The Days of the King Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself to be swindled or intimidated. He appeared with a ruler and, taking measurements, making calculations, placed before them a sheet of paper with sums that left them speechless. A few minutes later, Peter Bykow, a baker, knocked at his door, wishing merely to introduce himself, to shake his neighbor's hand and congratulate him on not allowing himself to be tricked. They talked for a little while, as new neighbors and old Germans, clinked glasses of schnapps, laughed, and decided to go rabbit hunting together sometime. Not on the following Saturday, but the one after that, Joseph chased away some new builders who had finished the walls but were lagging over plastering the ceiling and sanding the beams. They departed grumbling. At around lunchtime. Then, after roasted veal and buttered potatoes, after sleep and coffee, while Siegfried dozed fitfully on a sunlit window ledge, Joseph went out into the sweltering air, stopped at a crossroads and drank some kvass, avoided stepping in several piles of horse flop and a reeking dead turkey hen, dodged a cart laden with firewood, went into a tailor's shop and looked at the bolts of cloth (none of them to his liking), bought a poppy-seed cake, and, as he munched, decided to have a haircut. In front of the mirror, while the soft, white linen was draped over his clothes and tucked under his chin, not too tightly, while the shaving brush and razor ambled over his cheeks, while the comb and scissors strolled through his hair, while he was soaped and rinsed with warm water, while he felt palms patting him with an absorbent cloth and fingertips rubbing him with lavender oil, many cloudy things in his life became limpid. This was also due to his chat with Otto Huer, the barber. It was as if he, Otto, had cleansed the inside as well as the outside of his customer's head. From him, Joseph learnedthe names of two brothers in the Visarion quarter, a painter and a carpenter who worked carefully, quickly, and not too expensively, he learned of an old and skillful stove maker, he found out who it was that had crafted the very chair he sat upon, one just right for a dentist's patients, he learned everything under the sun about grocers, bakers, butchers, druggists, markets, and taverns. They went on talking until almost midnight in a beer hall where they had retired after the cuckoo clock on Herr Huer's wall announced six. Over his first mug, perhaps even over his second, Joseph had listened and grasped how politics was conducted in Bucuresci: theft was the order of the day, until there was nothing left to steal, and no few men, dreaming of the throne, were hoping that Prince Karl would obtain a sizeable foreign loan, fill the treasury, and then go back to his own country. Over the third mug, supping less thirstily, they spoke of how to go about learning Romanian, a sibilant language, sweetened by syrupy vowels, that bore not the slightest resemblance to their own. Mathilde, the sister of Jakob Vogel the optician, had given lessons to many people, not bad lessons, but at that very moment she had the chicken pox and was not receiving visitors. They imagined, as they blew the froth off their beer, a froth as white as milk or Mathilde's skin, how the pustules dotted her face, breasts, and belly button, they pictured how the pox spread over her plump buttocks, like a swarm of red ants or wild strawberries, they sighed, drank and smiled, and then after a while Joseph chased away that image, not from pudor, not because it was not to his liking, but because it was, strictly speaking, medically incorrect. Finally, while they were on the fourth mug, the barber, thinking over other potential teachers—not ones with diplomas, but with compassion and patience—conjured up the image of Martin Stolz: lean, jug-eared, jovial, with a thinmustache and arched eyebrows. He was a notary's assistant, young and eager at all times to lay up a coin in his purse. But because of the shadows dancing on the tin