Yet I did not fall asleep straight away, despite my exhaustion; probably because I was thirsty. I could see fragments of the city, jumbled together. The road here had been a labyrinth. I knew roughly the direction to Strada Berzei (Stork Street), but it was as if I were no longer a native of Bucharest and the city was playing with me, tricking me at every turn. The horizons, the buildings were different. The few lights were street lamps, the distances were deceptive, and I had found no street signs. I regretted that I did not even know the churches, whose names I had not made an effort to remember, although the woman had told me them, and I saw only the roofs gleaming like nickel teeth. There were fewer and fewer people on the streets. I asked them the way, and some of them gave me directions, but after the first corner I lost my way. I was frightened by all kinds of unlit horse-drawn vehicles, from which came shouts and curses. After a time I had to admit to myself that I was completely lost. The darkness became thicker and thicker and it was getting colder and colder.
In the middle of the night I came across a man walking quickly down the street. I tried to catch up with him, and when I did, I tried to stop him, I touched him, but the man almost leapt out of his skin, looking behind him in terror. I picked his bowler hat up off the ground. It fit my head and was still warm from the head that had been wearing it. I put it on. I continued to walk at random and just as I thought I could not go farther from my goal and had abandoned my struggle with the labyrinth, a church loomed in front of me, with a band of saints painted under the roof. It was the Church known locally as “The Stork’s Nest”. Right next to it, the woman had told me, was the painters’ house, where I would find my own nest.
I was woken by the bells. I had dreamed of Bucharest, while in a different Bucharest. My colleagues from the editorial office had appeared, they were laughing, although I was uncertain as to whether it was laughter or weeping. And there was somebody – a woman, who had been looking for me, a woman with an absent and ineffably sad mien, but I didn’t know who it was. Just as I was shouting at the top of my voice: here I am, here I am, I heard the bells and I thought: ‘The bells mean death.’ With those words in my mind, I awoke. The bells I was hearing meant life. The fire had gone out. The passer’s-by hat was inside a bucket – the hat I had picked up off the ground after I frightened its wearer in the middle of the night. The room was in complete disarray. Through the broken windowpane I could see snowflakes. It had started snowing. It was my first snowfall in this world; a world that was either real or the figment of a ghost-haunted mind. I knew I had to start all over again. But I was quite simply incapable of getting up. I waited for a miracle to happen. No, I was not in a nest, not at all. Rather, I was shipwrecked, except that on my desert island it was winter and I had salvaged nothing from the disaster. Even my luggage had been sequestered by the Police.
You were waiting for some miracle or other, dear Dan. You were waiting for your new life, looking out of the broken windowpane.
7.
The Ringster coughed and hawked a thick glob of phlegm onto the stone floor, deliberately, so as to nauseate the foppish sergeant who was guarding him, who looked like a young man who had had a mollycoddled upbringing. He was there for the sake of form, since Fane had no means of escape: the doors were locked and bolted. Unlike ordinary men, who sleep from evening to morning and work from morning to evening, Fane did things the other way around. During the day he had caught a few hours of sleep, but he felt on top form: there was money to be had. He could smell money from a mile off, and that invigorated him. He had begun the night stretching from Friday evening to Saturday morning in a good mood. The sergeant, bored, attempted to make conversation, but Fane cut him short: ‘Shut it, Jean, I’ve got work to do!’ To make his life simpler, he had once explained, he called everybody Jean.
The sergeant’s head started lolling, and finally his chin came to rest on his chest. Soon, he started snoring, and Fane avoided making any noise, since he had the fine movements of a wild animal, an instinct he had imbibed with his mother’s milk. He was a handsome man; narrow in the hip, broad in the shoulder, with cunning eyes the colour of frost-nipped plums, long eyelashes and long moustaches, which left no woman indifferent. The silvery box did not look like it had much of a lock, just three numbered rollers, but the mechanism was more like a toy. Fane dialled the rollers, with his ear pressed to the mechanism, to hear how they tumbled. He always went by his sense of hearing, like a bat. At first, he was unable to make out anything clearly, but when he repeated the circuit again and again, and the first roller reached zero, it made a faint sound. He left it in that position and went on to the second roller, which also made a click on zero. He did not even bother with the third: he turned it to the same figure as the first two and heard a clearer click, which coincided with a hiccup from the sleeping sergeant. The sergeant opened his eyes, and Fane leaned over the box as if he were hard at work, covering it with his broad chest. The sergeant watched him for a while, and finally his eyelids drooped over his small eyes again.
The Ringster put the box down and opened it without making the slightest sound. On his face could be read boundless amazement. He carefully rummaged through all the compartments, put everything back, turned the rollers, and crept to the door, whistling softly for Păunescu, who was on duty. He asked to leave the room for a rest break
At dawn, in the office on the first floor, Costache was informed that the locked case was missing. Down below in the basement, Fane kicked up a fuss to cover his tracks: ‘What have you done, Jean, if you can’t even trust anybody in a police station,’ he shouted. ‘Who can you trust then? Idlers, layabouts, bunglers!’ Then he went back to sleep, satisfied that he had a wonderful Saturday ahead of him.
Saturday, 20 December: Commotion
1.
Thank the Lord, my little brother was jollier this morning, on our walk. He was also delighted to espy little Nicu, the errand boy; his red cap always strikes the eye. The boy never stays still. Jacques, the dear thing, would have jumped down, had he been able. But our carriage was moving, and the wee imp was in front of where the Sărindar Monastery used to stand (it still pains my soul that they demolished it, it was Bucharest’s cathedral, and people say dire things will come of it). And so as the horses sped past he called out to him, telling him to visit us as soon as possible, although he had seen him just last evening. I am not sure whether Nicu can have heard and I do not think he will come; I saw yesterday that he is afraid of Mr Costache. Jacques and myself go out daily for an hour, in the morning, along the embankment, to look at the seagulls – this is his main entertainment – while Papa reads Universul, which is his main entertainment. This morning he gave a start when under the heading of Events from the Capital he found an item about the topic of our conversation yesterday and even more so when he saw (dear Papa!) that he himself was mentioned, albeit in a brief parenthesis. When we returned, he twice read us the news item, lowering his voice for the parenthesis: ‘‘The man under arrest who was found unconscious yesterday almost frozen near Băneasa Forest (by the lakes) has declared that his name is Dan I. Kretzu, that he is a newspaperman and not a malefactor. He has provided no explanation as to what took place and despite the efforts of the Police, it has not been possible to find one person to confirm his identity. Since his state of health is less than desirable, he has been given medical attention. (Dr Leon Margulius...’ they spelled my name wrong, the idiots! ‘...was kind enough to examine him.) Investigations are in progress.’’ I laughed when I heard that he was ‘a newspaperman and not a malefactor.’ I think such an explanation is welcome in this day and age. Papa shooed me away.
With the notebook I started yesterday I began a new life. My life therefore begins on Friday. I have reached Chapter 25 in my book, ‘in which all the principal personages think fit to leave Brighton.’ As for us, here in Bucharest, all the principal personages have arrived in town, where they will remain until at least New Year. At least so I hope.
Mr Costache will be furious: t
he newspaper item does not mention him even in parenthesis.
*
Late evening. Here I am writing again, rather than reading. When Safta took his stovepipe hat, Mr Costache pinched her on the ––, as he often does when he thinks nobody is watching. But then he saw me and cast me a strange look. We sat down to dinner rather upset, because dear Jacques was feeling out of sorts. He was sad that Nicu had not come. I tried to cheer him up and because he is a good child, he feigned that I had succeeded. He did not want to join us at the dinner table. He lay in bed instead, and I gave him the clock with the figurines, to wind it up to his heart’s content. He likes the sweet and ineffably sad minuet of the male and the female figurines, which bow, join hands, spin, part, and join hands once more. Jacques says he would like to know how the story ends; it is like a fairy tale. It depends how long you turn the key: Sometimes it turns out well and the two remain hand in hand. But sometimes it ends badly, and the two porcelain figurines stand twisting to the side and looking into the distance. Jacques swears that the expressions on their faces alter when they look into the distance. Mama can barely control herself in such moments, but nor can Papa, and he is a doctor and a grown man. And so it did us good when our policeman arrived with news from around town. He filled our heads with the duel in which poor Lahovary was killed, with the charges of intentional murder brought against the men from L'Indépendance Roumaine, with political pressure, since there are many who wish to believe that the crime was hatched by former friends, now adversaries. He also told us something spicier – the Bastaki trial, Bastaki being the adulterous paterfamilias, whom Miss Gorjan attempted to kill with a revolver. Miss Gorjan was the daughter of General Gorja, being the woman he seduced. The jury felt sorry for her and acquitted her, and after that the courtroom erupted in a cry of ‘Down with Bastaki!’ But Mama impatiently asked our guest how it could be possible that they had still not been able to open the stranger’s case.
‘How is it possible, my dear Mrs Agatha,’ Mr Costache replied with feigned astonishment, ‘that you know everything before I do?’
He knew very well that the ladies of Bucharest and the Police employ servants as their morning, afternoon and evening newspapers. He acknowledged that indeed they had not managed to open the case or box or whatever it was. The mistake was his. Instead of immediately ordering it to be broken open with an axe, fearful lest they damage its contents, which might be who knows what valuable items, they had tried to crack the combination and then invited a professional thief to do so: a certain Fane the Ringster, who was being held under arrest. But now, as if part of an illusionist’s number, the box had disappeared!
The stranger had been held in the same cell as Fane for an hour yesterday afternoon, but he is said not to have spoken a word, apart from complaining of the cold a few times. ‘What’s with you, Jean, somebody die?’ The Ringster had apparently asked him.
It amused me to learn from Mr Costache that Fane called everybody Jean, ‘to simplify his life’. Fane is certain that the stranger is some international burglar, he says that he knows all the thieves from Bucharest and the surrounding area by sight, and he knows how the ones from the rest of the country ‘work.’ And this is my opinion too: he must be some chevalier d’industrie wanted by the police commissioners of every country. Nevertheless, I sense, without my being able to explain why, that there is more to this than meets the eye, something mysterious, which causes me heart to beat very fast. I am curious even; it is like an episode from Vanity Fair. The gas lamp has almost burned out; better I go to bed.
2.
There are two things in life of which you are never bored: looking at falling snowflakes and gazing at the flames in a fireplace. At dawn that Saturday, Mr Costache was able to do both of these at once. It had started to snow and for a while he had looked out of the window onto Victory Avenue. Now he was looking at the flames. He had finished his Turkish coffee, laced with French brandy, to help him forget his annoyance at the disappearance of the case, and he had glanced at the announcement in Universul, taking note, without surprise, that it had been placed between two stupid advertisements. What prestige could the Police preserve if its requests were placed next to an advertisement for a confectioner’s? And it was not even a renowned confectioner’s, like old man Fialkowski’s, but one that was here today and gone tomorrow. Then he came across the news item about the man found in the snow: ‘The man under arrest who was found unconscious yesterday almost frozen near Băneasa Forest (by the lakes) has declared that his name is Dan I. Kretzu, that he is a...’ and observed two things: primo, that they had spelled his name with a K and a tz, although in his statement the man had written it with a normal C and a normal ț, and secundo, that he, Costache Boerescu, had been omitted from the news item. But these were trifles. And he looked into the fireplace once more, at the dancing tongues of flame, which soothed him, and then he went to the window again. No snowflake resembled any other, and, so Costache hoped, no fingerprint could resemble any other. Unfortunately, it had not yet been proven whether the patterns on a man’s fingertips might alter over the course of his lifetime, but Costache was almost certain that within a few years the fact that they did not would be demonstrated scientifically. His superior arrogantly contradicted him and gave as an example trees, which, when sawn in two reveal their own print. But if you compare the rings of a young tree with those of an old tree, you will see that in the latter the distances between them are greater and increase with the years, and that the accidents of good and bad years change their outlines. The same must also apply to a man, the Prefect of Police concluded.
Costache did not get on with his superior, although he acknowledged that he was not a stupid man. The 22nd of November had been the anniversary of his arrival, the date when, full of complexes and affectations, he had taken up the post. His brother Ion, the Prefect of Bacău, had been mixed up in a scandal involving the torture of a prisoner, from which he had got off scot free, while some poor constable had been made the scapegoat. Costache still missed Colonel Mișu Capșa, who during the year he had held the post of Prefect had made things run smoothly. He had been a just commandant, he knew how to give orders without humiliating a man, and above all he feared nothing. Indeed, he had been a war hero, decorated at Plevna and Vidin. Even the lawyer Deșliu, although he had been with them for only one summer, in ’94, had been better. And the best of all had been in ’89: General Algiu, who had remained a friend and whom he still visited when he needed advice. The more recent ones, good and bad, magistrates and career soldiers, these he did not count: they had come only in order to have a stepping-stone to other positions and so that they could be saluted by the crowd when they followed the King in their own carriage during parades.
The present chief, Caton Lecca, was a politician, the most slippery of species. He thought he knew everything. He had also been a member of parliament and a senator, suspected of electoral fraud. He acted the cockerel in front of his thickset wife, but the cannier agents directly subordinate to Mr Costache used to call him, with a hidden meaning, Cato the Elder. As for Costache himself, they called him Taki the Great, a double-edged epithet, since their dear chief was rather short, although well built and possessed of handsome eyes with velvety depths, seemingly unsuited to his profession. Apart from that, there was constant ill feeling and backbiting among the agents, sergeants and constables of the Prefecture. The turkeys, that is, the sergeants, who had numbers on their caps, laughed at the goldfinches, that is, the constables, because of the green or red patches on their shoulders. And the goldfinches called the commissars and sub-commissars, that is, Costache’s men, who had degrees in law and spoke French and German, coxcombs, bookmen and earwigs. Mr Costache heaved a sigh. Ultimately, the quarrels and the prefects flowed by like water, while he, like a rock, remained. But it was not easy to be a rock.
Life Begins On Friday Page 5