The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  They spoke in French, which was discouraged in the palace and the city under the new government. The girl stood with her back to the wall; she wouldn’t look at him. Nor was she reassured by the condition of the room. Prochenko could see her nostrils flare. He looked down at the pages in his hand, each embossed with a small crown.

  Cher Monsieur, I am writing you because I don’t know where to turn, and there is no one I can trust. I am more alone than I have ever felt, even since poor Felix’s death, because Miranda has not improved, and she is worse than ever. You would not know it just to hear her speak a few words, or else dance across the floor. But a mother always knows, even a mother who has been remiss as I have been. It hurts me to say it. But is there any other explanation for the way these other women have turned against me and abandoned me? I thought I could trust them! But here we are in Bucharest, which is a city I cannot recognize. Sometimes I think I shall go mad. But I am sustained by my studies, and the hope that I might intervene. Come, and you will see what I intend! I think you only are in a state to understand me, and help us who depend on you for my late husband’s sake. These few words in haste. The bearer is “a friend.” Will you help us? C.

  Prochenko folded the note up again. How useless it would be to lose his life for this nonsense! If he were as stupid as Princess Clara, he’d crush the pages into a ball, toss them into a corner for the police to find; they’d be here soon enough. Instead he slid them into his trousers’ pocket, sat down on the mattress to pull on his boots.

  But then he paused. He looked at the lace hem of the woman’s plain-weave dress, embroidered in the Gypsy fashion. He looked at the woman’s boots, hooked up the side.

  “Go,” he said. “Don’t come here again. I won’t be here. I will use the name Bailey, Andromeda Bailey—it’s an English name. You can leave a letter at the post office in the Champs Elysées. Leave an invitation for the ball tomorrow night. Did you bring any money?”

  “No.”

  “What use are you? Is there another message? Something else to say to me?”

  He rose and stood in front of her. She was almost his height. She wouldn’t look at him. She shook her head. “I am the chambermaid on the second floor. My mistress is staying in the Augustine apartments in the west façade.”

  “And Mademoiselle Popescu?”

  She shrugged, and he lost patience. What was the point of her? “Go,” he said. “Take the back stairs, the back way to the alley across the yards. Do not stop or give your name. Poste restante in the Elysian Fields.”

  The woman shook her head. Her nose was too large for her face. “My father said only the Brancoveanus could bring peace to Great Roumania,” she said. “Otherwise it’s all smashed to pieces. Princess Clara, she’s so gentle with me. Not like the others—”

  “Damn you, child, go. If Bocu’s people find you here—”

  That silenced her. Her mouth flapped open. He’d walked away from her while she was speaking, had opened the wooden shutter, peered outside into the lane. Already there were three policemen in plain clothes, waiting where the lane met the larger street. He could tell them anywhere. The concierge must have sent for them.

  He had his balled-up shirt in his left hand, his balled-up jacket. And from the outside pocket he drew a pistol, a lion-mouth revolver from Abyssinia. He had bought it his first day in the city. Now he raised it up beside his cheek. The girl had taken too much time. He turned toward her, held up the gun. “Strip.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me. Do it now. God help me, do not make me hurt you. You had your chance.”

  Now he left the window, went to stand with his back to the door. He threw the jacket and the shirt onto the bed. “Put those on.”

  “Sir—”

  “By the balls of Dionysus, do as I say. Put these on, and go out the back way as I told you. Tuck up your hair under the hat.”

  While he spoke, he was pulling off his undershirt, unbuttoning his trousers, hopping on one leg as he drew them off. Horrified, the girl had turned her back, burst into tears. When he was naked, Prochenko stood behind her holding the gun where she could smell it. He helped her with the buttons down her back. He wanted all of it—the slip, the underdrawers, the boots and hose. “You want the Brancoveanus to return?” he asked, as gently as he could. “We have to make some sacrifices, you and me. We all have to surrender something to bring them home. You go tell the princess what you’ve done. She’ll give you a jewel from her finger, I don’t doubt.”

  Careful not to rip the cheap material, he drew the slip over her head, revealing her starved, spotted back. “Sir, if Bocu’s men catch me dressed as a man, they’ll—”

  “God!” he whispered close to her ear. “Don’t talk to me about it. The boots now—do as I say. No harm will come to you.”

  Furious because she was so modest and so slow, he tried to reassure her once again: “I’ll give you time. What you fear—it is a certainty for me, when they force me to prove what I am. Afterwards, when they have me in the station, do you think they’ll boast and say my skin was hot to the touch?”

  These words gave him an obscure pleasure. Savage with impatience, he shrugged the slip over his shoulders, his right hand with the gun held high. How he hated her little fluttering hands, her weak attempts to hide herself and hide her eyes at the same time. He snatched her dress away, thrust his damp trousers into her hands.

  Holding his clothes against her body, she turned away from him, collapsed against the wainscot and the bare boards of the floor. Humiliated beyond words, nevertheless she must have managed to catch a glimpse of him before the slip was down. “Oh,” she murmured, the tears streaming down her face. “Oh, you are a woman, sir.”

  Prochenko pulled back his lips to show his glistening teeth. But when the dress was on, the hose pulled up, and he was sitting on the bed fumbling with the long boots and their hooks and buttons, he was able to swallow down his anger, still his breathing, calm himself. There was no reason to hurry. The men in the lane were waiting for instructions.

  “Watch me from the window until you see them take me,” he said. “Then do as I told you.”

  There was no hurry. He had several minutes to smooth down his layers of underclothes, lace up his boots, prepare himself like a knight preparing for battle. When he was a child his nurse had told him bedtime stories of the longago and faraway, when the knights would take their oaths in their white shifts, kneeling before dawn in the Temple of Mars.

  He also had given his parole in the long-ago time. And this was no temple, but it would have to do. There was no mirror in the room, but he was confident when he stood up, when he arranged his yellow hair around his face, when he buttoned the white dress with the red embroidery, when he pulled on the white gloves, that he’d suffice. He would suffice in his purity and strength. And his clothes would be like armor, and they would protect him as he walked slowly down the stairs, along the corridor, as he pushed past the concierge and out into the street.

  And for a moment he remembered Elena Bibescu at the mausoleum when she tottered forward to her death. “Here,” he said to the girl. His voice was musical and light. “You see the safety clasp. I don’t need this.” He threw the revolver onto the bed.

  * * *

  EVERY VERSION OF the hidden world is different, personal. In her version, Andromeda prepared for battle. This was not at Faurei Castle where Miranda had lain down with Pieter de Graz, healed him in an upstairs room. Nor was it at Chiselet or the great river, where the Turks were towing their enormous engines toward the open water, their enormous round barges like turtles’ shells.

  There was an enemy closer to hand. There was no reason to look beyond the borders of Great Roumania. In the heart of the country, the seat of government had been founded on a swamp that had not been drained. A monster had come out of the mud, a monster named Beau-cul—Goldenass. His standards showed a man defecating in the slime. Safe in his fortress in the swamp, he made waterspouts, thunder, and fog. From th
e battlements he drove his legion of toadies and pigs, who had kidnapped Mademoiselle Popescu as she lay asleep and vulnerable after her long night. They had brought her in through the mud gates of the fortress.

  Only Andromeda remained to do battle with the monster. In the beginning of the afternoon, ambushed in her room, she sent the messenger away. “Go,” she said, and then she climbed down to the boggy ground. She had no weapon to defend herself, but only a suit of white armor that did not belong to her.

  “Miss, do you have papers, please? Here, sergeant, you won’t believe it. Look at this. It’s him all right.”

  How could she convince them otherwise? Without her armor, they would have shot her where she stood. But when she was in their power, and they had brought her to their hole, the white armor protected her by coming off. But it could not keep her from the knives and sticks of her attackers, who dragged her down into the mud and hurt her over and over before they let her go.

  * * *

  LATER, ACCORDING TO the metropolitan report, a dangerous fugitive named Sasha Andromedes shot at two policemen in the alley behind the Floreasca roominghouse. A man who answered his description—linen jacket, dark shirt, slouch hat, gray trousers, leather boots—had been seen running down the Calea Mosilor. Then there was nothing. The scoundrel vanished while the officers, confused by a false resemblance, belabored a false clue. He left no trace. In the morning there were new posters in the streets, advertising this new crime and doubling the reward.

  Lieutenant Prochenko, for this reason, did not change from his own disguise, the chambermaid’s virginal and embroidered dress. After his hours in the Mosilor substation, he staggered out into the last light of the day, looking for someplace to wash. He walked down to the public water trough in Tineretului, then spent the night in Belu Cemetery among the graves. One of the officers had given him some money, an insult he had not refused. With it he purchased a blanket, which was not enough to keep the chill away.

  The next day—not too early—he went to the post office in the Elysian Fields. He gave his name as Andromeda Bailey and received an envelope. There was the printed invitation to the Festival of Beauty that same night. There was a pack of greasy banknotes, no worthless lei, but real reichmarks. The princess had scrawled a few words on her visiting card. Under her initial, “Ana” had added her name—the chambermaid, he supposed.

  He took the money and he went to the women’s baths in the Calea Victoriei, in the basement of the Venus temple. There, finally, he stripped off the poor girl’s digusting clothes and underclothes. He spent many hours in the steam room with the towel wrapped around him. Then, dressed in a long bathrobe, he stalked up to the peristyle of the temple where the women had set up booths for manicures and pedicures. He spent his money at the shop inside the nave, buying new clothes for the masquerade. He had his hair arranged and styled. But he waved away the cosmeticians with their paints and powders, which were after all unnecessary; when they left him to inspect himself in the mirrors that adorned Venus’s altar, he knew he had accomplished what he could. Even in his present mood, which was dark and furious, he could see he had transcended beauty, overshot it entirely. The other women in the sanctuary stood back to let him pass, and he stood as if alone before the icon of the goddess as she is represented there—naked by the forest pool, surrounded by animals who have come to gaze. And there is nothing adoring or angelic about their little faces. The beasts are jealous, hostile, as if she’d stolen something that belonged to them and they were half inclined, if they could summon up the courage, to destroy her, rip her apart. Perhaps one has tried already. She stands on the corpse of a silver wolf, who has reached up its paw to scratch her, and cover—as if accidentally—her pubic hair.

  There is of course another reading of the old story. The goddess wears a wolf skin, and has removed it to wash herself in the reflective water. The painting, which still hangs there, is called The Goddess and the Wolf.

  Prochenko’s eyes were silver and blue, his hair yellow and streaked with silver, and he had silver freckles on his skin. He had not lost his winter pallor under the fine white hair that seemed to float above the exposed skin of his shoulders, the long muscles of his arms, and make them glow.

  He wore a tight, sleeveless gown made out of black and silver goat’s hair, brought at fabulous expense from the Russian province of Cashmere, a wool so long and fine it seemed to float around him, mix with his body hair in an effect that mimicked nakedness, at least from the waist up. He wore no jewelry of any kind, but an actual wolf skin, lined in raw red silk. And because many of the myths of Venus involved some species of transformation, and because many of the fashionable ladies of society had repaired to the temple to arrange themselves before the colonel’s ball, the shop in the portico had stocked an assortment of animal disguises, including a feathered wolf’s head that fitted over his cheeks and made his teeth seem sharp and white.

  * * *

  BUT IN THE hidden world, in the middle of the morning Andromeda regained consciousness. She lay curled up around her wounds in the sharp grass. She’d been awakened by the south wind, which speckled her with ash and dust, and brought her also the acrid smells of war, of burning cottages and bodies. The wind troubled her soft hair, fanned her awake; she rolled onto her back and yawned, sniffed at the rank air, stretched out her tongue as if to taste it. When the change came over her, it spread from her nose backward over her cheeks, her brow, her ears, leaving only her eyes the way they’d been. Her muzzle lengthened, and the stiff coarse hair spread back, covering the soft pale under-fur.

  She stretched, then yawned again. Along with the rags of clothes that had been left to her, she abandoned with her human shape all her contingencies and plans. All her memories and regrets—what a relief to leave them all behind! Stiff-legged, she crawled out from her refuge, then climbed down farther into the swamp itself, where the goldenass maintained his fortress.

  * * *

  IN THE PEOPLE’S Palace, Victor Bocu was preparing for his masquerade. Radu Luckacz helped him with his costume. “I feel invigorated,” Bocu said, examining himself in his dressing-room mirror. “I will enjoy the dancing. Do you want to know why?”

  “Yes, your excellency.”

  “When you say ‘yes, your excellency,’ I presume you mean ‘no, your excellency,’ and vice versa. I reverse the phrases in my mind. It is because I don’t care what you think. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, your excellency.”

  “I thought not. But I’ll tell you anyway. I will enjoy the dancing because I used to be a dancing instructor at one time, thirty years ago. I am quite sure everyone who knows this is now dead—you are the only one. So if I read it or any reference to it in the newspaper, I will know where the information came from. Have you discovered what happened to my previous valet?”

  “No, your excellency.”

  “I thought so. You still have the habits of a policeman, which is why I trust you in your important new job. I do not trust you, however, to help me with the right sleeve of my shirt,” said Bocu, carefully arranging the folds of red and black embroidered cloth. You understand why not.”

  “No, your excellency.”

  “I thought so.”

  Victor Bocu was in a rare mood. The air in his dressing room was perfumed with the smell of his unlit cigar, his untasted glass of schnapps.

  Radu Luckacz stood behind him. The old man was dressed in the palace livery. With a whiskbroom he brushed flecks of dandruff from his master’s shirt, then tied the bandit’s scarf over his close-cropped head. “I think you think you are being punished,” Bocu remarked, “because you were unfaithful. I think you think you deserve your punishment. Soon you will be dead, you think, and in the land of the dead you will throw yourself at Nicola Ceausescu’s feet, earn her forgiveness. Let me tell you,” he said. “The reason I rewrote the anti-conjuring laws is to prove to men like you what’s dead is dead. Here’s another part of it, in case you think I’m too kind. Is it better to ha
ve my enemies scattered in secret through the villages? Or here in Bucharest under my hand—because they are deluded, these old women, doesn’t mean they can’t make trouble. But I believe I’ve pulled the fangs of this white tyger!”

  Radu Luckacz stood behind his shoulder. Studying him in the mirror, Bocu guffawed. “It is absurd to think of Mademoiselle Popescu as any kind of tiger, after all. Or one can only hope. You, on the other hand, are very like a crow, I think—there is no suit of clothes you can’t make dingy. Every time I see you, you look thinner and more miserable.”

  “Your excellency,” croaked Luckacz, “we are talking about a dangerous criminal. I am convinced she murdered a policeman in Braila.…”

  The colonel sighed.

  * * *

  THE STREETS OF Bucharest were dark as Sasha Prochenko walked up the Calea Victoriei.

  It had rained while he was in the temple, and he stepped daintily through the mud. Beggars reached out their hands, Gypsy children came to the flaps of their canvas shelters, but he did not pause. He was faster on foot than the ladies who’d been with him in the Venus temple, stuck in their carriages and motorcars. A barouche had sunk to its axles at the corner of the Strada Eforiei, where a hole had opened up between the paving stones.

  But on this night, in celebration of the victory at Staro Selo and the return of the lost princesses, the lamps were all lit in the Palace of the People and in the piata outside, where the carriages pulled up along the Hasmonaean Gate, looted from the sack of Jerusalem six hundred years before.

  Prochenko had his invitation in his hand, but no one would have stopped him. Men and women pulled away from him to let him pass, then stared after him, muttering; he wore no cape or overcoat. And like any of the great predators of the forest, he was surrounded by a sphere of quiet that resolved itself in furious chattering when he had passed. Most of the guests had not yet donned their masks, which in any case were modest dominos on gilded sticks, and did not hide their faces. But Prochenko’s silver wolf mask was fringed with peacock feathers.