A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  He spoke gruffly and confidently, though he was concerned. The problem then would be to recognize Miranda Popescu. With any luck they wouldn’t fire a shot.

  The old Gypsy was a witch, that much was sure. Where had the girl come from after all, and de Graz’s son? Miranda Popescu must not be left in there, he told himself, to be turned into a vampire or a ghost. Now he understood what his lady had said—that they must rescue her, save her from her enemies. But he was sure this Gypsy had some bad surprise for him.

  At quarter past five, Ferenc got up from beside the fire. He was the one who’d escaped from the house. He’d come yelling across the bridge, and he was lucky no one hit him when they fired at the open door. Later he sat covered in blankets next to the fire in the birch trees, and as the snow grew thick he told the captain what he had seen. The guide had given him a cup of tea.

  Raevsky had just made the circuit, and was headed back to the main camp by the promontory when he saw him. With his blanket over his head, Ferenc walked out into the open, down the slope and onto the ice surface of the pond.

  “What are you doing? Get back!” Raevsky shouted, but the snow was thicker now. And then the wind came up, and his words were thrown into his face by the wind. He ran down to the edge of the pond. From where he stood he could see four of the five watch-fires. But then he couldn’t, and they disappeared, and he thought it must be a trick of the snow. Certainly it wasn’t possible for all of them to be extinguished in a single moment, blown out like so many candles. He couldn’t see the lights. Yet it was not too dark to see the tops of the pines turn over as the wind passed through. Nor was the wind so strong that he couldn’t hear noises in the trees, branches ripped down. He turned and ran back toward the camp in the birch trees. He called out for Alexandru, his sister’s son.

  Five minutes before, Raevsky had been with him. That camp was at the far side of the pond, guarding the house on the north side. As he ran, he expected to see the fire reappear, hidden by the trees or a trick of the snow. But when he got there, the fire was dead, the embers scattered, dead. The boy lay on his back, cold and scarcely breathing. The wind howled and tore at the trees.

  Shouting a charm his mother had taught him, Raevsky dragged him up, threw him over his shoulder, and staggered back through the trees. There was a sheltered place among the rocks that he’d chosen for an emergency position, and now he headed for it—an outcropping of rocks and a deposit of dry leaves. Before he went back for the others, he stripped his mother’s amulet from around his neck and wound it around the boy’s unresisting fingers. He gave the boy a hug, held him in his arms, tried to warm his cold body. Then, keeping in his mind the image of the Baroness Ceausescu’s beautiful face, he plunged off again into the snow.

  * * *

  IN BUCHAREST, IN THE HOUSE on Saltpetre Street, in her cold, upstairs room, the baroness sat waiting. Markasev had returned. He lay naked in the cage under a horsehair blanket. For several minutes his eyes had been open. He had sat up, moved his arms, given some nonsensical responses to her questions. But then he had slipped back into unconsciousness like a swimmer desperate for air, who had found his legs entangled in some wreckage and had sunk again below the surface.

  Something was wrong. The pigs in the crate had sighed and squealed. Now they no longer breathed. Jean-Baptiste would dispose of them.

  Something was wrong. Markasev had failed. Or something was the matter with the science. Or else Aegypta Schenck had tricked her. Or else Markasev had made a fool of her—in any case the girl had not come with him. Jean-Baptiste had built this cage for her at some expense.

  The baroness sat watching in her leather armchair. If Markasev had brought back the girl, if he’d not disappointed her, then the baroness would have helped him. She was a generous woman, and she’d been yearning to help him for many weeks. She’d imagined his gratitude—she would have found a home for him. But now this cage would be his home, at least until he explained himself: now he tossed and struggled, and threw his head from side to side. “No,” he muttered, “no, what will you do? Oh, Sennacherib,” a word that filled the baroness with anxiety and rage. She didn’t show it. She sat in her husband’s armchair, her bare feet crossed on a stool. Nothing disturbed the smoothness of her face. From time to time she ran her big-knuckled fingers through her hair. But what was happening in America? What was happening in that place?

  All night and now past noon, she had sat in the leather armchair, chewing her nails. Now she kicked aside the footstool and stood up. Gathering her dressing gown around her, she stalked past the cage. Beyond it was a long, ironwood table, in the center of which rose a crystal pyramid, one meter on a side. Flanking the pyramid stood a black mirror and a hanging pendulum.

  Most of her husband’s laboratory equipment she had never touched. She was not interested, as he was, in chemical research, or metallurgy, or the quest for the philosopher’s stone. If he had not died, he would have beggared them with his experiments, the ceaseless expiation of his guilt. But there was one area of knowledge where her interests coincided with his, one part of the room that she still used. She’d dragged this table away from the wall, and on it she had laid her husband’s astrological charts, his books by Zosimus and others, and his divining instruments.

  Now she ran her stained, bleeding fingers along the polished wood. An enlarger was clamped to one end of the table, and beside it stood the big box camera with the Zeiss lens, which her husband had bought in Dresden. A chance imperfection in the lens had enabled him to capture not just faces and landscapes, but spirits and souls.

  Her husband had a book of black and white prints that he’d prepared himself. She leafed through it. “Sennacherib,” she said. And there he was, in a series of three. The first was out of focus: a grinning, freckled child about six years old, taken at Lake Como on the beach. The second showed a bear in the snow. And the third was difficult to make out, a swirl of shadows around a glowing center.

  There were notes in her husband’s handwriting, which was clear and precise. Nevertheless, the words were difficult to read. Often he used a kind of code. And finally she was too impatient. She consulted the chart tacked to the wall. Her husband was in the circle of brass.

  There are seven spheres of life, seven of death, and the Baron Ceausescu was in the third of these. In a year or so, as he dropped downward, he would be harder to reach. But now she glanced at her watch, glanced at his plotted trajectory on the chart and made some rapid mental calculations. He was always waiting for a transmission from his wife.

  She pressed the coordinates into the ansible, an iron box fifty centimeters long, ornately painted with a pattern of exploding stars. Typewriter keys protruded from one side, and her stained fingers played on them. Then she waited. Her husband didn’t sleep now, didn’t eat, didn’t rest, so he was always at her service.

  From the back of the ansible rose a horn made of lacquered paper over a wooden frame, like the horn of a Victrola. The baroness adjusted the lever, then stood alternately gnawing and examining the cuticle of her right thumb. She was waiting for a flicker of movement in the surface of the crystal pyramid. Now she saw it.

  Shortly after her husband’s death, she had had carried into storage the various portraits of him that had decorated the house—all but one—because it hurt her to look at them, she’d said. It was the truth. She’d always been oppressed by his ugliness, his heavy, sagging features and bald head, his pig’s eyes. Mercifully, all that was gone now, rotted to nothing inside the Ceausescu mausoleum. The image that now came to her out of the spirit world was of a young woman with a long throat, her golden hair tied up. There was no sign of the red pig.

  The image flickered and burned below the crystal surface of the pyramid. The girl’s face was happy. She smiled when she caught sight of the baroness and gave a small shy wave. The baroness studied her thumbnail. She was waiting for the sound of her husband’s voice, unrecognizable and airy in the depths of the lacquer horn. First there was a sound of wind, the
static of the spheres, and then a girlish whisper, “Nicola, oh, are you there?”

  The baroness rolled her eyes. “Of course,” she typed into the machine.

  “I could bear a thousand years of this if I could see your face. What are you wearing?”

  Death hadn’t changed him. “Show me the place,” she typed in.

  “Nicola, don’t make these mistakes. Learn from me.”

  The girlish voice was covered sometimes with a rushing sound, a swell of ions or of wind. But the intention was clear and the baroness ignored it. Always when he was alive he had oppressed her with his opinions, his advice, and now it was the same. If it were up to him she’d be a virgin in the temple, and she imagined he had many reasons for wishing so. What did he care now about money or her position in the world? What did he care about her son’s future? She’d been twenty-six when he died, and he had left her with enormous debts and no one to rely on but herself.

  “Please,” she typed in. “If you love me.” He had never loved her. Only he had wanted to possess her, touch her body with his old hands.

  Now there was silence except for the ionic wind. The girl under the pyramid disappeared. The baroness came closer and peered into the crystal surface, which now seemed opaque. Nothing was there. She brought the lamp closer and examined the reflection of her own face in the triangular glass. As always the image of her face came as a surprise to her.

  She lived her life as a beautiful woman, because that was the way people treated her. She herself couldn’t see it. When she glimpsed herself in mirrors, she had the impression of an unattractive stranger. The pouting, small-featured woman who confronted her seemed as foreign as the girl inside the pyramid. She put her bitten fingers on the image of the woman’s lips, then watched her face dissolve, though not before it had given her a haughty frown.

  Instead a landscape seemed to form under her hand. She extinguished the lamp so that she could see more clearly into the pyramid’s depths; the detail was minute. Now it was almost as if the sloping sides of the pyramid had disappeared. The tiny landscape seemed to spread across the surface of the table, and she peered into it as if she were a spirit or a god.

  It was almost too small to make out. But she saw the little house next to the pond, the wall and the wooden bridge. The hills were ghostly, white—new snow had fallen. It didn’t lie thick and uniform, but rather in blown drifts. Many trees, also, had blown down completely, or else the tops had snapped off. There was no sign of movement, except now she saw a dog running on the surface of the pond where the snow had blown away to show the ice beneath.

  The door of the little house stood open, and three people came out, loaded with gear. The first—it enraged her to see—was Miranda Popescu, dressed in black trousers and a black coat, and carrying a bag over her shoulder. And the next boy seemed familiar, a youthful version of the Chevalier de Graz, who had lived in Constanta after Prince Frederick’s murder. And the last was a tall man with a long-barrelled gun. The baroness, who had a capacious memory, fumbled for a moment and then recognized his face—Gregor Splaa, an orphan whom the prince had hired in his stable. A Gypsy had adopted him when he was on the street.

  Even in spite of her frustration and disappointment, she was conscious also of a sense of triumph—she’d been right to send Raevsky after all. She had been right to spend the money, even as a last contingency. “Where’s Raevsky?” she asked. “Can you see him? Was he there?” But there was no sound from the ansible except the rushing of the wind.

  “I thought Sennacherib was one of yours.”

  She heard her husband’s coughing laugh, soft now, almost swallowed up in static. “He belongs to no one. But every night Princess Aegypta prays to him on King Jesus’ altar. He does not despise a broken heart.”

  She turned back to the tiny landscape. Almost she could feel the wind blowing out of it, see the glare of the sun on the snow.

  * * *

  ON THE STONE DAM, MIRANDA squinted up into the morning light. She could feel the presence of a world above this one, beyond the dazzling arc of the sky. She shuddered, then buttoned the flaps of her new coat. It had been Blind Rodica’s. Her fingers were clumsy in Blind Rodica’s gloves.

  First things first, she told herself, because there was a lot she didn’t want to think about. She had woken that morning and lain still for a moment, seeing in her mind’s eye Rachel and Stanley in their old house. So, a bad dream she told herself savagely, even as she lay awake.

  But in that vanished town, every morning when she’d woken up in bed, she’d been able to remember every dream in every part. How could it be different now? With part of her mind she could not but imagine Andromeda’s mother looking out into the empty driveway, and Peter’s father alone in his little house, and people going up to search the hill, and the whole town going on without her. It would take more than waking to consume that dream, more than burning to unwrite that book.

  The night before she had not taken any of the black pills. “Bad dreams,” Rodica had said, so probably they were supposed to help her forget. What was the point of remembering?

  All that was finished, done, and yet she didn’t quite believe it. No matter how real and true and right this new world seemed despite its terrors, still she would keep faith with Rachel and Stanley—especially Stanley. She would not stop imagining. At least, it would take more than a pill.

  When Rachel’s parents had visited from Colorado, on Sundays they’d all go to St. John’s church. Afterward, when Miranda had come out of the church vestibule and down into the street, always she had been astonished at the brightness and clarity of her real life. Now as she came down from the little house into the morning, she felt the same astonishment, the sense of new-minted value, even in the chaos of broken trees. But she wondered if as time went on she would no longer be as sensitive to it, as close to tears.

  Blinking, she looked down, and found herself staring at the corpses of four men, dusted with snow, arranged below the wall. Blank-faced, frozen, they were laid out below the dam like the trophies of a cat. Raevsky was not one of them.

  Horrified, blinking again, she turned back toward the house. Through the open door she could see Blind Rodica’s body, laid out with candles at her head and feet.

  That morning, with Rachel and Stanley in her mind, she had sat up and watched Gregor Splaa light the candles. She’d sat in her nest of blankets, hugging her knees as Splaa talked, telling stories about the dead woman.

  “She had a house in the Piata Italiana, a seamstress’s shop before the baron signed the Gypsy bill,” Splaa had said. “That’s why she hates Ceausescu. The empress confiscated most of those businesses. Rodica didn’t want to go back. Her daughter was passing as a citizen. She didn’t want to damage that, you understand.”

  “Not really,” Miranda had muttered to herself. But she did understand a little bit. Listening, she was able to piece together a story of how a boy and a middle-aged woman had crossed the ocean, had lived in the woods for twelve years, seeing almost no one but each other, just to help Miranda now. It seemed impossible.

  “She took me in when I had nothing,” he said. “That was when your aunt could protect us in Roumania.”

  Then he spoke to the dead woman, reminding her of how she’d saved his life when he was attacked by the panther. He reminded her of when he’d caught his leg in his own trap, and when he’d had the fever that wouldn’t break. He told parts of jokes and stories, and sometimes whispered a song in his cracked voice. Hugging her knees, Miranda listened. She was trying to gather shreds of another story, how a proud empire had been throttled by corruption and violence.

  “Hundreds of years ago, we were there before,” said Gregor Splaa. “The Germans and the Turks and civil war. That was the first of the white tygers, Miranda Brancoveanu. Her son Constantin was the first of the golden kings.”

  Later, “Twenty years ago, the generals put Valeria Dragonesti on the throne. Your father fought against them—why they hated him. Madame Twelve
Percent,” Splaa called the empress, which was her share of the Transylvanian oil field.

  And there was someone else, a general named Antonescu. He was seven feet tall, weighed hundreds of pounds. Miranda imagined him striding across the countryside, reaching out to grab men and machines.

  Now she stood under an early-morning sun so bright it made her want to sneeze. Splaa was on the step of the house, strapping up his knapsack. He ducked into the house again and came out with a burning torch. He walked along the side of the house until he turned the corner of the wall.

  “I can’t leave her for the wolves,” he said. When he’d finished the circuit, the thatched roof of the house had started to smoke on the far side. He’d thrown away his torch, and had a bird perched on his wrist, an eagle or a hawk. “Rodica let them go last night, but she came back. I was the one who trained her. She was in her cage, waiting for me.”

  Miranda saw some rabbits running down the slope, away from the far side of the house. He must have freed them—Splaa dug into his pocket and produced the little crucifix, taken from the statue of Ganesh. There was a leather pouch hanging from the thigh of the immense bird, and Splaa slipped the cross inside. Then he threw up his wrist. This time the eagle rose straight and sure into the sun.

  * * *

  THE BARONESS SAW IT as a scratch appearing on the surface of the crystal wall. She turned away, distracted by a noise behind her. Markasev struggled underneath his blanket. She strode over the cage and put her hands on the bars. Now she found herself overcome with pity. He lay on his back, the blanket twisted around his waist, and his skin seemed bruised and flushed. Hectic spots stood on his forehead and his cheeks.

  She slipped the lock and took a step into the center of the cage. “Poor boy,” she murmured. Then in a moment she had gone and returned, and she was kneeling over Markasev with a towel in her hands. Gently she took him into her lap and dried his face. She put a corner of the towel into a bowl of water and used it to moisten his blistered lips. “Tell me,” she murmured, for he was coming awake now. His eyelids fluttered open. His pupils, which had rolled back in his head, now seemed to look at her. But his eyes were bloodshot.