Papa examined the stranger at the request of Costache, our friend from the Police, and said that he was not a vagrant, despite his wearing unbelievably odd clothes. Perhaps he is a clown from the circus. He is otherwise clean and has no “physiological” flaws apart from the fact that he does sometimes talk in a garbled way. But if he is a madman, then he is a cultivated madman; he “couches his words nicely”. But when Papa asked him whether he had tuberculosis, the man gave him a scornful look, as if infuriated, and answered cuttingly: ‘You’re a two-bit actor!’ Papa replied, as gravely as he does whatever the situation: ‘Sir, if you please, I am not an actor, but a physician!’ He added that his lungs sounded a little congested, that he was very pale, but that he could not find any serious illness. The man calmed down and said that he would like to smoke. Papa, who is against the habit, nonetheless brought him some fine tobacco and rolling papers from Mr Costache’s desk, but said that the man under arrest, after giving him a savage glance, quite simply turned his back on him. He is ill bred! They retained his valise for examination, and a silver box, like a safe, which indicates that he might be a money forger, but they released him after keeping him under arrest for only an hour, following a brief interrogation by Mr Costache. On finding himself free, he straightaway made himself scarce. But the best coachman in the police force was assigned to follow him unobtrusively.
‘How old is he?’ asked mother, her favourite question.
‘He declares himself forty-three. Well, that would mean he was four years younger than me, but I say he’s lying. I reckon he is no older than thirty or thirty-five. He says that he is a journalist and that he was born here. Dan Kretzu. What surprised me was that he was completely shaven. You see this only with actors who play the rôles of women. Hmm!’ And here Papa stroked the thin blond tuft of his beard, as wispy as maize silk, the cause of a lifetime’s suffering.
‘We shall find out more tomorrow, at dinner, because I have invited Mr Costache.’
Papa noticed that my face was flushed and immediately put his hand to my forehead to see whether I had a temperature. As far as he is concerned, all things have solid, bodily causes. He will not hear of the soul. Although Mama continued to interrogate him for a while, I preferred to take off one glove, now that my hands had warmed up, and to return to Becky. What I like about her is that exactly like me she can speak French and English. What I do not like about her is that exactly like me she has green eyes. I would have liked hazel eyes, the same as Jacques, and blond hair, the same as Becky, but it would seem the factory did not have that model in stock twenty-one years ago, and so I must content myself with black hair. How is it that from the same parents, both with hazel eyes, one child can turn out the same as them, while the other has green or blue eyes? I wish to finish the book by New Year, and so I shall try to write in my diary more seldom. There are still twelve days and a few hours to go.
2
The people of Bucharest were having a good day. It had snowed, there were still twelve days till the end of the year, and twelve hours till the end of the day. The whiteness, which stretched from one end of the city to the other, from the Cotroceni Palace to the Obor district, and from the Șerban Vodă Cemetery to the flower-beds on the Chaussée, and then onward, into the horizon, was melting in the afternoon sun. The icicles looked as if they were coated in oil and here and there were beginning to drip onto the heads of the passers-by. The streets were quite busy, as they always were on the days before Christmas. Looking up, lest he get wet, Nicu fell head first into the snow, and was as annoyed as when he woke up with his face pressed to the sheet.
‘Looks like you’ve taken another tumble, young man!’ said the boy loudly, shaking off his red commissary’s cap. ‘I’ve told you time after time to look where you step,’ he grumbled in his small voice, but with the tone of a bad-tempered old man. Since the year before, when he started to attend school, that pedantic tone had stuck to his tongue and he could not rid himself of it. But he had been in the habit of talking to himself for as long as he could remember, because to his great misfortune and unlike other children, he had no siblings. He would have been happy to have even a sister, at a pinch.
He dusted the snow off his coat, cast a glance of vexation at the patch of ice on which he had slipped, and at a trot arrived under the clock with the mechanical soldier above the door of L’Indépnedance Roumaine newspaper offices. At twelve on the dot, the chimes began to sound. Nicu always tried to be in time to see the soldier. It was not easy, because he had to tell the time by the sun and the length of the shadows. This time the lad’s attention was caught by something else. On the ground, right in front of him, was a splendid icicle, more than a metre long, perfect for a sword. He picked it up and stroked its slightly rippled surface, oblivious to the chill of the ice. Holding it in both hands, he lowered it to his hip, raised it, still in a two-handed grip, and with a roar made a swordsman’s lunge at an unseen enemy. Unfortunately, the icicle, probably inured to the greater peace and quiet at the edge of the roof, struck where it ought not to: to a man in military uniform, holding a silver-handled cane; a gentleman of middling height who was just emerging through the door beneath the clock. He was the Prefect of Police’s right-hand man: the Chief of Public Security, Costache Boerescu, a man always in a hurry, his short legs rapidly scything the air. In that period he visited the Frenchmen’s newspaper two or three times a day, ever since the director, Mr Lahovary, had been slain in a duel by “that pig-headed Filipescu,” the director of the Epoca newspaper. And so the policeman was in the mood for anything but a duel, irritated as he was by the investigation, which was going nowhere, and by voices from the press, who were persecuting him ever more sorely. He could no longer stand newspapermen: when he did something good, they ignored him, but when he failed to solve some matter swiftly enough, they jumped on him and blackened his name using his own words, but truncating and turning them upside down. Whenever he had occasion and only men were present, he would cool off by calling the press a “painted whore.” Otherwise, he lived alone, and the brothel at Stone Cross had special reduced rates for him, should he so desire. He had visited the establishment both as a policeman and as a customer.
The cursed child ran off before the policeman could grab him by the ear. He made a suicidal dash across the road, dodging the carriages and sleighs, in the direction of Sărindar, not before being cursed by a number of coachmen heading in a column towards the Capșa restaurant, then by those on the other side, on their way towards the Dâmbovița River; one after the other, they had to pull on their reins, lest they crash into each other. The lad looked behind him at the same instant that the copper waved his stick at him threateningly. Nicu then put the incident out of his mind and headed towards the Prefecture, a few minutes’ walk away.
‘You were almost done for there, young man. Mr Costache won’t forget you, he never forgets anything, and he’s as cunning as a snake, he is. You’ve been getting into nothing but scrapes today,’ said the lad, addressing a large snow-laden bush that grew slantwise in a shady spot next to a wall. Some sparrows were hopping with abrupt, bullet-like movements from one branch to another, then lingering a little, touching the thick whiteness of the snow with their plump bellies, and scattering the flakes, before moving to another storey of the bush, as if it were a house. Nicu wondered why they moved around so much, since they did not seem to be following or looking for anything, unlike him. He had a precise goal, which loomed tall in front of him: the entrance of Universul, Bucharest’s most read newspaper. Granted, the men from Adevĕrul said otherwise, but they said everything otherwise. He stepped forward, having swiftly shaken all the sparrows off the bush.