by Paul Park
She stretched and yawned. And as soon as her mouth was open she could smell a number of new smells, wax, fish eggs, and fruit preserves, sawdust, grease, and gunpowder, urine, sweat, and straw.
There was a smell she couldn't identify, and she raised her head. She lay curled up in a corner between two vibrating blocks of merchandise, strapped down and covered with tarpaulins. Beside her head wooden crate was packed with cylindrical containers. Their rounded edges, their smooth, mirrored, metal skin seemed out of place. Carefully stenciled along its side were letters she couldn't read.
Above her de Graz said something, and she tried to understand his tone of voice.
It had been a long time since she'd been able to interpret the words of men. When she first woke on Christmas Hill when everything was new, then she'd understood. Especially she'd caught everything Miranda had said, perhaps because she knew her well. But steadily there'd been more guesswork and interpretation as her body changed and thickened, her hair grew coarse and dark along the spine, along the ears.
But even now she thought she didn't miss much of importance. Pieter de Graz grunted above her. Already she missed Peter Gross, whose body had always given out a light and pleasing odor, even when he hadn't washed for weeks. This new smell was rank and coarse. There was something apelike in the way he smelled, something apelike in the way he hung above her from the strap.
Andromeda yawned, stuck out her tongue. Then she settled her head between her forelegs.
She didn't have long to wait. She listened to the shudder of the train. They were moving fast, the straight track a blur beneath them. She heard the whistle, a high, screaming sound, and then the scrape of metal as the brake came on. The wheels locked and the train slid forward. Andromeda started up, her claws uncertain on the metal floor.
De Graz already had his head out of the hole, and then half of his body. When he came up there was a different tone to the language of his grunting. Andromeda could see the ladder of the track that had led them to Roumania; at every instant the rungs were more distinct. The rhythm of the ties was slower, though the screaming of the brake hadn't changed.
Pieter was hanging from the metal cage beneath the hole. Above him Andromeda watched the rungs of the ladder, thicker and darker all the time. She could see the stretches of cinder between them. She'd heard in Adrianopole that bandits sometimes stopped these trains. That's why the engineers put the baggage car in front, she now remembered ("What an idiot!"), in case the train went over a mine.
De Graz was crouching in the metal slot, and she imagined for the first time he was waiting to drop down onto the track. If so, he would be ripped apart. And what about her? What was she supposed to do? What a jerk he was—the whistle was still screaming and the car lurched from side to side. But it was slower now, much slower, as she could tell from the rhythm and the solid ties.
De Graz climbed out of the hole again, picked up a hammer from behind one of the bins. There were some ventilation windows on the side of the car, fastened on the inside. He undid the steel clasps, pressed the windows open, a half dozen long, rectangular holes on top of each other, set into a louvered wooden frame. This he attacked with the hammer and a crazy fury that she recognized. He threw the entire weight and strength of his body into each blow. Andromeda could see the trees rushing past outside, more and more now as the frame gave way. De Graz pounded out a ragged hole maybe two feet square, and now he was scrambling through it with the hammer in his hand— what was she supposed to do? But no, she heard him clambering on the outside of the car, and then the blows of his hammer on the padlocked door, one, two, three, four, five, and then a crash, and the door slid open,
De Graz was nowhere to be seen. The train was still going about five miles an hour. She crawled to the open doorway and looked out. There was a path beside the track, and then a steep embankment, and then trees. But my God, to jump seemed crazy; she leaped forward, hit the ground, collapsed and crumpled with a pain in her foreleg. She kept her head pressed down beside the rail. She remembered a fall from her mountain bike outside her mother's house on Syndicate Road.
She pressed herself into the dirt and listened to the cars trundle past, first the screaming engine and then the rest. One, two, three, four, five. And then the gray sky above her and some steaming rain and pebbles, and she raised her head to see the back of the train receding down the track. It seemed to go very slowly now, and other passengers were jumping from the rear platform onto the path, or rolling down the embankment on either side, still in their nightclothes.
Then there was an explosion that Andromeda couldn't see except as a flash of light. But she heard the roar, felt the concussion. Ears down, teeth bared, she watched the train come off the rails. Slowly, at just a few miles an hour, the front car hit an obstacle and couldn't proceed. But the back cars were still moving. One by one they collapsed onto each other and continued down the embankment on the right-hand side, away from her in a relentless grind of metal.
But the baggage car had blown up and had fallen to the left. As she watched, the steel skin of the compartment was ruptured and fire burst out of it, an immediate conflagration as the car broke apart. In front of it the track was broken over a trestle bridge, and there was a pile of stacked timbers. The whistle blew once and was silent.
Andromeda kept her head down. After a few minutes there was a silence that washed over everything, washed over Andromeda as she lay in the dirt.
In time she was aware of some new sounds, birds and squirrels chattering and buzzing in the trees. And then people whimpering and calling out like weak young pups, over on the other side of the embankment. The train lay sprawled and wheezing there. No one was with her on the track itself, and no one had the vantage point to see, as she did when she pulled herself upright and hobbled forward, the different views on either side of the embankment. On Andromeda's left, men were coming out of the woods to stand around the broken baggage car, which was on fire. But after the first few explosions, everything was quiet there. The sun was coming out now from behind some clouds.
The engineer must have disconnected the car before it went over the mine. On the right-hand side of the embankment, the passengers gathered in dispirited little groups, men with their hands in the pockets of their dressing gowns. Andromeda caught the odor of a cigarette. Two cars stood almost upright down the slope, and two lay on their sides.
Andromeda saw Pieter de Graz pulling himself out of one of the fallen cars, walking upright underneath the line of windows, carrying a child in his arms. He jumped down and laid her on the ripped-up grass, bent over her as others stood around. Then he pulled himself onto the train again and disappeared into a window. A few minutes later he poked up again, dragging up a woman who was bleeding from both legs. He laid her on the side of the car, where she cried out. Men came to help her as de Graz lifted her down. He was the only moving part in that broken machine. Again he disappeared into the overturned train.
On the other side of the embankment, bandits were in the baggage car. And in the distance beyond the trestle bridge, some people were hurrying through the fields along a dirt track. There was a town not far away. The church had a double onion dome.
None of these three groups of people, separate and converging in a small space, was likely to have any use for Andromeda. A woman in her bathrobe shouted and pointed. A bandit raised his rifle. Favoring her left side, Andromeda jumped down the embankment into the long grass. Her paw wasn't broken, she decided; But her feet and legs were bruised and she was bleeding from a gash along her ribs.
The wood was full of briars and dead trees. Andromeda lay down several times and licked her feet. As she left the railway line, the ground got soft and wet. Soon she was wading through water between hummocks of dried grass. Crows flapped from tree to tree.
During the night the train had crossed into Roumania. Curled up on the floor of the car, Andromeda had thought about the morning with anticipation and nostalgia. Prochenko was not sentimental about the beauty
of his native land. It was Andromeda who longed to see the majestic rivers, the mountains, and the forests.
In Prochenko she'd felt as if she were discovering old parts of herself, re-learning skills she'd always had. Her double memory had fused into a single impression of the past—high school and military school, California and New England, Roumania and Ukraine. Prochenko's family was from Rymarivka across the border. His father was gone, his family was busted up, his mother drank too much.
But in her dog's shape, each part of her humanity seemed muffled and unreal. It was natural for her to leave de Graz and wander out into the swamp. She felt no loyalty to him. She felt no dogged loyalty to Miranda, even though she'd laid on the cold floor of the baggage car the previous night, listening to the throbbing engine and the shudder of the rails: find her, find her, you must find her.
But now she limped away. Her heart was full of feelings that had nothing to do with her hurt paws, or the swamp, or her arrival in Roumania. Nor did she care that she'd escaped death. None of that held any interest. She squatted to piss and then went on through the dead trees, her nose crowded with signs and smells that made a map in front of her. She followed the tiny paths, and came first to some wood lice in a rotten stump, which she scratched apart. Then there was the smell of otters but she didn't see them.
Bees flew among the wildflowers. The sun came out again. She lay down on her stomach and licked at the pads of her feet. She must have hurt herself worse than she thought, because she was conscious of a smell of blood that interfered with other smells.
She spent the morning hunting for rodents and frogs. Then she lay licking her paws and the wound in her side. The ground was wet under her. When she heard men in the woods, she ran from them back toward the train track. Over the smell of her blood she caught a peculiar scent of someone else's, mixed with gunpowder and grease and sweat—a trampled path through the undergrowth. Someone had pulled himself away from the wrecked train, maybe to escape the bandits. Someone had pulled himself into the small trees. There was a smell of feces now. There was a sound of shouting and pounding from the track.
On three legs, forefoot poised, Andromeda looked that way, then bent her nose into the trampled grass. The man had slid along here like a slug. When she found him, she did not recognize him—a black man in expensive clothes. He had dragged himself into a thicket of high briars and could go no farther. He sat holding his stomach, and when he saw her he started to cry and grunt and argue—not loudly, because he hadn't the strength. He held onto his stomach, and she squatted in front of him under the thicket, waiting and watching, her head cocked to one side—he had nothing to fear from her. She wished him no harm. She herself was hurt and tired, yet still joyful, tongue lolling from her mouth. Maybe in an ideal world there could have been some communication of hurt spirits. But in that thicket, half a mile from that railway track, Andromeda listened to him groaning, watched his lips twist and falter, his chin tremble. He spoke words but she couldn't understand them. Inside all the other stinks there was the stink of fear, which was unnecessary. She was waiting for his clothes.
She saw a silver cylinder lying in the mud. Andromeda touched the metal with her nose, but there was no smell. At least there was no smell that could compete with death.
In time, toward evening, clutching his stomach, the African slumped onto his side. He didn't live to see the transformation. Andromeda got up and came to him and put her burning muzzle by his face. On the dirty leaves under his mouth she saw a tiny salamander, newborn, struggling to lift its head, warmed and invigorated by the man's last breath. It was blue and red and yellow, lapidary in its nest of powdered leaves, and it had no scent at all.
Where that jewellike creature lived, she felt rather than thought, all creatures might lie down in harmony. And even the most elusive and beautiful, with her white-striped fur as delicate as gossamer or thistledown, and her white teeth as sharp as knives, might climb down from the trees and walk upon the ground.
Truth-telling
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, IN the evening, Radu Luckacz, surrounded by policemen, stood on the steps of District Police Station Number Three, trying to understand the crowd. More than a thousand people had waited in the rain, newspapers and umbrellas above their heads, to watch the public exhibition of Count Sfetcu and the other conspirators. A scaffold had been erected in the center of the square, and the prisoners had been paraded briefly and then driven away. But in spite of the weather, the crowd did not disperse. What did that mean? Nor did the people sing, or chant revolutionary slogans, or raise their fists. But they stood glumly in their wet clothes.
Radu Luckacz knocked his fists together behind his back. The problem was, he thought, that he had made no public statement, issued no proclamation, commissioned no editorial to tell the crowd what it should feel. It was because of his own ambivalence. On the stone steps below the mural of the martyrdom of Kevin Markasev, he stood as glumly as the rest. This event was regrettable and sad, he knew. That it was necessary, he wished he could be sure, though he had signed the order of arrest.
At that moment he felt on his shoulders a burden of failure. And later in his car, as he was driven through the wet, dark streets to his evening meeting with the baroness, he reflected on the sadness of the day. How hard it was, he thought, to keep one's own hands clean! At supper in his modest house, the police at watch outside, Radu Luckacz sometimes felt an overwhelming desperation as he sat in silence with his wife and teenage daughter. How could he explain to them what he had done that day? How could he explain it to himself? Yet wasn't it a worthy goal after all, to maintain a functioning Roumanian state, a functioning parliament and post office and police force, even under foreign occupation? Wasn't it a worthy goal for a freethinker and a liberal to oppose the minions (as he might have described them in his unwritten editorial) of monarchy and superstition? Even if he was forced to make a bargain with a snake like Ernest Dysart, wasn't it still worth it after all?
And the baroness must be protected. In his mind she personified the spirit of Great Roumania. Her beauty, her artistic genius, her generous heart—the government could not exist without them. Now that she'd embarked upon the first of a new series of public performances, her people stood outside the theater in long lines. The house was limited, the audience kept small. Afterward, well-dressed men and women sobbed and whispered in the coffeehouses and the streets, conscious they had burned their hands upon some spark. Or else caught a glimpse of the white tyger, though Radu Luckacz despised the manipulation of these empty and outdated myths. Deeds were better, like the new pediatric hospital the baroness had opened and endowed with money from the German government.
His car turned up the Calea Victoriei. At the end of the street between the ornate stone facades, under the lights he could see a shoulder of the People's Palace, a monument to the excesses of the old regime. The baroness lived in part of the south wing, while the rest had been turned into a museum. In the wet dusk Radu Luckacz saw lights shining on the second floor. As usual there were some people gathered at the fountain in the square, hoping to see the baroness's shadow cross the blind.
He hung up his own hat and coat in the vestibule, and then walked up the stairs. On the landing, a horse-faced woman waited to let him pass. Dressed for the opera, perhaps, she looked familiar, but she bowed and hid her face and he continued on. He could hear the sound of the pianoforte in the small drawing room. It played a few notes, then stopped, then went on again.
He knocked. Jean-Baptiste was there, dressed in his old-fashioned, threadbare livery. He shrugged his high, narrow shoulders, put his finger to his lips, guided Luckacz in. A number of upholstered chairs were arranged in front of the piano, but they were empty. The baroness herself sat at the keyboard. A candelabrum stood atop the instrument, though the rest of the room was dark.
As always when he saw the woman, lit as if with inner radiance, he felt a mixture of unpleasant feelings that he had learned to call love. There was vertigo and nausea first of
all. Then there was the desire to stumble forward, to grab hold of her and clutch her and rub his face against her bosom, though she was Baron Ceausescu's widow and he was a married man. But what wouldn't he give to go down on his knees and kiss the front of her dress? A cry came out of him, sublimated to a cough, and she started up. Then she stood away from the instrument and came toward him, smiling, holding out her hands. "My friend, I was expecting you!"
Jean-Baptiste had left the room. Luckacz struggled forward, his desire to clutch her now transformed, as always, into harsh, officious speech, buzzing and rasping in his ears. He scarcely knew what he was saying. But she interrupted him, held up her bitten fingers. "Thank God you've come! I've been so frightened. Please forgive a woman's weakness, but I've made myself afraid."
"Ma'am . . ."
"Oh, I've been foolish! And the night is so dark! Look what I have done." And she led him to a sideboard under the candlelight where there were some plans laid out—a circular small building and a naked woman. He could make no sense of it.
"It's my tomb," she said. "My mausoleum. I've had the artist draw it up."
He didn't understand, said nothing, and in a moment she continued, "The statue is inside. Lying on the lid of the sarcophagus. But there's no place where you can get a look—-just perhaps a shoulder or an arm. The walls of the building hug so close. You can just see part of my body if you crane your neck— what do you think? It's my own idea. The plan itself is like a birdcage. Oh, but my soul has been a prisoner!"
He stood staring at the drawing, which he now saw was beautifully rendered in pen and ink. But he couldn't make out much of the detail, it was so small.
"Ma'am," he said, then swallowed. "Did you pose for this?"
She laughed, touched his arm. "My friend—what do you take me for?" Then she grew plaintive. "I've been at my wit's end. Tell me some good news! Oh, I can see it in your face. You've come from the execution."
