The Days of the King

by Filip Florian

  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.

  In time, their precautions and fear began to wither away, and a reckless kind of courage sprouted in them like a vigorous plant, an invisible, climbing ivy that quickly overran them. Without having suggested or even discussed it, they tacitly abandoned their perambulations through outlying areas, through forsaken quarters and churchyards, and still roaming here and there, they shortened the distance between them by twenty paces, or left it to its fate, as if they had retreated from barren territories like soldiers losing their patience, rhythm, and purpose. Ever further from the flocks of ducks, geese, guinea fowl, hens, and turkeys, ever more rarely having to skirt the dead bodies of horses, donkeys, pigs, dogs, oxen, and goats, ever more guarded against the stench of slops and mounds of garbage (for, as far as smells went, Bucharest had its nuances), glimpsing ever more rarely the banks of the Dîmbovitza, crowded with lopsided houses, washerwomen, watermills, pigsties, and rats, the dentist and the nanny drew nearer to the belly of that huge body. And the city pulsed peacefully. Like two points on its imaginary map, Joseph Strauss and Elena Duković moved in decreasing concentric circles toward where the cityscape and the air grew cleaner. They walked side by side and separately, as was their wont, proceeding along Podul Mogoşoaiei, conquering the street yard by yard, day by day, convinced that the throne was the absolute center of the city, because the sovereign, in the late August heat, might be anywhere, whereas the princely throne, massy and heavy, remained in place. One Wednesday, they ventured from the Zlătari Inn, at the end of Lipscani Street, all the way to the crossroads, where they could glimpse the handsome Bărcănescu house. Joseph could not rid himself of a nagging cough, which was not the result of a cold but of nervousness, and Miss Duković, following behind him, slightly frowning, hesitant, preoccupied with that nasty cough, heedless of the crows that flew slantwise against the clouds. On Thursday they did not choose the Sărindar and Hotel Oteteleşeanu side of the street, but the other side, and they went as far as the Pasha Kapuşi gate, by the old palace from the reign of Caragea Vodă. Had someone sprung from the earth or bare stone (for this street alone was paved) and wondered what the one was doing following the other, why they kept pausing and touching in passing, why they were smiling and casting glances at each other, Herr Strauss would have been ready with the answer that they had set out in search of a medicament for inflamed gums at the Brus Pharmacy, the Slătineanu store, or the La Fortuna Pharmacy, where Adolf Steege sold his remedies. On Friday, he acting the part of the doctor and she the patient, they passed by the library in the building of the former municipal courts, by the Gothic façade of the Small Theatre, by the wine emporium of C. A. Rosetti, by a hairdressing salon (Miss Duković, under her hat, was wearing her hair fastened with four pins), and by the inn of Friedrich Bossel, an Austrian, proprietor of the Romanian Arcade (paved with flagstones, roofed with yellow glass, and swarming with merchants). On their way back, at a brief, barely perceptible signal from the dentist, they entered the studio of Szathmari. Inside, where everything was reminiscent of an alchemist's laboratory, the complicated birthing of photographs and lithographs abated, temporarily entrusted to the apprentices, and the master hastened to greet his guests, giving instructions for Turkish coffee to be prepared. They drank from small cups, blowing on the hot liquid, crushing the coarse froth with their teaspoons, and fidgeting on the soft chairs. Apart from the news and commentaries in the papers, Joseph had learned nothing about Karl Ludwig except that he took delight in watercolors by Preziosi, a painter who had recently arrived from Istanbul. This last detail, and the memories it stirred, stung him like salt sprinkled in a wound. He did not sigh, but after a few more pleasantries, they rose to take their leave. After each had passed Sunday in his and her own church, Joseph in the cool of the Catholic cathedral, attending the Roman mass, digesting events on an empty stomach, praying, occasionally twitching, Elena at the Saint Nicholas Udricani church in her own neighborhood, inhaling the incense-laden, Orthodox air, making hundreds of signs of the cross, daydreaming, they met again on Monday and resumed their advance up Podul Mogoşoaiei, passing the Hugues Hotel, the Grand Theatre, the piano emporium of Jakob Rink, the adjacent Romanian Club, with the invisible but ever present mist exuded by its English Masonic rituals, the Lazarus and Coriolano stores, and the stores across the road in the Kretzulescu Inn. In front of a shop sign inscribed Giovanni Confiseur they gazed into each other's eyes, they restrained their longing, and each thought with compassion of the other and with joy of him- and herself, because Herr Strauss was expecting at home a block of nougat and almond cookies, gifts from Martin Stolz, the notary's assistant, and Elena Duković had learned that morning that she was to be welcomed home with plum dumplings and walnut syrup cake, prepared by the cook of the Nikolić of Rudna family. And on Wednesday, having tucked all thoughts of sweetmeats somewhere deeply away, they at last reached the royal palace, viewing it in detail first from the wing by the guardhouse, then from an acute angle in the Bishopric Gardens. The dentist knew all too well where the throne room lay, and so he was more interested in the profile of Miss Duković, while she, gazing at the opaque windows, was left with the mystery unsolved. To passers-by and cabmen idling at the corner, the two both did and did not seem strangers. It was not until a Saturday, September 2, that they cleared up this confusion, when they stood in front of a shop window clasping each other's hand
s and pressing their shoulders together, laughing softly and imagining what it would be like at their wedding if Joseph Strauss were to wear that cylindrical and dreadfully tall hat invented by M. Jobin, the French proprietor of the store. They left arm in arm, still laughing, and then suddenly they fell silent, realizing that this was the first time they had talked of marriage. After that, they did not head toward Giovanni Confiseur but to the Fialkowsky cake shop by the Grand Theatre, in the Torok building. They were sitting in a sunlit spot by the window, cutting their cake with their spoons and munching at leisure, when through the door came Dušan, in his best clothes, and sat down without greeting them. He placed his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his palms. Scowling.

  6. Hubbub and Babies

  CLIMBING FILARET HILL in a gently rattling coach, with the horses bridled at a walk, Elena was wearing a voluminous dress, but not so voluminous yet that she could not go out in public. On the next to last day of October, when the fading year 1869 unleashed its winds, her desire to see the railroad, to hear the whistle of the locomotive, and to travel down to the Danube, was great, infinitely greater than her bulging belly, which according to the hunches and calculations, had been growing for about five months. She was shielded from the cold by a lined cloak, a velvet bonnet, the beige shawl from which she was so rarely parted, and the right arm of the dentist, which clasped her around the shoulders. Before the conveyance conquered the slope, however, and before the outline of the station loomed over the rows of vines, in fact before they even climbed into the coach, before her belly began to swell, and before she began to have bouts of morning sickness, she had ceased to be called Duković. It had happened the previous autumn, pages now torn from the calendars, soon after she had tasted that cake with whipped cream and marzipan. She had seen first of all the handle of a dagger in the waistband of the estate overseer, the blade had gleamed in the Fialkowsky cake shop under the table, and the lips of the overseer, as if spitting, had cast dreadful words in Serbian and Romanian meant to terrify them both, Joseph had attempted to riposte, but the point of the knife had pressed him ever more heavily below the liver. The overseer had led her to the door, gripping her elbow tight as a vice, he thrust her into a gig, and tied her hands behind her back, he did not swear, he did not curse, he merely scowled and goaded the chestnut stallion into a gallop. When they arrived at the house in Udricani he shut Elena up in her room and padlocked the door. On the sixth night of her imprisonment she was kidnapped by a hired thief with a concealed face and a reconciled soul, one who was fond of garlic, to be exact. And that thief had made the sign of the cross on the preceding night, the fifth, when he had for the first time softly unfastened the padlock and the lady had refused to dress and flee, but instead calmly sat down to write in the pitch blackness, taking care not to dip the nib too deeply into the inkpot, and handed him an envelope for the gentleman who had engaged his services. The envelope, as Herr Strauss was to discover half an hour later, was blue and elongated, without seal, insignia, name, or address, and vaguely redolent of brackish glue. In the letter Elena Duković asked him to swear with his hand on the Bible and then with his hand on the pen, consigning his oath to paper, that they would be married in an Orthodox church, that their numerous children would be baptized in the same place, that he would not succumb to a mania for strong drink or the vice of philandering, that he would not touch the mushroom tea as long as he lived, neither to drink it himself nor to prepare it for others, that he would not forget to hug her, and that he would never invite her to a Polish cake shop again. And he swore. In German, uttering the words softly, but distinctly enough to make Siegfried prick up his black ear, and then he sat down before a sheet of white paper, with the inkpot and a goose quill at the ready. The wedding, because that modest gathering of seven people and one tomcat was still a wedding, was held on a Wednesday, at ten o'clock in the morning, at the church of Saint Ionică in the Brezoianu quarter. The preparations, such as they were, had been taken care of by their godfather, Calistrache. He had not cooked for the prince in fourteen months, since Karl Ludwig now entrusted his luncheons and dinners to a French chef, but he still lived in a lane behind the royal palace, in a small two-roomed house with whitewashed walls and a shingle roof. And the lanky Calistrache, who had sheltered them there for almost a week, persuaded the parish priest to shrive them, to give them holy communion, and to bind them in holy matrimony at an hour and on a day when it would not have crossed anyone's mind to wed. During the service, while Joseph and Elena wore the wedding crowns, while they processed around the table to the hymn "Dancing Isaiah," while they listened to the rather muffled voice of the priest, while their godmother took the rings out of a cloth and kissed them, while Siegfried sat on a pew lifting the tip of his tail in the air, during all that long and muddled interval in which their dreams were fulfilled, they saw how the perspiring Calistrache strove to stop his shoulder twitching and his eyes blinking. After the ceremony, the party rode in a spacious carriage to the Colentina River, where they laid rugs on the empty riverbank, ate, laughed, and drank, and at four o'clock in the afternoon, when the barber had fallen asleep on the grass, the tomcat had just caught a baby mole, and Joseph's brain was swaying in his head like a pendulum, the groom lifted Elena Strauss in his arms and, fully clothed as she was, instead of carrying her over the threshold of the house at number 18 Lipscani Street he threw her into the shallow water, so that she might be cleansed of evil and her heart be pure.

  Filaret Station, as it suddenly loomed in the plain beyond the huge vineyard of the Metropolia, far from the buildings of the city, looked as if it were painted on the sky. Elegant and awkward, unconnected to the world in which it found itself, it endured the harsh wind and the ceaseless assault of souls burning with curiosity, who regarded it as a great marvel. Not even a month after its magnificent inauguration with brass bands, flowers, cannon salvoes, holy water, prayers, wine, and impassioned speeches, including one from prime minister Dimitrie Ghika, affectionately nicknamed by other politicians and the people Beyzade Mitică, the dentist had been swept along by the collective madness and had managed to come by second-class tickets, paying a hefty bribe to someone who had been queuing since the crack of dawn for two reserved seats. With that bit of luck he was able to satisfy the greatest craving of Elena's pregnancy, for she did not dream of baklava, sherbet, caviar, truffles, or pâté de fois gras. Instead, like so many inhabitants of Bucuresci, she wanted to see at close hand the den of the monster ensconced to the south, the long, metallic, puffing serpent that sped faster than cavalry squadrons. She examined the station minutely, first the office building, which was like a synagogue, but lower and broader, then the glass-roofed terminus and the platforms, along which ran rows of lamp posts and small ornamental arches, she gazed upon the perfection of the rails, six parallel lines grouped in three pairs, laid on countless ties, she sneezed softly, so as not to draw glances, and sniffed some camphorated smelling salts. And the serpent, refusing to slither, remained as straight as a ruler and as proud as a cockerel. Then, suddenly awakening into life, it belched smoke, not from nostrils but from a tall, thick chimney, and emerged from its den at precisely the appointed hour, juddering at first as it set in motion, then moving ever more smoothly as it approached its maximum speed, twenty-five miles an hour. The Strausses found themselves in the belly of the iron beast, on a road of iron, fearful lest their gallbladders rebel. They held each other's hands and spoke in whispers, and after a while they forgot to tell each other what they were thinking, falling prey to their own reveries in the swaying train, as the plains unfolded beneath their eyes and the locomotive's whistle gave occasional deafening hoots, when carts, flocks, or people were slow in getting out of the way. In the second-class car, in the middle of that train built in Manchester, at the Aushbury works, Joseph sank into a tangled recollection of the route he had covered from Berlin, in particular its railroad sections. Somewhere by the Călugăreni marshes, he realized that just as he had followed Prince Karl Ludw
ig three and a half years earlier, as a pale shadow, traversing the same route with a delay of seven weeks, so he was following him now, the only difference being that this time he was accompanied by his young wife (and unborn child), not a tomcat. The major absentee from the inaugural ceremonies of October 19, the sovereign had in fact been the train's first passenger, a privileged one, traveling as far as Giurgiu on the morning of August 26 in the locomotive's cabin, alongside the stoker and the railroad concessionaire, Englishman Trevor Barkley, who had personally bridled the metallic beast, pulling levers and handles. At the end of the summer and at the 42-mile mark, Carol had disembarked and taken an open carriage to the port in Giurgiu, boarded the yacht Stephen the Great, and with the wind in his sails he had set off for his native land. Imagining those scenes described in the newspapers, Herr Strauss recalled an episode in his relationship with the former captain of dragoons, their last, lengthy encounter, which had taken place just four evenings before the prince's departure for his homeland. There had been a strange and paradoxical discussion, in which one of them, the prince, though he used harsh words, was excited and overcome with joy by his impending reunion with his family (the first since he had been elevated to the Romanian throne), and the other, the dentist, for all he strove to smile, felt that the bitterness and tension were worsening second by second, bunching up in his chest. They had not seen each other for a long time, and in that interval so many important things had happened that Joseph felt he could no longer take it all in, though he had read reams of newspapers and chatted with friends, patients, and acquaintances (including Siegfried, without learning his opinion).