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.
3. Stained Sheets
WHEN 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 ne
ighbor'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 ga
rb 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!)
The Days of the King Page 3