The Days of the King (12 page)

 

And not only did she have small and slender wrists, she had feet and ankles to match. Examining her boots, Joseph marveled at their unnatural smallness; they looked like doll's footwear. What remained mysterious to him above all was how Elena Duković managed to keep her balance and how she managed to tread so smoothly, as if floating. Her steps, whether she walked at leisure or in a hurry, resembled in his imagination the flight of a bird. And that gliding, as insecure as any flight, demanded to be guarded, like her small hands and slender wrists, as fragile and brittle as glass. In their frequent walks, inhaling her perfume, gazing upon her profile, feeling her discreet touches, he refrained from many things and was careful, very careful, that this woman in the unusual situation of taking treatment for a nonexistent malady should not stumble against the many rocks on the streets of Bucuresci, that she should not slip in the mud of the gutters, that she should not be bitten by the dogs or twist her ankle on any curb, stair, or pothole. The good Lord saw to it that she did not twist her ankle.

 

To them the summer seemed short and not at all sultry, even though the relentless heat melted men and withered hapless animals alive. The fury of the sun paled before the ardor of their hearts: they perspired, they grew faint, their faces were flushed, but they ascribed their frissons and fevers to the fire of love. After her employers had set off for Belgrade, drawn like moths to the flickering crown, Elena had left the estate at Hereşti and settled into a poky room off the courtyard of the palace owned by grandees of the Nikolić family of Rudna, in
the Udricani quarter of Bucharest, where the rumbling of the carriages, the whinnying of the horses, and the cries of the millet-beer hawkers were incessant. The way from there to the surgery of the German doctor who was endeavoring to heal her gums was not long, and so, twice a week, with the baron's permission, she would inform the baron's overseer that she was going out for a few hours, on foot, in order to be treated for her ailment. In that room with its waxed floors and Anatolian carpet, with its chair by the window, a chair with a single, central leg and a reclining back (upholstered in navy blue velvet), next to the display cabinet with its host of potions, powders, and surgical instruments, next to the anatomical charts hanging on the walls, they sought and slowly discovered each other, but not completely, for they both knew (or at least had an inkling of) the meaning of propriety and esteem. During so many conversations, in the pauses between words, silences, and illusions, the skirts of Miss Duković were never lifted all the way, each visit they ascended a further one or two inches, in the latter part of July they had reached a little above the knee, then, at the beginning of August, halfway up the thigh, and finally, when the calendars were preparing to usher in the month of September, a mere palm's width higher, sufficient for the quivering, milky white skin—velvety as not even velvet can be—to be caressed. And it was caressed, at leisure, lightly, with the tips of the fingers, with the fingers entire, with the forehead, with the nose, with the chin. Sometimes, suspended in the fluid of time, while the tweezers, chisels, needles, spatulas, pipettes, and forceps coyly kept watch, their mouths seemed inseparable, and their tongues writhed together, coiling and ravenous. One Wednesday, just as the noise of Lipscani was coming to a boil, it happened that the hem of her skirt remained in its proper place at her ankles, and
instead it was her bodice, fastened with small green buttons, that yielded. Thin and pale, with his chestnut hair and hazel eyes, with his inscrutable (fortunate and sorrowful, Berlinese and Balkanic, joyful and agonizing) histories, Joseph Strauss buried his face in the breast of Elena Duković and wept. He was not pushed away, neither when he unfastened the sixteen buttons nor when he let the cloth and the lace glide down naked shoulders, nor when he suddenly laughed, as though in his soul there were not enough room for all the things that had accumulated therein. His tears moistened her breasts, they mingled with droplets of perspiration and trickled down to her belly, they ran around her navel and flowed ever lower, and Elena clasped his neck in her arms and squeezed him tightly, as tightly as she could, until they lost count of the moments and one of her nipples, who knows which, found its way between his lips. And that nipple, like a ripe bramble, somehow bulged and, in time, began to throb and to breathe like a swallow's chick. Thinking of soaring and of flight, Joseph removed one of her sandals, the right, kissed the pink foot and nibbled the big toe, which quivered and tried to touch the firmament of his palate. The young woman slipped her hands under her dress, seeking to disencumber herself of her garters, of her white linen undergarments, her slip, her silk stockings, all that was underneath. Herr Strauss, the dentist, even if he did not at that moment regard himself as a German or a doctor, clasped her hands and prevented her. Without his head intruding beneath the pleats of her dress, but rather from above, he kissed the small hollow between her thighs, firmly, where the hair must have been as black as her tresses, curlier and sparser. Then he lifted her from the blue velvet of the upholstered chair, and while Elena kept her eyes shut and her teeth clenched, he bore her in his arms, making a circuit of the room, rocking her and whispering to her a host of things, as though to a child with a fever.

Although they had never ascended to the first floor of his redbrick house, Joseph decided one morning, while draining a cup of tea, that it was, at last, time for his two loves to meet. And so he carried downstairs the wicker basket, very early, before any bleary-eyed tradesmen could knock at the door of his surgery, their jaws swollen and teeth doused in alcohol. Entering after lunch, Miss Duković, who was wearing a beige hat and had just folded her parasol, came across a sleeping tomcat with one white ear, one black, lolling on the dentist's chair. It was as though he, too, were waiting to be rid of aching gums. The tomcat's eyes blinked open, and, moving only the tip of his tail, he regarded her at length, as if she were a fairy from his feline dreams.

In all their walks through blazing Bucharest, they never ceased telling each other the stories of their lives. Since the overseer of the houses of Theodore Nikolić of Rudna was negligent as to the comings and goings of the nanny, being more concerned with carafes of red wine, with keeping the woodpile full, with sleeping, with repairing the drainpipes and window shutters, with the haunches of the kitchen women, with the grooming of the stallions in the stables, and with how the dice fell when he played backgammon or shot craps for handsome sums, Elena often found reasons to go out, concocting more lies in these weeks than she had uttered in the past ten years put together. Totting up her fabrications, one afternoon Herr Strauss deduced her age, for he had never ventured to ask her. At the age of thirty-two (and a half), he felt old, but that thought quickly evaporated. Their meetings took place in secret, at none too customary hours, and they had to find deserted, hidden-away areas of the city, where they would
not bump into any acquaintances of the baron or his servants. At least at first, in July, Joseph racked his brains in search of spots where they might meet each other or winding lanes along which they might walk. And so it was that for three whole weeks Miss Duković adored the brioche and poppy-seed cakes of Peter Bykow, crossing the threshold of his shop almost daily after lunch, when the canicular heat was at its height. She would buy two of each, and with the parcel in her hands, always looking at the floorboards and not the baker's face, she would enter the back room through an annoyingly squeaky door. There, where everything was white with flour dust, sitting on a clean checked blanket laid over a heap of sacks, she would await the dentist, the healer of her heart, if not her gums. She did not permit herself to remain within for more than a quarter of an hour, but in that brief segment of time, as tart as a slice of strudel, they would grow dizzy. It was also then, around the middle of the month, that they profited from the feast of Saint Elijah and took shelter in the courtyard of the Stavropoleos Church Inn, sitting on some peeled logs, and she stuffed his head with the virtues, travails, and good deeds of the prophet, also describing to him a few Serbian customs, especially those linked to plum brandy and beekeeping. As women had no business at a barber's, they were unable to enjoy the immediate help of Otto Huer, but they received the gift of his most cunning ideas. The barber, compassionate toward the amours of moggies and dear human friends alike, remembered that he knew Vasile, the warden of Colţei Tower, an eternally jolly fat man with nine children. And so, thanks to his lather brush, razor, and scissors, to his prattle during the moments when the cheeks of the warden were thickening with foam and the bristles were vanishing between the thin, narrow blade, the two lovers were able
to climb to the top of the tallest structure in the city. They were not interested in spotting far-off fires and they did not think of the tower's builders (Swedish soldiers from the army of Karl XII, roaming the East after the defeat at Poltava). They counted the steps, one hundred and eighty-eight, they had no idea that there had been two hundred and fourteen (until the devastating earthquake of October 1802, which had lopped off the building's peak), they gazed into the distance, astonished and embracing, silent, perspiring for all too many reasons: the stifling heat, the spiral ascent, the joy, the insatiability, and also affection for the hundreds of swallows that had made their nests beneath the eaves. From high above, Bucharest revealed itself as they could never have imagined it. The clouds of dust that followed the carts and carriages looked like minuscule flecks, the roofs and chimneys awaited the rain and the cold, the spires of the churches and the belfries no longer scraped the sky, the waters of the Dîmbovitza gleamed brightly and those of the Bucureştioara dully, the palace of the prince, from which Carol I was absent (driven away by the sweltering heat, by affairs of state, and by boredom), was no more majestic than the boyar houses, the vacant lots looked brownish red and the clusters of woodland a dusty green, the color of olives immersed in brine, the hospital, the school, and the monastery at the base of the tower seemed stunted, one hundred and fifty thousand souls were at their feet, each living by his own law and all by the laws of the prince and the United Principalities, eating or dozing (because it was that time of day), breathing and sweating. Joseph, who knew that he was not in midair but for all that believed that he was flying, withdrew his hand from hers and sought something in the pocket of his waistcoat. He pulled out a gilded watch on a chain, and on the back of its lid two names were engraved,
Gertrude
and
Irma.
And, in accordance with their good habit of telling the stories of their lives, not in chronological order but all in a jumble, he began to describe to Miss Duković something he had described to no other: how his mother and sister had perished, consumed in a fire. First he told her about a poisonous mushroom,
Amanita muscaria,
red with white pimples, which the people beneath their eyes, in the city stretched below, called snake's hat or snake mushroom, and some called
Fliegenpilz,
about how it could be dried and powdered, about the enchanted powers of the tea prepared from the fine dust, somewhat like the gifts of opium, but more seductive and restful, about the longing that those who tasted the brew would have to drink it once more, about their desire no longer to know about anything or anyone, about their flight from the world, about the serenity and acceptance that could be read on their faces, about their vast indifference. Absorbed by this treacherous tea, which he himself, a young lad fascinated by the glass vials and miracles of the laboratory, had on a number of occasions prepared for them, his mother and sister had slowly grown distant from their fellow men, they had set out along the road of stars and beatitude, one evening of blustering wind they had forgotten about the kettle on the hob, leaving it to buckle and burst into flame, afterward (perhaps) applauding the flames, (perhaps) blowing on them, allowing them to overwhelm the curtains, carpets, furniture, thick-beamed walls, and (perhaps) even their bodies. He felt a dreadful pain in his chest, it was suffocating him, but he managed to swallow some of the scorching afternoon air when Elena did not try to discover the recipe for the tea, but simply embraced him, tightly. Somewhere toward the horizon, hazy outlines could be made out, and the dentist leaned his elbows on the balustrade under the shingle roof. He examined them for a long time, then gave a start, on realizing that they were the Carpathians.

Slowly he and Elena descended the rickety, winding steps, careful not to scrape the ceiling with the crowns of their heads or bump against the doorjambs. Below, in the arched passageway of the tower, where not only ordinary folk but even circus stilt-walkers would have had ample headroom, they straightened their backs and smiled. Joseph was thinking of the fat Vasile, always huffing and puffing up the minaret-like stair, and Elena Duković was not thinking of anything, she merely felt like smiling. Soon enough, however, they remembered the insufferable face of the overseer, their sole enemy. At a quarter past three, Dušan, the Nikolić family's trusty man, would certainly be snoring in a cellar of the Udricani quarter, taking his siesta on a straw mattress, but his eyes saw through those of others and his ears heard many things. As ever, Herr Strauss set off first, the nanny following him twenty paces behind, so that it would never occur to anyone that they were walking together or that there was any connection between them. They headed downhill, toward the Catholic church, leaving behind them the Kiesch Hotel, the old Austrian consulate, the courtyard of Doctor Marsille, and the freshly whitewashed fa-çade of the Hagi-Moscu Palace. Before them lay a long lane and the future, gentle and overrun with the flurry of drying sheets, as the dentist hoped, mysterious and resounding with the prattle of children, as Miss Duković imagined, but first they would have to traverse the weeks at the tail end of summer and, before that, bring to a close the days that abode under the zodiacal sign of fire. They did not hurry. They felt good, warm, they found no reason to rush. In the shops of the Colţei Inn, while Joseph was admiring the saddles, harnesses, bridles, and spurs in a window, a woman with tiny boots, like a doll's, passed alongside him, lightly touched his shoulder, then swung her parasol and went on her way in her blue dress, as though she were floating. When she had gone some twenty paces, the doctor abandoned looking at the items of harness laid out on shelves and hanging from hooks, and strolled on. Halfway across the fenced-in vacant lot next to the Kalinderu Church, over the road from the Bucuresciu Caravanserai (where the windows were covered by thick white drapes, behind which the Sultan's emissaries were dozing or cooling themselves with infusions of mint, lemon, and aniseed), Elena stopped for a while, opened her parasol with a snap, and adjusted the brim of her hat, allowing the tall thin man who had been standing stock-still on the pavement to overtake her by almost twenty paces. Thus they walked, until the macadam disappeared and the lane was paved with wooden beams. Then they grew smaller and smaller and veered left, one after the other, vanishing from the gaze of a fat man with nine children, who, watching them from the pinnacle of the highest structure in the city, was chortling and hiccoughing.