by Paul Park
The baroness was glad she wasn’t sitting at that table. So she admired the cut flowers in the vases, and listened for a moment to the person who was talking to her. She turned her head and saw with surprise that it was Mlle. Corelli—the steward must have called their names in alphabetical order. She found herself staring at Kepler’s Eye, which appeared now green, now purple as the light touched it. But just a piece of rock after all, and she might not even have glanced at it, had it not been for her earlier conversation. It was set into a band of wide, flat, carved, silver links, which Mlle. Corelli had strapped around her forehead below her widow’s peak. Now the baroness remembered what Monsieur Spitz had said. There was a fire in the stone, and indeed Mlle. Corelli’s eyes also burned with an unusual ferocity, though she was not a beautiful girl. But it seemed she was eager to talk to the baroness. It seemed—yes—that she’d been at some of the last performances at the Ambassadors Theatre. If so, she must have been very young.
“I waited backstage with my programme—do you remember? You were so kind to me. Papa was furious. The next day I told him that I wanted to be an actress—no, I wanted to be you. Then I wrote you some letters, but you must have been too busy; that was the same time you were married. You see I kept the photographs from your performances and pinned them up over my walls—Papa was in a rage. He’d rip them down, and in the morning there’d be new ones. I was heartbroken when you left.”
“… heart-broken,” murmured the simulacrum, while she watched the dish now being served: ciorba de burta and some kind of Turkish pilaf. But Mlle. Corelli went on. “I just had to tell you the effect you had on a young girl, and not just me. My friends at school, we all vowed we’d never marry, and you see? I’ve kept my word.”
For a moment, the baroness wondered how she could shut her up. She imagined what the effect would be if she could reach out with the simulacrum’s hand and put it over the girl’s mouth. But then she remembered she could slip away, and in a moment she was standing in the cold night outside the shrine of Venus, a goddess who had often come to men and women like a thief in the night.
The baroness watched the plume of her breath. Above her the stars burned. She looked up at the constellation of the crown and orb. There is a power that must be grasped, the baroness thought. She pulled her hood over her face and knocked on the cottage door.
“Come in,” said a voice, as if she were expected. The door was wooden, studded with nails; she pushed it open and stepped inside. She felt no change in the temperature of the air, and she remembered the day when the princess had served her tea in her cold house. Now as then, the woman was not dressed for the weather. There was no fire on the hearth.
“Come in,” she said again. She stood in the middle of the house, a raw-boned woman with coarse features and coarse skin. Her gray hair fell to her shoulders. She wore black trousers and a white shirt, and she was cleaning a revolver. It lay in pieces on a low table, and she was rubbing part of the interior mechanism with a dirty rag.
The Baroness Ceausescu saw the room at a glance, the elegant furniture and comfortable chairs. Light came from kerosene lanterns. At the back, a curtain was pulled aside to show the doorway to the bedroom.
There was a Turkish carpet on the rough, stone flags. The baroness let her bag dangle from her hand. “I was told I could receive your blessing, but…”
“Please,” said Aegypta Schenck. She gestured toward a bench along the wall near her right hand. “You will excuse me,” she said. “I was making some tea. Would you like some?”
She spoke in the Roumanian language. It sounded beautiful in her coarse mouth, the melting vowels and liquid consonants. She put down the piece of metal she’d been polishing. “Domnul—sir, will you not show your face? No? But there’s a chill in here. Allow me.”
A stone fireplace occupied the whole of one wall. Wood was stacked under the raised hearth. The princess selected several pieces, and soon a fire was burning while she fussed over a primus stove. The kettle whistled. “What is your name?”
The baroness had prepared one, but she didn’t use it. She sat on the bench, her head abjectly bowed. “I was told you were the keeper of my lady’s fountain.”
“If you are thirsty,” said the princess, “this house is open to you, for we are all guilty of mistakes.”
The Baroness Ceausescu stared at her boots. She remembered how the woman had grabbed her by the lapels of her coat the last time she had seen her. She remembered how easily the woman had thrown her to the floor. Suddenly she felt threatened and afraid.
“People who come here bring an offering,” Aegypta said. But she shook her head when the baroness dug her hand into her pocket—she hadn’t yet removed her gloves. “I mean of themselves. Why are you here? You must understand that there are many kinds of thirst.”
She put the cups on the table beside the pieces of the gun. Then from hampers and wooden boxes she was producing food. The baroness watched her rough, big-knuckled hands as she sliced bread and meat and laid them out on a trencher along with pots of horseradish, mustard, and mayonnaise. To the baroness, fresh from the scent of the empress’s supper, it smelled oddly delicious, though of course she was a vegetarian.
She let the bag slip between her heels and took a slice of bread with meat on it, a glass of tea. The tea, especially, was unlike anything she’d ever tasted. She wondered if it was drugged.
“Let me see your face,” Aegypta said.
But there is power in the world, if you can seize it. There it is, there where your hand is. The baroness had a story prepared, but she didn’t use it. Instead she opened her mouth and told a version of the truth, how she had run away from a muddy mountain village and come barefoot to the streets of Cluj when she was ten years old. How she had found work with many different men.
“There is no shame in that,” murmured Aegypta.
Her kindness gave permission to invent. Suddenly the baroness remembered her false name. She remembered her false confession, how she had been a soldier in the war against the Turks. How she had served with Frederick Schenck von Schenck during the siege of Adrianople. How she had deserted with two other men, and when the police came they had run away into the woods. They had robbed a man on the road, beaten his head in, left him to die, etc., etc.
When the baroness told the truth, she felt the weakness of the starving girl that she had been. When she lied, she felt the strength of the false soldier. She went on and on: year after year of violence since that time.
“When I remember my life when Prince Frederick was alive, it is a forgotten paradise,” she said. “I know all Roumania thinks that, though he was a German.” This was the biggest lie of all. When von Schenck was alive she was still homeless, sleeping in boxcars and stables. Since then she had made a name for herself, a place in a difficult world.
But the princess had tears in her eyes. “He was my brother,” she said. “Perhaps God led you to my door.”
It was the soldier who went down on his knees before the princess, who was sitting on the arm of her chair. But it was Nicola Ceausescu who had secreted, while he was talking, the stiletto in her hollow sleeve. What for? The baroness felt the woman’s hand fumbling at the edge of her hood. Holding her breath, she released the catch on the stiletto. For one last lingering moment she took the soldier’s face into her face, as she felt her hood peeled back. Then she looked up and smiled, though there were tears in her eyes.
“You,” murmured Aegypta Schenck.
“Please forgive me,” cried the baroness. “Please forgive all this, and hear me out. I was afraid you wouldn’t talk to me. But I must…”
This was the moment. It all depended on this. The tears were wet on her cheeks. “I need forgiveness for my sins, and in return…” She tried to grab hold of the princess’s hand again, while at the same time she was studying her face, looking for a sign of weakness or of strength. But then Aegypta pushed her away, and the baroness felt a shudder of hatred pass through both of their bodies. It was en
ough. She seized the old woman by the waist and flung her down on the stone floor. She knelt above her with the stiletto in her hand. Its long, blue blade was pressed into her throat.
Now what? Well, of course. This was what the rope was for.
* * *
THE EMPRESS WAS THE FIRST of her family to rule in Bucharest. “Valeria” wasn’t her real name. She had adopted it two decades before, after the generals put her on the throne. Eight other queens had used it, and she imagined her subjects might find it comforting.
She was a soft, large woman of forty-five, and she loved money. The government paid her a monthly fee in return for the legitimacy she seemed to offer. The prime minister was required to meet with her every six months, but she had no influence with him. Since she had no husband or children and was not loved by her people, she found herself much blessed with time. This she spent on various projects. She was a patron of music and musicians. But her greatest enthusiasm was for gathering money.
Or rather, not money itself, since her allergies made her unable to touch coins or bank notes. But she had a powerful mind, and she was aware of all the fluctuating balances in her various accounts. Her bookkeepers reported to her twice a day. She was no miser, and enjoyed spending large sums—that night, by the time Aegypta Schenck von Schenck had found herself fully bound, gagged, curled up on the floor, the empress had already wasted half a million francs on food, flowers, fireworks, frivolity, during her patriot’s day celebration at the Winter Keep in Bucharest.
Outside the palace, the fountains were illuminated by gaslight flares, which shone in a spectrum of colors in the mistlike spray among delicate towers of ice. The rose-colored, neoclassical façade of the building was lit by thirteen bonfires placed around the perimeter of the Piata Revolutiei. The crowd was kept back by a regiment of her majesty’s own dragoons, who also stood in a double row on the wide steps of the palace. Each soldier had his right fist clenched against his chest; each stood as motionless as a statue, and the guests walked up between them. All the candles were lit in the hall of mirrors, in the banquet hall, and indeed in every room where people might find themselves, at a cost of fourteen thousand francs in beeswax alone. Then there were new gold curtains and quilted wallpaper in the reception chambers (fifty-seven thousand), a hundred cases of French champagne at twelve hundred and twenty francs a case, food for three hundred and fifty guests at four hundred and seven francs a place, including vegetable aspic and foie gras, stuffed partridges, and sherbet. Then there were the absurdly extravagant displays of irises, tulips, and columbine, brought up from Turkey on a special boxcar at a cost of ninety-eight thousand francs.
The empress kept all these numbers in her head, and she made mental calculations, small subtractions with every popped cork and exploding rocket. Against this mounting debit she had chosen to set one single credit. At seven o’clock she had sent her chamberlain to inform the Baroness Ceausescu that the pension she’d received since her husband’s death would not be renewed. Eight years was a long time, too long.
At seven forty-five she waited for the chamberlain in the peacock room, which, since it was rumored to contain real peacocks, was always empty of guests. “How did she take it?” she asked.
“Ma’am, I found her in the billiard hall, where a crowd of men was watching her play. I believe she was under the influence of liquor or else some narcotic, because she said nothing to me, even after I took her aside and gave her your majesty’s letter—she was with the Corelli girl. She looked at me with glassy eyes as if she didn’t understand. She said not one word as I described to her the respect your majesty retains for her husband’s memory. Then I heard some laughter as I left.”
This was unsatisfactory. The empress would have preferred violence or tears. She knew the baroness was close to bankruptcy. She was a conjurer and a whore’s daughter. What would it take to drive her from the city?
“Ma’am, you remember she was on the stage for many years. Perhaps she was able to hide her feelings.…”
* * *
PERHAPS, BUT PERHAPS NOT. It was the simulacrum whose eyes were glassy and bloodshot, whose breath smelled, whose heart was equable and dull. But in the shrine of Venus, the baroness felt her fingers thrill with rage, barely suppressed, barely understood. She felt it as she pulled the soft rope around the wrists of Aegypta Schenck, as she cut the rope and pulled it tight again. Then she tied her ankles together. Then she made a slip knot of the last of the rope, and put it around the woman’s neck.
She stripped off her gloves, slid the flask of brandy out of her bag, and took a drink. “I don’t mean to hurt you,” she said. “I want you to listen to what I say. Are you comfortable?”
She had gagged the woman with a silk handkerchief, which she now removed to offer her the flask. But the old woman said nothing. She just lay there on her side, watching the baroness’s face. Her eyes were dark with an odd tint of yellow, the same as in her gray hair, though it might have been a trick of the firelight.
The Baroness Ceausescu sat on the ledge of the fireplace. Sweating, she pulled off her robe. Then she unbuttoned her wool shirt. “Tell me how you did it,” she said.
The woman stared at her. She lay curled on her side. She didn’t complain. Her breath went in and out. “What?” she said after a moment, as softly and comfortably as if she’d been sitting in her chair.
“You killed the men I sent.”
When Aegypta said nothing, she went on: “Yes, and weren’t you surprised to see them there? It was nothing you wrote about. It was my idea to send them. Guard the back door, I thought, though you think I’m a fool.”
Nothing: “No—you were the foolish one. You told me it was possible to bring her straight to Bucharest. I read it in your papers, but you were wrong.”
Again, nothing. The baroness sat with her knees apart. “My men. You murdered them. You don’t have to deny it. I saw it in the glass. It was Sennacherib. Do you have an altar here?”
Still there was something peculiar about the woman’s eyes. Now the baroness understood—she had no eyebrows. No, but their color made them invisible. “Don’t lie to me,” said the baroness. “There’s no reason to lie. I’m not angry. I want to know how it is done.”
She got up and stood over the woman. After a moment she stretched out her booted foot and pressed her in the side. “Why won’t you talk to me? It doesn’t have to be like this. We could be friends.”
The words came out of her almost against her will. Immediately she was ashamed of them, especially when the woman closed her eyes. “Not friends,” the baroness amended. “We’ve hurt each other too deeply for that. For my part, I’m sorry for what I’ve done. Are you sorry?”
She was referring to the death of her husband eight years before. The princess had been accused of killing him with witchcraft, poisoning him with sickness and remorse until he took his own life. There’d been no proof. The court case had collapsed, though the scandal had ruined Aegypta Schenck von Schenck. She’d been stripped of her title and the last of her inheritance. Already four years previously, the baron had chased her from her brother’s house near Constanta on the beach.
The baroness herself had not believed the charge. But now she could imagine convincing herself that it was true. “Look at me,” she said. “Listen to me. If I’ve hurt you, I am sorry. But you’ve hurt me also.”
Still no response. In the corner of her mind that she shared with the simulacrum, she could picture the black stationery, the first words of the empress’s letter: “Madam, after much internal consideration, we have decided that the sum of…” But how dare they? Not one of these aristocratic snobs was fit to lick the soles of her shoes. Not one of them had suffered what she’d suffered, overcome what she’d overcome.
“You will talk to me,” she said. She knelt over the princess with the stiletto in her hand. She pressed the point into her spotted neck under the knot of the white cord, but didn’t prick her. Then, suddenly disgusted with herself, she got to her feet and p
ut the dagger down on the ledge of the hearth. She had a headache from the brandy and whatever was in the tea, and she was breathing hard. “I won’t let you,” she said. Then to calm herself, she threw some more wood on the fire and started to explore the house.
This was the larger room with the fireplace and the armchairs, the table and benches. The princess cooked on a primus stove. There was a food cupboard set into the wall. Opened, it revealed a plethora of delicacies: marmalade, cornichons, olives, pickled cherries, sardines, smoked oysters, teas. Many of the bottles and cans had foreign labels.
“You know it’s true, what I told you,” the baroness said. “I came from a village near Pietrosul. Seven of us in a room. Not like this—we had nothing. Just a wooden shack in the mountains. Water from the stream. Cold in the winter, I remember. Oh, I remember…”
She stood on the threshold of the inner room and pushed the curtain back. Maybe she had imagined something different, some saint or hermit’s alcove of bare rock, maybe a pallet or a narrow bed. Or else something to suggest the simple, peasant cottage that had burned. But she was not prepared for the richness of this room, the soft gray carpet with a pattern of snow lions, a carpet that was not even from Turkey, but from some more exotic country farther east. She was not prepared for the carved four-poster bed, the embroidered coverlets, the brass lamp stands and gilt-framed watercolors. One thing only was rough and plain, a wooden cross over the bed.
In the corner was a mahogany armoire, which she pulled open. It contained some gowns and dresses. And inside an inner drawer there was money, a great deal of money, a bag of currency in small denominations.
The baroness bit her lips, drew blood. “You understand?” she called out. “A dirt floor shack, chickens with us in the room. When I ran away I had to eat from the garbage heaps, sleep in the train cars—do you know anything about that?”
