The Days of the King (3 page)

The crossing of the Bodensee was not exactly a joy. The glare out on the lake, the excitement of boarding, the sailors going about their tasks, and the aroma of the tea drunk in the port of Rorschach—all these dissolved under the rocking of that vast expanse of azure also christened the Schwäbisches Meer. The pitching of the boat provoked in the doctor a more wretched nausea than had the beer and champagne, causing him to lean over the side thrice and splatter the water with undigested morsels of his breakfast and a yellowish, bitter juice, such as the foaming streaks of the waves scattered over the lake that also had a third name, Konstanz, perhaps did not deserve. His grogginess had abated by the time they reached Lindau, where he managed, trembling, to gulp down ten drops of quinine mixed with brown sugar, and it definitively dispersed in the mail coach that raced northward, once he had rubbed his temples and the backs of his hands with swabs soaked in vinegar. He spent a night in Memmingen and another in Augsburg, and in Munich he discovered a town as carefree as early summer could make it. He permitted himself a light lunch and hours of delectation, he looked at the ladies out for a stroll, the governesses and the boisterous children, at a group of Dominican nuns, a perspiring bakery woman, and a lass with a bundle of dirty laundry, he indulged his appetite with cherry tarts, he paused in the shade (where his pipe slowly went out) next to a maid perched on a ladder washing the window of a chemist's shop, with her skirt hitched up and a bruise on her left thigh, he leafed through the papers (his pipe now lit), he found time to pause for beer and gaped at some circus folk who were breathing fire, playing tambourines and trumpets, dancing and juggling with colored balls. But in a small square, the thread of pleasure snapped when a top-hatted little dog who was whining in time to music abandoned its performance and, deaf to its trainer, rushed at Siegfried. Two girls screamed, a lady tripped on the train of her dress and almost fell onto the cobbles, a seminary student and a shop boy jumped into a coal cart, an old woman pressed herself against a wall, and the dog, small and dolled up as it was, yapped loudly, bared its gums, growled and snapped at the air. Perched on a fence, the tomcat bristled his tail, spat, and then twisted round and sprayed the dog with piddle.

In the second-class railway carriage where a seat had been reserved for one Joseph Kranich, the doctor spent a very long time deciphering the rhythms and tones of the breathing around him, the cough of the man by the door, the lip-smacking of a country priest, the light snore of a woman in mourning, the fidgeting of a businessman with ginger sideburns, and the unintelligible snatches of speech from a freckled little girl. At Salzburg, as they passed through Austrian customs, he heard his heartbeat, which, oddly, was louder than the ticking of his watch, whose lid was engraved inside with the names of his mother and sister, Gertrude and Irma. The hands showed ten
to four in the morning, a cold, damp hour. The wind slipped through the steam of the locomotive, chased away the railway smells, and filled Joseph's nostrils with the scent of lilac. Inside the waiting room, bodies were emerging haltingly from sleep, conversations were being conducted in an undertone, the air was crackling like the guttering candles and dispersing droplets of perspiration, and an officer was bustling ceaselessly, checking the passports one more time, putting stern questions to the travelers, giving orders to the customs guards, soldiers, and his own adjutants. When his turn with the officer came, Herr Kranich was midway through chewing a slice of smoked fish he had found in a handkerchief, left over from the tomcat's last meal. The lieutenant wrinkled his nose, cursorily read the documents, and cast a look of scorn at the brown-haired, unmarried Catholic Switzer with hazel eyes who was heading to Bukarest with the intention of finding gainful employment doctoring Wallachians' teeth. At last, the train glided along the tracks to Vienna—it slipped between troop movements and war maneuvers, it let itself be caressed by torrid heat and fields of ripe wheat, it panted like a supple greyhound loyal to its purpose, it puffed smoke like a young gentleman and became somehow flustered as it neared that city pampered by the fates. Joseph greeted the new sunset dozing in another second-class carriage, with new companions and a new destination, Pest, one of the lungs of the empire, the other being Buda. If someone were rotating a globe in his palms (as a certain count with a catarrh had done that February) or scrutinizing a planisphere, he might have remarked that the dentist had descended a quarter of an inch, at most three-quarters of an inch (some three hundred miles, in fact), as far as one of the soles of the empire's feet, when the railway came to an end and once more the waters of the Danube
could be glimpsed. In Baziaş, a gloomy little town dominated by the coal trade, the portmanteaus, bags, and trunk that had set out from Berlin, together with their owner and the tomcat in the basket, boarded a boat for the second time. The passengers' papers were carefully inspected, and so Herr Kranich's profession did not remain unknown to the captain, a fellow with a well-trimmed mustache and a good memory. As the boat passed a long island occupied by a fort, white houses, a Franciscan monastery, and tobacco plantations, an island that was called, in the Turkish tongue, Ada Kaleh, the officer on watch appeared suddenly on the lower deck, called out the name of a migratory bird, and was answered by a pale, thin man holding a tomcat in his lap. He entreated him to come urgently to one of the cabins in first class, where a baroness, a young Russian, was about to give birth. Though he preferred to treat only teeth, the doctor did not hesitate. He hastened to fetch his medical bag and reach the room with sunlit portholes, in which a woman was groaning and trembling, livid, blonde, frightened and astonished, stretched out in bed. Aksinia Larisa Yakovleva was at the end of a honeymoon voyage that had lasted more than a year. The breaking of her water had soaked her dress and the sheets. She was immersed in the throes of childbirth, while her husband, who was older, much older, caressed and kissed her hands, babbling, complaining, weeping in a muffled way, and blaming himself for having miscalculated the length of the pregnancy and for not having delayed the voyage home. Joseph looked at the scene and remained silent for a quarter of a minute. Un-impressed by the baron's laments, Joseph invited him into the corridor and asked him to send for a basin of hot water. Then time progressed like a lazy snail, sometimes curling up in its shell and dozing, sometimes advancing undecidedly, until the baby arrived, just as evening was falling. It was a blond-haired boy who screamed loudly in amazement, and in amazing circumstances: he had Russian parents, he had been delivered by a Swiss (in reality, German) dentist, and found himself on an Austro-Hungarian vessel, with a Czech captain, between the Romanian and the Bulgarian banks of the Danube, both buffeted by winds from Istanbul. At the behest of Osip Afanasievich Yakovlev, the physician tossed back four brimming glasses of vodka and then admitted that he had never supervised a birth before. Plashing the Danube jerkily with its paddles, the steamer had long since passed Turnu-Severin, where he ought to have disembarked, and headed toward Giurgiu, while Joseph slept soundly for two hours, forgetting Siegfried, the young mother, past and future. On dry land at last, he was greeted by a dust storm and dozens of people, some of them barefoot, who jostled him to carry his luggage. It was not until he was in the coupé, jolting along the road to Bucharest, that he found the diamond ring. It was in his matchbox. Next to his pipe. He had seen it on the left hand of the baron, on his middle finger, when they had clinked glasses for the lucky star of the newborn. He laughed.

 

At first, a diffuse light bathed details and peculiarities; it allowed only outlines and thick brushstrokes to be distinguished, so that their personal histories seemed as alike as two drops of wine. But drops of wine are not like drops of water, and they can have identical forms and colors, but different tastes, for example, a drop of cabernet and a drop of pinot noir. On his way to the Principalities, the captain of dragoons wrote and dispatched letters to the Prussian king, to the tsar, to the French and Austrian emperors, he was accompanied by his trusty chamberlain, von Mayenfisch, by his counselor, von Werner, and by three ordinary servants, he wore spectacles of plain glass, without lenses, so as not to be recognized, he passed everywhere and always as Karl Hettingen, borrowing the name from the family's Swiss castle in Weinburg, once he chanced to find himself in the vicinity of some old friends from the Habsburg army, and was forced to hide behind a spread newspaper, he spent three days in a squalid inn waiting for a boat that had been blocked by military transports, he unexpectedly leapt onto the jetty at Turnu-Severin, in spite of having a ticket to Odessa, and, all in all, countless things in his peregrination happened differently than in the dentist's; the dentist sent no letters, he enjoyed the company of a tomcat, his false name was created by substituting one bird species for another, he did not disguise himself, and he did not glimpse any familiar face. Nevertheless, in the spirit of the times, their journeys were as alike as two drops of different wines. They had followed the same route, they were both Germans, they both had false passports, they both traveled second class, and they both sometimes thought, out of the blue, of the little lead soldier enclosed in a small box covered in maroon velvet.

After they stepped onto Wallachian soil, however, the one on May 8, 1866 (after the Julian calendar), the other seven weeks later, on June 25, nothing was similar. Joseph Strauss did not seek a telegraph office to announce his arrival in his new homeland, he was not treated to a coach drawn by eight horses, he did not cross the Jiu River on a floating pontoon (at dawn, in dreadful weather), he was not greeted in Craiova by a motley crowd and a triumphal arch woven from willow branches, he was not guarded by two files of foot soldiers, and he did not spend the night in a cool manor (making small talk with Zinca, a woman who had lived through much, with her son Nicolae, a Liberal and triumvir, various ministers, and the head of government, the erstwhile Bey of Samos). Joseph entered Bucuresci from the south, through a malodorous slum, in a not at all handsome coupé, in no case coming from the direction of Titu (in a carriage adorned with garlands, drawn by twelve white horses, escorted by a detachment of lancers and followed by a ceremonial procession), he did not wash or attire himself in festive garb in order to receive the keys to the city (outside Băneasa Forest), he did not listen to a speech by the mayor (which went something like this:
Sovereign of Romania! I have given thee the crown of Stephen the Great and of Michael the Brave, thy forbears this day hence! Restore the land to its ancient splendor! Make this beautiful land the progressive sentinel of modern freedoms, the unvanquished boulevard of western civilization!
) and he did not reply in French, stirring first murmurs, then applause, and finally a torrential downpour (after three months of drought). He did not proceed from one end to the other of that long, broad avenue, the capital's only paved street (called Podul Mogoşoaiei), amazed at the potholes, the miasmas, and the buildings, he did not strive to remain upright and composed amid so many jolts, flowers, flags, carpets hung out of windows, cheers (or shouts) from the mob, cannon salvoes and chiming bells, white doves fluttering to the heavens, startled crows flapping, and sheets of paper (calligraphically inscribed with poems) floating like dry leaves in the middle of spring, he did not salute the honorary guard of alpine hunters, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, he did not ask (in front of a one-story house with two soldiers at the door), "
Qu est-ce qu' il y a dans cette maison?
" and, not having understood the reply, he did not persist, saying, "
Où est le palais?
" He was not greeted on the top of a hill by His Beatitude Metropolitan Nifon (with a gilded cross in his right hand and a silvered Gospel in his left, a synod of priests at his back, garbed in rich vestments); he did not attend mass at the Cathedral of the Metropolia and he did not stride into the main (in fact, rather small) chamber of Parliament to utter the first word of Romanian he had ever spoken in his life
("Jur!"—
"I swear!") and then follow Manolache Costache Epureanu (in his capacity as president of the Constituent Assembly), who was coughing and clearing his throat, to be proclaimed
domnitor
(in other words, a kind of king) of that land. But, since nothing is perfect in this world, not even differences, their arrivals in Bucharest did have one thing in common. Prince Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig, before being named Carol I, and Herr Joseph Strauss, immediately after arriving in the center of that city, stared wide-eyed in amazement at the numerous swine wallowing in the mud, unfettered and fat, under the very windows of the house that passed as the princely palace. And that was all.

As the twenty-fifth day of June was fading, the clouds of dust were dispersing, and the mounds of garbage were slowly, slowly melting into the darkness, the dentist stopped at an inn by a river, where he was served some very tallowy sausages. That evening he had no strength left to dip his pen into an inkwell. It was not until morning, after dissolving ten drops of quinine in brown sugar and procuring a glass of milk for the tomcat, that he had leisure to write to his benefactor. On one of the days that followed, after he had been received by the sovereign in his office and after the latter, in return for the lead soldier, had entrusted him to a lieutenant of the guard, who was to help him find a place to live, Joseph came across a German street, with all kinds of merchants, functionaries, craftsmen, pharmacists, notaries, bank clerks, jewelers, and watchmakers. It was called Lipscani Street, recalling Leipzig. Soon, the Berliner doctor discovered that he was not the only shadow that had followed the captain of dragoons, as he had, naively and without troubling his head, imagined for a while. Around the throne there thronged countless other shadows, among them a physician with the rank of colonel, who had apparently been a foundling; a gentleman named Brătianu, with the initials
I
and
C;
and a professor who spoke very oddly, as if in Latin, though it was Romanian he was trying to drum into the prince. Moreover, Joseph discovered that he was not the city's first dentist. Among romances, poesy, and scientific tomes, he found a slim volume printed in Cyrillic letters, whose reddish cover the bookseller read for him:
I. Seliger, dantist in Bucuresci; Guidance for the Cleanliness of the Mouth and the Preservation of Healthy Teeth.
It had been printed in 1828. He purchased it.