A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  The men in the stream had splashed backward a few paces. The men on the shore were squatting over the guns. Raevsky scrambled into the boat and took his seat. For a few minutes he and Miranda paddled like mad, but then he paused to put his fingers on the neck of the wounded man, still lying in the bottom of the boat. The river was quiet here, broad and shallow. They went on a little farther. Then, sooner than Miranda thought was safe, Ravesky brought the boat to shore.

  “We camped here on the other way,” Raevsky said. Enormous pines grew near the shore, and they pulled the boat up the bank onto a carpet of black needles. Miranda was shivering because her pants and feet were wet, and the wounded man was unresponsive, cold and stiff under his blankets. The gash on his head was dry. Raevsky stripped off his clothes and wrapped him, naked, in a feather sleeping bag, then Miranda sat with him while Raevsky gathered firewood. There was plenty of dead wood among the trees. He tore it down, then built a fire in a hearth set among the boulders. He lit the kindling with matches from a silver canister, and piled on more wood than was prudent, Miranda thought. Later, gathering branches as the sun went down, she saw the fire burning from far away.

  She imagined throwing the branches down and striking out to find the hunters’ camp, the path along the south side of the stream. She imagined Peter and Andromeda waiting for her, and for a moment she saw in her mind’s eye Peter’s face as she’d last seen it from the boat. So—she would find him the next day. Night was falling and Raevsky’s fire burned bright between the trees. She had no blankets or gear. Besides, there were the wild men, the Indians. What had Raevsky called them—English? It seemed ridiculous.

  “Tomorrow I will go,” she thought. “Probably he will let me go, after all this.”

  Despite herself she was impressed by what Raevsky had done, how he’d fought for his men and cared for them. And in the meantime he had made a comfortable camp. In the gathering dark he’d boiled water and made potato soup out of a powder. He gave her crackers and sliced sausage and German chocolate, all without speaking. He pitched a tent for her, a military pup tent made of thick, bleached canvas. Then he fussed with the wounded man—Alexandru, he called him, his sister’s son. He whispered to him, chafed his arms, checked his heartbeat and his pulse.

  She saw him bending over Alexandru as she returned with her load of wood. He scarcely looked at her. So then she crawled into her tent and watched the shadows of the fire on the canvas walls. She listened to Raevsky muttering and chanting in Roumanian, before she fell asleep.

  In the morning when she woke, it took a moment for her to realize she was not in her own bed in her own room. Gray light came in through the canvas wall. Miranda lay in the blankets that Raevsky had given her, imagining Rachel and Stanley and the old house. What day was it—Thursday? She wondered if school was open again, and if not, where her classes were being held. She supposed they could find room in their old elementary school in town. Then she imagined the police searching the woods on Christmas Hill, and Stanley, and Peter’s father too, while Rachel sat with Andromeda’s mother in the kitchen. What must they be thinking now?

  In her warm tent, Miranda lay still until she started to cry. Then she got up, unbuttoned her tent, and went down to the stream to wash. But it was too cold. Her breasts ached, and the rocks were slimy with ice. She cupped some water in her hands to drink, patted her cheeks with her cold hands, then sat brushing her hair with Blind Rodica’s brush.

  Since she was a child, Miranda had told herself she wasn’t comfortable in her own parents’ house, that her real home was elsewhere, in another country. Now this morning and the one before, she had thought of Berkshire County when she woke. As she brushed out her hair, Miranda found herself remembering another dream from earlier in the night, torn and covered by these thoughts of Stanley and Rachel and the house on the green. Now again the dream came back to her in rags—it was her aunt once more. The gray-haired lady with the fierce, hard face was bending over her as she lay in her blankets. “You must find them. Follow the path. In the dream life I will send a messenger.…”

  The rest drifted away. The harder she though about the words, the slipperier they seemed. Why couldn’t the woman say what she meant, give her something real, tell her what was going on? Was that too much for the white tyger to ask? Dream life messenger—what crap was that? Frustrated, she got to her feet and walked up to the camp.

  Alexandru had died during the night. Captain Raevsky had laid him out on a flat boulder. The fire still burned in the circle of rocks. Miranda stood holding her hairbrush, watching Raevsky fussing with the body—how many corpses had she seen in just two days? Making up for lost time. She’d been to Stanley’s father’s funeral when she was eight, but the casket had been closed.

  Was it possible she was hardened to this already? Or was she just numb from the cold. Certainly she felt no special horror at the sight of the dead man. He looked asleep. She sat down by the fire to warm her hands. Water was boiling in a handleless tin pot, and even though she pulled the cuff of Blind Rodica’s shirt over her fingers, still she burned herself when she drew it out. But Raevsky had showed her the enameled cups the night before, the tea in its silver foil. She sprinkled tea into the bottom and poured water over it, doing a better job with the pot this time. Perched on a rock, wrapped in a blanket, she held her cup in both hands and stared into the fire.

  Where was Peter now? She would get away from here and go back up the trail on the south bank. That’s all that she could do. When she came to where the wild men were, she’d go in a circle through the woods.

  Or should she cross the river? What would Peter do? She didn’t want to miss him in the woods. But Andromeda would find her, if she’d figured out how to use her nose.

  The night before, she’d thought she’d wait for daylight. But now she wondered if the darkness was better. Or else, if he’d been up all night, maybe Raevsky would fall asleep—to her annoyance, she could not keep her thoughts to these important questions. Always they were escaping backward. When Kevin Markasev had held her book above the fire on Christmas Hill, before he let it drop, for a moment she had guessed at what was happening. When he had asked her if she wanted to go to Bucharest, he was asking her permission—she could see that now. Perhaps the change could not have taken place without her welcoming it. So why now did she feel she’d give up everything just to be home? She had no right to feel that way. All these men were fighting because of her.

  Not far from where she sat, Raevsky was digging a hole in the bank near a collapsed tree. With gloved hands and a piece of wood he was pulling out stones, shoveling out black masses of pine needles until he had dug a sort of cave. He was muttering to himself, and Miranda watched as he walked past her without a word, then returned carrying Alexandru’s body. He curled it into the small space as best he could, then covered it with needles and stones and dirt, more and more until he’d made a pile and the body was hidden from sight. He made a tower of stones and against it he laid a rifle. In a crevice he placed Alexandru’s spectacles and a book. Then he stood chanting, a bottle of colorless liquid in his hand, which he was alternately drinking and pouring on the rocks. When finally he came and sat next to the fire, he smelled of alcohol.

  “Raki?” Miranda asked.

  “Turkish ouzo.” Raevsky shrugged, pulled his gloves off. “So, we have a legend that a river leads into the tara mortilor—the country of the dead. No one can cross unless their body—see? Now there are many ghosts haunting me. These young men, I could not do what I must do. Killed by a demon. Skin so white. I was afraid to touch. All these witches must be hunted. Germans have the good ideas in this. German laws. That boy Ferenc, he will haunt me.”

  “Who were those men?” asked Miranda.

  The liquor in Raevsky’s bottle was a quarter gone. He shrugged. “Many tribes here. Cannibals. Ishu told me before he ran like an iepur—a rabbit.”

  Ishu must have been the man with coral in his hair. “Indians,” Miranda said.

  “The
y are English, so I tell you. After the earth moves they are coming across the sea. Big wave—a big wave. Floods in the Black Sea—this was more than one hundred years. Some go to France and Spain, Roumania, even. Some here.”

  He stared into the fire. Miranda was full of questions. Finally, “What are you going to do now?”

  Raevsky spat into the fire. “I promise to bring you to Bremerhaven, so maybe now I have to go with you. Maybe I send telegraph. But I will not return to my own place. How can I see my people there? This was my sister’s son.”

  His stubbornness was terrible, Miranda thought. But if he was awake all night, he could not stay awake forever. She would wait till he was drunk and then escape.

  So she sat with him that day as he was talking. He told Miranda how he had fought with her father and the Baron Ceausescu against the Turks. He was the baron’s man from the baron’s town of Cluj, and after the war he had returned there. He had a farm, no wife, no children. Then in the autumn he had hired the men for this journey—boys from the countryside or students.

  “I was tired of looking at the curu magarului—the back of my mule,” he said. “Madame Ceausescu remembered me. She saw me just some times, but she knew my name. Oh, you will see that she is beautiful and wise.” He brought a locket out from underneath his shirt. He split it open to reveal a portrait of a woman.

  Miranda had her backpack between her knees. It still contained her Roumanian things as well as some supplies that Splaa had given her from his house—a toothbrush, a towel, socks and gloves, a bar of soap. These Miranda felt with her hand as she fished for her own locket, opened it. “Who is that?”

  Raevsky studied it, surprised. “You never saw your mother’s face?”

  “No.”

  “So, that is Clara Brancoveanu. Her husband was von Schenck the traitor, but she paid for it. She told us the date and time of the invasion when the Germans came to Kaposvar, so we are grateful. She paid with her freedom—that was twenty years before. When Aegypta Schenck must close her Constanta house, what did you do? You were—tell me—eight years or so. I never saw. The story is that you were dead or else in Germany. Tell me the truth. Where did you come from? That Jew and that Gypsy did not raise you in that house. My lady did not tell me that. Every night we were waiting on that hill, she said. For what? But some trick! You and de Graz’s son.”

  It was too complicated to explain. Miranda said nothing, and soon Raevsky started to talk again. He sipped his bottle and told her stories of Roumania. He spoke good English, learned in the baron’s service. He told her about a cabin in the mountains where he had hunted bears and wild boar. He told her about a lake where he’d gone fishing.

  “Your father was a great man,” he said. “That is why he is so shamed—or so. Twenty years before, he died. Is long enough…,” he said, but how could it be twenty years ago? Miranda herself was only just fifteen. She’d had her fifteenth birthday in the summer.

  Her hands were cold. She put her hand into her pocket and felt the bottle of Blind Rodica’s pills.

  Miranda thought she’d give him one more chance. Enough time had gone by. Maybe now he might be able to think of her as more than just a duty or a task. So she thought about her predicament until she had a lump in her throat. “Please let me go,” she interrupted him.

  Raevsky stared at her. After a pause, he went back to talking about things he’d done.

  “Please let me go back to my friends,” she said.

  He looked at her as if he didn’t understand.

  “Now you’re alone,” she said. “You can’t do this by yourself. I could have left you last night. I could have left you on the riverbank. Please, will you take me to my friends? Peter and … I promise we’ll go with you. We won’t fight you any more.”

  He looked at her, then spat into the fire. “It will not be bad,” he said. “All Roumania will love you. The Baroness Ceausescu…”

  Miranda did not want to hear that name again. “What do you think?” she said. “You think she sent you here to bring me back, just so she could take me to parties and send me to school? You had to shoot an old woman and take me from my friends? You had to give me a forged letter and see your men killed by maniacs, just so all Roumania could love me? I was going there anyway—you know that. Those people were going to take me to my family!”

  After a moment, he cleared his throat. “The letter is a forgery, is true.”

  Then in a little while, “But it will not be like that, so you see. Bucharest with its blue domes like turnips. The Baroness Ceausescu will protect you from the Germans, that is true. And from Valeria Dragonesti—so, I think. She does not tell me everything.”

  He was obsessed. After a little while she asked him, “May I have a drink?”

  He reached for a tin cup but she shook her head. He was drunk enough to hand her the entire bottle. She had hidden some of her black sleeping pills in her palm, and when she wiped her mouth after a sweet, burning sip, she dropped them one by one into the bottle’s neck. Raevsky wasn’t looking. He stared into the fire.

  But for a long time the pills had no effect. Captain Raevsky told her stories through the afternoon until the light fled away. Miranda ate potato soup and sausage, but he didn’t do anything but drink. Inch by inch, he slouched deeper in his blanket roll. And it took a long time, but finally he was asleep, and the full moon rose. Miranda watched it though the trees, then walked along the riverbank in the cold, clear air, so she could see it in the open sky.

  She came back to the fire and Raevsky hadn’t budged. She covered him with blankets. He lay snoring on his back.

  Under the moon, as she picked through the camp, more than ever in her life she felt she was Rachel and Stanley’s daughter, alone and far from home. This fire, this snoring soldier, the dead man in his cave covered up with rocks—maybe she could believe in what she saw and heard and touched. The moon and the cold night. All the rest was just a story, a family in Roumania named Brancoveanu. A woman named Miranda Brancoveanu, who freed her country long ago.

  She took down her tent and packed it into its roll. She took warm clothes, dried food, and slung them into a canvas pack. She wouldn’t take too much because she had to travel fast. She’d follow the river upstream again, and she wouldn’t think about the wild men. And she’d meet Peter and Andromeda along the path on the south bank. Maybe they had come for her, and they were close.

  Again she felt a stab of terrible regret. What had she done for Peter, that he would chase after her now? It was her fault he was in this mess with her. When she’d surrendered to Kevin Markasev on the hill, she’d dragged him out of his whole life. And even before that, she’d not deserved to be his friend. When Andromeda came back from Europe, she had ditched him.

  Around her neck she hung the locket that contained the sepia face of Clara Brancoveanu. On the cold riverbank, Miranda found it hard to think about her. Instead she imagined there were times in the past year when she’d been cruel to her own mother, had hurt Rachel deliberately in little ways. And even though, now standing by the fire, she couldn’t think of any specific incidents, still if she ever …

  When she was small, Stanley had often put her to bed, had read books and sung songs to her. Her favorite one he made different every night, though there were verses that came around again and again:

  Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,

  Papa’s going to buy you a mocking bird,

  And if that mocking bird don’t fly,

  Papa’s going to buy you a pizza pie,

  And if that pizza pie’s too cold,

  Papa’s going to buy you a crown of gold,

  And if that crown of gold gets lost,

  Papa’s going to buy you the holy ghost,

  And if that holy ghost flies away,

  Papa’s going to buy you a sunny day,

  And if that sunny day clouds over,

  Papa’s going to buy you a dog named Rover …

  Etc., etc., and she was always sleeping by the end.
Now she picked up a stick, poked at the fire. Raevsky was snoring, and there were shadows among the trees. Miranda straightened up, then felt suddenly light-headed and crouched down again. She had a pain in the pit of her stomach, and an odd, burning sensation lower down. She unzipped her jeans, and found that her underwear was streaked with blood. At first she imagined she’d been hurt.

  A secret source of shame for her was this: Long past the age when her friends—Andromeda, for instance—first started menstruating, she had not yet crossed this bridge, as she imagined, into womanhood. “This is just great,” she said now. Then she walked down to the water to wash herself, thinking at the same time about the pirogue. She had to hide or destroy it. If Raevsky woke, he must think she had taken it downstream.

  Once outside the fire’s circle of warmth and light, she had a momentary image of the wild men coming quietly along the path, raising their quartz-headed clubs. Furious at herself, she stepped over the wet stones, peered across to the far bank. There was a flat rock sticking out into the stream.

  Miranda stripped off her boots, her pants. Naked from the waist, she squatted down next to the freezing water. She examined herself as well as she could, then looked away.

  She looked up at the river of the sky as it flowed through the treetops, following the curve of the river at her feet. Stanley at various times had taught her all of the constellations, and now she looked for some hint of the familiar winter patterns: Orion fighting Taurus, his dog at his heels. But the stars were dim, unrecognizable, washed out by the moon.

  She had thought and worried about her period over the years. But it hadn’t occurred to her she’d feel so light-headed, so intoxicated. Either that, or one sip of ouzo had affected her. Looking up at the sky, she felt nauseated, dizzy, and her heart was beating hard. When she looked down again, Andromeda was there.