The Days of the King

by Filip Florian

  For a while, the fates proved generous to Joseph Strauss. And adroit. At lunch after his consultation with his five patients, while he was absorbed in a piping-hot plate of cockerel borscht, they gave him the idea and, undoubtedly, they inspired in him the courage, to declare that the nanny's gums were ailing. He was met with an astonished look from the head of the table, where the master of the manor was biting into a chicken leg dotted with specks of fat. And from the adjacent chair, the mistress of the house, who was chewing a lovage leaf, stared at him sidelong. He did not hasten to enter into details, first tasting a chili pepper and then rapidly drinking a few spoonfuls of soup to douse the hot coals on his tongue. After he had blown his nose and his eyes had stopped streaming, he explained that the gleaming white of Miss Duković's teeth was mere deceptive appearance. He frightened them with strange words—extraction, alveolar pyorrhea, pathology, and so on and so forth—describing a hidden malady, which in both German and French was called parodontose. And that malady, of which Herr Strauss spoke learnedly and measuredly, induced dreadful pain. He drank some wine, examined the newly arrived platters, one with mushrooms stewed in cream, another with browned leg of roast pork, sprinkled with marjoram, paprika, and slices of beetroot, he sighed pensively, and said that for the young nanny a serious plan of treatment was required. He recommended two sessions a week for at least three months. He left the piece of roast meat on his plate to repose in its steam and sauce while he employed copious medical terms, giving a diagnosis for each member of the Nikolić family, four bland verdicts, incapable of causing concern. They dedicated themselves to the chewing of tender meat and mellow mushrooms. A servant vanished behind a door, and from outside the supple and impertinent greyhound was heard to bark. Over dessert, as the flies buzzed gently and languor settled over the walnut table, they agreed that the dentist should pay them another visit that Friday. On Monday, for it was a Monday and according to Joseph's calculations there were another ninety hours until Friday, the nanny and the children withdrew for their afternoon nap. The children bid him farewell as if reciting part of a beginner's lesson in good manners. The others proceeded to take their coffee, to converse and yawn, until that gentleman who was neither short nor tall, with a tendril of cream clinging to his bushy mustaches, asked, at his guest's request, that the carriage be drawn up to the steps. And the fates were not idle. They kept tally of the hours without losing count. They kept watch over Herr Strauss, and saw to it that he slept at least part of the night, that he did not neglect to feed his tomcat, or squander his reserves of schnapps, that he made the journey over the Wallachian plain once more, that he tended to a canine tooth belonging to the lady with the pale cheeks, polished the yellowed incisors of the baron, and helped the little boy rid himself of his first milk tooth, that he took Elena Ducović in his arms once more, in the silence of that luminous room, and finally he rubbed the tip of her tongue with a thick camphorated paste, so that from her breath it would seem that the treatment had begun. There, at Hereşti, where the sun was still searing and the starlings more numerous than the crows, the fates decided that their protégé should listen and be mindful. He heard the drawling voice of Theodor Nikolić of Rudna describing the house, while they sampled a cloudy, cooling liquid that might equally have been called raki, ouzo, or mastika. The polished, grayish-white stone had arrived two hundred and thirty years before from the quarries at Rusçuk, and the manor house, highly symmetrical and full of right angles, with an upper floor, two entrances to the vaulted cellars, a pantiled roof, eight identical arched windows facing the plain, and six windows on the side facing the garden, had been constructed by Hungarian masons entirely according to the tastes and plans of two brothers, the Năsturel boyars, the oldest having had an old and strange name, Cazan, ("cauldron"), and the younger, a lover of calligraphy and printing presses, enjoyed the same rare quality as the liqueur they now savored, for he was known by three different names, in his case Oreste, Iorest, and Udrişte. The aroma of aniseed invigorated them and allowed them to imagine that the heat of that summer was pleasantly bearable, and so it was that they went on to explore the history of the house's large belvedere, with its two stories and redbrick walls, plastered to imitate stone, and built some three decades previously at the behest of the penultimate master of the domain. And that master, around whom swirled a host of tangled tales, exploits cruel or magnanimous, illustrious or shameful, lucrative, cunning, amorous, worthy, villainous, and astonishing, deeds dedicated in turn to his nation, to himself, to the Ottomans, to the Wallachians, to the Father, to the Son, to the Immaculate Virgin, and to the Holy Ghost, had been none other than Milos I, knjaz of Serbia for quarter of a century, forced to abdicate in 1839 and recalled to the throne nineteen years later, upon which, having meanwhile grown old, he rested and fretted until his ascension to the heavens in 1860. All these things were now recounted by his nephew, Theodor, as he sprawled on the soft cushions of a wicker armchair, running the fingers of his left hand through his mustaches and occasionally lifting, with his right, the mouthpiece of a hookah to his lips. He inhaled deeply and without haste exhaled thick clouds of smoke, through which the boundless expanses, the plains, the valley, the glittering water of the Argeş, and the scattered trees could no longer be glimpsed. Joseph preferred to puff on his pipe and sit cross-legged. And as he sat, puffing and idling, he learned that Milos Obrenovic had purchased the domain and the manor house from a descendent of the Năsturel boyars, Constantine, a general floundering in debt, that he had built the new outbuildings and stables and renovated the church (of the Holy Trinity), reinforcing the corbels, closing off the porch, and demolishing the wall between narthex and nave, that he had paid for two massive bronze bells to be cast and brought from Budapest, that he had bitten his lips until they bled when his oldest son, Milan III, had been killed just three weeks before his enthronement, that he had sighed heavily when his other son, Mihailo I, lost the crown to the family's deadly foe, Prince Alexander Karadjordjević, that he had knelt and sobbed, his shoulders slowly quaking, on the passing of his older brother Milan I to the world of the righteous, he too an erstwhile knjaz, whose red marble tomb could be found there, by the very church at which they, the dentist and the baron, were now looking. At this, they fell silent and waited for their glasses to be refilled. The silence was broken by the footfalls of a servant and on the graveled terrace in the shade they once again watched as the liqueur clouded like whey when mixed with cold water fresh from the well. They drank without clinking glasses, and Herr Strauss observed that the other liquid, in the glass bowl of the hookah, had also changed color, reddening as the tobacco smoke bubbled through it. At last, the baron gave a vague frown; annoyed at his own thoughts, he scornfully muttered something about women, and moved on to a description of an aunt by marriage, Mar-giolitza or Maria, née Catargi, now Obrenovic, a widow who had stolen the wits and the vigor of Cuza not long ago and was now living in exile alongside the former Romanian sovereign, while her son, a lad of fourteen, had just been proclaimed Prince of Serbia. Although the dentist was by no means one for palace intrigues or alcove whispers, he pricked up his ears and shifted in his seat, startled by this revelation. He even gave a light cough, hoping that the subject would not be abandoned. And it was not. The gentleman who was neither short nor tall, who, it goes without saying, had himself aspired to the throne of his native land, was planning to go to Belgrade for a month, perhaps for the rest of the summer, because the gates of the city had reopened a few days before when the young Milan IV had returned the family blazon to its rightful place. Joseph wished to ask whether Elena Duković would accompany the little girl and boy over the Danube, but as he did not dare, he asked the baron where all those rusty anchors that looked like the claws of a dragon had come from. His host blinked, swallowed the liqueur he was rolling around in his mouth, and turned to look at the three pieces of iron, arranged around a robinia in the courtyard. They were from the ships of Miloš Obrenović, from the years when he had acquired a monopoly
on salt, in the reign of Vodă Ghika, and his fleet tirelessly sailed down the river in the valley. On his departure, the dentist, still in the hands of the fates, heard through one of the windows, perhaps from the children's bedroom, the low voice of the nanny. She was humming a Serbian lullaby, to which he for one could have listened until nightfall. But the baron was extending his hand to bid him farewell.

  And not only did she have small and slender wrists, she had feet and ankles to match. Examining her boots, Joseph marveled at their unnatural smallness; they looked like doll's footwear. What remained mysterious to him above all was how Elena Duković managed to keep her balance and how she managed to tread so smoothly, as if floating. Her steps, whether she walked at leisure or in a hurry, resembled in his imagination the flight of a bird. And that gliding, as insecure as any flight, demanded to be guarded, like her small hands and slender wrists, as fragile and brittle as glass. In their frequent walks, inhaling her perfume, gazing upon her profile, feeling her discreet touches, he refrained from many things and was careful, very careful, that this woman in the unusual situation of taking treatment for a nonexistent malady should not stumble against the many rocks on the streets of Bucuresci, that she should not slip in the mud of the gutters, that she should not be bitten by the dogs or twist her ankle on any curb, stair, or pothole. The good Lord saw to it that she did not twist her ankle.

  To them the summer seemed short and not at all sultry, even though the relentless heat melted men and withered hapless animals alive. The fury of the sun paled before the ardor of their hearts: they perspired, they grew faint, their faces were flushed, but they ascribed their frissons and fevers to the fire of love. After her employers had set off for Belgrade, drawn like moths to the flickering crown, Elena had left the estate at Hereşti and settled into a poky room off the courtyard of the palace owned by grandees of the Nikolić family of Rudna, in the Udricani quarter of Bucharest, where the rumbling of the carriages, the whinnying of the horses, and the cries of the millet-beer hawkers were incessant. The way from there to the surgery of the German doctor who was endeavoring to heal her gums was not long, and so, twice a week, with the baron's permission, she would inform the baron's overseer that she was going out for a few hours, on foot, in order to be treated for her ailment. In that room with its waxed floors and Anatolian carpet, with its chair by the window, a chair with a single, central leg and a reclining back (upholstered in navy blue velvet), next to the display cabinet with its host of potions, powders, and surgical instruments, next to the anatomical charts hanging on the walls, they sought and slowly discovered each other, but not completely, for they both knew (or at least had an inkling of) the meaning of propriety and esteem. During so many conversations, in the pauses between words, silences, and illusions, the skirts of Miss Duković were never lifted all the way, each visit they ascended a further one or two inches, in the latter part of July they had reached a little above the knee, then, at the beginning of August, halfway up the thigh, and finally, when the calendars were preparing to usher in the month of September, a mere palm's width higher, sufficient for the quivering, milky white skin—velvety as not even velvet can be—to be caressed. And it was caressed, at leisure, lightly, with the tips of the fingers, with the fingers entire, with the forehead, with the nose, with the chin. Sometimes, suspended in the fluid of time, while the tweezers, chisels, needles, spatulas, pipettes, and forceps coyly kept watch, their mouths seemed inseparable, and their tongues writhed together, coiling and ravenous. One Wednesday, just as the noise of Lipscani was coming to a boil, it happened that the hem of her skirt remained in its proper place at her ankles, and instead it was her bodice, fastened with small green buttons, that yielded. Thin and pale, with his chestnut hair and hazel eyes, with his inscrutable (fortunate and sorrowful, Berlinese and Balkanic, joyful and agonizing) histories, Joseph Strauss buried his face in the breast of Elena Duković and wept. He was not pushed away, neither when he unfastened the sixteen buttons nor when he let the cloth and the lace glide down naked shoulders, nor when he suddenly laughed, as though in his soul there were not enough room for all the things that had accumulated therein. His tears moistened her breasts, they mingled with droplets of perspiration and trickled down to her belly, they ran around her navel and flowed ever lower, and Elena clasped his neck in her arms and squeezed him tightly, as tightly as she could, until they lost count of the moments and one of her nipples, who knows which, found its way between his lips. And that nipple, like a ripe bramble, somehow bulged and, in time, began to throb and to breathe like a swallow's chick. Thinking of soaring and of flight, Joseph removed one of her sandals, the right, kissed the pink foot and nibbled the big toe, which quivered and tried to touch the firmament of his palate. The young woman slipped her hands under her dress, seeking to disencumber herself of her garters, of her white linen undergarments, her slip, her silk stockings, all that was underneath. Herr Strauss, the dentist, even if he did not at that moment regard himself as a German or a doctor, clasped her hands and prevented her. Without his head intruding beneath the pleats of her dress, but rather from above, he kissed the small hollow between her thighs, firmly, where the hair must have been as black as her tresses, curlier and sparser. Then he lifted her from the blue velvet of the upholstered chair, and while Elena kept her eyes shut and her teeth clenched, he bore her in his arms, making a circuit of the room, rocking her and whispering to her a host of things, as though to a child with a fever.

  Although they had never ascended to the first floor of his redbrick house, Joseph decided one morning, while draining a cup of tea, that it was, at last, time for his two loves to meet. And so he carried downstairs the wicker basket, very early, before any bleary-eyed tradesmen could knock at the door of his surgery, their jaws swollen and teeth doused in alcohol. Entering after lunch, Miss Duković, who was wearing a beige hat and had just folded her parasol, came across a sleeping tomcat with one white ear, one black, lolling on the dentist's chair. It was as though he, too, were waiting to be rid of aching gums. The tomcat's eyes blinked open, and, moving only the tip of his tail, he regarded her at length, as if she were a fairy from his feline dreams.

  In all their walks through blazing Bucharest, they never ceased telling each other the stories of their lives. Since the overseer of the houses of Theodore Nikolić of Rudna was negligent as to the comings and goings of the nanny, being more concerned with carafes of red wine, with keeping the woodpile full, with sleeping, with repairing the drainpipes and window shutters, with the haunches of the kitchen women, with the grooming of the stallions in the stables, and with how the dice fell when he played backgammon or shot craps for handsome sums, Elena often found reasons to go out, concocting more lies in these weeks than she had uttered in the past ten years put together. Totting up her fabrications, one afternoon Herr Strauss deduced her age, for he had never ventured to ask her. At the age of thirty-two (and a half), he felt old, but that thought quickly evaporated. Their meetings took place in secret, at none too customary hours, and they had to find deserted, hidden-away areas of the city, where they would not bump into any acquaintances of the baron or his servants. At least at first, in July, Joseph racked his brains in search of spots where they might meet each other or winding lanes along which they might walk. And so it was that for three whole weeks Miss Duković adored the brioche and poppy-seed cakes of Peter Bykow, crossing the threshold of his shop almost daily after lunch, when the canicular heat was at its height. She would buy two of each, and with the parcel in her hands, always looking at the floorboards and not the baker's face, she would enter the back room through an annoyingly squeaky door. There, where everything was white with flour dust, sitting on a clean checked blanket laid over a heap of sacks, she would await the dentist, the healer of her heart, if not her gums. She did not permit herself to remain within for more than a quarter of an hour, but in that brief segment of time, as tart as a slice of strudel, they would grow dizzy. It was also then, around the middle of the month, that they p
rofited from the feast of Saint Elijah and took shelter in the courtyard of the Stavropoleos Church Inn, sitting on some peeled logs, and she stuffed his head with the virtues, travails, and good deeds of the prophet, also describing to him a few Serbian customs, especially those linked to plum brandy and beekeeping. As women had no business at a barber's, they were unable to enjoy the immediate help of Otto Huer, but they received the gift of his most cunning ideas. The barber, compassionate toward the amours of moggies and dear human friends alike, remembered that he knew Vasile, the warden of Colţei Tower, an eternally jolly fat man with nine children. And so, thanks to his lather brush, razor, and scissors, to his prattle during the moments when the cheeks of the warden were thickening with foam and the bristles were vanishing between the thin, narrow blade, the two lovers were able to climb to the top of the tallest structure in the city. They were not interested in spotting far-off fires and they did not think of the tower's builders (Swedish soldiers from the army of Karl XII, roaming the East after the defeat at Poltava). They counted the steps, one hundred and eighty-eight, they had no idea that there had been two hundred and fourteen (until the devastating earthquake of October 1802, which had lopped off the building's peak), they gazed into the distance, astonished and embracing, silent, perspiring for all too many reasons: the stifling heat, the spiral ascent, the joy, the insatiability, and also affection for the hundreds of swallows that had made their nests beneath the eaves. From high above, Bucharest revealed itself as they could never have imagined it. The clouds of dust that followed the carts and carriages looked like minuscule flecks, the roofs and chimneys awaited the rain and the cold, the spires of the churches and the belfries no longer scraped the sky, the waters of the Dîmbovitza gleamed brightly and those of the Bucureştioara dully, the palace of the prince, from which Carol I was absent (driven away by the sweltering heat, by affairs of state, and by boredom), was no more majestic than the boyar houses, the vacant lots looked brownish red and the clusters of woodland a dusty green, the color of olives immersed in brine, the hospital, the school, and the monastery at the base of the tower seemed stunted, one hundred and fifty thousand souls were at their feet, each living by his own law and all by the laws of the prince and the United Principalities, eating or dozing (because it was that time of day), breathing and sweating. Joseph, who knew that he was not in midair but for all that believed that he was flying, withdrew his hand from hers and sought something in the pocket of his waistcoat. He pulled out a gilded watch on a chain, and on the back of its lid two names were engraved, Gertrude and Irma. And, in accordance with their good habit of telling the stories of their lives, not in chronological order but all in a jumble, he began to describe to Miss Duković something he had described to no other: how his mother and sister had perished, consumed in a fire. First he told her about a poisonous mushroom, Amanita muscaria, red with white pimples, which the people beneath their eyes, in the city stretched below, called snake's hat or snake mushroom, and some called Fliegenpilz, about how it could be dried and powdered, about the enchanted powers of the tea prepared from the fine dust, somewhat like the gifts of opium, but more seductive and restful, about the longing that those who tasted the brew would have to drink it once more, about their desire no longer to know about anything or anyone, about their flight from the world, about the serenity and acceptance that could be read on their faces, about their vast indifference. Absorbed by this treacherous tea, which he himself, a young lad fascinated by the glass vials and miracles of the laboratory, had on a number of occasions prepared for them, his mother and sister had slowly grown distant from their fellow men, they had set out along the road of stars and beatitude, one evening of blustering wind they had forgotten about the kettle on the hob, leaving it to buckle and burst into flame, afterward (perhaps) applauding the flames, (perhaps) blowing on them, allowing them to overwhelm the curtains, carpets, furniture, thick-beamed walls, and (perhaps) even their bodies. He felt a dreadful pain in his chest, it was suffocating him, but he managed to swallow some of the scorching afternoon air when Elena did not try to discover the recipe for the tea, but simply embraced him, tightly. Somewhere toward the horizon, hazy outlines could be made out, and the dentist leaned his elbows on the balustrade under the shingle roof. He examined them for a long time, then gave a start, on realizing that they were the Carpathians.