Free The Days of the King by Filip Florian

("calendar"), Batiştei ("courtyard"), Sărindar, Enei, Kretzulescu, Doamnei, and, only after that, Saint Nicholas Şelari ("saddlers"), Saint Sava, and Saint Nicholas dintr-o Zi. From the west, where the circle imagined by Joseph Strauss came to an end, there came only two series of chimes, one hollow, the other honeyed, from Saint John the Great and from Zlătari ("goldsmiths"). Then the bells fell silent, each according to its tongue, but only after the Unclean One had been driven from every place. In the damp air the silence was consummate, though raindrops were pattering upon the sill and Siegfried was growling in his sleep, dreaming of hounds, hostile tomcats, and rats. Joseph had finished munching the last morsel of strudel, and now he sank into an armchair and began to read Apuleius'
Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass,
sipping a glass of cider. Gradually absorbed by the misadventures of the young Lucius, he forgot the packed churches redolent of incense, whose number was known only to a few, perhaps only to certain priests and tax collectors. As he smoked a quincewood pipe, he was not thinking about how everywhere in that sprawling city, as far as the barriers toward the open plain, sermons were praising Saint Spyridon, Bishop of Trimythous, who had changed a snake into gold pieces, who had called forth rain in the midst of drought, and who, raising from the dead two horses with severed heads, found that he had attached the white head to the dun horse and the dun head to the white horse.
    Later that gloomy afternoon, the dentist tried to sleep, but tossed restlessly under the sheets, his eyes closed. Faces, phantasms, gestures, events, appearances, and deeds came all in a welter, without connection or logic, each enveloping him in turn, tender or paroxysmal, then vanishing as mysteriously as they had arisen. He had barely twisted onto his side and settled the pillow under his right cheek when he remembered the fantasy he had had in April in Berlin, in which beautiful women and impatient crowds waited at his door for him to quell their aching teeth. He had a few patients, some regular, some occasional, but he had understood from the outset that one of the local vices was that people did not care if they were gap-toothed. They did not brush their teeth, they ate as best they could, and they hastened to have bad teeth pulled. They pulled their teeth themselves, having first steeped them in plum brandy,
mastika,
rye brandy, and raki, or they went to barbers who wielded chisels and large pincers, whom they called toothsters. Such customs left Joseph with a bitterness in his mouth, one he could taste even then, in bed. He turned over onto his tummy and lost himself in a late autumnal landscape. Once again he saw a gray rabbit bound from behind the bushes and run zigzagging over a ploughed field, cleaving the fine mist, then suddenly encountering a bullet from the gun of Peter Bykow the baker and spinning over the clods of black earth. A dog fetched it, and Peter wrapped it in burdock leaves and crammed it into his pouch, alongside another four. On the Ciumernicu estate where they had hunted in the whitish light of dawn, queer shapesand outlines loomed, colored like the cold. The two Germans, one with a scarf and fur-lined cap, the other with a rifle slung over his shoulder, had come to a stop on the Wallachian plain, at the edge of a village of Bulgarians, and were gazing at a stocky, bald man wearing priestly garb, who was piling thick layers of straw onto some vine stocks. He was working slowly, with a pitchfork. He greeted them in Slavonic and Latin, then Romanian, mentioned his name in passing, and, in that mixture of languages, confessed that he was fearful of the frost, the angels' anger, and the darkness. He left his horse hobbled on the stubble field and led them to some low-roofed houses, beyond which lay the manor of the boyar Condurat. On the way, Necula Penov, the priest, talked continuously (pausing only