered the baroness. She stepped away from Jean-Baptiste and wiped her eyes. “They are mine. Those emeralds were given to me by the Sultan of Byzantium when we opened the new railway line. Put them under your shirt,” she said to the old man.

  No one had moved to escort Miranda to her room. “She’s got no authority to do these things,” she said. “In the morning if—”

  “Silence.” The baroness’s whisper was more effective than a shout. Even Miranda strained to hear her. “You have stolen this man from me, stolen his heart. You will not rob him of what I owe him after all these years.”

  And because of the power of her character, and because also—Miranda surmised—the underfootman and the others had witnessed or heard about the speech she’d made that afternoon in the piata, they took Jean-Baptiste by his thin elbows and led him out into the corridor. He’d stopped crying. There was a cold, desolate expression on his face. Miranda also—two men made a gesture to touch her. But with a flick of her fingers she waved them away, and then preceded them out the door and down the hall toward her own rooms. She didn’t turn around, didn’t look back. She walked through the portrait gallery as if the men did not exist. And when she reached her chambers she turned the lock herself, and heard them settle down beside the door.

  But that night Ludu Rat-tooth came to her. For hours she had lain in her nightdress, waiting in the dark. And there was a creaking in the armoire, and the Gypsy girl was in the shadows, naked, blind. She stepped into the filtered light from the French windows, and Miranda could see her heavy breasts and hips, and the faint glow in her throat where the tourmaline was caught. “Come,” she said, and the girl came to stand beside the bed. There were red shadows all around her eyes and stains on her cheeks, as if she’d been weeping blood.

  “King Jesus says he’ll wait for me,” she murmured. “Please let me go to him.”

  Miranda didn’t know what to say. She stood barefoot on the polished wood, her hand over the nightgown’s frilly top.

  “Take me down,” she said. There was no reason, she thought, to go and confess failure to the witches in Borgo Pass. Unless it was to tell them Olga Karpov was a traitor, so Miranda guessed.

  “Please, miss, I’m choking.” Every time she opened her mouth, Miranda could see the gleam of light between her teeth.

  So everybody has a problem, she thought grimly, deliberately. “I’ll help you,” she said. “I want to find Pieter de Graz.”

  When she first came to the People’s Palace, they had locked her in. As the baroness’s power had waned and hers had grown, then she was free to go where she wanted inside the building. Now the guards were at the door again. How much time did she have left?

  Peter was gone from his old cell, she knew. Jean-Baptiste had told her. He couldn’t tell where he’d been taken. There was no point in pretending someone else was going to help in this world or in any other—no. Ludu would help. “Please, every hour it’s worse,” she said. “Please, miss, I climbed up to the bridge but it was too light for my weight. King Jesus stood in the middle of the span. I couldn’t catch his hand. He had clothes like a Gypsy bridegroom with the knife at his belt. Crossed sashes underneath his waistcoat and a feather in his hat. There’s an island where the Gypsies live, he said. He’d built a house for me. He had a room for me upstairs, he said, where I’d lie on my back with my legs in the air.”

  How romantic. “I thought you took a boat.”

  “It’s different every time.” This was what the witches had said, too.

  They stood on the balcony and looked down over the courtyard in the steamy summer night. There was traffic in the street beyond the iron gates, horses and lanterns ghostlike in the mist. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, miss, it hurts to talk. Different for everyone—you make it different.”

 
Hurting or not, she continued talking as Miranda looked down into the formal garden and the statue of the violinist or the hunter. The bulbs of the lampposts seemed luminous in the fog, bigger than they really were. “There’s the dead world, the secret world, the mountain where God lives, locked in his tower. Maybe more. Here, of course—Bucharest, Great Roumania. They’re like different parts of the same country. Sometimes they are spread apart like stars. Sometimes they’re inside each other—you can’t control it. It’s like a dream that way. But you meet the people you know, go to your own places.”

  Miranda’s hair was wet and stringy around her face. Her nightgown was damp. “Like a dream,” she murmured. She had been asleep when Ludu Rat-tooth came, asleep and waiting. “Take me down.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  And when Miranda opened them, again they stood upon the high escarpment with the mountains in front of them across the plain, and the fat river twisting like a snake. Below them spread the marshland and the dark trees. “That’s where we’ll go,” Miranda said.

  “Miss, that’s a new place. You’ve not been there before.”

  “So you say.”

  “There’s no flying,” said Ludu Rat-tooth. “Not from here.”

  “Why not?”

  The girl shrugged. “They’d shoot us from the trees.”

  Her cheeks were streaked, her dark eyes ringed with dirt or crusted blood. Her hair was knotted, wet. On her knees she searched among the slippery rocks until she found the end of a thick vine that seemed to grow out of the roots of a broken tree. It was as big around as Miranda’s forearm, and it hung down over the sharp cliff.

  Once before, Miranda had asked Jean-Baptiste for a rope, thinking she might tie it to the stone balusters late at night and let herself down into the courtyard. From there she would find her way through the wrought-iron gate and out into the Piata Enescu. Surely that would be easier than breaking down the door, evading all the footmen and the guards.

  He had laughed at her, yet with a sympathetic expression on his narrow face. Everything she suggested seemed to amuse him and make him sad after a few beers. But this was what she’d had in mind. It wasn’t impossible. The vine was braided out of three strands growing underneath the rotten, saturated stump. Ludu the Gypsy had already disappeared into the dark. She slid down and pulled the vine taut. And there was some purplish green glow down there. The mist seemed to gather as they descended down a rocky chute, seemed to cling to them and fill the air around them, so after only a few minutes of dirty scrambling she could no longer see the river or the sky. Nor did she look for them, but instead she was searching for ways over the steep, mossy rocks that did not seem entirely real under her grasping fingers and bare feet. Or it was as if she hung suspended on that vine halfway between the world and a dream. No matter how low she climbed, still she hung suspended, even when with aching feet and hands she reached the bottom of the cliff. As she sank to her shins in the wet mud, as she felt the hot breath of the swamp on her skin, still she was looking for the trick. Looking for it and not finding it in her sensations, which seemed genuine enough.

  But there was a kind of distance from herself that she remembered from dreams, and in particular the lucid dreaming that brought with it an illusion of control. Maybe that illusion was, she thought, what protected her now as she stumbled into the swamp in her bare feet—the reassurance that in some way all of this was an extension of herself, her own fears and desires.

  She trod on something sharp. All the time she was following a little glow, and it led her to drier land. Ludu Rat-tooth was on her hands and knees in front of her. Miranda could see her broad backside.

  “There it is,” she breathed.

  In the half-light Miranda could see a pile of sand or dirt that rose out of the stringy grass. Squatting in her wet nightgown, now she saw what it was: an enormous ant hill that rose in cliffs and towers almost to the level of her knees.

  “Find the queen,” whispered Ludu.

  Everything was quiet. There was not an insect stirring. But Miranda knew if she touched the smallest of the outlying fortifications with a stick or with her toe, the entire structure would erupt into disgusting life. These creatures would bite and sting. Where was the queen?

  “Try,” whispered the Gypsy.

  Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the building, fat and repulsive, lived … no. But in a third-floor apartment overlooking the Piata Revolutiei—that was where she might be found. So Miranda did take a pointed stick, and after a little dithering she plunged it into the side of the hill. And she was right, and in a moment all the air around them was full of swarming bugs. Squatting back, Ludu Rat-tooth had a cloud of them around her head, while an army of the soldier ants broke out of the earth. Miranda put her arms around the girl’s shoulders and tugged her down into the swamp.

  But when Miranda poked her sharp stick into the hill, the world started to change, not all at once. As she brought the Gypsy girl into the water, she saw the light change around them. Before, there had been a copper glow that seemed to gather out of the swamp itself. On the cliff face and on the balcony it had been dark night. But when they’d sunk into the mist, there had been more light down there, and a different light, too.

  Now that was extinguished. The only illumination to reach the surface of the swamp came from above the clouds, a rolling front of heat lightning that broke and built up pressure every few seconds. As if under a slow, irregular strobe, Miranda caught glimpses of new dangers in the hot ionic mist, new creatures in the water and among the broken trees. There was a snake in the water; she didn’t have to see it to know. But she imagined a cold, flat head would break onto the surface through the duckweed. She didn’t have to look behind her. The girl’s skin was slippery with sweat, but Miranda pulled her through a channel of deeper water around their knees, away from the anthill and toward what seemed to be an island. The ground scarcely broke over the surface of the swamp. But there were cattails, living trees.

  And something else: a man in the dead grass. He came out from behind a green tree trunk, and the light rolled across his face. Miranda recognized him, his yellow hair and formal clothes. She remembered his name. She’d last seen him on the Hoosick riverbank in the snow.

  It was Dr. Theodore, the worse for wear. His pleated trousers and white shirt were ripped and stained. He stood above her on the shore with a gun in his hand, a small silver derringer. At first she thought he was waving to her or gesticulating, his face twisted with rage. But then she heard a pop and felt the impact in the Gypsy’s body. She heard the whisper in her ear, “Oh, miss …”

  But Miranda was saved now by the darkness as the lightning shuddered out. Holding her from behind, she dragged Ludu Rat-tooth’s slippery, naked body through the water. Dr. Theodore was raging and crashing through the reeds, and Miranda sank into the water with one hand over Ludu’s throat.

  She let the heavy body down into the mud. One hand was on the Gypsy’s neck, but even so she couldn’t block the small glow of the tourmaline. There was a snake in the swamp and other enemies on the dry ground. Small blobby creatures had affixed themselves between her fingers, leeches or slugs, and Miranda understood that she was holding a corpse, supporting its head above the surface, feeling its cheek and hair against her cheek, listening to its voice as it whispered, “Miss, please …”

  Above her came a rumbling of thunder. “Let me go,” said Ludu Rat-tooth. Her mouth had lolled open to reveal her sharp incisor and a greenish radiance. Dr. Theodore raged and shouted twenty yards away. Miranda felt a change come over her, a sensation she remembered from Insula Calia and St. Mary’s Fountain. The tourmaline bulged in the girl’s throat, shined in her cold skin, and in its glow Miranda could see her hand, the cruel claw. But in another way she was still the same, squatting wet and hot and dirty in the shallow water, one arm around the Gypsy’s waist. Even so she felt the transformation, and in the darkness she could glimpse the hooked blade of her claw. “Please, miss … I’m choking �
�� Jesus, please …”

  Then there was just a little pressure, and the pale skin parted, and the stone was in her hand. Slippery and cold, it throbbed under her fingers as she squeezed it, as if it weren’t a jewel at all but rather an organ of the girl’s body, something that had held her between life and death. Now she subsided into the water, while at the same time her last breath rose from her mouth. Without further impediment it rose into the air, a sudden radiance. And there was a scratching along Miranda’s arm and a little plop in the water. It meant, she supposed, that a wet mouse or a wet rat would soon be creeping up the bank onto the land, where it would find the boat or the bridge or whatever artificial means now led to the island where the Gypsies lived.

  The thunder broke above Miranda’s head. Someone was pounding on the door of her room. It took a long time to wake her, but then she was awake, standing in her nightgown in the dark. “Qui est là?” she asked. Who is there?

  It was Jean-Baptiste. Miranda put on a robe and lit the lamps. She opened the door to let him in. A half dozen men stood outside in the corridor.

  Jean-Baptiste had taken off his jacket. He had not changed his shirt, which showed a greasy burn over his breastbone. Miranda stepped aside, and he strode immediately to the windows. “I thought you would have gone,” Miranda said.

  He shrugged, a tremor of his high, thin shoulders. “You must not judge her. She feels too much. But she is … changeable.” Then in a moment: “She will change her mind.”

  He turned to face her, and Miranda saw a mark on his white cheek, a smear of red where the baroness had struck him, she guessed, or else hurt him with one of her diamond necklaces. “Where would I go?” he said. “She will not abandon an old man. You’re the one in danger.”

  He had gone to the armoire and pulled it open, revealing all Miranda’s ridiculous gowns and dresses. “She will have changed her mind,” he said, “but not tonight. Antonescu has left the city, but she has sent for Colonel Bocu and his men. She will take hold of the palace and dare the Germans to do their worst. There are people camped in the piata because of the murders there this afternoon. More every hour. You can’t see them from here.”