The Days of the King

by Filip Florian

  Whether by chance or not, the next day, which was the twenty-seventh of August, the city's newspapers and gossips took note of the Lord's will. For on that day the good Lord had decided that Maria, daughter of Carol I and Elisabeth, should be born. And born she was.

  As Joseph Strauss had been hoping, along with all the other Germans enduring the frosts of the new year, in time not only the snowdrifts, the icy northeasterly wind, the icicles, and the snow storms came to an end, but also the stupid rumors and incessant lies. He had never believed one jot of the news that was concocted on the banks of the Dîmbovitza and that had accompanied from beginning to end the resounding war being waged one thousand miles away on battlefields and maps, in stratagems and, at the same time, in his own heart, which beat passionately for the pennants of Prussia. For weeks on end, every day and even a number of times a day, all kinds of fantastical rumors had reached his ears, rumors that reported as certainties the position of the frontline, the balance of forces, the gains and losses, the morale of the troops, the troop movements, the numbers of dead, wounded, and prisoners, the level of reserve munitions, and, naturally, the predictions of eyewitnesses, who were always knowledgeable, objective, and anonymous. As for King Wilhelm, one of the favorite characters of these winter's tales, now he was supposed to have been hit by shrapnel, now he had broken his leg while beating a hasty retreat, now he had been taken prisoner along with 20,000, 45,000, or 60,000 soldiers. In the same Wallachian whirl of rumor, there was also talk of Ministerpräsident von Bismarck, who was now supposed to be on the brink of losing his mind, having begged the forgiveness and mercy of Gambetta and Trochu in tormented and encrypted letters, now ready to cross the ocean to America with a fortune stashed away in hundreds of trunks, and now in love in his old age with a siren from Lyons, a young maiden in whose palms and between whose breasts he had laid all the military secrets in Berlin. Of all these mad imaginings born by the fireside during the long hours when folk chattered, munched pumpkin seeds (toasted, salted), drank plum brandy (boiled with sugar and pepper) or wine (also boiled, with cinnamon and cloves), counted their money (little), and made children (many), the dentist understood many things, but what he could not comprehend was how such stupidities could be printed on countless pages and peddled to people as the truth. He found no explanation, neither then nor later, and was left merely with the memory of subdued evening chitchat, at the end of which Elena and he, late at night, when the boy was sleeping, would slide under the quilt and forget everything else, even themselves, in kisses and entwinings. In the light of day, however, pallid and short as it was after Epiphany, Joseph saw one thing clearly: that in the frozen city, with its steadfast affection for France, penchant for any Frenchified details and boundless trust in Gallic politics, a madcap wind was blowing, aimed at the sovereign or, to be precise, at Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. And that wind, although it had always blown, now intensified palpably, especially after the huge Strousberg scandal of January 1871, when the Berlin consortium and the Romanian government refused to pay the many, many adventurers, bankers, manufacturers, traders, and ordinary mortals in Prussia who had purchased shares in the railroad of the United Principalities. The theory of the railroad's builder, who had not for one moment renounced the title of doctor or the initials of his forenames, H and B, had been that upon the provisional opening of the Bucuresci—Buzău—Brăila—Galatzi—Tecuci—Roman section in December '70 it became the responsibility of the Wallachian treasury to honor the coupons and pay its creditors the interest due. On the other hand, it was the opinion of the cabinet, led by Ion Ghika, erstwhile Bey of Samos, once more taken out of peaceful retirement and placed in the prime minister's chair, and the opinion of parliament and Carol I himself that, according to the acts signed by both parties, the financial burden should remain on the shoulders of the concessionaires until the entire railroad network had been completed and irregularities on the newly opened line rectified. The conflict was grist to the mill of the prince's adversaries precisely at a time when water was scarcer and dearer than ever, as the river had turned into a solid floe, resembling a thick white serpent, that stretched from one bank to the other and to both horizons, forcing the water sellers to abandon the holes in the ice they had dug before Christmas and take their sledges far and wide in search of springs that continued to flow. Amid the general uproar, in which the prince had been accused of not having forgotten the source of his blood and of having permanently favored profiteers, embezzlers, and forgers of mortgages, and in which the arrest of all the ministers involved in negotiating the concession, their trial, and the confiscation of their property had been demanded, a joint assembly of the two chambers had voted, feverishly, despite the bitter cold, that the Strousberg affair should be elucidated by a foreign court of arbitration. Saddened and disappointed, perhaps disgusted, not only by those insane attacks but also, as the dentist believed, by the ineptitudes, gaffes, intrigues, and idleness coming in quick succession from the political parties, Karl Ludwig had decided, while the frost was splitting the cobblestones, to tell the public once and for all, gruffly, why his head was splitting. And tell them he did, sending to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung for publication a letter nominally addressed to a certain Auerbach, who likely did not exist, but addressed in fact to the whole world, and in particular to those Romanian politicians who had the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and the will not to stand idly by, their arms folded. And the fiery missive, which Joseph had read dozens of times, until it lost its sense and he had learned it by heart, which had been reproduced in other newspapers everywhere and stirred such controversy, began by saying:

  I should like to see you for but one hour in My place, to assure you of how shattered is my existence and with how many tasks, cares, and deceptions it is filled.

  It was not until halfway through the text that Carol slipped in his view of the real reason for these evils:

  This ill-fated land, which had always lived under the harshest servitude, went without transition from a despotic Government to the most liberal of constitutions, a constitution such as no other nation in Europe enjoys. I regard this, according to My experience, as a misfortune all the greater given that the Romanians may not be flattered that they possess the virtues of industry...

  Joseph Strauss, who understood these words differently than his wife and best friend, Otto Huer the barber, not because he was a more competent interpreter or a more skillful diviner of thoughts, but because he had a different past, chose to be honest to the very end only with Siegfried, who alone knew in what wise the dentist had arrived in Bucuresci and who had invited him thither. And he took Siegfried in his arms one morning, when dawn had not yet scattered the darkness, descended with him into the surgery as if into a frozen grotto, and lit a fire in the stove, which was also like an icy cavern. The doctor listened as the firewood began to crackle, he sat down in the chair with the blue velvet upholstery and the one leg in the middle, shivering and lazing in the spot where his patients trembled, he clasped to his breast the tomcat, wrapped in a towel, stroking him in the way he liked best, tickling him under the chin with his fingertips, and as the dawn broke he read aloud the passages from the letter that had most troubled him:

  "If I had not so cared from my heart about the interests of this beautiful land, a land for which in other circumstances the most radiant future might have been foretold, My patience would long since have given out. . " and "I preserve My freedom to return to My dear fatherland and to lead there, in the bosom of absolute marital felicity, an independent and carefree existence. The strong magnet of the fatherland has never ceased, even in the midst of the difficult trials to which I have been subjected, to exert upon Me its influence. I am sorry only that my good intentions have been disregarded and received with such ingratitude."

  Siegfried, with his black ear pricked up and the tip of his tail poking from beneath the cotton towel, had warmed up and was waiting. And the dentist confessed that deep
in his soul he sometimes believed that he himself, Joseph, was that fictive Auerbach to whom the prince had addressed his letter. His suspicions were strengthened by the very first sentence: "I have awaited too long a time to give you any sign of life."

  As was to be expected, the Strousberg scandal, Carol's blunt epistle, and the course of the Franco-Prussian War had been hardest to swallow for the Liberals, who were now outdoing themselves in their asperity and gestures of hostility toward the throne. Deputy Nicolae Blaremberg had, in his typical fashion, seen fit to claim, in an interpellation in the Chamber, that the sovereign's missive was either apocryphal or an act of high treason, even making a startling allusion to the fate of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, who had ended up in front of a firing squad. Another Nicolae, Ionescu, one of the leading factionalists, had proposed in a restricted party meeting that they should bid the prince good riddance, while the newspaper of the radicals, The Romanian, had celebrated on February 11, as a barb aimed at the palace, the half decade that had passed since the banishment "of a Sovereign who violated the Constitution and squandered the public purse." In riposte, the prince had been sent from Jassy a long, astonishingly long, list with the signatures of Moldavian conservatives, more than a thousand names, intended as a show of loyalty, an encouragement to him to remain on the throne, and a promise to review the law that had whipped up so many storms, the mother of all laws: the constitution. But for the dentist of number 18 Lipscani Street, for his family, friends, and acquaintances, for all the Germans who lived on that commercial thoroughfare, the surrounding streets, or other quarters of the city, the most important thing was that the winter was on the wane and that the armies of Prussia, the infantrymen, cuirassiers, artillerymen, sappers and buglers, had not taken any account of the buzzing of north Danubian politicians. They could hardly have done otherwise, in fact, because the sound of gadflies droning in the Balkans did not reach as far as the outskirts of Paris, where the ground now quaked under the boom of cannons, the trampling of hoofs, the whizz of bullets, and the clatter of sabers, under the shouts of battle and the groans of the wounded. Truth to tell, maybe one in a hundred of those soldiers had ever in his life heard the name Bucuresci mentioned, and one in ten thousand had any inkling of where it might be. And this geographical ignorance had helped them, as they followed the banners of the black eagle, to inflict a crushing defeat at Sedan, to drive Napoleon III from the throne and from history, to extend the frontiers of the fatherland through the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, to open the way for the dragoons to march down the Champs Elysees, and to offer Wilhelm I the opportunity to be proclaimed first emperor of Germany at Versailles itself, in a ceremony agonizingly humiliating for the French. As reflected in the mirrors of Bucuresci, which for the most part showed pallid faces, enervated by the ghastly season, the Prussian triumph was noted in grief-stricken terms. The Romanian brought out a special edition, with the black borders of an obituary, which announced, referring to the City of Light, that "the Teutonic hordes are trampling the sacred earth." On March 10, in the middle of the night, Herr Strauss heard an uproar and the sound of breaking windows. He knew he was not dreaming. He leapt out of bed, quickly closed the bedroom door, so as not to wake Elena and the baby, and looked vigilantly through the curtains of the day room, without lighting a candle. Below, brawlers with torches were shouting slogans against the Germans, reading aloud the shop signs, smashing most of the windows. From the number of torches they were waving, there must have been around forty, and in their fervor it did not occur to them that the Teutonic names might be deceptive, since Germans, Austrians, and Jews all lived in that quarter. They approached swiftly, in small groups, apparently relying on the complete absence of gendarmes. They destroyed everything in their path, first smashing the shutters with clubs and crowbars, then hurling rocks and entering the shops, merrier than if they had been entering a tavern or their own houses. They trod over broken planks and shards of glass as nonchalantly as the dragoons probably strode down the grand boulevard in Paris. They occasionally fired revolvers, there were two or three revolvers, and to Joseph it was clear from the lack of answering detonations that no one was confronting them in the street. And when finally they were confronted, not far from the Zlătari Church, they punched and kicked to the ground the merchant who had dared to stand up to them. If any window was open, they took care not only to smash it to smithereens but also to throw refuse through the gaping hole. Frightened as he had not been for a long time, Joseph thought to call his wife, but there was no need, because the blue Serbian eyes were already there, gleaming in the room, like embers, and her hands clasped his shoulders and squeezed. Elena wanted to boil water and pour it on top of the madmen's heads, and he had to pacify her and beg her to help him with something else. They quickly went downstairs in the dark and picked up the blue velvet chair, managing to drag it into the hall and prop it against the handle of the front door. Before barricading themselves on the upper floor, they gathered, groping in the dark, medical instruments, powders, and liquors. Then all hell broke loose on the ground floor, directly below them. They kneeled by the cot, pressed together, praying to the Blessed Virgin, each according to his and her own language, manner, and creed, for the still sleeping little boy and for each other. The dentist felt the tomcat rubbing against his left thigh and felt ashamed that they had not also prayed for him. And Alexandru, whom they called not Sasha or Alex, but Sănducu, as Sevastitza the midwife had nicknamed him when she knotted his bellybutton, did not stir during all the time the room downstairs was being laid to waste.