The Days of the King

by Filip Florian

  The child bawled strenuously, like a cat in heat, around an hour and a quarter after midnight. When human calendars had not yet begun that eighth day of March, shortly before noon on the seventh, the tomcat had looked in astonishment at Elena Strauss's dress, stained from the waist down, imagining that his mistress, who had just been cracking eggs for a crème brûlée, had splashed herself with the whites. He hastened to fetch her a cloth, jumping onto the sink and grabbing one in his teeth. Then he coiled like a spring in a corner of the kitchen, his eyes boggling, and it became clear to him what was happening only when Elena staggered to the door, went out onto the landing, and leaned on the banister. Then he streaked between her legs, as if he were chasing a mouse or a rat, he descended like a bolt of lightning, hung with his paws from the handle of the surgery door, swinging there until the handle gave way and, without paying any attention to the fact that Joseph was busy cleaning the canine of a gentleman with dyed sideburns, he leapt onto the dentist's back and mewed in his left ear. Herr Strauss dropped his spatula, stammered something to the startled patient, and ran upstairs, three steps at a time. He was pale, his lips unable to form words, his palms incapable of caresses, and he set off again immediately through the slushy snow, without hat or galoshes, his overcoat unbuttoned, to the house of the old midwife with whom he had consulted many times. And that plump, worldly-wise old woman, whom he had niggled until her hair grew whiter, poring over her midwife's certificate, dressed and prepared without delay, summoning her sister for assistance. Since not only the oaths he had consigned to paper had to be kept but also the promises he had made to Elena in recent weeks, once he had fetched the two midwives Joseph meddled no further. Not even through the keyhole did he watch the events in the bedroom. Throughout the afternoon, evening, and first part of the night, he smoked incessantly, employing all the pipes in his collection, sometimes two, three, or four pipes in as many ashtrays. From time to time he opened the windows wide to fill his lungs and his thoughts with the throbbing frost, and he let his eyes wander over Bucharest. He poured himself apple brandy once in a while, and often set the coffee pot on the stove to boil. He allowed the tomcat onto his chest for a long stretch, stroking him under the chin, talking to him about this and that, not telling him a story, because stories would have meant snatches of the past, instead prophesying and giving vent to a stream of hopes. He told him that mother's milk has the gift of strength, health, and compassion, that it chases away drought and storms, that it always points to goodness and human kindness, just as the polestar points sailors on their way. He confessed that the heart can grow larger and beat madly, leaving the chest and floating away over the world like a balloon. He flattered Siegfried, telling him that his kittens would multiply without number, filling the entire city with their kittens' kittens. He supposed, chewing on his pipe until it almost cracked, that the hair of the newborn child would be chestnut and his eyes blue and haughty. He flattered himself that he, Joseph Strauss, would be strong and redemptive, lifting the baby up to the ceiling, dandling him, and helping him to re-lease his first happy cry.

  Some time earlier, when Elena's belly had barely begun to swell, he had in great secret tended to a funeral. This was because he believed that the peace of the newly born depends on those who have ascended to the Heavens, that new shoots can emerge into the light only from the roots, bulbs, or seeds of older plants, that in a new land fate will smile on no one unless he has his own dead in the ground. That summer he had found a crackpot priest and haggled with the gravediggers so they would dig deep; to keep their mouths shut, he had frightened them with the ravages of an unknown contagious disease. One Wednesday evening in the Catholic cemetery, he had taken part in a service officiated in accordance with all the canons. In the two coffins were laid rocks wrapped in layers of white canvas and velour, weighing as much as a human body, and along with them all kinds of sundry items: a pocket mirror, spectacle frames, a handbag with charred edges, a smoke-blackened fan, some tweezers, a pouch filled with a fine powder (a tea that smelled of mushrooms), a parasol, a few letters, photographs, and a pair of amethyst earrings. Engraved on the granite crosses were the names of Gertrude and Irma Strauss, who had come into the world in 1817 and 1838, respectively, and had both joined the ranks of the righteous, according to the inscription, in 1869. Under the circumstances, the true year in which his mother and sister had perished, Anno Domini 1864, could not possibly be carved upon the stone.

  And if for that burial, Joseph Strauss had for the first time removed from their hiding place under the floorboards six gold florins, it was from the same place that he also later took, one morning when his wife was out shopping, the diamond ring. He had decided to use it for the good fortune and health of the newborn baby, offering the midwife who was to cut the child's umbilical cord much more than she expected (or dreamed of), and for a quiet but bountiful christening. He had gone to a number of jewelers in the January blizzards and snows, had the ring valued and sold it through one of them, receiving a goodly sum from a carpet merchant, a man with a side parting and a brown wart on his cheek. And indeed he had paid Sevastitza the midwife enough for ten births, but otherwise all had not gone quite as he had imagined. Instead of bursting into the bedroom, embracing his beloved wife and showering her with kisses, cradling the baby and whispering a prayer over him, he had awoken, groggily, from a faint, his forehead gashed on the edge of a cupboard, with the tense faces of the two sisters hovering over him, with the great wonder of the place, moment, and situation in which he found himself, with his heart, as he had predicted to Siegfried, beating madly, about to leave his chest and float through the room that was filled with the exhalations of sweat and dried blood. For hours and hours he had listened to the groans of Elena, he had seen the women coming and going, calling for fresh cloths, wetting their eyebrows with cold water and drinking strong black tea, he had walked for dozens of miles around the room that faced the street, he had numbered thousands of stars in the moonless sky, losing count and then starting over, and after he heard the child's first whine, barely had he been called in and discovered that he had a son than he had collapsed like a limp rag in the doorway. They wafted smelling salts under his nose, they rubbed his temples and wrists with vinegar, and finally the midwife slapped him so smartly that he woke up. For a while he was unable to hop around the room, whoop for joy, dandle the baby at his breast, or kneel beneath the icon and praise the good Lord. All three of them lay in the broad, raft-like bed, with the baby in the middle, ruddy-faced and wriggling, wrapped in a little green blanket, his parents holding hands and gazing deep into each other's eyes. In the middle of the night, after the women had finally ventured to leave (having been awaited in the street for long hours by a stout young lad with a conical fur hat) and after the baby had been placed for the first time in the osier cot, Siegfried softly approached the oval mattress, fearfully inspected the man-kitten, sniffed him and twitched his whiskers, then curled up by his feet and fell asleep. Joseph and Elena, who had decided many times not to let the tomcat near the child, at least for a few months, watched him anxiously at first, then calmly and lovingly. Sleep overcame them. Swiftly.

  On the very same day, March 8, 1870, at the morning's end, that helpless little mite, Alexandru Strauss, of the male sex, was recorded as entry no. 214 in the Registry of Births, thanks to the declaration signed by his father, Joseph Strauss, dentist, Catholic, of Lipscani Street, and witnessed by Sevastitza Florian, authorized midwife, of Armenească Lane, and Otto Huer, barber, of şelari Lane, and to the goodwill, earned with a bribe, of Vasile Tincoviceanu, one of the scribes of the Saint Nicholas quarter. Afterward, the same as on the evening they had first met, the two Germans went to a tavern and once again lost count of the mugs of beer. With chastened laughter, they discovered over the first mug that the philandering life no longer preoccupied either of them. Over the second or third mug one of them whispered, while the other listened with reverence, all kinds of things concerning newborn babies, not the things women
talk about, with their charms against evil, with their swaddlings, lullabies, and old wives' remedies, but different things, such as the fact that a man's soul melts for joy, that droplets of his soul can be seen gleaming on his cheeks and trickling down his chin, dripping onto the baby's delicate skin, that the fine, porous skin slowly absorbs them, until another soul coagulates within the fragile body. Over the fourth or fifth mug, they agreed that the throes of labor and, more importantly, the forging of a dynasty were also in store for the newly wedded wife of Prince Karl, Elisabeth Pauline Ottilie Luise—daughter of Prince Hermann of Wied and goddaughter of the widowed queen of Prussia—with her massive frame, broad, bulging forehead, cheeks like puffy pouches fused to her jawbones, and the good fortune to marry when she had already resigned herself to the life of an old maid. And over another mug, the last, which might well have been the fifth, sixth, or seventh, the dentist confessed that he was suddenly on tenterhooks and had to get home as quickly as possible. They walked, tottering as they went, and, still tottering, they urinated endlessly in a dark passageway, whence they were chased with curses by a seamstress in a headscarf who kept trying to whack them with a rolling pin on the arms, legs, and back. They barely managed to escape, buttoning their flies in haste and soaking the crotches of their trousers.

  The christening was held six weeks after the birth, on the next-to-last Sunday of April, the infant being immersed in the font by a young priest with a wispy beard and hesitant movements. Elena Strauss never feared that the priest might drop the child in the lukewarm water, and she felt a kind of pride when Alexandru, after his brief and sacramental bath, piddled on the shirt of his (and their) godfather, Calistrache, who was blinking incessantly. Remembering the episode in the dark passageway, and laughing with the tall cook, Joseph realized that not only had the father's soul come to nestle in the breast of his son, but also the father's habits, both seemly and unseemly. Calistrache had just recited the creed, without stuttering, and the Unclean One had been cast out from the vicinity of the infant, when Elena gave a start, glimpsing by the door a visage with bushy mustaches, another with bluish-white cheeks, and two merry little faces. It had been almost two years since she had seen the boy and girl to whom she had been governess, and as long since she had heard from Theodor Nikolić of Rudna and his wife, Antonija. She had sent the baron and baroness eleven letters, but had received only an icy, obdurate silence for her pains. She had begged their forgiveness, she had spoken to them of passion and tranquility, she had thanked them for the gentle past, she had painted for them a present that often resembled a dizzying dream, she had recounted to them details from a marriage that did not yet know strife, she had never hidden from them that she missed them, she had always asked about the children's favorite sweets and games, about the lady's migraines and about the gentleman's zeal for riding, she had described to them an astounding tomcat with one white ear and one black ear capable of assisting her when she knitted and cooked, and she had confessed that the only bitter thing in her life was their dry, unending anger. All these thoughts had been written and rewritten steadfastly, because the man with the bushy mustaches and the woman with bluish-white cheeks, who together had bought her from a wretched village in the Rudnička region when she was only three years old, paying a pauper, Ivailo Duković, four sacks of potatoes, a cow with a full udder, fifteen bushels of flour, and a gold piaster, were like parents to her, while the little boy and girl had become her siblings, no different than her eight long-forgotten blood brothers and sisters. After the service, she took Joseph by the hand, clutched the child to her breast before he could be properly swaddled, and walked to the entrance of the church, coming to a stop before those people who had grieved her for so long. There by the oak door could be divined embraces, caresses, whispers, sighs, tearful voices. Standing apart from the women and children and clearing his throat, the baron invited the dentist to come play a game of chess and, since the heat of summer was not far off, to share a few glasses of that liqueur with three names, raki, ouzo, and mastika. One evening. Whenever he pleased. Later, in the churchyard with its white and red peonies, its daisies, and its thronging crows, surrounded by such a tranquility as can be found in Bucharest only at noon on Sundays, the Baron and Baroness Nikolić of Rudna showered the child with gifts. As if he were their own grandson.

  Ever since Miss Duković had consented to bear the name Strauss there had been, however, one discord between husband and wife, never acknowledged or commented upon, a muffled, enduring disagreement that showed no sign of diminishing. On the Sunday when she had first remained alone on the upper floor of the redbrick house, Elena had carefully examined the mountain landscape on the west-facing wall, she had stroked the bronze frame and the oil paint spread over the canvas, she had rummaged in the lumber room for long minutes, returned with a hammer and nail, climbed onto a stool, and carefully knocked the nail into the wall, moving the painting a hand's width lower and farther to the right. On his return, not right away, but only after dusk began to fall, Joseph noticed that the painting had shifted its position. He said not a word. He waited for her to go into the bedroom and returned the alpine landscape in muted colors to its former place, then followed her between the enticing sheets. Since then, in a silent ritual, each had been hanging the painting on his or her own nail, for half a day at a time. Uninterruptedly.

  On Lipscani Street a few hours after sunrise the bustle and din were so great that a man passing that way for the first time would have thrown up his hands in astonishment and most likely fled. Herr Strauss, however, had grown accustomed to the swarming townsfolk and thronging carts, barrows, carriages, and cabs, to the recalcitrant beasts of burden, to the cries of the vendors of kvass, pies, and yogurt, to the elbowing and shoving apprentices, to the swaggering journeymen and slippery-eyed merchants, to the thronged stores, to the ladies lingering in front of shop windows and the gentlemen's hats bobbing above the crowd, to the universal haste, and, above all, to the clouds of flies that would not be driven away by the commotion. He knew very well that in Bucharest he would never find a better spot for his occupation, and he knew equally well that all of those people would prefer to fritter their money away on anything rather than the health of their teeth. At the end of the summer, one Friday, as he was struggling to extract the residual stumps of a molar in his sunlit surgery, he had seen through the window a young woman with a small child clinging to her left hand and a cane in her right. She looked like one more of the hundreds of images that passed before his eyes every morning, and so he paid her no mind, heedful of the pincers and small chisel with which he was working, heaving away at the ruined tooth. Later, after he had washed himself with soap, taken his fee from the bald innkeeper, and recovered from his exertions, he noticed that the woman and her brat had not vanished from the window, but had drawn even closer, as if to shelter from the torrent of passers-by. Before calling a new patient inside, he was able to study them through the translucent curtain, especially since they did not seem to be in much of a hurry. She had a narrow waist, thin arms, and from beneath her yellow headscarf there fell a plait of chestnut hair. He felt a brief shudder, a kind of longing. He placed his hands on his hips, stood on tiptoes, and stretched his joints. He liked the sensation of ease that pervaded his body, and looking at the woman outside he imagined Elena baring her large, milk-laden breasts, offering them to him for kisses, not to the baby to sate its hunger. The child seemed to be a little boy, although he was wearing a girlish linen blouse that fell below his knees. His hair was rumpled like a bunch of hay, he might be two, but perhaps not, and judging from the whitish streaks around his mouth he had been eating halva. He supposed that they must be waiting for someone and that after walking for so long among the crowd they had grown faint and taken shelter by the window. Then, the next patient took his place in the blue velvet chair with one leg in the middle, a lieutenant of the cavalry with an abscess as big as a walnut on his gum. Concentrating on his scalpel, swabs, and the sac of pus, the dentist brushed h
is elbow against one of the uniform's epaulettes, disturbing the flawless braids and pips. To the accompaniment of muffled groans, stamping the floor with the heels of his boots, and suddenly rearing up like a cock, the officer found the strength to smooth the braids and buff the gold insignia with his fingertips. The doctor compared him in his mind (and soul) with a captain of dragoons from Berlin, who had developed an abscess nearly as large after the chill he had endured on a firing range. He thought with pity of Prince Karl, who had to rein in such an army, such a country, such tantrums. And especially now, when he was reportedly on the point of abdicating, at the end of a very long series of insults and tragicomedies, when the waters of Wallachian politics seemed muddier not only than the Dîmbovitza but all the other rivers and brooks in the land during the rainy season. Measured by how many raindrops fell from the clouds, the year 1870 had been one of drought, but measured by how much muddy water had been splashed about during speeches in the chambers, in the intrigues hatched by the parties, in the attacks published by the newspapers, in the endless quarrels, it might be said that from the outset the skies had opened and turned the earth into a mire. Joseph Strauss was a passionate reader of the newspapers, and, in a single minute—while the cavalry officer straightened his waistcoat and belt, wiped his lower lip with a handkerchief, brushed flecks off his white gloves, sought his wallet, and adjusted his cap—he had recalled how the minister of justice, Boerescu, had been forced to resign because he had had the temerity to propose an annual stipend of 300,000 lei for Elisabeta of Wied, the wife of the sovereign, how the radical liberals had been scandalized and stormed out of parliament on the appointment of Alexandru G. Golescu as prime minister, how that government of straw had come tumbling down in two months, making way for another, of windblown leaves, led by Manolache Epureanu, how Cuza, the erstwhile prince, although he had from his exile categorically declined candidacy as a deputy and then refused the mandate, had nonetheless been elected to the Fourth Congress, how The Romanian had railed against the prince, accusing him of wanting to repeal the constitution and rule despotically, how the same rag, on another occasion, suggested him as a model monarch to King Bernadotte of Sweden, how conspiracies and plans to dethrone him were sprouting like weeds in the shadows, how the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War had inflamed many politicians, providing them with an opportunity to insult the pureblood German prince, how the opposition had, even in excess of their Parisian-scented sympathies, conceived of the absurd demand that the United Principalities should abandon its neutrality through a general mobilization of the army. Finally, as the lieutenant bid him farewell, the dentist smiled, saluted him in military style, and asked whether he thought the events of August 8, in Ploesci, when a handful of men had occupied the prefecture and telegraph office and proclaimed a regency led by General Nicolae Golescu, had been a farcical revolution, a practical joke, a lamentable failure at a coup, a criminal act, a childish game (as Karl Ludwig had called it the following day), or the first, tentative sign of a powerful force hostile to the throne and, in particular, the man on it. But before the lieutenant could reply, or deliver his verdict on the trial in Tîrgovişte, at which rebels with illustrious names—Golescu, Brătianu, Candiano, Carada, Rosetti—were being tried by jury, Joseph had already invited the next patient into his surgery—a rather odd, middle-aged gentleman. He was complaining not of his teeth, but of a host of pustules that had appeared on his belly and back. To soothe him, while attempting to persuade him to visit an apothecary for medicines to suit his ailment, Joseph told him that Princess Elisabeth, too, soon after arriving in Romania, after the religious service at the Metropolia and the civil ceremony in the same place on an open-air dais, had come down with the measles. He was astonished to discover that the woman with the yellow headscarf and the tousle-haired little boy had not vanished, as he had believed for an hour, an hour and a half, but had merely moved farther to the left, out of the luminous rectangle of the window. As it was getting near lunchtime and no one else had arrived seeking treatment, he took off his physician's coat, washed thoroughly with soap, and rinsed himself at a basin. Out of habit and hunger, he was about to climb the stairs to the upper floor, but he changed his mind and opened the door to the street, remaining on the threshold. Soon, noticing him, the little boy grew embarrassed, thrust his chin into his chest, and seemed to tug his mother by the sleeve. By the way they were dressed and how much time they had wasted outside, Herr Strauss was sure that the woman was going to ask him to take pity on her and to cure her pain free of charge. It was not to be. She turned and gazed in his direction, past his shoulder, blinking slowly, very slowly, staring into space. She was blind. And not only that. It was the blind whore. Linca. He suddenly felt as if his legs had been cut from under him; he could not breathe. He supported himself against the doorframe, then hurried over to the woman and whispered something in her ear. The words of her answer were lost in the surrounding din, but Joseph did not wait for them; he led her forward, along the fronts of the buildings, hoping and praying that he had not been seen from the windows of the upper floor at number 18. Then he veered into şelari Street, stopped at a corner, drew air deeply through his nostrils, and was met with a scent compounded of roast mutton, fried fish, and warm bread. Hunger no longer stalked him, and the mad beating of his heart had abated. The woman and the little boy followed him. At every step she tested the pavement with the toes of her boots and her cane, and they almost toppled over each other when a lame dog ran in front of them out of nowhere. While they talked, Linca held him by the arm, so that she would have no doubt that he was there beside her and that all the words, spoken and unspoken, remained only between them. She showed him the boy, touching the crown of his head and his cheeks, and asked about that Dutch merchant who, forty months previously, months she had been counting, had been thrust into her bed. Herr Strauss shrugged, then realized that his gesture was not worth a penny, and so, pale as a sheet of paper, he said that he did not know anything, that from what he could recall, vaguely, the merchant had left Bucuresci in June or July 1867 and that for weeks on end before he vanished he had been talking of African rubies, which he was dreaming would make him rich. The woman smiled a crooked smile and informed him that the Dutchman had visited her plenty of other times, from May until that winter, always announcing his arrivals many hours or days beforehand, entering by the gate, crossing the graveled path, and hiding between her sheets in the dead of night, always asking that the old woman Mareta and the other girls not be at home, arriving and departing in a carriage that did not creak or rattle, with horses trained to move soundlessly like cats and not to snort or neigh. Now it was the dentist who, having grown dizzy, was leaning on the woman's arm. And she added that the old biddy had driven her out when her belly had begun to swell, because she had refused to drink green watermelon tea or boiled wine to induce a miscarriage. She also told him, without her voice quavering, that she needed to find the merchant and ask him for money. The hustle and bustle around the shops had died down somewhat, but Joseph, his mouth agape, did not notice. He took from his waistcoat pocket all the money he had earned in his surgery that Friday morning, and seeking her palm he placed the coins there, large and small, all in a heap. Linca thanked him, coughing and caressing the child's head emphatically.