The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  But at just the moment he was giving himself up, she collapsed across his body, dead.

  11

  The House in the Strada Cerbului

  IN BUCHAREST, PETER boarded the train with a number of other soldiers. Magyars and German-speaking Saxons, they were headed home to Transylvania on leave. In the enormous smoky shed of the Gara de Nord, the train took hours to fill. It was the Szekely Star, made from cars that had been cannibalized from other railways and reconditioned for mass transport.

  The line ran up the Prahova valley from Bucharest to Brasov, a distance of a hundred twenty kilometers. Scheduled for departure before dawn, it had steamed out of the station at the precise time, only to stop for several hours in the crossing yard. Afterward they made good time to Ploiesti across the plain, where they changed engines for the trip into the mountains. It was almost as if they had to cross a border to a different country, where the beige uniforms of the national railway and the Rezistenta were replaced with army green. This was Antonescu’s land, under the peaks of the Bucegi Mountains and the Fagaras to the east.

  It was evening before they reached Brasov. In the old days, the Count de Graz had kept a hunting cabin in the woods outside the town, and his son had shot bears in the autumn when the leaves fell. There had been fêtes and celebrations in the Stadthaus and the old citadel, none of which Peter Gross could remember now.

  Or else he almost remembered, as if he’d once read an article in a society magazine—the fireworks for the Demeter festival, reflected in the surface of the Pool of Swans below the Trumpeter’s Tower. He lingered by the delicate wrought-iron fence of the platform as the station cleared. He sniffed at the cold mountain air.

  From where he stood he could see the streetcar terminus across the track and down the stairs. An officer scanned all the faces, looking for him, perhaps. With his pack on his back, he walked down to the other end of the platform, found the gate into the road, took the streetcar to the Piata Sfatului. He could walk from there to the regimental barracks in the Strada Castelului.

  It was raining. The weather matched the mood of the entire nation away from the war, as far as he could see. As the streetcar came in through the brick gates of the town, he passed through neighborhoods that seemed stripped of all energy and color—no children played in the wet streets. One house in three looked unoccupied, and the curtains in the rest were drawn. Inside, as darkness fell, Peter imagined cheerless, silent meals of turnips and cabbages—the men exhausted, the children with their lesson books, the women upstairs in their rooms.

  But Peter himself had nurtured a small hope since Staro Selo. Antonescu had no use for one-armed cripples. No one cared about the death of the baroness’s son. No one was looking for Peter Gross or Miranda, either.

  So how could he be unhappy, here, away from the front lines? And when he descended in the central square, he could see the streets were closed to carts and trucks and traffic, and the lamps were lit. Music spilled out of the doorways and across the slick cobblestones. Peter took shelter under a tin awning. He looked in through the diamond panes of some restaurant—Gypsy fiddlers and a woman dancing. Peter put his fingers to the glass, which throbbed to the music and the rhythmic stamp. In the shifting gap made by people’s backs, he could see the Gypsy dancing with her skirt low around her hips, her hand above her head.

  Yes, he had been grateful when General Antonescu plucked him from his regiment. He had been desperately grateful. But there was a price for everything and the price he’d paid was in this: a separation from his own experience and an introduction to a world of lies, of ordered principle and cause and effect, where men didn’t cough their lungs out as they squatted in muddy latrines beneath the thunder of the guns. Maybe everyone above the rank of company commander lived in that other world of organized assaults and counterassaults, which was why talking to them was so surreal and strange—shaking hands with the politicians and the colonels. Now he was here, some kind of damaged metal soldier with his steel hook, his Star of Hercules. He was to find his regimental barracks where tomorrow he’d meet with the reporters from civilian and military magazines. He’d wear a dress uniform. He would be photographed. He would speak to new recruits, conscripts from these mountain villages. People had told him what to say.

  How was it possible, in such circumstances, for him to recognize himself? Here was one way: In the bottom of his knapsack, in a crumpled pack of cigarettes, he had a wad of German reichmarks, which he would deliver to a certain address. This was a promise he had made to a dead man, a promise that made no more sense than anything else—a duty to a dead traitor or a dead spy. To be involved in any part of it, he supposed, was also an act of treachery.

  The glass throbbed and tingled under his fingertips. The big wooden street door of the public house was already open. But now a lighter door opened as well, a screen or a barricade of wood and canvas that kept in the heat. Three people came out and stood under the awning, adjusting their overcoats—a man and woman and a boy. Smells came out with them—sour beer, and sawdust, and wet wood. By then they were aware of him, and even though he snatched his hand from the window and wiped his face with his damp cuff, still he could imagine the story he must represent, the crippled soldier coming home—if only that were it! If only his or any story could be summarized like that, as if it were a photograph or an illustration in a magazine! They clustered around him now, although the child hung back. But the man had big, thick, heavy eyebrows and a wrinkled face and a big beard. He groped self-consciously for Peter’s left hand, gripped it in his big, hard palm, spoke to him in Hungarian, a language Peter barely knew. It didn’t matter. It was all right, they must be saying, welcome home. What did they know about it? Peter had a sudden vision of his father’s face, not the Count de Graz but the other one, alone in his house on White Oak Road.

  He pulled his hand away, turned away from the public house, continued through the town. In the Strada Castelului he found his barracks, where the celebration had already started.

  It wasn’t until four days later that he managed to break off a chunk of time. By then the first of the newspaper articles had already appeared in the local press, together with a printed portrait. Already he was famous in the town, which complicated things. He had met the mayor, and the councilors, and the tribal chiefs, and the priests of Pan and the various mountain cults, and the representatives of the trade guilds.

  But finally he was able to make excuses and slip away. He told the barracks commander he must visit some of the families of the men in Theta Company—men who’d died. The excuse was almost true, or true enough. He sent a message, and in the evening he found himself in among the streets surrounding the Piata Sfatului, a fashionable neighborhood of high, narrow houses with Baroque façades. He passed the mansion that had once belonged to Lucas Hirscher the vampire, then turned into a narrow, flagstoned lane where the houses were lower and older, built in the windowless Turkish style. Though the evening was mild, he wore an overcoat with cuffs long enough to cover his right arm. In the newspapers, many centimeters of ink had been wasted in descriptions of his hook, which had made him conspicuous around the town.

  There was a small, circular park at the bottom of a cul-de-sac, a ring of gravel and a circular wooden bench under a tree, a beech tree with bare limbs and splotchy silver bark. A man sat in the waning light, a newspaper on his lap. Some pigeons had come to him. For a moment Peter imagined sitting next to him, studying the birds with him, maybe feeding them with crumbs from his pockets. But instead he found the address Janus Adira had given him in Staro Selo, and after sunset he climbed three stone steps to knock at a wooden door. The knocker was tarnished brass in the shape of a horse’s head. The door was scarred and fissured, most recently painted black. The house was plain yellow stucco without any decoration or distinction, yet it maintained a solid dignity. The door was opened by a housekeeper in her apron and cap. Peter gave his name and rank, which had recently been confirmed.

  And when the housekeeper
returned, she led him back along a tiled corridor with closed doors on each side. The coarse plaster walls were painted yellow and dark green. There was no sound from the street, which was in any case a quiet one. But as they penetrated deeper into the house, Peter was aware of a soft music, a poignant simple melody played upon the pianoforte, and filtered through a series of closed doors. When the housekeeper led him into the receiving room, the sound broke off abruptly. The musician swiveled on her stool, then rose to her feet, a dark-skinned woman in her middle twenties, Peter guessed. Her dark, thick curls were loose around her shoulders, and she wore gold rings in her ears. Her clothes were stiff raw silk with the grain showing, a loose dress that was simple and unornamented, but which managed to suggest a kind of eastern exoticism, at least to Peter who stood speechless at the door. “Excuse me,” she said. “It is The White Tyger. The funeral march—I have the sheet music from a Russian publisher—a work of genius, don’t you think? And of course the composer, hounded to her death by this present government—she would never have led us into this war.”

  The housekeeper was gone. The woman came toward him, holding out her hand. “You must excuse me. I’m afraid I make no secret of my politics. We’ve had bad news. You’ve come about my brother, I suppose? I am Chloe Adira.”

  Her eyebrows were thick and black, her eyes lined with pencil. She had gold rings on her fingers, and her hand was cool. Peter stammered out his name, and she laughed. “I know—the famous Captain Gross. I have seen the posters in the market, though they do not do you justice. But I saw you were at Staro Selo—this is about my brother, isn’t it? We received the letter yesterday, and the telegram the same day—you must forgive me. This is a terrible shock. He was in the university—a gifted boy—man, I suppose I must call him now. He was taking his degree in political philosophy, something like that, I think. Only now—forgive me.”

  “Please.”

  Peter still had hold of her hand. “Oh, you have come about him! Did you see him in the hospital? Will you tell me? You must forgive me, my mother—”

  “Please.”

  “Will you come into the garden?” she asked. “Will you take supper with us? It is very simple, you understand.”

  The room was lit with candles in glass chimneys, or else in mirrored sconces on the wall. The walls were lined with painted portraits of men in uniform, women in long dresses. Chloe Adira’s voice now trembled and was silent, but Peter also felt a rush of emotion that closed his throat. And he still grasped at the fingers of her left hand until she extricated them, showed him her pale palm. “Follow me.”

  Chloe Adira led the way into the garden at the center of the house, a rectangular courtyard open to the sky. It was surrounded by a gallery whose slender columns supported ornate wooden balconies, carved screens and shutters on the second floor. All was dark up there, but a servant lit lanterns in the garden as Peter followed his hostess along the covered gallery. She was barefoot, he saw.

  It had been a long time, he thought, since he’d been alone anywhere with a woman his own age or what felt, at least, like his own age—how wonderful it was! Everything about her seemed important, every word or gesture full of meaning. He studied the fabric of her dress, which was slit in the back to revealed her bare calves. She stepped off the polished boards onto the grass that surrounded the tree in the middle of the courtyard, a tree with a bench under it. For a moment Peter was reminded of the pathetic old man with his unread newspaper, sitting in the little park outside the house. That tree seemed naked and exposed, this one intimate and protected. “You must come back in the summer when these pots are full of flowering plants and oranges—not since the war, of course. I want you to be comfortable. My husband was in Poland when Antonescu let the Russians through the Fedorivka Salient. I suppose he is a prisoner now. This was a great betrayal. Look, let me show you.”

  She turned and crossed her hands over her heart, then pulled a locket out of the top of her silk undershirt. She opened the clasp to show an officer from one of the Bessarabian regiments—they always wore a lot of braid. Peter took the locket into his hand, conscious of how near she stood, conscious also of a fragrance that hung about her like the promised orange trees; she was a beautiful woman, with dark eyes, beautiful lips and teeth. “Sometimes I imagine him like this, alone in a strange country. And I would be grateful to anyone who showed him any kindness, took him into her home.” She pulled the locket out of Peter’s hand, stepped back—“It breaks my heart to think of him. And now this news about my brother.”

  Tears were in her eyes. But she put out her hand, its pale palm toward him, pale fingers outstretched. “Captain Gross, where are your people? Where is your home?”

  “Satu Mare,” said Peter, thinking of White Oak Road. “But my mother has a house near Lake Herastrau, in Bucharest.”

  “So, scattered. And is she the last one? Did you have brothers?”

  Peter shrugged. He did not remember them. “My father was Prince Frederick’s man—”

  “So, a republican! They did not say so in the newspaper. I knew I could trust you, trust your face. Now you must tell me about Janus, I am strong enough. Here, sit here with me,” she said, bringing him to the bench under the tree. “The letter came, but it told us nothing. Only that he’d died in hospital in Staro Selo while on transfer from his regiment.…”

  She interrupted herself, then went on: “Satu Mare! But that’s not what it said in the newspaper. They said you were from Arcus, north of here.”

  Peter shook his head. “My father had a hunting cabin—”

  “No!” she said. “They did not say so. Your father was a farmer from the German villages. I read it. Now you must tell me, is the rest of it a lie? All those stories that make a woman’s heart beat. I read you had taken a trench during a counterattack, and held it with thirty-five men. My father was a soldier, too, and my husband.…”

  A glass lantern hung above them from the branch of the leafless tree. Her eyes were fierce in the lantern light. He found it mattered to him what she thought. How to explain? He remembered the noise above all, the noise and the smell, and the shouts of men whose names he knew—she rubbed her hands together in the chilly air. “How can I trust you? Why have you come here? You must not guess our secrets—”

  “Here.” He unbuttoned the brass buttons of his collar, and slid his fingers under his shirt. “I came to give you this, that’s all. I won’t stay.”

  For a moment as he said this, he caught a glimpse of Miranda’s face, as if superimposed onto the face in front of him. But then the pale, open palm came toward him in a fragile, wilting gesture that was different from the language of Miranda’s hands—she disappeared, as if Chloe Adira had moved her fingers through a breath of smoke.

  The servant, a big man with a big beard, had returned with a metal tray, which he set clumsily on a low table. “Dumitru has made tea,” said Chloe Adira. She gave Peter no more attention, while with trembling fingers she unsealed her brother’s envelope. She didn’t touch or count the banknotes. A faint expression of disgust passed over her, articulated in her eyebrows and her stiffening hands—then it was gone. She unfolded the pages of the letter, held them up to the light. For a moment her face was as still as a mask, and then it cracked apart and she was weeping, a shuddering sound that she tried to suppress and swallow down, which made it far more horrible—he leaned toward her and she put her palm up, holding him in place.

  By the time she got to the last page, she had recovered some composure. “You must excuse me,” she said. Peter sipped from a glass of sweet, Russian tea, watching her black eyeliner dissolve onto her cheeks. She raised a hand to her face, then frowned at her dark fingertips. “Please,” she said, and she was gone from the bench. She stepped onto the wooden gallery, ran into the house, while Peter wondered what to do.

  His glass was red with a motif of pointed arches etched in gold. Peter clasped his hand around it, warmed his fingers. He wondered if the old man in the hat was still sitting on his
bench outside; then his hostess returned. She had washed her face, washed all her makeup away, and Peter could see she’d had some kind of color on her mouth, cosmetic powder on her cheeks. She looked different now.

  Quiet and composed, she sat down next to him, her knees together. “He mentions you,” she said. “He vouches for you. Now you must tell me what you know.”

  Peter didn’t look at her. Instead he studied the etched glass in his hand. But he told her about finding Janus Adira in no-man’s-land the day before the push. He told her about bringing him over the trench and back behind the line, leaving him in a field beside a stone wall in a ruined orchard; he had a broken leg. Peter told her about the money. He mentioned the page of hieroglyphs. A list of ordnance, Andromeda had said. Was it possible the letter could be traced to Brasov, to this house?

  Maybe Chloe Adira wondered, too. “What became of that?” she asked, and Peter saw an anxious look pass over her face and disappear—everything was quick with her.

  “A friend took it, a civilian. I sent him for a stretcher-man before I went back.”