Ciu-flea. It was quickly extinguished by the firemen from the station on Strada Cometei. Then a lost wallet, whose contents seem to be very, very valuable, because the reward is three times bigger than usual – I don’t know what it might be, it’s an unusually closely kept secret – then two fraudsters who have been swindling the gullible, like the notorious Andronic used to do, in other words, he takes all their money to multiply them in a ‘machine’... and what else... a Turkish vessel sunk in the Black Sea. Ah, yes, that was the most important thing: it would seem that the Senate is finally going to propose a law against duelling.’
‘I heard that the Princess sent a cable to Lahovary’s mother, expressing her condolences.’
‘No,’ editor-in-chief Procopiu corrected him, ‘the mother of the deceased, Mrs Olympia Lahovary, is in Nice and the news was not sent to her immediately, the other son went there to break it to her gently, because she has a weak heart. Her Highness Princess Maria sent an immediate message to Mrs Lahovary, to the widow, as it were...’
And the editor sighed, for the sake of form: he was too much of a veteran newspaperman to be easily moved any more. Nevertheless, the slaying in a duel of a fellow newspaperman, one of Bucharest’s best journalists, George Lahovary, whom he had seen not long before, had rocked the capital. What was more, it had come after the campaign that Lahovary’s newspaper L’Indépendance Roumaine had waged all year against the present Constitution and after Lahovary had been attacked from every side. It certainly made you think... A good job that Universul was not political.
‘Ah, and another thing,’ continued Pavel Mirto in a barely audible voice, running his hand over his thick hair, ‘a curiosity, a man who says that he is forty-three, but looks much younger, he doesn’t even have a beard, this man was found half-dead in a field, he was rescued by Petre, the Inger coachman.
‘Which Inger, the confectioner from Strada Carol?’
‘Exactly,’ and here Pavel cleared his throat, before reaching for his cup of coffee. ‘It’s not known what the stranger is up to; the police are intrigued. He has a locked case with him, or something of the sort, and nobody can be found to vouch for him.’
Marwan was hard of hearing and did not make much of it, but he did understand that it was a trifle, like a bearded woman or some other circus act.
They moved on to a fashionable subject: Roentgen’s rays and how a surgeon from Germany had been able to see the stone in a man’s gall bladder and in another man’s liver, and how he had operated on the patients. ‘To see a man on the inside is worthy of the front page.’ Mr Procopiu had written an article on Roentgen’s discovery, titling it ‘The Miracle-working Ray.’ He had been happy to be able to write about his favourite subject: science. Apparently, one November day, exactly two years ago, the diligent researcher had seen in his rather dark laboratory a greenish ray that seemed to be coming from some cardboard covered with barium. He gazed in wonder before extinguishing the cathode tube, whereupon the light from the cardboard also vanished. He turned on the tube and placed his hand, probably by accident, between the piece of cardboard and the cathode tube. On the cardboard appeared some delicate and very real bones. His own hand, as if photographed on the inside! The upheaval he felt in his soul cannot be imagined! And so Mr Roentgen was the first mortal in the universe to see himself on the inside without so much as scratching his skin.
On learning this, his colleague Pavel, who was artistic rather than scientific by bent, declared that hypnotism was as good as proven, since it was probably also transmitted by an invisible ray. And the man who signed himself Marwen told how the director himself, Signor Luigi Cazzavillan, had recounted a few days previously, when he met him at the club, that in Rome a venerable lady had been sitting in the salon when all of a sudden she had clearly seen her husband, who was away in Milan, appear in the doorway and call her by name, before vanishing as if in a puff of smoke. The lady had fainted and, as a cable later revealed, her husband had died suddenly in Milan that very moment. Pavel recounted in a whisper a matter that was all the rage, especially among the servants, concerning a house maid who had told her master about how she dreamed that a wounded Turk had buried some gold in the roots of a gooseberry tree in his yard, and when the man dug there, sure enough, he found the gold. The girl had gone back home with a dowry, she never had to work again, and her master became a rich man and had built himself a palatial home in a leafy suburb. And then there was the startling case in the Procopiu family: a sister who at the age of thirteen dreamed she married a miller and her best friend drowned in a mill race, and now she was Mrs Miller, and her friend had indeed drowned, but in the waters of a lake. What was even stranger was that Mr Miller was an engineer. Neculai Procopiu sighed with envy; his brother-in-law’s profession had been his own dream.
‘You would say that all the things that have been and will be are now too, in the present,’ said Pavel softly.
Having heard but half of the phrase ‘all the things that will be,’ the photographer took his leave. No sooner had he left than to the surprise of the two editors there was another knock on the door, firm and polite, which was not like the knock of the lad from the printing press. They both lifted their eyes once again. Mr Costache Boerescu, the Chief of Public Security, entered. He did not like to shake hands or to sit around and chat, and so when he did so they knew he had an ulterior motive. This time he asked the two men in a hectoring voice to introduce a short announcement in the morning paper, right that instant, while maintaining the utmost discretion as to his identity. Pavel Mirto stood up and took the piece of paper down to the printing press.
‘Ah, lest I forget, is your number two-nine-seven?’ he asked Procopiu as he was leaving.
‘The telephone number? 297, yes, but in the evening there is nobody to answer it. Didn’t the girl at the switchboard tell you?’
An hour later, the proofs arrived, for a last quick look before the edition went to press. Mr Procopiu read the headlines in capital letters, and the beginnings of the news items, and the most important announcements: PLANNED LAW AGAINST DUELLING. OTTOMAN BRIG WRECKED in the Black Sea. Events from the capital. A confidence trick à la Andronic... Legal news. Births and deaths. Deeply moved by the tragedy... H.R.H. Princess Maria. Wedding banns. FROM ITALY. FROM LONDON. ... Opera. Mrs Olympia Mărculescu and Mr... in Rigoletto. ‘A chamois leather wallet has been lost in the Teilor-Clemenței area. Please contact...’ ‘A white cat has been lost. Left hind leg amputated...’ ‘The man under arrest found yesterday unconscious and half-frozen near the Băneasa estate (by the lakes) has declared that his name is Dan I. Kretzu, he is a journalist and not a malefactor...’ Neculai Procopiu’s eyes fell on Costache’s announcement, crammed rather incongruously between the advertisements for the Inger Confectionary Shop and the Romania Weaving Loom. He noticed that the brand name ‘Romania’ lacked quotation marks and added them with an indelible pencil, wetting the point on his tongue, in order to make it clear that it was not a loom that wove the beloved homeland, although that would not come amiss, every now and then. Because of the indelible pencil, the editor-in-chief’s tongue was permanently purple. He carefully read the Police announcement: ‘A young man who seems to be of good family, around twenty-two years of age, has been found shot and is in a serious condition in the Health Establishment of Dr Rosenberg. Anybody with information about this person or who has information about the circumstances of his wounding should contact the Prefecture of Police, in Calea Victoriei, No. 25.’
All these items would be perused at leisure and with thoroughness by those citizens of Bucharest who subscribed to Universul on the following day, 20 December 1897, according to the Julian calendar. The subscribers included Dr Margulis, who would read the paper before setting off to his surgery on Strada Sfântul Ionică, behind the National Theatre. And old man Cercel, who would then convey its contents, censored and commentated upon, to young Nicu. And Costache, over his second cup of coffee, which he always drank at work, and his boss, Prefect of Police Caton Lecca, sitting at the table at home, coddled by his large-boned wife. And Iulia Margulis, who was looking for ideas for Christmas presents. And Luigi Cazzavillan, the newspaper’s director, who, together with the diplomats from the Italian Legation, had already celebrated New Year. And there were many others, countless others, whose names and occupations do not concern us here.
The last lit window on