The Days of the King by Filip Florian Read Free Book Online Page A

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 whichhe 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