The Days of the King (4 page)

W
HEN IN YOUR
pipe-tobacco pouch there are stashed a copious number of groschen, guilders, and florins, it seems an easy matter to choose a spruce little house and set up a surgery there. Especially if under the floorboards, as a safeguard against hard times, you have a diamond ring hidden away. And Herr Strauss, whom the torrid summer found in precisely such a position, under a munificent star and having managed to pull up one of the floorboards and nail it back again without leaving a trace, had settled in the Saint Nicholas quarter, on the street that teemed with his compatriots, Lipscani as it was named, where he occupied two rooms on the upper floor of a redbrick building. At the same address, number 18, he had also rented the ground-floor shop. It was narrow and long, with a large, shuttered window, a former haberdasher's. He did not dawdle, he began at once to alter it, but not in the two weeks he had thought this would take, rather in five, because the workmen were idlers and drunkards, always ready to demand more money than the initial reckoning. He chased away the first crew one Tuesday, paying them as much as he thought they deserved. From their mouths he heard
all kinds of filthy curses (which he intuited, rather than understood), but did not allow himself to be swindled or intimidated. He appeared with a ruler and, taking measurements, making calculations, placed before them a sheet of paper with sums that left them speechless. A few minutes later, Peter Bykow, a baker, knocked at his door, wishing merely to introduce himself, to shake his neighbor's hand and congratulate him on not allowing himself to be tricked. They talked for a little while, as new neighbors and old Germans, clinked glasses of schnapps, laughed, and decided to go rabbit hunting together sometime. Not on the following Saturday, but the one after that, Joseph chased away some new builders who had finished the walls but were lagging over plastering the ceiling and sanding the beams. They departed grumbling. At around lunchtime. Then, after roasted veal and buttered potatoes, after sleep and coffee, while Siegfried dozed fitfully on a sunlit window ledge, Joseph went out into the sweltering air, stopped at a crossroads and drank some kvass, avoided stepping in several piles of horse flop and a reeking dead turkey hen, dodged a cart laden with firewood, went into a tailor's shop and looked at the bolts of cloth (none of them to his liking), bought a poppy-seed cake, and, as he munched, decided to have a haircut. In front of the mirror, while the soft, white linen was draped over his clothes and tucked under his chin, not too tightly, while the shaving brush and razor ambled over his cheeks, while the comb and scissors strolled through his hair, while he was soaped and rinsed with warm water, while he felt palms patting him with an absorbent cloth and fingertips rubbing him with lavender oil, many cloudy things in his life became limpid. This was also due to his chat with Otto Huer, the barber. It was as if he, Otto, had cleansed the inside as well as the outside of his customer's head. From him, Joseph learned
the names of two brothers in the Visarion quarter, a painter and a carpenter who worked carefully, quickly, and not too expensively, he learned of an old and skillful stove maker, he found out who it was that had crafted the very chair he sat upon, one just right for a dentist's patients, he learned everything under the sun about grocers, bakers, butchers, druggists, markets, and taverns. They went on talking until almost midnight in a beer hall where they had retired after the cuckoo clock on Herr Huer's wall announced six. Over his first mug, perhaps even over his second, Joseph had listened and grasped how politics was conducted in Bucuresci: theft was the order of the day, until there was nothing left to steal, and no few men, dreaming of the throne, were hoping that Prince Karl would obtain a sizeable foreign loan, fill the treasury, and then go back to his own country. Over the third mug, supping less thirstily, they spoke of how to go about learning Romanian, a sibilant language, sweetened by syrupy vowels, that bore not the slightest resemblance to their own. Mathilde, the sister of Jakob Vogel the optician, had given lessons to many people, not bad lessons, but at that very moment she had the chicken pox and was not receiving visitors. They imagined, as they blew the froth off their beer, a froth as white as milk or Mathilde's skin, how the pustules dotted her face, breasts, and belly button, they pictured how the pox spread over her plump buttocks, like a swarm of red ants or wild strawberries, they sighed, drank and smiled, and then after a while Joseph chased away that image, not from pudor, not because it was not to his liking, but because it was, strictly speaking, medically incorrect. Finally, while they were on the fourth mug, the barber, thinking over other potential teachers—not ones with diplomas, but with compassion and patience—conjured up the image of Martin Stolz: lean, jug-eared, jovial, with a thin
mustache and arched eyebrows. He was a notary's assistant, young and eager at all times to lay up a coin in his purse. But because of the shadows dancing on the tin tabletop or the moths dissolving in the flame of the candle, this image failed to imprint itself in their minds. They left Martin to the Lord's mercy, alone in the suffocating, sticky night. They, too, were sweating, yearning for a breath of wind, but still gabbing away. They had lost count of the number of mugs. One said they must have reached their fifth; the other, their seventh. They sighed, quaffed, and smiled. Then the doctor related how one night he had entered a low-ceilinged room, after passing through a courtyard with a chained, lame dog, two goats munching corncobs, and hens sleeping under a fruit tree (plum or quince, who could tell). It had all happened in the dark, the other week, a page now torn from the calendars. It smelled stale and moldy within, he said, and he described how a woman with birdlike eyes had taken off her dress on the threshold, knelt down, opened his trousers and placed his member between her dugs (warming it like a frozen sparrow chick, fondling it). He remembered that, damp and aflame, they had tumbled together on a grubby mattress. In his ears there still lingered the panting, not the sleep, he could not hear that, of course, but he had heard the rustling of dawn. He had not budged, as he saw through half-closed eyes how the woman rummaged through his coat pockets, how she took his last penny (no great matter). Finally, after the sun had risen, he had seen the seamy sheets, stained as if by gobs of spittle. Listening to him with his arms folded over his chest, Otto Huer was of the opinion that in such a city it would not go amiss to have the addresses of bathed, pomaded, and less thievish girls. But neither on that night, over the sixth or eighth mug, nor in the future which then seemed to them so mild, did the dentist ever reveal to Otto the secret of why he had decided to come to Bucharest.

It was on the eleventh day of that August that the young prince who had lured him into a new life next gave a sign. His gums were inflamed, livid, as distressing as bad news. Joseph pushed an armchair to the window, arranged a pillow against the back in the torrid afternoon, and, with a pair of tweezers sterilized in medicinal spirit, extracted a tiny yellow fiber next to one of the prince's canines. It appeared to be from a bean pod. Before he came to perform that elementary but salutary operation, however, and even before he carefully examined the prince's teeth and palatal arch through a magnifying glass, a number of things had taken place, things not worthy of wearying the mind of a sovereign. First, the two brothers from the Visarion quarter, the builder and the carpenter, had turned out to be Russians, not just any kind of Russians, but Filippovian Old Believers, with bushy blond beards, with smocks that reached below their knees and broad belts around their waists, with the foible of not touching strong drink, with blue eyes and a strange religious zeal, who genuflected and kissed the crosses at their throats whenever they ate, quenched their thirst, or heard church bells. They had finished the job rapidly, plastering, polishing and painting, adjusting the window frames and sashes, staining the woodwork with caustic, sanding and waxing the floorboards, glossing the ceiling. It had come out well, hewing to the tastes and blueprints of Herr Strauss, and the price, rightly to say, had been neither so low as to be an act of charity nor so high as to take the coat off a poor man's back. The stove maker too had soon made his appearance, tall and thin, bald, rather like a pottering, peevish heron. He continually chewed leaves, apparently mulberry or wild hemp. He skillfully shackled smoke and straightly joined terra-cotta tile. After the renovation was complete, when nothing in the room recalled the former haberdasher's any longer, Joseph had picked out some Anatolian carpets and affixed to the glossy walls five anatomical charts in gilt frames. He had brought them from Berlin, tightly rolled up inside a flute case. One showed the buccal cavity, including the uvula, tongue, and inner cheeks, another illustrated a mature and healthy set of teeth, and the other three depicted the visible and invisible structures of an incisor, a premolar, and a molar, root and all. He then took care to purchase a pendulum clock, and to give a detailed explanation, at the furniture workshop recommended by Herr Huer, of exactly how he wanted that unusual chair to be: it was to have a single, thick, cylindrical leg in the middle and a screw thread, so that it could be raised and lowered by rotation. It also should have broad, comfortable arms, a neck rest, and a reclining back, like a chaise longue. He had spent an hour and three-quarters sketching the design for the carpenter. Meanwhile, in the forty-seven days elapsed since their arrival in Bucuresci, Siegfried had learned how Wallachian cats held their tails, how numerous the rats were, and how fiercely the stray tomcats fought. He was satisfied, above all because his master had kept his word with regard to the goose liver fried with slices of apple, black pepper, and onion.

By the eleventh of August—the day that his remarkable chair was entrusted to the hands of an upholsterer, who would install its springs and garb it in blue velvet—Joseph had managed to learn a few words of Romanian. And so after he dabbed the prince's gums with tincture of chamomile, he was able to tell him: "
Găsesc fericit tine, Maiestat!
" (I find happy thee, Majestät!)

***

Sultan Abdülaziz displayed an unwonted benevolence at the beginning of autumn. Up until then, without being a raging dragon, but rather a padishah astonished and intrigued by events in his northern territories, he had breathed scalding vapors over the Principalities, intensifying the sweltering heat. That breeze had brought with it twenty thousand troops of Turkish infantry, assembled at Rusçuk and ready to cross the Danube on the orders of Omer Pasha. And in the summer (and what a summer!), seeking a smattering of coolness in his new homeland, Carol I had put the army on a war footing, flattered the pride of the national guard on the occasion of the disturbances provoked by the debate of the Jewish question, and abandoned his sumptuous Biedermeier bed, to be found in the little palace on Podul Mogoşoaiei, for one narrower and harder, in the shady residence on Cotroceni Hill. His inspection of the troops and fortifications had left him with a bitter taste, because he had encountered soldiers poorly equipped and devoid of elementary discipline, derisory stocks of cartridges, gunpowder sufficient only to dust the bottom of the sack, horses gaunt and scarce, ramshackle lines of trenches. Now daily wearing the uniform of a general with gold braid and buttons, having renounced that of a captain, the sovereign had also learned alarming details from the report of the minister of war. The rifles purchased in recent years had proved largely defective, the storerooms were bare, new and costly barracks, such as those at Braila, Galatzi, and Jassy, were in a ruinous condition, the gunpowder factory was rudimentary and unproductive, large sums were being squandered on officers' quarters, and the foundry at Tîrgovişte turned out faulty cannons that were many times more expensive than those imported from the West. There was another figure, too. A gloomy one. Eight thousand. This was how many men that vaudeville army could muster. And the more he came to know places and facts, the more the prince began to discover the muddle and languor in the ministries, the impracticable roads, the impoverished schools and hospitals, the looting and embezzlement in the prefectures, police, and other institutions, how few gas lamps there were in the streets of Bucharest and how many miasmas, the rumors, the string-pulling, and rival camps in politics, the villages like deserted hamlets and the city outskirts like boggy villages, pleasant strolls along the Avenue, the coquettish Cişmigiu Park, where the hand and the skill of a German landscape gardener could be divined, the indolence and dirty tricks of the courts, the tedious evenings at the theatre, a modestly sized and dimly lit auditorium, the thistles in the fields, the dusty market towns, the prisons brimming with the guilty and the not guilty, the resplendent gowns and jewels of the ladies, the cholera that stalked the land like a succubus (and the succubi, in that land, wreaked havoc), the tranquil monasteries of the Wallachian plain, and the splendor of certain landed estates, such as that of the Metropolitan Nifon at Letca. A man by no means tall, with blue eyes, a hooked nose (aquiline, according to some), thick eyebrows, a closely trimmed beard, and beveled cheeks, Karl Ludwig knew very well that neither the state's functionaries nor its soldiers had received their wages since spring. And in the report of the minister of finance, presented to the Assembly, he had circled the following brief passage in red ink:

...all the official pay offices are empty and the treasury is liable for payment of a fluctuating debt of 55,761,842 piasters; according to a precise calculation, the year 1866 will close with a deficit of 51,956,000...

In the unrelenting heat, that sentence, the crisis in general, and his Prussian blood prompted him to halve the wages of state employees for a period of six months, decrease pensions, introduce new taxes, and increase the old ones. He was cursed, slandered, reviled, vilified loudly on every street corner, but he swallowed it with stoicism, although he was saddened and the rings around his eyes grew darker. The Great Powers had not acknowledged him as ruler, locusts and secessionist ideas were swarming over Moldavia, Cuza's cronies, stirred up by Florescu and Marghiloman, were hatching dark schemes elbow to elbow with the Austrian and Russian consuls, the French military mission was like a wasps' nest readying its furtive sting, in spite of the good intentions of d'Avril, the consul general, while Moustier, Napoleon III's ambassador to the Sublime Porte, seemed to be acting on instructions from General Ignatieff, the tsar's representative. In one of his frequent letters to Hortense Cornu, his protector in Paris, Carol set down on paper, while sipping wine at around midnight, when he could breathe more easily, the following: