by Paul Park
Sobbing, she leaned forward over her knees, holding the tourmaline in the pit of her stomach. Still she had no tears. But that was because she was not like these other women who would weep and cry and beg for mercy. No, she had resources of her own. Perhaps she could not match the skills of her great enemy. Perhaps she could not match his cold and devious mind. The symbol of his house was a banded serpent, and that was how she imagined him—crushing, relentless, slippery, and cold. But she herself had powers no one could match, an artist’s passion and an artist’s soul. What was it the French newspapers had said? “There is a conflagration burning on the stage of the Rivoli, fed out of a beautiful young woman’s heart.”
She had not lit the lamps, and the room was dark, illuminated only by reflections from the street. She held the tourmaline to her stomach. Slowly, all day and night she had been making up her mind—it was a risk, but she would take it. She would not live here like an animal in a hole, until her money ran out and she went begging in the streets. No, she would return to her husband’s laboratory. She would find a way to break the serpent’s grip.
She rose to her feet. She would take nothing, she decided; if she didn’t come back, her landlady could accept her clothes and Markasev’s in place of rent. She threw open the hall door, and in the slanting gaslight she saw his shirt hung on a hook. It was a red shirt that she had bought for him in the Lipscani market, and it hurt her to see it hanging there empty—where was the boy now? If he were to die during his interrogation, no one would claim his body, unless she did. Oh, but it would hurt her to see his body mauled and strangled (if that was what was going to happen) by the metropolitan police, in that greasy station in the third ward. Once she herself had spent a day there, arrested for soliciting when she was twelve years old.
She left the door unlocked. Quietly, carefully, in the hours before dawn, she tiptoed down the splintered stairs into the street.
* * *
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE night, Peter started awake inside his tent. Raevsky was beside him, curled up in his sleeping bag. Peter had laid down blankets over the cold sand, and at first he thought it was the cold that had woken him, along with the light from the campfire. Or was it the moon that cast a soft gray light through the canvas walls? No, the moon was still new.
Peter lay on his back. Finally, he had not dared to try Miranda’s tent. Not after Andromeda had gone in. But now someone was standing next to the fire. Peter saw the shadow on the wall. Who could it be besides Miranda? Maybe she’d expected him after all.
He slipped his boots on, then got up to his knees and pushed open the tent flaps. Miranda had gathered together some big pine cones. Once Peter had gone car-camping in California with his mother and father in the old truck, and they had built fires with pine cones like this, six or eight inches long.
Miranda had thrown a pile of them onto the embers, where they burned up suddenly and spat. They cast a short-lived, garish brightness that was like a flare, and by its light Peter could see her standing with her hands behind her back.
She was across the fire from him, and the outline of her body was distorted by a wavering curtain of heat. But he wondered if she’d left her hair loose around her head, or braided it, or tied it back. He wondered if she wore a coat, or just a shirt, like him. The temperature had dropped during the night. On the rocky strand, crusts of ice glittered like jewels.
Then she stepped forward, and Peter saw he was mistaken.
What had Raevsky said? Hair both red and brown—Peter couldn’t see. Skinny as a boy—he supposed so. She was an older woman, though not old. Her face was still unlined. What had Raevsky said? Skin so clean …
The wendigo had led Raevsky out into the snow in his bare feet. But Peter had his boots on, though they were unlaced. Now he stood up, stepped out of the tent. The woman’s arms were bare.
Was she a ghost, who would fade and disappear? No, she had built the fire up with pine cones. And now she spoke: “Am vazut focul tau printre copaci”—I saw your fire through the trees. You’ve about reached our house.
So he must be dreaming. And this was not Raevsky’s wendigo. There was nothing boyish about this woman. She wore a sleeveless, embroidered vest, a long skirt, boots. Her hair was long and braided. Her skin was a greenish color in the light from the pine cones, which was fading now.
“You must be freezing,” Peter said.
“Yes, I am cold.”
She continued in a language that wasn’t English, but he understood. “It’s all right,” she said. “We’re just around the bend.”
The fire was leaving them in darkness. The woman gave a helpless little smile. She was looking right at him, not flinching away. He didn’t know much about these things because of his arm, but at that moment he understood he could step forward and embrace her, and whatever he wanted he could ask, and she’d submit to it, to anything at all. But he didn’t move, and in a few seconds he knew something had changed, and that if he stepped forward now then she would laugh and resist, push him away without any conviction, and end up by submitting just the same. Still he did nothing, only stood there as the fire died, and in a few more seconds he knew that she had changed again, and she would laugh and smile and pull away, and disappear and leave him. “I will expect you,” she said. “I will see you tomorrow. There’ll be Belgian waffles.”
She clasped her hands over her naked arms and started to move away. “It’s the temple of Aesculapius,” she said. Then she was gone. The air was dry and still. Beside him, the water sucked at the icy stones.
* * *
WHEN MIRANDA WOKE, SHE LAY for a few minutes in her sleeping bag, looking into the peaked roof of the tent. She felt thin-skinned and brittle-boned. She lay on her back with her hands crossed behind her head. She listened to a shuddering in her stomach, a sensation that had passed beyond hunger, while at the same time she was thanking God that they had found the river and the boat. Soon at least they’d be out of these woods. They’d be away from this landscape of snow and trees and dead men—they would find a way. They had money—the purse of silver grains that she had taken from Gregor Splaa. They had the rings from Andromeda’s ears—maybe they were worth something. Or if worst came to worst, she could sell her bracelet.
She imagined sitting down with Peter for a talk. What would she say? What did she feel? How did it affect your feelings, to have given something up for someone, if that’s really what she’d done—did it make you resentful? Or did you hold onto someone, because you felt you had nothing else? The previous night she had lain awake, wondering if he’d try to come into her tent, wondering what she’d feel if he did try.
It was too hard to think about, and she wondered if her hunger was a distraction or a relief. She imagined in detail the food she was going to eat. There were numerous courses, especially if you counted candy bars, which probably wouldn’t be available. Then she was interrupted by the sound of Peter drumming on the taut canvas above her head. “Come out! Come out! Waffles this morning!”
He was already up, already dressed. He was in a good mood, and while they pulled down her tent and broke camp, he told her about a dream he’d had about his mother. “She was always a crappy cook,” he said grinning, rubbing his chapped lips. “But she had roast turkey and pie and Belgian waffles—it was like Thanksgiving.”
“Belgian waffles?”
“I’m telling you. You’ll see.”
Rousing Captain Raevsky proved more difficult. He had slept in his boots, and now he couldn’t take them off. He cursed and muttered in Roumanian. He couldn’t walk. He crawled out of the tent on his hands and knees.
“Shall we cut the laces?” Miranda asked him.
“No. Not so yet.”
He was useless when they were packing up, stowing their bags aboard the pirogue. He put his arms around their shoulders, and they almost had to carry him down to the water. They laid him in the middle of the boat and took their places at the bow and stern. Andromeda curled up under Miranda’s feet. There were cr
usts of ice along the shore. “Are there rapids lower down?” Miranda asked. “Or is it flat like this?” They couldn’t carry the boat, and the bags, and Raevsky, too.
Miranda also was astonished at the change in him. He lay curled up in the bottom of the boat. Nor was it possible to think he was still a threat, that he could do anything but entreat her to go with him to Roumania, to his lady’s house.
It wasn’t until an hour or so later that they came around a long, slow curve. On the left side the gorge fell to the river in a wrack of broken trees. On the right the land opened out, and the trees gave way to scrubby undergrowth. There was a sandbar, and shallow water on the right hand side. A man was on the shore.
“Stop,” Miranda said. She was in the stern. She turned the boat out of the current. There among the pines about a hundred feet from the water, she saw a house. Just a moment before, when she had glanced that way, there had been nothing.
“What?” Raevsky said. He propped himself upon the canvas bags, and raised his hand as if to push away a blow.
The man on the shore also lifted his arm, a slow, awkward gesture. Miranda said nothing, because she was looking at the house. It was a small, bark-covered cottage with black, rough sides and protruding eaves.
“What’s wrong?” Peter said. “Why are we stopping?” Miranda took her paddle from the water and let the boat drift. Couldn’t he see? The cottage had a metal roof that caught the sun. Chopped wood was piled under the eaves. Then it was all hidden for a moment as the bank rose beside them. They came to the shallow water. The man stood above them on the bank.
“Welcome,” he called out, “to Aesculapius’s house.”
Miranda had three memories from Roumania. One was the train station at Mogosoaia. One was the castle on the beach. And one was this cottage in the pine trees with the metal roof.
“Oh,” she said. Raevsky reached for her paddle, but she held it up.
Again, as she brought the boat in, the man raised his hand. She looked up into his face as the boat slid along the bank. His hair was yellow. He was dressed in a baggy canvas overcoat.
“What’s wrong with him?” Peter said. “Is he sick?” He was talking about Raevsky, and had turned around in the bow and put his paddle down. Raevsky was muttering in Roumanian. He lifted up his hands.
Now he was shifting his weight, rocking in the boat as if he meant to upset it. They were so low in the water, it wouldn’t take much. Andromeda was curled up with her tail between her legs. “Hey, stop that,” said Peter, and when Raevsky struggled to stand up, Peter pulled him down. When Miranda looked again, the man on the shore was gone.
“Did you see that house?” she said. “Stay here.”
The beach was easy and gradual where she had brought the boat in. “I’ll be back,” she said, and stepped into the cold water, which seeped through her boots. She ran up the beach away from the pirogue, then up the riverbank.
Where was the cottage now? Where was the man? The forest had closed in. She walked upstream along what seemed to be a path. Where it turned into the woods, she hesitated.
“I’ll be right back,” she shouted. She put her hands in her pockets and stepped under the trees. Up ahead she saw the outline of a building.
In a minute or so she stood at the edge of a clearing. Smoke rose from the chimney of the bark-covered cottage, and she stood looking at it, rubbing her arms and waiting for Peter. Now she wanted and expected him to follow her—should she go back? Where was the man she had seen?
While she asked herself these questions, she was moving forward over the crusts of snow until she came onto the porch among the piles of chopped wood. The door was ajar, and she stepped through it, remembering as she did so the way the heavy, blackened wood felt against her hand, remembering also the wrought-iron latch, the dark, wood-and-plaster interior: a single room, heated with a big, blue ceramic stove. Along one wall there was a battered wooden table, battered wooden chairs.
The man stood next to the stove. When she crossed to him, he held out his hand. But he didn’t touch her. He bent over her fingers and brushed them with his lips, which was ridiculous. His hair was yellow and thick. He had taken off his canvas coat. Under it he wore creased, formal trousers and a white, formal shirt.
“Princess,” he said. “We are honored.”
She didn’t look at him. Instead she looked around the room. There was the burned place on the floor where a coal had leapt out of the fire. There was the iron candelabrum, smaller and shrunken now. Once it had been twice her size. There was the yellow bowl on the table. It was filled with bread. But Juliana had used it for potatoes sprinkled with salt.
There was the place on the table leg the borzoi puppies used to chew. “My name is Theodore,” said the man. “I have a clinic here. There are some smallpox patients now who tell me they have seen a great sight in the mountains. But I did not expect you’d be so beautiful—”
Miranda interrupted him: “I used to live here.”
Dr. Theodore scratched his chin. “Often when we are in danger,” he said, “there is a feeling of remembrance. In fact, these buildings are quite new…”
* * *
DR. THEODORE SMILED. And in his hotel suite on the fifth floor of the Athenée Palace Hotel, the Elector of Ratisbon also smiled. He was the one who had produced this great illusion, and who now sustained it by an exercise of will. Only in his mind could it continue to exist, this cottage on the banks of the Hoosick River in the empty wilderness. He had known Miranda Popescu would recognize it. Her father’s gardener had lived there.
The elector had thought the sight of the cottage would lure her from the river. He had thought to make an image that would welcome her and call her home. The white tyger—she was easy to fool! After everything, she was a stupid girl.
He lay on the sofa in his suite, propped up on cushions, a glass of water on the floor beside him. It required stupendous energy and precision to hold all those objects in his mind, to give them density and substance on the banks of that wild river, thousands of kilometers away. His brain was stuffed and full. His temples throbbed. There was the food he had provided on the long peasant’s table: luncheon rolls, a bowl of apples, a pitcher of cold water, a rasher of ham—all quite tasteless, he was sure.
Years before, after Aegypta Schenck’s disgrace, he had journeyed to Constanta as a tourist. He’d been looking for some trace of this same girl. He had wanted to see the laboratory of Aegypta Schenck, and had been disappointed to find nothing; he had walked through Prince Frederick’s abandoned castle on the beach. He had walked through the gardener’s abandoned cottage.
And perhaps it was not necessary to recreate it so perfectly. But a skilled craftsman does not easily disown his skill. He was confident that out of all the conjurers and scientists in the history of the world, only he was capable of this mnemonic display. Out of nothing he’d made hundreds of inanimate objects that you could pick up and hold in your hand. And more than that, he had been able to send someone who could carry on an actual conversation with the girl. Others—the miserable Nicola Ceausescu, for example—could dispatch a lifeless version of themselves over a limited range. But he had sent an incubus and succubus across half the world.
The incubus was Dr. Theodore, an idealized image of himself. But the succubus he had created from a painting on the wall of his hotel suite—he could see it from where he lay. It was a full-length portrait of the Countess Inez de Rougemont, painted, according to the style of a previous generation, à la campagne. She was dressed as a Roumanian peasant, in a long skirt and an embroidered vest that left her arms naked. Her thick hair was twisted behind her head in a peasant’s braid. And in the portrait, her face was frozen at the moment of vulnerability, of sexual consent.
Not considering himself a connoisseur of female beauty, he had chosen her image more or less at random—on the walls of his suite hung several paintings of society women from twenty years before. But the countess had been famous for her sultry and exotic looks, and th
e elector thought that he could use them to ensnare the boy. Already he had sent her—the dead countess, the succubus—into the camp, to lead the boy away into the woods. That had failed, and so the elector had added a refinement. Like the mythical wendigo of the North American woods, the countess at moments would show glimpses of another face, another person that the boy had loved. At least that was the elector’s plan, and for that purpose he had left a soft, blank region in the countess’s face, on which could be superimposed another image of the boy’s own choosing.
All that was intended to disarm him, draw him away, and the dog, and the broken old soldier—the elector had seen them all around the fire, now that Aegypta Schenck’s protective cloak had been withdrawn. He desired to be alone with the girl, who was meant for him, or else for Dr. Theodore. Lying on his sofa, with a movement of his hand he made Dr. Theodore move. How beautiful he was—his second self, who appeared to him sometimes in dreams. If in his youth he had not been afflicted with disease, perhaps he would have grown into this man who now rubbed his smooth cheek with his forefinger. Who now opened his red lips and said, “Will you join me? Please, sit.”
The elector could be clever and charming, and he was aware now of the doctor’s clumsiness. No doubt it would be prudent to end this quickly. But the elector had searched and wondered for so long! Miranda Popescu was a helpless girl.
He was distracted by a knock on the door, and in America the doctor’s mouth sagged open. The knocking would not stop. “Come in,” said the elector, sitting upright on the cushions—oh, his head was aching! His heart pounded, his blood throbbed. But with the pride and arrogance of a great athlete in the middle of a race, he pulled himself erect, slid his feet off the sofa onto the floor.
