In June, when the solstice is nigh, dawn shows itself earlier than ever. Then, however, on a Wednesday, the sunrise did not come into sight. The coach laden with suitcases, bags and chests set into motion with a jolt, one of the horses (a tallish grey mare) whinnied and chomped at the bit, the other (a sorrel with a scar on his throat) puffed out his chest, and, from a wicker basket with a lid, Siegfried the tomcat mewled dreadfully. The dentist lost sight of the green shutters of the boarding house, the massy 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 she was no more to be glimpsed, and soon, along the streets leading to the Oberbaumbrücke, Siegfried stopped thrashing around and whining piteously. He 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 relinquished him, gazed through the greasy window at the clouds, the barely wakening quays, the endless rows of buildings along the banks of the River Spree, the streaks of smoke rising from hundreds of chimneys, and the placid water in which was reflected a darkling sky, presaging rain. He thought of the hotplates sizzling in as many kitchens, he was gravely 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 colours of a well-known painting.
The storm began at the morning’s end, about an hour after the dentist had managed to throw up and rid himself of his grogginess. It was not the enervated thunder and lightning that forced them to seek shelter, but the lashing volleys of cold raindrops. They stopped at an inn among the hills, where a man and a woman were whitewashing the walls and a lanky young lass was half-heartedly scrubbing the floors. By the window, with a mug of warm milk in his palms, Joseph had plenty of time to observe how, outside, the coachman, soaked to the skin, took care to tether the horses in a roomy shed and to hang nosebags with oats from their necks. Inside, the innkeeper was wielding his paintbrush with great rapidity and sweating buckets (he kept taking off his tattered hat and wiping his bald pate with a rag), the woman was grunting and kept straining up on her tiptoes (hindered by her dumpy body), the girl was moving back and forth on her knees, her blouse having ridden up out of the waistband of her skirt (revealing a mole-covered patch of white skin on her back). Strangely, the whitewash and the lye did not drive away the odour of brandy, cider and smoke in the room. A bitter smell, which rasped the emptiness in his stomach. Then, at lunch, an old woman brought duck soup and peas, and the tomcat ended up with the bones and gristle left over from a chicken leg. He did not even touch them.
When the earth had aired a little in the wind and the afternoon sun that had hoodwinked the clouds, the coach once more set into motion. A light trot, straightaway transformed into a gallop, conveyed the doctor into the heart of that rare (blessed? accursed? he had no way of guessing) journey, a convoluted and risky journey, fragmented and odd, which he urged himself to believe would not prove to be an irreparable mistake, the longest journey of his life, his only important journey, so important that he sometimes likened it to a journey to the other world, for after all he was heading to a place of verdure or, in any case, wheat, a place of very much wheat, as a spice merchant had told him. He was following the trail of the captain of dragoons, like a belated shadow, copying his steps and movements at an interval of seven weeks, taking precisely the same route, abiding by his advice and spending his money. After the epistle in the middle of April, to which he had replied hastily and gratefully with his assent, Herr Strauss had a month later received, from the hand of a lean functionary, another envelope, this time accompanied by a little packet, wrapped in waxed paper. Using a paper knife with a silver handle, he had opened both, careful not to break the seals, one familiar, that of the house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the other unfamiliar, likely the insignia of the new monarch. His former patient, Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig, now elevated to the throne of a land of five million souls, had sent him a pouch of pipe tobacco, in which he had hidden so many groschen, guilders and florins that Joseph had grown faint, and a map of the continent, on which he had traced in red ink an itinerary and marked with brown crosses a number of key points. In the letter, he laid out minutely what he would have to undertake on that exhausting journey, especially given that war with Austria was about to break out, and he, as a Prussian physician, would have to cross hostile territory, to pass through enemy border posts and checkpoints, to endure suspicion and searching questions. He was asked to conceal his identity, which meant not only procuring false papers, a matter explained in detail, but also a rather ridiculous thing, namely getting rid of any petty items that might betray him. Joseph Strauss had obeyed sullenly, even grudgingly, and, on one of the days when he was making ready his luggage, he had removed using a pair of nail scissors the monograms stitched to his underwear, scraped the letter S off his doctor’s bag with a razor, concealed a diploma and other documents in the lining of a fur overcoat, and, examining each book in turn, torn out the flyleaves that bore his signature.
He parted with the grey (not at all stubborn) mare and the (industrious and honest) sorrel at Magdeburg railway station. He paid the coachman his fee, he allowed a porter to handle all his luggage and, with the wicker basket on his arm, he went into a nearby tavern at dusk, where a greenish lamp swayed above the door. Although he ordered trout in cream, so that they could enjoy dinner together, the tomcat refused to eat. It was the eleventh time since their departure. Curled up in a ring, his fur tousled and his forepaws pressed to his eyes, Siegfried seemed very ill. The dentist blinked, lit his pipe, blew smoke rings towards the ceiling, and sipped a blackcurrant liqueur. Then they spent their first night and morning in the train, with the rumbling of the wheels, with the puffing and the whistling of the locomotive, with the vernal southern landscapes, with the imperturbable amiableness of the conductor, and with the chattering of a lowly bank agent, who was visiting his sister at a sanatorium in Graubünden. It was not until Zurich, in the attic room of a cheap hotel, that Joseph took his friend in his arms, he stroked him on the crown of his head and under his chin, pressing hard, he clutched him to his breast and spoke to him precipitately, he explained to him things that the tomcat surely did not want to hear, for example, why they had not elected the railway from the outset but rather crawled along for a hundred miles in the coach, why they had not headed directly south-east but rather set off south-west, ending up in Switzerland, why a false passport had been required, how the drums of two armies were rumbling, how the flags of battle were waving and how the troops were on the march, why the landlady of the boarding house in Berlin, his friends and the girls from the Eleven Titties brothel had had to think he was moving to Stuttgart and not setting out in search of an adventurer prince, why a king is a king, regardless of the state of his teeth, what it means to count out and to hold gold coins in your palm, why the clocks chime all over the world and, finally, why people grow old. Here, at the words about time and ageing, Siegfried gave a start, pricked up his black ear (the white one remained limp) and raised the tip of his tail. His master’s voice had softened, his caresses had abated, and the air in the room was growing warmer, probably from the hot tin roof and the confessions that were beginning to flow. But first of all, as if from a holey kettle, plenteous drops of sincerity trickled, drops that collected into a small, oval, gleaming pool of water in the tranquillity of the afternoon, and the water began to lap over the floorboards, a slender and clean thread, a liquid both visible and invisible, being composed, by a caprice of chemistry, of only dreams, disappointments, hopes, wounds, presuppositions and vanities. Herr Strauss, who in the middle of the previous winter, in January, on the eighth day of the month, had turned thirty, was saying all kinds of things, he was not telling a tale, he was not talking his head off, he was merely saying that he wanted to get out of a rut, that there was a whole host of titties in the world, in any case many more than eleven, that everything was deadeningly monotonous, that beer and schnapps were good, but wine is not to be sniffed at, that every town is full to bursting with stripy, spotted, black and white, grey, yellow, plump or lean, squint-eyed, and lame cats, cats of every shape and size, that a fire which deprives you of a mother and a sister goes on roasting your heart forever, it dries you and smokes you like pastrami, that there comes an hour, all of a sudden, when nothing binds you to anyone any more or even to those around you, that beyond an empire, three mountain chains and boundless plains it is possible to be born again, that to be dentist to a king is not the same as draining the pus from the mouth of a captain of dragoons, that a wife means children, that a new country is a new place, and a new place is a new opportunity, that games of whist can be played anywhere at all, that the present and sadness look like a lump of shit, and that the future might, with the mercy of God, look better, that a wife means a mother, that a young tomcat has seed enough to fill the earth with kittens, that beyond an empire, three mountain chains and boundless plains there might not be heaven, but nor can it be hell, that the geese saved Rome, that that land has taken the name of Romania, that there will likely be plenty of liver there to fry with slices of apple, black pepper and onion, that a wife is a sister, that no road is without return, that the one-eyed man is always king in the land of the blind, and that a wife means a woman, not just any woman, but one who comes out of an angel’s or a devil’s egg. And so on and so forth. All these things were said by Joseph Strauss in the garret of a hotel in Zurich, while the room grew blazing hot, and at last he begged the tomcat’s forgiveness and fell silent. Then and there, Siegfried, sprawling for a while on the chest of the lean, chestnut-haired man, his muzzle resting between the clavicles of the pale, warm-hearted man, looking straight into the eyes of the hazel-eyed, large-eyed man, leapt towards the window and caught a huge fly on the wing. He swallowed it, then mewled sharply, as though hunger had skewered his belly.
They feasted forthwith, on goose liver, as it happened, not cooked in a frying pan, but in the oven, with slices of roulade covered in sweet paprika, ginger and acacia flowers, to be precise, later they asked for cognac and cold milk, one preferred sparing sips, sufficient for him to roll the beverage around the inside of his cheeks and under his tongue, the other favoured rapid slurps, sufficient for him to let something cool glide down his throat, they made their peace until peace itself, as a state of affairs, seemed derisory and boring, they strolled down peaceful streets, they climbed countless steps and arrived once more in the suffocating garret, convinced that idleness is a supreme virtue, they tasted the sweetness of sleep, one in a bed not quite soft, the other on the carpet, in the rays of the sun, and one let out a sigh and the other a mewl when a knock was heard at the door. To Joseph’s amazement, into the chamber stepped the same lean functionary who sixteen days previously, in Berlin, had handed him the envelope with two seals and the little packet wrapped up in waxed paper. It was not until then and there that they finally became acquainted, perspiring together, when the eyes of the dentist were as heavy as lead, and his attire was not quite appropriate. The visitor was called Wolf Dieter Trumpp and seemed not to heed how the doctor was fastening the buttons of his shirt and putting on his waistcoat, how he was smoothing the creases of his trousers. He was the private secretary of Princess Maria, the youngest member of the Hohenzollern family. That gentleman gave a light cough, as though the cough might have assisted in its way, he placed the passport on the table, he professed his surprise at the hotel’s habit of keeping tomcats in the rooms (to guard the guests against mice, he supposed) and explained that the document was in good order, with all the official headings, stamps and signatures, having been issued by the governor of the Canton of St. Gallen himself, Her Äpli, and not fabricated by some forger. Offering his opinion that a little rain would not go amiss, would reinvigorate the vegetation, the guest also uttered a name, Joseph Kranich, which the dentist was obliged to bear for the rest of the journey, this choice of name being the fruit of the governor’s inspiration (or whimsy), as he had reckoned that an ostrich and a crane, eine Strauss und eine Kranich, were somewhere akin. With his hands clasped behind his back, on Monday, at sunset, the secretary added that he had made a reservation on the train that left Bavaria on Friday, after nightfall. Finally, Herr Trumpp removed from his pocket a little box, covered in maroon velvet, he wiped it with his fingertips, and placed it next to the passport. The little lead soldier within, in a victorious attitude of attack, must have belonged to the young king from the Balkans. Undoubtedly. From his youngest sister, Maria, who had found it hidden under a sheaf of military treatises, on his desk in Sigmaringen Castle.
The crossing of the Bodensee was not exactly a joy, because the glitter out on the lake, the excitement of boarding, the sailors’ tasks and the aroma of the tea drunk in port, in Rorschach, dissolved under the rocking of that vast expanse of azure, also christened the Schwäbisches Meer. The pitching of the boat provoked in the doctor a more accursed nausea than had beer and champagne, causing him to lean over the side thrice and splatter the water with undigested morsels of his breakfast and a yellowish, bitter juice, such as the foaming streaks of the waves, scattered over a lake that also had a third name, Konstanz, perhaps did not deserve. His grogginess had abated by Lindau, where he managed, trembling, to gulp down ten drops of quinine mixed with brown sugar, and it definitively dispersed in the mail coach that raced northwards, after he had rubbed his temples and the back of his hands with swabs soaked in vinegar. He spent the night in Memmingen and then in Augsburg, and in Munich he discovered that the town was carefree, like early summer. He permitted himself a light lunch and hours of delectation aplenty, he looked at the ladies out for a walk, the governesses and the boisterous children, at a group of Dominican nuns, a perspiring bakery woman and a lass with a bundle of dirty laundry, he indulged his appetite with cherry and syrup tarts, he paused in the shade (where his pipe slowly went out) next to a maid perched on a ladder to wash the window of a chemist’s shop, with her skirt hitched up and a bruise on her left thigh, he leafed through the papers (his pipe now lit), he found respite for beer and gaped at some circus folk who were breathing fire, playing tambourines and trumpets, dancing and juggling with coloured balls. There, in a small square, the thread of pleasure snapped when a little dog with a top hat, which was whining in time to the music and swaying, abandoned the performance, paying no heed to its trainer, and rushed at Siegfried. Two girls screamed, a lady tripped on the train of her dress and almost fell onto the cobbles, a seminary student and a shop boy jumped into a coal cart, an old woman pressed herself against a wall, and the dog, small and dolled up as it was, yapped loudly, bared its gums, growled and snapped at the air. Perched on a fence, the tomcat bristled his tail, spat, and then twisted round and sprayed the dog with pee.
The second-class carriage in which a seat had been reserved for Joseph Kranich seemed new. And it was in this setting, with panelling and a beautifully lacquered banquette, that the doctor spent a long, a very long time, not so much according to how the hands of his pocket watch revolved as much as according to how his instincts measured it. He examined the woodwork and convinced himself that it was made of oak, plane and beech, he looked out of the window without distinguishing anything in the pitch darkness outside, he deciphered the rhythm and tone of the breathing around him (in the screeching silence, which was anything but silence), the cough of the man by the door, the lip-smacking of a country priest, the light snore of a woman in mourning, the fidgeting of a businessman with ginger sideburns, and the unintelligible snatches of speech from a freckled little girl. It was not until Salzburg, at Austrian customs, that he heard his heartbeat, which, oddly, was louder than the ticking of his watch. As he was unable to look at his heart, he looked at the gilded watch, on the inside of whose lid were engraved the names of his mother and sister, Gertrude and Irma. It showed ten to four in the morning, a cold, damp hour, which would soon dissipate, swallowed by the light of incipient day. But before that hour could dissipate, before it could pass into the memory of books and the world, then, at ten to four in the morning, the wind slipped through the steam of the locomotive, chased away the railway smells and filled Joseph’s nostrils with a scent of lilac. Amazed, the dentist saw not far away a burgeoning bush, not at all tall, blossoming at the end of June. He thought about how such was the fate of mountain plants, always late, and this thought, his amazement, and the bustle of the platform made him forget his heartbeats and walk into the waiting room. Inside, bodies were emerging haltingly from sleep, conversations were underway in an undertone, the air was crackling along with the candles and dispersing droplets of perspiration, and none but an officer was bustling ceaselessly, checking the passports one more time, putting stern questions to the travellers, giving orders to the customs guards, soldiers and his own adjutants. When his turn came, Herr Kranich was chewing a slice of smoked fish. He had found it in a handkerchief, left over from the tomcat’s last meal. Without doubt, the lieutenant did not like the reek of smoked fish, he wrinkled his nose, he rapidly read the documents, he cast a look of scorn at the brown-haired, unmarried, Catholic Switzer with hazel eyes, who was heading to Bukarest, with the intention of finding gainful employment doctoring Wallachians’ teeth. Finally, the train glided along the tracks to Vienna, it slipped through troop movements and war manoeuvres, it let itself be caressed by torrid heat and fields of ripe wheat, it panted like a supple greyhound loyal to its purpose, it puffed smoke and somehow became fuddled, like a young gentleman, as it neared that city pampered by the fates. One of the passengers, with a wicker basket on his arm and whose real name inspired so many connections with the waltz, without there being any, broke free of the barracks hubbub of the western station and traversed the heart of the empire in a carriage, among happy buildings and gardens, along lively boulevards, as far as the eastern station. During the journey, he asked the coachman to stop three times: at a cathedral, for some moments of peace and recollection, at a grocer’s, for ham, Swiss cheese and olives, and at a tavern, for a single tankard. Joseph greeted the new sunset dozing in another second-class carriage, with new companions and a new destination, Pest, one of the lungs of the empire, the other being Buda. Further still, presuming that someone were rotating a globe in his palms (as a certain count, with a catarrh, had done that February, in Brussels) or were scrutinising a planisphere, one might have remarked that the dentist had descended a quarter of an inch, at most three quarters of an inch (some three hundred miles, in fact), as far as one of the soles of the empire, where the railway came to an end and where, once more, the waters of the Danube could be glimpsed. And in Baziaș, a gloomy little town, dominated by the coal trade, the suitcases, bags and chest that had set out from Berlin, together with their owner and the tomcat in the basket, boarded a boat for the second time. The passengers’ papers were carefully inspected, and so Herr Kranich’s profession did not remain unknown to the captain, a fellow with a well-trimmed moustache and a good memory. This fact, minor at first sight, abruptly began to grow, however, somewhere between the huge crag through which the river had carved out its course, it grew and grew, it tumefied and became a significant fact as the boat passed a long island, occupied by a fort, white houses, a Franciscan monastery and tobacco plantations. There, by the island which was called, in Turkish wise, Ada Kaleh, the officer on watch appeared precipitately on the lower deck, he called out the name of a migratory bird and came upon a pale, thin man, who was holding a tomcat in his lap. He begged him to come urgently to one of the cabins in first class, where a baroness, a young Russian, was about to give birth. For all his propensity to the healing of teeth, the doctor did not hesitate, he hastened to fetch his medical bag and to reach the room, neither wide nor narrow, with sunlit portholes, in which the woman was groaning and trembling, livid, blonde, frightened and astonished, stretched out in bed. Aksinia Larisa Yakovleva was at the end of a honeymoon voyage of more than a year, the breaking of her waters had soaked her dress and the sheets, she was immersed in the throes of childbirth, while her husband, who was older, much older, was caressing and kissing her palms, babbling, complaining, weeping (in a muffled way), blaming himself for having miscalculated the length of the pregnancy and for not having delayed the voyage home. Joseph looked on and remained silent for a quarter of a minute. He was unimpressed by the baron’s laments, and so he borrowed a phial of salts, invited him into the corridor and asked him to send for a basin of hot water. Then time dilated once more, like a lazy snail, sometimes curling up in its shell and dozing, sometimes advancing undecidedly, until the baby saw the light of day towards evening. It was a blond-haired boy, who screamed loudly and in amazement, in amazing circumstances: he had Russian parents, he had been delivered by a Swiss (in reality, German) dentist, and found himself on an Austro-Hungarian vessel, with a Czech captain, between the Romanian and the Bulgarian banks of the Danube, both buffeted by winds from Istanbul. At the behest of Osip Afanasievich Yakovlev, the physician tossed back four large brimming glasses of vodka, and then admitted that he had never supervised a birth. He had the precise presentiment, as the sky and the people on the deck reeled dizzyingly, that his first child would also be a boy. Plashing the Danube jerkily with its paddles, as though it was fitted with millwheels to either side, the steamer had long since passed Turnu-Severin, where he ought to have disembarked, and was about to land in Giurgiu. Up until there, Joseph slept soundly, not so much as two hours, forgetting Siegfried, the young mother, past and future. On dry land, he was greeted by a dust storm and dozens of people, some barefoot, who jostled him to carry his luggage. It was not until in the coupé that was jolting along the road to Bucharest that he found the diamond ring. It was in his matchbox. Alongside his pipe. He had seen it on the left hand of the baron, on his middle finger, when they had clinked glasses for the lucky star of the newborn. He laughed.
*
At first, a diffuse light covered details and peculiarities; it allowed only outlines and thick brushstrokes to be distinguished, so that their personal histories were as alike as two drops of wine. But drops of wine are not like drops of water, and they can have identical forms and colours, but different tastes, for example a drop of cabernet and a drop of pinot noir. On his way to the Principalities, the captain of dragoons set down on paper and sent letters to the Prussian king, to the Tsar, to the French and the Austrian emperors, he was accompanied by trusty chamberlain von Mayenfisch, by counsellor von Werner and by three ordinary servants, he wore spectacles of plain glass, without lenses, so as not to be recognised, he passed everywhere and always as Karl Hettingen, borrowing the name from the family’s Swiss castle, in Weinburg, once he chanced to find himself in vicinity of some old friends from the Habsburg army, and was forced to hide behind an open newspaper, he spent three days in a squalid inn waiting for a boat that had been blocked by military transports, he unexpectedly leapt onto the jetty at Turnu-Severin, although he had a ticket to Odessa, and, all in all, countless things happened differently than in the dentist’s peregrination: the dentist sent no letters, he enjoyed the company of a tomcat, he received a false name by means of a substitution of bird species, he did not disguise himself, and he did not glimpse any familiar face. Nevertheless, in the logic of the epoch, their journeys resembled two drops of different varieties of wine as much as could be. For, they had followed the same route, they were both Germans, they both had false passports, they both travelled second class, and they both sometimes thought, out of the blue, of the little lead soldier enclosed in a small box covered in maroon velvet.
After they stepped onto Wallachian soil, however, one on 8 May 1866 (after the Julian calendar), the other seven weeks later, on 25 June, nothing was similar. Joseph Strauss did not seek a telegraph to announce his arrival in his new homeland, he was not treated to a coach drawn by eight horses, he did not cross the Jiu River on a floating pontoon (at dawn, in dreadful weather), he was not greeted in Craiova by a motley crowd and a triumphal arch made of willow branches, he was not guarded by two files of foot soldiers and he did not spend the night in a cool manor (making small talk with Zinca, a woman who had been through much, with her son Nicolae, a Liberal and triumvir, with various ministers, and with the head of government, the erstwhile Bey of Samos), he entered Bucuresci from the south, through a malodorous slum, in a not at all handsome coupé, in no case coming from the direction of Titu (in a carriage adorned with garlands, drawn by twelve white horses, escorted by a detachment of lancers and followed by a ceremonial procession), he did not wash or attire himself in festive garb in order to receive the keys to the city (outside Băneasa Forest), he did not listen to a speech by the mayor (which sounded something like this: Sovereign of Romania! I have given thee the crown of Stephen the Great and of Michael the Brave, thy forbears this day hence! Restore the land to its ancient splendour! Make this beautiful land the advanced sentinel of modern freedoms, the unvanquished boulevard of western civilisation!) and he did not reply in French, stirring first rumours, then applause and finally a torrential downpour (the first after three months of drought), he did not proceed from one end to the other of that long, broad avenue, the capital’s only paved street (called Podul Mogoșoaia), amazed at the potholes, the miasmas and the buildings, he did not strive to remain upright and composed amid so many jolts, flowers, flags, carpets hung out of windows, cheers (or shouts from the mob), cannon salvoes and chiming bells, white doves fluttering to the heavens, startled crows flapping and sheets of paper (calligraphically inscribed with poems) floating like dry leaves (in the middle of spring), he did not salute the honorary guard of alpine hunters, infantry, cavalry and artillery, he did not ask (in front of a one-storey house with two soldiers at the door), “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a dans cette maison?” and, not having understood the reply, he did not insist by saying, “Où est le palais?”, he was not greeted on the top of a hill by His Beatitude Metropolitan Nifon (with a gilded cross in his right hand and a silvered Gospel in his left, a synod of priests at his back, garbed in rich vestments), he did not attend mass at the Metropolitan Cathedral and he did not stride into the main (in fact, rather small) chamber of Parliament to utter the first word of Romanian in his life (“Jur!” – “I swear!”) and then follow Manolache Costache Epureanu (in his capacity as President of the Constituent Assembly), who was coughing and clearing his throat, to be proclaimed Ruler (in other words, a kind of king) of that land. But, given that nothing is perfect in this world, not even differences, their arrivals in Bucharest did have one thing in common. Prince Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig, before being named Carol I, and Herr Joseph Strauss, immediately after arriving in the centre of the city, stared wide-eyed in amazement when they saw numerous swine wallowing in the mud, unfettered and fat, under the very windows of the house that passed as the princely palace. And that was all.
And when the twenty-fifth day of June had begun to fade, so that the clouds of dust were dispersing and the mounds of garbage slowly, slowly vanishing into the darkness, the dentist stopped at an inn by a river, was served sausages full of suet, and no longer had the strength to dip his pen into an inkwell. It was not until morning, after dissolving ten drops of quinine in brown sugar and procuring a glass of milk for the tomcat, that he had leisure to write to his benefactor. On one of the days that followed, after he had been received in the sovereign’s office and after the latter, in return for the lead soldier, had entrusted him to a lieutenant of the guard, who was to help him find a place to live, Joseph came across a German street, with all kinds of merchants, functionaries, craftsmen and pharmacists, with notaries, bank clerks, jewellers and watchmakers. It was called Lipscani Street, recalling Leipzig. Soon, the Berliner doctor discovered that he was not the only shadow of the captain of dragoons, as he had, from naivety and avoidance of troubling his head, imagined for a while. Around the throne there thronged countless other shadows, among whom a physician with the rank of colonel, a bastard, seemingly, a gentleman named Brătianu, with the initials I and C, and a professor who spoke very oddly, as if in Latin, although he was striving to instil Romanian into the prince. Moreover, Joseph discovered that he was not the first dentist in the city. Among romances, poesy and scientific tomes, he found somewhere a slim volume with Cyrillic letters, on whose reddish cover the bookseller read for him: I. Seliger, dantist in Bucuresci; Guidance for the Cleanliness of the Mouth and the Preservation of Healthy Teeth. It had been printed in 1828. He purchased it.
