At a dead run he bursts from the library, manuscript in hand. His father shouts. The walls are failing. The moon has raised the foaming sea.
Out through the Paris room, the great hall, the foyer. Through the main doors and into the courtyard. He is scalded with rain. Dashes toward the gardens, ducks under the laurel arch.
Wagner grins, humming a deranged tune.
And then—howls. The dogs have escaped! They are ahead—no, behind in the courtyard. They will smell him.
He turns at bay between Handel and Chopin. Shadows lope among shadows.
“Faraz!”
God knows how long he’s starved them.
Anton dashes on, throaty barks following. Soon he is at the very heart of the gardens, where a shallow reflecting pool churns in the rain. The wet jaws snarl in a tightening circle. He jumps into the water, thrashes to the center of the pool. His mind races: he would hide his smell. He would crouch here, motionless upon this flat disk of porphyry, be taken for a statue, he would—
Anton would never know how Julita spent her coin of freedom. He was buried in the village of his birth, in a churchyard swept by the shadow of Tchavodari Palace: as close as he ever came to the structure, save for once as a child.
He would not learn how Julita walked over the Bicazului in a fury of snow, holding the hands of two boy cousins who would abandon her in Brasov for factory jobs; would never know that she carried not only Posnr’s child in her womb but eleven thousand dollars of his silver in burlap over her shoulder, between slabs of salt pork; how she caught the train from Brasov to Rijeka, Yugoslavia, crossed the Adriatic to Venice on an Italian steamer, sold the silver with perfect acumen to a dealer on the Ponte Rialto, and after a night of horrible dreams, caught the train to Paris where instinct told her, correctly, the doctor waited who would take the fetus from her womb.
Her brother never saw her skin browned by four years of sun, or the leaps that brought gasps of pleasure when she danced with the Ballet de l’Opéra. He also would not know how she fled violence again in January 1939, this time to New York, boarded a southbound train the same day, descended in Washington, danced with the National Conservatory, and married a lawyer.
Julita did not speak of Anton. In the lawyer’s extended family, the deceased brother was simply a figure connected to an incomprehensibly distant time of sadness—the small, cold place from which Julita came.
But one of this brood, the lawyer’s brother’s son, shook hands for the first time with Great-Aunt Julita at a Christmas party in 1986, and disturbed the old woman profoundly.
The boy was a recovering anorexic. Thin as a whittled stick. Shuddering in a warm room, like his great-uncle half a century earlier on the Black Sea coast. His laughter was forced.
Julita, past seventy, knew nothing about that branch of the family—a soft-spoken, old-money clutch from Virginia. They were consistent in attaching stabilized to every mention of the boy: he had a stabilized diet, stabilized moods, stabilized glands. But they were consistently wrong, and two weeks later he fell into a coma, with flooded lungs and a heart murmur: galloping pneumonia.
She had quite taken to him at Christmas, liked his aberrant bookishness, in a family replete with practical men who spoke of growth funds, golf tournaments, quarterbacks, tight ends. When it seemed he might die she came alone, sparrow-small behind the wheel of a huge green Buick.
The boy thought his waking was his own death. Above him was a wrinkled angel, smiling with infinite tenderness, shrunken until she seemed almost a girl. Her hands, spread beneath his pajama shirt, burned cold through his fever. She was drying his chest with a towel.
The boy’s parents slept on a couch, wretched and unwashed. Julita sat primly on the edge of the bed.
“Stay with us,” she said.
“I don’t remember you.”
“You will.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Pneumonia.”
“I dreamed I was a fish. Hooked.”
“But fighting?”
“Yes. Who are you? I don’t know you.”
He didn’t know any of them. But he sat up, stronger than he had been in weeks, and listened curiously as Julita told him who he was, and who she was. He drank some orange juice. And since his parents showed no sign of waking, she leaned very carefully on one elbow and told him the whole tale of Anton and the pig man, the little rabid dog that killed him, and the palace where his mind took refuge.
But the next day the boy suffered a relapse, and lay wheezing and muttering for three days. Julita was still there when he woke, but they were never alone, and uneasy in the crowded room, she kissed him goodbye and drove back to Maryland.