A Princess of Roumania Read online

  “Should we go back for the car?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s too late now.”

  For years he’d known Andromeda’s name, known where she lived—a big, square, modern house off Syndicate Road. But he’d never spoken to her before tonight. Now she walked beside him, breathing easily as they came up the steep part of the hill. She wore black bicycle pants and a gray T-shirt. She did not complain about the cold.

  He found himself catching sidelong glances of her when he thought she wasn’t looking. The sky was clear now, and it was remarkable how much you could see by moonlight. Andromeda’s skin was pale, dusted with liver-colored freckles. Her arms and legs were covered with fine white hair—he’d never been this close to her before. She reached up to push away a branch, releasing a spatter of wet drops. On the underside of her right wrist she had a long, white, hook-shaped scar.

  He’d always found her intimidating. She was an inch or so taller than he was. Her eyes were a cold color, almost silver when she turned toward him. Her voice was hoarse and soft. “I’m so pissed off—I’m sorry. But it’s good to get a chance to finally meet you.”

  What did she mean by this? She could have met him any time. Though he was a grade ahead of her, it wasn’t as if she’d never seen him. The town was too small for that. Once she’d stopped to watch him mow the lawn. She hadn’t said a word, or even waved.

  “Miranda told me about you,” she continued. “How you looked out for her when I was gone away.”

  Looked out for her? Is that what he’d done? She’d barely spoken to him for a month. Of course he hadn’t really expected that she would, after school started up. He’d learned not to expect much from girls, because of his arm. Sometimes just with one other person he could forget about it, and so could she. But that was always harder in a group.

  Peter hesitated. “Why do you think she called me today? She said she wanted to thank me for something I had done.”

  “You should ask her.”

  He had asked her. Then he’d asked again after he’d walked down to her house that night. But she’d been anxious, nervous about Andromeda’s car. And he’d had some hurt feelings that still had to be pushed out of the way. He wouldn’t have come at all except she’d sounded so upset.

  “Maybe she likes you,” murmured Andromeda.

  Above them masses of black leaves broke up the moonlight. Was she teasing him? He couldn’t tell. He knew better than to think she’d recognize him tomorrow, but just at that moment she seemed easy to get to know, and not just because they could talk about Miranda. Soon Andromeda had left that topic behind, and she was telling him about her plans to circumvent her mother’s anger about the car, about how she would appeal directly to her father, a philosophy professor who was living in Berkeley, California, with a woman half his age. She had a brother whom she rarely saw.

  “Why did your parents split up?” he found himself asking, a question that related, obscurely, to his own mother. And her answer related, obscurely, to himself. “I think I was a problem child,” Andromeda said. “Hell, I didn’t even talk till I was five.”

  There seemed nothing to say to this. Was she just boasting? At first Peter thought Miranda would wait for them at the gate in the wire fence. But when they got there she was gone. They stopped for a moment, then moved on through the deeper forest. He could smell the oak trees, and the black night was all around. Andromeda was walking close to him, sometimes letting her right arm brush against his left arm. It wasn’t his imagination. He could feel the soft white hair on her forearm, and sometimes their shoulders touched.

  They climbed along the spine of the hill. What was he doing here? What was he doing with these girls? He was going to read a book and go to bed—he hadn’t asked for this. It wasn’t just Andromeda—after tonight, he told himself, neither of them would speak to him again.

  He felt Andromeda’s shoulder against his shoulder, her hand against his hand. He knew enough not to respond. He pictured his mother lying back against her pillows, sick from lung cancer, though she hadn’t smoked for years. “Let us be true to one another,” she had murmured not even a year before.

  * * *

  MIRANDA WENT ON AHEAD. She knew she was behaving like an idiot. Not wanting to face Andromeda or hear her accusations, she hurried over the muddy, rutted road. The leather pack had a weight and a solidity she knew by heart, but at that moment she was embarrassed to be carrying it. The panic she had felt on losing it, she couldn’t reconstruct. The dream she’d had the night before had lost its urgency—what was it that the old woman said? That she’d recognize someone from her own country?

  When she got to the stone bench, she sat down to wait under the carved name of Gregor Splaa, who had taught Romance languages at the college before the Second World War. Once Stanley had mentioned that when they were walking up this way, and she’d remarked on the strange name.

  Expedite the inevitable, Stanley had told her more than once, which was why she was waiting here now. She didn’t worry about Peter, because it wasn’t as if she and Peter had done anything really wrong. Maybe they’d get detention or something, but Peter at least was used to that. Andromeda must be furious, though. She’d known the whole idea was stupid from the beginning. And she was right, thought Miranda miserably, and Stanley was right, and the stuff in her backpack was just stuff. All the rest was dreams and wish-fulfillment, and the scribbled note of someone’s aunt.

  When she saw the two dark figures coming up behind her, squeezed together as they tried to negotiate a pair of mud puddles, she sat forward on the stone bench. “I’m really sorry,” she said to Andromeda as she came up.

  And for a moment she thought Andromeda would stalk by without a word. In front of them, at right angles to the road, lay the path down through the woods toward the upper meadow and the art museum. There was a wooden gate through the barbed wire, and Andromeda had her hand on the gatepost before she turned back. “I’m glad you’re sorry,” she said, “because this is a fucking disaster. You know I’m supposed to be starting driver’s ed. Now I’ll have to wait till I’m sixteen, even if my mother ever lends me the car again, which I totally doubt.”

  She went on for a while more. Miranda had often heard this kind of rage turned on other people, and in a way that had felt good, as if Andromeda were protecting her by abusing others. Now it was as if she’d lost her special status. But she also knew that Andromeda sometimes said more than she meant, and it was good to let her blow off steam. Maybe she’d be over it by tomorrow, and she’d be able to admit that none of this was entirely Miranda’s fault.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Let’s…”

  But Andromeda was gone, striding away through the tall trees, and then she disappeared beneath them in the dark. Peter Gross came to sit beside her and put his hand on her wrist.

  “We did it,” he said—words which filled her with a sudden gratitude.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” he said. She looked up above their heads to where the canopy of trees gave out. Above her she could see the open sky, the clouds rushing past.

  “There’ll be some yelling,” he said. “There’s always a little bit of yelling.”

  She sat beside him with her backpack in her lap. She dug her hand down through the circle of leather laces that held it closed. She fumbled around until she found what she was looking for, an old pasteboard box from I. Manin’s jewelry store in Bucharest.

  She could recognize the box just by the feel of it. She opened it without looking, without taking it out of the pack. Inside were eleven very small gold coins, thin as paper, the faces and numbers on them almost worn away. She pinched one of the coins between her fingers.

  It had been her intention to bring it out into the open air, to press it into Peter’s palm, to reward him for his loyalty, especially after how she’d treated him for the past month. But what had her aunt said to her? Protect the book, protect these memories, which always could be stolen or given away. So after a while s
he closed the box and pushed it down again under the gray shawl into the bottom of the pack. Then she asked him about the dead animal she had found in the birch trees. “That’s why I didn’t call,” she said, which was only partly true. “I was a little afraid. But now I want to know, did you leave that there for me? Were you trying to say something?”

  He was close to her on the stone bench, and she turned toward him. “Were you giving me something from my country?”

  But she could tell he had no idea what she was talking about. If only she could remember her aunt’s words. But she couldn’t make them clear, because they had been spoken in Romanian.

  “I don’t go there very often,” Peter said. “It was my mother’s favorite place. So I wanted to show it to you, to see…”

  “What?”

  “Well, if you liked it too.”

  That was very sweet. Later when they walked down through the woods, she could feel he was walking too close to her. He kept on brushing up against her, bumping her with his shoulder. She believed him when he said he had nothing to do with the dead woodchuck, but instead of being relieved, now suddenly she resented him. And if he touched her with the stub of his arm, then she was sure she’d have to throw up. She moved away, walked faster, then slowed up again, because she didn’t want to go home. When they came out into the meadow, the moon was down behind the mountains and the gray clouds were drawing in.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  He touched her on the shoulder when she stopped, but she pulled away. “What is that?”

  There was something in front of them in the path. She found her flashlight and flicked it on, revealing something in the beam. A small animal, a monkey—it sat on its haunches in the middle of the path, hugging itself with long, naked arms.

  “Look,” she whispered.

  They stood without moving. The animal seemed to have no face until it twisted its head around. Then it opened two enormous lidless eyes. And maybe she would have been frightened except it was so small, so plainly terrified as soon as it saw them. It unwrapped itself and scuttled away out of the light, dragging its bottom along the grass.

  “A monkey,” Peter said. But its arms and back and shoulders were as hairless as a child’s. It couldn’t move very fast over the hummocks of the meadow. She could see it was wounded. There was a long red cut on its pale belly.

  “Let it alone,” Peter said. They stood and watched as it reached the shelter of the trees. “It’s somebody’s pet,” Peter said. “Or maybe it escaped out of some lab.”

  “We can’t just leave it.”

  But they did. They watched until it disappeared and they could no longer hear the rustle of dry leaves. She promised herself that she’d tell Stanley as soon as she got home. She was looking for something to think about, and so she pondered the animal until they reached the next small ridge. She held the picture of its small, scared face inside her mind until it disappeared again, driven out by what she saw down at the crest of the hill overlooking the art museum—a bonfire. Shadows moved around it.

  Several paths crisscrossed over the open field, which had been stirred into uneven hummocks by the hooves of cows. Now they climbed down through the pale rocks and solitary birch trees of the meadow. And they could see Andromeda below them, waiting among the milkweed and goldenrod, where the fire threw back long shadows of the trees. Miranda was relieved to see her, even if Andromeda had stopped to yell at her some more. She deserved it, so it was best to get it over with. Besides, Peter was beginning to make her uncomfortable, or else not Peter exactly, but the intimacy of walking together in the dark. Already she’d glanced forward to the time when he’d be saying good-bye to her in the yard of Stanley and Rachel’s house—surely he’d earned something from her, and she was grateful. What was she supposed to do, kiss him? But it would be nice to have Andromeda there, nicer still to be alone with her. Even now, if she wanted to go back and try to retrieve the car, Miranda would go with her. And it would be too much to ask Peter or allow him to come. He already had a long walk home from town.

  These thoughts moved quickly, and they kept her from seeing much beyond Andromeda’s pale shape, and the shifting ragged line where the light gave out among the goldenrod. Andromeda faced away from them, perched between a boulder and a birch tree, her long legs crossed. She was looking down the pasture, and it wasn’t until they had crept over to her and squatted down with her that Miranda recognized Kevin Markasev standing by a bonfire, fifty feet away.

  “There,” whispered Andromeda. “I told you he was cute.”

  He had his expensive clothes on, a soft shirt open at the neck, showing a silver chain. He hadn’t shaved. He wore baggy, pleated pants and leather boots. He was opening a bottle he had taken from a paper bag. Several empty bottles lay on the ground. A girl was with him. Miranda recognized her T-shirt, her baseball cap, her tattoos, but not her face, which was covered with pimples and red spots.

  “I could use a beer,” Andromeda said.

  She wasn’t looking at Miranda, and she didn’t seem so angry anymore. Or maybe, Miranda thought, it was just that her anger had gone cold. She couldn’t really be thinking of going down into the firelight. It would be easy to pass by without being seen.

  “No,” Miranda whispered. And of course Peter was standing back beyond the light’s reaching edge. But then Kevin Markasev raised his head, and looked up toward where they were squatting near the birch tree in the dark. He had a concentrated expression on his face, as if he were smiling and frowning at the same time. It was obvious he knew someone was watching. For all Miranda knew, he could see them clearly. He gave a friendly waggle to the bottle in his hand.

  “What’s the big deal?” Andromeda said. “It could be fun. Besides, my feet are freezing.”

  “It’s not a big deal. Only…”

  Only what? She didn’t really know. Only a sense of menace, left over from the night in the quad. And the way he behaved toward her in school, which could be a misunderstanding or could even be her problem. Miranda often felt her own anxieties dissolved or at least diluted in Andromeda’s self-confidence—that was part of why they were friends. Don’t be such a worrywart, Miranda told herself.

  But what about Peter? He wasn’t about to go down with them. And as if to emphasize that, Andromeda now leaned to her and said—loud enough for Peter to hear, loud enough maybe even for Kevin Markasev to hear, “Look at him. Which of these two guys would you rather spend your time with?”

  And before Miranda could respond, she stood up and walked downhill into the light. As she approached the fire, Miranda and Peter could hear the sound of her voice, but they couldn’t understand what she was saying. The girl in the baseball cap took a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her jeans, shook one out, and gave it to Andromeda. But Kevin Markasev wasn’t looking at her. He hadn’t stopped looking uphill.

  “Is that you, Peter?” he said in his soft accent. “Please join us. I am sorry. The shirt was…” He made an odd, dismissive sound, accompanied by a gesture of his left hand, as if he were throwing something away into the darkness.

  Peter was squatting behind Miranda and a little to one side. Now he stood up and stepped back behind the birch tree. But Kevin Markasev didn’t stop smiling. He turned his head, and Miranda could tell he’d shifted his attention to her. “Buna,” he said. “Ce faci?”

  It took a while for this to sink in. When it did, Miranda got up. She rubbed the wet knees of her jeans. The girl in the cap had put some more sticks on the fire and it had blazed up so the light was at Miranda’s feet.

  Markasev smiled and shook his head, as if to answer a question she had not yet asked. “Not far,” he said. “From Ukraine. But close. So, of course…”

  He repeated the gesture with his left hand, as if he were throwing something away. “Here, you see,” he continued. “Raki. Roumanian homemade beverage—not the best quality. Would you like?”

  “Oh,” she murmured to herself.

  For a moment she r
emembered her dream. What was it that her aunt had said? But then she put that aside and didn’t answer, cheered to see Andromeda by the fire, sitting now and talking with the girl in the cap, smoking a cigarette, holding her hand out.

  Kevin came a few steps toward her up the slope. “Te rog, esti invitatul meu,” he said—“No, you don’t speak? Forgive me.… My grandmother was from Constanta. Ah, you know?”

  “Come on,” she said to Peter, but he made a face. And that was too bad, because Kevin obviously wanted to be friends, and not just with her. Besides, what did she know about the fight? For all she knew, it had been Peter’s fault.

  When Markasev held a bottle out to her, she climbed down over the uneven grass. She examined the red Budweiser label as if it might contain some clue. She sniffed the top of the bottle and then took a sip of a bitter, fiery liquor that brought tears to her eyes.

  “Come, sit,” he said. She looked behind her and saw Peter beside the birch tree. He came a few steps down the hill so that the firelight touched his face.

  “Please, my friend,” said Kevin Markasev, gesturing with his left hand up the hill. “No, I am sorry. I apologize. These things are an understanding,” he said, smiling.

  But was he drunk? Miranda remembered the way he had spoken once in class, and it was not like this. “There, now, you see. Listen…” Now everything was expressed in single words and broken phrases. “Listen,” he repeated. “You know Constanta. Black Sea. Every summer. Train from Odessa.”

  These words were accompanied with many small sounds, grimaces, shrugs, and gestures. As long as she was looking at him, he was easy to understand. “We go fish,” he said. “Marsh, swamp, I think. Houseboats, painted colors, you know—red, green. Herons, storks, anchovies, all kinds, so many.”

  Andromeda sat cross-legged, smiling up at her. “This is Brenda,” she said, indicating the girl in the cap, who didn’t seem exactly friendly. When she smiled, the firelight glinted off the gold in her teeth. Miranda inspected the tattooed ring above her elbow as she squatted down beside Andromeda. She now identified it as a ring of numbers and unfamiliar letters. When the girl spoke, her accent was so thick that Miranda couldn’t understand, though she inferred some kind of greeting. Maybe that’s what the problem had been with Kevin Markasev, some kind of language barrier or cultural misunderstanding, none of which made any difference to Andromeda. Miranda felt a comfort to be near her, a warmth that was greater than the warmth of the fire, and which had dispelled all sense of danger as she watched Kevin Markasev. Or maybe there was still a little thrill of risk, but that was part of anything fun, as Andromeda had often reminded her. Certainly there was no real danger—they were three against two, and Peter had already beaten Markasev in a fight. But why was she even thinking about that? He seemed really nice. And she could see what Andromeda meant about his looks, his heavy eyebrows and dark eyes, his pale skin and the hint of a beard. And he’d been to Romania.