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

after the other, eye to eye, her green eyes were
boundless, like vernalfields full of gophers, peace be unto you, once more, good Otto, O magician, for you are a magician and all that came to pass was a spell, for seven days through which processed six nights we dwelled in tenderness, we rolled together on the carpets and we dissolved into one, we scaled tables, cupboards, and dressers, seeking tenderness and repose, once we almost fell, from the stove, but we caught ourselves, our forepaws entwined, our tails likewise, mine white with a black tuft, hers black with a ruddy spot, we dallied in the bed of our beloved master, at leisure, having slipped under the soft coverlet, so that it would be dark and that the world be contracted thus, I would not have wished, O barber, you to be witness, because you would have shuddered to hear us, they were the rustlings of love, not meows; Manastamirflorinda and I were center and circumference, our bodies on the upper floor and our souls in the firmament, we were in the belly of a fluffy cloud, from above which you, dear, merciful Otto Huer, did descend, turn the keys, and enter, you did stroke us and sigh, you did fill and drain three glasses of my beloved master's schnapps, you did wrap the maiden in a tartan rug, in the evening, when she was a maiden no more, you did take her in your arms as if between your unseen wings and vanish, praise be to thee, O angel, may thou be rewarded!
    Thusly and thus much wrote Siegfried on yellow velvet before falling into a deep sleep. He had inscribed his psalm on the back of one of the new chairs, and his soul and ten claws had not been idle.
    Herr Strauss arrived in the morning, weary, his clothes rumpled, dreaming of a hot, interminable bath and a milky coffee. He called the tomcat from the doorway, still holding his luggage, ready to kiss him and to regale him with the smoked swordfish he had brought from Istanbul. But Siegfried was nowhere to be seen. Herr Strauss had time to take off his overcoat, light the fire, and put the kettle on the stove. He opened the windows wide, enough to let the cool of the twenty-third day of October waft into the room. Long did he gaze outside, and he called out once more, but the street was bustling with people, horses, and donkeys, not at all an hour for stray cats. He was about to tear the leaves from a calendar, quite a number, for after all he had been gone two weeks, when his eyes alighted on the back of one of the chairs, which was covered in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rips, rents, slashes, and holes, as if the velvet had been riddled by moths or pecked by sharp-beaked birds. He did not even shrug. He merely stood there, mute, heedless of the boiling kettle. Later, he espied a hummock in the middle of the bed. He found the tomcat under the coverlet, asleep on the white sheets, sad and ill, curled up over a hardened bloodstain. Examining the wound on his ear, touching the stitches, and running his fingers through the cat's fur, Joseph was convinced that Siegfried had lost, if not the war, then at least a number of street battles, and that he had suffered from loneliness and longing. It did not enter his mind that the dried black blood might be that of a young she-cat, who had recently come into heat for the first time.
    In the kitchen, on the top shelf of the sideboard, there were other scratches. Those notches in the wood, which were to fill with dust but never fade, read in translation something like this:
What wonder, and what fortune, and how all things followed upon one another, and now more than ever would it seem rich to die

The rustling has not faded, I see it, it is the mist that floats through the room

The moonlight lolls on the floorboards, I hearken, it quivers like Manastamirflorinda

The droplets of sadness, I smell them, they wax large and ruddy, they are the very flecks in her fur.
    The German Christmas came, dismal and damp, with days not cold enough for the sleet to turn to snow. And on