The Tourmaline (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  “Thank heavens we were not too late,” he murmured over the baroness’s chestnut hair. Then in a moment: “I must tell you that Herr Luckacz wants to talk to you about the Spitz affair, at your convenience. When you’ve recovered.”

  “Captain, you have my word,” whispered the baroness, her voice soft and bruised. Tears stood in her eyes.

  The elector was seized by a desire to laugh. In the drafty room he felt the sweat slide down his arms. The lieutenant mumbled a few more words, too soft to hear. And then, “My father saw you at the Federal Theatre House in Hildesheim. Every night for a week, though he was just a student.”

  Nicola Ceausescu ventured a weak smile. “Captain, you are very kind. But you must come back and let me thank you properly.…”

  All this time she had not raised her head. The elector stared at her until she lifted up her chin. Even then it was as if she were afraid to look at him. Her eyes made small attempts—he had to admit her skill was astonishing. She turned her face to him in profile, then shrank against the broad chest of her rescuer. She let her shawl slide down to reveal her naked shoulders.

  She was at least a decade older than the officer, who now admired her with calf-struck eyes. The elector watched his nostrils flare as he admired her smell. He himself suppressed a bark of laughter. Then with the coarseness of defeat he said in German, “You will see she’s not even an honest whore. She’s no intention of paying you for what you’ve done.”

  He stood supported by two guardsmen in steel helmets. Hands under his armpits, they hoisted him onto his tiptoes as the lieutenant stood. “You are a disgrace,” he said.

  In Hanover the local government was run by peasants and factory workers, which meant that idiots had risen to all positions of authority. This man was typical, a handsome, empty-headed lout with yellow hair and a soft yellow mustache. Now he spoke to the baroness again. “Madame, you must see this fellow does not represent the best of Germany. He is a civilian first, a private citizen. The order has come down. The general will ship him home to answer a complaint. I must warn you—he’s a conjurer.”

  Though her eyes showed astonishment, the baroness was still able to manage an adoring smile. “I didn’t know. I was just lighting the candles when he broke in.”

  3

  After Five Years

  IN CEAUSESCU’S SERVICE years before, once Captain Raevsky had visited Prince Frederick’s castle on the beach. Then the prince was already dead, his sister chased back to her cabin on the Brancoveanu lands in Mogosoaia north of Bucharest.

  Then the castle was already empty. Now, sitting on his log in the American wilderness, it was easy for the captain to imagine Miranda Popescu waking there, stretching herself awake in the March sun while he and Peter lingered on the riverbank. She would yawn and wake up in the garden near the fountain. The picture was as clear as if he’d seen it in a photograph.

  But from his fifth-floor suite in the Athenée Palace Hotel, already that day the Elector of Ratisbon had scanned the beach, the castle, and the grounds and had discovered nothing.

  Later, when he was again in his own house in Germany, he found himself returning to his vice of clairvoyance, like an addict who can’t acknowledge his own danger. Disgraced, sequestered, but not in legal jeopardy—his family connections had seen to that—he sat in his study in the schloss at Ratisbon, contemplating the Roumanian coast.

  Miranda Popescu was not there—where was she? But if he’d been able to turn his eye into the future, then he would have seen her.

  When, to protect her niece, Aegypta Schenck had placed her in an artificial world, had invented the United States of America and the Romanian republic, and had written the book of their history, she’d worried that a seven-year-old child would not be easily adopted from the Constanta orphanage. Rachel and Stanley, the Americans she’d had in mind, were looking for a younger child, a girl no older than three. Thinking also that Miranda would be happier without her childhood memories, she’d tried hard to accommodate them.

  In a moment, with just a few written words, she’d robbed her niece of five years—more than five. But when Miranda made her journey to the real world and Roumania, when she stumbled through the woods into her father’s garden, all that lost time had come back. The place was as Raevsky pictured it. But on the Black Sea beach north of Constanta, Miranda was more isolated than she yet knew. Six thousand miles separated her from Peter and Andromeda, as well as five years and a few months.

  Spring had come. There were flowers in the garden and the grass was high. From where she stood among the brambles and weeds, through a cut in the sand dunes she could see the water. The stone wall rose up, and she could see the steps to the terrace, but she didn’t want to go that way, not yet. The sun came from behind a cloud. Drawn to the sunlight on the water, seeing no one, afraid of the empty house, she left it for a moment to trudge north along the shore. Maybe she thought for a moment she could escape the lost years the empty castle represented. From time to time she climbed up to the dunes.

  “Peter!” she cried out once, but she knew he couldn’t hear her. Birds passed overhead, and there were pelicans in the water. Inside a tidal inlet she found an abandoned boat. It was pulled onto the hard shingle and the bottom was broken out.

  Since she’d arrived here, for half an hour she had been moving without thinking, observing things without talking about them in her mind. Now she stood staring at the broken boat, letting her anxiety build—there was no way to put it off any longer. In fact she was anxious to see the place; she turned back toward the spire of the castle. No, but she couldn’t, not just yet. Midway where the pebbles were replaced by fifty yards of coarse yellow and black sand, she stopped.

  And then suddenly a memory where there had been nothing before: She had come down here to go swimming in the old days. She’d come with Juliana and her family. Now she remembered the red and white pavilion where she used to change, the shape of the big rocks, the sweep of iron-encrusted sand. She remembered the light on the water and the feeling of sand on her toes—this sand. And she sat down to unlace her boots and strip off her stinking socks. She rolled up her jeans and then stepped down into the small thin waves, and the water was warmer than she’d imagined, though still it was not warm.

  Now she looked around again to make sure she was alone. The boulders would shelter her from someone in the dunes, someone in the tower. And because she was so dirty and filthy, and because she remembered this place, with trepidation she stripped off her dirty pants and stepped into the water, dressed only in her shirt and dirty underwear. The surf was gentle. It was a windless afternoon. The sun shone in the dark sky and the light felt good after so long in the snowy woods. The water was so clear.

  At first she thought she’d splash her legs and leave it at that. But her hair was tangled and she wanted to get it wet. As one long wave receded, she took off her wool shirt and threw it behind her on the sand. With her arms crossed over her chest, she waded out until a bigger wave came and soaked her above the waist.

  How glorious it would be to dive into the water and then climb up onto the beach and feel the heat of the sun! It would feed her hungry skin. Instead, the rocks banged around her feet. She was cold when she came out of the water, vulnerable, self-conscious. She didn’t even wait till she was dry before she put on her scratchy shirt and chafing pants. With sandy feet she trudged back to the castle.

  As she approached, she told herself she had to find some food. With food in her stomach she might have dared to take a proper swim. Now, as if the sun had thawed out part of her that had been numb with amazement, or as if the water had sobered part of her that had been drunk with memory, she realized how frightened she was and how alone. Knowing they were far away but not guessing how far, she called again for Peter and Andromeda. And when she found the path from the beach, again she hurried by the terrace of the castle without looking up. She hurried through the garden to the caretaker’s cottage where she’d fought the man with the scarred face. He’
d shown her breakfast on a long table. She climbed the steps into the room to look for some of those apples and rolls, but they had never been genuine and now they were long gone.

  What had happened? She had seen the roof of the house. She’d been paddling down the river with Peter and Captain Raevsky, and she had seen the roof beyond the trees. Even when she’d found the place, she’d known it wasn’t real, not in the ordinary sense. Objects shifted and lost substance when she touched them. And the man with the scarred, ruined face who had attacked her, he’d been more like a ghost than like a living creature. She had beaten him, disarmed him, knocked him to the ground here in this room. She’d darted through the door into the garden and then circled through the woods calling Peter’s name. And when she’d given up and come back, the house was different, real this time. When she came up the steps again, the boards were real under her feet.

  Had she been dreaming? Woken up? The cottage showed signs of an old struggle. There was broken crockery across the broken floorboards and the back door was off its hinges. It led to the pantry, Miranda now remembered, a low room off the back. In the old days there had been cabinets and ceramic vessels, a stone sink and a hand pump, a stove with a tin chimney. But the room was wrecked now. The outside wall was broken, and briars grew through the hole.

  She found pots that were still intact but empty. The pump was dry. Once again Miranda turned, hoping to see Peter in the middle of the cottage’s larger room, but there was no one.

  Then she went out into the garden and lay in the rich warm grass. By the overgrown fountain she dug her hands down through the lily pads. Tiny frogs jumped through her fingers. She drank the water and she poured water from her cupped hands over her face and hair.

  Around her there were birds and butterflies and hummingbirds. She lay down for a moment and put her arm over her face. She felt both languorous and desperate. She could lie in that warm place forever, and at the same time she must jump up. The sun was halfway down the sky.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon she did what she’d been dreading, and climbed onto the terrace of the castle past the stone lion with the stone shield on its breast. Dressed in her black jeans and woolen shirt, she stepped over the octagonal, terra-cotta tiles toward the shattered French doors. Moss outlined each tile, and there was broken glass. She sat down on the balustrade to pull on her stiff socks and boots, which she had carried up the steps.

  In this place, as in the cottage, every object seemed to liberate a new memory. Once free, they were gone. But by the dozens and the hundreds they receded into the air, leaving behind a sense of familiarity that was painful and exciting. This rough, convex, stone surface where she sat. These broken tiles. These curled brass door handles that were blackened now.

  The doors sagged open. She slipped through them into the main entrance hall. Above her hung the big gas candelabrum whose ceremonial lighting was the sign her aunt was actually in residence. The candelabrum would mysteriously descend from the vaulted ceiling. A servant on a stepladder would reach up with a brass taper.

  Across from Miranda stood the square-paned high windows that looked out over the sea. They were in shadow now. Facing them had been an area of comfortable furniture, big armchairs and settees, which were now ripped down to the springs. Miranda could see footprints of small animals in the dust. There was the inlaid table under which she’d run her wooden trains—a present from her aunt during the festival of Saturn. The threadbare oriental rug was gone.

  Along one wall some of the bookshelves were intact, and under them there was a pile of leather-bound volumes. A book lay at her feet, and she picked it up. The plate on the inside cover showed a monkey holding a mirror. Below it a forceful signature. Pieter de Graz.

  The Chevalier de Graz. The name gave her a shudder of recognition. And she found she could puzzle out some of the text as she opened the book, even without the French translation on the facing page. “Departe doara luna cea galbena…”—something about a moon over some icebergs. It was a book of love poems.

  Now she was here, the language was coming back. In this place she’d been a child, not a baby. She understood that now. And maybe it was the language that was bringing back her memory now. Thoughts can’t exist without words for them, Stanley had told her once.

  Before her were the doors that led to the rest of the house. They hung drunkenly on their hinges, and some of the carved wooden panels had been smashed in. On the other side there was a stone-flagged hallway. Again the carpet was gone. To her left as she went in, a small and unpretentious staircase led to the second story, and straight ahead was the dining room and the kitchen. The hall she had just left, with its high windows over both the garden and the sea, was the largest in the house.

  Most of the furniture downstairs had been carried away, and the rooms were empty except for broken glass and dishes and a few broken chairs. But when she gathered her courage to climb the wooden staircase, she found places on the second story that seemed undisturbed. There was a smell of bats in the stairwell, and some of the woodwork had been gnawed away. But the rooms were not wrecked, nor were the windows broken. The furniture was whole, and much of it was covered with thick, white, protective cloth. It was obvious no one had been here in some years. The curtains in the windows, particularly those overlooking the sea, were ripped and faded, and all the rooms had a strange, bad smell. Dust was everywhere. On the wooden floorboards Miranda’s footprints left a mark.

  The biggest room was on the east side of the house. It had a balcony overlooking the gray water. This was her aunt Aegypta’s room, and she’d never been allowed to enter. Now with a furtive sense of transgression that wafted back across the years, she stepped over the threshold. There was a wicker dresser and a couple of wicker armchairs. There was a high, single bed with four carved posts, and on its dusty cover she laid down the book of poems while she stood looking around.

  A line of photographs in tarnished silver frames stood on the dresser. Some were sepia prints and some were hand-tinted. Most showed ladies and gentlemen in formal clothes. Then there were several of the lady whom Miranda had only seen in dreams or in tara mortilor—the country of the dead—and even now no memories came back. But this is how she must have looked when Miranda lived in the house, her aunt Aegypta in a younger version. In one of the photographs she wore boots and trousers and carried a shotgun over her arm. In another she held a baby. With a sour, impatient expression, she pushed a lock of hair from the child’s face.

  Another photograph was larger than the rest. It showed a dark-haired girl of maybe seven or eight or nine, standing in the garden beside an ornamental plinth. Miranda took it to the long windows that led onto the balcony. With the sleeve of her shirt she cleaned the glass. The girl had small protruding ears.

  It hurt Miranda to look into the girl’s worried face. She couldn’t put the feeling into words, but she found she could remember the circumstances of the portrait, the photographer in his dark coat, crouching behind his enormous apparatus. Lieutenant Prochenko had been there, the handsome guardsman who had been her father’s aide. He’d been standing behind the photographer, making faces to make her smile as if she were a baby. He’d said something rude as usual when she was posing—called her his little lump-cat; always he refused to see that she was growing up. Her forlorn expression in the photograph, that was intended as his punishment.

  But she couldn’t yet begin to think about Pieter de Graz or Sasha Prochenko. It was hard enough to think of Peter and Andromeda. She pressed the glass face of the photograph against her chest, then placed it facedown on the dresser. Suddenly the room seemed airless, and she left it and ran up the stairs again; none of these rooms was particularly familiar. Or else only one at the top of the house where she was headed now. It was built into the base of the steeple, reached by a special half-landing off the third floor. It was Miranda’s room, and she knew because she remembered suddenly how she had struggled to claim it. Her aunt had meant to use it as an upstairs study because
the light was good. But Miranda had begged and begged.

  She stayed in Juliana’s cottage if the house was closed. But when the glow of the gas candelabrum spilled from the French windows over the garden, then Miranda would pack her clothes. As darkness fell, holding her little bag, Miranda would slip her hand into Juliana’s hand. They would walk together up the garden path and in the small side door. They would climb the stairs together to Miranda’s room.

  The door was set into an odd high threshold that you had to step over. The silver doorknob was carved in the shape of a rose, one of the symbols of her father’s family. And when she turned the knob and opened the door, she found the room as she remembered, an octagon of yellow walls set into the circle of the tower, and each wall held a high window. The windows were covered with wooden blinds, which she now pulled open. She fastened the cords onto their brass cleats.

  There was her desk and bureau, there was her small bed. There was her full-length, gilt-framed mirror with the yellow shadow in the glass. Miranda had not seen a mirror since she’d been in Williamstown, and she stood staring at her reflection. Then without thinking she opened the top drawer of her bureau and drew out her silver and tortoiseshell brush and comb. They had belonged to her mother’s mother. She sat on the edge of the small bed and began to comb the tangles from her hair, which was still damp.

  But one big hank of it was hopeless. Toward the west the sun was going down behind the trees. After a few minutes, sick of staring at her ghostly face, she threw down the brush and stood in front of each window in turn, trying to remember each framed view. The trees had grown up, she saw immediately. There was the carriage road. The fenced-in fields were overgrown with briars and weeds and straggling, small oaks. In no direction could she see another house.

  Beneath her feet there was the tessellated floor, an imitation of a Roman mosaic in Constanta. It showed the face of Diana in profile, surrounded by a pattern of running deer. Made of small squares of multicolored tile, it was quite crude—not nearly as fine as the original, which Miranda now remembered. It had been uncovered when they built the train station, and then put into the museum.