Life Begins On Friday

by Ioana Parvulescu

  Bucharest, 23 December 1897

  Sir,

  Your visit of yesterday caught me at an inopportune moment. I am rather ill, I have conjunctivitis (an illness due to which my eyes have become a mixture of green and red, rather like the colours of garments in Renaissance paintings), I also have other problems, which I will refrain from mentioning to you. Perhaps, if you had taken a few minutes of your time, which, I am sure, is very precious, to write to me at least a day in advance, I would have been able to make our meeting possible. But concern for rules does not preoccupy you. If you nonetheless wish to see me, having been warned about the way that I look, please come on Saturday the 27th to our house at five o’clock in the afternoon. My parents, unfortunately, have to pay a visit. I impatiently await your reply.

  Iulia Margulis

  The curlicue on my signature was quite dented, a sign that I was out of sorts. I refuse to feel sorry for myself: my eyes, the tooth that must be extracted, les règles, the house cleaning that seems never to end, and which in fact has barely begun, since now Mama is in command, and the bad dream. But as soon as I finished writing the note, I felt better. And since Nicu had come to visit my little brother, I gave him the envelope to deliver to Alexandru, and even gave him his tram fare. A big clock grows inside my heart whenever I am waiting for an answer from him, a clock that runs twice as slowly as it ought to do and whose seconds tick twice as loudly. And it is as if all my other sorrows are smaller and far away, like when you look through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses.

  2.

  From her bed, next to his, she could hear the doctor’s even breathing. He was still asleep, weary from the journey of the day before. Rarely did he snore, which was one of his great qualities. There were plenty of wives who took separate bedrooms in order to be able to sleep, because their husbands chugged like trains the whole night through. Agatha thought of the chugging of the train to Giurgiu on Sunday, and the train back, yesterday, which had jolted her every bone. Her back ached more and more frequently, although she wrapped her middle with a woollen girdle, and now she could feel a migraine coming on. That was all she needed, when she had so hard a day ahead and so tiring a day behind. Perhaps next year they ought to rear their own pig. So long a journey was not worth it, although it was good to have everything prepared and ready, admitted Mrs Margulis. She lit the gas lamp by the side of the bed. It was still pitch black, but she lay back down so as not to waken her husband: the floor creaked rather loudly.

  It had been a pleasant surprise to meet their friend Costache on the return journey. He was alone, and so they moved from the other end of the carriage into his compartment, bringing with them the small suitcase, which emanated delicious odours. They had had to surrender the larger suitcase at the baggage car. The doctor had gone with the porter to the baggage cassa, not a quarter of an hour before the train’s departure, as required, but a half an hour earlier. Their baggage was weighed: thirty-two kilos, and they had been relieved of it. It was therefore easy to move to Costache’s compartment. Outside it was gloomy, snowflakes stuck to the windowpane, revealed their starry patterns for an instant and then melted, but inside it was warm, there was light, they felt sheltered, and the conversation flowed more easily than ever. It was as if you had guests, but without the attendant burdens of the host. The time melts like snowflakes. You know that you have a few suspended hours, in which you have nothing whatever to do, except to glide across the white fields, as if you were flying. They had hesitated before setting off, because in winter the train sometimes got stuck in snowdrifts. But the newspapers had not forecast any blizzards.

  ‘What is the news about the stranger who was found on Friday, Dan Crețu?’ asked Agatha. ‘People have started talking all kinds of nonsense, and our children – which is to say Jacques mostly – believe he fell from the sky.’

  Costache, who was always highly discreet when it came to the cases he was working on, told them that he had not found out very much, but hoped in time to bring everything to light and, without his realizing it, he found himself telling his old friends the story of Rareș Ochiu-Zănoagă and the awkward moments he had spent at the young man’s family estate. The policeman had seen many things in his time, but he was still not accustomed to some. He still felt affected by the grief of the parents, who on learning the news had been ripped from the soil of their lives like trees at the height of a tempest. Such a thing ought not to exist in the plan of the world, he said. The child was an artist and sometimes caused them to worry, and it is true, they used to be on tenterhooks because of his frequent trips to Bucharest, but nothing, except perhaps the presentiments of the blood that bring you tidings before any messenger, could have foretold such an end. With the sister of the young Rareș – he found out from her that the lad was not yet twenty-two, Iulia’s age – he had managed to speak for somewhat longer, although the girl’s eyes kept turning red and she had been unable to utter a word. She was given smelling salts a number of times, but she was a brave girl, she did not faint, and kept choking back her tears. The boy, Rareș, was talented at painting, and every June, he went to Bucharest, where he worked as a volunteer, restoring church frescos. It was his passion and in recent years there had been frequent restorations in Bucharest. No sooner had he finished in one church than he was sent to another. When he was just ten-years-old, a mural painter from Giurgiu had allowed him to climb the scaffolding in the church he was working on and to paint the eyes and mouth of St Constantine and his mother, St Elena, who had become rather smoke-blackened because of the candles. The lad had taken the brush from the painter and working with his child’s hand he had displayed an unusual talent. The priest came in and angry lest the painting be ruined, he shouted at both the painter and the lad. It was then that the first portent occurred, for Rareș took fright and fell off the scaffolding. You should have seen how the priest’s hand trembled when he cradled the blond head in his palms and saw the closed eyes. You should have seen how Mama, who had been talking to somebody in the churchyard, ran inside and took him in her arms as if he were an infant. But on that occasion they had merely had a fright, nothing worse.

  The policeman lowered his voice and urged them to treat with the utmost confidentiality what he was about to tell them, and both Agatha and the doctor, sitting opposite him, leaned forward to hear. He told them the last words spoken by the young man, the visible relief on his face, and how he seemed to die at peace.

  ‘Perhaps it was a case of mystical aspiration,’ said the doctor, and Agatha added: ‘A kind of prayer.’

  But Costache was certain that the ‘syndromes’ said otherwise. Once, the policeman and her husband had amused themselves finding similarities between their professions, and they had discovered them in droves. Both professions demanded a spirit of observation, a warm heart and a clear head, generosity and dedication, tact and courage. Both required discretion and stamina. Both entailed investigations, since in today’s medicine, explained Leon, questioning is obligatory. The answers had to be interpreted: the sick, the same as malefactors, avoid telling the truth. Both professions examined signs with the greatest attention. In both there was need for strong moral fibre and love of one’s fellow man. Both the physician and the policeman had to be educated and intelligent, capable of understanding the subtlest bodily, spiritual and social mechanisms. Both the physician and the policeman had to have money, the first for instruments and hospitals and the second in order not to be corrupted. Here, Costache was better off than Agatha’s husband: he was from a wealthy family and to him his remuneration was mostly symbolic. You could not become Chief of Police if you were not from a wealthy family, and the reason for that was not only to prevent you being bought but also to ensure you had the education required for such a difficult profession. But above all else, both the physician and the policeman were afraid of the spread of evil and tried to quash it. Perhaps in the society of the future, after man makes progress in all the areas expected of him, there will be no need for either physi
cians or policemen. They had often said as much, but they were among the few who did not believe it. For, they knew that man, wherever he might be in space or time, was in essence the same. For Agatha, Leon Margulis and Costache Boerescu also had one more thing in common: both of them had fallen in love with her. And it was not the stronger that won.

  Still lingering in bed and somewhat drained of strength, Agatha thought of the words she had learned from Costache: in her mind, light and Holy Mother could only be connected to the final moment. But Popescu? A priest (popă) or the descendent of a priest... But why had the boy uttered the name? A Popescu must be found, the Popescu with whom the poor child was acquainted. Thinking of his mother’s grief, Agatha wandered down an evil path, a path she almost never allowed herself to follow. Neither Iulia nor Jacques knew that they had had a little sister, born before them, but younger than them, because she had died of meningitis just a few days before her third birthday. She had been unutterably charming, good and happy, until she fell ill. Never in her life had Agatha fought harder for something than she had then. She felt in the most tangible possible way that she was wrestling with death, as she sat by her little girl’s bedside day and night. She had talked to her, although the girl could not hear, she had caressed her, she had called to her, she had smothered her little hands in kisses, she had followed to the letter the instructions as to the doses of medicine and everything she had to do to make her well, and she had prayed unceasingly. She had sensed that the doctor-father no longer believed in the possibility of salvation, but she had believed and fought. But Death had been stronger than the mother; Death is always stronger. And Agatha had wanted to follow her daughter immediately, to help her. How could she leave her alone in the darkness? She had always been protected by her mother, by her father, by a night-light next to her bed. It is impossible to speak of what came next, she was in hell, day after day in hell: of that she was sure. What had she done wrong? Why was the child guilty if she was at fault? Did God exist, if he could permit such a thing? Was not the world itself at fault, from its very foundations? Maybe we are living in an imperfect world, a world abandoned to the whim of fate. The doctor-father had to give her injections, to make her sleep for days on end, because when she awoke, she immediately wanted to follow her little girl, demanding a double dose of morphine to make her sleep forever. Since then, the lamp on her little girl’s grave had never gone out, she had made sure of it, during her frequent trips, on which none of the children were allowed to accompany her.

  She spoke to her constantly and told her: if you are in heaven, be happy, there, in heaven, however unhappy we are here, and if you are not there yet, then I, with my own hand, will take you up above, hold on tight, I won’t let you go. And Agatha would clench her fist, grasping thin air. And if there be no heaven, I will make one for you, and if there be no God, you shall have one, your Mama promises. And Agatha could see God plainly and in His arms rested her little girl. And if you are nothingness, then I will love that nothingness and soak it with my tears and protect it with all my being. Do you hear me, nothingness? I love you! You are my nothingness now, my only nothingness. And the nothingness had her eyes. If you feel poorly, I will stand in for you, so that I will be poorly, but no, you could not feel poorly, I give you all the good I have. If you need us, call us, we will come, we hear you. I will come straight away, send me word! For me death was like pregnancy, but in reverse. I counted the days, I spoke to the departed child, just as then I had spoken with the child who had not yet arrived, I explained to it, I consoled it, I protected the child that was no longer, just as I had protected the one that had not yet come. Except that one was drawing nearer to life, while the other was moving farther away from it.

  Agatha always kept the ears of her soul pricked up, to hear whether her little girl needed help. And never could she be fully happy again, as she had been before. And not a day passed but in her mind she kissed her on her little head, on her cheek, and when she kissed Iulia, who had come into the world soon thereafter, on her dark hair, she hoped the kiss would also reach the blonde hair of the other girl. The children sensed something; they sensed that they could never make their mother fully happy, there was always a little corner of her that remained discontented and sad.

  And when the trial with Jacques had come, Agatha was no longer able to experience even that as a normal mother would have experienced it. As ever, she reined in her thoughts, toiling with desperation. That was her salvation and, strangely, she also seemed to find salvation in the chatter of the servants and women’s affairs, which shifted her thoughts to more concrete things. And Costache’s visits also did her good, and his concern, which had still not flagged after such a bitterly long time. Now Costache sometimes seemed to view Iulia as he had once viewed her. She was not surprised; she knew that he could see the inner person more clearly than Roentgen’s miraculous rays. But nevertheless, Agatha did not like to see him too much in Iulia’s company.

  She would now have to inspect all the cleaning that had been done in her absence, to see to the kitchen, the potted plants, to make ready the lamps and candlesticks, to take out and check the crockery for special occasions, to examine the towels in the toilet cabinets next to the bedroom, to make sure they were fresh, to scrub the basins and the porcelain bowls, to remember to send for a piano tuner, because Iulia had asked for one to come, to arrange the things in the larder, to remove the cobwebs that had caught her eye that very moment, to see to the presents, and tomorrow at the break of day she had a meeting of the Mothers’ Association. They were going to visit the Elisabeta Crèche at No. 11 Strada Teilor, which had been inaugurated three weeks previously, at the end of November. In Agatha’s mind there remained a darling little girl who resembled her departed daughter, except that she was swarthier and her eyes were sadder, whereas her little Maria had made the whole street and the whole city and the whole world smile when she took her for a walk.

  She got up and on the nightstand she saw The Lady’s Planet, which in Giurgiu a cross-eyed organ grinder’s parrot had picked from a basket for her. Only now did she read it, putting on her glasses: ‘You like to joke, to spend time with your friends, for which reason many ladies envy you, but your heart belongs only to the man with whom you are married. You will live for eighty years. You will have a good marriage. And you have no reason to be wary of your husband. Your reward will be happiness. Lottery: 13, 21 and 26.’

  She would buy a ticket and if she won, she would have money to repair the house, for they needed new wallpaper and above all to modernize their home, which was behind the times.

  ‘Are you awake? It seems to me that I have done la grasse matinée,’ said Leon Margulis and with the soles of his feet he felt around for his house slippers. ‘What time is it? I dreamed of Costache. In the end I forgot to ask him: is he or is he not coming to the Christmas dinner?’

  3.

  Costache carefully pressed the button of the electric doorbell that General Ion Algiu had lately had installed. He heard a buzz and in the same instant a bark. The footfalls of the adjutant and the quadruped reached the door at the same time, as if it were a race, and when the soldier took Costache’s hat, a splendid Borzoi wolfhound leapt up and placed his paws on the trousers of the policeman’s uniform. Costache thrust the dog aside, although it was friendly and had something very aristocratic about it, with its lively, elongated head and ruff of fur. He deposited his walking stick with the silver beak in the vase in the hall and entered the library, as usual during one of his working visits. The general was in mourning for his wife, who had died the previous winter. It would soon be the first anniversary of her death, but his grief was as great as it had been from the very first. His son, who lived in Craiova, wrote to him frequently, his two daughters, both married and with their own households, tried to cheer him up, inviting him to visit them, but he preferred to be all by himself, taking tobacco amid his memories, in the place that was still filled with all her little gestures. In the beginning, he had not been
able to bear the presence of any other person, visiting cards went unanswered on the tray in the hall, but now he had gradually begun to look at them and deigned to reply: to a quarter he answered yes, to three quarters Forgive me, but another time. However, Costache’s visit made him feel better. He had liked him ever since the time when, seven or eight years ago, as Prefect of Police and rather put out at the thought of working in an office, he had sought a decent subaltern and instead found a friend. They measured each other with their eyes, the same as the first time, when between them had arisen that empathy that seems only to exist between certain people, and were happy to observe that they were both the same and that the same empathy still existed between them even now.

  ‘Misfortunes!’ said the policeman by way of a greeting, and the General merely raised his unkempt white eyebrows.

  Neither wasted words. Mr Costache accepted a coffee and a brandy and mixed them, pouring a few drops of brandy into the coffee à la manière de Marghiloman. He briefly recounted the two cases that had been causing him trouble and seemed to be going nowhere; with each passing day they were becoming more and more bogged down. In the meantime many gazettes had begun to make a fuss, and that was deleterious. The young Rareș Ochiu-Zănoagă, who had been found shot, and a certain Dan Crețu – no relative of our red-headed apothecary – cases connected by all kinds of coincidences. The General read four or five gazettes daily, and so he was up to date with the affair. More importantly, he was familiar with the account in Universul, which seemed the best informed.