A Princess of Roumania Read online

  For a long time the bench seat in the cab had been wide enough for him to sleep with his head on his mother’s lap when they’d gone on family trips—up to Maine, or every summer down to North Carolina. Later his father had bolted a roof over the bed of the truck and made a nest for him back there. The sliding window between the bed and the cab was always open, and often he had lain awake listening to his parents’ slow talk. Sometimes late at night the gap between a question and an answer had been miles wide.

  Now he laid the stump of his arm outside the passenger’s side window. “I was trying to remember that part of ‘Dover Beach,’” he said. “About the ignorant armies.”

  His father raised his eyebrows. “This is relevant?”

  “Not really.”

  A drip of ice-cream had fallen onto his father’s shirt, onto the bulge of his belly. He picked it off with his broad thumbnail and then held his hand out to Ralph the cat, who licked at it enthusiastically.

  “Your mother used to teach you more on a Saturday afternoon than those clowns did all week,” he said.

  They finished their ice-cream cones sitting side by side. There was no rush. The truck was in the back of the lot, pointed into the woods, and for a moment Peter imagined they were driving someplace through the trees, the bushes reaching for the windshield. “Here’s what happened,” he said finally, “and I can’t explain it very well. I had a dream on Monday night. After I woke up, I could remember almost every part of it. There weren’t any of the crazy things that usually happen in dreams.”

  He paused, then went on. “It was winter, and I was standing in the snow next to the soccer field. And there was this new kid, Kevin, standing next to me. He’s from the Ukraine, and he’s living in a house on Woodlawn Drive. There’s a bunch of kids up there, and his mother, I guess. Anyway, I could feel the cold and see his breath when he talked. He was clapping his gloves together, stamping a circle in the snow with his boots. The snow was deep and smooth as if we’d been dropped there by a bird. He was telling me I had to do something for him. We argued for a while. Then he said something about my arm, and I woke up.”

  There wasn’t much room between Peter’s father’s belly and the steering wheel, but Ralph the cat had climbed up in there and was licking his fingers, held out for the purpose.

  Peter said, “The next day when I saw him in line, he came over to talk to me, which he never does. I tried to walk away and he grabbed hold of me. Then he said the same thing he had in the dream, the same thing about my arm. He’s got a foreign accent, and it’s a weird phrase, so I couldn’t be wrong. So then I—”

  “Yes, I know the rest,” said his father. “You punched him in the stomach and ripped a hole in his shirt, and when he was down you kicked him in the ribs, which I don’t like to hear. But let me ask you this. What did he say to you?”

  “You mean in the dream?”

  “I don’t care about the dream.”

  Peter shrugged, because he didn’t want to repeat what Markasev had said. The whole thing sounded stupid to him now. But his father would not be put off, would wait forever if he had to.

  “He called me a hurdy-gurdy boy.”

  Peter’s father pushed Ralph off his lap, then wiped his fingers on his red pocket handkerchief. For the first time he turned to look at his son. “Well, that’s not the worst I’ve ever heard,” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  Peter was looking out the windshield at the trees. “Here’s what I did,” his father said after a little while. “I paid for that kid’s shirt. We’ll figure out a schedule, and you can pay me back. You’ll go to school tomorrow. I’ll drive you in. We have a meeting in the office—no big deal.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He reached out to touch Peter’s hair, a brief and clumsy gesture he reserved for special occasions. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” he said after a moment. “You’ve had a lot to overcome. Your mother and I…”

  He still talked about her as if she were alive. He rubbed his nose, then started up the truck and backed it out into the lot. Peter knew what he was referring to, and it wasn’t just his arm. It wasn’t even his mother’s illness. But when he was about five, he’d stopped talking for some reason for about eight months. Obviously it had made a big impression. “The longest year of my life,” his mother had once said, though he wondered now if she would have included her last year, when she’d had to get all those transfusions, and those smelly sores were beginning to break out on her neck and shoulders.

  His father glanced at him as they turned onto Water Street. His eyes were fierce, though he was smiling. “That’s the end of it,” he said.

  But it wasn’t quite the end, Peter thought. It was fine to say you didn’t care about a dream, but there it was, as clear as something that had really happened. Kevin Markasev, standing in the snow, had asked him what Miranda kept in her leather pack. He had asked about the book, all kinds of specific details, and Peter had told him.

  There was another strange thing. Kevin Markasev was bigger than Peter, and he had two hands. But he had lain there and let Peter kick him in the side.

  3

  Miranda

  “YOU WON’T GUESS WHERE I found it,” said the baroness. “It was in the back of a jewelry shop in the Old Court. I was having some rings reset. I came early to pick them up, and I’m glad I did. I was poking around the back when I saw your painted locker and I recognized the seal. Your book was in a leather case inside. When I touched the binding, I could feel an ache in my teeth and my fingertips. It was like an electric shock.”

  “Really.”

  They spoke in French. “It must be hard for you to imagine your private documents for sale in a Gypsy’s shop. Particularly something as important as this. I condescended to bargain with the old woman, and was able to purchase it for almost nothing.”

  The baroness wasn’t doing herself justice. In the Gypsy’s shop she had pawned a platinum bracelet and a ruby ring, and would have pawned her husband’s signet ring as well, if the old woman had shown any interest, if she had not, in fact, spat in the corner and made the sign of the evil eye. The footlocker of papers had been on a rubbish heap to be discarded, and the baroness was lucky to have noticed it. She had cowed the old woman into giving it away, and when she thought how slim a chance that had been, she shuddered, a feeling again like an electric shock.

  Now she ran her gloved fingers along the cover of the book. “The essential history of the world. You know it’s quite remarkable how this was done. It’s like a magic box where the inside is larger than the outside. Or one of those decorated eggs, and when you peer in you can see a whole town.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Please don’t make a game. No one but you could have created such a thing.”

  The book lay between them on the rough, pine table. The Baroness Ceausescu sat shivering on a wooden stool while the princess served tea. She stood above the table in the single, cold room, pouring tea into white porcelain cups that she must have inherited from her mother, for they carried the mark of the Brancoveanu family, the same mark that the baroness had noticed on the leather trunk, half obscured under layers of dirt—a ring of gold letters, so small they could not be deciphered. But the porcelain cups were true imperial ware. How was it that they had not been sold? How had they survived the wreck?

  Nicola Ceausescu had every reason to hate this old woman, she told herself. Over the years, she told herself, her hate had turned to pity, because the woman had lost so much. But because what she called pity still had so much hate in it, she found she had forgotten about the woman’s self-possession, her dignity, or indeed any of her other qualities. Now she remembered. Even now, when she must have known the game was finished, Princess Aegypta was entirely calm.

  The baroness wore her greatcoat over her riding clothes, and she was still cold. But Aegypta Schenck von Schenck had only a white linen shirt tucked into leather hunting trousers. She had been walking along the snow-dusted path wi
th her shotgun broken over her arm, and the baroness had had to turn her horse to pass her again before she recognized her. She’d last seen her at one of the empress’s receptions years before, dressed in a purple Chinese jacket, surrounded by her court.

  Of all the Brancoveanu land she had inherited from her mother, there remained only these few acres of worthless forest. Only this thatched, one-room house in which the baroness sat shivering. Impatient, she had ordered her own men to bring in wood and build up the fire, now that the kettle had been taken off.

  It was a sign of the old woman’s condescension that she did not sit, that she poured the tea out like a servant. Angry and ashamed, the baroness pointed to the book again. “How dare you?” she said. “How dare you use my name? This foul animal, this pig,” she said, meaning Nicolae Ceausescu, the character in the book, the son of peasants, the leader of the Communist Party of Romania, who had murdered so many, destroyed so much out of his capricious vanity.

  At other times, reading, she had been flattered and amused. Now she was angry. She put her gloved hand on the cover of the book and flipped it open to where the ribbon lay—a description of the party conference of 1977, a drawing of the dictator’s disgusting face in which nevertheless she could see her own, though she was only thirty-four years old and a beautiful woman, as everybody said.

  Now she was angry, especially when she thought she saw in the woman’s eyes a hint of mockery. For a moment she imagined crushing the teacup in her hand or throwing it against the wall. Then she sat back, put it down. “This tea—do you have something stronger?”

  Aegypta Schenck turned to the shelf above the basin and pulled down a jug. Then from beside it she produced another beautiful object, a cut crystal goblet, decorated also with the ring of tiny letters.

  “It is raki,” she said, pouring out the colorless liquid.

  The fire was roaring in the cast-iron stove, and the baroness could feel its small warmth. She didn’t touch the glass. Instead she stood up, stripped off her glove, then carried the book to the middle of the cottage. She stepped over the rough-sawn, muddy planks. How astonishing to imagine the woman’s life here in this single room! There was the straw mattress where she slept under those blankets, those rolled-up sheepskins. Along the far wall were the bins of turnips and potatoes, and above them stood shelf after shelf of jars and cans. There on an overturned crate was an altar to her obscure Jewish god. Bunches of onions and garlic hung from hooks in the rafters—all the work, the baroness imagined, of Aegypta Schenck’s own hands. But there’d been a time when her brother had commanded armies. And on her mother’s side she was descended from Miranda Brancoveanu and the golden kings.

  “Well,” she said. “I thank you for returning it to me, though I fear it’s not as important as you think. If you were hoping for a reward…” She shrugged, then gestured around the room. “But if you’ve come to make amends, I’m glad of it, because what’s past is past. There were some other papers, too.…”

  The baroness suppressed a bark of irritated laughter. “Yes,” she said. “Forgive and forget. But tell me this—why is your world so much more terrifying than the real one? Why isn’t it a place of peace and understanding? Was all this necessary, just to make a place of refuge for your niece? These wars, these names and dates. These fantastical theories—Copernicus, Darwin, Freud. Look at this section on the United States.” Her fingers moved over a summary of the NASA space program, a description of the achievements of Apollo XI. “As if anything like this could come out of that wilderness.”

  The woman shrugged. The ugliness of her face, the coarseness of her skin gave her a kind of distinction, the baroness thought. Especially when contrasted with the beauty of her voice: “I had ninety scholars working for a decade. Those references to Ceausescu were not in the initial drafts.”

  She hesitated, then went on. “The project was not finished when the empress turned against me. At the end I was working by myself. Originally, of course, I had hoped to transform the world.”

  How smug she was! The baroness felt her hatred seeping back, her desire to wound. She opened the book to the last page and revealed the flyleaf, inscribed with the woman’s own handwriting. She held up the book, then read out loud. “‘By herself she will discover sadness…’”

  Carefully, she tore out the page, then crumpled it up. The stove had a small plate on top, which she pried off to reveal the fire. She dropped the sprig of paper and watched it burn. Suddenly she felt her heart was breaking as she imagined the woman’s pain. Or no—when she looked up, there was again the flicker of a smile.

  “You’ll never find her,” said the woman, a piece of bravado. The orphanage in Constanta had kept records, and the town in Massachusetts was a small one.

  “Alas,” the baroness murmured, and from elsewhere in the book she produced the battered photograph of Miranda Popescu.

  “You cannot hide an entire world,” she said.

  Then after a pause, “You must think I’m a fool. But you are the stupid one. Maybe I don’t have the resources you once had. Ninety scholars, but I can follow simple instructions. Yes, there were other papers in your trunk. Yes, I was able to decipher your pathetic code. There was a woman who told fortunes in your Bucharest. She gave lessons in the English language, and she had a shop. I spoke to her through my ouijah board. She answered through her ball of quartz. I gave her directions, sent her on a trip to Massachusetts—is that right? What an absurd name! She posted me this photograph; you see? It’s called a Polaroid. Color. The process doesn’t exist here.”

  She’d been examining the fire. Now she looked up, confident that the grief in Princess Aegypta’s eyes would be as much as she could bear. But there was nothing like that, only a false look of puzzlement. “You’re lying. Nothing can cross…”

  The woman caught herself, was silent. But the baroness finished the sentence: “… unless what? Unless the book is destroyed? You are wrong. I found a way.”

  She was torn now between her desire to boast, to pretend she was as great an alchemist as her dead husband, and her desire to hurt. As always, boasting was a pallid sensation, second best—“You led me by the hand. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  It wouldn’t matter if she told her. The two soldiers she’d brought with her knew no French; they spoke nothing but Roumanian. Besides, they’d been her husband’s men when he was with the army. Now they stood in the doorway, bored by what they did not understand.

  “I sent five spirit children from the prison at Cluj,” the baroness went on. “They were my—what’s the word? I read it in your book. They were my archetypes, and very crude. Then when I had read some more, I sent another one, a boy from my own house, whom I control more easily. Thewoman from Bucharest has kept them safe, though I haven’t told her what I plan to do. It would be cruel to ask her to conspire against her own existence. I’ve sent the five to hunt Prochenko and de Graz, though it’s been scarcely worth the trouble. They have not been—what shall I say?—effective guardians. Certainly they can’t protect her from the boy, who will accomplish what I want. He’ll get her book from her. Already he has put my mark on what you’ve made.”

  Placid and calm, the princess looked at her. She was standing by the cistern pump, one big hand on the enamel trough, supported in an iron frame. Nicola Ceausescu was by the little stove, leafing through the pages of the book—“I don’t understand,” the princess said. “If you’re not here to return my papers or sell them back, why are you here? I saw you looking at my teacups. Perhaps we can arrange a trade.”

  The baroness disliked questions that began with the word “why.” She was here because of a great impulse, a tingling in her body and her hands, a sadness marred only by a wisp of anger as she caught a glimpse, again, of Nicolae Ceausescu’s pudgy face, this time in a chapter about détente. The dictator was shaking hands with Richard Nixon; momentarily she closed her eyes, because she did not want to feel her sadness overwhelmed. Tears were on her cheeks. She lived in th
e heart’s chaotic realm, and this was not the moment to explain the obvious. Why should she trade these papers for a few pieces of china, when the girl in the Polaroid was worth millions of francs? Why should she deny herself a sensation of victory over an old enemy, who had never given her an instant’s consideration or politeness, even when the princess’s brother had been alive?

  She shut the book and held it up. “The world is in two places. One false and one real,” she said, dropping the book into the fire where it began to smoke. She picked up a pair of tongs. But before she could step back, Princess Aegypta had grabbed her shirt between the lapels of her coat, ripped it open with her coarse hands, thrown her to the floor.

  The baroness had chosen an awkward moment for her triumph. Her men were outside the door, bringing in more sticks from the woodpile, leaving her defenseless. Now they dropped their logs with a clatter and seized hold of the woman, dragged her back. “Neciopliti!”—idiots, the baroness snarled, then scrambled to her feet because the woman was loose again. She had twisted loose and now had put her hand into the flames and snatched out the burning book, which was spitting fire, blazing like a torch. She held it up, and the baroness scanned her ugly face, searching for a glimpse of real emotion, some real grief, and not this pretense of tranquility. She held her big nose high, and her lip was lifted in an expression of aristocratic disdain. Then when she couldn’t keep the book from burning her fingers, she let it drop to the raw wooden boards.

  “Take her outside!” the baroness commanded. “Please,” she continued as the soldiers looked at each other—she knew what they were thinking. This gray-haired lady had once been a champion of the poor, a patron of charity hospitals, and this was her own cottage, after all. Surely …

  “I don’t have to remind you,” she continued, “of her brother’s treachery.”

  This wasn’t much, was old news after all. Uncertain and ashamed, the soldiers wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Please,” she said again.