The White Tyger

by Paul Park

  As she stood there in the open door, eyes wet, heart pounding, she was aware of something else. She was frightened—an unnatural sensation, and one she scarcely understood. Maybe she mistook it for another emotion just as foreign, but which shared some of the same signs. Oh, the human heart is such a mystery, especially in the moments that leave us vulnerable and uncovered in the dark of night.

  Again she heard the steady, even breath. “Domnul,” she said—“Sir, are you there?”

  She left the food behind her on the threshold. Cold, piled on its plate, the meat gave off an odor. She imagined Andromedes—lying on the bed? Curled up on the floor?—turn his face into the smell. She took a step into the room and then her feet refused to budge.

  How she longed to kneel beside him, push the hair from his hot brow! How she longed to hear something from his lips, a whispered word or phrase that might be different from the insults that had masked, up till now, something more tender, hadn’t they? He had come to her, after all. He had come to search her out. Mintbean had seen to that.

  So they were alike, she and he, a hard exterior, a tender heart. “Please, speak to me,” she said. But he was too shy. And perhaps he was intimidated by the shell the others saw, the beauty they described in their poems and reviews and newspaper articles. She had never been able to see it. And he also, she could tell, had not been taken in. Oh, he had seen through her on the first day.

  Often, though, she had used her body to manipulate others. She admitted it. How could she convince him it was different now, that she had changed? Tonight she had played on the piano, sung her songs—he must have heard her through the walls. Was it enough? What we have is what we are.

  She shrugged her loose robe from her shoulders, then shyly spread her arms apart. Could he see her in the darkness? Did she have an odor he could smell?

  But his breathing didn’t change. After a few minutes she tied up her robe again and left the room. She paused for a moment in the corridor. She did not feel humiliated but fulfilled, a hot flush on her body. If he rejected her now, surely it was no more than she deserved. But she could change; the music had said so. How could she sweeten herself, prepare herself, rededicate herself after all this time?

  She reached to shut the door, and then he spoke. Only the faintest murmur from inside the room: “Let me go.”

  She had not noticed he had a foreign accent or a speech impediment. Almost she couldn’t understand him. She stood on the threshold looking back into the dark. “Domnul, it is not safe for you. The streets aren’t safe right now. Magda de Graz has been arrested, and I know you were a friend of hers—no, not a friend. I could not vouch for that if I were questioned. But you know her.”

  It was true she had an instinct to protect. Inside her heart she felt a glow of something like self-satisfaction.

  Again the odd, queer, malformed voice: “What is this insect that bites me? Let us go.”

  Was Mintbean still in there, bobbing near the ceiling in the dark? Was that the “us” he meant?

  Frightened, she closed the door and locked it. She turned into the gas-lit corridor and leaned her back against the door. She waited for her heartbeat to subside, but it did not. And in a moment, her anxiety had been replaced by a kind of eagerness; she returned to her dressing room with a sense of purpose. A half hour later, in evening clothes, she found herself prowling the palace’s east wing, which was now the headquarters for the Brancoveanu artillery. Colonel Bocu-Bibescu had his offices there, both military and political.

  There also were the chambers of the new secret police, a body of men still uncommissioned and disorganized. Matters of jurisdiction and professional conduct were still unresolved. Even so, they had taken over a row of small suites and receiving rooms on the second floor. It was past midnight when Nicola Ceausescu pushed in through the double doors.

  There was no secretary at the desk. No one challenged her as she walked the hall. But men with shaved heads and wire spectacles moved back and forth between the rooms, dressed in the shapeless uniforms of Bocu’s militia.

  This was the center of the investigation into the assassination of Felix Ceausescu, the young baron, as his name was now configured in the press. It was the center of the effort to track down the conspirators, who included—it had turned out—several journalists, trade unionists, and social figures, friends of Frederick Schenck von Schenck in the old days. The baroness knew what she was looking for. Jean-Baptiste had told her. Magda de Graz had been arrested in Tutrakan. Under escort she’d returned to Bucharest the previous day.

  And the Princess Clara Brancoveanu was already here—a preposterous miscarriage of justice, the baroness admitted to herself. Bocu was quite obviously a monster; this could not be condoned. Her son had loved the princess, who had conforted him the night he died. When she’d stood up, the front of her dress had been wet with blood.

  A man came from the room in front of her, a notebook in his hands. These thugs, these hypocrites, what did they know about a mother’s love? Whatever crimes Mme. de Graz might have committed, surely they were for the sake of her only surviving child? The baroness, also, had committed crimes.

  And now the man came toward her. Nicola Ceausescu could see how young he was—not twenty-five, she guessed. Under her heart she felt a stab of pity and remorse. Felix would never grow into a man.

  At moments in the past few days, whatever else she was doing she found herself watching the same small surreal drama, performed over and over on her imagination’s stage. She smelled the cordite, felt the bruises on her hands. Under the lights, the little figure staggered and went down—God, no.

  “Ma’am, you cannot be here,” said the officer, his eyes strange and wide. With her new sensitivity to fear, the baroness decided he stank of it; he hadn’t shaved. His face was mottled, pale.

  “You must tell me,” she said. “Magda de Graz—is she … well?”

  The man stared at her. “Ma’am, what do you mean?”

  “I mean she is an old lady. She must be treated with respect. In her situation I would welcome any chance to die for my son, protect him with my death—the last gift any woman may offer to her child. Clara Brancoveanu, too. Please, they must not be mistreated.”

  Another man now appeared at one of the right-hand doors. The officer gestured to him, rolled his eyes. Perhaps he didn’t understand her, and she partly didn’t understand herself. The words she’d spoken—“I would welcome any chance to die for my son,” etc.—were a quotation from The White Tyger, one of the final recitatives. Excerpting it here was not entirely to the point.

  The second man was older, dressed in the same uniform without markings. Where had Bocu found these people? Had they worked in the old Siguranta, the secret police from the empress’s time? If so, they looked as if they’d spent the intervening years out of the sunlight, underground. They had the same blotched complexion sprinkled with red spots, though the older one had picked up an additional rash as well. His left cheek was lumpy and discolored, as was that side of his neck. He also seemed frightened, as he stood rubbing his hands together. “Ma’am,” he said, “that is a point of view. I must assure you it is not a question of mistreatment. We are entirely within our protocols. It is true, though, what you say about these old ladies. They are recalcitrant. Prisoner G. has been unwilling to be cooperative, and she is more than seventy years of age.”

  Not frightened, but terrified, the baroness decided. Both of them looked ready to wet themselves with fear. The younger one looked at the older one, and the older one looked anywhere except at her—the floor, the ceiling, past her down the hall. “Bring them to me,” she said. “Magda de Graz and Clara Brancoveanu.”

  “Ma’am, that is not possible. My superior could not allow it. If you would make a request for an interview …”

  “Where is your superior?”

  “Ma’am, he is home in bed. It’s past midnight … .”

  So they had homes, these people. Not burrows, caves, or wormholes, but actual h
ouses—the baroness couldn’t imagine it. Actual beds! “I can only assume you choose to disoblige me because you have something to conceal. As you know, I am a simple woman, with no patience for your protocols, as you describe them … .”

  “Ma’am, it’s not true! I swear to you they are well treated, both of them!”

  What was she doing here? the baroness asked herself. It was true she couldn’t sleep. If she wasn’t here, she’d be moving back and forth between her music room and bedchamber, or else lying on her narrow bed alone with her regrets. Or she’d be sitting on the threshold of the adjoining chamber, her ear pressed against the door. Or she’d be at her piano, lost in the thicket of notes, pursuing and pursued—“Let us go,” Sasha Andromedes had told her. Would he be satisfied with this, her gift to him?

  Oh, but there was more. Always she’d delighted in taking risks. Always she had followed her instincts. If she wasn’t careful now, Colonel Bocu would carry off the prize. Because of his militia and his presence in the capital, he’d been well placed to take advantage of the potato-eaters’ sudden departure. This was how he’d paid her, when she’d invited him to restore order. Already he had taken over this whole section of the People’s Palace, while she kept to her own apartment—she, the white tyger of Roumania, who would not stand idle while foreign tyranny was superseded by another type, no less destructive for being native-grown. How dare these fellows use the tragic, accidental death of her only son to tighten their grip on power, or (as she’d expressed it in another recitative) on the throat of the defenseless, naked body of Great Roumania!

  And if this was not a meaningful or prudent place to confront Bocu and the others, since when had she ever valued prudence, or meaning either? Every artist knew the truth, that meaning was a trap and a manipulation. Everything of importance, by which she meant the symbolic and emotional pattern of events, hid under the surface. In that hidden landscape she was powerful, though in the surface world she was an ordinary, fallible, and defenseless woman, as everybody knew.

  Despite their terror, she saw she could get nothing from these men, these grave-robbers and ghouls, who themselves seemed to have only just recently issued from their crypts. Forever they’d defer and defer, hands trembling, knees knocking in their shapeless trousers. And so she used some of her woman’s charm, one of her husband’s spells that she had altered to suit herself in the Strada Spatarul, when she’d had Kevin Markasev to play with and work against his will—oh, God, these names, these ghosts, how they tormented her! That, too, had been an accident.

  She wore a shawl over her shoulders and her gown. But she reached out with her arms uncovered, and with her ink-stained hands she touched the grave-robbers on their pasty foreheads and their eyes, one after another, the older man first. They shrank against the painted wallpaper. These had been elegant apartments once, now disfigured by dirty wooden desks and iron beds. Oh, she would preserve Roumania from this, the history of her long-suffering country.

  These men had the spirits of blind worms, or maggots, or snakes that lie in darkness. She touched their mouths and pushed them back against the wall. Always you thought progress might be made, or that the next success would be the last success required. But there was no end to these people, a tide of derelict humanity, and she was like a boat tossed on its surface until she sank. And perhaps it was the effort of conjuring, but now suddenly she felt exhausted with the struggle. Ugly, worthless men like this, one day they would vanquish her.

  This was not the only time she’d had such a feeling. Colonel Bocu’s men inspired it these days.

  “I am interested in all these prisoners,” she murmured.

  The older policeman shook his head, a slow heavy wagging that cost him a great deal. Impatient, with her hand outstretched, the baroness dug into him.

  Once again she imagined letting go, leaving all this, turning her back, staggering out through the double doors, calling for Jean-Baptiste and her small valise, abandoning this life. There were two kinds of escape, two that she’d imagined and considered. One was from the final act of Florio Lucian’s Medea, a version of which she was scheduled to perform at the old Ambassadors the following night. Drawn by dragons, a magical chariot appears, which pulls the queen away from the carnage and the havoc on the stage—where? To Geneva, perhaps, a little house on the lake.

  But there was also Klaus Israel’s Cleopatra, her first critical and popular success, and the performance that had started all this. Always in a moment she could find herself there behind the smoking footlights, a young girl from the country and the streets of Bucharest, standing naked and exposed before the world, the little live snake clasped in her hands, flickering its tongue against her breast. And in the front row the old General Ceausescu, not yet a baron, not yet deputy prime minister. As she stared at his bleached, skull-like face, he leaned to whisper something to his companion, Prince Frederick Schenck von Schenck, hero of Havsa and all that.

  Still in her future were Marcus Antony and Actium, or else already in her past. But the snake was always there, bumping its nose against her nipple; she could always feel it. Always, always, always it was possible to escape that way. Afterwards, perhaps, there’d be another journey and a solution to at least one of several mysteries, a partial solution, maybe. Conjurers and alchemists grew into crones and skeletons just scratching around the edges of these things. But there was a quicker way.

  She had learned many things in the past five years, studying her husband’s books in the People’s Palace, perfecting or at least improving various techniques. Even a year before, she could not have coerced these men like this, with all their will opposed to her. The older man had slumped down the floor. He had slid down with his back against the wallpaper and rose-colored wainscoting without even leaving a trail or a stain. He sat on the floor with his legs splayed, his eyes big and unseeing while the younger one pleaded and begged. “Please ma’am, they’re all asleep. It’s us that keeps them safe and the floors clean. They don’t suffer while we’re here, you’ll see. Even in the daytime it’s just questions, I swear. Whatever you heard, it’s not true. We would never hurt a woman—”

  Then he was quiet, his tongue straining from his open mouth. “It’s like rotten wood,” the baroness reflected, now examining his voided face. “You just push and push, and it gives way under your hand. There’s no source for it, no place where you find the source.”

  Still she pushed, and the man fell. And the baroness walked down the hall, opening the doors. They were not locked, which surprised her. From the doorways she could see the ugly new furniture and the gilded interiors full of shadows.

  UPON REFLECTION, RADU Luckacz had not gone to Rimnicu on the night train. He had not gone to police headquarters to recruit an escort, as the baroness had demanded. Instead, he had chosen to disobey her. No, it had not felt like a choice.

  Instead, cut off from his work or his usual pursuits, he had sat drinking chocolate in a late-night café near the station. He had read a foreign newspaper. Several times he had blotted his lips with his pocket handkerchief. Later still, fists in his pockets, he had walked the streets of the old city.

  Not long before, he might have visited the steward, Jean-Baptiste, in his room. He might have asked him for a game of chess, a bowl of soup. Or he would have haunted the corridors of the People’s Palace. Those doors were closed to him now, he thought. And so, exhausted after a circuit of small streets that had seemed both methodical and aimless, he found his way back to his own house in the Floreasca.

  It was on a street of modest houses. Early, before dawn, he unlocked the door and stood in the hall, listening to the sleeping house.

  Until recently, his salary had been paid by the German government on the fifteenth of every month, with regular increases. His wife had always made do, despite some grumblings. It was because she was proud of his reputation for honesty, his steadfast rejection of any opportunity to enrich himself. This included all transactions outside his official duties, even ones that weren�
��t illegal. He had always been precise about this.

  Nor did he have cause to regret it now, among his other regrets as he stood in his comfortable hall, decorated with small watercolors of the Hungarian countryside, inherited from his wife’s family. His prospects were uncertain now, of course, but he had money put by.

  Now he revisited and summarized the musings that had accompanied his walk: It was likely, or at least possible, that Colonel Bocu would require a man of his integrity and experience to run or at least manage the police department. No doubt the actual chief would be a political functionary. That was to be expected. But he might need an assistant or a deputy assistant who knew what was what.

  Light came through the colored glass panes in the stairwell, shined on the dark varnished woodwork, which did not show the dirt. Luckacz stood on the coiled rug and removed his overcoat, his hat. He listened to Viorica, the housekeeper, stirring in the kitchen, and then a door opened up above. “Radu, is that you?”

  Ibolya was on the stairs, a big woman with a big middle and coarse gray hair that was braided down her back. Wisps of it protruded from her nightcap. She had not dressed for the day.

  She stood on the landing above him, her fat hand on the post.

  For years now he had carried a secret that had separated them, driven him from the house. He’d been so accustomed to the burden, even now he wondered if he could set it down. But at moments even in these past five years—at dinner, say, or with his daughter in the room—he had been able to see her clearly, laughing at some joke, her teeth still good in her head, her black eyes shining.

  “I’ve come back,” he said.

  “I’ve been so frightened. There was gunfire last night on the Promenade. You could hear it from the roof. Broken windows in the shops.”