I particularly liked that ‘Am I not to be left in peace?’ and even more so the declaration of love: ‘Are you determined to compete with the Danube?’ And the final ‘I embrace you.’ Perhaps I would have lost my mind too, who knows? But I find the unanimously reviled Mr Bastaki rather likeable, he has something of a character from Vanity Fair and I think his fury was genuine and probably justified to a certain extent. But what would I have done in Miss Gorjan’s place and in the same circumstances? Anyway, I do not have a revolver. Although to use his words, now that I have seen what a man is capable of, ‘I am under the influence of a pang of the heart.’ Outside there is a blizzard, the errand boys are certainly not on duty, and so I cannot hope for any sign. Now my mind keeps coming back to the ‘palpitating flesh’ of yesterday evening. For decency’s sake, I cannot set down in this notebook what I am thinking.
2.
‘‘People are crying out because not all our roads are paved, because three quarters of the streets do not have drains, because we do not have electric lighting except on the main thoroughfares, because we drop like flies when there are outbreaks of disease. And Mayor Robescu has saved up money in his stocking and proposes to erect statues for us: the statue of Independence and the bust of Ioan Brătianu. When we ask for improvements, there is no cash. When there is cash, they erect statues! Bucharest is burning and the mayor is fiddling!’’
‘The usual untruths from Adevĕrul!’
Procopiu and Pavel Mirto had made their way to the newspaper offices through the blizzard and were planning in broad outline the New Year issue. They were plucking up courage with the help of tea laced with rum. Pavel, whose spectacles were steamed up, warmed his hands on the porcelain tea cup, while Neculai Procopiu warmed himself by reciting from the rival gazette. Although the editor-in-chief had quoted the passage to Pavel only to make fun of their counterparts in Strada Sărindar, he was still a little envious when he thought of them. The article was unsigned, but it seemed to be in the style of Constantin Mille: expressive distortions of reality, beautifully turned phrases, well-honed rhetoric, that of a former professor of literature who had become a lawyer. Overlaying it all was his militant socialism, which was the reason he had been expelled from the University of Jassy many years previously and which, rather than subsiding, was all the more aggressive. And of course Alexandru Beldiman, the newspaper’s founder, had been the first to lavish streams of inky bile on King Carol and the heir to the throne, Prince Ferdinand, endlessly repeating like a bird of ill omen that the latter would not reign even for a day. But on the subject of the truth, it ought to be known that a large number of streets had been paved, and the money for Brătianu’s statue did not come from the pockets or ‘stockings’ of the Town Hall, but had been raised by means of tombola draws. A large part of the money from the New Year grand lottery, to whose result Procopiu was by no means indifferent, was earmarked for various municipal works. As for Mr Mille, everybody knew that he had bought shares in the newspaper with funds that were suspect to say the least. He now used Adevĕrul to thrash the King black and blue, although the King did not care to react, or refrained from doing so, since as everybody knows that press has become the Fourth Estate throughout the world.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if years from now, with the collectivists in power and the King banished, there will be people who do not know or do not want to know the truth, and they will name a street after Mille. Perhaps right here, on Strada Sărindar,’ said Pavel in a whisper. Thereupon, he lit a cigar.
Procopiu was accustomed to such original and gloomy ideas: one of his colleague’s obsessions was the future, and now that he was writing a novel about it, he seemed almost not to live in the present any longer. And Pavel’s future was radically different from all the futures of his friends and acquaintances. Procopiu had told him many times, albeit in vain, to get married, and that he would see life and the future in a different light, which was his own experience. Ever since he became a married man, it was as if his thoughts had been tidier, just as his wife’s hand made sure the house was tidy, although she did nag him rather a lot. But on the other hand, the most senior newspaperman at Universul was afraid of Pavel’s predictions. At least when it came to elections, Pavel’s predictions were always systematically borne out. He thought for a moment about the future and, for the first time, he was afraid.
3.
Lately old man Cercel’s belly had been behaving like an animal, giving him certain signals, and he spoke to it like he spoke to his doves. For example, that morning, when he woke up, his belly immediately began to squeak, and he said to it: ‘So you’re awake too, are you?’ He said it aloud, and so his wife answered drily: ‘For ages! I get up before you every morning.’ A short while later, Cercel said to his restless belly: ‘Come on then, little dove, let’s eat!’ and his wife thought he was talking to her, much to her amazement. Now, at work, his belly was annoyed, probably at having to brave the blizzard and go to work on a Sunday, and it stabbed him maliciously, as if it had knives inside, and to placate it, he said: ‘Behave, this is what it’s always like before New Year, but after that we’ll have some time off.’ Nevertheless, all was not well with his belly. Should he nip over to Dr Margulis’ surgery? But then he would have to get somebody to stand in for him. Surely half an hour wouldn’t make any difference... Undecided, the doorman picked up a newspaper at random, from the pile that had arrived from other editorial offices, but on seeing that it was L’Indépendance Roumaine, he put it back. With his belly in the state it was, he did not feel like deciphering the Gazette of the late Lahovary, and to tell the truth, there was no much he could decipher. Old man Cercel knew a bit of French, but only enough to be able to communicate when a foreigner came through the door of Universul, but reading it was a different kettle of fish. He picked up the next newspaper, which happened to be Lumea Nouă. He grimaced and put that one back, too. It was one of those papers that had socialist ideas. Up until two years ago, their neighbour Constantin Mille had been in charge of it, and even now they kept attacking Nicu Filipescu, saying he was worse than a common criminal, because he killed openly and in the presence of witnesses! The doorman respected the former mayor and liked the fact that he was an active young man. Nor did he feel like reading Românul or Drapelul, and Adevĕrul even less so. Adevĕrul was the paper that annoyed him the most. Timpul was too dull and didn’t have the wit it used to have in the old days, when the men with the biggest brains in Bucharest wrote for it. In fact, without Nicu, whom he kept up to date on what the papers were saying, he didn’t much feel like reading any of them.
‘Speak of the devil, I was just thinking about you. But what’s up with you? What happened?’ he asked, taking fright, when he saw the boy, completely white from the blizzard and carrying a bird cage with a very distressed Speckle inside.
Nicu looked as bedraggled as the bird, his eyebrows joined in the middle like an arrowhead, and despite the cold outside his cheeks were chalky white.
‘She doesn’t like it at my house, she doesn’t love me, I love her. I thinks she’s sick, she misses her house!’
He rattled off the words one after the other without a pause.
‘Sit down and catch your breath.’
The doorman opened the door to the cage, held Speckle beneath her wings, felt her and turned her on every side.
‘I think she hasn’t been eating,’ he said, and the lad confirmed that she had neither eaten nor drunk, but she had left droppings, as was visible. She had left droppings all over the house, because he had let her out of the cage, and then he had struggled for a long time to put her back in.
The doorman decided to take her back and in spring to give him a pair, but only after he built a coop for them. You don’t keep a dove in a cage, like a parrot or a canary, because you’ll kill it like that. Seeing the state the lad was in, he decided to read to him from Universul and looked for a story of love with obstacles, because Nicu listened to those attentively: ‘The flight of a young lady from
Vaslui: Love has no boundaries and neither the laws of the world nor of religion can stop its adventurous flight. Proof of this is what happened a few days ago in Vaslui...’ As old man Cercel’s voice unravelled the tangled plot, the boy’s face grew calm and took on colour, and the melted snowflakes caused his cheeks to glow. Finally, when he saw that nothing could stop the two young people ‘of different religions’ and that the girl’s relatives ‘will finally be convinced that they can not easily shatter the strong chains of love,’ he felt as if he were one of the bird’s relatives and he no longer felt sorry for sending her back to her mate.
‘What does it mean, ‘different religions’?’
‘It means one makes the sign of the cross from right to left and the other from left to right or not at all.’
Nicu thought that maybe it depended on whether you were left- or right-handed and asked curiously: ‘If you make the sign of the cross with your left hand, are you of a different religion?’
The doorman did not answer, because to tell the truth, he did not much care about such hare-brained twaddle; he left such things to his wife.
‘I know a love story, but it’s not to do with religions,’ said Nicu. ‘I met Mr Alexandru Livezeanu, he was in a big hurry, like he always is, and he sent me on an errand, even though Sunday’s my day off. He said it was urgent! Do you believe me when I say it’s to do with the strong chains of love? You know, young man, who I mean,’ he said excitedly.
The doorman didn’t ask who it was, unfortunately, although Nicu would have been glad to tell him. Old man Cercel wasn’t curious by nature. As a doorman for a big newspaper, he had met too many people in his life. He wasn’t curious about people. That was why he reared doves.
4.
On by one, the General took the Calendars placed in a pile on the table, then the magazines which the hound had sniffed, firstly with interest, then without interest, before raising his muzzle to the much more entertaining fringes on the upholstery of the armchair. The borzoi looked at Algiu reproachfully: for two hours he had not budged from the armchair. The hound’s almond-shaped eyes showed a shadow of puzzlement: his master was reading, motionless, without calling his name, without so much as glancing at him. The General, on the other hand, was reliving every day of the year 1893, when his poor wife had still been there beside him, on the other side of the table, working on her embroidery, a time when the hound had not even been born, and Lord’s parents, each a borzoi of impressive pedigree, had been separated by many kilometres, one in Craiova, the other in Bucharest. Mrs Turnescu’s visit, coming soon after Costache’s, had reawakened his longing to work. He went back over the news items about the demolition of the Sărindar Church, although he knew them almost by heart. At the time he had already resigned the post of Prefect, but he well remembered the circumstances of the demolition and told himself yet again, that Filipescu was not to blame. In any event, it was not because of Filipescu that he was rereading the article, although somehow it was all connected. He then returned to the recent newspapers. And just as he was about to give up, he came across a news item in tiny letters that he had hitherto missed, although it was below a drawing of the courtroom in Brăila, during the trial of Miss Gorjan, the daughter of General Gorjan, whom he had known as a colonel. He now read the article and within its circumference he saw that the riddle that the young Costache had told him about was beginning to make sense: light, Popescu, light, Holy Mother, gift...
‘Not now, Lord, be patient!’
The General made some notes in pencil, consulted other calendars of ephemera, and then summoned his adjutant, who arrived with his ears pricked up and with his usual whiff of boot polish.
‘Go and find Mr Costache. If you do not find him, leave word that I invite him to come today, tomorrow, whenever he can, no matter the hour.’
Had he not known that orders are to be obeyed not questioned, the adjutant would have had a number of solid objections. But as it was, the man looked at the General with the same expression in his eyes as that of the borzoi earlier, a similarity compounded by the fact that the eyes of both were almond-shaped.
The hound at last received a pat on the head and was taken out into the yard, where he ran madly around in the blizzard. The General felt like doing the same, but he was accustomed not to reveal his feelings. He stood motionless by the door, between the two naked statues that were impervious to the cold. The wind blew through the ivy that clad the wall, but without being able to snap it. Ivy knew how to fight, and the General admired it for that reason.
5.
I have been talking to myself less and less and perhaps soon this voice that keeps me prisoner in its depths will fall silent and I will be the same as I once was. Perhaps this world will completely swallow me up and I will no longer long for the other world. Perhaps the interior and the exterior will merge. I don’t know whether this world is real, but I know that my mind is made in such a way that it cannot but seem real to me. I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to understand it more, but I know that until my very last moment I will want to find out.
After I went back with the answer that Iulia was home alone, Alexandru put me in a cab and told the cabman to take me to his house in the centre of town. He told me that from now on I was his guest, and would continue to be for as long as I did him the pleasure of wanting to be his guest, but that on the way I should stop off at the hôtel and announce that I wasn’t staying there any more. He told me what to tell his servant and assured me that he would come later to see how I felt. He was terribly agitated and kept biting one gloved finger. The cabman stopped at the hôtel and told me in a reedy voice that he would wait for me. I climbed down, almost falling again, as it was almost pitch black. I entered, told them I was leaving, and a man who was like an oriental rug, soft and enveloping and convoluted, answered that he was sorry, since everything was paid for a week in advance, that they had been honoured to have a guest such as myself (but why?) and that an errand boy had left some things for me.
‘Are you Mr Frascati?’ I asked, but he laughed cheerlessly and gave me a very piercing look.
I went upstairs to fetch my things from the room, intending to leave as quickly as possible. I felt out of my element and I was afraid. Otto, who was upstairs, didn’t want to let me leave. He planted himself in front of the door and started telling me something about some miracle-working icon. He told me that the churches were in a ferment and that the rumour had spread swiftly from one to the other: a priceless icon has vanished, wunderschön, and then he told me some details that I couldn’t follow, especially since he was speaking now in Romanian, now in German. And especially since a rich young man, sehr sehr reich, Alexandru Livizeanu, was mixed up in the whole affair, and that came as a blow to me. Everybody thinks he has the icon. Is this what Alexandru suggested to me? That he is a thief?
When I went downstairs at last, the man with the oriental air stopped me and showed me something in a newspaper, Lumea Nouă or something like that. I sensed it wasn’t good and I wanted not to look, but it wasn’t possible, given his enveloping manner. The man forced me to read it, with a malicious gleam in his eye. It was my portrait, drawn quite nicely, and beneath it the title in capital letters: A MYSTERIOUS STRANGER. And below it, in smaller letters: Whence comes Mr Dan Kretzu? The unsigned article was about ‘the stranger who seems to know more than we’ and some of the things I had told Dr Marguis, luckily not very many, about ‘a world with other rules and a future time, which will be rather grim for us.’ But the doctor was not mentioned. He had promised me absolute discretion. Can he have betrayed me? In less than ten minutes the only people who have helped me in my new life, and whom I trusted, each seemed to have a serious flaw. The man with the oriental smile assured me that he would be honoured (again!) for me to remain there, that he was prepared to cover all the costs, accommodation and board, and that I would have a room to myself. He gave me to understand that lots of people would come, knowing that... I thanked him and left without looking back
, feeling his eyes on the back of my neck.
6.
It is obvious that his head is full of his patients today too. Or full of shortages of medicines and money problems, or maybe of his assistant at the surgery, a worthless student, whom he wants to dismiss, but is not brave enough. He does not seem to hear what is said to him. He merely nods, as if he has heard and murmurs yes, yes, which might just as well mean no, no or anything else. Agatha was accustomed to it and did not take it amiss, but sometimes she did have a great need of a listening ear. When she chose between the two men, she knew that by marrying the doctor she would be the fifth wheel on the cart, the spare wheel. But it was not easy, and sometimes, like today, it was very hard. Agatha’s eyelids were red with tears and, strangely, this time the doctor’s ear immediately ‘heard’ those inflamed eyes and he became troubled. Mrs Margulis had the impression that her husband’s sense of sight was far more developed than ordinary people’s, because every small change in her face, in the colour of her skin, every bag under her eye, every signal her body gave he perceived with a hawk eye, from a great distance, and even if she tried to disguise such signals, she never managed to make them go unobserved. And so, upset, she placed a newspaper under his eyes – it was Saturday’s – and the doctor read quickly:
Question of the Day
Protection of the Trades
We have had occasion to speak here of a society of ladies that has been formed with the purpose of providing money, clothes, books and dowries to the poor girls who study at the trade schools or even in private workshops. With all our heart we approved this undertaking...
‘This was your idea, two or three years ago, or when was it?’
Agatha nodded her head, because she felt a lump in her throat.
A fact that we came across recently caused us to remember this society and to note a great lack. This lack is as follows: our trade schools have produced graduates for a number of years, trained as seamstresses and in the art of making artificial flowers and other trades. What have these professionally trained girls done, what do they do? As chance would have it, we came across one.
Life Begins On Friday Page 23
