The Days of the King (7 page)

In the kitchen, on the top shelf of the sideboard, there were other scratches. Those notches in the wood, which were to fill with dust but never fade, read in translation something like this:

What wonder, and what fortune, and how all things followed upon one another, and now more than ever would it seem rich to die
The rustling has not faded, I see it, it is the mist that floats through the room
The moonlight lolls on the floorboards, I hearken, it quivers like Manastamirflorinda
The droplets of sadness, I smell them, they wax large and ruddy, they are the very flecks in her fur.

The German Christmas came, dismal and damp, with days not cold enough for the sleet to turn to snow. And on one such day, luminous only in things holy, boots sank into muddy puddles and hurried carriages splashed capes with splatters of brown. Time was measured in different ways in Bucuresci, and this year the Catholic Christmas Eve, when wet, skinny dogs had been lured to the Lipscani quarter by the scent of roast goose, baked carp,
cozonac,
and gingerbread, coincided, in the Julian calendar, with the feast of Saint Spyridon, which maddened the cats, for it fell in the fifth week of the Orthodox fast, bringing a dispensation to eat fish. And so it came about, when December 24 and December 12 were one and the same day, that the different calendars, one Western and the other Eastern, one Papist and Protestant, the other Orthodox, were at peace as never before. The two separate holy days did not merge into one common feast, but at least the shutters of all the shops remained closed. As a good Catholic, Joseph Strauss, the dentist, whose surgery was, it goes without saying, closed, said his prayers, and then leaned on the sill of an upper-floor window to gaze at the clouds, crows, gray roofs, and the smoke that rose from the chimneys and dissolved to the north. He nibbled on a sweet-cheese strudel, feeling languid from the heat of the stoves and the tidiness that the woman who came to do the cleaning, infirm as she was, had managed to instill in his bachelor rooms. In the six months he had been living there, he had learned sounds and distances, details and echoes, so that the first bell he recognized, in the cold drizzle of that morning (not quite sleet, not quite hail), was that of the church at the end of Podul Mogoşoaiei, joyfully chiming to announce the feast of its patron. And because all things can be divided into old and new, not only calendars, shoes, reigns, maids, potatoes, and mistresses, immediately after the soft, delicate chimes from the old Church of Saint Spyridon there resounded the long, booming clangs of the new Church of Saint Spyridon, at the foot of Metropolia Hill, where the celebration was officiated with greater pomp. Then, one after the other, each of the bells of the city began to chime, until they were all ringing in unison, summoning folk to the liturgy and love of God, a reminder that in that land the Orthodox faith was strong and the founders of churches who dreamed of forgiveness for their sins were countless. Unawares, Herr Strauss murmured something hard to make out, a passage from the
Dominus dixit ad me,
and out of the blue, or out of the damp gray sky, he glimpsed another Joseph, thinner, shorter, with a shrill voice and flushed face, in the balcony of the Sankt-Hedwigs-Kathedrale on Bebelplatz, in the third row of the choir. For a few moments the doctor once more inhabited the child's body. And he was happy. Then, still with the strudel in his hand, his upper lip dusted with icing sugar, he listened to the majestic voices of the humming and vibrating brass. His thoughts were borne off on the wind, southward, past the churches of Saint Anthony the Great, Saint Demetrios, and Saint John the New, they skirted Stavropoleos Monastery, by the banks of the dirty, sluggish river they met the spires of the Dormition of the Mother of God, of the Holy Apostles and Princess Bălaşa, they found, on the right hand and the left hand of the Metropolia, Antim Monastery, Mihai Voda Monastery, and the Nuns' Hermitage (where he had bought a carpet in September), and the churches of Saint Nicholas Vlădica, Slobozia, and Saint Catherine. Climbing to the east, as if his ears were following a course opposite that of the sun, he wandered in his mind to Saint Venera, Saint Mina, Old Saint George, Răsvani, and New Saint George. Soon he veered northward and smiled to realize that in the part of the city that corresponded to the cardinal point cursed with cold and shadow, the names of laymen and things were favored for churches above those of the saints: ColŢei ("pitchfork"), Scaune ("thrones"), Kalinderu ("calendar"), Batiştei ("courtyard"), Sărindar, Enei, Kretzulescu, Doamnei, and, only after that, Saint Nicholas Şelari ("saddlers"), Saint Sava, and Saint Nicholas dintr-o Zi. From the west, where the circle imagined by Joseph Strauss came to an end, there came only two series of chimes, one hollow, the other honeyed, from Saint John the Great and from Zlătari ("goldsmiths"). Then the bells fell silent, each according to its tongue, but only after the Unclean One had been driven from every place. In the damp air the silence was consummate, though raindrops were pattering upon the sill and Siegfried was growling in his sleep, dreaming of hounds, hostile tomcats, and rats. Joseph had finished munching the last morsel of strudel, and now he sank into an armchair and began to read Apuleius'
Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass,
sipping a glass of cider. Gradually absorbed by the misadventures of the young Lucius, he forgot the packed churches redolent of incense, whose number was known only to a few, perhaps only to certain priests and tax collectors. As he smoked a quincewood pipe, he was not thinking about how everywhere in that sprawling city, as far as the barriers toward the open plain, sermons were praising Saint Spyridon, Bishop of Trimythous, who had changed a snake into gold pieces, who had called forth rain in the midst of drought, and who, raising from the dead two horses with severed heads, found that he had attached the white head to the dun horse and the dun head to the white horse.

Later that gloomy afternoon, the dentist tried to sleep, but tossed restlessly under the sheets, his eyes closed. Faces, phantasms, gestures, events, appearances, and deeds came all in a welter, without connection or logic, each enveloping him in turn, tender or paroxysmal, then vanishing as mysteriously as they had arisen. He had barely twisted onto his side and settled the pillow under his right cheek when he remembered the fantasy he had had in April in Berlin, in which beautiful women and impatient crowds waited at his door for him to quell their aching teeth. He had a few patients, some regular, some occasional, but he had understood from the outset that one of the local vices was that people did not care if they were gap-toothed. They did not brush their teeth, they ate as best they could, and they hastened to have bad teeth pulled. They pulled their teeth themselves, having first steeped them in plum brandy,
mastika,
rye brandy, and raki, or they went to barbers who wielded chisels and large pincers, whom they called toothsters. Such customs left Joseph with a bitterness in his mouth, one he could taste even then, in bed. He turned over onto his tummy and lost himself in a late autumnal landscape. Once again he saw a gray rabbit bound from behind the bushes and run zigzagging over a ploughed field, cleaving the fine mist, then suddenly encountering a bullet from the gun of Peter Bykow the baker and spinning over the clods of black earth. A dog fetched it, and Peter wrapped it in burdock leaves and crammed it into his pouch, alongside another four. On the Ciumernicu estate where they had hunted in the whitish light of dawn, queer shapes
and outlines loomed, colored like the cold. The two Germans, one with a scarf and fur-lined cap, the other with a rifle slung over his shoulder, had come to a stop on the Wallachian plain, at the edge of a village of Bulgarians, and were gazing at a stocky, bald man wearing priestly garb, who was piling thick layers of straw onto some vine stocks. He was working slowly, with a pitchfork. He greeted them in Slavonic and Latin, then Romanian, mentioned his name in passing, and, in that mixture of languages, confessed that he was fearful of the frost, the angels' anger, and the darkness. He left his horse hobbled on the stubble field and led them to some low-roofed houses, beyond which lay the manor of the boyar Condurat. On the way, Necula Penov, the priest, talked continuously (pausing only to cough): about how the pumpkins grow, how for eleven years he had held services in a sheepfold, how they planted peppers and cauliflowers, how he administered the sacraments, how he scared away the crows, how he arranged christenings, and how, day after day, he confidently awaited a letter from the magnanimous and kind Pius IX, in reply to the one hundred and seventy-six epistles he had sent to the Vatican. At a crossroads shaded by tall poplars, the two hunters, a dentist and a baker, subjects of that same Pope, discovered to their astonishment that the ramshackle structure before them, with an iron cross on the peak of its roof, bore a blessed name: the Virgin Mary Queen of the Holy Rosary. It was a church of planks and earth, clad with reeds, Catholic in accordance with the desire of those peasants who had arrived from south of the Danube in 1828, during times of war. In his warm room, Herr Strauss also glimpsed the churchyard, swarming with sparrows as if there were grains of millet strewn throughout the grass. In the end, he did not find the path that led to sleep, and so, enervated, he
emerged from between the sheets as the light outside was beginning to fade. He heated some water, readied his razor, shaving brush, soap, two towels, and clean linen. He washed thoroughly and shaved with care, meeting his hazel eyes in the mirror, eyes free of sadness and worry. When he went out the front door, he was wearing a gray coat, hat, and galoshes, and the hour hand of the pendulum clock rested halfway between five and six. Beneath the drizzle, Lipscani Street resembled a river, along whose course calmly flowed not water (puddles and pools), but people. Joseph walked side by side with the others, warmed by the throng. He heard snatches of conversation, replies, stray whispers, many in German, but plenty in Italian, Hungarian, and Polish, and even the laughter of some young ladies, whom he avoided. At one point, the river split into two branches, one swerving strangely uphill, as no river can do, toward the Lutheran church, the other flowing onward, down a gentle slope. And outside the walls of the Catholic Church there had gathered so many souls that for a few moments he could hardly believe his eyes. He found a place to one side of the door, out of the way of those who were still arriving. He climbed onto a heap of coal and looked out, scanning the fresh darkness. Amid the wet capes, umbrellas, and cloaks, he descried the profile of Mathilde Vogel, now cured of the chicken pox. At that distance he could not make out much, but it appeared to him that her cheeks were rosy and her chestnut curls were touching her earlobe. He wondered whether it was worth pushing his way through the crowd, whether the cold raindrops bathed her or bothered her, whether her boots were dry, whether her calves were quivering and puckering. He was thinking of many things and standing motionless when the first bell chimed loudly, the largest bell, donated to that church, Sancta Maria Gratiarum (Holy Mary Mother of Grace), by none other than Franz Josef, the emperor in Vienna. Soon, in the white tower, the smaller bells also began to ring, bells fashioned at the behest of the august sovereign Archduke Franz Karl and Princess Sophie, bidding peace between couples and contraries, and after them, the smallest bell, a gift from Maximilian, brother of the Austrian emperor and an emperor in his own right, at the other end of the world, in Mexico. The chimes heralding Christmas Eve pierced the clouds above Bucharest and, the dentist thought, dissolved in the glassy firmament, rising to the stars. Also there rose the music from the beginning of the Liturgy of Angels,
Filius meus es tu, ego hodie genui te,
and the chords of the organ struck the windows of the cathedral, then trickled through the wide-open doors, touched the bowed heads of the crowd, kindling voices and hearts, and in a corner of the churchyard, by the gate, tears gleamed on the face of Herr Strauss. Together with the others he intoned
Laetentur Caeli
and
Tecum principium,
plunging with his spirited voice into the spell of psalms 95 and 109, and at the end of the service when the calm river began to flow backward, from the Catholic Church to the congregation's houses, he strove to meet up with Mathilde, but glimpsed neither her nor her brother, Jakob Vogel the optician. So he stopped off at his own house instead, helped Siegfried to climb into his wicker basket, and carrying him on his right arm, he headed toward the home of his friend Otto Huer. They all sang in chorus, and even Siegfried purred along, by the stove. They drank raki and wine, they feasted on countless dishes, above all that steaming wonder,
die Weihnachtsgans,
roast goose. They remembered the old, the sick, and the poor, and even the ravenous stray dogs, for whom they filled two pots with bones. And they prayed for them all.

A carriage had waited in front of the redbrick building, Number 18 Lipscani, for an hour and a half. A lieutenant of the guard, with sideburns, had orders to hand the dentist a note. It was from the prince, inviting him to the palace for tea by the Christmas tree in the library.

In the Yuletide atmosphere, spending Christmas for the first time far from his family, Prince Carol had announced during the course of the evening that he was not feeling well, and had withdrawn to his office, refusing all company. For hours on end, without rising from his desk, he set down on paper, in five versions, many of the things that had burdened him in recent months. With varying degrees of intimacy, occasionally sipping a bitter cherry liqueur, he wrote in turn to his father, mother, sister, and brothers, adjusting tone and nuances to the face and personality of each addressee in mind. Events were compressed or detailed; descriptions that were cold in one letter grew impassioned in another. He placed the emphasis now on politics and affairs of state, now on feelings and sorrows. Sometimes he revealed himself to be strong, poised, and optimistic, sometimes he bemoaned his fate and gave free rein to his doubts. And in all the different versions of his brief history as monarch, one each for Karl Anton, Josephina, Leopold, Friedrich, and Marie, he referred to the large Oppenheim loan, the finishing touches to which had been made in Paris after his confirmation by the Sublime Porte, a lifesaving transaction that quelled the protests of officers and functionaries, even if it did involve the repayment of 32 million francs over twenty-three years, on a principal of just 18.5 million. Then he related how the elections to the two chambers of parliament in November had been not only an occasion for brawls, abuses, and manipulations but also depressing in their outcome, which had left the govemment without serious support. Likewise, in disappointed terms he described the first palace ball, held at his own personal expense, an act of normality and decency in his opinion, but also a target for vile attacks, on the grounds that he had squandered the country's money in a period of grinding poverty. Finally, long after nightfall, when the loneliness had become oppressive, the prince felt a need to chat and to forget. Smoking a cigarette, he thought of that intelligent, warm, discreet man, Joseph Strauss the Berliner, and of his miraculous tea, which inspired dreams and indolence. At around midnight, however, he was informed by an officer that the dentist was not to be found.