He entered by the door on the left. The doorman shook his hand as if he was a grown-up. Old man Cercel told him that he would have to wait: the parcels had not yet been brought from the “distribution bee-oo-row.” Nicu sat down in his usual place. He was most satisfied. Conversations with old man Cercel were always instructive, because the doorman read the paper every day and kept him up to date with the news. Nicu asked him whether he had decided to play the big New Year’s lottery; the jackpot was ten thousand lei. Six numbers had to be chosen, and the lad had asked to try his luck, without any claim on the prize (although the money would not have gone amiss), just so that he could lend a helping hand. Nicu knew that as far as he was concerned, his choice was nine and eight, because next year would be 1898, and the doorman would choose the remaining numbers, except that he would make his mind up one day, only to change it the next. Old man Cercel replied yet again that it was no joking matter and he would have to think carefully. From today’s paper he had a news item even better than the one about Jack the Ripper, who had thitherto reigned supreme over the headlines.
The doorman picked up Universul, held it rather a long way from his eyes, and read slowly, syllabically: “Sundry items. From Bor-del-… Bor-der-and… Bor-der-land magazine. The planet Mars and the Martians.” ‘Hear that?’ And then he read on, slipping in his own comments, as he always did: “The Martians do not eat meat, but use mam-moths as beasts of burden. Their horses are no larger than our ponies.” As large as our ponies — what ponies? “Their oxen are smaller — in other words, we have larger oxen, and so where we are, if you’re an ox, you’re a big ox — and have just one horn. The Martians have very pen-et-rat-ive eyesight. They have learned how to fly, but only for short distances. They walk on water with the same ease as they do on land. War has been ab-ol-ished on Mars. The Government is the-o-crat-ic. They have twelve states. They have no private property.” Then I’m not going to Mars. This is my country here, my private property, my house, my garden, my wife, my pigeons, and my plum trees,’ said the doorman, folding up the newspaper thus ending all discussion, having been fully enlightened as to the Martians.’
Nicu did not agree. He was something of a Liberal. He knew very well that the Martians could fly and walk on water and that they rode mammoths, as he had seen the drawings in Universul Ilustrat. And so in that respect, the same as in many others, he could not share Cercel’s opinion, although the old man’s broad face and splayed nose, beneath which grew a shaving brush of a moustache, demanded respect.
Nicu said diplomatically: ‘I for one would go, if it were possible! I’d go to have a look and if it wasn’t any good, I’d come back straight away.’
‘For the time being, run and deliver these papers!’
Probably annoyed at having been contradicted, the doorman rather brusquely took the newspapers from the hand of the man who signed himself Peppin Mirto. Mirto was employed as a translator and proof reader, and was recently given the responsibility of dispatching the Gazette to important clients, if it included important articles: Mayor Robescu; Petre Grădișteanu, the director of the National Theatre; the Royal Palace; Caton Lecca, the Prefect of Police; and the directors of the other newspapers, even those with which Universul was at war. Nicu ran errands for the paper, earning five lei a month, paid on the first of each month, plus tips, in addition to his usual wage as a commissary. He had to deliver parcels containing all kinds of small items, which were sold from the newspaper premises. The items were kept in untidy heaps in the administrative office downstairs and in the director’s office upstairs, since the director himself was more likely to be found at home or at his club than on newspaper premises. Nicu worked for two hours a day at most, straight after school. He clandestinely hitched rides on the back of carriages and sometimes even the horse-drawn tram, when there was a lot of traffic and he could pass unnoticed. But it was rare that he had such luck.
‘How are you, laddie?’ asked Pepin Mirto, in his sonorous, operatic voice, and Nicu doffed his cap by way of greeting. He was about to tell him about his plans to go to Mars, but the man quite simply turned his back on him, shouting a ‘Be on your way now!’ that boomed as far as the courtyard. Why did people ask you questions if they did not wait for the answer? True, here at Universul you saw only men who were in twice as much of a hurry as Nicu’s other acquaintances. They were like Martians, the lot of them, but without their good qualities! As he was leaving with the parcel tied up with string, he almost collided with a young man who had slipped lizard-like through the door and was asking old man Cercel how he could place a small ad. He was agitated and kept knocking his gloved hands together, jerking his head.
‘Good day, young gentleman,’ said the doorman, still in the same voice as when he had been spelling out the words in the newspaper.
‘Good day, young gentleman,’ Nicu seconded, but without doffing his cap this time.
Too agitated to reply to these greetings, the young man got straight to the point: ‘Where can I place a small ad? A wallet has been lost and the owner…’
‘With money in it?’ the boy and the doorman both asked at the same time.
‘Not, not with any money…’
‘Any jewels?’ asked Nicu, just as the doorman was asking: ‘Any documents?’
‘No, with a… with something else. And my owner, its owner I mean, is offering a handsome reward. We live not far away from the Icoanei Church, on Strada Teilor, the new houses, which they were working on all summer.’
And here he knocked his fists together once more.
‘The second door on the right where it says: Announcements. This way, please.’
As the nervous young man with his lizard-like movements was walking away with the doorman, Nicu set off to his first address, the premises of the rival paper on Strada Sărindar, scanning the snow in front of him, just in case. He now had a goal to make him forget the tedium of his daily duties and the water dripping from the eaves. He was searching for a wallet in which there might be a diamond ring or maybe a ruby tiepin, like the one owned by Jacques’ father, Dr Margulis. But if the man-lizard had been telling the truth, which was not at all certain, then there were no jewels. All of a sudden he had a bright idea: it must contain a lottery ticket, the very one that was going to win!
‘That’s it!’ Nicu said to himself, rather proudly. He had rejoiced when the snow arrived, but now it annoyed him; a good job that it had started to melt. His grandmother, who believed in saints, like all women, had told him that there was a saint to allay every misfortune. He hoped that there was a saint of lost objects too, particularly those lost by other people.
‘Let us hope, young man, that you will lay your hands on that handsome reward.’
*
After he had completed his final errand, Nicu ran home to change out of his red work-cap and put on his free-time cap; for when he wore the red one, people stopped him on the street and sent him off on errands all over the place. From somewhere near the neighbours’ old walnut tree, a crow croaked bitterly a few times. Since there was nobody at home (who knows where his mother might be?), he was able to make his way to Strada Teilor, the place where his investigation must surely commence. It was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack, but he did not have anything better to do, as it was the Christmas holidays. In any case, school had been suspended for a month because of an outbreak of typhus, and so he had been quite well off from that point of view. Lessons had not recommenced until the eighth of December. Nicu had every faith in his luck, despite, or rather precisely because God had already punished him with a feeble-mined mother and no siblings, not even a sister, and so He owed him for the rest of his life. Prudently, he made the sign of the cross, as he always did when he thought he was speaking too familiarly about the Lord in Heaven, but it was a tiny one, more like he was scratching himself.