The Days of the King Read Free Page A

spacious shed and to hang oat-filled nosebags from their necks. Inside, the innkeeper wielded his paintbrush with great rapidity, sweating heavily (he kept taking off his tattered hat and wiping his bald pate with a rag), the woman grunted and strained, standing on her tiptoes (hindered by her dumpy body), the girl moved back and forth on her knees, her blouse riding up from the waistband of her skirt (revealing a mole-covered patch of white skin on her back). The whitewash and lye could not drive away the smell of brandy, cider, and smoke in the room. A bitter smell, which rasped against the emptiness in his stomach. An old woman brought lunch: duck soup with peas for him, and the bones and gristle from a chicken leg for Siegfried. The cat did not even touch them.
    When the earth had aired a little in the wind and the afternoon sun, the coach set out once more. A light trot that straightaway became 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 he had ever taken, and the only important one, so important that he sometimes likened it to a journey to the next world, for after all he was heading to a place of verdure or, at least, a place of golden wheat, endless 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 at the sight, along with a map of the continent on which he had traced out a route in red ink and marked with brown crosses a number of key points. In the letter, he laid out meticulously what Joseph would have to undertake on that exhausting journey, especially since war with Austria was about to break out, and he, a Prussian physician, would have to cross hostile territory, to pass through enemy border posts and checkpoints, to endure suspicion and prying questions. He was asked to conceal his identity, which meant not only procuring false papers, a matter explained in detail, but also one rather laughable duty, 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 in 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 of his books in turn, torn out the flyleaves that bore his signature.
    He parted with the gray mare and the sorrel at Magdeburg railway station. He paid the coachman his fee, allowed a porter to take care of his luggage, and with the wicker basket on his arm went at dusk into a nearby tavern where a greenish lamp swayed above the door. Although he ordered trout in cream, so that they could enjoy dinner together, the tomcat again refused to eat. It was the eleventh time he had done so since their departure. Curled up in a ring, his fur tousled and his forepaws pressed