A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  And as if conjured out of the baroness’s tears, there he was now, her attentive husband, brought back out of the land of the dead to comfort her. His eyes closed down to slits, still Markasev could see him as he moved around the room. Markasev could see him before the baroness felt his presence: a bald man with the greasy skin of the dead. Big sagging features, little pig’s eyes—it was a face Markasev recognized from dreams. The man was dressed in a military uniform, the star of Roumania around his neck.

  In his dreams the man had been a devil to him, a cruel father and a master. But now Markasev could almost imagine he had been redeemed by wretchedness, by his love for the lady of comfort and tears. She sat in her armchair, biting her fingernails while he moved around the room. He was studying her face, reaching out to her and then pulling back.

  Only when he came close to her did he seem spectral or ephemeral, when he reached as if to touch her with his knotted, long fingers. Then the boy could see his flesh was weaker than her flesh. He reached out as if to touch her hair; she flinched away, brushed her hand against her ear as if a fly had lighted on it. Then she turned, staring at him, though she couldn’t see him.

  “Who’s there?” she said, no tears now in her voice. Markasev could see she had a green stone in her hand. It glittered softly in the light.

  On one of the side tables stood a ouijah board. The baroness had laid it out and consulted it many times, though not for several days. Now by itself the planchette started to move. It trembled and chattered across the board. But when the baroness got up to look, it skated rapidly from letter to letter. Markasev couldn’t see, couldn’t read, nor did he have to. For at the same time the old baron opened his leathery mouth, whispering words too softly for his wife to hear. “My love,” he said. “Dear one.”

  “Who’s there?” cried the baroness. She could not smell the odors of the red pig of Cluj, thought Markasev. She had no taste of sulphur in her mouth. She couldn’t see her husband as he held out his weak, arthritic hands. But she was reading the words as he whispered them, and in a moment she relaxed. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “My dear, I saw you weeping—”

  There was no trace of tears now on her cheeks. As if impatient with the slow letters, she cut him off. “Someone in my house. Someone went through my clothes, my boxes. Jean-Baptiste—”

  “It wasn’t Jean-Baptiste,” whispered the old man.

  “How do you know? The door was locked. Oh, I have many troubles,” and her eyes brimmed up again.

  Markasev watched the old man acting out a pantomime of sympathy. He wrung his hands, held them out in supplication, though his wife couldn’t see. Finally he spoke. The planchette started to move. “What’s in your hand?”

  “A jewel I planned to sell. Tonight I must be gone. The police will come—”

  “You will not sell it. It is Kepler’s Eye.”

  She was talking and not reading. Now she stopped, looked down at the board, the planchette skittering from letter to letter. “Those men came for Kepler’s Eye.”

  Markasev listened to the old man whispering. “There is a man in the first circle now. He told me how a man shot him as he lay in his carriage with a broken head. That man was looking for Kepler’s Eye. You must keep it. Do you know what it is?”

  * * *

  IN HIS CAGE, Markasev gave up his pretense of being asleep. He raised himself up on his elbow. He rearranged the blanket over his cold feet. But the baroness was bending over the ouijah board. She had the green stone in her hand: WHEN JOH KEPLER DIED IN TUBINGEN HE HANG IN PUB MARKET & ALL WEPT HE WAS THIEF & MURDER & THEY WEPT FOR HIM MEN & WOMEN IN CROWD FIGHT SOLDIERS BECAUSE OF LOVE

  “What are you telling me?”

  LOVE IN THE STONE KEEP IT

  “What do you mean?”

  LOVE WILL PROTECT U C

  There was a story that Johannes Kepler had maintained a thousand lovers, which didn’t seem to be what the baron was talking about now. “What do you mean?” Nicola Ceausescu said again.

  KEEP IT U WILL C

  Then, after a pause: LOVE WILL PROTECT & STONE WILL BRING 2 GREATNESS IT IS CHANCE 4 U & NOT MY GIFT BUT CHANCE SO HOLD IT 2 YOUR SKIN & TRUST & DO NOT B AFRAID 2 LEAVE ALL THIS MY LOVE

  This wasn’t helping. She had come home to find her bedroom broken into, her boxes and drawers rifled. Even the secret compartment under the pipes had been opened, the money spread across the bathroom floor. The thieves hadn’t cared about it. She had come home thinking she would empty out her laboratory that night, send Markasev away, but it was late, too late, she knew.

  DO NOT B AFRAID TO GRAB THE TYGERS TALE

  He was delusional. Death had made him crazy. With her right hand, she batted the planchette across the floor. She had the tourmaline clasped in her other hand. Of the heart’s emotions, love was one she understood the least. How could love protect her from the danger she was in?

  Then there was a knocking at the quilted, outside door, and Jean-Baptiste saying, “Please, they’re here.”

  No reason to ask who. As she hurried through her yellow room, past the clothes strewn across the floor, she looked out through the windows onto the street and saw the black police carriage with four horses. Jean-Baptiste was talking: “Don’t be afraid. I spoke to them as they came in.”

  There was something unusual in his voice, a thrill of nervousness and triumph. When they came to the stairway he took hold of her elbow. On the way down he touched her back. He was a spry old man, and she felt a trembling in his fingers. “Please, Nicola,” he murmured, the first time he had ever used her given name. “Don’t be afraid,” he coaxed, placing his hand on her back as they reached the landing. “You’ll see.”

  In fact she was allowing him to bring her down the stairs. Her thoughts were dark and sluggish. She had the tourmaline in her left hand. She felt it slide between her fingers when she squeezed it. Surely they would not put her in prison, either for one crime or the other.

  “Be quiet when you meet them,” murmured the old man. “I’ve burned your clothes, all trace. I’ve left you a letter and some money. Please let me tell you, I could not let them search the house.”

  She turned to face him on the last landing. The light in the vestibule had not been lit, and the whole stairwell was in shadow. Down below stood a policeman by the door onto the street, and light streamed from the blue sitting room.

  Jean-Baptiste stood close to her. She could smell his breath, a little brandy. In contrast to his threadbare coat, his slovenly, unshaven look of the morning, he now appeared carefully and meticulously groomed, dressed in a dark suit she had not seen before. He seemed agitated, and he licked his lips. His eyes were full of urgent pleading.

  “What have you done?” she whispered. And she reached out with her left hand and almost placed it on the front of his shirt over his breast. Almost she touched his necktie, which was askew. Now she felt some sympathy with his excitement. Some sympathy, also, for him.

  “Ma’am, are you there?” The voice was one she recognized: harsh, fussy, and with a Hungarian accent. It came from the blue sitting room, and now she looked down and saw Domnul Luckacz on the threshold, a black shadow with the light behind him.

  Animated now, full of anxiety, she came down the remaining steps. Luckacz stood aside and she crossed into the room, which was quite warm. There was a fire hissing in the stove. On a small side table stood a silver candlestick.

  “Ma’am, your servant was telling us how it was,” said Domnul Luckacz. “I understand your feelings. I wish you had told me when I was here this morning.”

  Was it only this morning? She was staring at the candlestick, which Jean-Baptiste must have brought from somewhere. Immediately she felt a kind of separation, as if a part of her had stepped onto a stage. “He’s been with me a long time,” she murmured.

  “Of course. You felt a loyalty, I understand. You understand also—”

  “You have a job,” she breathed. Still she hadn’t turned t
o face him, to face Jean-Baptiste.

  “We have a job to do,” agreed Luckacz. “Let me say at once there are some favorable circumstances. This man was protecting you. We would like you to make a formal statement—”

  “I am exhausted,” she said.

  “I understand. Tomorrow I will bring the notary. I do not wish to inconvenience you or add to your discomfort. Nevertheless I must assure you. There will be a public statement.”

  She was staring at the candlestick. “Is your investigation finished?”

  “By no means.”

  “May I ask who your informant was?”

  “Ma’am, I’m not able—”

  He was quiet when she turned around. He was dressed in a green overcoat, but as before, his hat was in his hands. The light fell on his gray hair, his dyed moustache, and illuminated also the same odd, stricken look that she had noticed for the first time in her bedroom that morning.

  Like an actress on the stage, she brought her left hand to her forehead in a long, languorous gesture, then let it fall. She looked at the carpet at her feet, then glanced up at the carefully shined shoes of Jean-Baptiste, who stood in profile behind Domnul Luckacz. He wouldn’t look at her, but stared instead at the policeman, invisible in the shadow of the hallway. The baroness watched his Adam’s apple knot and subside, knot and subside.

  And when he turned to face her, she felt tears come. He seemed lost, his eyes bright and rheumy, rimmed with pink. A helpless old man. “I’m asking for a reason, for your informant’s name,” she told Luckacz. “Monsieur Spitz died of a gunshot wound, is that not right?”

  “How do you know that?”

  Ratisbon had told her. “I am acquainted with Herr Greuben from the German embassy. If that is the source of your information, then you should ask yourself…”

  She let her voice trail away. As on a stage, every movement and inflection seemed false to her, though always, then and now, her audience was taken in. “I understand that you are trying to help us,” Luckacz said. “But—”

  “He is a poor old man. We have no firearms in the house.”

  Luckacz held up his hand. “All this can be part of your statement. Please remember it is in your interest to be discreet.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said, tears in her eyes. “And of that other matter in the Mogosoaia forest, have you heard something about that?”

  “Not yet.”

  She swallowed back a sob. “Please don’t let him suffer for the crimes of others. Herr Greuben—remember. You might find you cannot trust these Germans. You above all should understand that.”

  She couldn’t look at Jean-Baptiste. Instead she spoke to Luckacz: “Leave me now. Only if you would, please let me keep a policeman outside the door. Tonight I am afraid to be alone.”

  Which was the truth. Already once that evening, Ratisbon had sent his men to find the tourmaline. When he came for her again, she would be gone. “Leave now,” she said. She held out her left hand, and allowed Luckacz to kiss it. She felt the tickle of his moustache on the back of her hand, which she kept clamped in a fist around the stone.

  Later that night, much later, she took it out as she sat at the table in her kitchen. She rubbed it between her fingers, the green eye of Johannes Kepler. She put it carefully beside her plate.

  She had sat down with a bottle of beer and a ham sandwich: the first time in years she had tasted this substance, which she had asked Jean-Baptiste to buy for her that morning. But since the previous night, when Aegypta Schenck von Schenck had laid out under her nose the slices of meat and bread, she’d thought about it: the smell of the grease, the way the fat and muscle yielded between her teeth. Then she had forced herself to eat, because of the part that she was playing. But in the morning she had woken with a hankering, and now she ate sandwich after sandwich until the packages in the zinc icebox were gone.

  There was a letter in the middle of the enamel table top. It was Jean-Baptiste’s letter, and as he’d said, there was money in the envelope. She hoped he had not sold his house in the woods.

  10

  Tara Mortilor

  IN THE GERMAN CITY of Ratisbon, in her third-floor room in the elector’s house, a woman sat at her casement looking up at the night sky. She was not aware of the conjuring in Bucharest, nine hundred kilometers away. She was not aware of the elector in his trance and the wind that rose from it. She had risen from her bed, unable to sleep—there were no bars in her window, but the drop onto the tiles was perilous, impossible. In the town, where would she go? No one knew her name after these years. She had grown old in this upholstered room. In the mornings the hair in her brush was streaked with gray.

  Books were brought to her whenever she wished. Sometimes musicians came to play for her. She was allowed ink, brushes, paints, paper, and for two decades she had used them with great skill, drawing from memory the faces of the great men and women she had known, painting from memory the landscapes she had seen. Especially she had amused herself with a series of sketches of someone she had never known, but who had grown up from babyhood under her imagination’s eye. Her daughter was a woman now. Clara Brancoveanu had not seen her since the first day of her life. But, in pencil or pen-and-ink, she drew her portrait several times a week. Where was her daughter now in the wide world? Inevitably, inaccurately, her drawings could not but suggest a memory of her own face when she was young, or else a memory of her dead husband’s well-loved face.

  That morning she had drawn, in pen-and-ink under a gray wash, a portrait of a young woman reading a letter. She was beautifully dressed, elegant, graceful, as Clara Brancoveanu once had been.

  * * *

  THE PRINCESS WAS WRONG about many things. But she had gotten some things right—the position of the body, the attitude of weariness and lassitude. Across the ocean, in her shelter in the hunters’ camp, Miranda sat with her back hunched, overcome with exhaustion but unable to sleep. Andromeda lay on a sleeping bag, staring at her with pale eyes.

  Andromeda lifted her muzzle from her paws. She lay in the shelter one of the hunters had vacated for Miranda, a round canvas tent over a wooden frame. Bearskins covered the floor, which was of frozen dirt. Even so, the shelter was warm inside. There was a small woodstove, vented by a pipe through the roof.

  Andromeda thought about the smells from the bearskin. Miranda sat on her cot. She was reading and rereading the letter Splaa had given her at last. She held it up next to the candle. “Listen,” she said.

  Her voice was awkward and unsure. Andromeda thought it couldn’t be natural for her to read to a dog.

  “My dear,

  I find it hard to express myself in this language I speak only badly to someone with no memory of me. O if you only knew how many letters I have torn and thrown away or kept only for myself. A friend has smuggled this out for me in his violin and I have sent it to my cousin, my husband’s sister, so that she will send it on to you—so tentatif, as the French say. Did you take French in school? Aegypta tells me you may never receive this message. But if you are reading it now you have received it, n’est-ce pas? At least I can pretend.

  So let me tell you how much I am thinking of you for all this terrible time. Do not think it was my choice to give you up. After your father was killed, I came here to Ratisbon because I was afraid of your father’s enemies—a terrible decision! You have heard of the battle of Kaposvar? These Germans will not forgive me for what I did for my country. By an accident I discovered the elector’s plan after he had made of me some kind of prisoner in his house. He allowed only Aegypta to visit me, because I was with child (you, my darling!)— two harmless women, he supposes. Aegypta stole the battle plan from under his nostrils! He was with the army when I was delivered. Aegypta gave me something to make you come early and it was a good idea because the elector was furious when he came back and you are gone. Do not trust him for any reason. He is a bad man in this terrible world. Aegypta crossed the border with his papers in your nappy! O but why am I telling you all this? Only
to say I would have given anything to go with you but could not. Aegypta told the nurse I miscarried so I had to stay there to pretend. Besides I was a species of prisoner as I said. My dear they knew I was ill because I cried day after day. It was the discomfort of losing you. Since then every day I must weep sometimes when I think of you growing up alone without your mother or your father among strangers as Aegypta tried to tell me. She says you are safe in some English language country. Please, what country is that? Now I am in my room here in this house and my only hope is that you grow up strong in freedom. Always remember who you are from the great families of von Schenck and Brancoveanu especially. I know you will have the great heart from your father whom they murdered. From me maybe some kind of a ‘style personnel’, and the constant nature to wake up every day hoping to see your face as I have seen it in my dreams. What kind of girl are you become? Each day I am asking myself, supposing something different, some new story. But one day you will tell me from your mouth and I will know for myself, because one day I will embrace you for the second time.

  Your affectionate mother,

  Clara (Brancoveanu)”

  Andromeda had closed her eyes. “Wait, there’s more,” Miranda said. “There’s another whole letter:

  “My dear niece,

  Here you are among us once more again, which means that a great hazard will begin today, which will lead to our freedom from black tyranny, and our deliverance from foreign powers. Do not worry if you do not feel prepared, because no preparation is possible for what you must undertake. If you are alone and without friends, it is because help is hidden and will come from the strange places. This is as it must be when the weak fight against the strong. With God’s help, we shall prevail. Now I give you the first instruction to seek me out. You must put your trust to my dear Rodica and faithful Splaa, and they will lead you. In Albany, I have left another letter in the hands of Ion Dreyfoos, who will bring you home. Then in Mogosoaia we will find our weapons in the land of our ancestors. Do not shirk from this and do not linger, because we wait in slavery. You are the white tyger that was prophesied. Many will attempt to stop you or prevent you, so have a care.