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.
The boy knew the streets of Bucharest well and a large number of their residents knew Nicu well. He had even made friends with some of them, such as the Margulis family on Strada Fântânei. He was an errand boy on whom you could rely, very useful for urgent business that required discretion. Theirs was a dependable firm, his boss used to say, taking upon himself the merits of the five lads in his employ, who were individually responsible for any mistakes. He looked up and by the Central Girls School he saw a police carriage, as red as the cherries in the bottle from which his mother tippled. He once more fixed his eyes on the snow, which after melting in the afternoon, was now beginning to form a crust, like the skin on boiled milk. How was it that ice and the hot skin of boiled milk looked the same if you held them in your hand, and that both turned your skin red? Nicu walked with long strides and kept his eyes on the ground. It was then that he clapped eyes on the most unusual pair of footwear he had ever seen in the eight long (and hard) years since he had come into this world. They did not look like galoshes or overshoes or even the latest styles advertised in Universul. They were neither officers’ boots nor peasants’ bast shoes. There was not even a word for them; they were strange thingies, the likes of which had never been seen.
*
‘They were strange little thingies, the likes of which you’ve never seen, I don’t even know what to call them, brother dear, neither you nor I have ever seen the like,’ recounted Nicu that evening, in Strada Fântânei.
He was dead tired, having been on his feet the whole day, walking through the snow; the driver had not let him board the horse-drawn tram without paying for a ticket, and he had not wanted to waste the fortune in his pocket: ten pennies from tips alone. But his account of how he bumped into the stranger’s legs reinvigorated him. He felt that all of a sudden he had become an important person in the world. It was not every day that you saw wonderful things on the streets of Bucharest.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Jacques, overjoyed. For Jacques, the errand boy’s tales, mostly embellished and exaggerated as they were, were the water of life. Nicu’s homecoming had got him out of bed. ‘What do you mean, thingies, I don’t understand, explain!’
Jacques sat up straight in the deep armchair that all but enveloped him.
‘Just listen,’ answered Nicu, enveloped in the armchair alongside and twisting his head over the velvet armrest, ‘just listen, you’ll never believe it. They were coloured. Coloured!’
‘Colou-r-r-ed?’ marvelled Jacques, who rolled his r’s like a Frenchman. Therre’s no such thing. I’ve never seen footwear that wasn’t black, or brown, or white, in summer.’
‘And they didn’t have buttons, or laces, or hooks. It was like they were glued to his feet. I look up and I see ugly black trousers, without any stripes, and then an ordinary overcoat, like a cast-off, like a second-hand bargain, it didn’t fit in with the rest. And, ah, yes, just listen, for you’ll never believe it: he was bare-headed!’
‘Weren’t you afrraid? I would have run away, I mean...’ said the host and blushed slightly.
Nicu hastened to continue, as if he hadn’t heard.
‘Well, no, but his face was quite nice, like... like your sister’s there,’ said Nicu, pointing to above the sofa, where there was a small pastel portrait. ‘I don’t know why, but it bowled me over. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Whether he was an angel, whether he was a devil, I liked him a lot; I’ll have you know. May you have a brother like him!’
Although Jacques was accustomed to the way Nicu spoke when he was excited – Nicu was in the habit of addressing himself in the second person – he thought that perhaps here he was referring to him, because he too wanted a brother. ‘He asked me.’
At that moment the “quite nice” face from the portrait above the sofa looked in through the half-open door. The face was rosier in the cheeks than the one in the framed picture, however. Iulia Margulis, wearing a green velvet dress entered, carrying two plates, two silver knives and two red apples. The doctor had demanded that the children eat at least one piece of fruit a day, and in the cellar there was a shelf full of apples, placed a finger’s width from each other lest one spread rot to the others.
‘Wait, I want to hear it too! What did the stranger ask you?’
‘Have you met him?’ marvelled Nicu.
His eyebrows were peaked like the outline of a roof, rather than finely arching, like the Margulis siblings’, and that made him look permanently surprised or perplexed.
‘He said... erm... he said to me: “Just a moment, lad, please. I’m quite cold and I’m afraid to go home.” ‘Why?’ says I. ‘I think somebody’s living there,’ says he. ‘I need a place to sleep. Any idea where?’ That’s what he said, I remember it very well: ‘Any idea where?’
‘You should have invited him here!’
‘No, no, no, how could I do that? Nor could I have invited him to my place, because I didn’t even know when my mother would be coming home. When she’s angry, she scares everybody, although she doesn’t do anybody any harm. Since we were near the Icoanei Church, I said to him, the same as Granny would have said: Go inside, bow to the miracle-working icon of the Mother of God, the one cased in silver, and you’ll be granted