The Tourmaline (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  She didn’t turn around, didn’t open her eyes. But she could hear the soft, breathy voice again. “Dear, you have climbed a long stair to this room. But I think there’s a short way down.”

  The lantern blew out, and when she opened her eyes she was in darkness. Save for herself, the room was empty.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT THE cloak of Saturn, god of death, passed over Germany as well. In the countryside there were some hidden celebrations, seances and family gatherings behind locked doors. As on most of the feast days of the old calenders, the police were in the streets, watching for any public demonstration. In years past the peasants and the townspeople had painted their faces to look like skulls. But this could not be tolerated in wartime. News had just arrived of a bloody battle near the city of Pskov. It was one car in a baggage train of victories, but many men had died.

  In Ratisbon, two men drank a toast of Roumanian brandy. They were not believers in the ordinary way. They approached these mysteries with the coldness of scientists, and the service that they paid was an ironic one. Arslan Lubomyr, glass in hand, recited a few lines of an old monastic chant, praising the wines at Saturn’s wedding feast.

  In the gas-lit chamber at the top of the high house, perched on a cedar bench next to an inlaid table, the elector was in an anxious mood. All evening they had been discussing politics and the elections to the Reichstag. “Humor me tonight,” he said. “Let me ask you. Why do nations go to war?”

  Then after a pause, “What is there in Russia that is worth these miseries? Already oil and sugar are rationed in the Kirchenstrasse market.”

  As usual he was dressed in evening clothes. He said, “My friend, I’m glad you’ve come to visit me at last. Now I can look into your face when I talk to you. It is easier to see if you are telling me the truth. Do you believe the justifications of the foreign minister? I read the transcript of his speech in the Gazette. Do you think we have a duty to take over the affairs of these corrupt and backward governments—a moral duty, whatever the cost, as he explains it?”

  The lieutenant-major was a handsome man with dark, thin, Asiatic features. He was in uniform—brass buttons, silver braid. He sat in a stuffed armchair, his boots stretched out.

  “Humor me,” his host continued. “Is there no room in Europe to contain some backwardness? Perhaps the mark of a great nation is to leave others in peace.”

  Fascinated by the ugliness of his host, Lubomyr sipped the liquor in his glass. He looked away, then back again, studying for an instant the elector’s nose. He had his own political opinions, his own fears that Germany’s success in battle could be stolen away by cowardly politicians. The war coalition was a fragile one, and it depressed him to think about it.

  Instead he saw a way to introduce a subject to the conversation. He’d been looking for the chance since his arrival the night before. “I think those countries have a clearer duty to resist,” he said. “I mean whatever the benefit.”

  It was hard for Lubomyr to judge expressions on his host’s ruined face, though he now saw the elector was peering at him keenly. “My friend, I think so, too. So the force comes from our side. Why is it, do you think?”

  Lubomyr brought his hand up to hide his eyes. He was irritated by these constant declarations of friendship, the use of the familiar forms of speech—irritated and obscurely touched. Once again he made a motion toward his subject. “I think all nations are like animals. Some are sheep and some are wolves.”

  He crossed his legs and the elector shook his head. “I have a sympathy for sheep. It’s all right for a handsome fellow like yourself. But I’ve spent a long time in this room. These things are revealed at death and not before. They say Alexander of Macedon was a prong-horned snail. And I believe I have discovered some sheeplike characteristics…”

  Around them at the borders of the room stood several of the elector’s simulacra. They came and went, engaged in unknown tasks. Lubomyr was used to them by now. They were blond, moustached, identical.

  “My friend, I see you are surprised. It’s because I have depended on the courage of others. Yourself, for instance.”

  Lubomyr shook his head. “You have defied conventions. That takes bravery.”

  “Ah, my friend. That is only because I had no choice. Without choices we are all champions.”

  Lubomyr took another sip of brandy. His subject was close at hand. “I can see you’re in a melancholy mood,” he said. “And I don’t understand. I came here to offer our congratulations, unofficially, of course. You had your part in our success on June the seventh. There are people on the staff who understand our debt to you, and in the highest reaches of the government. I am sure that when the war is over, unofficially—”

  “Of course.”

  The elector sighed. He put his small, elegant hand out to the table in front of them, and almost touched a bronze statue of Tsong Kapa, the Buddhist deity. Several small objects were scattered over the complicated surface. “It’s a delusion,” he continued, “that cowards have a lot to lose. But I will miss my beautiful things.”

  “Your grace, this is morbid—”

  Ratisbon smiled. “It is the night for truth-telling. And you have made me drunk. I feel it suddenly. But I’m talking about something else—a danger.”

  There was an empty vase on the table and he reached for it. His expression was difficult to interpret. But his small grasping hands were eloquent.

  “There’s always danger,” said Lubomyr tolerantly. “Our own politicians are a venal lot. If it wasn’t for von Stoessel and the ministers—three men! And the Russians!”

  “No! Not from that side. But from underneath. You understand?”

  He had scarcely tasted from his glass, which he now placed clumsily in the center of the table. He did seem drunk all of a sudden, Lubomyr thought. Perhaps it was for the best, but perhaps it was a complication. “Underneath?”

  “My friend, this brandy you have brought has poisoned me. It is too sweet. From Roumania, I think.”

  Baffled, Lubomyr nodded. “They have signed the treaty of alliance, as you know. They are fighting beside us in the Ukraine.”

  He took an ostentatious sip from his own glass, and then continued. “But your patriotism is to be commended. As I say, these things have not escaped the notice of the general staff. Let me tell you I am here to welcome you to Berlin or wherever you wish to go. You must keep appearances, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “There is one thing,” continued Lubomyr. And now he had arrived. “I don’t know how to put it. The office of the foreign minister has given me a message. There is a story that you might be keeping two Roumanian subjects here for patriotic reasons. One is the child of Madame Ceausescu.”

  Now he sat forward in his armchair, glanced into the elector’s face. “The minister believes the time has come to reward her for her change in attitude. He wants to invite her to Berlin and reunite them publicly—you understand. We are signatory to provisions for the ethical treatment of prisoners. With your new passport, I have a letter in my bag that explains the particulars,” he said. “Tomorrow…”

  He let his voice trail away. He found himself watching the elector’s hands. There was a bowl of nuts on the Chinese bench next to the man’s knee. Lubomyr watched him pick up a macadamia nut, covered with white dust.

  “And Clara Brancoveanu?”

  “Her, too.”

  Still chewing on the nut, the elector put his forefinger onto the surface of the table. He stared down at the assortment of objects for a moment, as if contemplating a problem on an invisible chessboard. But when he raised his head, Lubomyr could see the ridges of his smallpox-ravaged face were tinged with sudden color, white and red. His lips were twisted back to reveal pearllike teeth. Only his large eyes were calm, expressionless. He cleared his throat. “Weren’t you listening to me? Are you all fools? Roumania, that’s where the danger is. Roumania.”

  When he was talking about cowardice and sheep, Lubomyr
had not imagined what a frightening figure the man could make when he was angry, as now. “You make me want to puke,” he said. Around them in the darkened room, four blond, moustached, identical servants paused to listen.

  Only the elector’s brown eyes were calm while the rest of him twitched and fidgeted. He held his hands above the inlaid surface of the table, which now seemed to reveal a kind of pattern in the marquetry. “Look,” he said, “are you insane? Do you think you have the knowledge to protect yourselves without my help?”

  He was referring, Lubomyr knew, to the hidden world. This kind of talk was rare in Germany, a shared interest that had brought the men together. After the elector’s expulsion from Roumania, Lubomyr had written him a letter from the university. In five years of correspondence he had learned much, benefited much.

  “Look around you! Don’t you see the beauty of my collection? But you want to take away the prize! You must know how those two wronged me and wronged all of us. Nicola Ceausescu robbed me of the most valuable jewel in Europe, a German national treasure. Clara Brancoveanu betrayed me when she was my guest, when she was twenty-three years old and pregnant, too. There were anti-German riots all over Transylvania, Bucovina, Bucharest itself after the empress had her husband murdered. I offered that girl the hospitality of my house for her sake and for Schenck von Schenck—I didn’t turn her away when she was pregnant and without funds. And I thought she’d be happy to learn that we were marching on Roumania to protect her interests and our people. We were going to avenge her husband. But she betrayed us. Six kilometers!”

  “And the boy?” asked Lubomyr. He was looking at the man’s fingers, which had selected another nut.

  “Kepler’s Eye! I wanted Kepler’s Eye! Is that too much? Isn’t that what every man wants—to try to change things for the better? Do you think there’d be a need for all this fighting? Without the stone, what am I? A national scandal and a joke, while Nicola Ceausescu uses it for her own vanity, a mirror for herself. I have heard she gives theatrical performances and the people cheer her idiotic self-indulgence—if there was any doubt of the stone’s effect, then that should settle it. But what do you suppose that power would be worth in the hands of a dedicated and serious man?”

  Nicola Ceausescu had already been a subject of conversation earlier that night. The two men had already discussed her thwarted attempt to smuggle radium from Abyssinia. They had discussed the tourmaline, and in that context conversed easily and pleasurably about land reform, new rights for citizens, the abolition of hereditary privilege. But the elector was an unstable fellow after all, and with a growing sense of anxiousness, Lubomyr watched the movements of his hands.

  In his patent-leather case, as he had said, Lubomyr had brought an offer from the government, a possibility of rehabilitation. Now he wondered why he’d bothered to mention it. Arriving in Ratisbon the day before by train, he had not been prepared for the elector’s ugliness. Now, glancing up at the elector’s seared and puckered face, he thought a thousand tourmalines, a bath of tourmalines, a purple shower of tourmalines would yield only a minimal effect.

  “We are thankful for your patriotism,” he repeated blandly.

  When he had spoken to his contacts in Berlin, he had not understood how isolated the elector had become, how solitary, how irrelevant—a rich man who lived by himself in a big house on a hill above the old part of the town. Daily his servant, Dr. Theodore, came shopping at the Kirchenstrasse market.

  From the squares and street corners you could see the overgrown terraces of the park. The gates were open to the lower garden. Children played and were not chased away. In the afternoon, Arslan Lubomyr had climbed the cobbled drive. The house was not an ancient one. It had a stucco façade. Dr. Theodore had brought him up after he’d rung the bell—the first of many Dr. Theodores. Now in the dark chamber at the top of the house, they clustered around him as the elector raised his hand. Unhinged by loneliness, sucking on a macadamia nut, he gestured over the tabletop. “My friend, this is not your fault, I know. But you must not allow yourself to be the errand boy for fools. If I have taught you anything in these five years, it is to look beneath the surface of the world. You can’t doubt the reality of what I say, that after all this time I’ve still kept watch over my country. For years I have accustomed myself to only a few hours of sleep, so that the shield I have in place cannot be broken or disturbed. I have received no thanks for this, but only ridicule and abuse from those who have no understanding of the world. And now you’ve come to rob me and insult me at the time when I’m most needed. Do you believe your bombs and guns and your new tanks will be enough to protect you? All these things can be blown away like spiderwebs. Now in the Reichstag they are working to undo all that. And I tell you now I made a terrible mistake when I allowed you to let Miranda Popescu escape that day in the Dobruja forest. You should have shot her through the skull. I was in love with a sense of symmetry, that she would take our forged letter to the Russians. I thought she was a defenseless girl. But now she rises again to challenge us in the heart of Europe—this is the moment you have chosen to insult me. What if I refuse? Are you authorized to have me arrested, take these things of mine away by force? My friend, I wish you luck.”

  Lubomyr couldn’t look at the man’s face. He found himself disgusted and repulsed by this long speech, angered by the suggestion that he might have been capable of murdering a beautiful young woman, a civilian—or not beautiful, particularly, as he now remembered her, but fresh and alive; it didn’t matter. He passed his hand over his eyes, staring instead at the surface of the table in front of him.

  Now he saw a change in it, a pattern in the marquetry he’d not observed before. And the objects he had thought were placed at random, the bud vase, the incense burner, the small statues of Tsong Kapa and Kwan Yin, the ashtray, and the brandy glass now appeared like the counters in a game. And the board they sat on now revealed itself in alternating blocks of color, and stylized patterns that suggested rivers, rocks, mountains, seas—the continent of Europe, Lubomyr now saw. There were the thousand islands and the wreck of Britain, there was the submerged coast of France. There was the enormous white mass of the Pyrenees, six thousand meters tall, and then the verdant Alpine hills. There stood the abandoned ruins of Rome. There were the great capitals: Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest, Berlin, and Petersburg.

  Fascinated in spite of himself, Lubomyr leaned forward to look. Was this a pattern that had been there all the time, and now he was only just seeing it? Or was the elector showing him some aspect of the hidden world? As the gaslight dimmed along the sconces in the wall, Lubomyr saw more and more. A new light seemed to rise out of the brandy glass, set in the Hungarian forest. “These are the powers that protect the world,” came the elector’s voice. “It doesn’t matter that the armies fight. We have achieved an equilibrium, though we struggle for advantage. There in Krakow is a professor of philology. There in Bratislava is a milkmaid in a barn. Her name is Zuzana, and she sits upon her stool, smiling and laughing to herself—I have seen her in my glass. There in Mogosoaia is the ghost of Aegypta Schenck—old enemies, she and I. For a long time I had her bottled up, but now she has escaped.”

  Uncertain, feeling the alcohol that he had drunk, Lubomyr glanced up at the elector’s ruined face. He tried to follow the gestures of the man’s clean little hands, looking for the conjuring trick: His host was pointing toward the statue of Kwan Yin, slightly to the north and west of the Roumanian capital. The token of Aegypta Schenck, Lubomyr supposed, and now he looked for other tokens. Near at hand, in Germany, on a hill outside of Ratisbon there was a pebble he hadn’t seen until that moment. Now it glinted in the light thrown by the brandy glass, diffused through the red dregs of the wine.

  “And I will tell you a secret that in time you’d have to know,” said the elector. “Each one of us requires a prisoner. For the Baron Ceausescu it was his own son. And when he surrendered his son he lost his power. The milkmaid has a lover whom she tortures. Each of us in different
ways has interpreted the texts of Hermes Trismegistus in his lessons to a young conjurer. And you see how effective they have been at least in my case. We feed on our prisoners in ways you cannot guess, and I think I am the honest one because I hold them under lock and key. Do you want to take away my strength, now of all times? You see there is no one to the west,” said the elector, gesturing. “You see there is a wave of darkness rising from the west across the sea.”

  His face, disfigured, hard to read, nevertheless showed traces of a new anxiety, a new weakness. “I need them,” he went on. “Aegypta Schenk held her own niece in the palm of her hand. But when she let her go, when she let her escape into the real world, then she was defeated and killed by a minor adept almost the same day! It was because she was a woman, and she did not have the firmness to be cruel.…”

  All this time, Arslan Lubomyr had felt a mix of competing sensations: curiosity, drunkenness, anxiety, disappointment. This last reaction now was uppermost as he leaned back in his chair. He didn’t know whether to interrupt. So that’s why the elector had kept his prisoners all these years! For nothing—Lubomyr had read the new edition of the letters to a young conjurer, the annotations that explained the errors in all previous translations. Was it possible the elector was not aware of the ambiguities in the ancient text? Was it possible he had never read the letters in the original hieroglyphs? Or was he was using Trismegistus as a screen to hide some other more malevolent motive—revenge, perhaps, or sadism? If so it was a horrifying disappointment, and Lubomyr would put some version of it in his report, when he left for Berlin the following morning.

  As if he sensed some of Lubomyr’s disgust, the Elector of Ratisbon paused and stared at him, before he continued with his rant. “My friend, was it foolish for me to think you could learn some of my skills? Can you guess how you have disappointed me? I tell you we are in a delicate position in this country, and everything we’ve worked for can be stripped away. Yes, we’ve won a victory, but you must know this war is not popular. Bodies are returning on every train. Many are asking these same questions, now the tsar has offered peace. Should we press forward? Should we retreat? These things are in a subtle balance in the middle of a parliamentary election. But if von Stoessel fails, or one or two men are defeated, what will happen then?”