A Princess of Roumania Read online

  Then he turned back toward her. “Are we still going to be friends,” he asked, “after school starts?”

  She didn’t know, didn’t say anything. After a minute, he pointed with his forefinger to a spherical white stone about as big as a human skull. It was half submerged in moss.

  “My mother showed me that, years ago. What do you think?”

  Miranda knelt down to take a look. It was sort of a strange thing, and it did look very much like a skull carved out of stone. Even when she examined it closely, she wasn’t sure whether she was looking at an artifact or just a piece of rock.

  Either way it was a little creepy. She felt as if someone had touched her softly on the back. “Probably not,” Miranda thought suddenly in answer to his question. Already she’d been asking herself the same thing.

  That night she and Rachel had an argument. Rachel was a good cook, and she had made Miranda’s favorite summer food, fried chicken and a fruit salad. It had been ready at six-thirty, but Miranda didn’t get home until after eight.

  When Rachel was angry, her voice got soft. She was a thin, light, small-boned woman. “First,” she said, “I don’t want you to go out without sun block on your skin. Second, I already showed you that article. I want you home by six o’clock every evening and six-thirty on weekends. Were you with that boy?”

  Rachel had planned to eat outside at the picnic table in the backyard. But when it got dark, she and Stanley had moved the food indoors onto the kitchen table, without tasting any of it, apparently. That made Miranda angry, too, because it seemed like a reproach. “You don’t have to like him,” she said.

  During periods of calm, Miranda and Rachel led separate lives. But when things were tense between them, Miranda sometimes found herself confiding in her adoptive mother, telling her secrets in an angry rush. Now she ardently regretted having mentioned Peter Gross. She and Rachel stood on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Stanley was in the living room drinking a beer. “I just want to know what his intentions are,” Rachel said. “Do you know? You’re a pretty girl, and he’s older than you. I know he’s been in trouble with the police. I don’t want to forbid you from going where you want. I just want you to think about it—is that so terrible? I just want you to use some common sense. Those things of yours are valuable. I had them in my closet for a reason. You can’t just carry them around.”

  “I can do what I like with them,” Miranda said. “And I can choose my own friends. You might be too much of a snob to see it, but he’s a nice guy.”

  Rachel stood watching with her arms crossed over her chest. Then she turned away and stared out the window over the sink into the dark backyard. Miranda could see the reflection of her mother’s lips. Furious, she stamped upstairs into her room. And she was furious with herself. It seemed hollow and hypocritical to be defending Peter now, because she had almost decided to stop seeing him.

  * * *

  SHE WAS ON HER BED, lying on her stomach, leafing through the small, translucent pages of The Essential History, when Stanley knocked at the door and came in. The room was dark, but she had lit some candles. One burned on her headboard, one on the bedside table.

  They lived in the middle of town, in an old house Rachel had filled with antique furniture and art. Miranda’s room was on the third floor, set into a gable overlooking the backyard. The casement window was hooked back, and the candlelight trembled in the small current of air. Miranda’s rocking chair, oak armoire, and dresser all loomed with shadows. Every time his in-laws visited from Colorado, they took Rachel out shopping for some new, big, dusty piece of furniture.

  The light flickered on the varnished floor and wainscoting. Stanley sat down beside the high oak bedpost, and watched his daughter turn the pages of the book she couldn’t read. He watched her move her lips, sounding out the strange Romanian words.

  When she was little he had asked a friend to look at it, a bookseller and linguist who had been intrigued by the elegance of the binding, the beautiful small maps and portraits, the absence of any publisher’s or author’s name, any date or printer’s information. His friend imagined the book to have been handmade by some Romanian monarchist in exile or in hiding. The descriptions of Ceausescu’s government were full of bitterness. But otherwise the text was dry and full of facts. There was a good deal of rather basic natural history. There was a single section for every country in the world.

  He watched her for a moment. If she knew he was there, she gave no indication even when he reached out and laid his hand on the small of her back.

  As always when he looked at her—the straight, dark hair down her shoulders, kept out of her face by delicate, slightly protruding ears, his heart seemed stuffed with feelings that he couldn’t identify. Happiness, he thought, although it didn’t feel like happiness. Miranda lay on her stomach. One of her legs was bent at the knee, and one of her dirty, calloused, scratched, bare feet was poised near his shoulder. The other kicked at the summer quilt. Most of her toenail polish, an odd turquoise color, had scratched off.

  She closed the book on her pillow. Stanley followed her eyes, staring now at the carved headboard, the candle on its little shelf. “Tell me about Romania,” she said, which surprised him. It had been a long time since she’d shown any curiosity about that. Her voice was not unfriendly, he thought. But there was a softness in it that he couldn’t make out.

  “Your mother loves you very much,” he said, but then he stopped, corrected by the slap of his daughter’s foot against the quilt. He waited, and when the foot was quiet, he cleared his throat and told a version of the same story he had told her many times when she was little. Then he had tried to make it into a fairy story. But even then he’d ended up trying to describe truthfully what he’d felt when he’d seen her for the first time, standing in her metal crib, staring at him calmly out of her blue eyes in that ward of silent, disinfected children. She’d smiled and pointed at him with her tiny finger. He’d tried to describe the feelings and not the place, which had been horrifying. His little girl was gaunt, malnourished, and her head was shaved because of the lice.

  “You were my princess,” he’d said when she was young, and she’d put her arms around his neck and her cheek against his chest, curled up contentedly to listen. But as she got older she lost interest in Romania, except as an expression of discontent. Which was why, he supposed, she was bringing it up now.

  Now he told the literal truth as he remembered. He had no gift or power to invent. “We flew to Bucharest and thought we’d come right home, but then we had to spend a few weeks. The laws were changing, and here were people in the new government who didn’t like to see children adopted by foreigners, even from the orphanages, which at that time were very full. And Rachel thought it was important to see something of the country, though it was difficult. This was after the revolution against Ceausescu and his wife. They had been killed on Christmas day. But nothing changed, really, afterward. The people who came in were all Ceausescu’s men—the new president. There were demonstrations every day, people in the streets. Your mother and I had signed a contract to adopt a child in Bucharest, but that fell through at the last minute, we never found out why. But we were lucky, because then we flew to Constanta and found you.”

  “What was it like?”

  “We went during the fall, and it rained almost every day. The hotels were terrible and there wasn’t much to eat—just canned food, really. The countryside was beautiful, but in Bucharest, Ceausescu had knocked down most of the old neighborhoods. There were these terrible, gigantic, concrete buildings. But people said it was like Paris at one time.”

  None of this was what she wanted to hear, he thought. He waited for the sound of her whisper. He knew it would come. “What did they say about me?”

  He shrugged. “Not much. They called you Miranda, which was odd because it’s not really a Romanian name, as we found out. We asked about your family, but they couldn’t tell us. Your family name was Popescu, but you know, that’s like Smith
or Jones. They said it wasn’t necessarily your real name. We heard your parents had been involved in the Timisoara riots that December. But that’s the other side of the country, and no one said how you’d ended up where we found you.”

  “Did you see a castle in Romania?” And Miranda described it to him, the long parapet along the beach.

  “I think I saw a picture of something like that,” he said.

  “Where?”

  Stanley shrugged. “I think it’s famous. Queen Marie lived there before World War Two.”

  Still she hadn’t looked at him. She lay on her stomach, staring at the candle flame. “Your mother loves you,” he began, and stopped. Then, “I think things are better now in Romania. There’s a different government. We could go back if you wanted. We could take a trip maybe next summer. Would you like that?”

  She curled around on the bed and stared at him. She drew her hair out of her face and back behind her ear. He imagined she was trying to see if he was serious. Then she grabbed hold of his hand, so hard it almost hurt him.

  “Expedite the inevitable,” she said, which puzzled him, although he recognized the phrase with joy. It had been one of his father’s maxims, and he had passed it on to her.

  “Expedite the inevitable.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m happy here.”

  He felt something sharp inside his heart. “Your mother was worried, that’s all. She wasn’t trying to punish you. But she knows that boy has been suspected of breaking into college buildings.”

  Miranda held her hand up, spread her fingers. “What about my things?” she asked.

  Deflected for a moment, Stanley paused. Then: “Well, that’s a little peculiar. They were all things that were left with you by whoever it was, inside the pockets of a child’s coat. One of the nurses gave it to us after we signed the papers, wadded up inside some paper bags. No, it was the next day—she came running up when we were standing on the steps of the hotel. Either she was extremely honest, or else she’d never really looked at what was there. Most of it we didn’t even discover until we were back home. I’m sure they never would have let them out of the country if they’d known. The bracelet and the coins were sewn into the lining. The crucifix was wrapped in newspaper in an inside pocket. Besides the book, that was the only thing she actually showed us. She said it had belonged to your mother.”

  In a moment Miranda had twisted off the bed and gone to the armoire next to the open window. It was full of clothes she never wore, presents from Rachel’s parents, “girl clothes,” as she disdainfully called them. But the coat was there, made of a dark green wool that Stanley associated with Austria. Its black velvet collar was threadbare and worn. Miranda sat cross-legged on her bed, smelling the old cloth and then searching the torn lining, as if there might be something else they’d never found, a letter or a key. The coat was for a child perhaps eight years old.

  She ran her thumb along the inside of the lapel and found the pocket hidden underneath a flap of cloth. The cross was there, a tiny piece of ancient-looking steel, hanging from a steel chain.

  Miranda slipped the chain over her neck. “You never asked her anything about my mother?’

  “We were too surprised. To tell the truth, we didn’t really recognize her from the orphanage. She spoke pretty good English, and I remember her green eyes. We didn’t get her name.”

  Now Miranda sat holding the cloth up to her nose again, as if trying to inhale whatever small trace of Romania still was there. “A mystery,” she whispered.

  Stanley smiled. “A mystery. Later we wrote a letter to the orphanage but we didn’t get an answer.”

  To tell the truth, he thought but didn’t say, Rachel hadn’t wanted to know too much. Maybe that had been a mistake. “Next summer we could go,” he now repeated, though he imagined Rachel might forbid it.

  Miranda sat for a while with the coat in her lap, then picked up the book again. “I don’t remember any of the rest,” she said. “But I remember this. A woman gave this book to me. She pressed it into my hands. She was dressed in red furs, fox furs or something. I could see one of the heads hanging down. She had dark red lipstick and jeweled earrings. She stood on the platform, and I was on the carriage steps. It was after dark, and I could see the lines of evergreens along the track. There was a lamppost, and the light was shining on a circle of snow. Snow fell on my face. The man on the platform blew a whistle, and my aunt pressed this book into my hands as the train started to move. She told me to keep it safe until I heard from her. She’d send a messenger.”

  “Darling, you were three years old,” said Stanley. In fact, they hadn’t known how old she was. It had been the doctors and the dentists here who’d told them that.

  “You were three years old,” he repeated. “Darling, don’t you see how the mind plays tricks?”

  Once when she was ten, before she lost interest, she’d marched up to Weston Hall and asked Marc Pedraza to translate not the book itself, but a penciled inscription on the title page. She’d come back very excited. The old man had printed it out for her on the back of a file card, which was still stuck in the book.

  He reached for the card and she allowed him to turn over the pages till it showed. And he read over her shoulder the old professor’s patient, trembling letters, so different from the minuscule original:

  Dearest M. A hurried note to tell you once again to carry this with you and keep it safe. You know when the time will come to give it up. I’m sorry for so much. I promised your mother to provide you with a mother’s love, but it’s a pale version. A house on the seashore. A room in a stone tower for the white tyger! Maybe some day you will understand my difficulties, and maybe when you learn to read these words, it will be a sign you have prepared yourself. Now my enemies can hurt me, and not just the pig but many others. I must break and run or they will find you. It bruises my heart to leave you with this book and nothing else, just a third class ticket to Constanta as if you were a servant. De Graz and Prochenko will be with you, and you will trust them because they were your father’s men. Rodica the Gypsy will meet you at the station. If I’ve been too worried and oppressed to show the love I have for you, still God knows that everything I’ve done has been for you and Great Roumania. God knows also I will miss you every day. And if God never grants me the sight of your face again, know your happiness and safety are the last concerns of your devoted aunt.

  After a moment he went on. “It’s hard to think that message is not for you, because of that stupid ‘M.’ It’s interesting, actually, how the mind grabs at things and makes them into memories. The train, the aunt, the fancy clothes—it’s all there, and then you’ve made a picture of the rest. Believe me, when you go back, you’ll find Romania is not like this.”

  Her face was tear-stained when she looked up. “But if it’s not for me, what does it mean?”

  He shrugged, hating for a moment the sound of his own reasonable voice. “I guess it’s just a mystery. Your mother and I had an argument about whether to show you any of this, or just to sell it and pay for college. In a way I wish we had. If nothing had remained it would be easier. Just this meaningless treasure, it’s a little cruel.”

  * * *

  THIS WAS A RATIONAL EXPLANATION. But it was not true. In all time and space there were only two copies of The Essential History. One was in Miranda’s hands that night, and the other was in the attic of a house on Saltpetre Street in Bucharest. These two copies were not identical. In Miranda’s book the frontispiece portrait was of King Carol I, reproduced from an official photograph of that monarch taken in 1881, the year of his coronation.

  But in Saltpetre Street that name and date meant nothing. On the title page there was no scribbled note. The engraved portrait showed the malleable and sour features of Valeria IX, empress of Roumania, which in those days stretched from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, from Hungary to Macedonia. Under the engraving was a line of text, missing from Miranda’s book: The author hopes this squalid and pedantic fant
asy will slip beneath your notice. But there was no author’s name.

  Saltpetre Street was in the southwest quadrant near the Elysian Fields and the Field of Mars. In those days Bucharest was called the sapphire city, because of the distinctive blue-tiled onion domes of its thousand temples to the old gods. It bore no resemblance to the place Stanley remembered, Nicolae Ceausescu’s gray and mediocre capital, which was also described in many sections of The Essential History. These sections were of particular interest to the baroness when, standing in a Gypsy’s pawnshop, rummaging through a painted leather footlocker, she’d first discovered the strange book.

  Later she’d had Jean-Baptiste go fetch the entire trunk and drag it home. Inside there were other interesting papers, but this book was the most interesting, she decided as she sat perusing it in an armchair in her husband’s attic laboratory. There were no windows, but the lamplight caught at her husband’s signet ring, engraved with the symbol of his family, the red pig of Cluj. It looked out of place on her bitten and stained forefinger, which she ran rapidly over the onionskin. Fascinated, she read about the modern history of Romania: the alliance with Nazi Germany, Antonescu’s dictatorship. Fascinated, she followed the invasion of the Soviet Army, the Communist victory, and finally Ceausescu’s despotic reign.

  Such a tangle of inventions, she thought, and for what? She glanced at other sections too, especially the descriptions of North America. Then she was leafing back and forth until she found on the rear flyleaf of the book a penciled notation in impossibly small handwriting, which she recognized.

  In Miranda’s copy the page was blank. What would she have felt had she been able to read these words, in a language she didn’t know, under the baroness’s impatient forefinger?

  You will deliver her to the Constanta orphanage. Follow the directions I have already given you. Americans will find her, will take her from that place. They will bring her to a town in Massachusetts, which is far from here. They will protect her from violence and give her everything they can. It will not be enough. The book she has cannot be taken from her. She must give it up. By herself she will discover sadness and it will not break her heart, I swear.