by Paul Park
But the humor of the city was kept somber by an official act of mourning and the state funeral of Felix Ceausescu, the baroness’s only child. But in certain neighborhoods all that—the black flags, the suggested curfew—was like a lid on a boiling pot, and there were fireworks and public demonstrations.
In other places these official displays of grief seemed more appropriate. The political transition was defined by public suffering as much as private celebration. When, during the summer festival, black-robed priests carried the centuries-old sarcophagus of Miranda Brancoveanu across the city, their procession was augmented by many hundreds of collaborators, shuffling with their hands behind their backs. By tradition the parade took place at midnight, five kilometers from the Temple of the Sacred Body to the Temple of the Sacred Mind, and in other years it had been sparsely attended. But now the streets were full of people watching in silence as the rich men staggered by, the editors of the Evenimentul Zilei, the heads of all the various bureaucracies, the senators and puppet deputies, who had been meeting all these years in Satu Mare under German auspices.
And if anyone grumbled that until a month before, Nicola Ceausescu had benefited from the occupation more than anyone, he did so privately. Her supporters, identified now by enamel collar buttons in the shape of a tyger’s head, made pamphlets of her anti-German speeches. It was impossible to criticize a woman who had suffered so much for her country—the death of her only son, shot down by a dangerous assassin who was still at large, though the police were searching house to house.
The assassin had escaped from police custody and fled south toward the Turkish frontier, abetted by a hidden network of counterrevolutionaries and collaborators. In all towns, villages, and cities now controlled either by the army or Colonel Bocu’s militiamen, these accusations—complicity with the Germans or involvement in the murder of Felix Ceausescu—were sufficient to transform the nation. Bankers and factory owners were arrested or dismissed.
All this proceeded rapidly. Naive observers, caught up in an optimistic frenzy, might have supposed they were participating in a spontaneous revolution, made possible by the defeat of the German army. But these were plans of many years, rooted in darkness, now brought violently into fruition by a new nexus of power, a marriage of convenience between Nicola Ceausescu and Colonel Victor Bocu, who despised each other. Radu Luckacz was the link between them, the former chief of the metropolitan police.
And the center of this tempest of activity was the People’s Palace, the apartments of Nicola Ceausescu overlooking the Piata Revolutiei. In these hot summer afternoons after her return from Galati, the baroness hardly stirred from her inner bedchamber except to give some speech or issue some pronouncement. She was in mourning for her son, whose death was now conflated in her mind with the death of Kevin Markasev. If her sorrow was profound, her anger had no limit, and was directed inward to herself as well as outward to the world, according to her unhappy custom. This much was true no matter how she squirmed: She had hired a murderer to beat Kevin Markasev to death in his rented room. And from the balcony overlooking the Mycenaean Gate she had fired the fatal shot with Prince Frederick’s revolver, before it had kicked out of her hands. Unconvinced by the efficiency of the police, unconvinced that Radu Luckacz could help her, she had reloaded and reset the antique gun, switching the mechanism to its ordinary use.
But everything had been by accident! She had no skill or even competence to shoot a man at such a distance, let alone a child. No, the bullet must have come from the Chevalier de Graz, whose prowess in these matters was notorious. Or at least he had invented the moral circumstances for the crime. And Miranda Popescu had dragged the boy downstairs when he was safe in bed. It was not possible for a mother to stand by and watch her son abducted. Already she had done that once, when Theodore von Geiss had stolen him away to Ratisbon.
De Graz, Popescu, and one other who had been with Markasev in his upstairs room the day he’d died—oh, how that idiotic monster Vladimir O’Brien had tricked her, made a fool of her, deliberately misunderstood her when she’d given him two thousand marks to buy the boy a train ticket anywhere he wanted—out of the country, preferably—with more money to come. She had never cared about money. All she had ever cared about was the safety of these boys who had abandoned her. Who had been so eager to escape her.
All she had ever cared about were her two boys. Ah, God—no doubt that man Andromedes or Prochenko had played a part in what had happened. And Popescu, and de Graz. No doubt the three of them had conspired together in these murders, resolved to destroy her at the moment of her greatest triumph, turn her life into a desert of bitterness and regret. No doubt, finally, they did not act alone in this, but as emissaries from a land of darkness, where Aegypta Schenck von Schenck sat nursing real and imagined slights.
Aegypta Schenck, and the old baron also, the red pig of Cluj. She had smelled him from the balcony—the ghost of her dead husband. Doubtless he had guided her hand, guided the bullet that had killed their son.
Because of the lie she’d told him; in the middle of the afternoon Nicola Ceausescu lay motionless in bed, en deshabille. Of these five enemies the one she thought about the most had harmed her least of all. Unless you could count, as she did, casual insults in a voice of studied disdain. What right had he or any man to call her these things—dog excrement, whore? Oh, he had seen into her heart of hearts. Always she had hated dogs.
But she would have her revenge. Mintbean would find him. Abscess had worked quickly, but Mintbean was more sure. The baroness had released love and death into the world, and they had visited her first of all. Perhaps she could have predicted that. Now already she had paid the price of this last piece of conjuring. The benefit was yet to come.
So she was not surprised when Sasha Prochenko called on her. She was gratified and frightened, but not surprised. Except for Jean-Baptiste, all the previous stewards and footmen had been arrested or had disappeared. The reception rooms on the first floor swarmed with militiamen, and everything was in chaos there. Clara Brancoveanu had been taken to a new apartment in the palace’s east wing. Sometimes she sent plaintive messages that begged permission to reopen her husband’s summer residence on Mamaia beach—where was the money for such things? It was a mystery to the baroness how meals were produced for her every morning and evening—the sardines and herring and eels packed in brine that she ate now obsessively. It was a mystery how her chamber pot was emptied, how her clothes were cleared away and brought back clean and fresh.
And if these things were magic, Jean-Baptiste was the conjuror, for he produced them out of his hands. She had forgiven him everything; who was she to deny forgiveness? With relief she saw that he had settled in immediately to his informal way of talking. He and Luckacz were her only friends among all these swaggering new people, bullies under the command of Colonel Beau-cul. It was Jean-Baptiste who brought her the news that Domnul Andromedes had arrived. He was waiting for her in the amber gallery.
“You might as well put some clothes on,” said the steward from outside her room. “No, the blue is better. And remember about Domnul Luckacz, who is coming later.”
Flustered, she turned again to her closet, pulled the clothes down from their padded hangers, though her hands were shaking. What was she, a child? To calm herself, she put her hands on her hips and stared at herself in the long mirror set into the door of the armoire. There she was. Everything was in place, and as good as it ever was. She herself had never understood what the commotion was about.
Now, reinforced, she chose her wardrobe carefully, like a soldier going into battle. Despite the heat she selected many layers of armor—garters and silk stockings, a petticoat, even a corset that laced up the front. And after much consideration she selected—let him wait, the bastard—a virginal light blue with a cream-colored lace trim around her neck and sleeves.
It had not been her custom for many years to wear jewelry or paint her face. But now in a fit of nervousness she sat down at her ta
ble with her dress unbuttoned to her waist, and drew out her box of colors and powders. Later she wrapped a strand of platinum and marcasite around her neck, an intricate pattern of interlocking flowers. But she wore nothing on her wrists.
“I’ll see if he’s still here,” commented Jean-Baptiste from beyond the threshold, where he stood with his eyes turned away. “I believe he had an appointment in the new year.”
She laughed; she was ready. She hooked and buttoned herself up. Unaccustomed to the constraint, she could feel her heart throbbing as if it were outside of her body, caught between her breasts for all the world to see. What was she afraid of? She was an important woman, after all.
Preceding Jean-Baptiste down the lapis staircase, she sometimes had to pause to remind herself, build herself up, make a list of her accomplishments: an artist famous throughout Europe. And now the white tyger of Roumania, as everybody called her—a title she had not been born to or inherited. These aristocratic dispensations, all that was in the past. You were what you made yourself, a savior, a liberator, a queen.
But it all disappeared when Jean-Baptiste left her at the entrance to the amber gallery—the czar had not even requested that to be dismantled or returned, though it had been the jewel of the Winter Palace in Petersburg in the old days. The walls, ceiling, even the tiles were cut from polished sheets of amber. Anything else got lost in the strange patterns. No, there he was, standing by the window.
She had prepared herself, but he had not. He looked drunk or ill. Mintbean had found him and punished him, she reminded herself—punished him for his disdain. And though there was justice in that and even an amount of pleasure, still she could not but pity him as he stood slack-jawed and slovenly, unshaved, his hair lank and crusted around his beautiful face. As she approached, she was surprised by how hairy he was. She had not supposed she’d be attracted to hairy men.
Nor had she supposed that personal attraction, a new experience for her, would feel like this. How could she not have cherished the qualities that made her strong? Once in a review of a performance in Paris she had read about her terrifying solitude (“solitude effrayante”) even on a crowded stage.
Sometimes she’d tried to imagine what it might be like to be like other people, to have had a conventional childhood or to possess an ordinary array of characteristics and desires. But she’d not imagined they would cause her suffering, as now. Love and affection, she’d supposed them to be comforts. The heels of her shoes scraped the surface of the amber tiles, liberating a peculiar waxy smell—really, she should have chosen something else to wear. She felt a mixture of unpleasant sensations: pity, guilt, triumph, and disgust. Was this what Jason had engendered in Medea, her greatest role? Yes, she supposed it was. How interesting to feel it or something like it after all these years, as well as something physical she couldn’t identify, a nervousness, an anxiety, a humid itchy feeling on her most private skin, though of course she was overdressed for the heat of the day, even in the coolest chamber in the palace.
Oh, he was in pain, and her woman’s heart went out to him. No doubt he felt some version of what she was feeling. She could see the sweat on his forehead and his cheeks. “Qu’est-ce que vous avez foutu?” he said—what have you done?
His linen clothes were misbuttoned, his cuffs and sleeves streaked with dirt. His shirt was open at the neck. His thin, pale, long, dark lips were open, revealing teeth that seemed too big and too numerous, and he licked them constantly with his thick tongue. As she approached she could smell the sweat on him. Why was it that she longed to take him in her arms? Was it because she wanted to comfort him, as she imagined she might have comforted Markasev and Felix when they had evil dreams or fevers in the night? No, something else.
“You grotesque whore, what have you done to me?” He staggered toward her with his arm stretched out as if he meant to strike her. His voice was harsh and indistinct, as if his mouth was the wrong shape for the words.
He slipped and fell forward, and she opened her arms. But his long, sharp fingernails clutched at the front of her dress, breaking the platinum chain and tearing the lace material—she didn’t care. She felt his nails on her skin. He dug under the top of her corset and pulled her onto the floor, where she embraced him in a spasm of misplaced surrender—he was the weak one, after all. He was the one who needed comfort and healing. His skin was burning wet. “Bitch,” he whispered next to her ear, and then continued in a mixture of Roumanian, English, French—“What have you done? What was in those crates on the Hephaestion? God, you have poisoned me.”
The Hephaestion? He didn’t know the half of it. Maybe he did; she looked up and there was Mintbean drifting against the ceiling, his transparent wings buffeted by drafts and currents only he could feel.
A SHORT WHILE later Radu Luckacz stood at the doorway to the baroness’s apartment on the upper floor, waiting to come in. He had an appointment. He listened for the sound of the piano, or else a whispered murmur when he drummed his fingertips against the door, which was ajar.
But he heard nothing. Lately, in mourning, the baroness had taken to her bed. Was it possible she was asleep? He cleared his throat—“Madam!”—but he heard nothing.
He touched the tortoiseshell buttons of his gray suit, then rubbed distractedly at his bald scalp. He was concerned for the baroness’s safety, needless to say. His heart ached for her.
On the night when Felix Ceausescu had been murdered, Radu Luckacz had been the one to bring the terrible news, though in fact she had seen everything from the balcony overlooking the Mycenaean Gate. But she had come in through the long window and stood with her back against the glass, Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck’s revolver at her feet—too late she had snatched it up and dropped it. And her eyes were staring as she uttered little moans. She knelt to retrieve the gun when he started to speak, hid her face in her hands, and for long moments he debated what to do. Should he attempt to comfort her? Lift her up? Take her in his arms? Twenty minutes earlier he had contemplated the same actions in a different context—all that was ruined now, unthinkable. The mood was irrevocably broken. Soon he had left her to go see if he could find a trace of the criminals who had absconded.
Ah, how bitter to imagine what she might have surrendered to him there in the darkness before dawn, or else later in her room, this room! He remembered the clues she’d given him, her cigarette next to his hand. Since then of course he’d had no opportunity, found no appropriate moment to show or demonstrate his feelings. Indeed he felt guilty even to imagine the possibility now, when the baroness was so vulnerable, so prostrate with grief. Instead he had dedicated himself to chasing after Miranda Popescu and the Chevalier de Graz. The girl’s trail had come to an end in Cismigiu Park, though he and Bocu had made progress with the mother and her son.
But when he thought about it later and tried to recall the clues and language of her body, the revolver troubled him. Why had she brought a firearm to a romantic assignation? Ah God, sometimes he suspected he had sold his soul to the devil and had not even been paid the pittance it was worth, not yet.
It was the same revolver he could see through the partially open door, displayed on the lid of the piano. He felt a sudden, terrible despair—was it possible the baroness had hurt herself, punished herself for what had happened? Surely she was expecting him. Perhaps she lay undressed, sedated; he knocked against the door and pushed it open. No one.
But the gun was there, the long, old-fashioned revolver with the octagonal barrel and the plain bone handle. He seized it up, broke it open. There was one spent shell. The other bullets, made of a curious atypical metal, spilled across the polished wood.
Was it silver? Harder than lead, in any case. He tested a bullet with his thumbnail, then dropped it. And with the empty gun in his hand he crossed behind the piano to the threshold of the inner room and cleared his throat again. “Ma’am!”
Still nothing, and he crossed the threshold. There was the virginal iron bedstead where she slept, the sheets in
wild disorder, the pillows on the floor. Disgusted with himself, he bent to pick up one of the pillows and buried his face in it, sucked in the smells, a potent, dizzying stew.
“Excuse me.”
It was Jean-Baptiste. He stood in the doorway. Radu Luckacz dropped the pillow and turned toward him, the empty gun held out.
Since the night on the balcony he had not known what to say to his friend, if that’s what he was, what he had been—fellow sufferer, perhaps. Of course he’d questioned him about the hired coach he had taken to Cismigiu. De Graz had threatened him, pressed a gun against his forehead, he had claimed. It was a lie, wasn’t it a lie?
What was the fellow doing there in the first place, at the Mycenaean Gate? Even now, was he holding something back? But the baroness had forgiven him, had brushed away the subject when Luckacz mentioned it. “He would never hurt me,” she had murmured brokenhearted, in tears. “Don’t take him away from me.” So there was nothing further to be said or done.
“Under the circumstances I was apprehensive that she might be ill,” he said, his voice in his own ears always striving to a new level of ugliness. Then why was he carrying the gun? He returned to the antechamber and laid it where it had been on the piano. “We had an appointment,” he went on, observing for the first time the vanity table with its pots and brushes, the clothes laid out. Was this for him?
“I told her.”
“It is important that she must be reapprised of …”
Luckacz’s voice drifted away. The air was thick and hard to breathe. “Open a window,” he said shortly. “My God—”