The Days of the King

by Filip Florian

  ***

  Sultan Abdülaziz displayed an unwonted benevolence at the beginning of autumn. Up until then, without being a raging dragon, but rather a padishah astonished and intrigued by events in his northern territories, he had breathed scalding vapors over the Principalities, intensifying the sweltering heat. That breeze had brought with it twenty thousand troops of Turkish infantry, assembled at Rusçuk and ready to cross the Danube on the orders of Omer Pasha. And in the summer (and what a summer!), seeking a smattering of coolness in his new homeland, Carol I had put the army on a war footing, flattered the pride of the national guard on the occasion of the disturbances provoked by the debate of the Jewish question, and abandoned his sumptuous Biedermeier bed, to be found in the little palace on Podul Mogoşoaiei, for one narrower and harder, in the shady residence on Cotroceni Hill. His inspection of the troops and fortifications had left him with a bitter taste, because he had encountered soldiers poorly equipped and devoid of elementary discipline, derisory stocks of cartridges, gunpowder sufficient only to dust the bottom of the sack, horses gaunt and scarce, ramshackle lines of trenches. Now daily wearing the uniform of a general with gold braid and buttons, having renounced that of a captain, the sovereign had also learned alarming details from the report of the minister of war. The rifles purchased in recent years had proved largely defective, the storerooms were bare, new and costly barracks, such as those at Braila, Galatzi, and Jassy, were in a ruinous condition, the gunpowder factory was rudimentary and unproductive, large sums were being squandered on officers' quarters, and the foundry at Tîrgovişte turned out faulty cannons that were many times more expensive than those imported from the West. There was another figure, too. A gloomy one. Eight thousand. This was how many men that vaudeville army could muster. And the more he came to know places and facts, the more the prince began to discover the muddle and languor in the ministries, the impracticable roads, the impoverished schools and hospitals, the looting and embezzlement in the prefectures, police, and other institutions, how few gas lamps there were in the streets of Bucharest and how many miasmas, the rumors, the string-pulling, and rival camps in politics, the villages like deserted hamlets and the city outskirts like boggy villages, pleasant strolls along the Avenue, the coquettish Cişmigiu Park, where the hand and the skill of a German landscape gardener could be divined, the indolence and dirty tricks of the courts, the tedious evenings at the theatre, a modestly sized and dimly lit auditorium, the thistles in the fields, the dusty market towns, the prisons brimming with the guilty and the not guilty, the resplendent gowns and jewels of the ladies, the cholera that stalked the land like a succubus (and the succubi, in that land, wreaked havoc), the tranquil monasteries of the Wallachian plain, and the splendor of certain landed estates, such as that of the Metropolitan Nifon at Letca. A man by no means tall, with blue eyes, a hooked nose (aquiline, according to some), thick eyebrows, a closely trimmed beard, and beveled cheeks, Karl Ludwig knew very well that neither the state's functionaries nor its soldiers had received their wages since spring. And in the report of the minister of finance, presented to the Assembly, he had circled the following brief passage in red ink:

  ...all the official pay offices are empty and the treasury is liable for payment of a fluctuating debt of 55,761,842 piasters; according to a precise calculation, the year 1866 will close with a deficit of 51,956,000...

  In the unrelenting heat, that sentence, the crisis in general, and his Prussian blood prompted him to halve the wages of state employees for a period of six months, decrease pensions, introduce new taxes, and increase the old ones. He was cursed, slandered, reviled, vilified loudly on every street corner, but he swallowed it with stoicism, although he was saddened and the rings around his eyes grew darker. The Great Powers had not acknowledged him as ruler, locusts and secessionist ideas were swarming over Moldavia, Cuza's cronies, stirred up by Florescu and Marghiloman, were hatching dark schemes elbow to elbow with the Austrian and Russian consuls, the French military mission was like a wasps' nest readying its furtive sting, in spite of the good intentions of d'Avril, the consul general, while Moustier, Napoleon III's ambassador to the Sublime Porte, seemed to be acting on instructions from General Ignatieff, the tsar's representative. In one of his frequent letters to Hortense Cornu, his protector in Paris, Carol set down on paper, while sipping wine at around midnight, when he could breathe more easily, the following:

  ...this is a land of intrigues, the enemies of order do everything possible to foment unrest. The most dangerous are the Bibescu family, who send secret reports to Drouyn de Lhuys. They behave toward me in the most inappropriate manner and constantly spread slanders. N. Bibescu was saying the other day in company that it is wonderful that Prince Carol has had his photograph taken, because it will be the only thing that will be preserved of him. And the French mission always takes his side ... The article in Revue des Deux Mondes, where it is said that I am a deserter, was published by the Bibescus and the mission. Given that they are French subjects, the emperor would do a favor to the country and myself were he to recall them.

  And as ever, that lady replied to him loyally and affectionately, honestly and providentially, with the supple ability of one who works behind the scenes, one knowledgeable about the details that guide worldly affairs.

  In the hundreds and hundreds of lines he read, the former captain of the dragoons shuddered at many, in the mornings, on the sofa of his office, as he smoked and drank coffee with cream, as he opened his correspondence and came up against the convulsions of the canicular heat. Once he found himself laughing aloud at this formulation: "I know that King Leopold has cited you as an example of a constitutional prince, but your Romanians are not Belgians." On another occasion, he felt himself suddenly breaking into a sweat on reading a paragraph that went, "the French government looks poorly on the fact that Mr. Brătianu has acquired such obvious sway over you and your ministers. In 1852, at a time when he was in contact with Mazzini and Ledru Rollin, Brătianu was involved in a conspiracy against the life of Napoleon III. I do not condemn him for what he once was, but now his omnipotence particularly chills your relations with the people here. I never imagined that you would allow Mr. Brătianu to rule in your stead, as someone has related to me." In another letter from Madame Cornu, the prince encountered a scintillating statement, like a flaring match, which caused him to light yet another cigarette, in excess of his usual morning ration. It went like this: "It is said that nothing is being done over there, that everything is up in the air, that the recently decreed requisitions have given rise to scandalous thefts on the part of the authorities and that these go unpunished. Corruption is the cancer eating away at the nation. You must extirpate it vigorously." But since the water there flowed under the bridges not of the Seine but the shallow and fetid Dímbovitza, the prince turned his mind to other matters, leaving the tumor to be excised later. At the end of June, two days after he had stroked with his fingertips and rolled in his palms his beloved lead soldier (received unexpectedly from Maria, via that pale and bewildered dentist), he saw the constitution adopted by parliament, in a stifling atmosphere, as ninety-one fans or newspapers used as fans were raised toward the ceiling of the auditorium, validating with a large majority, in fact unanimously, a law that was in fact the mother of all laws, that consecrated the hereditary in place of the elective monarchy, freedom of conscience, education, opinion, and speech, the right to assembly and association, the inviolability of the person and the home, private correspondence and private property, the indivisible nature of the state, the principles of national sovereignty, representative government and separation of powers, and qualified suffrage. He had hastened to swear a new oath to sanction and promulgate the newborn constitution, and at the close of those hours, to deliver a not particularly ardent speech, a text he had drafted with a cool head, determined not to inflame his audience. Nobody knew (or, if anyone did know, they were few, discreet, and God-fearing) that at the moment when the constitution, silent and smiling,
was emerging from the press into the light of day, the ruler's younger brother, Prince Anton von Hohenzollern, sublieutenant in the First Regimental Guard of Prussia, was about to die. He had been wounded in the offensive at Rossberitz, where three bullets had stopped him from leading his platoon's charge, smashed his legs and left him to be taken prisoner shortly thereafter, without, however, snatching from his eyes the gleam (of victory?) or the strength to smile (wanly) when Crown Prince Friedrich in person espied him on a cart for the moribund and shook his hand. He was wrapped in a canvas sheet sticky with blood from the waist down. Two weeks later, when Anton, wearing on his chest the medal bestowed upon him by King Wilhelm, found himself simultaneously at the gates of heaven and beneath a layer of clayey earth, Karl Ludwig revoked the council of ministers, renouncing temporarily, and with bitterness, the services of Brătianu and Rosetti, and, with satisfaction, those of Prime Minister Catargiu, who in a sweltering and blasé Bucuresci was held to be an intriguer, allied with the former prefect of the police and the Bibescu brothers. He then allowed things to flow on in their customary Turkish style, for this was what was needed. In September, with Ghika at the head of the government, he managed to award the Strousberg railroad concession to some deputies who could picture the train snaking and whistling over their landed estates, a business affair that stretched over ninety years and 915 kilometers, departing from Vîrciorova, passing through Turnu Severin, Filiaş, Craiova, and Piteşti, arriving in Bucuresci and continuing through Ploiesci, Buzau, Braila, Galatzi, and Tecuci, as far as Roman. The project also included the Tecuci-Bîrlad line as a robust, northern appendix, it alone as large as the southern Barkley concession, born exactly one year previously, under Cuza, for the construction of the railroad between Bucuresci and Giurgiu. As for the former Bey of Samos, a man accustomed to the tides and the vices of the Bosporus, to words spoken and unspoken (floating in midair, suspended in the smoke of the hookahs, opaque, sometimes as sharp as a khanjar), he hovered like a bird through the torpor of summer, he petitioned the grand vizier and engaged in convoluted diplomatic maneuvers, sufficient to be lucrative but not irksome, and he slipped into the text of the new princely firman (which had been kneaded and was now rising like cozonac) stipulations such as had never been read or, perhaps, conceived of before. The Sublime Porte recognized the new dynasty and the constitution, granted the young ruler the right to strike coins, and permitted him to increase the strength of his army to a limit of 30,000 men, a threshold neither too high nor too low, but which meant, by virtue of arithmetic, almost four times as many soldiers and officers as existed at the time. And although in that document the United Principalities were termed "an integral part of the Ottoman Empire," vassalage was somehow softened or sweetened by a trifling clarification: " within the limits fixed by the concessions and the Treaty of Paris."

  Throughout these events, the prince's wisdom teeth had been niggling, nasty, heartless. And when one of them, out of the blue, took it upon itself to pierce the prince's gums midway through his twenty-eighth year, to sprout on the very eve of his departure for Constantinople, where he was to receive the firman of his election and praise the sultan to the skies, to mince his nerves as finely as the meat in a moussaka or the walnuts in baklava, to lead his patience away into barren wastes, and to scatter his sleep over the carpet, when things had come to such a pass, the fact of the matter was that the wisdom tooth was raw in its cruelty. Raw in the full strength and sense of the word. Firstly because the tip of Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig's tongue, feeling the jagged skin, met only a minuscule, rounded bone, as big as a raw grain of rice. Then, because the prince wished not to have raw nerves, but to be calm, lucid, and detached on that journey upon which so many lines and outlines of the future depended. He did not succeed, it goes without saying. He was groggy, exhausted, and overexcited, at the end of a night in which he tossed and turned ceaselessly, opened and closed the window countless times, gargled a liqueur of bitter cherries, drained cups of tea, strove in vain to read or to write to his father, applied cold compresses, then hot compresses, began a chess game against himself, massaged his temples and conceded the first moves, yawned, paced, stretched out in a chair and leapt to his feet once more, took a few spoonfuls of honey, and, at the break of dawn, as a coffee-colored streak fringed the edge of the sky, sent for Herr Strauss, the dentist, his only savior. Urgently summoned by a small cavalry escort on galloping horses, Joseph consented immediately to pack his bags and join the retinue that was to accompany the prince to Istanbul. Later that morning, a long and gleaming file of carriages became rather bogged down on the city's southernmost streets, then wound its way through the stale odors of the outlying slums and the coolness of that ninth day of October, before raising a thick cloud of dust over the plain, a huge cloud that looked like a bushy tail. They startled dogs, starlings, and gophers, and left gap-toothed old biddies open-mouthed, infants champing their lips (in search of the teat), men staring in amazement, and women adjusting their headscarves. It drizzled on the approach to the Danube, to make the point that it was autumn, and the carriages, assembling in four rows, crossed the river by ferry, effortlessly, smoothly, because the whirlpools and currents had abated after such a long drought. Given the cold breeze during the crossing, Carol had chosen not to go on deck. He gazed through the porthole, alert and tense, reclining on cushions covered in cashmere, leaning his chin on his left palm, his right hand clutching his head. He was awestruck by the multitude of flies and midges that swarmed around the horses. In the distance he glimpsed a minaret, gray at first, then milky white as the sun pierced the clouds. He examined the walls of the fortress of Rusçuk, the towers and the lookout posts, the battlements and redoubts, the large pennants, with their undulating golden crescent moons. With his barracks background and incurable passion for order, he could not help admiring the formation in which the troops were drawn up to pay him honor. On the riverbank, near the wharf, he was greeted with a doubtful, barely perceptible smile, a smile that might not have been a smile, but which he, the prince, knew very well could not be anything else. Omer Pasha proved gallant, squandering the long and ardent minutes of lunch in praising, through an interpreter, the precision of Prussian cannons. When at last the detachment of soldiers pressed their weapons to their chests and gave the salute, Karl Ludwig felt his throbbing gums erupt, as if the point of one of those slender bayonets had skewered his cheek. Somewhere to the rear, behind the generals, politicians, ministers, advisers, secretaries, and so many others, a muffled thud was heard. A thin, chestnut-haired man with well-ironed clothes had dropped the bag he was holding. It looked like a doctor's bag. Truth to tell, Joseph Strauss had never heard anyone emit such a terrible yowl of pain.

  To Varna they were conveyed on a short and motley train, with a red carriage immediately behind the locomotive, like a salon on wheels, with all the trappings of luxury, a blue carriage in the middle, with broad, restful couchettes, and a green one at the end, used for regular journeys. For six and a half hours—perhaps longer, until one and all they glimpsed the sea, gleaming in the pale dusk, somnolent and boundless—each member of that numerous retinue kept to his allotted place, without transgressing rank or role. As for the dentist, with a notebook in his lap, an inkpot in his left hand, and a pen in his right, he had taken advantage of the company of a garrulous and tic-ridden cook to jot down a large number of recipes, in particular ones for game, fish, and lamb. Even though he understood only a part of the chatter of the lanky man beside him, who had a twitch in his shoulder, blinked incessantly, and accompanied each detail about food preparation with fluttering fingers, Herr Strauss thought gratefully of young, jug-eared Martin Stolz, with his thin mustache and skillful Romanian lessons. He did not, however, know the words for something essential in the language, the names of the condiments, and so he had patiently tried to elicit them, in that train advancing over hills and through forests, tilled fields, pumpkin patches, hay meadows, and vineyards, now crawling through oriental-looking towns, now
hurtling past isolated houses, villages, and flocks. Onerously, he managed, amid a welter of words and a flurry of gestures, to discover the words for pepper ( piper), mint (mentă), paprika (boia), garlic (usturoi), rosemary (rozmarin), poppy seed (mac), and tarragon (tarhon). They had got as far as lovage (leuştan), boredom, and the impossibility of matching up in German all the aromatic herbs and seeds of Romania, when Joseph was summoned to the first carriage, the red one, where Prince Carol, anticipating the moment when he would acquire, peruse, and decipher that enchanted document (which must have looked like any other document but which would, at last, bestow upon him genuinely sovereign powers), was pacing like a caged wolf, oblivious not only to the landscape and people, but also to his own attire. The top three buttons of the prince's waistcoat were undone, his belt was loose, the buckle drooping by his hip, and he was wearing lilac slippers with curved, pointed toes and silk tassels, while his immaculate black boots awaited him under a coffee table. They remained alone together for a while. The prince was walking from one end of the room to the other, his head slightly bowed, his paces measured and equal in cadence, nineteen paces forward and nineteen paces back. He always turned on the sole of his right foot. Nineteen paces to the southeast and nineteen paces to the northwest. All of a sudden he stretched out on the narrow couch, for such was now his whim, and lay with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. And upon the arching ceiling was emblazoned a silver crescent moon, framed by meticulously engraved and painted chains, lines, and spirals, as if the red car gliding down the iron rails of the Ottoman Empire might at any moment have transformed itself by the mercy of Allah into a small, mobile mosque. The dentist rummaged among his flacons, powders, and instruments, and selected a curved pair of tweezers, lint, medicinal spirit, and extract of celandine. In a few minutes, he managed to lull the prince's wisdom tooth to sleep, or at least he persuaded it to doze. He was getting ready to withdraw, but Karl Ludwig, who according to some had an aquiline profile (and perhaps he did, but not then, lying on the couch groggy and perspiring, with deep bags under his eyes), begged him not to leave. They examined together one of the lilac slippers, they discussed at length and in German its shapes and details, they presumed many things and strove to imagine even more, until the slipper, with its curved, pointed toe and silk tassel ceased to be a mere slipper and became an embodiment of the world that Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig had entered five months previously, a world in which he often wondered what he was looking for, in which he was sometimes astonished to find himself. Herr Strauss, meditating on the fate of the prince and that land of plentiful goose liver, of more barrels of wine than beer, of charlatans and cereals, of tumult and tobacco, permitted himself to offer the not at all reassuring advice that he should keep his poise, his determination, and his throne. Carol cleared his throat, shook Joseph's hand with unwonted firmness, and asked (he did not command) that the dentist find an appropriate (and blessed) remedy for his tooth prior to his appearance before the sultan. After they parted, Joseph found himself in a quandary; he had left on the other side of the upholstered door a man agitated, exhausted, and fearful. In the rear car, with its second-class insignia and rhythms, the cook was snoring gently, his brow resting on the windowpane and his shoulder still twitching. They had not yet come to any agreement about whether leuştan was lovage, but the hours and the days had not yet run out.