A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  “Peter’s going to die,” she said. “My aunt…” She could hear the dog barking up ahead. She turned away, repulsed by the lizard’s ugliness, but then a few steps farther into the wood she saw it again in the same place. “I will go with you,” it said. “Let me go with you.” Without waiting for a response it climbed onto her shoulder as she walked past, and climbed inside her open coat. It worked its claws into her sweater, and she could feel it in her armpit, whispering to her whenever she turned her ear. “You are in the white wood. Go this way to the water. Sasha Prochenko knows the way.”

  When the trees gave out, Miranda found herself at the top of a rise, and the ground under her boots was dry and sandy. The yellow dog came back, and Miranda could see her in the mist, prancing with happiness, tongue hanging out. “He was your father’s man,” whispered Gregor Splaa. “There were two of them, and they were not friends. De Graz was the hero of the army. Prochenko was cautious in that way. A coward, people said, not to his face—it was not true. Not a coward like me. Your father loved him.”

  “He’s a girl,” Miranda said.

  “A bitch, now,” agreed Gregor Splaa. “You will depend on him because de Graz is dying.”

  Miranda felt the lizard’s claws digging into the wool above her chest. This dream had begun to frighten her. She had to remind herself that that was all it was.

  The dog’s tongue was hanging out. “Andromeda, her name is,” said Miranda.

  “Call her.”

  Miranda walked down through the tough, high grass onto the strand. A warm wind came off the water in front of her. A stork flew overhead. “Sasha,” she whispered, and to her surprise the yellow dog came back to lick her hand, grab her by the cuff, drag her down the beach.

  She listened to the lizard’s soft, insistent voice. “Once at the siege of Varna, Sasha Prochenko convinced the Turkish officers that the peace had already been signed, and the prince had decided to surrender the city for a million dinars and the crown of Constantin Brancoveanu, which the Turks had stolen many years before. The truth was the peace really had been signed, and Prince Frederick really had surrendered the city but without compensation, because the defenders couldn’t have held out another day. They settled for half a million and the crown, which was considered a victory.…”

  Miranda slipped her cigarette lighter into her pocket. There was a greater light shining on the water, and Miranda could see the boat now coming toward her over the small waves. She could see the wide deck. The light was at the masthead, burning like St. Elmo’s fire, a white path over the water that lapped at Miranda’s boots. She stood in a scum of foam left by the waves, smelling the sweet water, and watching the birds fly around the light as the flat boat came in. It grunted ashore on the coarse sand. The deck was empty. But then the animals were struggling through the water from the beach and climbing up the lines until the boat was full of them. And the dog led Miranda through the shallow water.

  She had heard nothing as the boat came in. But once she climbed the ladder and stood upon the deck, she could feel the shudder of some kind of engine. The door to the wheelhouse opened and a woman came out. Impatiently she kicked through the beasts which crowded around her legs. All of them, it seemed, were small and meek. There were rabbits, badgers, mice. They scuttled away from the woman’s feet, clearing a space on the steel deck that rang under their claws, under the old woman’s feet as she approached.

  Her face was thin and sharp. She was not tall. She peered up at Miranda through a single eye. The other one was squinted closed. “What do you want?” she said, then relented when Miranda proffered one of her gold coins. “Make sure you have another for the trip back.”

  “How many do you have?” asked Gregor Splaa under her coat.

  “Four. Three now. And the silver one.”

  “That’s not many. Listen to what she says.”

  But Miranda couldn’t hear anything above the thrum of the motors. The steel plates of the deck vibrated under her feet. The old woman had already moved away from her, back to the wheelhouse. As soon as she disappeared through the door, the boat reversed its engines and pulled back.

  A wind stirred in Miranda’s hair as she moved to the front of the boat. As it turned, she watched the fish leaping from the churned-up water. This lake was full of living things. The clouds were full of birds. And the boat behind her was full of small animals moving softly and without fear. Now the wind blew the hair from her face as she stood in the bow, leaning on the rail. The boat had turned, and they were heading back the way it had come, into a mist that hid the sky and shore. At intervals she was aware of a soft sound above the trembling of the motors, a high, hooting whistle up ahead, which grew louder and louder until she saw a blue light glowing in the fog.

  It was a buoy at the entrance to a long breakwater. The boat came into a empty harbor. Miranda could see a dock on wooden pilings, and a row of blue lights on the shore. The engines stopped, the boat drifted forward, and the old woman was moving back and forth with great alacrity and spryness, setting the lines and the automatic winch, which pulled the boat up to the dock. “Help me,” she called out. Miranda went to her and together they pulled down the gangway and set it in its slot. The dock was three feet or more above them, and the gangway sloped down at an angle. As soon as it was set, the animals streamed across it and up into the town. Miranda could see houses now, a row of shop fronts.

  “You’ll be last,” said the old woman. So Miranda waited until all the beasts had gone, and then she climbed up with her lizard and her yellow dog, and stood in the parking lot behind the dock. A slope of broken asphalt and gravel led to the front street of a dark and empty town. There were no people, no lights in any of the windows. The shop windows were empty.

  “Where are the sphinxes?” she thought, remembering now what her aunt Aegypta had told her. Then as if conjured from these thoughts, she saw two women cross the street into the parking lot. Each carried one end of a leash, the other end of which was bound to the collar of an enormous beast. It snarled and slavered when it saw them. It pulled its lips back to reveal teeth that were grotesquely large, and it was scratching at the ground, straining at the double leash. The yellow dog whimpered and put her tail between her legs.

  The women, however, did not seem concerned. They laughed and chatted as they ambled down the street, not exerting any effort to keep their animal restrained. Now that they were closer, Miranda saw they weren’t women at all, but rather girls. They looked to be twins about ten years old. And they were innocently dressed in white patterned frocks. One wore a ponytail. The other had her hair cut short.

  As they sauntered toward her, Miranda could hear their high, trilling laughter, see their plump, bare arms. Their animal was full of urgency, which they didn’t seem to feel. Her own yellow dog had yelped once and then disappeared among the piles of wooden boxes and pallets that covered one side of the lot. “No help there,” Miranda thought.

  “Welcome, welcome,” laughed the girls, speaking in uneven unison, and in voices older than they had a right to. “Don’t worry about him. He’s all right.”

  And in fact their dog seemed a little more friendly now that the yellow dog was gone. He had stopped snarling. He sniffed insistently and obnoxiously at Miranda’s crotch, which the twins found amusing. “He likes you,” they said. “He’s called Cerberus.”

  Miranda reached down to push his head away. Her fingers sank into the coarse, silver hair around his neck, and she wondered if it was possible that the creature was a wolf. She’d never seen a wolf. But she recognized from TV specials or as if from dreams the ferocious yellow eyes, the texture of its thick, coarse fur.

  She was wearing Blind Rodica’s coat, though she’d unbuttoned it. Even so, in the mist she’d been too warm. But now she looked up at the sky and saw that it was gray and clear. The mist had disappeared, and the air was colder. She looked up and saw there was a mountain behind the town, a snowcapped mountain that rose up many thousands of feet, and whose topmo
st spires of ice were touched with pink from the rising sun.

  The air was colder, and she could see gooseflesh on the twins’ bare arms. The sea behind her was gray and silver. Cerberus yawned and looked up toward the mountains. “Tell me,” Miranda said, “what I must do.”

  The twins laughed. “You’ve been to school. It’s like a test. You’re good at tests. Aren’t you good at tests?”

  The wolf, if that’s what it was, had settled by her feet and was staring up at her. Now it opened its mouth to yawn, and the smell of its hot breath was so disgusting, Miranda felt a small door had been opened into hell. None of this was real, yet even so, she was close to tears.

  “Aren’t you good at tests? You are familiar with the theory of Pythagoras? You know the date of the 1848 Rebellion?”

  “I think so.”

  “You know who wrote ‘Jerusalem,’ by William Blake?”

  She found she couldn’t swallow the lump in her throat. She stood looking at the wolf, breathing its breath, while the twins chuckled. “That’s excellent. So answer me: What are you doing here?”

  Miranda looked up at their smiling, relentless faces. In the new light she could see color in their cheeks, stripes of yellow in their tawny hair. At first she’d thought they were identical. But one had a wider face and lighter eyes. She was the one with her hair cut short, and now she continued independently of her sister: “You’ve been led around from place to place, and what’s to show? Your friend is dying! You could have gone with Raevsky from the beginning. That’s why I’m asking you. What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m on my way to Albany,” said Miranda, and at that moment the other girl, the one with the ponytail and the narrow face, opened her mouth to show a gold coin balanced on her tongue. Then she closed her mouth again, and Miranda knew that if she put her fingers into her pocket now, she would find two coins left beside the silver one—not three.

  “If you had a chance to save de Graz’s life, how would you do it?”

  “I’m here to meet my aunt,” Miranda said, and again the girl with the ponytail opened her mouth to show a gold coin.

  One more question, Miranda thought, and she wouldn’t have enough money for the boat. She took a step backward, and immediately the wolf started to growl. She could smell its breath.

  “You’ve heard of Einstein’s special theory of relativity?” asked the girl with the ponytail.

  Miranda nodded.

  “And the Counter-Reformation?” And then immediately: “If you could make one choice that would change history, what would it be?”

  When Miranda didn’t answer, the wide-faced girl smiled. “Ten seconds,” she said. Miranda wondered if at that moment, in the cave in the Hoosick valley, the virus that had infected Peter was gathering itself to enter her. Or perhaps she was already delirious. Ignoring the beast at her feet, she turned toward the water, took a step back toward the boat.

  A man was walking toward her from the freight shed and the piles of boxes, a tall man smartly dressed in a tight, cream-colored jacket. “Sasha Prochenko,” whispered the lizard inside her coat, and she recognized him. Andromeda turned into a man, his yellow hair, pale eyes, beautiful face.

  He was not as hairy as he’d been in the dark woods outside the hunters’ camp. But Miranda remembered the smell: tobacco and cologne. His hands were in his pants pockets. His collar was turned up. He strolled toward them over the broken asphalt, a smile on his face, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  “Ai un chibrit?”—Got a match? he said.

  Miranda imagined even the girls were struck by his good looks. They giggled a bit, and did not object when he hiked up his trousers to squat next to the wolf. “Ai un chibrit?” he said again, and Miranda gave him her father’s lighter. He flicked it to produce the flame, and lit his cigarette while at the same time as he was stroking the wolf’s fur around its ears.

  “Nice animal,” he said in an accent so thick that Miranda scarcely understood him. He squinted at her through the smoke. The cigarette was in the corner of his mouth. He kept her father’s lighter in his left hand, while with his right he dug his fingers into the thick fur. He smiled up at the two girls. The wolf was yawning happily. Sasha Prochenko’s hands were quiet and slow. Holding the wolf’s head with his right hand, he slid the lighter into its mouth. Blue flame erupted from the silver box, and the wolf leapt up and pulled itself loose. The wide-faced girl let go of her leash at once, but the other was pulled down onto the asphalt as the wolf turned tail. Miranda caught a scent of burning hair.

  “Go,” said Sasha Prochenko. He had not gotten up, not stopped smiling, even though the wide-faced girl had jumped onto his back and was scratching at his cheek. He took the cigarette from his mouth, blew on the tip, and pushed it into the back of her hand. “Go,” he said again, and Miranda went.

  And as she ran up the slope into the front street of the town, she saw someone coming toward her whom she recognized. It was the woman who had pushed the book into her hands at the train station, the woman who had warned her about Kevin Markasev, the woman who’d appeared to her the night before the hunt and predicted some of this. It was her aunt Aegypta, dressed in a fur coat with a collar of foxes, and their heads hung down. She wore a lamb’s wool hat, with her gray hair pulled back under it. She wore long gloves, and lipstick, and powder on her big nose, and when she put her arms around Miranda’s neck she smelled of cinnamon and dust.

  Miranda was conscious of an enormous feeling of relief. She clung to her aunt’s coat and wouldn’t let go. She rubbed her face in the stiff fur, hiding her face from what was happening behind her.

  She was surprised to find the woman did not tower over her. Her aunt’s face was level with her own. They stood embracing, while Miranda breathed in her aunt’s smell and felt the fur prickle on her face. Aegypta Schenck was rocking her in her strong arms.

  “My darling,” she said. “You must not think that I would give you up. Oh, it has been so long.”

  She brought Miranda up into the street. They stood in a row of shop fronts and quaint Victorian buildings, a deserted tourist town in winter, and above them hung the slopes of the white mountain. “Come,” said Aegypta Schenck, and she brought Miranda to a shop where there were lights inside. It was a restaurant or a café, and the old woman led her in and sat her down at a round, marble-topped table where there were coffee and cakes. “Let me look at you,” she said, and she took Miranda’s leather pack, then pushed back her coat and stripped it off.

  The lizard was gone. “Let me look at you,” repeated the woman, and she pushed Miranda’s hair from her forehead. “Oh my darling, we have been successful. You still have the silver coin?”

  Miranda slid it from her pocket and put it on the table, the coin stamped with the head of Alexander the Great. “Then we are free,” the old woman said. “Roumania will be free. All my plans…” Tears glistened in her dark eyes. Above them, Miranda noticed, her eyebrows had been penciled on.

  They were the only people in the restaurant. There was no one at the counter behind them where the register was. Behind that there was a red velvet curtain that covered the back wall.

  “You planned this?” Miranda said, looking down at her croissant. It was made of papier-maché.

  “Yes of course. You do not think that I should let that fool, Nicola Ceausescu, get the better of me? It was Rodica’s mother who had the pawnshop in the Old Court. Rodica’s mother who led her to the book. Perhaps I even misled you a little bit—oh, I am sorry. Please forgive me. I must make others do these things, even if there should be risks. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, I will have time to tell you! And your mother will be glad! Because you have grown into a wise girl, to do what is right. This was a risk, but I must take it, because I was a prisoner in Roumania. Everywhere I was constrained and watched. There was the Siguranta—the police—and also our great enemy in Ratisbon. I could do nothing to go with you, only these small warnings. I could do noth
ing where I was. An old woman in a hut in the woods, an old bird in a cage! But Jesus Christ came out of death. In Roumania they will put an empty coffin in the ground.”

  Miranda didn’t understand any of this. She was focussed on one thing. “What about Peter?” she asked.

  When her aunt did not reply, Miranda told her the story of the past few days. She told her about Peter and Andromeda, and Blind Rodica’s death and Gregor Splaa’s. She told her about Captain Raevsky, and the wild men, and Peter’s sickness. Her aunt made little sympathetic clucks. But then at moments she would smile, as if none of this dire information could change her mood.

  “We are in battle with an enemy,” she said finally. “It is the one who holds your mother prisoner. And even he is just a servant of something worse. Oh, I am sorry about Splaa and Rodica! They were my loyal friends. I am sorry you are all alone! This smallpox sickness is a coward’s weapon, but our enemy would like the world to suffer as he suffered.”

  Miranda stared at the old woman. “I am sorry,” Princess Aegypta said again. “De Graz is a soldier, and this is not a soldier’s death.”

  Miranda stared at her, searching for an answer in her proud, ugly face. “My child, I can help you now. Use the coin to bring me from this place, and I will help you. Oh, but I am sorry for de Graz. His mother is still alive, an old woman in Bucharest. There will be an empty place for him in the mausoleum of his ancestors.…”

  “His mother died of cancer,” Miranda said. “She was a secretary in the English Department. She used to teach him poems.…”

  She watched a flicker of impatience pass over her aunt’s face. “Yes, of course. That is the story you were told. And it is hard to give it up, I know—these stories of your childhood. Now we wake up, and we must not be frightened. There are sacrifices that must be made. These matters are more important than his life or my life, or yours.”