A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  2

  Andromeda

  BUT THAT TOWN IN MASSACHUSETTS was already changing, as if from the pressure of the baroness’s finger and the smell of her cigarette-perfumed breath as she bent over the page. Miranda was busy with other things, other people, and she didn’t go to the ice house for a few days. Only once before school started, she biked out to see if Peter was there. But he wasn’t, so she didn’t wait, even though she’d arrived earlier than the usual time.

  Peter’s father was a nurse’s aide in one of the local hospitals. His mother had been the one with the real job. Peter had stories about her, but he was vague about his father because they didn’t always get along. Miranda had never seen their house, although she knew where it was—at the end of White Oak Road, three miles from town. Sometimes Miranda saw Peter’s father driving down Water Street in a pickup truck. He was a fat man with a red face. His gray hair was tied back in a ponytail. Once Peter had mentioned that he used to smoke a lot of pot.

  It was news to Miranda that Peter had ever been arrested. And she wanted to ask him about it. But now that she’d shown him her Romanian things, she was embarrassed. She felt she’d shared too much, particularly if what Stanley said was true and she’d invented all those memories. Besides, Rachel was right. If she spent any more time alone with Peter, he probably would start trying to kiss her or something, although he hadn’t shown any signs of that so far. But it would be awkward. Part of her liked to spend time in the woods, following the secret paths, but there was another part.

  She found it hard to imagine him with the other people she knew. During the summer it had been easy to keep him separate from them. He wasn’t likely to show up at the pool or the tennis courts. He didn’t ride a bike.

  With Andromeda in Europe, it had been good to indulge the part of her that felt misplaced and solitary. Even before she’d met Peter, she had spent time at the ice house reading the fantasy and science fiction books that otherwise made her feel a bit ashamed. Peter himself, at first, had seemed like a character from one of those imaginary worlds.

  But when school started, it was different. Those first few days when she saw him at lunch or in the halls, usually sitting or walking by himself, it seemed to her that he must feel as awkward as she did. But he didn’t approach her or try to speak to her, so why should she make the first move? He looked at her without smiling, which made her unhappy and a little angry. So then she took the further step of passing him in the hall without saying “hi.” She knew she was handling things badly, but this was the kind of thing that happened all the time, didn’t it? People spent some time together and then they stopped. If they didn’t fit into each other’s lives, then it was just too bad.

  And she stopped thinking about it when Andromeda came back, fashionably late for the beginning of school. Her father had taken her to Greece and Turkey, where they obviously had a lot of sunshine. She looked amazing, her nose freckled and peeled, her blond hair almost white, pulled back so you could see the four new silver rings on the ridge of her left ear. When she knocked at the screen door, when she burst into the kitchen, as they hugged, Miranda was aware of physical sensations, the smell of Andromeda’s sweat, the strength of her arms and shoulders, all that.

  Then and later she realized how much she had missed being Andromeda’s friend, the attention paid to both of them at school or as they walked together down the street. She’d missed the way Andromeda so effortlessly divided what was cool from what was stupid. Always you had to find a way to share her self-assurance, or else you’d find yourself left behind.

  There was something about her that made Miranda eager to fit in, to accept what she was, an ordinary American girl. When she was with Andromeda she tended not to give a damn about any of the things she’d talked about with Peter. All that—her foreignness, her adoption—she now resented having talked about. She told herself that Peter had dragged it out of her so she could share his sense of isolation. One night, though, at volleyball practice, when they were waiting for the court to clear, she told Andromeda about Stanley’s offer to take her to Constanta the next summer. This was part of the longer story about her fight with her mother about privacy. At first she thought she could tell the entire thing without mentioning Peter’s name, but it turned out she couldn’t. To tell the truth, it felt like a relief to talk about him, even though Andromeda wasn’t exactly impressed. “You’re kidding me,” she said. “Wasn’t he suspended twice last year?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then later: “I met some Romanians in Bodrum,” Andromeda said. “I tried to talk to them a couple of times—you know, because of you. But I’ve got to say they were completely sleazy.”

  They sat on the bleachers making fun of an old woman in a moth-eaten coat, taking Polaroid photographs of people playing basketball, of the roof of the gym, even of them.

  Andromeda waved and posed. The woman smiled. Andromeda wasn’t such a great student, but people loved her. Later, when the game had started, Miranda was happy to see her on the volleyball court, yelling and cursing, spiking the ball down people’s throats.

  Afterward the girls took showers and walked home. Miranda was carrying the backpack with her Romanian things inside. Andromeda said, “You took that to the gym?”

  “I don’t like to leave it home. I don’t want Rachel to go through it.”

  “So it’s safe in a locker?”

  Miranda shrugged.

  “You are so bizarre,” Andromeda said. “What do you care?”

  The high school teams were holding tryouts in the town gym. Rachel had told Miranda to be home by nine o’clock, but all rules tended to be forgotten or relaxed as long as she was with Andromeda. Adults were crazy about her, although it wasn’t as if she never got in trouble. “I know she’ll look out for you,” Rachel had once said, and Miranda wasn’t about to argue.

  So they turned left across the campus and headed for Water Street to get some ice-cream cones. “I’m not surprised about Peter Gross,” Andromeda said. “He’s had a crush on you for years.”

  This wasn’t what Miranda wanted to hear, so she said nothing. “Don’t you remember when we were kids?” Andromeda went on. “It was like in third grade, when that kid Ricky Sheldon was harassing you. We didn’t even go out on the playground for a few weeks until Peter Gross got in a fight with him. You probably didn’t even notice.”

  It was a humid night, and the streetlights were surrounded by swarms of gnats. Andromeda was carrying the volleyball. She was sweating, and her T-shirt was sticking to her freckled skin.

  “What’s with these lights?” she said. “Are they new?”

  “They put them up this summer. It’s a security system.”

  The college had installed a number of call boxes, too. One of them was up ahead at the bottom of Holden Court, a black cylinder with a red globe at the top. It stood in an open place between the science center and the chemistry lab under one of the new lamps.

  On an upper floor of the center, one light burned. Otherwise the buildings were dark. As Miranda and Andromeda passed the call box, their footsteps clattered on the new surface, which was smoother and harder than the sidewalk. They paused under the lamp, because there was something on the new tiles within the circle of the light, a picture of an animal six feet across, drawn in many colors of chalk.

  It had the eyes of a person and the snout of a pig, and its face and body were covered with red hair. But its body was more catlike than anything else, its flanks both striped and spotted.

  The animal sat on its haunches against a background of red and purple clouds. Its tail was curled around its hooves. “Cool,” said Andromeda as she stepped over it. “That’s better than a stupid cow”—the college mascot.

  They were looking toward the lights of Water Street across the empty quad. Sounds came from there, a shouted conversation too far away to understand. Miranda heard some laughter and the sound of a breaking bottle, and then some people were walking toward them out of the distant
lights. For a moment they disappeared among the black, massed college buildings, though the noises still remained—more shouting, clearer now. Then they moved into one of the cones of light that surrounded the new security posts. Too young for college students, Miranda thought. “Come,” she said, and climbed the wide stone steps to the porch of the chemistry building, an alcove of dark brick. Andromeda followed her more slowly, the volleyball still in her hand.

  There were five boys. Miranda studied their faces as they shuffled into another cone of light. She had never seen any of them before, which was odd in that small town. One of them was tall and angular—much taller than the others, with long, thin arms and legs, and he was dressed in a gray suit. The other four, as they came closer, she imagined to be wearing some kind of uniform: sleeveless T-shirts, baggy shorts. They wore green baseball caps.

  They moved into the dark. And as they approached another lamp, Miranda thought she heard among their soft, slow voices a different laughter. When they came into the light again, she was surprised to see there were now six of them. A girl had joined them out of the dark, wearing the same short haircut, the same earrings, her bicep encircled by the same tattoos.

  Now they were coming down the sidewalk toward the call box and the red light outside the chemistry lab. Miranda imagined she and Andromeda were safe in the alcove as long as they didn’t move. She glanced at her friend, worried suddenly that Andromeda might do something stupid, call out some kind of greeting, step out into the light. Whatever sense of menace Miranda felt, she didn’t seem to share. She stood picking her nose with her big fingers, rolling the volleyball back and forth against her stomach. When the kids came out of the darkness onto the chalk-covered tiles surrounding the call box, Andromeda seemed ready to join them. But Miranda reached to put her hand around her friend’s sweating, freckled forearm. She squeezed it, and Andromeda paused, and she and Miranda watched the strange kids moving around the box. One of them pressed the alarm button on the box, but nothing happened. One bent low to talk into the grille, but no sound came out. The boy in the suit found a long pole in the grass beside the wall of the chemistry lab, and he used it to poke at the red globe of the lamp above it. There was a spray of shattered glass, a pop that was like a small explosion, and the light went out.

  After a minute, when the kids had left and everything was quiet, Andromeda stepped down onto the empty tiles and walked over to the call box. “Come on,” she said, “don’t be a scaredy-cat.” But it took a while for Miranda to join her, because in fact she was afraid of what she’d seen in the instant before the light went out—six faces looking up. One face in particular she had singled out, the girl’s. In the flash of the breaking light there had been a transformation, or else Miranda had imagined a new face, changed in subtle ways, staring up into the reddish light. The eyes were a little wider, the cheeks a little flatter, the nose a little bigger and more piglike. But then in the darkness Miranda had heard the same ordinary laughter as the kids moved around the corner of the building, up Holden Court, out of the quad.

  “What language was that?” Miranda asked. In the mixture of voices she had not been able to make a single phrase come clear.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what was that girl saying?”

  “What girl?”

  Miranda didn’t push it. Andromeda was always hard to challenge. And then naturally a police car stopped and waited for them at the far side of the quad, where the lights went down the hill toward Water Street. An officer got out, an older man. He asked them some questions, then walked them lazily back to the alcove, where he shined his flashlight at the chalk drawing and broken glass.

  As they stood in silence, the grille below the call box gave out some scratchy static. “What a mess,” said the policeman. He peered up toward the bottom of Holden Court. Everything was quiet now, and he couldn’t see where the six of them, five boys and a girl, had crossed under the trees and then turned left on South Street toward the art museum.

  * * *

  AVOIDING THE STREETLIGHTS, they walked in the shadows underneath the trees. They crossed the field behind Leake’s Pond until they reached the back side of the museum. They skirted the parking lot and walked along the white marble wall. While the others went on toward the dark line of the woods, one paused. From the pocket of his gray suit jacket he produced a can of brown spray paint. He shook it, uncovered the nozzle, and then painted PORC ROSU PIG RED PORC ROSU in letters high as he could reach. For a moment he stood still under the light, a tall boy with a pale scar over each of his temples. He turned away, then hurried to catch up.

  They walked in single file. They didn’t speak. Security lights were mounted on the wall above their heads, and they walked underneath them. But by the time they reached the path that led away from the parking lot up through the woods, the darkness was complete. Climbing in the middle of the line, Markasev could see nothing of the others. All of them had their instructions. Sometimes he could hear the shuffling of leaves, the crack of a stick, but even so it was as if he climbed alone. Soon even those small noises disappeared, and he imagined the others had spread out along the steep path or else moved off through the trees, on errands he knew nothing of—except for one. The girl came running back with an animal she’d caught in one of her traps. She waved its fat, hairy body like a flag. “Look,” she said, the only English word she knew.

  Then she was gone, and he climbed through the big oaks at the meadow’s edge until the path moved up a gully and then met the old logging road. Three paths came together here, and in an open place among the trees he saw the stone bench and the woman already waiting. He saw the glow of her cigarette from far away, and in its light, intermittently, the lower part of her face. She was curled against the stone arm of the bench, her back against the vertical stone slab. She was huddled in her ragged old coat, though it was a hot night.

  Moonlight drifted down through the clearing in the canopy of leaves. When he got close, Markasev could read the letters above the woman’s head. In Memory of Gregor Splaa (1882–1951).

  The old woman inhaled once more, and then ground out her cigarette on the bench’s arm. But in the red glow, before it was extinguished, Markasev could see her clearly. Her yellow hair was braided and tied behind her head in an old-fashioned bun. Her face was bloodless, the lines sharp as a bird’s.

  “Where have you been?” she said.

  “I’m very tired,” she complained as he sat down. “I still feel the flight from last week. My plane had a layover in Stuttgart, and we didn’t get into New York till 2 A.M. Then I must wait for six hours at the Port Authority bus station. You were there?”

  He shook his head.

  “Of course not. You came the next day. It is disgusting. Nothing but drunks and perverts. I don’t like this country.” She turned to face him. “Do you understand me?”

  He shrugged.

  “We could change to Romanian if you prefer.”

  “Nu este necesar.”

  There was air here, away from the closeness of the woods. A breeze cooled his face. They sat for a while in the dark, then she spoke. “We are moving from the motel. Today I took a house for all of us at Woodlawn Drive. In the morning you will go to school. But tonight I want you to carry a letter to the beautiful lady. When you wake up you won’t remember. So let me give it to you.”

  She handed him a sheet of paper and two photographs. The first showed some people playing volleyball. The second showed two girls sitting together on the bleachers. The one on the left, the dark-haired one, was circled in red ink.

  He glanced at the photographs for a moment, but when he started to slide them into the inside pocket of his suit, the old woman touched his hand. “No,” she said. “Fold them into quarters.”

  He shrugged.

  “Hold them in your mouth,” she said. “Under your tongue.” She was crumpling the piece of paper in her hand.

  But when he shook his head, she grabbed him underneath the jaw, her hand cold
and strong. And maybe he could have shaken her off, but there was something in her touch that made him weak, and he felt his mouth pried open, the crumpled letter and the hard, slick squares of pasteboard forced inside. He was stricken with a kind of helplessness that seemed familiar. The old woman held his mouth, and with her other hand she touched his lips, his face, his eyes, his forehead, his neck, and he imagined he was drowning, suffocating, and he fell back against the stone arm of the bench. A flush of warmth overcame him, tingled on his skin. Even before he fell asleep he thought that he was dreaming, and his dreams were taking him straight up into the air through the brown leaves of the oak trees, up into the dark sky.

  * * *

  IN BUCHAREST, IN A DIFFERENT time, the Baroness Ceausescu unlocked the spare bedroom of her tall house in Saltpetre Street. She had come upstairs from a dinner party, which she had given for some old friends from the Ambassadors Theatre. As often, she was dressed in men’s clothing, the uniform of a colonel of the Wallachian hussars. Ribbons hung from her chest. Pale and boylike, she glanced at herself in the gilt mirror by the door. The room, lit only by a candle on the bedside table, was almost dark after she closed the door behind her. Her face in the mirror was indistinct, hard to recognize, almost. She smiled at it, pouted, took a few steps across the carpet, and then went down on one knee beside the bed.

  She touched her gloved fingertips together, then pulled down the coverlet and the silk sheet, revealing the sleeping boy. His hair was matted, his face dirty, and his body, also, streaked with dirt. She pulled the coverlet down to his hollow waist, then checked to see if the soft ropes around his wrists, around the brass spindles of the bed frame were secure.