A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  The trees had lost their leaves. Snow was on the ground, though it had blown away in patches.

  Suddenly she remembered the book, the fire, Markasev. Where was Andromeda? “Come,” she said, and pulled him away from the woods, out into the meadow. Where was her backpack, her bracelet, her Roumanian things? She pulled him to the crest of the hill, and for a moment she could not bring herself to look down through the mist over the bare arms of the trees. For a moment she held and captured in her mind the view that she had seen a thousand times. Then timidly, but with a sense also of exhilaration, she stared out over the empty, wooded valley, where she could not see the marble bulk of the art museum, or the brick library, or the gold dome, or the spire of the Congo Church, or any building whatever. There were no streetlights in that winter morning, no streets, no town, nor anything except the woods and mountains where they’d always been.

  From Peter she heard a quick, sobbing intake of breath. She held him by the hand, dragging him back to the cold, extinguished circle of the bonfire. Bottles lay scattered about, and a crumpled paper bag. The girl and Markasev were gone. But Miranda’s backpack was there, thank God. And in the shelter of the boulder, curled around herself, slept a yellow animal, a big yellow dog, which at first they didn’t recognize.

  2

  The Essential History

  4

  Nicola Ceausescu

  THE BARONESS CEAUSESCU was not given to abstract thought. But on horseback sometimes, or to quiet her anxiety, she indulged herself. And since she’d read the papers of Aegypta Schenck, she’d had to question what she knew, what everybody knew. The universe spreads out from the center of the Earth. The planets turn around it in concentric spheres—first, the moon’s sphere, drawn by the moon’s watery orbit. Second, the wall of fire, the orbit of the sun. Then there are four planets, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Beyond them lies the sphere of light and aether, heaven itself, the galaxies and stars.

  But if this is so, how could there be another world that revolves around a star? The Earth itself sits motionless. Jupiter made it and molded it, but then stopped. Venus scratched with her thumbnail the line of the Danube river and its small tributary, the Dambovita. But she did not draw the road that follows the riverbank, along which the Baroness Ceausescu spurred her horse upstream toward Bucharest on a February afternoon.

  She felt the heavy, shifting muscle of the horse, the jarring trot as she slowed to join a wider way. Always, when she was in the saddle, she tried to isolate herself, pretend she was alone with her horse on a deserted road. As she came into the environs of the city, that proved more and more difficult—flushed and sweating, she remembered her conversation with Aegypta Schenck. In these matters there was such uncertainty.

  Triumphant in the burning house, the baroness had half expected the Popescu girl to appear out of the smoke, once the book that held her was destroyed. That was why she had brought the soldiers, she told herself now. It wasn’t because she was afraid of the old woman.

  Or perhaps the girl would just materialize in the cage in the baron’s laboratory. Or, at worst, in the North American forest, which was why she’d dispatched Raevsky at such expense—none of that had happened yet.

  No, the girl’s book was the important one, and the book the baroness had burned was just a decoy, a fishing lure that the old woman had not lifted a finger to protect—she was a powerful conjurer after all.

  And that was why she was so smug. She did not think the baroness had yet discovered the book inside the book—no, the girl’s book was the one to burn. Markasev would do it, or might do it with a little luck. It was frustrating to rely on others, when everything was so unsure.

  Of course it was unsure. How could anything be imaginary and also real? The baroness pondered this. Then, irritated, she suppressed her thoughts, because she loved this part of her journey on this bright, unseasonably warm day—the wide wind, the thud of her mare’s hooves on the rough road, the smell of sweat and leather, and the great city up ahead. In those days nothing in Europe could rival the richness of the sultan’s court, or the palace in Alexandria where the Pharaohs (brother and sister, husband and wife) sat on alabaster thrones side by side. Since the burning of Rome, nothing could rival the splendor of Meroe and Timbuctu. But of all northern cities, Bucharest was the proudest and most beautiful. That winter day as the baroness rode toward it through the outlying farms, it seemed to gather and rise around her out of the mist of the plain. She rode under the Vacaresti Arch and up the Boulevard of Martyrs, past white cliffs of public buildings, light-struck hills of palaces and apartment blocks. Ahead of her was the blue dome of the temple and the long machicolated wall.

  Formerly the Ceausescu family had kept a stable at the city wall. That was in the days before the baron had died, and there was still money. Now the baroness rented horses as she needed them, from a public stable on the Tineretului road. There she hung up her mud-stained riding coat, revealing underneath the gray jacket and tight trousers of an imperial cadet. She stood in the stone arch of the door for a moment, smoking a cigarette, which was not a constant habit. Then she slipped into the stream of people moving through the gate. Most, if they didn’t look too closely at her face, took her as she appeared: an eighteen-year-old boy, narrow shoulders hunched, hands in his jacket pockets, whistling impudently as he sauntered through the crowd. And even those who looked carefully might have been fooled, so smooth her skin, so glossy her short, chestnut hair.

  Others of her rank took cabs or private carriages. But for many years she had strolled like this through the cobblestone streets, even sometimes when her husband was alive. Sometimes she had left the old baron in bed to walk alone through the small ways.

  Now abruptly she came into the town on the other side of the Curtea Veche, the Old Court. She was near the Gypsy pawnbroker where she had found the book. Her way meandered through the wooden houses and led gradually uphill. After a few minutes she passed through the iron fence and into the park that surrounded the Cleopatra Temple.

  The weather was mild and she had come early to her rendezvous, so she spent a quarter of an hour walking up and down the gravel paths, admiring the polled, naked branches of the pear trees under the red sky. But when the tower bell rang six o’clock, she walked up the steps of the church into the alcove. There was a stoup set into the wall. The baroness moistened the tip of her gloved finger and drew the mark of the goddess onto her forehead.

  When an additional five minutes had passed and no one had joined her, she pushed through the swinging doors into the church itself. The lamps in the nave were lit, but instead she passed through the stone screen into the aisle on the right-hand side. Up ahead, candles decorated the shrine of the goddess, but it was dark where she was walking until the sun came from behind a cloud, and the last sunlight of the evening pressed through the long windows. It reddened the floor under her boots. Then suddenly both walls were lined with images from the life of Cleopatra, the stained glass on one side showing the painted statues on the other. The baroness strolled from the beginning of the story toward the end. Though familiar, it was always poignant to her, a narrative that had kept her company throughout her life. She glanced up at the window that showed the presentation of the young princess, surrounded by the kneeling kings of Asia. But her crown was not secure, and after her father’s death she had to fight for it against fools and rebels and her own brother. She bore a child to the god Julius, but returned to Egypt after he was murdered. There she ruled alone until she was betrayed.

  The baroness was halfway down the aisle when the sun disappeared again, the images faded into darkness. In front of her was Cleopatra’s shrine, where a single, slender candle burned. The baroness paused, deposited a five-leu piece into the box, and lit another candle under the image of the queen offering her breast to the snake, a furious expression on her face.

  The baroness could scarcely afford even this small indulgence. Her husband had owned a farm outside the city, and she had just come from
arranging the sale of it—a necessary payment to her creditors, regardless of how things turned out with the Popescu girl.

  When she’d arranged this meeting, she’d expected to have the girl in hand. But Markasev had been too slow. It couldn’t be helped. “Sir,” whispered the man behind her.

  She had been aware of him for several moments, but now he spoke. She turned and saw, as she’d expected, the charming and handsome junior attaché from the German embassy, Herr Greuben, whose generosity helped pay the household bills. Once a month she met with him in some anonymous location and told him gossip from the various parties he had not been invited to. It was harmless, really, and the money was important. Things had been difficult since her husband’s death eight years before.

  Today was the feast of Caesarion, commemorating the birth of Cleopatra’s son. Now in the belly of the temple, acolytes were preparing for a festival mass, while the baroness and Herr Greuben walked up and down the west aisle. As always, Greuben was courteous and full of jokes. He was younger than the baroness, and she was aware of a desire to please him. Aware also of her own tendency to act on impulse, to make things happen by predicting them—“And one more bit of news,” she said. “There’s a rumor that Miranda Popescu has been found.”

  Greuben turned to face her, and in the candlelight she caught a glimpse of something in his face. Then he smiled, urbane and civilized again, maybe a little embarrassed. But for a moment she had glimpsed a hidden part of him, something savage and mean, and she felt a shiver of recognition.

  All human souls have at the same time an animal nature that shows itself at moments. In Herr Greuben the baroness recognized a small fierce beast, a wolverine, perhaps. Now instantly she regretted what she’d said; it was too soon, too soon. Always she acted without thinking. Her rashness would destroy her, and yet it was her strength as well. She might have known the Germans would be interested. They still held the girl’s mother in the house at Ratisbon, if she wasn’t dead.

  Once the baroness possessed the girl, the white tyger, Miranda Popescu, once she had caught her in the cage she’d built for her in her husband’s laboratory, it would be time to weigh her choices. The obvious one was also the safest—to turn her over to the empress in return for various considerations. But in this moment, with Roumania so shaken by internal struggles, so menaced by foreign enemies, maybe the empress—no, it was important to choose the winning side. The empress was no friend of hers. Since the baron’s death, the empress had spared no effort to impoverish and humiliate her. And there was always her son’s future to consider.

  “This information would be worth a great deal,” said Herr Greuben.

  She shrugged. “I will enquire.”

  Now suddenly he seemed less congenial and less at ease, anxious, in fact, to leave her. Together they passed through the doors into the alcove, then onto the outer steps.

  Outside the sky was dark. Greuben put his hand on her sleeve, a familiar gesture. She tried to pull away, but for a moment he held tight. “There are German citizens in bondage here,” he said. “The time is coming when my government will not ignore them. Then we will know our friends. Do you understand me?” he said, as if he were speaking to a servant. Angrily, she shook him off and turned away down the worn stone steps into the park.

  How could she have been so stupid? It had been foolish enough to boast to the girl’s aunt, Aegypta, whose house had burned in that regrettable accident. But she had nowhere to go with the story, except to those who knew it already. Now the rumor would fly, and the baroness was connected to it. She strode home, kicking at the stones.

  All her husband’s land in Cluj had already been sold, and that autumn, finally, his ancestral home, though it had been so heavily mortgaged she had realized nothing. She had spent so much on Raevsky and his men, now she had little left for emergencies—what a waste of money that had been! Aegypta Schenck had not even mentioned it or recommended it in her instructions. She’d implied that Markasev could bring the girl straight back to Bucharest. But the baroness had thought it best to cover every last eventuality. Not that she had heard anything since she’d seen Raevsky off on the train to Bremershaven more than three months earlier. They should have had plenty of time to take the steamer to New York and to get into position. But it was all so damned uncertain—everything in that continent of darkness, that blank wilderness. Only desperate people found their way across the sea, English-speakers, trying to cut a new home out of the forest after the loss of their miserable islands. Failure was possible. Raevsky might already be dead. Time and space were not the same in the two worlds.

  But it was worth the money, worth the risk. She could not continue as she had, poorer and more insignificant each year. The goddess herself—Cleopatra or Fortuna—had put Aegypta Schenck’s book into her hands. The goddess had given her this chance, and she would take it.

  Ordinarily she would have chosen a more circuitous route, but now she hurried home through the dark streets, down the Calea Victoriei, through Elysian Fields and down Saltpetre Street. Her house was tall and narrow in a block of tall, narrow, brick houses. A cartouche of the red pig hung above the door, high on the wall where it could not be defaced. But there were some obscenities scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the steps, under the gaslight. While her husband was alive, she had been too powerful to insult.

  Jean-Baptiste, her steward, waited in the hall. She handed him her gloves. “The mail has come?”

  “Of course. There is your invitation to the Winter Keep tomorrow night.”

  She climbed the stairs to the suite on the fourth floor. From the landing she went first into the boudoir, where the lamp was lit. Then in her dressing room she changed her clothes, kicking off the boots and throwing the jacket onto a chair. She chose a shirt from the long closet, and then went barefoot into what had once been her husband’s bedroom and was now her own, a beautiful, spare space, lined with yellow wallpaper. She had to check on Markasev. Buttoning her shirt, she strode past the unmade bed and into the far corner of the room.

  A small door, its knob hidden by a secret panel, led to what had been her husband’s laboratory, where he had engaged in alchemical research. It was a dark, windowless room with quilted walls. Much of his equipment—the alembics, kerotakis, beakers, pipettes, and glass tubes—still gathered dust on the tables where he had labored to turn base metals into gold, a painstaking and prohibitively expensive process, as it had turned out. Purify, always purify, though he had not been successful with himself, the empress’s government, or even his young son.

  Light came from oil lamps set in sconces in the walls. In the middle of the floor there was an iron cage three meters square. It was intended for Miranda Popescu, but Markasev now lay in it on his cold bed, a blanket wrapped around his naked legs.

  The baroness cursed under her breath. Was it too much to ask for a little luck, for something to proceed as planned? As she came into the room, she had pictured in her mind what she wished to see—the boy and girl together, naked and cold, clinging to each other to keep warm, just stirring with a rose of color on their skin.

  According to von Schenck’s instructions, she might expect some variant of that. But the boy lay unconscious. So he had not yet succeeded in finding the book. He had not yet succeeded in bringing the girl back. When he did, the baroness would reward him as he deserved, would take him out of this cold cage and give him a room of his own—a room with windows. She would send him to school.

  Near him, five baby pigs slumbered in a wooden crate. One had a line of tattooed numbers on its foreleg. The baroness could see the blue letters and numbers under the pink hair. As she watched, the pig began to stir.

  * * *

  FOR HIS PART, when he’d separated from Nicola Ceausescu on the temple steps, Hans Greuben waited for a moment and then followed her, admiring even in the cadet’s uniform her slim hips and waist. Those high boots, those trousers with their purple stripes, he told himself, concealed superlative long legs, superl
ative firm buttocks that he imagined pushing apart, marking with strong fingers—a brief fantasy. Then he turned away when they reached the Calea Victoriei, sauntering north through the evening crowds.

  On the boulevard there was a chilly wind, but he did not close his long black coat. Nor did he turn off to the left when he reached the corner of the Strada Millo and the German embassy. Instead he continued straight on to the Piata Enescu and the Athenée Palace Hotel, a building that irritated him with its decadent luxury—he himself could not afford to stay there. He could scarcely have afforded a drink at the bar.

  At the malachite reception counter, he gave his name. And while the clerk telephoned ahead, he entered the brass cage of the elevator and rose to the fifth floor, where he found the elector’s suite—the door was open. Light spilled from it across the rose medallion of the carpet, and he could hear the elector’s soft and modulated voice call out to him before the cage had scarcely closed. “Dear chap, dear fellow”—friendly words in which Greuben nevertheless detected a hint of condescension, though it was always welcome, he reminded himself, to hear German spoken in this nest of Francophonic savages. “Dear chap—please!”

  Always in the elector’s presence he had to steel himself to the man’s ugliness. Now as he crossed the threshold he held out his hand. When the elector took it in his small, soft, effeminate fingers, could he feel how he made Greuben’s skin shiver and creep?

  Greuben smiled; he did not think so. What was the use of diplomatic training if you could not hide such things? Even so, for a moment he hesitated before he looked into the elector’s face. He let his gaze slide from the crimson cummerbund up the elegant shirt-front and starched collar, out of which rose the elector’s white neck and smallpox-ravaged face, a cratered mass of blotches and scars, out of which peered two enormous, penetrating eyes—women’s eyes, Greuben thought, with long lashes and a kind of shimmering surface, as if, despite his evident good humor, the man was going at any moment to burst into tears.