The Days of the King (20 page)

As he left the square, with his horse bridled to a walk, Karl Ludwig gave a start. Among the thousands of faces, his eyes had met the eyes of Joseph Strauss. They were still hazel. He smiled at him and, looking at the woman pressed to his shoulder, he raised his hand to the peak of his cap.

 

Joseph and the prince did not speak until one year after that occasion, one year and three days, to be exact, when the darkness stretched like black water over the hills around Plevna, interrupted only by dwindling fires kindled from thistles, tree stumps, and cornstalks. Perhaps even then they would not have managed to talk at leisure, the two of them alone, if the prince, in his general's uniform and accompanied by a few adjutants, had not entered that afternoon the large, flimsy tent that served as a field hospital. Treading among the stretchers huddled on the ground, in the reek of blood, guts, and putrid puttees, beneath the groans and screams of the wounded, he espied the dentist at one of the operating tables, his
shirtsleeves rolled up, that very dentist who had been so knowledgeable about enchanted teas. And the dentist, now busy with anything but incisors, molars, and canines, was at that moment pouring half a bottle of plum brandy down the throat of a wan infantryman, whose right leg, shattered by shrapnel from a shell, was oozing pus and had turned as yellow as a honeycomb. The dentist wiped his face with a towel, asked the orderlies to tie down the terrified soldier, raised the bottle to his own lips and took a slug, selected a hacksaw, and by the light of a sputtering lamp began to cut above the knee, well above, almost below the hip. Leaning against a wooden post, watching, Carol heard, in the brief pauses between the howls, how the canvas of the tent whooshed in the wind. He grew dizzy, and, emerging for air, thought the whooshing was like the swift wing beats of a flock of wild ducks. In the sleet outside, not seventeen hours since the slaughter around Rahova, he lit a cigar, the hundredth, and pretended not to notice the colonel behind him, who was doubled up and clutching his stomach. He let him throw up undisturbed near a wild rose bush. He gazed up at the gray clouds, the crescent moon flags on the ramparts, the rows of trenches mired in mud, the slumbering cannons, and the shivering outlines of the horses. He heard whoops and the strains of an accordion coming from the Russian positions (and he knew that they had just shared out the vodka ration), and he shuffled his damp feet and thanked God that they were still there, in their boots. He felt the glow of his cigar warming him; he smoked and waited for the amputation in the tent to be finished. And when it was over, Herr Strauss appeared, wearing a crumpled tunic, with the epaulettes of a major, and a crooked belt. His cheeks were pallid, unshaven for a week, there were blue circles under his eyes, and his hair was disheveled. He tried to salute, but when his fingers reached his temples, he realized that he was not wearing his cap and so refrained. He looked at the prince in a strange way, as though he both did and did not see him, and his eyes were as misty as the dusk. He was quick to answer all the prince's questions, not in German but in Romanian, but he avoided details and intimacies. He said
no
when the matter of a fine powder, good for infusions and delight, came up, he said
yes
when he was invited to take a glass of cognac at a quarter to ten, he shrugged when he was offered an escort for the journey through the night, and, at last, as the officers in the retinue were getting ready to mount, he, too, asked a question, in a hoarse voice, namely whether the prince was happy at having conquered that wretched redoubt, Rahova.

 

That spring, there had gathered around Joseph, like moths to a flame, countless omens and occurrences presaging war, some known to him, others of which he was not aware. Elena, for example, had toiled for days on end to cut from cloth, stitch, and stuff with scrunched-up newspaper a little Turkish infantryman, no more than three feet tall, on which she traced a mouth with rouge and a nose, eyes, and eyebrows with charcoal, a soldier whom Sănducu daily stabbed with his sword, throttled in furious wrestling bouts, used as a target for his bow and arrows, and whacked over the head with the stick used for stirring maize porridge. That same month, April 1877, the crown council had been urgently convened. The Tsar's army had received permission to use the railroad to reach the front in the Balkans. General mobilization had been decreed, and a number of regiments had marched to the Danube. Bukharest found itself overrun by Russians, who seemed more numerous, more raucous, and more clinging than flies. The sultan's cannons had managed to bombard Braila, Cala-fat,
Bechet, and Oltenitza. The Romanian artillery, in response, had rained cannonballs on the fortresses on the other shore. On the penultimate day of the month, after protracted vacillation, the Chamber had declared, with 58 votes for, 29 against, and 5 abstentions, a state of war against the Sublime Porte. In the madness that gripped the city, the dentist and the barber, while frequenting taverns, strolling at the fall of twilight, and drinking schnapps on the upper floor of the redbrick house, kept trying to get to the bottom of a particular question. In a period when patriotism wafted through the air along with the poplar fluff, when in churches, by crossroads, and at balls money was being raised for the troops, when volunteers were being lured with all kinds of promises, and when Princess Elisabeth herself had been caught up in the fervor, abandoning her poetry to set up a corps of nurses, Joseph Strauss and Otto Huer kept asking themselves whether they, as Germans, had done enough for the Principalities when they arranged that at the intersection of Lipscani Street and Boiangiu Lane the country's second statue should be erected, a plump nymph with bared shoulders, symbolizing commerce. The barber, who had paid very dearly indeed to avoid being called up, had felt blessed by heaven when the cream of the Russian army was billeted at the nearby şerban Voda inn. His shop was besieged daily, because those men, some wearing white tunics with pistachio-colored braids, many in boots as polished as glass, could not imagine letting more than a few hours elapse without tidying and pomading their mustaches, without shaving, without straightening their sideburns, without adjusting their hair to their liking. Thanks to this good fortune and the money that had fallen into his lap out of the clear blue sky, Otto had hired three apprentices and had stationed on the street, under a shady canopy, three new chairs, equipped
with oval mirrors and small enameled basins. Herr Strauss might also have rejoiced in the new patients that had appeared overnight, but the easily earned rubles left him cold. He felt gloomy when he saw so many officers in his surgery with sturgeon bones embedded in their gums, with remnants of endive stuck between their teeth, and with breath sweetened by alcohol. To his mind they all bode ill, like owls. They conjured up misfortune and catastrophe. They reminded him of Elena's heavy silences, Elena who did not ask him to go off to war, but demanded it of him with her sighs. And they made him think of the army's small number of medics, a thought that gave him white hairs and forced him to acknowledge that before becoming a dentist he had been a doctor and knew how to wield a scalpel. In her silent insistence, his wife never ceased to teach him a complex science, that of love, without resorting to charts of the heavens, telescopes, or compasses, as in astronomy, but instead to the art of gazing at the floor, blinking, turning down the corners of her lips, dressing in haste and undressing in stealth, kissing him sparsely and wearily, sometimes wearing the dress he liked best, the swishing one with the low-cut neck and flounces, leaving newspapers open at the pages praising volunteers to the skies, sighing for the fate of vanquished Serbia, and humming songs about heroes while she cooked or ironed. Furthermore, one Sunday morning, under her downcast, white countenance, as white as cream in early May, Sănducu had appeared carrying the ruddy calfskin bag, and had asked Joseph to sprinkle liquors on the dead soldiers to bring them back to life. Joseph said nothing and promised nothing. He caressed the lad, took the bag, tested its weight in his palms as though on a pair of scales, examined the faint traces of the letter'S, placed it on top of the wardrobe, and thought of his mother and sister. In the evening, Otto Huer made light of the whole scene, laughing at the idea of going off to the front. But the dentist could no longer tolerate jokes, and Otto had to go home early, together with Ritza. After Prince Carol had somberly and rhythmically read the declaration of Romanian independence, on May 10th, eleven years to the day since his elevation to the throne, giving tavern keepers, against their better instincts, occasion to unstop barrels of their best wine, women to sob uncontrollably, urchins to yell and break the windows of the caravanserai, dogs to bark in chorus, and men to get dead drunk, Joseph had allowed one more Sunday to pass, and then placed himself at the disposal of Davila, the doctor and general who headed the army's medical corps. And in the middle of July, when the Russians no longer crowded into Otto Huer's barbershop, but were beyond the Danube, harried by the Ottomans and riddled with fly and mosquito bites, demanding assistance from the troops of Wallachia, the upholsterer who had once replaced the yellow velvet on the dentist's chairs in the winter of 1869 rummaged through his workshop, opened the lids of trunks, rubbed his chin, and gave his apprentices an unusual task. He made them take from the chests all the scraps of old material accumulated over a lifetime, cram them into sacks and take them to the edge of Bucuresci by cart, to the shredding machine with its presses and cutters. Soon, as a distant rumble wafted from the southern front, the psalms of Siegfried's youth, inscribed on pieces of yellow velvet, had been transformed into lint for the soldiers' wounds and were soaked with human blood.

The escort for Joseph Strauss arrived at half past nine, just as he was finishing off the stewed cabbage left over in his mess tin from lunch. He dusted himself down, smoothed his uniform, put on a large cape and set off alongside the two elite cavalrymen with rifles slung over their shoulders. They proceeded
behind the trenches and earthworks and skirted the huge corral in which the cavalry horses were snuffling. The doctor thought for a moment of the blind woman and how the world must seem to her like a miry cave. They went around the back of a copse and stopped when a sentinel cried out at the top of his lungs and cocked his rifle. Then one of the cavalrymen pronounced a comical password, which sounded like the name of a fowl, and they disappeared behind a hillock and into a vineyard, out of the range of Turkish shells. At the next sentry's cry, they stood still in the cold, viscous darkness, in which not a star was visible. From a building with lights burning in the windows, surrounded by tall trees, which must have been poplars, a man with a torch emerged and approached them. It was a lieutenant, perhaps a clerk or secretary, who gave Joseph a textbook salute. The cavalrymen who had escorted him vanished in the direction of some gray outbuildings, and the two officers headed toward the small manor house. On the veranda, Major Strauss was greeted by a short infantryman without a cap, who set about cleaning his boots with the dexterity of a shoeshine boy. Once inside, in the empty hallway, he was asked to take a seat. After ten minutes, he rose to his feet, stood to attention as best he could, and studied the generals and colonels who were leaving the conference chamber. When the voices giving orders had died away and the rumble of the horses' hooves had faded into the distance, the prince appeared and invited him into another room. They sat in wicker armchairs, eight years and three months since their last meeting (or ninety-nine months, according to the dentist's reckoning). At first, they were silent, they cleaned their pipes, filled them with tobacco, lit them, looked at the bare walls, one of them coughed and the other ran his fingers through his hair, they clinked glasses, they each took
a sip of cognac and rolled the warm liquid around the insides of their cheeks, and then the prince, as always before, poured out the things that were most on his mind: he told of troop movements plotted on charts by the general staff, hinting at the vanities and rivalries of the high-ranking officers, he spoke of morale, placing soldiers, horses, and cannons on an equal footing, each with their own requirements, for warm clothes and cartridges, for horseshoes and fodder, for cannonballs and gunpowder, he showed concern about the impending winter and the patience of Osman Pasha, who tolerated the interminable siege and would not emerge to counterattack, he alluded to his old dreams with regard to independence, trains, and a dynasty, and at this point, Joseph suddenly interrupted him and began describing his son, Alexandru. It seemed pointless to him to bring up the other son, Petre. His hazel eyes looked deeply into the blue eyes of Karl Ludwig, but he found only puzzlement and new dreams, nothing of the shadows of the past. It was midnight when the prince, sitting by the warm stove, unbuttoned his tunic and felt the need to take off his boots. He rang a little bell and the short infantryman entered with a basin in his left hand, a jug of hot water in his right, and a towel over his shoulder. He carefully pulled off his master's boots, removed the damp socks, rolled up his trouser legs, and washed his feet, soaping them twice. Then he brought some checked slippers, bowed, and left with the boots under his arm, ready to grease and buff them, for they would have to be worn again at dawn by the sleepless man with the bushy beard, the commander of all the Romanian and Russian regiments that encircled Plevna. Carol poured more brandy, stretched out in his armchair, and, his hands interlocked behind his neck, he enquired whether the reserves of lint and bandages were sufficient, whether he, Joseph, could bear to see so many men maimed and dying, whether he managed to sleep, and whether he thought that the Turks' tasseled fezzes brought them luck, in addition to their bellicosity, their stratagems, the logic of battles, and the seasons. At last, after much gloomy talk, the prince yawned deeply, and Herr Strauss made a single request. He wanted a letter to arrive in Bucuresci, without fail, at number 18, Lipscani Street, not like the letters before it, which had been scattered to the winds.