The Days of the King Read online

  The Days of the King

  Filip Florian

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Farewell

  Belated Prologue

  2. The Captain's Shadows

  3. Stained Sheets

  4. The Dwarf on the Tightrope

  5. Footwear for Dolls

  6. Hubbub and Babies

  7. Hurried Times

  8. The Parade

  Notes

  Copyright © 2011 by Filip Florian

  Translation copyright © 2011 by Alistair Ian Blyth

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Florian, Filip.

  [Zilele regelui. English]

  The days of the king / Filip Florian ; translated from

  the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-38835-9

  1. Dentists—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Kings and rulers—Fiction.

  4. Illegitimate children. 5. Bucharest (Romania)—History—19th

  century—Fiction. I. Blyth, Alistair Ian. II. Title.

  PC840.416.L64Z5513 2011

  859'.335—dc22 2010049821

  Book design by Linda Lockowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Luca, my son,

  who knows what joy is

  1. Farewell

  THE FAREWELL EVENING in Berlin concluded just as it ought to have concluded: with the scrawny body of the dentist sprawled across the bed, his head buried in that moist, gigantic breast whose mate had long ago been sliced off by the saber of a drunken hussar. Previously, he had drained six mugs of beer, bought a drink for anyone who entered the tavern, clinked glasses, hugged friends and strangers (what a commotion!), and won one last round of whist, to the cheers of the kibitzers, mainly because his fellow card players had connived to make him emerge triumphant, not cheating in broad daylight but by the light of the candles on the tables and shelves. He departed from Der Große Bär after nightfall, letting them think that he would quickly return from the latrine and order another round for one and all; in any case, he left his coat on the back of his chair, a scuffed overcoat, rather short in the sleeves, that had not found a place in his luggage for Bukarest and now eased his exit from the scene. Later, at the brothel, they welcomed him with whoops and tears, in the way whores do when they take an occasion to heart. The establishment did not shut up shop in his honor, it is true, but the girls were able to bid their farewells one by one, plundering minutes from other customers and lavishing on him slices of time as sweet and filling as slices of cake. It was a night on the house. Fräulein Helga even cracked open some champagne, and in her capacity as madam she kissed him on the brow and gripped him by his fly, begging him to forget their teeth, but remember their tits. In Rosa's room, as she was oiling her skin with an infusion of jasmine (with her right hand), now and then stroking her bottom (with her left), the girls entered one by one and allowed him to take a leisurely leave. He nibbled a plump earlobe, with its stud of blood-red glass imitating ruby, hidden beneath chestnut locks; with his lips he circled a pair of rounded knees; he ran the tip of his tongue along the spine of a lean and milky back, having first sprinkled it with cinnamon; he bit two fleshy buttocks; and he slowly breathed warm air over a rosy belly until he found its button and desired to swallow it. His fingers, like ten little snakes, slid over calves and thighs, nestled in the folds of hips and armpits, twined among curls dyed purple (beneath the pubic bone, where the snakelings slithered over moist burrows, snuffled them, but did not slip inside), lashed nipples with their tails, ten nipples in all, curled around them, and bade them farewell. Before gluing his nostrils to the eleventh nipple, the largest and most imposing of any he had ever come across, Joseph Strauss urinated for a long time into a chamber pot as large as a cauldron, behind an arras. Then, biography and all, he sank between Rosa's thighs, trying to abandon there his past.

  Belated Prologue

  FIRST OF ALL, however, as a sign that kings are anointed by the Lord, not elected by mortals, it came to pass that the young Count of Flanders was laid low by a catarrh. In an armchair by the fireplace that warmed his bones and his eight Christian names—Philippe, Eugène, Ferdinand, Marie, Clément, Baudouin, Leopold, and George—the count rotated a globe between his palms, opened atlases and travel books, sipped an eggnog, dabbed his brow with mentholated tinctures, sighed, and sucked sticks of licorice (Lakritze, as he called it, although réglisse or zoethout, according to his French- and Flemish-speaking subjects respectively) but sweats, fever, sneezes, and the winter beyond the windows made him imagine the throne of the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia as a knobbly stool, cold as ice. Perhaps in other circumstances, had he been in good health, riding or hunting, spurred by springtime to audacious desires and gestures, he might not have hastened to turn down the proposition from the east; he might not have viewed the Romanian crown as something paltry. It was 1866, at the beginning of the second fortnight in the month of February, and the counsels of his worldly-wise father would not have gone amiss. But Leopold had abandoned his realm and family at Christmastide, his body having been lowered into the royal crypt of the Notre Dame Church in Laeken and his soul having ascended to the heavens. The biography he left behind him was blue like a seascape, except that the hue was not marine or cerulean but the deeper blue of royal blood. Born in the Bavarian castle of Ehrenburg, son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, he was a colonel in the Imperial Russian Izmailovsky Regiment at five, a general at twelve, a field marshal at twenty-five (after the campaign of 1815 against Bonaparte), ruler of his native duchy at a tender age, thrice married (to Princess Charlotte Augusta, sole legitimate child of the future King of England, George IV, then to the actress Caroline Bauer, who had hastily been given the title Countess of Montgomery, and finally to Princess Louise-Marie d'Orléans, daughter of King Louis-Philippe I of France), twice a widower, he embarked upon old age amid the tumult of a sordid affair (with Arcadia Claret, paid off with the title Baroness of Eppinghoven), father of six sons and one daughter, stern patriarch, gentle monarch (the first of that newly formed and trilingual state, Belgium), unwavering in the face of military threats and Dutch territorial claims, tenacious in carrying his plans through to the very end (such as the construction of the continent's first railroad, the Brussels-Mechelen line, inaugurated on May 5, 1835), influential adviser to Queen Victoria of England (and author, behind the scenes, of her marital alliance with his nephew, Albert), adept at neutrality in the storm-tossed year of 1848, a man somewhat extravagant in his choice of a future for his only daughter, Marie-Charlotte Amélie, sent across the ocean to be the wife of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. In short, a man with ever more strands of gray hair, which later turned altogether white.

  It is highly likely that out of this whole series of events, dates, conjunctures, opportunities, calculations, and abilities, the Count of Flanders was thinking of an earlier episode in the life of his father, what one might call a track switch in the life of that prince so preoccupied with railroads. In 1830, at a time when he was not yet called Leopold I of Belgium but merely Georges Chrétien Frédéric of Saxe-Coburg, the duke had spurned another nation's need to bolster itself with powerful characters, titles, and honors, when he declared himself uninterested in the crow
n of Greece, which had been offered to him on a platter. Now his son, sunk in an armchair, his forehead aflame and his cough worsening as evening fell, administered himself that Balkan precedent as medicine. A physic all the more welcome since he had just discovered that in the northern part of the peninsula, where the map showed the lower course of the Donau (le Danube) and some tallish mountains, the Karpaten (les Carpathes), philosophy and the belles arts were not much heard of, the balls were modest, and mathematics mostly served for tallying sheep. And so, before dinner, he wrote a letter (in violet ink) rejecting the decision of the two chambers in Bucuresci, the Elected Assembly and the Senate, which, on February 11, at one o'clock, pressed by the lunchtime recess and the national interest, had held a joint meeting and voted unanimously to elevate him to the throne, rechristening him Filip I. In an epoch when not even the swiftest postilion or the most reliable homing pigeon could have made the journey to Brüssel in less than a week, the epistle descended upon the banks of the Dîmbovitza with the speed and force of a bolt of lightning, inducing shudders in three gentlemen and a prime minister, who thus saw their immediate plans thwarted and their longer-term civilizing project hung out to dry.

  In the end, those gentlemen, N. Golescu, L. Catargiu, and N. Haralamb—a triumvirate of expedience and members of the Princely Lieutenancy—and I. Ghika, president of the Council, commenced anew their rummaging through the foliage of illustrious genealogical trees, in search of another prince capable of founding a dynasty and taming history. First, however, wearied by events and reversals, fearful lest the disapproval of the future be directed against them, and hopeful that sleep would be a wise counselor, they went to bed, sleeping long but fitfully. They had spent the previous night at the palace persuading Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza I to sign the act of his abdication, summarily pack his bags, and proceed to the border, escorted by a platoon of alpine troops.

  With his unfinished Parisian education in medicine and law, a '48 revolutionary, but first and foremost a freemason, governor of the port of Galatzi, minister of war in the Jassy government, and a proponent of Romanian unification, liberal in his outlook, Cuza had been too much enamored of throne and mistress, forgetful that beyond a certain point some things become scandalous. He had overlooked the farrago in the administration, the plundering of public finances and, more to the point, Russo-Turkish preparations to chant a funeral dirge over the United Romanian Principalities. He had allowed the whitish clouds that continually rose from the land's roads, not only in the wake of carts, carriages, and gigs, but also when little children ran and skipped or hens scrabbled before a rain shower, to settle in a thick layer on the proclamations of the ad hoc Divans. Nine years had passed since the enlightened minds had assembled in frock coats at the urging of the Great Powers, and laying aside intrigue and enmity had examined every facet of the situation, made their calculations, and—weighing every word in order that their will might be clear—placed at the head of their political program two brief statements: " We desire Unification, but we desire as ardently a foreign prince" (on the Moldavian side) and "It is necessary that the ruling prince be chosen from one of the sovereign families of Europe; and this need is imperative and absolute' (on the Wallachian side). Such were the texts that had been left to gather dust in desk drawers, cupboards, and chests until little by little people began to recollect them, and to fear that this vessel on which they had all embarked might run aground. And the leaders of the lifesaving operation, having risen from their sheets refreshed and clearheaded, quickly changed their strategy. Having burnt their lips and their peace of mind on a soup of Brussels sprouts, the four—General Nicolae Golescu, minister of the interior and of foreign affairs under Bibescu Voda, member of the 1848 revolutionary committee, the provisional government, and the first Princely Lieutenancy; Lascar Catargiu, with his wolflike senses, honed until then only in appointments as prefect and en famille; Colonel Nicolae Haralamb, landowner, son of a court victualler from Craiova; and Ion Ghika, bizarre Turkophile revolutionary of 1848, long-time Bey of Samos—were now so prudent that they would have blown even on a bowl of yogurt before tasting it. Consequently, they did not hasten to pronounce a new name, but extended long, unseen feelers toward the royal courts of the west. They had decided to replace the politics of intuitions, hopes, and faits accomplis with one of cautious soundings and discretion. Wandering by circuitous routes over a continent scattered with forests, marshes, snowy mountains, brigands, and military patrols, many of their feelers got bogged down in the wilderness, but others, few in number, found the beaten track to Paris. It was there, in any case, that the conference of the Great Powers was underway, at which the Sublime Porte, intrigued by the rather permissive wind blowing from the principalities, wished to make use of stipulations laid down in the firman of November 1861, whereby unification was to be recognized only for the duration of the reign of A. I. Cuza, which was limited to seven years. There were days when one might rightly have said that the souls of the gentlemen from Bucharest quivered like leaves, and the plenipotentiaries of France, l'Angleterre, Turkey, Prussia, Russia, Austria and Sardinia used tones and inflections of voice rarely encountered, resembling the clank of arms. It was also at the close of that February, while ice floes and garbage floated down the Seine, that two of the feelers spread by the Romanian government, the emissaries Ion C. Brătianu and Ion Bălăceanu, gave proof of their skill at snaking through salons, swimming like fishes in the waters of high society, and gaining ingress to all-but-inaccessible bureaus, libraries, and boudoirs. They managed to enchant and flatter. They soothed self-regard, touched sensitive cords, intuited desires and took pains to meet them halfway. And their efforts to elicit sympathy were not in vain, particularly among the ladies, where the decisions that count always come to ripeness. And so it was that the influential Hortense Cornu, the emperor's foster sister, skillfully set in motion a succession of sympathies, first of all drawing into the game the Baroness de Franque. Touched by the fate of that faraway little country, which had barely come into being but was already about to unravel, with its throne vacant and pagans trampling its southern frontier, the baroness passed on the tale with as much passion as if it were a sad novel in which a malnourished and quite possibly consumptive orphan is cast out into the street by villainous bailiffs. Such a narrative could not help but arouse feelings of solidarity, compassion, and affection in her close friend Mathilda Drouyn de Lhuys, wife to none other than the minister of foreign affairs, who happened to be president of the conference now about to come to the boil. It was then a mere formality that, through the long polished mechanisms of conjugal life, the message should be conveyed further. At last, informed and prepared by a creature dear to him, beside whom, as a newborn, he had suckled from the same breast, and persuaded by the chief of his own diplomatic corps, Napoleon III categorically opposed any Ottoman intervention north of the Danube and lent a benevolent ear to the proposals for a Romanian crown. Among the names put forward, four in number, he inclined to the only one allied with the French imperial line as well as the Prussian royal house. Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was about to celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday, and as a lieutenant of dragoons in Berlin, he had been waiting for almost a decade to be promoted to captain. Because of the chill he had suffered on a frosty firing range his left jaw had swollen around a decayed molar. The pain was dreadful and, though dizzy, and without consulting his father or Ministerpräsident von Bismarck, he found himself asking the man who was incising his gums with a scalpel whether he would like to follow him to Bukarest, permanently.

  Joseph Strauss had never heard of that city and supposed that it must be thousands of miles away, somewhere in the colonies. In any case, the matter seemed to him preposterous and insignificant, especially since in his waiting room two men and a woman were fidgeting on their chairs, and the young officer, given how much pus had accumulated along his jawbone, was probably seeing pink elephants. Later, after lunch, however, the doctor found out
by chance that the patient with an abscess as big as a walnut was the middle son of Prince Karl Anton, the military governor of Rhineland, adviser to Kaiser Wilhelm, and recently appointed prime minister. He was amazed. Then, for a good few weeks, he allowed his bachelor's life to flow on in its gentle course between his rented surgery, the room he occupied with Siegfried the tomcat in a sunny boarding house, Der Große Bär, and the Eleven Titties brothel. It was not until April 14, when the daffodils were in bloom and Siegfried had wounded his muzzle and paw in one of the neighborhood cat fights, that he read, to his astonishment, a short item in a gazette about the holding of a plebiscite: " Today, the lieutenancy and the ministry have proclaimed, by means of bills posted on the streets, the candidacy of Prince Karl of Hohenzollern for the throne of Romania. The event seems to have filled the whole nation with rejoicing." That evening, as the jovial Karl of Prussia bantered with the other Karl (now at last a captain) in the foyer of the Berlin Opera House, addressing him as "Turk," the dentist felt no inclination for mugs of beer, for chatter and whist at the bar, or for the eleven titties, two per five lively wenches and the one huge one on the chest of Rosa. Frequently refilling his glass with schnapps, puffing his pipe, and gazing through the open window at the stars and the eaves of the houses across the way, Herr Strauss regretted not having taken the young officer seriously. He fell asleep dreaming of beautiful women and impatient crowds waiting at his door for him to quell their toothaches. A few days later, a courier of the dragoons regiment handed him a yellowish envelope with a crest and the seal of the house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. It was raining buckets, but the envelope was dry when it emerged from beneath the military cape.

  2. The Captain's Shadows

  IN JUNE, WHEN the solstice draws nigh, dawn is at its earliest. That Wednesday, however, for their eyes no sunrise sprang into view. At dawn, the coach laden with portmanteaus, bags, and trunks set in motion with a judder, one of the horses (a tallish gray mare) whinnied and chomped at the bit, the other (a sorrel with a scar on his throat) puffed out his chest, and from beneath the lid of a wicker basket Siegfried the tomcat mewled heartrendingly. The dentist lost sight of the green shutters of the boarding house, the door, the water barrel in the yard, and the clump of daisies by the gate, but he did see a stripy cat running along the fence tops with fleet and nimble steps, leaping over broken pales, stubbornly keeping pace with the horses. She seemed to him pretty, and large-bellied. At a crossroads, where the coach turned south, the cat must have wearied or floundered in the puddles, because he saw her no more, and soon after, along the streets leading to the Ober-baumbrücke, Siegfried stopped thrashing around and whining piteously and curled up in his basket, with his black ear pricked up and the tip of his tail aloft, while Herr Strauss, whose migraine had not yet relinquished him, gazed through the streaked window at the clouds, the wakening quays, the endless rows of buildings along the banks of the River Spree, the plumes of smoke rising from hundreds of chimneys, and the placid water reflecting a darkling sky, presaging rain. He thought of the hobs sizzling in countless kitchens, he was violently jolted for the length of a bridge, he felt an emptiness in his stomach, perhaps from the rattling of the coach, perhaps from the previous night's beer and champagne, perhaps from the mental image of the sausages, eggs, and bacon being fried in every house, perhaps because of the vista that was now vanishing, as though an unseen hand had wiped away the outlines and colors of a familiar painting.