A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  Now Miranda listened to his story, which flowed easily as long as she supplied most of it, filling in the gaps between the words with mental pictures—an opossum, she thought. It must have been an opossum she saw. But the memory of that small creature on the hill was now supplanted by a multitude of other more exotic animals and birds, native to the Danube River delta in Romania. There as it approaches the Black Sea, the stream of the great river breaks apart into a skein of tiny channels through the reeds, a marsh which covers hundreds of square miles. She had seen photographs. All the waterbirds of Europe stopped there on their annual migrations.

  She knew about this from the Web, and books she’d taken out from the library. “Train from Odessa,” repeated Kevin Markasev. “Beautiful city,” and in her mind Miranda saw the domes and spires of the town beyond the railway yard, the great black locomotive bellowing gusts of steam—a photograph she remembered, doubtless, from an old book. She shook her head. “What is wrong with me?” she thought, taking another drink of raki. Is this the enemy her aunt had warned her about? Is this the friend? She sat and listened while Markasev told her how one summer when he was thirteen he had gone to Izmail with his cousin. They had borrowed a flat-bottomed boat and gone out fishing with a murderer named Ion Farting Breath. His teeth were full of gold. He had showed them a place where the stream came into a tidal estuary and the water was clean and cold. In the boat they had drifted over a sunken wall, part of an old castle that had belonged to the emperor. They had found a place where the water was twelve meters deep over a glass mosaic of a woman’s face, the goddess of the sea inside the old temple of Neptune. There were no fish, no weeds, nothing except small flickers of light in the black water when the sun went down, which Ion Farting Breath had told them were the sunken ghosts of dead animals, part of the emperor’s menagerie, destroyed in a great storm. Now they preyed on the bodies of dead sailors. The emperor’s mistress had preferred animals with stripes: tigers, zebras, kudus, and okapis, all of which had drowned. And it was true. As Kevin Markasev looked down, he had seen cages, manacles, chains.

  What emperor? Miranda thought. There hadn’t been an emperor in that part of the world for a thousand years. She took another sip of raki. Beside her, Andromeda had finished her cigarette. She was laughing at something Brenda said. Now she turned to Miranda. “Show him your backpack,” she said, as if it was the most natural and normal thing in the world. And then to Markasev: “What’s this—Romanian old-home week?”

  “You have…?”

  This was going a little too fast, too far. Miranda shook her head. She tucked her backpack under her feet. Andromeda went on. “She has a book. That’s where we were tonight. We went back to the school to get her book.”

  “Ah,” said Brenda. “We also, we were there. We like the fire.”

  She was easier to understand now. The light gleamed from her gold teeth. Miranda made a gesture with her hand, and then she turned around toward Peter, who looked uncomfortable and awkward sitting by the birch tree. Miranda beckoned to him, but he didn’t move.

  Andromeda smiled. “I told you he might come in handy,” she said. She was talking about Kevin. “Maybe he can help you with the translation. You know that note from your aunt.”

  Miranda didn’t even remember telling her about that. Glancing back toward Peter, she shook her head. But why did she have to worry so much? Surely it wasn’t such a big deal to take out her book and show it to Kevin Markasev, who understood about Romania.

  He stood above them, a smile on his handsome face, but he was frowning, too. He reached out his white, long hand. When he spoke, it was to Andromeda. “I know about … these things. This book … these things are famous in my country. Your friend is from a famous … family.”

  Miranda was conscious of her heartbeat. “You know about my family?”

  The boy made an elaborate shrug, raising his delicate, thin shoulders. “Who … does not know? Miranda Popescu from Constanta on the sea. When I was … small, my grandmother told me stories. How she … disappeared.”

  Was it her imagination, or was he speaking more coherently than even a few minutes before? This is all baloney, she thought, like the baloney about the emperor.

  When she’d decided that, she felt both happy and relaxed. The boy seemed suddenly unthreatening. She had been squatting in an uncomfortable position, but now she stretched her feet toward the fire with the backpack on her lap. She turned to look at Peter, made another gesture for him to join them, but he did not come.

  The grass was wet under her seat. Brenda threw on some more gray sticks from a pile beside the rock, first snapping them with her big hands. Andromeda took a drink from another bottle of Budweiser. “Sure,” she said. “It’s not such a big mystery.”

  Markasev stood above them, and Miranda could see the movement of his shoulders and thin arms. His green silk shirt was unbuttoned halfway down, and she could see the bones of his chest. “Of course I would like to see the Brancoveanu bracelet,” he said in his sibilant harsh accent. “The white tyger…”

  Miranda didn’t hear the rest of what he was saying. It was a phrase from the penciled note at the beginning of the book. “And I see you wear your mother’s cross,” the boy. “Made from the nails.”

  She clutched at the crucifix around her neck. Markasev laughed—“Is not such a mystery, I say. Your mother is in Ratisbon—not so far. Your aunt is in Mogosoaia. North of Bucharest. A little village about fourteen kilometers. You can take a railway from the Gara de Nord.”

  “You know them?”

  “Not at all. I know a lady who takes you to these places. I go for Thanksgiving holiday. I take a letter.”

  This is bullshit, thought Miranda. Almost to reassure herself, she put down her bottle and then started unlacing the leather strings of her pack. Glancing backward, she saw Peter Gross had gotten to his feet, but then she was fumbling with the envelope and the folded shawl. She had to see the sentence about the white tyger, and something about surrendering the book and knowing when to do it. Was Kevin Markasev the person from her own country, the person who would give her something? Maybe that’s what the raki was—she put the bottle down. Where was the card from that old professor? The book fell open to the frontispiece, the picture of the king.

  Markasev squatted down behind her, so he could read over her shoulder. “A small history of the world,” he said. “Ah, this is very interesting. This is the note to you? Yes—‘Dearest M.’”

  First his long hand was over her shoulder, and he was running his finger over the words. Then the book was in his hands as he squatted above her.

  “Look at the inscription,” said Miranda. She recited from memory—“‘A hurried note to tell you…’”

  “But it doesn’t say this.”

  He’d stood up. Twisting around so she could see him behind her, Miranda could also see Peter Gross coming hesitantly down the hill. She shook her head. “No—where it says about the time will come…”

  “But it doesn’t…”

  Markasev was leafing through the book. He was caressing the leather binding, smelling the pages. “Small history. Romans … Turks … kings, queens. Fascists. War. Communists. Ceausescu. Revolution. You, in Constanta orphanage.” He shrugged, then made a little squirting sound between his lips. “Future must come. Everything is here.” He made a gesture that included the book, the hill, the sky, the fire, and all of them.

  “No, where it says, ‘Dearest M.’”

  Markasev squinted, shrugged. Now he was looking at some photographs she had placed inside the book: she and Stanley and her grandparents at Disneyland when she was ten years old. Rachel holding a bouquet of flowers. “World is here,” he said. “And note from father’s sister. ‘When you read this, you will know this book will be…’”

  His index finger moved along the penciled words. How could he have known about the Constanta orphanage? “What did you say?” she asked, sick to her stomach from the raki and then suddenly remembering dreams or visions
or actual past times, when the woman with the fur hat on the frozen train platform had told her to protect the book, protect it with her life, or else surrender it to a man from her own country—was that it?

  The woman had clapped her woolen gloves together. When she spoke, Miranda had been able to see her breath. “Something precious will be given, something stripped away,” she’d said—the same woman Miranda had dreamed about the night before.

  “Give it back,” she said, reaching for the book. Markasev was standing before the fire. He was holding up a picture of her that he had found in the back pages, a posed portrait, taken when she finally had her braces off. “How beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful face, beautiful eyes, beautiful hair,” he said, laughing. She knew he was making fun of her.

  Brenda threw some dry pine branches onto the fire, which spat and crackled and flared up. Then Markasev was squatting down again. He had his finger in the last chapter—“You have not read? But here you are, your father, mother. Everything. Every day. Here we are,” he said, running his finger along the lines of the last page. “Here on this hillside, here.” He was shrugging and grimacing, holding the book out toward her.

  “So,” he said. “Would you like to come to Bucharest?”

  She felt tears in her eyes. And suddenly it was as if part of her were rising up into the sky, looking down at the hillside, at the fire and the people grouped around it. From the shelter of the trees, a white-faced opossum looked toward her. Then Miranda moved up even farther into the cold air, and she could see spread out below her the town where she’d grown up, the art museum and the lights of Water Street, the old house on the green where Rachel and Stanley lay asleep, the flat roof of Andromeda’s house on Syndicate Road. She saw the college buildings poking up below her through the trees. Cars drove slowly down Route 6, peering around corners as if looking for something. She watched a yellow dog run across the museum parking lot and then into the tangle of underbrush.

  After a moment she forced herself to smile. “Yes,” she said, “I would like that,” and with a casual, small gesture, Markasev let the book drop into the flames.

  Peter came down the hill. Shouting, he grabbed hold of Markasev’s arm. Miranda was on her knees, snatching at the book with her bare hands, but it was horrible how quickly it erupted with fire, how quickly and completely it was consumed. There must have been something in the onionskin, the scented leather, that allowed it to explode before her eyes.

  * * *

  RIGHT BEFORE MARKASEV dropped the book, Andromeda realized something. She’d been talking with Brenda while Miranda was taking her stuff out of her backpack. She’d been trying to figure out what Brenda and Kevin Markasev were doing up here in the middle of the night. As Markasev told Miranda about Romania, Brenda was muttering in her thick, slow accent, and as she listened, Andromeda felt a shiver of alarm, a “frisson,” as her mother might have said, that started at her tailbone and climbed the length of her back: “So. Finally you are here. I am bored from waiting. Many nights this week we wait for you, light fires, drink raki. Kevin says this time we have to smoke you out. He is clever. Here you are!”

  A line of gold caps shone along the left side of her jaw. Andromeda smiled, too. “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t you? At school. Kevin says we have two chances. But we can’t get into the west corridor. Doors too strong. Kevin says, ‘No problem.’ We do what we can.”

  “You were there tonight?”

  “No, stupid. Last night.”

  Andromeda had made a big mistake. Kevin Markasev was squatting behind Miranda, leafing through her book. Miranda was staring up at him with an adoring expression—no, not that, but it was close to that.

  Sure, Andromeda had been pissed off about the car. Of course she was still irritated, so when she saw Kevin and Brenda at the bonfire, she had thought it was a good idea to bring them and Miranda together, partly because of the Romanian thing—if Miranda was going to obsess about it, she might as well have her nose pressed into it.

  Partly also, she couldn’t stand the idea of Peter Gross and Miranda walking home together by themselves. Now she looked up toward Peter; he was running down the hill, alert as she was to the problem. Too late: Markasev dropped the book just as Andromeda lunged forward and stretched out her hand. And maybe she might have even caught in on the fly, except Brenda held her back, grabbed hold of her shirt and held on even after Andromeda had given her a backhand slap across her ugly face—too late. It was all too late. Miranda was poking at the embers with a stick, but the book was gone.

  Whimpering, she staggered up away from the circle of the bonfire. Andromeda got up to follow. She followed her toward where the woods began a hundred yards away. But then she turned back when she heard Peter shout; he was having a harder time with Markasev this time, and Brenda was there, too. It was difficult for Peter with his one hand. But he was quick and turned away, and then Markasev was sprawling backward on the ground. He stopped to let him up, which was stupid because Brenda was behind him. And there was something in her hand that she’d pulled out of her shirt, and Markasev was getting up. Andromeda paused to pull a stick up from the fire, and she was thinking Peter Gross and she could take care of these putzes, these neciopliti. Nothing was more sure than that. She was happy to do it, happier than she’d been all night. The stick was charred along its length except for where she held it. Its point was a mass of sparks that made a pattern in the air. A line of red followed the tip, and as she pulled back her hand the line seemed to thicken and hold its shape as the air changed around her.

  * * *

  MIRANDA STAGGERED ACROSS the field into the shelter of the woods. She crawled into the shelter of the trees and pushed herself into the protruding roots of a big hickory tree. Shuddering and crying, she tried to vomit, tasting again the raki’s bitter taste. She rubbed her forehead into the ragged bark, pressed it into the unyielding wood.

  At the moment when Andromeda’s stick described a long gash of red, she fell asleep in the shelter of the hickory tree. Later she would be surprised how in a moment like that, she would be able to lose consciousness. But then she would imagine that it wasn’t ordinary sleep, but rather a dazed trance in which the hickory tree was gone, and she saw standing in front of her a shadowy, enormous figure. Nor was there anything comforting about the embrace of those hard arms, and she was bruising her forehead against the front of the woman’s rough coat; it was in wintertime, that’s all she understood, a cold, dark wintertime. And the woman was speaking to her in a language she didn’t know: “What’s done cannot be changed. You must find Rodica and Gregor Splaa. Rodica the Gypsy will tell you what to do. Go to the house by the dam. She is in the house by the dam. I’ve left you a letter, and a letter from your mother. De Graz and Prochenko will protect you now as they always have, so there is nothing to fear, nothing…,” and then something else which she was unable to grasp, because already she could feel herself waking up, could feel the dream receding just as it was taking shape.

  Just as she imagined she could see the woman’s face, she found herself awake. The words that seemed so urgent hovered around her and then disappeared, because now she was awakened by the sound of screaming, a hoarse, constant, desperate screaming, and she recognized Peter’s voice.

  Time had gone by, she knew. Gray shadows hung around her, and it was very cold. Morning was coming, and as she stood up, she saw the thin white trunks of the birch trees glowing in the mist. Her head hurt. Peter screamed, and she didn’t know where he was. The sound was all around her. But then she stumbled out into the frozen meadow and saw him crouching underneath a barberry bush. She saw the bright red berries. He was holding out his arms, and she could see he had two hands.

  At first she could not take this in, because it made no sense. In her dazed state she noticed it but didn’t understand it. Nor could she tell, when she got close, whether he was screaming in terror or in pain. She herself felt light-headed, dizzy, stupid. “De Graz and Prochencko,” she thoug
ht, names from her dream, names that had haunted her throughout her life—Peter’s hand had a mark on it, a raspberry-colored birthmark. She knelt in front of him on the white, frozen ground and watched as he stretched out his hands, the left one small and familiar, the right one pale and huge, a man’s hand on a boy’s arm. Its fingernails were chipped and dirty, its knuckles thick and gnarled. The back of it was covered with black hair. The birthmark was below his thumb, in the shape of a bull’s head.

  She thought she’d seen that mark before. “Does it hurt?” she asked stupidly, looking into his panicked face, his open mouth. For a moment she was surprised to see him look so young and vulnerable. His face was gray with terror, as if his skin had turned pale under his tan. His curly hair hung limp and damp. His eyes were dark and wide and big, and they were staring at her, and there was something about them that was both familiar and unfamiliar. It occurred to her that she had rarely looked into his face. One of them had always been looking away.

  His lips were thin, his teeth crooked with wide gaps between them. Why was she studying his face as if she were trying to memorize his features? She looked down at his hands again and grasped hold of his hands, clasping them in her own until his cries subsided to a kind of whimpering. Then, standing up, holding his left hand, she pulled him to his feet.