Coronets and Steel (18 page)

I finally got up and turned on the light. First I busied myself with removing Ruli’s favorite color from my nails. That was quickly done. Okay, what to do next? My little pile of books lay on the nightstand, the Dobreni dictionary on top with the paper on which I had been taking notes stuck between its leaves.

Dobreni.

The print blurred before my aching eyes. Bright images of the pictures on Gran’s night table, of Alec’s face, his words, his ring glinting in the starlight, all drifted through my mind in a montage of vivid images. Gone was the cool air-conditioning and the stars over the beautiful Dalmatian coast and the compelling light-toned voice in the Daimler’s darkness. I saw my grandmother’s face again on those long-ago days in our house in Santa Monica.

There were days when she would sit down silently at the piano and play and play, sometimes for hours. Her action had seemed unfathomable to me as a child but I had welcomed the interludes because they were an invitation to put on the dated full-skirted chiffon evening dress my mother had given me to play dress up with, and dance to the enchanting melodies of Brahms, Glazunov, Bach, Glinka, Britten. The entrancing glissades made me dance out stories, fantasies. Responding in childlike fashion to half-sensed emotions, I was driven by the joy and sorrow and yearning captured in the music that flowed through the sunny dancing dust-mote afternoons.

There were her distant-seeing blue eyes, the certain set to the small, firmly closed mouth. When mind-filling memory had threatened to brim over she had channeled it into those shimmering rivers of sound.

And what memories! I relived the first time she had played an arrangement of Mom’s favorite opera, Puccini’s
Madama Butterfly
. The aria “Un bel di” had so taken me I couldn’t move at first and stood by her side and stared down at her drifting hands—the sure fingers—

My breath caught sharply.
And on her left hand the glint of a plain gold wedding band.

I knew it! I knew it.

I opened my eyes, stood up and began methodically to stack my books, and then pack the suitcases. The puzzle pieces had dropped back into place, and I smiled again as calm settled through my system like snow on a burned field. I knew what I had to do.

Emilio knocked at my door at six, but his apologetic air disappeared when he saw me smiling and ready. We descended by a back staircase and took a taxi to a side street a few miles distant, where we stopped and shifted selves and baggage to a waiting Citroen.

Conversation was intermittent, but I persisted with extreme care, and ascertained to my considerable relief that Alec had left earlier for Vienna.

Nodding, smiling, I pronounced everything lovely, from the food at the restaurant we stopped at to the luxurious arrangements on board the ship that they had reserved a berth on. They had reserved places on three ships; I picked the next one leaving the dock. To Emilio, as he carried my bags of Ruli clothes aboard and deposited them securely in the stateroom, I chattered on about the glories of the Greek Isles.

I walked back out with him, shook hands and thanked him, and waved as he descended the gangplank.

As soon as he was out of sight I returned to the attractive stateroom, removed all the ID from the suitcases, then picked up the small overnight bag, which held all my own stuff, plus a couple of things closer to what I would normally wear.

The trains were easy to find, tickets easy to buy, and when darkness descended I tranquilly closed my eyes as the
klank-klank, lunk-lunk
soothed me to sleep: I had begun my pilgrimage to my grandmother’s homeland, to find out the truth.

T
WICE I HAD to change trains, the last being a small one with only three cars and that had to date back a hundred years. Apparently it ran once a week—less frequently in winter—but I lucked out with only a half-day’s wait.

As the train climbed slowly and steadily into the mountains, I thought about my grandmother. My mind ranged back in memory as the twisting tracks seemed to lead the train back through time: among the sudden, breathtaking views of rocky crags, dark and mysterious forest-cloaked valleys, and occasional mountain-hugging towns and villages were the few mundane signs of modern civilization. Several hours before we began the descent toward our last destination, someone pointed out the window across from me, exclaiming something in that language that sounded vaguely familiar.

I looked out at a mighty castle on a peak so high it was partially obscured by clouds. The three other people in that train car also stared up at that castle, which seemed partly medieval and partly Baroque. They talked quietly among themselves, then one grizzled old man shook his head slowly.

When the castle was obscured from view by a towering cliff, I turned my attention the other way, and was surprised by a spectacular view. Dobrenica was bordered by three chains of intersecting mountains that created a long valley roughly in the shape of a comma. The tail of the comma was a high plateau covered with ancient forest; the rounded part of the comma was a glacier-carved river valley whose winding banks were rich-soiled for farming. Summer seemed to find the land at its best. Everywhere were crops, long green grasses, and wildflowers of varieties I’d never seen before.

The weird giddiness came and went, leaving the even weirder sensation of having stepped back in time. No, that’s not quite it. It left me with an eerie sense that time is mutable.

When the train rolled at last into Riev, Dobrenica’s capital, I pressed my face eagerly to the window; a fair-sized town, mostly old slant-roofed buildings, lay on the gentle lower slope of a high mountain tucked into the northwestern corner of the kingdom.

An official dressed in a blue uniform with red piping down the side walked through the train, checking tickets. He’d passed me with a smile and a tip of his pillbox cap before I figured out that he represented the entirety of the Dobreni customs check.

Talk about a totally different interpretation of “homeland security,” I thought as I disembarked and eyeballed the scene. The transit vehicles available to take one from the station into the heart of the town were two ancient cars, their vintage about 1930, and a plain black sulky drawn by a huge, hairy-footed horse in blinders.

Some ten or twelve people got off altogether. All but one were promptly greeted by relatives and friends. The lone man heaved his bags straight into the nearest of the cars; a party of happy relatives took the other, so I turned to the sulky.

A black-haired man around my age leaned comfortably on the iron rail dividing off the station house, watching the people. He had a snub nose and squinting dark eyes, wore a Cossack-style belted tunic over loose trousers stuffed in boots. I was to discover this was the way most men dressed here. As soon as he saw my tentative approach, he straightened up and gave me a quaint bow.

I spoke one of the sentences in Dobreni that I’d prepared during the last hour of the ride: “Can you recommend a comfortable inn in the center of town?”

The man’s smile widened, and as he took my bag and tossed it up behind the seat he burst into a long, rapid speech punctuated by grand gestures. He ended with a question as he handed me up onto the seat, and I delivered my second sentence: “Please talk more slowly!”

He nodded four or five times, clucked to the horse, then said slowly and loudly, “Inn good . . . my mother [something] cousin—”

I plunged through the dictionary to track down the verb, but by the time I found it I’d lost the rest of his sentence. He smiled with goodwill, taking charge.

The ride through town was short, mostly uphill. I obtained swift impressions of tall stone houses, cobblestone streets with no traffic lights, and the weird sense of having stepped back in time was reinforced by the traffic, which was primarily pedestrian or horse-drawn. Here and there chugged old cars, mostly from the 1940s, their engines obviously much repaired.

The inn he brought me to was built on a corner where two streets joined and intersected another, the resulting triangle forming a courtyard fenced by beautifully tended rose trellises. The wide end of the triangle was formed by one wall of the inn, a three-storied building with a steep roof, green shutters, and flower boxes in all the lower windows.

The sulky stopped before the front door. A few people were out on the street, carrying baskets or pulling carts. One boy rode a rusty bicycle. Clothing from the entire range of the twentieth century seemed to be worn here, and no one paid any attention to it any more than they did the sulky pulling up behind a car that I think had been made in the 1950s; the few passersby seemed more interested in me than in the nineteenth-century mode of my travel.

The cab driver accepted my euros—though it took him a moment to calculate his fee in them—and I went inside, where I found a huge dining room with wooden furniture, white tablecloths embroidered with red flowers and blue birds in a pattern, brass fixtures behind the counter, everything scrupulously clean.

The sulky driver carried my bag inside, then knocked on the glass-paned door next to the counter. A short, sharp-featured woman approximately my mother’s age emerged, conducted a rapid exchange with the driver, who gave me a friendly wave and departed.

The innkeeper brought out an old-fashioned ledger, and as she did not ask for a credit card or my passport, I registered myself as
Kim Atelier—Paris, France.
She asked in bad French how long was I staying. I told her a week, she said something that I assumed was the price in local currency, then I found myself guided up to a small but cozily charming room looking out over the courtyard from leaded windows.

A tray of coffee appeared on the side table next to the high bed with its carved wood headboards, curtains, and brightly colored handmade quilt that would be worth a fortune at home. The only other furniture was a table next to the window, a straight-backed wooden chair next to the table, and a tall wardrobe set in a corner, the top half for hanging clothes, and the bottom half divided into two large drawers. Madam shooed me to the table to sit down and sip coffee while she tackled my bit of luggage.

My few clothes were soon hung neatly or folded away in the wardrobe. Madam Waleska was like a force of nature, impossible to stop. Such people have only to move through a chaotic room and order results, sometimes despite the wills of others in the whirlwind’s path.

Madam’s husband—

I’d better clue you in on Dobreni forms of address. I didn’t figure these out at once, but I’m going to throw in the explanation and get it out of the way.

Long-stratified Dobreni society has eight basic types of address. The aristocratic forms have close enough equivalents in English, which I’ll use and don’t need to describe.

The male head of a family is called either by his job title, or simply by his last name. The equivalent of Mister is Domnu, and their wives are Madam. They adopted the French Mademoiselle as a title of respect for unmarried ladies. The Dobreni have equivalents of Master and Miss for young people, and older, retired people are given the title of Grandfather or Grandmother, or Great-aunt and Great-uncle, which are all honorifics.

Finally there were the peculiar terms
salfmatta
and
salfpatra. Matta
and
patra
were
mother
and
father,
and
salf
the dictionary translated as
good
—though the word for
good
was altogether different.

But I’ll get to that later.

So. The innkeeper, Domnu Waleska, was a silent man who ran the restaurant. The three daughters helped out when they were around.

It was the youngest of these daughters whom Madam presented to me as I sipped the strong, thick coffee.

“My daughter, Theresa—she learns French and German in Gymnasium,” Madam said in slow and loud Dobreni, thrusting forward a shrinking girl of about fifteen who was clad in a severely practical and old-fashioned blouse and jumper that had to be a school uniform. She had thick dark hair worn in braids, a high forehead, and sharp features like her mother’s.

Theresa blushed awkwardly, and as her mother prodded her further into the room she murmured in soft, stilted and alarmingly archaic French, “Mademoiselle does not speak our language? I am to aid you as best I can. Please forgive the poorness of my diction—”

“But it’s good,” I said, speaking slowly. “Can you tell me where to exchange my euro bills for the local money?”

Theresa said, “There is the national bank on the Royal Square, but if you do not wish to exchange great sums, the post office will do. It is at the top of our street.”

Madam beamed in triumph as her daughter spoke, arms folded across the front of her white apron. After I thanked Theresa, Madam gave her daughter rapid instructions in her booming voice. Then nodded, almost a curtsey, and backed out of the room, shutting the door with a firm snap. I heard her heavy tread bustle back down the well-scrubbed and waxed floorboards toward the stairs.