by Paul Park
They were crossing a little stream. Miranda Popescu sat down to take her boots off. “Mademoiselle,” he said. “Je vous en prie.…”
“Oh, Peter, I’m so tired. Completement fatiguée. Just let’s sit here for five minutes.”
“Mademoiselle—”
“Don’t call me that. Don’t be so formal. Please—there’s no need.”
The Gypsy, who had been walking behind them, now came up. She spoke the language of the country people. “We can’t go on. We’ll stop here for the night.”
De Graz muttered a curse. Bitterly, as if they were children he explained the facts to them. Their only chance was to slip over the river in the darkness, the Colentina River where it broke at Constantin’s Ford. If soldiers and policemen had not already secured it …
The light was fading from the trees. “Well, then let’s wait for darkness,” argued the Gypsy. “Can’t you see how tired she is? We’ll rest here for a few hours.”
How could these women be so headstrong? How could he help them if they would not help themselves? Frustrated, he made his right hand into a fist inside his bandage, squeezing it to feel the puffed-up wound. That was real at least. He would need a surgeon soon.
“It’s all right,” said Mlle. Popescu. She had stood again to cross the brook. Now she turned around to face them with the water around her bare ankles. “Ludu—he’s right. The quicker we are, the more we’ll have a chance. Besides, if we reach the river we will have to wait till darkness then. We’ll have an hour at least.”
This surprised de Graz. He had made the same calculation, more or less. Now on the far bank she was rubbing her feet before she slipped into her socks again—that had to stop. It was nonsense for her to think she could keep her feet dry. So once the stream was past he turned north onto swampier ground just to teach her a lesson. And of course the way was more direct.
The Gypsy cursed him. But now Mlle. Popescu was following him with grim stubbornness as they splashed over the uneven hummocks and through the dead trees. There were mosquitoes. He caught at them with his left hand as he stamped a path through the undergrowth. Sometimes he held aside the brambles for her, turning to watch her flushed, angry face. At Mamaia Castle he had not known much about children, and she had not taught him much. She’d been too proud and too precocious. But he remembered this way of goading her.
Now she was a woman.
And it was true—she must be tired. Two days of wandering in the hidden world—he knew about that. He had been lost in an American boy’s body and he still had dreams. But he had woken up, and now she was awake, and he would bring her across the river at Constantin’s Ford, the only possibility on foot. Bucharest on the north side had spread beyond its walls, which had been torn down in many places. But his mother had a house near Lake Herastrau. There was a fig tree in the courtyard, he remembered. Seven steps led to the door, which was painted red.
It was strange, he thought, how you could give your life over to other people. But that’s what a soldier did, and that’s what a soldier’s glory meant. Dysart had forgotten that, had gone out for himself. Now he was worse than dead.
Pieter’s hand ached where Dysart had cut him. It throbbed and ached. In half an hour they left the wet ground behind—they hadn’t lost any time, and might even have gained something. And he could smell the river. In a thicket of pine trees they sat down and waited for the moon to rise. Businesslike, Miranda Popescu stripped off her wet boots. Then she brushed her teeth, wrapped herself up, and in the last light she sat down to read once more the letter that she carried with her money in the beaded purse. The Gypsy had kept it for her after all.
“What is that?” he asked.
Mlle. Popescu looked up at him. And she actually smiled; in her expression there was no trace of any anger. When she was a child, sometimes she’d been cross with him for days.
“Do you remember?” she said. “Please correct me. But was there a time—I must have been about seven—when my aunt and I sat on camp stools in a farmer’s field. There was a tent, and lots of food, and bottles of wine in copper tubs, on ice. Some officers gave an exhibition of trick riding and dressage. And I remember you on a big gray horse. Prochenko was there with us in his uniform. I saw him under the torchlight. He promised me a sip of wine!”
Curse his handsome face! “He had hurt himself,” murmured de Graz. “Otherwise he would have won as always.”
“You see—I remember him saying that! If I read this letter before I fall asleep, then in the morning I remember something like that, some small thing. And of course it’s looking at your face that brings it back. Hearing your voice. I think we were friends before. That’s not too much to ask!”
Later he went down to the riverbank to reconnoiter. He came out from the trees. Crouching down among some cattails, he surveyed the broad, shallow reach of the Colentina, slow and noiseless here. There were no lights anywhere that he could see, no sign of life on either bank, which proved nothing, obviously.
When he came back, Miranda Popescu was alone. Doubtless the Gypsy had gone out to squat somewhere. Curled up on a bed of pine needles, wrapped in a gray shawl, the general’s daughter had fallen asleep. De Graz sat watching her. There was a mist above the trees, and beads of moisture on the surface of the shawl.
Restless, she murmured and rolled over. The letter had fallen from her hand. Inadvertently he caught a glimpse of it as he bent over her. The light was almost gone. “If you are as I think a princess of Roumania…,” he read.
Perhaps. He’d sworn his parole to Frederick Schenck von Schenck, and to his sister too, whose handwriting it was. But there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, as his old nurse used to say in English, he remembered suddenly. Mrs. Abigail. She’d had a wart on her cheek. The wart had had a hair in the middle of it.
The moon was up now, though it was hidden in the mist. But the sky was brighter in the east. Soon he’d wake her, Miranda Popescu, who now turned onto her back. He could see her cheeks and long neck. Her face was beautiful in the soft light. Drops of mist were in her hair.
Nurse Abigail must have taught him some English doggerel, which he now remembered:
They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking within my chamber:
Once I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember.…
What if she was the general’s daughter? A man could look, couldn’t he?
He stood over her as she awoke and stretched, opened her eyes. He had not been alone with her before. Too soon there was some noise from beyond the thicket. But it was only the Gypsy coming back. She was excited, laughing, and she bent down to grasp Miranda’s hands—“Oh, miss, you won’t believe it!”
And as Miranda Popescu turned her head, the girl went on—“I saw one! Oh, I’m sure I saw one.”
“What?”
“And it was huge! A white tyger, miss. I saw it underneath a tree!”
* * *
HAVING REACHED THE university district in the eastern part of Bucharest, the baroness’s horses slowed to a walk. The baroness sat forward on the seat. Mlle. Corelli was beside her. A creature of impulse, Nicola Ceausescu had not planned carefully what she would say or do.
But when the carriage stopped outside the narrow stone house, she pushed open the door and stepped onto the rung. She had posted one of Luckacz’s men at the corner of the road, who now touched his cap—“He’s still inside.”
“Thank you.” Standing in the unpaved street, looking up at the dark, elegant façade—Professor Corelli, historian and antiquarian, was nevertheless from an important family—the baroness now understood why she had brought the girl. And it was not, as she had first supposed, because she needed her to show her the location of the jewel. But the baroness wanted something to trade. Years before, the Elector of Ratisbon (now deceased!) had proposed a trade: her son for Kepler’s Eye.
“Come, my dear,” she said to Mlle.
Corelli, holding up a gloved hand to help her from the coach.
Oh, but she had been a fool, the baroness thought, not to trade the false stone for the boy—her only son! But how could she have known? It didn’t matter. In two hours she would embrace her darling Felix on the station platform in front of the assembled dignitaries, the real jewel in her pocket. That would be the moment of her victory, and the band would play the appropriate motif, mixed inevitably with other, darker themes—she had given Luckacz some sheet music from the third act of her drama to pass on to the musicians. Oh, but her husband had been right! Trismegistus was right! The elector had given up his prisoners. Now he was dead. She felt a thrill of triumph.
“Come on, my dear,” she repeated, her fingers clamped around the girl’s elbow. “Please don’t dawdle. Your father is expecting us.”
This was untrue. It was not the baroness’s habit to come announced. But even in the dark street, she thought she could detect a wistful kind of apprehension in Mlle. Corelli’s painted face—“Ma’am, what did he say?”
“Hush, child. He will be glad to see you.”
This proved to be an exaggeration. Fingers clamped under her elbow, she led the girl up the stone steps while one of the footmen rang the bell. Gaslight flickered in the portico. In time they heard the sound of the bolt pulled back. New light spilled out from the hall, and a servant stood with his hand on the doorknob. In back of him a big man with a loud, jovial voice—“Who is it, Gaston, please?”
The servant, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, peered out doubtfully. He said nothing, but in time he pulled the door back to reveal his master, a big man dressed in slippers and a smoking jacket. “You!” he said.
Then Gaston was gone, and the man stood alone on the threshold barring their way. He was clean-shaven, with a high, pale face, good features, and gold-rimmed spectacles. “You are not welome here,” he said.
The baroness felt the girl cringe under her hand. In what spirit of bravado had she painted her lips and eyes? “Please, father,” she said.
Now her cloak had parted, and the baroness could see also that her clothes underneath were far from modest, a low-cut shirt, silk stockings above her knees. And it was just those small, defiant, self-defeating details that touched the baroness in an obscure section of her heart—Mlle. Corelli had prepared herself with some carefulness. And at that moment she reminded the baroness of herself, of errors she had made.
She dismissed her own footman with a nod, a gesture of her head. “Please, sir,” she said. “Do you recognize me?”
At receptions and official functions, at all social gatherings, Nicola Ceausescu felt a constant tremor of pride and shame, wondering if each old or middle-aged man remembered seeing her as she’d appeared as Ariadne, or Medea, or Mary Magdalene, or Saint Joan, or Miranda Brancoveanu, or Cleopatra with her breasts uncovered at the end of the last act. As they bent to kiss her hand, she wondered if they were at that moment imagining her in greasepaint as she stood upon the boards of the Ambassadors in Bucharest, or on similar stages in many foreign capitals. Perhaps that was why she felt such sympathy now for Mlle. Corelli, a tiresome girl in many respects—why she felt tears now on her own unpowdered cheek. “You would not turn your own daughter away?”
In spite of the professor’s pale complexion, she could tell his nature was choleric—she could see the blood rise to his face. And in spite of his good looks, there was something in him that recalled a gnawing, biting animal, a marmot or a squirrel perhaps—she could see his long fingernails and big front teeth. “Yes, I recognize you,” he cried. “You’re the start of this.”
He had his fingernails on the doorpost, and with his other hand he held onto the knob so that the way was blocked. “That night she sneaked away from home to one of your performances,” he chattered angrily. “She came back telling me she’d be an actress, which meant a whore in your case as the old baron found out soon enough. A whore in her case, too; the whole city knows it. Not that I blame her—a nation of whores now, and Germany has hired us by the hour…,” on and on.
At every repetition of this ugly word, she felt Mlle. Corelli cringe as if she had been slapped. And the baroness felt also the force of what he said. Was it true she had destroyed this family? She’d heard Corelli’s wife had died, though she was not yet old. And the son was now a soldier in the Ukraine.
But surely the professor could have used the power of the tourmaline to save himself, protect himself, protect his home. So he was a coward after all, without the strength to do what’s necessary. In her heart the baroness felt a surge of music, and she imagined momentarily how various themes from the overture of the first act would repeat in the third—she had risen from the streets to the top of her profession. And yes, she had betrayed her country to the Germans, but she would rise above them, too, and all Roumania would profit, and all its citizens would thank her, finally.
Now more than ever she had need of the jewel, useless in this coward’s hands. “Please,” she murmured. “Everything you say is true.”
As she spoke, she put a spell into the words, a small piece of conjuring she had learned out of her husband’s books. She knew the spell was powerful because of what she was, a beautiful woman who now pulled her gray shawl from her neck. And Corelli was silent, his voice extinguished as she reached out and put her gloved finger to his lips, while at the same time she pushed him backward with the weight of her gloved forefinger. She tightened her grip on the daughter’s arm, and pushed her father back against the door. “Please,” she said. “May we come in?”
“No,” said Mlle. Corelli. “He doesn’t want me here.” But she also was powerless to resist as Nicola Ceausescu pushed her way into the hall. It was a comfortable old place, smelling of smoke, lined with red wallpaper and glass-fronted cabinets. And on the left-hand side, a mirror, in which she caught a glimpse of herself—her helmet of copper-colored hair, her unlined, small-featured face. A beautiful woman, as all the world agreed. And if she couldn’t see it, if even momentary, sidelong glances were enough to shake her confidence, that was a tragedy to be explored in the first act of her drama and then again in closing scenes. Now there was no time for it as she felt the small effects of her conjuring begin to dissipate and drift away. Corelli struggled to speak. The girl twisted her arm away and pulled it free.
The baroness slammed the door behind them, and they all stood together in the narrow hall. There were doors with velvet curtains on the right-hand side, a staircase up ahead. On her right a row of cabinets displaying Roman glassware and ceramics and other curiosities, all painstakingly labeled, and among which she searched in vain for mineral samples or uncut jewels. She needed the tourmaline, needed to find it, if only to defeat the self-doubt that now assailed her—“Gaston, Gaston,” Corelli managed to say, and for a moment the baroness felt a thrill of fear. What would he do, call the police? But the police were already outside, would arrest him and burn down the house if she gave the order—no, that wasn’t the reason she had come. Now she knew: she had come here to rectify the damage she had done to this family, to earn the trust her people had in her, to demonstrate she was the white tyger in more than just name. What had Corelli called her? The Germans’ hired servant? Something uglier than that.
And if she needed a reward for her efforts, a small but valuable token that nevertheless would enable her to achieve more, heal more broken families, who would deny her? Not some nervous professor with a face like a rodent’s, who had made no use of it himself. “Come,” she said, muttering another small curse under her breath and turning fiercely on the girl, who cowered against the closed door.
In order to heal them, first she must cause pain. “Tell me where it is.”
“Ma’am, I…”
“Where does he keep it? Tell me quick!”
But the fool wasn’t paying enough attention. Instead she was looking toward her father, even reaching out to touch him in spite of the cruel thing he’d said. And she was right to be concerned
—the man was flushed and stammering. Still impeded by the fading spell, he touched his throat, and with his other hand gestured toward his servant on the stairs. There the door led to to the servants’ quarters. When the baroness glanced that way again, the door stood open and the boy had disappeared.
It didn’t matter. If he left the house by the back door, then her policeman would pick him up—she’d given orders to arrest anyone who tried to leave. “The tourmaline—tell me now!” she said, while at the same time she repeated in her mind the formula for squeezing and tightening, which she’d learned in her husband’s book. And it was having a renewed effect. Corelli staggered back against one of his cabinets, hands at his throat. He was a coward and a weakling, and the girl, too. “Please, ma’am,” she begged, holding her hands out beseechingly—her cloak had slid aside, revealing her whore’s clothes, the dark material cut low over her breasts. Still she could not keep herself from looking toward the second pair of velvet curtains and then looking away.
It was enough. And once they had surrendered—father and daughter, both—then the baroness could afford to be generous again. Corelli could breathe easier again, as the baroness reconsidered. Not cowards but lost sheep from a dispersed flock, now reunited at long last.
“Ma’am, he has a weak heart,” protested the girl. Nicola Ceausescu seized her by the elbow. Then she was shepherding them both through the curtains, and they came into a drawing room and study. There were bookcases, dark furniture, leather chairs. On the side away from the street Corelli kept his chamber of curiosities, a small area like a stage that was lined with cabinets and shelves. Light came from sconces set into the walls, chimneys of frosted glass with the flames turned low. The baroness had a vague impression of apothecary jars and bones, animal skeletons and stuffed hunting trophies, as she surmised. But on the floor beside an armchair was the safe.
“Tell me,” she said to Mlle. Corelli, but the girl was useless now, in tears. Her cloak had fallen back from her shoulders, exposing her bare arms. Her father stood in the light, and any suggestion of a squirrel or a mouse had vanished from his face, ennobled now with suffering and concern. “Natalie,” he murmured, wringing his hands, though still he did not dare to approach the girl. “Open it,” said Nicola Ceausescu.
