A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1: The Red Pig Comes to Berkshire County

  1. Peter

  2. Andromeda

  3. Miranda

  Part 2: The Essential History

  4. Nicola Ceausescu

  5. The Attack at the Ford

  6. A Second Assault

  7. Princess Aegypta

  8. The Wild Men

  9. Prisoners

  10. Tara Mortilor

  Part 3: The Invasion

  11. Transformations

  12. The Wendigo

  13. Dr. Theodore

  Teaser

  Part 1: Catching up

  1. The Hoosick River

  Also by Paul Park

  Praise for Paul Park and A Princess of Roumania

  Copyright

  THIS BOOK IS FOR MY FRIEND

  JIM CHARBONNET, WHO WAS GOING TO HELP ME WITH THE ENDING.

  Comment

  Oh life is a glorious cycle of song,

  A medley of extemporanea;

  And love is a thing that can never go wrong:

  And I am Marie of Roumania.

  —Dorothy Parker

  1

  The Red Pig Comes to Berkshire County

  1

  Peter

  IN EARLY AUGUST, after her best friend, Andromeda, had gone to Europe, Miranda met a boy in the woods. She knew who he was. His name was Peter Gross. They had no friends in common, though their high school was a small one. Miranda was a good student, popular and well liked. Peter Gross was none of those things.

  He had curly brown hair, crooked teeth, tanned skin. Because of a birth defect, he was missing his right hand, most of his right forearm. Miranda had been aware of him for years. But she spoke to him for the first time at the ice house, which was a ruined cottage next to a little stone dam in a few wooded acres between the college and the golf course.

  It was a place she visited occasionally, a small stone building half hidden in the oleander bushes. It had a wooden roof that had fallen in. She used to go there to read books, to be alone, and at first she was irritated when she saw him in her secret place. Almost she crept back to her bike and rode away. Then she thought she’d wait for him to leave. Then she got interested in watching him; he had built a weir under the dam with a piece of plywood to make a larger pool. He had made a sluice gate for the water to escape, and he squatted on the dam to catch minnows and frogs. His hand was quick in the water.

  She stood under the willow trees while he caught a frog and let it go. After a few minutes she could tell by a kind of stiffness in his shoulders that he was aware she was watching him. Then she was too embarrassed not to go and sit beside him and scratch her sunburned legs. She thought he might be grateful for some companionship. He probably didn’t know many people. But he was intent on the water and he scarcely looked up.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  What did they talk about that first time? Later she couldn’t remember. Miranda had read in the newspaper about his mother’s death maybe a year before. Andromeda had mentioned something about it, too—Peter’s mother had been a secretary in the English department at the college, where everyone’s parents worked, and where Stanley taught astronomy.

  Knowing about her death made Peter easier to talk to for some reason, although Miranda felt she had to tread lightly when she mentioned her own family. That summer she was having some problems at home. One afternoon in the middle of the month, she showed up at the ice house a little late. Everything she ever did was wrong, she said, and there was no part of her life that Rachel didn’t want to supervise. She had no privacy. She’d got home and her shoes were lined up under the bed, even though she’d asked Rachel not to go into her room. Worse than that, the computer was on, though she was almost sure she hadn’t touched it. Maybe she had. It didn’t matter. She’d have to change her passwords.

  Sitting on the dam, pulling at a loose piece of rubber on her sneaker, she said, “I feel as though my life isn’t my life. My house isn’t my house, and my parents aren’t my parents. Which they’re not, of course.”

  Peter was chewing on a long piece of grass, a habit of his. “What do you mean?”

  She sat cross-legged and examined a scratch on her knee. “I guess when Rachel and I fight, sometimes I look at her and think, ‘You’re not my real mother. My real mother is somewhere in Romania.’”

  “Why Romania?”

  “Because that’s where she is.” And then she told him about having been adopted from the orphanage in Constanta. She kicked her foot over the edge of the dam. “It’s on the Black Sea. Have you heard of it?”

  Peter shrugged. The stream under the dam was almost dry. Not much wider than a snake, it slipped back and forth over a bed of dry mud.

  “I know a poem about Romania.”

  His mind was full of scraps of poetry that his mother had taught him. Already he had given her some recitations. “‘Oh, life is a marvelous cycle of song,’” he now quoted, and then a few lines more.

  This was very annoying, even though she found herself smiling. “Hey, shut up,” she said, because he wasn’t taking her seriously. “Sometimes I feel like crying the whole time,” she said, which was an exaggeration.

  Peter was looking up the slope on the other side of the stream, squinting, not paying attention, it seemed like. Now he turned toward her. He was interested in things like tears or anger, she thought.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Sometimes it’s just that word. Romania. It makes my stomach turn.”

  She was deeper into the conversation than she wanted. She had only planned to tell him about some of these things. But now she felt she had to continue, because of the stupid poem. “I was three years old. I have these pictures in my mind, but I can’t tell what’s real, what’s made up. There’s a woman I call my aunt. There’s a journey on a train. There’s a man and he’s talking to me, trying to make me do something I don’t want. There’s a cottage with a tin roof, and he’s talking to me from the terrace above the beach. There’s a stone castle with a steeple—it’s like a postcard in my mind. There’s a little room overlooking the sea.”

  Rachel and Stanley had found her in Constanta. They’d told her how her family had disappeared during the uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator who had destroyed her country. But then who was the woman in the picture? She had coarse skin, gray hair, dark eyes. Her hair was pinned up on the top of her head, and she was dressed with great elegance in furs. It was wintertime and she looked cold. But the smile on her frosted lips was full of love.

  “God damn it,” Miranda said.

  Peter had wedged the stem of grass between his two front teeth, and he was smiling. “Go on,” he said.

  “God damn you.” Miranda blushed. To her surprise, her face was hot, and some tears were moving down her cheeks. Was this a real emotion? She couldn’t tell.

  Peter looked away. “I’m not sure I believe you,” he said. “I think you’re trying to make a fool of me.”

  “What do you me
an?”

  “Everyone feels as if they’re from some foreign place. Or another planet. That doesn’t mean they are.”

  She scratched her nose. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess you’re right.”

  A few minutes before, she had pretended to be angrier than she was. But now she was furious and she didn’t show it. Who was Peter Gross to condescend to her? Though he was older, he’d never acted like it before.

  She looked down the stream, where it disappeared in a tangle of broken willows. She didn’t look at him, though she could tell he was watching her. Then she stood up. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Rachel wants to take me shopping before school starts.”

  He had a piece of grass stuck through his teeth. “I’m sorry if I offended you,” he said.

  “Hey, no problem. You’re right.”

  “Will you be here tomorrow?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got some things to do.”

  Though she stood for a while scuffing her feet, she was anxious to go. And when she bicycled away, up the dirt road behind the grounds department shed, she wondered why she should ever come back, which made her sad. She didn’t need to prove anything to Peter Gross.

  But maybe she did, because the next day she snuck into her parents’ room and found the box of her Romanian things on the top shelf of the closet. In the afternoon she loaded them into her leather backpack and rode out to the ice house.

  For a minute or so, she and Peter sat listening to a bunch of birds. Then: “Let’s see,” he said. She took her time. The house had a wide stone step, and the first thing she did was brush it clean with the edge of her palm. Then she opened her backpack and took out a fringed, gray velvet shawl, which she unfolded and laid over the stone step. Next she took out a manila envelope and a beaded black purse. The envelope contained a leather-bound book with gilt-edged pages, very thin, almost transparent.

  “Onionskin,” she told him.

  There’d been a time in her life when she’d looked at this stuff almost every day. But it was years now since she’d touched it. Still, she found she remembered everything as she opened the book, the mysterious foreign words, the penciled inscription opposite the frontispiece—a hand-colored, photographic portrait of Carol I, king of Romania. His hawk-faced, bearded profile was extremely clear. You could see the grizzled hair along his neck.

  “It’s called The Essential History,” she said. “But I can’t read Romanian. Stanley says that when they found me in the orphanage, I could barely speak. I was still in a crib. When I go to college, I’ll learn it all again.”

  She placed the book carefully on the gray velvet. She allowed it to open to where the marker was, a ribbon maybe halfway through. Then she was drawing her things one by one out of the beaded purse. Most were wrapped in Kleenex, and she was uncovering them and laying them out according to her remembered ritual. First, a silver cigarette lighter, decorated and engraved with the initials FS under a small crown. Second, a silver locket on a silver chain. Opened, it revealed two sepia faces, a woman’s and a child’s.

  Third, fourth, fifth, and sixth were all coins—big, solid, heavy, ancient, gold. And then a smaller silver one, which Stanley once had managed to identify in a book from the library. It was a Greek drachma, they’d decided, two thousand years old, and stamped with the head of Alexander the Great.

  Romania had been conquered by the Romans in the second century. But even before that, Constanta had been a Greek town. As Miranda unwrapped the last of her things, she caught a remnant of a fantasy from long ago when she was small, an image of herself as a princess standing on the shore of the Black Sea, the warm water lapping the toes of her riding boots. From the terrace of the castle she had walked down to the beach. Someone was above her on the parapet—was it that man de Graz? What was he afraid of? Why was he always watching her?

  As always, she had saved the best for last. Inside the nest of Kleenex was a bracelet of eleven gold beads, each in the shape of a tiger’s head. And on the flat clasp was a circle of tiny letters, indecipherable even under the strongest magnifying glass, which Stanley had brought back for her from the lab.

  She ran the beads through her fingers. Each one was different. She imagined they were even older than the silver coin. Once on a trip to Washington, D.C., Rachel had taken her to a museum where they had seen an exhibition of Scythian ornaments from the Black Sea. There was a pair of gold earrings that had reminded them of her bracelet, though they were not as fine.

  Miranda looked up. Through the open door of the ice house she could see the pit in the middle of the stone floor. Saplings grew from it. There were no bugs, no mosquitoes. There was no wind. The light fell down in spears through the still leaves. Miranda held the bracelet around her wrist. It glistened in the light.

  Peter smiled. He pulled the grass out of his teeth. “Oh, life is a marvelous cycle of song,” he said,

  “Of wonderful extemporanea.

  And love is a thing that can never go wrong,

  And I am the Queen of Romania.”

  He’d recited this the day before to tease her with the last line. But she realized now he wasn’t making fun. And she knew the definition of “extemporanea” because she’d looked it up the night before: “unprepared, unrehearsed,” which didn’t sound so wonderful to her. She was the kind of person who had nightmares about missed assignments and arriving at school in her underwear. The poem was by a woman named Dorothy Parker, he now claimed, when she accused him of having made it up.

  She knew how much his poems meant to him. He had learned them from his mother, which made them like the things in Miranda’s pack, gifts from a vanished past. So in that way they were similar, she thought. Now he sat on the stone lip of the dam, squinting into the shafts of light. With his left hand he scratched the stump of his right forearm. It often seemed to itch.

  Though he was only a grade ahead, he was almost two years older than she. He’d never been friendly with her, even in elementary school. Rachel disliked him because he wasn’t “college material,” as she said, a phrase that implied a lot without actually meaning anything.

  Now he got up. “Come on,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  He waited while she wrapped up her things and put them away. Then he turned and jumped onto the stone dam over the stream. He knew all the little paths through the woods and across people’s properties. Those two weeks he’d shown her some of them. Some were “deer paths,” as he described them, and some, Miranda suspected, were maintained by him alone. Always they provided the fastest, most direct, most secret routes to anywhere. But when she got home from following him, she had to pick the burrs out of her clothes and hair.

  They climbed uphill through the woods and then over the golf course. They crossed the road in front of the art museum, but then immediately took to the trees, circling around until they reached the parking lot. They climbed over the split-rail fence and down the hill into the deeper, scratchier woods. Most years there’d been a swamp back here. Now it was dry.

  “Look at this,” said Peter.

  Under a bush, next to the rotted trunk of a tree, were the droppings of some animal. “Look here,” said Peter, showing her where the bark of the tree had been rubbed away. “What do you think this is?”

  That summer there had been sightings of strange creatures in Berkshire County. People said it was because of the dry weather, because there was no water in the hills. Sometimes in the paper Miranda had seen grainy photographs of lynxes and bears.

  “Let’s wait,” said Peter, sitting down on the rotten log.

  He fished his harmonica out of his back pocket and rubbed it on his jeans. This was another habit of his. It looked so grown-up and professional, the way he rubbed the battered metal till it shone. The first time she had watched him, she had hoped to be impressed. She would have been impressed by anything, even one song she recognized, no matter how lamely played. But always he just fooled around, and th
at was what he was doing now. He held the harmonica in his left hand, then cupped it in his right forearm where the stump ended in some strange, small knobs—vestigial fingers, she supposed. He breathed lightly into the aperture and made soft, papery noises.

  Miranda would be late for supper. The sun was going down. She stood with her backpack over her shoulder, and she was going to tell Peter that she really had to go, when he lifted his mouth from the harmonica and said, “This was my mother’s favorite place on this hill. She used to come up here to gather cow flops for her garden. It’s not much now, but you should see it in springtime. This whole place is carpeted in blue flowers.”

  She looked around. Now, as if his mother had touched it, she could see it was a pretty place, a little dell in the middle of the bushes where some big trees grew up straight. Though she wasn’t even angry anymore, she could tell he was trying to make amends and give her something. “I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Pretending not to believe you. Romania—it sounded so odd.”

  “That’s okay.”

  He made a few more silly sounds from his harmonica. Then, “I want to know,” he said. “Can you describe it?”

  “What?”

  “The postcard. The castle on the beach.”

  She closed her eyes. “It’s not really a castle,” she said after a little while. “It’s small. But the walls are made of stone, and the windows are narrow. The roofs are steep and a green color like old copper. There’s a tower with a spire, and a wide terrace along the sea. The water comes to the edge of the parapet at high tide. The terrace is made of red tiles, and there are chairs and tables with newspapers and magazines. That old woman sits there in the afternoons, drinking tea and writing letters. I used to play there with Juliana when my aunt wasn’t home. We used to throw bricks into the ocean.”

  She opened her eyes. “And the cottage?” he asked, but she shook her head. One picture was enough. Besides, he wasn’t listening. He’d heard a noise, and now she heard it too, a rustling of leaves, then nothing. Peter held up the stump of his hand, gesturing for silence while he replaced his harmonica in his back pocket.