A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  She was keeping him here until his task was finished, and she could wake him entirely and reward him as he deserved. Her fingers hovered over the strange, pale scars above his temples. What had caused them? He had stumbled into the courtyard of her house in Cluj. Nor could he say where he was from or who his parents were. She would have sent him to the orphanage, only he had touched her heart. And he had a terrible gift for hypnotic suggestion, which she found useful when she began to read the papers in the painted footlocker. Now he was here.

  It is a myth that evil people feel pleasure at the pain of others. Often the sympathy they feel is hard to bear. The baroness moved her gloved fingers around the boy’s body, almost touching him. Then she picked up the candle on its iron spike and drew it back and forth in front of his face. His eyelids were closed, but she could imagine his pupils moving underneath them, following the flame. With her left hand she pulled his head up by his hair, then bent down to whisper in his ear.

  She didn’t even need him to speak. As he came awake, she could feel there was something choking him, hurting the inside of his mouth, some hard-edged thing. He spat it out, some slippery thing that seemed as if it had grown out of his mouth under his tongue. She had put the candle down onto the table; she released the boy’s hair, too. Now she was wiping the old woman’s letter on the bedclothes, smoothing it out, unfolding the Polaroid photographs. She touched them gingerly and spread them out on the boy’s naked chest; he was shivering now. And yes, there she was in the photograph, a girl no older than he, dressed in short pants and a short-sleeved shirt, laughing at her yellow-haired friend who was posing for the camera with a ball in her hands. Yes, it was she, obviously: the broad forehead, the straight nose of her mother’s family, the dark hair and protruding ears of her father’s. Even in this ridiculous and inappropriate disguise, the proud lines of her face were visible, yes. And was it a blemish on the print? No—she was wearing her mother’s crucifix around her neck.

  Triumphant, the baroness ran her finger over the image of the girl. Though she was younger than expected, surely there was an explanation for that. And her aunt had not even bothered to change her name, which was how the old woman in Massachusetts had found her. She was sitting with her legs spread on a long, high, wooden bench. Her black, short pants were tight around her thighs. With one hand she touched the back of her long neck where the hair was gathered and pulled tight—an unbecoming style in the baroness’s opinion. How insignificant she looked, how thin and frail, her wrists and shoulders, her long fingers. Awkward, scarcely grown, without much of a chest under her yellow shirt—all that would come later, if she lived so long. Perhaps she might be beautiful some day. The baroness had seen girls as maladroit and gangling as she come rapidly to flower.

  Inside her heart the baroness felt the first small trembling of the pain she was about to cause. Who could be sure? A war was coming, and this girl would be part of it. Clutching the photograph, she blew out the candle and stood for a moment in the remaining glow, the faraway street light diffused through gauze curtains. The window, triple-glazed, was opposite the bed. She looked down over the peaceful street. The boy was opening his eyes now, but she would leave him. She would send Jean-Baptiste to bring him water and wine.

  Outside in the hallway she paused to read the old woman’s letter, a cramped scrawl on the back of an advertisement, in English, for the Taconic Motel, whatever that was.

  Beautiful Lady, I have followed the instructions you gave me in my crystal in Bucharest, getting a room for this boy and the others as you said. I have found clothes for him and a place to live. I have given him a name from America, which is Kevin, and I have used Markasev, which is my own surname because my father was from Odessa as I told you. No one here speaks Romanian. No one knows about Romania. In just one week I teach this child English which he learns with horrible rapidity, and I will send him to school.

  I tremble with the thought of what I’ve done. You have given them to me but I am still afraid. Are they human creatures with human hearts? I have given them American names to comfort me, Henry, Dylan, Chuck, Brenda, etc. Now I bully them, tell them what to do as you have told me, but not much longer. They steal and break into shops. Soon I tell you the police will come. Please tell me what we do here, what I am to do. I want to help you but I am afraid.

  * * *

  THE BARONESS CRUMPLED UP THE letter again and put her hand to her narrow chest. And at that moment, as it happened, Miranda was making much the same gesture. She stood with her leather backpack clutched against her heart, in the middle of her mother’s bright kitchen. She could feel against her body the outline of the book. She had brooded for a few hours in her room alone, then before dinner she confronted Rachel. “You didn’t believe me.”

  Rachel wouldn’t meet her eyes. “It’s not that. It’s just the way it sounded. A bunch of kids, none of whom you recognized. You say there were six of them, Andromeda says five. You say they were dressed one way, she says another. You say they were speaking a language that sounded like Romanian. Was that a joke? I mean, what were we supposed to think? I’m just happy Andromeda was with you.”

  That afternoon, when Miranda found out that her parents had agreed to split the cost of the broken lamp with Andromeda’s mother, she’d felt betrayed. But now she had to admit the whole thing sounded peculiar. And it was true—the Romanian part had been a joke. But she wanted to be angry, and so she cursed under her breath at the hypocrisy of mothers, who yell at you when you do badly on a math test, but can’t even raise their voices if they suspect you of vandalism and bald-faced lies. They won’t even look you in the face.

  If she’d cared to, Miranda could have pointed out the obvious. Some bad things had begun to happen in Berkshire County. There was an outbreak of viral meningitis in Great Barrington. Then someone set a car on fire in the Price Chopper parking lot. Stanley had wanted to go look. It was just a car, but people were really upset—more than they had been about the sick kids, Miranda thought. Great Barrington was miles away. There was a fire in an old warehouse in Greenfield, but this was close to home. This was property. And when someone broke out all the windows of the shops on Water Street, there was another huge fuss, and letters to the paper about the breakdown of society.

  Also if she’d cared to, Miranda could have pointed out to Rachel that a lot of new people had moved to town, and it wasn’t so incredible for her to have failed to recognize the kids in the quad. In fact she did recognize some of them as early as the next day. There were unfamiliar faces in her class—all these arguments were on the tip of her tongue. But she didn’t want to rat anybody out for a little broken glass, and besides, it was too hard to explain. “You never believe me, never trust me,” she said, all the more bitterly because she wasn’t feeling particularly trustworthy about this matter. And it was painful to watch her mother flinch. She went for a ride on her bike and came home late for dinner.

  One of the new faces in her class belonged to the tall boy she had seen crossing the campus that night. She’d noticed him the following morning. Like a lot of the new kids he had missed the first weeks of school—his name was Kevin. He was from Russia or someplace, and he didn’t speak much English, and either he liked her or hated her. He sat two seats in front of her in homeroom, and in the next few weeks she’d look and see him staring back at her, his face expressionless. In the halls she felt as if he was always in her path, so that she had to walk around him. He said nothing in the classes they shared, but leaned back in his seat with his hands behind his head.

  Considering the fuss Rachel had made about Peter, this behavior was another reason not to tell her about Kevin Markasev. Andromeda identified his clothes as being both stylish and expensive, from Abercrombie & Fitch, mostly. She was amused by the whole thing. “I swear he’s stalking you,” she said. “Pretty soon he’ll be camping out outside your house.”

  Things had been awkward with Andromeda for a day or so. Miranda had been irritated with her for no good reason. Just
because of what Rachel had said—“Thank God Andromeda was with you”—which seemed so hypocritical and unfair. Just because she’d been part of that thing with the police, who had driven them to Stanley’s house and then asked questions. Miranda hated to be in any kind of official trouble. But Andromeda didn’t care, didn’t notice her bad mood. Besides, she was the only person who was able to see that Kevin Markasev really did have some kind of thing for her, or else really did seem to be following her around.

  Peter noticed too, she guessed, though he had taken to ignoring her whenever he saw her in school. This hurt her, though she knew it was her fault. It was because she hadn’t called him, hadn’t looked for him, hadn’t spoken to him, hadn’t introduced him to any of her friends. Andromeda always knew everything about everybody, and it was she who first told her that Peter and Kevin Markasev had gotten into a fight. Peter had been suspended, Andromeda said. She never got tired of teasing: “Your admirers. I go to Europe for five weeks, and already you’re hanging around with some one-armed delinquent.”

  Sometimes that September as the weather turned cool and the leaves started to change, Miranda got up early and walked to school. The way led over an abandoned logging road on Christmas Hill. You climbed up behind the art museum, either through the woods or else the high meadow, which in the early morning was always full of cows. The meadow rose up to the ridge where, looking back over the valley, you could see the spires of the churches and some of the larger college buildings poking up through the trees. You could see the gold dome of Schneider Hall.

  Sometimes she would walk home in the afternoons with Andromeda, or alone. The logging road led for a couple of miles through the woods, and then you came out suddenly onto the ridge. Then, especially, it was beautiful, the sun sinking westward down the valley, the long light shining on the yellow and red leaves of the sugar maples.

  One day in late September she was walking home along the logging road. Closer to town sometimes she saw cross-country runners from the college, but there was never anybody up at the end where the road came down toward Route 6 about a half a mile from the school. You reached it through some people’s driveway where it was blocked off with enormous boulders, and was in any case so rutted and uneven that no one could drive over it without special equipment.

  She climbed with her green book satchel over her shoulder. She had taken to leaving her backpack in her locker at school. The road followed the deep woods over the back of Christmas Hill.

  Sometimes she imagined there were dangers here. But the odd thing was how silent the woods were now that the weather had changed. She rarely saw a squirrel or a bird. It hadn’t rained all summer, and it still didn’t look as if it ever would. There was no wind. The sky was empty. All the streams and ponds were dry. No one could remember a more beautiful fall. The leaves had turned early, and as she climbed out of the pines, she found herself surrounded by beeches, and aspens, and maples, and birch trees, all in their gaudiest colors. Even the oak leaves, which often were quite dingy in the fall, this year shone like polished brass.

  There wasn’t a sound except for her own breath, the beat of her heart, the shuffle of her boots through the dead leaves. What was more, all the smells of the forest seemed to have gone away. Once at the ice house Peter had told her to close her eyes and then told her the colors of various smells—the green leaves and ferns, the dusty white stones, the black brown mold, the yellow sand. Afterward as she followed him through the woods, those colors seemed to wash over her in waves.

  Now she smelled nothing. There was something about the beauty of the trees that seemed artificial now, and sometimes she imagined that if there had been a wind, it would have stirred the leaves to clink against each other like shards of colored glass.

  She came out on the ridge above the town. She stood looking down the meadow at the white marble bulk of the art museum. She could see people standing among the marble columns. The closest way to home was down that way.

  The chance thought of Peter made her unhappy. But she often thought of him when she was walking in these woods—how could she not? She wanted to ask him about the fight with the new boy, because she thought she had to be involved somehow. She hated the thought of him getting into trouble.

  Halfway down the hill, she moved into the trees at the broken birch that Peter had once showed her. She followed Peter’s deer path through the undergrowth. Bent almost double, she climbed down the hill into the deeper woods until she found the place, the wildflower dell and the rotted tree trunk where he’d played the harmonica. She was looking for the skull-shaped rock when she heard the buzzing of a fly.

  She found the rock, sat down on the log beside it. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have a mother whose favorite place was a little dell in the woods, and not, for example, FAO Schwartz or Saks Fifth Avenue. But of course Rachel wasn’t her real mother. And despite what she’d told Peter, it was hard for Miranda to conjure up any coherent fantasy of her mother in Romania. Any image in her mind was always superseded by the lady dressed in furs.

  A fly lit on her arm. She shook it off. Again she was aware of the buzzing sound, and she looked for the source of it—a furry, purselike body was nailed to the trunk of a birch tree six feet above the ground.

  Curious, Miranda got to her feet. It was a woodchuck, she thought. And now she could see how the small belly had been cut open and a piece of metal jutted out.

  She had a stick in her hand, and as she reached out, the animal dropped to the ground, the flies scattered away. In the copper-colored leaves, Miranda saw some plastic beads, some nails tied together with grass, and a coin, a five leu piece from Romania.

  She knelt down for a moment over this small, headless, hairy, desecrated thing. She poked it with a stick. Disgusted, she looked around, but there was no one. Maggots were in the carcass, and a Romanian coin—she felt a sudden surge of fright, and she was hurrying through the birch trees down the slope. She crossed the golf course by the seventeenth tee. In fifteen minutes she stood out of breath on the stone dam beside the ice house, looking at the dried-up stream.

  As she was running, she had thought that Peter Gross was the only person who would properly appreciate the disgusting thing, nailed up in his mother’s favorite place. If he didn’t know about it, she would tell him, would show him the body of the woodchuck and the Romanian coin. He would tell her what he thought. Stupidly, she imagined he’d be waiting for her.

  But now, as she stood alone on the dam, she was glad Peter wasn’t there. The silence of the place was a relief to her, and as she stood on the bridge, it occurred to her for the first time to be frightened of Peter Gross. She knew what Andromeda would say, what Rachel would say. Why had he picked a fight with that boy? What did he want? And wasn’t it most likely that he had nailed up that thing? Who else went to that little dell in the woods?

  * * *

  IF SHE HAD SAID HIS name he would have heard her. He was sitting cross-legged under some oleander bushes not far away. With the fingernails of his left hand, he scratched at the stump of his right forearm.

  He was dressed in a plaid shirt and dirty jeans. He had been sitting a long time. His harmonica lay in his lap. For a while he had been making what he called whisper music, but he had stopped before Miranda came. Now he waited for her to leave. Without making a sound, he moved his mouth in the shape of certain words, part of one of the last poems his mother taught him:

  … let us be true

  To one another, for the world which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Has really neither joy nor love nor light …

  He couldn’t remember the last lines, though he had learned them from his mother’s lips and knew them perfectly well. “Ignorant armies,” he thought. He watched Miranda standing on the parapet beside the ice house, then watched her take the path over the dry brook. He waited for a few minutes before he went the other way, behind the grounds depa
rtment shed to the fieldstone gate at the bottom of Water Street.

  His father was waiting in the alley, leaning against the white clapboard wall. He wore a stained red T-shirt, tight over his big stomach, and was drinking a cup of water. When he saw Peter, he fished some wadded money from the pocket of his jeans and held it up. Three dollars—enough for two chocolate ice-cream cones that Peter went in to buy.

  The store was crowded and he had to stand in line. When he came out again into the alley, his father was already moving down the brick path. His way was blocked by college students. He pushed past them, then waited for Peter on the sidewalk of the larger street. “I hate this place,” he said.

  He hated every place the students tended to cluster. Water Street was full of them. Expensive cars with out-of-state plates lined the curb. Peter held the two cones against the crook of his right elbow. His father plucked one out, and together they walked down to the lot at the bottom of the street.

  Peter’s father had parked in the shade. Ordinarily it was pleasant to sit in the front seat of the truck and eat ice-cream while the breeze blew through the open windows. Anything you might want in the way of books, tapes, tools, maps, or magazines was underfoot. Ralph, his father’s red-haired, dirty, gaunt old cat was waiting for them, too. He arched his knobby spine.

  “I just got back from talking to the guidance counselor,” said Peter’s father as they got in. “He had a lot to say. But I remember that guy, and he’s no smarter than he was when I was in tenth grade. Everybody’s had a couple of days to think about this and get their story straight. Fighting is a thing that’s either stupid or bad. So now I’m asking you.”

  They stared out the windshield at the trees. They ate their ice-cream cones and stared straight ahead. Peter felt a surge of gratitude and uneasiness—his father shone in situations like this. His loyalties were clear. Outside the truck, the world was full of crooks and fools. Inside, there was no room for lies. So Peter wished this particular story didn’t sound so dumb.