The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  They spoke in English. “Oh, A.,” Miranda said.

  But then she didn’t know how to continue. “I’ve missed you,” she said, which wasn’t what she meant.

  Andromeda half turned. She raised one eyebrow, a characteristic gesture. Miranda could remember her practicing it in the bathroom.

  “Meanwhile, it’s time to go,” Andromeda said. She wore patent-leather boots. Now she walked over to the steps. But Peter hadn’t moved, hadn’t even acknowledged their presence.

  “Aren’t we going to wait?” Miranda asked. Then, panicked: “Isn’t Peter coming?”

  “That’s what I’m gathering. This is Mrs. de Graz’s plan. She made the arrangement with that guy in the bad clothes. You know, from the palace.”

  “Jean-Baptiste?”

  “Yeah. That guy.”

  Peter and his mother were talking. All smiles were gone, all tears dried up. He was nodding as he looked toward Miranda, and his expression now looked almost angry. No, colder than that. Resolved.

  What had changed, all in a moment? Now he came toward her. “Mademoiselle.”

  And he continued in French: “Already you’ve stayed here too long. You have enemies, we both have enemies. My mother has arranged a place for you, if you go with Prochenko now. I myself—”

  “What are you talking about?” Miranda said. She reached out for his hand and pulled him toward her against one of the pillars. He flinched.

  But she didn’t know what to say to him, so he continued. “They will be looking for me and my mother, too. Since what happened to that boy—”

  “But you didn’t have anything to do with that!”

  “So what difference does that make? Do you think she’ll take responsibility?” he said, again with something like anger in his face. “This is an opportunity for her.”

  He meant the Baroness Ceausescu. “I made my oath to your father to protect you. Sometimes you make me forget that,” he said and paused.

  Then he went on: “But then other times I understand it—that boy was fourteen years old. He had no business there. What is clear is that I will attract more trouble to you, at least now.”

  Mme. de Graz had lingered out of earshot at the far edge of the little colonnade. Andromeda had stalked down the steps into the dark. Miranda and Peter were alone, as alone as they were going to be. “Sure,” she said in English. “We’ll split up for a few days. Then you’ll come find me.”

  She’d grabbed hold of his hand. But now she realized he was pulling away from her, so she let it go. “You don’t understand,” he said. “If I go or stay, it won’t be what you think. Worrying about me, thinking about me and how we should behave—you don’t have time for that. I don’t have time for it—you want something, but you don’t know what it is.”

  “I do know,” she said, which was a lie.

  He held up his maimed arm, held it toward her. “What I know is what you want makes me forget myself. You want me to be some kind of boy, like that boy Felix Ceausescu or some other boy. You want that because it keeps you sure of what you are—not even what you are, but what you were. Listen to me: I am the Chevalier de Graz, and not someone from your past. I was your father’s aide-de-camp—I gave my word. And that wasn’t to make you happy, but to keep you safe. And bring you safe to your own country, where you could make a place in it—is that what you’ve been thinking about? Or is it about me, my plans? Or not even about me, but about Peter Gross.”

  But at that moment, with the stump of his hand held out, he was the most like Peter Gross to her, the least like Pieter de Graz since she had rediscovered him in Mogosoaia. “This is our future,” he said. He gestured into the darkness with his maimed hand. “You have something you must do and so do I. Together, we are back in the dead past.”

  Miranda felt that like a slap. “You’re right,” she said, although he wasn’t right at all.

  Mme. de Graz stared at her with eyes that were fierce, worried, blind. Now she bent down to fumble with the lantern, turn the wheel to reduce the flame, which glimmered down. Cheeks hot, Miranda stepped back to the brick edge of the gazebo. As if they had been held back by the light, the sounds and odors of the park now came to her, the dawn birds quarrelling. There in the wet mist. Something splashing in the little lake.

  Andromeda whistled from the darkness, her fingers in her mouth. Often in Miranda’s yard she’d stood under the trees and whistled like that, a signal for Miranda to come out and play. A wolf’s whistle, she had called it.

  Peter had to struggle against her because he did have feelings, Miranda decided. Not because he didn’t. So to hell with him; Miranda turned around. Then she ran down the brick steps into the dark. She found Andromeda where the bushes closed over a curving path. It led toward the south entrance of the park, and as they followed it, Andromeda let their shoulders touch.

  Miranda cleared her throat. “Where are we going now?” she asked in a voice that sounded weak and quavering, even or especially to herself.

  Her friend stalked beside her. The patent-leather boots made no noise on the rough slabs. “I think you know her. She said something about it.”

  Which sounded encouraging. But it turned out to be not true, or not very true. In a few minutes they reached the Boulevard Magureanu and the roundabout. Two vehicles were drawn up away from the lamppost, a small fiacre and a larger, covered, four-wheeled carriage with a team of horses and a coachman on the roof. Beside it, a gray-haired woman ranged back and forth, and when she turned her head Miranda recognized Inez de Rougemont.

  III

  A Cancer of Decadence

  16

  Mintbean

  IN THE MIDDLE of the month of Thermidor, the last regiments of Hanovarian Dragoons withdrew from Bucharest for positions farther north in Transylvania.

  In his rented room near the university, Sasha Prochenko lay awake. Beside him, tired out from lovemaking, Elena Bibescu lay asleep, the pillow damp under her lips. Her husband was never home, although his men were everywhere. For many afternoons she had risked disaster by coming here.

  The first hour of the first day she had surrendered to him utterly and completely, though she’d not taken off her clothes. It had become their habit never to undress, and she’d followed his lead in this. Now she lay in her green shift, her underpants around her knees. His trousers were unbuttoned, his shirt pulled up. Otherwise he was fully clothed; he had not taken off his boots.

  And while he thought about the Chevalier and Mme. de Graz, and wondered how they had escaped the net Bocu had laid for them, Prochenko also asked himself whether he would ever reveal to Elena what she must already know. He didn’t want to confuse her. When he was with her, after all, he was a man, a lieutenant of the Ninth Hussars, long used to women and their moods.

  But she knew also—and it was part of what she had first seen in him—that he was more than that, a creature, as she sometimes told him, out of myths and stories. She felt it in the soft white hair that grew over his legs, the unnatural fever of his body. Still he was damaged from the accident at Chiselet.

  Nor did she question him about his past. She accepted the story of his amnesia, even after she had stopped believing it. Maybe this was a strategy to absolve her of guilt; though she often spoke of her own childhood, her anxiety about her brother, she never mentioned her husband. Perhaps that was because he was important these days, his acts and motivations covered in the newspaper.

  Her brown hair was undone, tangled around her face. Prochenko lay with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling, satisfied but still hungry. Was he meant to live like this forever, equidistant between three natures—or rather, never equidistant, but ranging back and forth over a triple line, a triangle? For in the time he had spent with Miranda after the events in Cismigiu Park, another nature had won out. They had been girls again, for comfort’s sake. They had gossiped in English far into the night. Now, thinking in another language, he could hardly conceive of it.

  That first day, leaving the
city gates at dawn, they had traveled until dark along the Pitesti road. In the carriage they had scarcely spoken, only pausing to change horses and go to the bathroom until they reached the terminus of the cog railway. It was not till after midnight that they reached their destination, a little village in the Vulcan Mountains.

  Another black carriage waited for them at the station. It brought them to a hill above the town, a lonely house at the top of a high meadow. It was no mansion, but a simple farmhouse with a wide green roof and black, wooden sides.

  This was the house of Inez de Rougemont, who had not come with them from the city. Nor was she waiting for them at the station or the house, though she must have telegrammed ahead. A farmhand dressed in canvas trousers took them to their room on the second floor under the eaves. He had a candle in his big hand, and when he laid the brass stick on the bedside table, the flame stopped flickering. It swelled and lengthened, revealing yellow plaster walls and some religious icons. Also a plate of cold salad: beets, peas, and strips of beef. Also two glasses and two jugs, one of water, one of stale beer.

  If Miranda hadn’t said much in the carriage or the train, it wasn’t because she didn’t have much to say. Prochenko could see this. Her face had always been transparent to him, since she was a child at Mamaia Castle on the beach. She sat against the bolster and the wooden double-bedstead, picking at the knee of her trousers while Prochenko opened the heavy windows. He swung the shutters out into the night. There was a moon above the wooded ridge. The air was fresh and cool.

  But Miranda took no notice. She sat on the bed gnawing her lips, rubbing her face. She was worried about Clara Brancoveanu and de Graz.

  “Madame de Graz is an awesome woman,” he said, trying to break in onto her thoughts. “At first I thought she was, I don’t know, helpless. The viola lessons, the lodgers in the house. It all seemed a little pathetic. But she’s the center of a political movement that’s been dormant all these years. Underground. This woman—our hostess is a part of it. And your father, years ago.”

  When he spoke in English especially he could feel the girl coming out, her cadences and inflections and vocabulary struggling to be heard. And he was exaggerating out of a sense of irony; Andromeda Bailey had not sounded exactly like this. “She was going to take him south across the river, while you and I came north and west. I told her to go for it.”

  Miranda rubbed her nose. She sat cross-legged on the lumpy bed. She pulled her hair back from her face. How old she looked! Mournful and peevish—older, almost, than he.

  “Why?”

  Prochenko shrugged. “I’m sick of him. Don’t forget, I was with him for a long time. It’s not so good, the three of us. We don’t need him.”

  Miranda looked up. “You said that before. You remember when we were going over Christmas Hill to get my backpack from the school.”

  She didn’t smile, and Prochenko realized with surprise he could not in fact guess what she was thinking. Realized also she looked good sitting there, her dark hair, dark blue eyes. It troubled him obscurely.

  She looked so tired, but even her tiredness suited her. “Do you think they’ll bring us some fresh clothes?” he asked, changing the subject. He was still wearing what he’d worn to the Moskva bar, when he’d seen Elena Bibescu with her husband. His linen, especially, was disgusting.

  “Sure, let’s talk about clothes,” Miranda said, and smiled. “Oh, A., what are we going to do?”

  Standing with his back to the open window, Prochenko considered her. “Have some beer,” he suggested.

  And she almost laughed, which had been his intention. “I would,” she said. “Only I’m not sure about the facilities.”

  He shrugged. “There’s probably an outhouse. And a chamber pot under the bed.”

  Miranda touched her nose. “I hope there’s two of them. I don’t want to share.”

  And that’s how it began, because they had a lot to talk about. They had not talked in a long time. Back home (home?) in Miranda’s bedroom in Miranda’s house, they had used to sit up late listening to music and talking about stupid stuff. In Bucharest, lying on his back next to Elena Bibescu, staring at the ceiling with his hands folded behind his head, Prochenko went over the conversation in his mind, as if he were pulling free one single strand out of a tangled skein, a cord that might lead him forward toward—what? A sense of his own purpose, something he had not had since Chiselet.

  In the farmhouse they sat cross-legged on the straw-filled mattress, drinking tepid beer. And Miranda told him what had happened since she had come to Roumania and even before that, since the night on Christmas Hill. And for Prochenko, who had always tried to look neither forward nor back, and whose memory even in the short term had never been good, and whose sense of his own self now waned and fluctuated constantly like other people’s moods, it was as if she had thrown him a rope while he was drowning. Drowning and not known it—in the farmhouse and again on his bed in Bucharest he seized hold of this timeline of events, adding to it the chaotic scenes of his own experience, one after another. Once someone had told him that the difference between animals and people was just their memories. Animals didn’t have any memories, or a sense of a past that makes the future real.

  So, step by step from Christmas Hill, and he had things to add as well, memories of his time in Turkey and North Africa with de Graz—though Miranda knew more than he did about even this, because she’d spoken to de Graz when they were both locked up together in the People’s Palace. “I’ll tell you this,” she said. “One thing I know for sure. Whatever plan my aunt had for me, if it included running some kind of government, or even being some kind of figurehead—I know now I’m not interested. That was where this always broke down. I couldn’t picture myself—what? Living in some palace on some golden throne? Telling people what to do? And now I’ve seen it from the inside. It’s the Baroness Ceausescu’s thing. Not mine.

  “And yet,” she continued, “I want to do something. This place is such a mess.”

  Prochenko took a mouthful of beer. “Your father and your aunt had different plans for you. De Graz and I—our promise was to keep you safe, that’s all.”

  Miranda frowned. “That’s what he said, but that’s not enough. Aren’t you my friend? Haven’t you always been my friend?”

  Her eyes were pleading, sad. She pushed back a lock of her hair, hooked it behind her protruding ear—a prim gesture that he recognized from long ago. It touched him now. “Of course,” he said, and then, halting and unsure, he told her a little bit about himself. “You may think I am Andromeda, but I’m not.”

  Then he went on to describe all that had happened since Chiselet and the accident. And feelings were never something he’d been good at describing, either as a man or a girl or—God help him—a dog, and so he screwed it up. He didn’t manage to say what he meant. But even so she looked at him gratefully, especially when he used his comic book analogy. She interrupted: “Well, that’s what it’s like for all of us. Peter, me. We’re like mutants. My question is, how much of that is just the same as everybody else?”

  Hmm, a poser, as they’d used to say, Miranda and she. “I feel so guilty about everything,” Miranda went on. “That boy was hurt, killed maybe, for no reason—was that my fault? And my mother—is she even my mother? What does that mean? What’s happening to her now?”

  “Don’t blame yourself for what Nicola Ceausescu does,” Prochenko said, the only advice he could muster under the circumstances. “She is one cold bitch.”

  Now, in Bucharest, in his rented room, lying beside Elena Bibescu as she slept, he translated this comment first into French, then Roumanian, then to English again. It wasn’t right. Prochenko knew about dogs, and the baroness was more a cat than a bitch. A cat in heat, and yet she was still cold.

  Now Prochenko—the amnesiac Domnul Andromedes—became aware of a noise, the sound of something scratching on the window.

  He got up, buttoned his trousers. There was a scratching on the dirty glass. An
d something, he thought later, must have drawn him to it, away from the beautiful girl asleep in his bed. Some instinct for perverse dissatisfaction. Maybe that was what had attracted the creature across Bucharest from the People’s Palace, this creature he saw now, as he stood in his boots next to the window. In the farmhouse in the Vulcan mountains he had stood with his hand on the shutter, feeling the clean wind. He had seen the moonlight on the fields of grass. But in this place he looked into a stinking airshaft, and the glass was streaked with grime.

  At first he thought it was a butterfly or an enormous moth. Its wings were as big as his hands. Looking again, he saw it was a boy, a tiny naked boy. And so he opened the window sash as high as it would go, just a few centimeters, just enough for the creature to crawl through. And when, impetuous, he put his hand out, the creature seized hold of his thumb. Without any preamble it bit him. Half amused, half horrified, he shouted, because his thumb hurt, stung as if by a bee. He shook it back and forth next to his face—“What is it?” cried Elena, sitting up in bed, her shirt pulled up over her breasts. And in the confusion, when Prochenko turned back to the sill, the creature had already drifted toward the ceiling.

  17

  The Baroness Receives a Visitor

  THE GERMANS WITHDREW from Bucharest as a temporary measure, part of an effort to protect the Transylvanian oil fields from the Russian advance, which had not paused or faltered since the crossing of the Bug. But they had left so quickly and with so little warning, it was as if they had disappeared from the streets of the city overnight. No one in Roumania, or at least no one writing in the pages of the Roumania Libera, doubted they would soon be driven back across the border into Hungary.

  When the Baroness Ceausescu returned from the conference in Galati on the Moldavian frontier, the crowd was lined up thee or four deep along the Calea Victoriei. She brought with her a treaty of neutrality signed by the czar himself. In a number of related editorials, the newspapers claimed he must have been seduced or bewitched by her tragic beauty. Nothing else could explain the terms of the agreement, considering the weakness of the Roumanian position. No territory was ceded, no rights curtailed, no restitution paid. The baroness in her carriage neither waved nor smiled, though she’d drawn her black veil away from her face, to reveal her neck and chestnut-colored hair.