The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  Standing by the half-opened door, Miranda peered into the corridor at the footmen and understewards, one of whom was picking his nose. “These men …”

  “Work for the Committee for Roumanian Affairs. It’s the German government that pays the salaries in this place. Maybe the baroness will dismiss them all, certainly if she gets the crowd behind her. But until then I’ve hired them to bring you to the German embassy where you’ll be safe.”

  Miranda stepped back. “I don’t think—”

  “You don’t have a choice,” the old man interrupted. “She’ll play a game with you, hold you out to show how these Germans have polluted us, the pure Roumanian blood. It is time for a new change, a woman of the people, she’ll say, and she’ll be serious—she hates you. Remember what happened to your father. When Bocu gets here or his adjutant … Where are the clothes I brought?”

  “But the Germans …”

  “Miss, you have no choice! Where are your clothes?”

  He meant the traveling clothes she’d begged from him, trousers and boots. “I won’t ask shelter from our enemies,” she said. “What about my mother and Pieter de Graz? Can you get a message to Andromedes?”

  “Miss, there’s no time. Captain Sawicki says the orders are already sent. He says most of the guards deserted since Maschmann’s troops were withdrawn. When she fired that gun at me it was the signal, but the plans were already made.”

  Once in social studies class, Miranda’s teacher, Mr. Oats, had described the passions of the crowd when they stormed the gates of the Bastille. Just for a moment, Miranda had caught a glimpse of a mental picture—men in long pants and red woolen hats—that returned to her now. The corridor where the understeward picked his nose was dark and quiet. But she could imagine it full of noise and light. “Wait for me,” she said.

  When the door was closed behind him, she said to herself, “But I won’t go to the embassy. And I won’t go without the others.” She spoke aloud to reassure herself as she fumbled in a chest of drawers for the precious trousers—she had hidden them inside a nest of unworn lingerie in case the room was searched. Time was important, she knew. But after she pulled them on and fastened her belt, after she chose her shirt and socks, she stepped through the French windows onto the balcony and looked down.

  In the open air, in the damp summer night, it was as if she’d crossed another kind of threshold. Here she had the tourmaline clasped in her hand. She studied it for a moment, a jewel the size of a plum, and she was not enough of an authority to tell if it had been cut or faceted, or if its shape was natural. It gleamed a little in the dark, a color hard to describe.

  And then—did she blink? Or was it an effort of the mind?—she was in the swamp again, and Ludu’s body had subsided under water. Dr. Theodore was gone. Miranda had pulled herself up onto dry ground and she yawned and stretched there, kneading the earth in front of her, ripping at the logs and stones with her cruel hands. She was confident of her strength, confident also that her enemies were powerful—not one by one, but in a mass. But she was the white tyger of Roumania, and she had not yet been tested in this place.

  Above and far away, she opened the door again and crossed the threshold. “Where is Peter?” she said.

  “Miss, there’s no time. Our carriage is at the Mycenaean Gate. I’ll take you to the embassy—I spoke to Madame de Graz. Just for tonight, I promise you. In the morning this will all look different, and the baroness … She is not a monster—I say it again. She will change her mind. Only she is excitable like any person of genius, or any woman touched by God …”

  The lamps flickered in their sconces. The old man stood rubbing his hands, a pleading expression on his narrow face. His skin was pale, his lips oddly dark, as if he’d put on lipstick—he was trying to convince himself, Miranda thought. And he’d have to go on talking all night, to her and to himself, because the Baroness Ceausescu really was a heartless murderer, as doubtless he was just beginning to understand. So even though he spoke of urgency, and even though the other men glanced nervously up and down the corridor, still he did nothing but talk until Miranda interrupted him. “I know the Mycenaean Gate,” she said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  Then she hurried down the corridor the opposite way from the direction he now indicated, ignoring his cry of exasperation—he meant to take the Promenade and then the Summer Stairs, she guessed. It was the closest way. But she turned the corner and then found the servants’ staircase he’d once showed her, a square shaft leading down. And down below there was a noise of footsteps and muted shouts; she only descended four turns of the stair before she let herself back into the main building, the second story with its residential apartments. This was King Rudolph’s Gallery, which was dingy, dark, unused. The furniture was covered with gray canvas sheets.

  But the lights burned brighter up ahead. And there was noise that way, too. She pushed herself against the wall and watched a dozen or so men run past the entrance of the gallery, where it debouched into the corridor. They were looking for the main stairs to the floor above, she guessed. There was no time to lose. Once in the bright corridor she turned away from them and hurried back toward the east wing, the Court of Venus where Clara Brancoveanu stayed—her mother—whatever. The wainscot was gilded here, the plaster painted with rose-colored domestic scenes.

  And the door was open, the lock broken. Her mother was not here. The room was dark. Without bothering to light the lamp, Miranda stepped across the carpet to the inner door and wrenched it open—dark there, too. But she heard something, a whimpering.

  She waited in the doorway. No reason to frighten the boy, if she wanted him to tell her what had happened. She stood with her hand on the doorknob, silhouetted, she imagined, in the light from the corridor until the boy emerged, Felix Ceausescu. He was small for his age, maybe fourteen years old—smaller than she was. He was dressed in yellow pajamas and his face was streaked with tears. But even so he had some spunk in him. His hands were knotted into fists. “Mother,” he said, “is that you?”

  Whom did he mean? Not the Baroness Ceausescu. But her own mother, Miranda guessed. “No.”

  All this was half of her experience. In the other half, she stood up to her shins in the black water while the thunder groaned and the heat lightning flickered above her. And on the shore there was a chicken peering out from underneath some hanging leaves. Miranda kept herself from moving because she wanted to lure it out—an awkward, tiny, yellow bird that now turned away from her so he could fix her with one round little eye.

  Before, in Insula Calia and in Mogosoaia, she had experienced the hidden world while inert or absent in this one, sleeping or else sleepwalking. Now, with the tourmaline clenched in her hand, she sensed both places simultaneously, lived in them simultaneously, breathed the divided air. It occurred to her to wonder what Johannes Kepler might have done to keep his equilibrium, calm the greasy, knotted feeling in his stomach, quiet the ringing in his ears. In each world she felt clumsy and half present. But now already she was used to it a little bit, she no longer imagined she was watching herself move, hearing her own voice out of a tape recorder—you could get used to anything. And it didn’t take long. That was the lesson she had learned and would pass down to her own daughter if she had one, the way Stanley, her adoptive father, had taught her to keep moving step by step.

  But in the hidden world, also, she was divided. No, not divided, that wasn’t it. But she had a double nature. Sometimes as the lightning flickered she saw herself standing in the water, her hair lank and wet, her body slick with perspiration, the stone grasped in her hand. At moments she was also something else, a white beast with long, heavy claws. And the strength she felt in her body stayed with her in the People’s Palace, where she stood silhouetted in the door. “Come out,” she said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  Maybe the boy could sense the white tyger somewhere, because he looked doubtful and afraid. The chicken clucked under the bush. But then it came out, impelled by a need greater than c
aution. “Mother—where is she?” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “They were here.”

  And as he came into the light, Miranda could see he’d been hurt. The sleeve of his pajamas was ripped. The scratch on his cheek still bled. So—not long, and she couldn’t stay here long. Whoever had come once would probably come again, once they found Miranda’s room empty.

  “They said they’d take her to the prison—it’s not fair,” the boy continued. “She’s an old lady, locked up half her life. How could they do this to her? They said for her own protection. What harm had she done?”

  Miranda had already turned away. Peter was next—she was wondering if she could find Peter. Listening for any sound in the corridor, she crossed the dark room again. But now the boy was at her heels.

  She paused. Felix Ceausescu was a fragile, funny-looking kid, without any of his mother’s beauty. Apprehension was mixed in him with a kind of fierceness; in the hidden world the chicken beat his wings, stretched his neck, shook out his feathers. He didn’t care about the white tyger. He came strutting and clucking by the water’s edge.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  THE MYCENAEAN GATE, leading out into the Piata Enescu, was one of the Palace’s most peculiar architectural characteristics, built during the reign of the fifth Constantin, when the Brancoveanu dynasty was already old and tired. Architects had disassembled part of Menelaus’s fortress on the Peloponnese and reassembled it into a kind of theater, with hemicircles of banked steps overlooking the ancient stones. A line of ancient columns, blackened with soot, separated the open space from the piata. The steps were divided by the famous lion gate, which led into the palace storerooms. Deliveries to the kitchens were made there. And from the holding cells, occasional prisoners were transferred to Jilava.

  Now on this same night, before dawn, Radu Luckacz stood on a balcony set into the outside wall of the east wing, overlooking the amphitheater. Beyond the old columns, unjoined at the top, people were still camped in the piata as a demonstration of support, a protest against the German occupation. In the hot night the open space was marked with torches and small fires.

  Out of the darkness beside him, the voice came low, throaty, soft. “Once I spoke to Ambassador Moltke about a grant of money to restore it. Scrub off all the grime, it wouldn’t take much. From the German archeological commission—now I suppose I’ll have to find another patron! I want it, you see, for The White Tyger. A thousand people could fit on the steps. Five thousand more in the piata. I’d build a raised stage. Knock down those pillars. She wouldn’t hear of it. A purist.”

  The baroness laughed. Her hand on the stone balustrade was near his own. A cigarette glowed between her fingers. Even in the hot, damp air, Luckacz could distinguish the heat from it.

  He said nothing, but his body was alive to the magic of the night. The baroness had summoned him here to this balcony for reasons that could not help but seem like a pretext. She wanted him to be the one who stood beside her while the world changed, and the crowd in the piata was proof of that. Also the police escort drawn up under the disputed columns, waiting to transport Popescu and de Graz to Jilava Prison as they both deserved; he had recommended this for many days. Now, he thought, the baroness was showing him how she’d submitted to his will.

  Hope against hope—surely no one could say he was guilty of impatience. But a balcony—surely it was possible to read something into this, a location that had suggested innocent illicit love affairs ever since that English refugee—what was his name—had included it in his play about the children in Verona. Perhaps the baroness herself did not yet understand the subtlety of her own mind. Since the night when he had brought her the black book and pledged himself to her, he had been waiting for this moment.

  He could feel the heat from her cigarette next to his hand. That night she had taken the book and chased him out into the hall, half-dressed as she was, because she was nervous and because she was afraid of what the servants might say—oh, he had been on fire since then. Acquaintances who had known him for years could scarcely recognize him these days. He could not recognize himself. Bald, clean-shaven, the last shreds of hair shaved away, he was dressed in a gray suit, a color and a cloth that was the fashion now. Before he’d been dismissed from his employment by the Committee for Roumanian Affairs, he had always worn civilian clothes—a black, dreary color, it seemed to him now.

  Since the night when he had brought the book to Nicola Ceausescu, he had lived in a peculiar state of ecstasy. How astonishing it was to let go of everything that was making him unhappy! How liberating it was to let his mind follow in the path his heart had dug, to convince himself finally that what he loved could not be wrong. No, his scruples had been another word for guilt. Now even in the movement of his body he felt fresh as a twenty-five-year-old.

  Why had he held himself back? Surely there was a joy in surrender after so many years. “There, you see,” said the baroness. “They’re bringing her out now. No, it’s the mother. I misspoke.”

  Under the lamppost in the center of the Mycenaean hemicircle, a modern truck had been brought up. Cavernous, its rear doors hung open. And there were some horse-drawn carriages, too, with all their old-fashioned chains and bits and traces. There was Jean-Baptiste, the steward, Luckacz’s friend. He had taken off his jacket with the red piping. He paced back and forth over the cobblestones, under the lamp.

  But that wasn’t where the baroness indicated as she brought her cigarette to her mouth. A dozen men came up the slot between the stone quarter-circles and passed through the lion gate. They brought with them a woman who didn’t struggle, and Luckacz recognized the Princess Clara Brancoveanu. They brought her toward the truck. Two policemen in uniform stood beside an enormous rubber wheel.

  “It would be better if they never reached where they were going,” mused the baroness. “You said it yourself—they are dangerous. We are too civilized sometimes. Look at the people sleeping like animals in the piata, copulating, eating like beasts. They will want revenge for the damage done. That would be cleaner, wouldn’t it? More democratic, surely. Look, there is the Chevalier de Graz.”

  Another knot of men came through the gate and down the steps. Luckacz saw de Graz with his curly brown hair. His left hand was chained to his belt. His maimed right arm was strapped across his chest.

  The policemen brought him to the truck. Then they stopped to argue with the other men.

  The baroness laughed again. “I think they’re saying it’s not proper for the two to ride together. What prudes—they’ll be dead in a week. Let me ask you, what harm could they do? I tell you she looks old enough to be his mother. There’s some conjuring there. No, I’m teasing you. Where is the daughter? That’s the source of intrigue, so I’ve heard.

  “Mother and daughter,” she continued. “It would be better if the people washed them from the world. Tonight, perhaps—they’re not worth two bullets at Jilava.”

  Luckacz breathed deep. “What’s the charge against her?” He meant the old princess. The daughter, he knew, was responsible for various crimes.

  “Treason.”

  This was astonishing, exciting—a bouleversement, in the French language. That Clara Brancoveanu, who had saved Roumania from foreign domination and then paid for it personally with twenty-five years in a German prison—that such a woman should be taken to the Jilava on such a charge—the world was upside down. His world also as he stood here, his hand near the baroness’s hand. “My friend,” she said, “don’t think I am cruel to her. Tonight is an important night. New generations in a free country will look back at us, standing on this balcony. Friends have become enemies, enemies our friends.” And then she told him how Ion Antonescu had left the city and was riding east to take up the command on the Bug river. “The czar is not my rival,” she said. “These women and the Germans have been manipulating us. Certainly it is better to have peace.”

  Certainly it was. What did she mean? “I need men who aren’t af
raid of a shared dream. We are witness to a great event,” she said, and it was true. Standing there, leaning on his hands, he imagined himself part of the audience of a private theatrical performance—an audience of two. Something the baroness had said had put it in his mind, how she would build a scaffold overlooking the piata for a presentation of her great work. In the meantime he looked down on the disused Mycenaean amphitheater as if onto a stage, half a circle of worn stones, lit from five lampposts—five circles of light that did not overlap. And if he couldn’t hear much of the dialogue, with great clarity from his position he could judge the movement of the characters: the Chevalier de Graz with his mouth open, straining at his bonds. And the old steward—Jean-Baptiste now hiding in the shadows with his men—why was he here, standing with his hand on the door of his old hackney cab? Policemen arguing next to the open truck. Two separate groups of soldiers and irregulars. The gray-haired princess with the empty circle around her. Was it true her life was worth nothing after all this time?

  But Miranda Popescu had not made her entrance. No, there she was. She had not come in through the lion gate. But she had found the door at the top of the amphitheater, not thirty meters from where Luckacz stood. She was dressed in trousers and leather boots, and she was helping someone down the big stone steps, each one waist-high. It was the baroness’s son, barefoot and in pajamas.

  From beside him in the dark Luckacz could hear a stifled hiss. Together, he and Nicola Ceausescu watched them negotiate the long stones. With his attention diverted, Luckacz didn’t see the moment when the drama shifted down below, changed from a static circle around the arguing policemen. Now there was sudden movement, and de Graz was free. He had gotten his left hand free, and one of the policemen was down, and he had the man’s service pistol in his left hand—Luckacz knew how awkward and unnatural that would be. But no, the fellow was a perfect devil, ambidextrous, obviously. Luckacz heard the smash of the gun and saw the second policeman stagger back, fall down. De Graz was biting and pulling at the laces that held his right arm to his body, and when four men tried to seize him he slipped between them—a wrestler’s trick, Luckacz supposed. Then the fellow darted back to let two men sprawl into one another.