by Paul Park
Though they had mounted their long bayonets, they made no attempt to stop the people streaming through the gate, even to check their papers, which was a relief. Pieter had none, either in his own name or in the name of his alias, Peter Gross. Andromeda—Prochenko—had purchased a false set in Adrianopole. But Pieter hadn't seen her since the wreck.
It was a lovely summer morning, bright and sunny after an intermittent rain. Shrubs and briars had been allowed to grow under the oak trees, though the paths were clear. Though he was not a romantic person, Pieter rejoiced in the smell of the earth, and he found himself paying attention to the birds and squirrels, even the insects as he walked. And when the great bulk of the Brancoveanu palace came into view, he felt suddenly giddy, not because it was a beautiful building—no one had ever claimed that. Nor had he himself ever been inside it. Already during his service to the prince, it had been abandoned, boarded up.
But in distance in a grove of pines he saw the tiled roof of Sophie's guesthouse, built for the prince's grandmother in an Oriental style. There he had stayed once, and there he had promised to defend the prince's child. That promise, sworn on his honor as a patriot, had taken him a long and weary way, first to Mamaia Castle and to Massachusetts, where he'd gone through school and high school in the body of a crippled boy.
Later he had come to Heliopolis with Prochenko. He had lived through many follies and stupidities, but now here he was again, standing in his flesh, the road now looped together under his feet, tied into a knot.
His trail had come full circle here, but where was hers—Miranda's? Days before, she'd been here. It was the talk of Bucharest. Even the director of railroads had mentioned it half wistfully, as if he too had been tempted to give up everything to march under her banner, white-haired and portly as he was, and dressed in a cream-colored waistcoat. "If I didn't have responsibilities, Domnul Gross," he'd said, as they stood together looking at the woodblock caricature that was posted on the wall of his office as on every wall in Bucharest—one thousand marks reward for news leading to capture of the woman who called herself Miranda Popescu. . . . Even then, reading the text, de Graz had imagined that Miranda's army would contain a great many poets, lovers, women, and old men, but few professional soldiers beside himself. It didn't matter. He was enough, if he could only find her.
Some lines of English poetry came into his mind, "Let us be true to one another, for the world which seems . . ." Seems what? What indeed? But she was here somewhere in the forest. He walked through the overgrown gardens, following his nose, understanding only where he would not go. Not to the guesthouse where the path would be muddied with sad memories. Not to the Venus shrine where Radu Luckacz was searching with his men.
Pieter de Graz was a man of impulse. Always he was searching for a sense of rightness that went beyond words. How could that be accomplished except through faith and trust in his own destiny? God spoke to men who did not contradict. Always he had been unpopular in the army, though he'd won more ribbons and medals than he could wear.
Now in his brown coat and trousers, his laced-up leather shoes, he stood at the border of the forest next to the old barn. Though there was a path under the trees, he didn't take it. Instead he struck immediately into the woods, pushing through the undergrowth, stepping over the dead leaves and sometimes finding cart tracks and stone walls. This had been agricultural land two hundred years before.
He pushed northeast through the brambles for many hours. He had no weapons or water or supplies. But in other ways he was prepared. His trail was as straight as if drawn with a rule. In time he came into the older forest, never cut.
Toward evening he crossed some rotten strands of barbed wire and stood beside the ruins of an old tower. Baron Ceausescu had sequestered the entire area in the old days, a circle of ancient trees held in the long curve of the river. Now those laws had been relaxed, more through inattention than design. There were still some notice boards nailed to the trees, but Pieter didn't read them. Instead he peered up at the body of a rat, tacked to the bark of an enormous oak. Its belly had been split and stuffed with fetish objects to guard against bad luck. There were beads, medallions, coins, and other objects wrapped in cloth.
He had stumbled out of the prickers now, his coat covered with green burrs. He plucked them off, looking in both directions down a muddy, leaf-meal path. For the first time he was unsure now how to go. The orientation of the path to the notice boards and tower was unclear.
But one way led deeper into the old forest. Choosing it, Pieter walked for several kilometers without seeing anyone. Moving through his thoughts as if through a sequence of empty rooms, he took a long time to become aware of a creature beside him in the undergrowth, longer still to realize that the creature was staying with him parallel to the path. He heard a crashing in the brambles, stopping when he stopped to look. Nothing was distinct in the low light. But there was some lurking movement that soon disappeared until he saw a figure up ahead. Something or someone was on the path in front of him, and without thinking Pieter thought that if he just broke forward in a run, shouting, shaking his fist, then the animal would blunder away—it seemed timid enough. But when it started coming toward him, he found his pretended anger swelling into something real; he paused to pick up a broken stick. And when the creature leaped at him he jammed the stick into its ribs and twisted it. At first he thought it was a monkey or an ape. It leaped on him and locked its legs around his waist, its arms around his neck. He felt in his body an immediate reaction, as if a child had reached up to hug him. So he dropped the stick and put his hands around the creature's knees, supporting it against his body—it was a female, he imagined.
There still persisted in the Roumanian forest the remnants of an older race of human beings, the original inhabitants of Europe. Displaced in neolithic times by waves of immigrants from Africa, they had retreated to the lonely corners of the continent, where they lived on government preserves. The Chevalier de Graz had not paid much attention to his education, but he remembered a few things.
Now he stood with his legs spread, supporting the woman with his hands under her rear. He had stabbed her with a stick and he could feel the warm blood, but she showed no reaction. Suddenly he felt the heat of the afternoon, and a small sensation on his neck where she was kissing him or maybe licking at the sweat under his ear. He glanced sidelong at her face and got a brief impression of long eyelashes and pale, hairy skin. But he couldn't get much of a sense of her, because she was dressed in strips of cloth wound around her arms and legs and body. The hair was clipped short on the back of her head.
A female, he thought, because he knew the males were shy and large, much stronger than a man. Driven out from the Carpathians, some family groups had been resettled by the Brancoveanus on their private land.
The air was hot and still. Pieter felt the tickling under his ear and listened also to small murmured words in a language he didn't know. The woman was talking to him. Or else she carried on a laughing, whispered, singsong conversation with herself. She couldn't have expected him to understand. She didn't seem embarrassed. In time she released her grip and climbed down. And he could see where she was wounded in the side, though she paid no attention. She took him by the hand and pulled him off the track into the undergrowth, finding a deer path through the brambles, and he followed her.
Pieter de Graz felt none of the aggression that comes from curiosity. As always, the part of him that thought about things was separate from the part that acted. Without thinking he imagined that the woman was taking him to Miranda Popescu. Perhaps she had found refuge in the dangerous small villages of these creatures, or in the caves they once had decorated with painted animals, where the Roumanian police would search for her last of all. The woman was laughing and chattering as she dragged him along, and in the speckled sunlight it was hard to see her face. This was partly because she was in front of him, and partly because he found himself glancing away when she turned back, made uncomfortable by her big eye-r
idges and sloping forehead, her big jaw and teeth.
In the woods in front of them he heard a gunshot.
The woman's skin was pale, her hair was gray, not thick enough to be called fur. Though most of her was covered in dirty strips of cloth, her forearms were bare past the elbow. And though she was smiling, Pieter sensed from her an impression of urgency and danger. She had let go of his hand as the land started to rise, and she moved quietly and quickly through the undergrowth, bent almost double. Quietly and quickly Pieter followed her. It was a skill he had from Berkshire County. Was Miranda hurt?
Then suddenly they came onto an outcropping of rocks above a clearing of felled trees. There were thatch-roofed wooden huts below them. Miranda Popescu lay in a circle of trampled earth on a tarpaulin or stretcher—he could just make it out. Dressed in the silver uniforms of the German military police, two men stood upright on either side of her. Two others were kneeling.
Pieter took his jacket off and dropped it on the rocks. The woman who had led him sat and hugged her legs. There was blood on her side, but she took no notice.
For a moment, dully, Pieter wondered what Sasha Prochenko might do now. Perhaps he would call out, wave, climb down slowly through the rocks, approach the policemen smiling with his hands open—whatever he did, it would involve a lot of talking. Pieter crouched behind a rock as one of the kneeling men looked up, stood up, pointed at the woman sitting cross-legged. One of the soldiers raised his rifle, but he didn't fire, and the woman didn't move.
Pieter recognized the man who had pointed, though he was older and white-haired now, a one-eyed man named Ernest Dysart who had fought with Schenck von Schenck. Prochenko would have definitely called out to him. They were old comrades, after all. But de Graz slipped back out of sight over the lip of the hill, then climbed down through the rocks. After circling through the trees, he came to the back of one of the small houses. In the village he could slip from house to house.
Some of these places were ruined or abandoned, and some were simple dirt-floored huts. There were about fifteen houses in all, arranged in two rough circles around the trampled clearing. One was larger than the rest, and its back door was open. Through it he stepped into a room with woven matting on the floor. There was a fireplace, a wood stove, a spinning wheel and treadle loom, some metal pots and even a few books. The house was neat as any peasant's cottage with its high shelf of painted crockery—Pieter de Graz saw none of these things. He was looking for the mark of a struggle, but he didn't find it, though the front door was ajar. And he was looking for a weapon, which he discovered near the household altar of Diana the huntress. It was a thin-bladed knife stuck into the timbers of the wall.
The shutters were closed on the glassless front windows. Pieter looked out through the slits into the trampled yard. The soldiers were close by, and he heard them talking. But it was hard to listen, hard to concentrate—they had put their hands upon the general's daughter. He couldn't see her face, but he could recognize her hair and legs. He found a noise of protest coming out of him, a low coughing noise. At the same time he started to pound his fist against the window frame. He wanted Miranda Popescu to wake up, and he thought surely the soldiers would be frightened of the creatures who lived in these houses. They were fierce, crazy creatures, as the world knew. Then he went and stood next to the doorjamb, next to the wooden lock plate so that he could meet them as they came to look. This was so easy, a child could have done it. He saw the muzzle of the rifle poking open the door, and he studied it as it came through, a fine light weapon from Abyssinia, perhaps.
He kicked the door and the man in the silver uniform staggered forward. He had a big fleshy nose, and Pieter grabbed hold of it. With his knife he sawed off a piece of it, then kicked the gun loose as he jumped across the open doorway and the second soldier fired his gun, fired it again—a high, odd, muffled sound. Pieter imagined he was safe for several seconds at least; the door was flat against the wall, and he had the double thickness of the door and wall. It didn't matter, though. He didn't need the time. The first soldier blocked the threshold. He was rolling on the ground and screaming, his hands over his face. The second soldier must have realized how exposed he was. He scuttled backward when Pieter looked out through the slits of the second window, and Dysart had disappeared.
It was time for talking now or else pretending to talk. Pieter dropped the knife and ripped away the bloody cuff of his sleeve, then pulled out his pocket handkerchief and wiped his hands as he ran through the cottage, slipped out the rear door.
The wounded soldier was still screaming. It was the end of the afternoon, and the sun hung low over the ragged cliffs. Rubbing his hands, Pieter moved away from the sun around the circle of huts. Between two of them he found the body of a little hairy woman dressed in a blue dress and white apron. She was curled up like a dog.
Pieter's right hand wouldn't come clean, and he now saw that he was wounded. A bullet had passed through the middle of his palm. Now when he saw the hole it started to throb, and he tied the handkerchief around it as he left the woman and went on. He flexed his fingers, and his hand hurt, and he wondered if he would meet Dysart circling around, or the German soldier, or the other man he'd scarcely seen except for an impression of drab black clothes and a slouch hat—he was the one, as it turned out. De Graz saw him lurking by the inner house, and so he changed directions and came up behind him, making no effort to be quiet.
The man turned back when he saw him, came toward him with his hands out. "Domnul Gross, where did you come from?" he whispered. "From the reception—heaven be praised. I am happy to see another citizen of Roumania. You are Roumanian?" he asked, speaking in that language but with a harsh, Hungarian accent.
"Oui. "
"I am so glad to hear it! Did you see one of those savage men? Are you here for the reward? I am asking you to help me—the hero of the Hephaestion—I am so glad. The Germans have her now."
"Oui."
He was a gaunt little man with a luxurious black moustache. He studied Pieter keenly without seeing him. "We saw him through the door. He bit Lieutenant Schneider's nose completely. Come with me!"
Grabbing Pieter's arm, he led him back the way he'd come. When they passed the curled-up body in its apron and bonnet, he groaned—"But this is terrible! These Germans have no affection for life except their own. Heaven forgive me for coming out with them. And that coward Dysart, where is he?"
He seemed anxious to talk. He kept a long, whispered commentary as he led Pieter back to the big cottage and the sound of muffled screams. "I must tell you this is an enormous creature. I think two meters tall. Did you see him run away? You must be careful."
But Pieter was a brave man, the hero of the Hephaestion disaster. Without hesitation he stepped through the back door of the cottage where the soldier was laid out. The knife, he saw, had fallen behind a chair. In the shadows of the room it was invisible. But it was too close to the severed nose, a gobbet of raw flesh. If the Germans looked for it, then they would find it.
Pieter wondered if he should seize it up and attack the second soldier who now crouched over his comrade, bandaging his head. He spoke to him in German, a language Pieter didn't know. And he had managed to cover his entire face above his mouth with blood-soaked bandages. Even his eyes were covered over.
Pieter's hand throbbed, and the bandage was soaked through. The little man was behind him again and led him through the front door into the yard. There lay the general's daughter on her stretcher. It was put together, Pieter saw, out of a broken canvas cot. "Dysart!" called the man behind him, "Dysart!" Then in a lower tone, "Where is that illegitimate fool?"
Pieter had gone down on his knees beside the cot. He couldn't see the girl's face, but only her black hair and the ridge of her ear poking through. He put his left hand out to touch her and then hesitated, and then moved his open hand above her body, stroking the air a few inches above her flank, cupping her shoulder, her elbow, and her hip. He listened to her breathing and imagi
ned the warmth of her; the sun was down behind the cliff. He smelled the fragrance of dirt and dust, and his mind was full of English words. "Ah love," he thought, "let us be true to one another . . . ," which was stupid nonsense. This was the daughter of General Schenck von Schenck. He had known her since she was in diapers.
"A thousands marks' reward is a beautiful sight," said the drab man with the absurd black moustache. "How did you hurt your hand? You must have hurt it in the wreck!"
Then the soldier came to the doorway and called out in German. The man listened, and then whispered to Pieter, "These men are potato-eaters. He wants us to carry back his friend. It is always the same with them. Heaven forbid that one of them should be getting hurt! In Russia I have heard it is always the Roumanians, always the Hungarians while they hang back. It is because they think we are like nothing or like dirt, perhaps. I tell you, my friend, I am glad to see you. Listen to him—he says Lieutenant Schneider cannot walk. He cares more for his comfort than for our success."
All this time the soldier had been calling out in German, and now he walked over toward them. He had both Abyssinian rifles slung over his back. Without ceremony, with bloody hands, he lifted up one side of the canvas stretcher and dumped out Miranda Popescu. She groaned and rolled over onto her back. Pieter reached his hands out, but he couldn't touch her.
"Qu'est-ce qu'elle a?" he asked.
The little man squatted down and fanned himself with his soft hat. His long gray hair was combed back from his forehead. "No, she's not sick. We found her in the house like this. Wake her up, make her walk, I beg you—try! Otherwise we cannot leave one man to guard her—where is Dysart? I tell you we must not stay here after dark."
