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tabletop or the moths dissolving in the flame of the candle, this image failed to imprint itself in their minds. They left Martin to the Lord's mercy, alone in the suffocating, sticky night. They, too, were sweating, yearning for a breath of wind, but still gabbing away. They had lost count of the number of mugs. One said they must have reached their fifth; the other, their seventh. They sighed, quaffed, and smiled. Then the doctor related how one night he had entered a low-ceilinged room, after passing through a courtyard with a chained, lame dog, two goats munching corncobs, and hens sleeping under a fruit tree (plum or quince, who could tell). It had all happened in the dark, the other week, a page now torn from the calendars. It smelled stale and moldy within, he said, and he described how a woman with birdlike eyes had taken off her dress on the threshold, knelt down, opened his trousers and placed his member between her dugs (warming it like a frozen sparrow chick, fondling it). He remembered that, damp and aflame, they had tumbled together on a grubby mattress. In his ears there still lingered the panting, not the sleep, he could not hear that, of course, but he had heard the rustling of dawn. He had not budged, as he saw through half-closed eyes how the woman rummaged through his coat pockets, how she took his last penny (no great matter). Finally, after the sun had risen, he had seen the seamy sheets, stained as if by gobs of spittle. Listening to him with his arms folded over his chest, Otto Huer was of the opinion that in such a city it would not go amiss to have the addresses of bathed, pomaded, and less thievish girls. But neither on that night, over the sixth or eighth mug, nor in the future which then seemed to them so mild, did the dentist ever reveal to Otto the secret of why he had decided to come to Bucharest.
    It was on the eleventh day of that August that the young prince who had lured him into a new life next gave a sign. His gums were inflamed, livid, as distressing as bad news. Joseph pushed an armchair to the window, arranged a pillow against the back in the torrid afternoon, and, with a pair of tweezers sterilized in medicinal spirit, extracted a tiny yellow fiber next to one of the prince's canines. It appeared to be from a bean pod. Before he came to perform that elementary but salutary operation, however, and even before he carefully examined the prince's teeth and palatal arch through a magnifying glass, a number of things had taken place, things not worthy of wearying the mind of a sovereign. First, the two brothers from the Visarion quarter, the builder and the carpenter, had turned out to be Russians, not just any kind of Russians, but Filippovian Old Believers, with bushy blond beards, with smocks that reached below their knees and broad belts around their waists, with the foible of not touching strong drink, with blue eyes and a strange religious zeal, who genuflected and kissed the crosses at their throats whenever they ate, quenched their thirst, or heard church bells. They had finished the job rapidly, plastering, polishing and painting, adjusting the window frames and sashes, staining the woodwork with caustic, sanding and waxing the floorboards, glossing the ceiling. It had come out well, hewing to the tastes and blueprints of Herr Strauss, and the price, rightly to say, had been neither so low as to be an act of charity nor so high as to take the coat off a poor man's back. The stove maker too had soon made his appearance, tall and thin, bald, rather like a pottering, peevish heron. He continually chewed leaves, apparently mulberry or wild hemp. He skillfully shackled smoke and straightly joined terra-cotta tile. After the renovation was complete, when nothing in the room recalled the former haberdasher's any longer, Joseph had picked out some Anatolian carpets and affixed to the glossy walls five anatomical charts in gilt frames. He had brought them from Berlin, tightly rolled up