by Paul Park
"Je me souviens."
And that seemed to be it in terms of conversation. He swayed above her with his hand on the bracket, hour after hour. She leaned her back against a crate of pickled mangoes, stretched her legs out. In her pocket she found a packet of cigarettes, but every single one of them was spindled and damp. Hoping they would dry out, she held two of the best ones in her cupped palm. She put her head back, and even though it was cold in that cramped space, she found herself nodding to sleep. Once she looked up to see de Graz eating fish eggs out of a bottle. His lips were smeared with black.
"Vous avez faim?" he asked. But she wasn't hungry. She felt sick to her stomach in a way she recognized.
The House on Spatarul
IN BUCHAREST ON THAT same night, Nicola Ceausescu had left the People's Palace by a servant's door. She knew of the Hephaestion's departure from Constantinople, though there were yet many hours before it crossed the border. She'd arranged for Jean-Baptiste to meet it at the Gara de Nord, and to supervise in secret the unloading of her crates.
What was in them, she scarcely knew. Something deadly and important that had changed the politics of northern Africa. Some chemical or virus that had been developed by important scientists, and not a conjurer among them. Yet their descriptions of its properties suggested conjuring, as well as a slow, long-lived poison that could contaminate an entire city—that was the weapon she would use against the potato-eaters in Berlin! That was the weapon she would use against the Elector of Ratisbon, whose skill as an alchemist had blocked every attack out of the hidden world.
In any case she had not yet found time for much research! Jean-Baptiste had seen to the details. Everything would be all right. The Abyssinian technician would show her what to do. Jean-Baptiste would find a hotel for him; Radu Luckacz was away from town, she'd made sure of that! And even though she knew it was important to maintain appearances, still she had canceled her evening performance, a reading of Euripides she had prepared for a small audience at the National Theatre.
Over the past year she'd considered returning to the stage after an absence of two decades. This was her first attempt in that direction—it was not even a proper performance! Anxious beyond reason, after supper she resolved to walk the cobblestoned streets by herself, in her guardsman's uniform and cape. She was hoping to relax herself, calm her nerves, find comfort from an indirect communication with her people, and visit Kevin Markasev in the Strada Spatarul.
This was the boy who had wandered onto her doorstep in Cluj, the boy she'd sent to fetch Miranda Popescu out of Massachusetts. This was the boy who'd been arrested for the murder of a German officer in the first days of the occupation—close to the wall that runs the length of the Calea Academei, she reached out her left hand and scraped it along the bricks. As always when she found the halfway point between the palace and the comfortable house she had provided for him, a surge of guilt came over her and made her weak, made her grasp at the coarse wall for support. Surely she was an evil woman who would get what she deserved. But no—wasn't she a loving mother to her people, at least as far as the potato-eaters had allowed? Hadn't she rescued her country from Zelea Codreanu the vampire? Even his corpse had not been found.
Waves of hot and cold came over her as she dug her knuckles into the wall. She would make the Germans pay for stealing her son.
But even as she surrendered to them, she realized these feelings were an indulgence, and they grew and thrived on idleness. Since the beginning of the eastern campaign the German government had dropped all pretenses. Official documents were now prepared for her signature by the Committee for Roumanian Affairs. The baroness had no responsibilities except to agonize and fret, and to reproach herself for the sake of Kevin Markasev.
But surely she was blameless there too, because she'd saved his life! If not for her, doubtless he would have been executed or imprisoned for the murder of Sergeant-Colonel Boris Blum outside the Palace Hotel. And if she still held him in a prison of her own, surely it was only to protect him.
Alchemists and conjurers require hostages to keep them strong, the baroness knew or thought she knew. Imprisoning another soul was like keeping money in a bank account. Scientists had proved this. Her husband had proved it, drawing on the ancient knowledge of Hermes Trismegistus. She had studied the passage in her husband's notebook, and it was true. The Elector of Ratisbon kept her son and Clara Brancoveanu prisoners in his house. And she had Kevin Markasev.
That night as she approached the house on Spatarul, the baroness went over the justifications in her mind, which was her constant habit. It is an artist's challenge to pick out of the chaos of life the random, subtle pattern of fate. She approached this task as she did everything, with creative skill. But because part of her greatness of an artist came out of her unrelenting honesty and pitiless self-examination, she returned again and again to the same facts and was not satisfied.
She was dressed in a guardsman's uniform. Her boots made a clapping noise on the new stones. As she turned among the comfortable houses of the Strada Doamnei, she kept away from the streetlights. There were carriages in the road, men and women returning home from the theaters and restaurants of the old town. Instinctively the baroness took her hand out of her pocket where she had been fingering her tourmaline, Kepler's Eye. It was the source of her people's love, but she didn't want to feel their adoration at that moment. She wanted to pass unperceived.
That night she was depressed and restless because no matter how she tried to manipulate and invent, Radu Luckacz had too grandiose a part in the third act of her play.
This was the project she'd been working on, toward which the reading from Euripides was just a feint. The title of it was The Tourmaline. Except for the music and the songs she had not yet written a line, but on long walks at nighttime she brooded over every scene—there was no problem with the first two acts. In her mind they were complete. The curtain would open on a village in the mountains, a young girl born in poverty. One day, standing in the cold stable with a bucket of milk, a waking dream occurs to her, a vision of herself. And because she drops the bucket, she is afraid of being beaten. She runs away to Bucharest and lives there in deserted buildings and railway sidings. She does a thousand disgusting things to stay alive. But because some talents are so great they cannot be broken, and because some characters are refined by suffering, by the time she is a woman she is famous in the theaters of the capital and abroad. She chooses to marry the deputy prime minister of Roumania, a hero who has saved his country from the Germans and the treachery of a half-German general. She retires from the stage. The gods and goddesses give her a child.
The second act is darker, minor-keyed. The evidence against von Schenck was forged, as it turns out, invented by her husband, a jealous old man now driven mad by guilt. Desperate to find purity, he beggars himself with alchemical research and writes new laws against political and racial corruption. The victim of one of these is his own son. Wrongly convinced the boy is illegitimate, he has him diagnosed and interned. Bankrupt, broken by remorse, he commits suicide and leaves his wife alone.
Oh, this was work she could be proud of, she thought—an oratorio or else an opera, though perhaps there would be intervals of dancing. By the end of the second act her fortunes will have come full circle. Chased from her home, she lives in the streets again, pursued by unjust enemies—the Empress of Roumania, a German elector, and von Schenck's daughter. All she has to protect herself is her own wit and courage and a miraculous jewel. As the curtain falls, and the police swarm to arrest her on a trumped-up charge, and as German troops march through the streets of her beloved city, she discovers one more thing: her destiny, at last!
In front of her a group of officers came down the flagstone walk, laughing and chatting and smoking cigars. Afraid of being greeted or accosted, the baroness crossed the street and waited in the mouth of an alley between two houses.
The flaw in the plot, she knew, was in the final act, and it wasn't just because the act
ual events were not complete. But the trajectory and shape had already gone wrong, though there remained two obvious contingencies. First, it was possible this drama was a tragedy, and that she herself was the tragic heroine, undone at the moment of triumph by her mistakes and sins. Oh, and if this were so, what a slaughter she would leave upon the stage!
But it was also possible that she would find a way to reassert herself, that she would chase the potato-eaters from her country and rule wisely and compassionately over Great Roumania. That she would become the white tyger not just in name. And even if she died in accomplishing this, the curtain would still fall on a crescendo of hope and love and the thanks of her joyful people.
So in either case it was right for the first half of the act to be muted and doubtful. All that would change with the arrival of the Hephaestion at the Gara de Nord. All that would change when she had the weapon in her hand, the thunderbolt that she had purchased from the Abyssinians—a mineral so poisonous that it had to be transported in lead-lined cylinders, as Jean-Baptiste had explained.
This was her experiment, a new weapon for a new age. And she needed a new weapon. The Elector of Ratisbon had thwarted all the conjuring she had attempted at long range over the German border. Still he was protecting his own country, as she would protect hers with this new slow-moving poison, as effective as a curse.
Radu Luckacz didn't know anything about it. There was a lot she'd hidden from him. She didn't trust him not because he was unfaithful, but because he had usurped her place at the center of the drama, at least in the final act. At least so far. And her cruelty to Kevin Markasev, a boy who loved her, also was a difficulty, though it could be explained.
Here was the plot of the last act, as far as she had sketched it out: Domnul Luckacz was a police detective in District Station Number Three off the Elysian Fields, on that night in early spring when she had been arrested. This was when German soldiers were first loose in the city. She had been apprehended by a Hanovarian officer and then turned over to the Roumanian police. As it happened (and this was the coincidence necessary to all dramatic plots, to intimate the hidden role of fate), Kevin Markasev was being questioned at the same station after the death of Sergeant-Colonel Blum, who had been shot outside the revolving doors of his hotel.
Alone in her prison cell, Nicola Ceausescu feels the thrilling presence of two men who adore her. She hears the boy's voice in the next room. The tourmaline vibrates in her hand. And it was true—when Radu Luckacz saw her that night, she begged for the boy's life. How could she not? She was to blame for his predicament. It was she who had hypnotized him, given him the gun to use against the Elector of Ratisbon, also a guest at the Athenee Palace Hotel. And it was not her fault that the idiot boy had ended up shooting the wrong man!
But after that (honesty forced her to admit), Luckacz had managed everything. It was he who had contrived her freedom in the chaos of events. It was he who had produced the body that was buried in the grave meant for Markasev. And it was he who had suggested that she speak at his funeral. On that cold day she had stood with the tourmaline next to her skin, and the entire crowd had felt its power. She had wept over the tomb of Markasev and praised his heroism, his youth, his virgin innocence, his courage, because he had been the only one to strike a blow for Great Roumania when German troops first marched along the Calea Victoriei. He had seen a poor fallen girl in the piata, abused and then abandoned by a German officer—was it any wonder that his heart broke in his chest? Was it any wonder that he seized his gun? Etc., etc.— long had he been tortured by Roumanian collaborators in District Police Station Number Three. But he had gone to his death without revealing a single name.
And—she must be honest—it was Radu Luckacz who had engineered the rest, the songs, the flags, the banners, the cult of Kevin Markasev. Her role had been symbolic: the white tyger, sent to comfort her poor country, and what Radu Luckacz had arranged she did not want to know. He also hated the Germans. But perhaps it was his hatred that allowed him to be so cold. Certainly he'd had conversations with the German authorities and with General Stoessel—von Stoessel now. When the Empress Valeria had fled the city, Luckacz had presented a symbolic alternative to the German high command, while the Roumanian political opposition—the socialists and democrats—were arrested and gathered up.
No, it was obvious she'd been complicit in a crime. She'd allowed her face to be a mask upon the face of German tyranny, which was why she was permitted to mouth her anti-German slogans—it was proof of how little the potato-eaters cared. It was proof of how secure they felt. All that would change with the arrival of the Hephaestion. Even now it was steaming nearer with its cargo of dreams, of freedom from foreign occupation and the schemes of Radu Luckacz, who (it must be said) had done everything he'd done because he loved her.
Now she stood upon the steps of a small house on the Strada Spatarul. This night, she believed, was the crisis of the act, when she would either descend into tragedy or ascend into greatness. Was it any wonder that her hands were trembling and her stomach was full of knots? Onstage, what was the song she would be singing at this moment? Yes, she had promised herself that she would sing—she herself, and not some younger actress. She grasped at the curving, wrought-iron rail, knocked at the door.
Or else the performance would be called The White Tyger. At moments she imagined she would need no script or score or rehearsal or choreographer, but would dance and sing the story to her people on the massive stage of Dinamo Stadium or else the smaller, intimate National Theatre, or else even the old Ambassadors, the scene of all her early triumphs. It alone had not yet been refurbished with German money. Curse them all! She heard the heavy locks drawn back. The high, black, double doors split inward.
A white-clothed orderly pulled wide the door and bowed to let her pass. She walked through the hall and then immediately up the stairs. At the top there was an antechamber where she waited, where she changed her clothes. Markasev didn't like to see her dressed as a man.
There was a cabinet, a clothes closet. The room was stuffy and overlit, the walls pale yellow with recessed gilt trim. The gauze curtains were restrained with golden tassels. It was a woman's room. The baroness stripped off her uniform and hung it up, stripped off her shirt, trousers, boots—she was not too old for this sort of thing. She was scarcely thirty-nine. Her chestnut hair still gleamed like a helmet without a trace of rust or discoloration. Her complexion and her skin were still the same. As for her face, she'd never cared for her small features, though people made a fuss.
Only her hands were not beautiful, the fingers heavy-knuckled, the nails bitten down and stained with nicotine. She held them out, dissatisfied, then inspected her small teeth in a gilt-framed looking glass above the cabinet. At moments when she turned her head, she could see in the reflecting glass the image of her spirit animal, a slit-eyed and ferocious alley cat, even after all this stroking and cossetting. A calico or a marmalade—no, she was a tyger, the white tyger of Roumania, she reminded herself, as she had to every day. Once, years before, she had seen the image in the glass. Once she had seen her spirit image in the adamantine glass. But not since then, no matter how she'd tried.
From the cabinet she took a new frock, also of the pale yellow that best suited her complexion and her violet eyes. As always it was a simple dress that fit her closely, ending at mid-thigh. Under it she drew on ash-colored stockings. She wore no jewelry except her husband's gold signet ring—too large for her, and with the pig's-head seal reversed. Why she kept it, why she worried it constantly, was a mystery even to her.
The guardsman's uniform she had thrown over a chair. From the pants' pocket she now drew the tourmaline, Kepler's Eye, glowing green and purple in its depths. Taken from the sorcerer's brain, it was a natural crystal, flawless and uncut, she thought, although sometimes when she rubbed it she imagined she could see a trace of subtle faceting in the rondelle style—the surface was not rough, not smooth. Sometimes the shape reminded her of something, some kind
of crouching, sleeping animal, perhaps.
She wore no cologne, but she took the jewel and rubbed it over her arms, her shoulders, and her neck. She rubbed it underneath her armpits. Then she laid it on the cabinet, shook out her hair, made a grimace in the looking glass, and she was ready.
None of this would have been necessary if she'd not made a terrible mistake. But Radu Luckacz and Jean-Baptiste had arranged a series of posed photographs during those chaotic days. If they had hired a model, if they had taken their exposures of the substituted corpse, all would have been different. Soon there were posters and flags with Kevin Markasev's real face, medals cast in his honor and a mural at the corner of Dobrescu Street and the Piata Revolutiei. After that it was imperative to keep him locked away for his own safety! But because of her generosity she took time out of her schedule to visit him. No, that wasn't it.
She turned the key in the lock of the inner door. With her hand on the knob she paused, trying to understand once more the problem of her cruelty. At moments such as these she felt the most alive, as if she could give and yet withhold herself. And as she turned the knob she felt the flicker of a self-justifying rage. Her own son was now a prisoner in Ratisbon, far from his mother's arms. If she treated this boy badly, if she never let him out, surely that was no worse than what she suffered. Under the circumstances she did what she could. No doubt she'd have given him his own room in the People's Palace if she'd been able to. What could she do—give him a mask to wear? Cover his face with makeup from the theater? It was impossible. But surely she'd have loved to walk with him arm in arm through the streets of Bucharest, in the students' quarter as they had in the old days. Oh, she was robbing herself! Besides, wasn't she right to use him in whatever way she wanted, because she had saved his life?
No, she must be honest with herself. Her strength as an artist and performer, it had always come from her sincerity—she was the one who had hypnotized him, who had manipulated him into attacking the German officer. Since the time he had appeared at her summer house in Cluj, he had always done everything she wanted. She had even sent him on a journey to Aegypta Schenck's imaginary world, the town in Massachusetts where she'd hidden her niece. And Markasev had found the girl and brought her back. And if that fool Raevsky had been half as competent as this abandoned boy, by now she'd have the golden bracelet of Miranda Brancoveanu on her wrist. She'd have no need for any stupid tourmalines or any parlor tricks. She'd have no need for love or being loved.
