A warm November, thick with pestilence. Thieves roam Bucharest, while the prisons are haunted by typhus, killing without mercy, spreading from cell to cell. In one of them lies a wretched man from the village of Roești, in Vâlcea. He is hunched against the wall, and through his fevered mind drifts an umbrella with fringes.
Ah, what an umbrella it is. I must describe it: small, made of silk, an intense yellow. Along the edges, two rows of lace and tufts of golden thread. It is called a cortel. We are, as I said, at the end of the 18th century, and Wallachia is full of cortels in every color—white and foamy, with muslin ruffles; ochre ones with beads along the rim; green ones, some topped with tassels, others with embroidered caps or glass seals. Their handles are of hazelwood or bone.
We learn about this man from Roești and his umbrella primarily from a document: a cold, administrative report certifying a death. Typhus killed him. What he left behind was an umbrella. Among other things. The document does not linger on illness or circumstances, but on the inventory of what Danciu—such was his name—owned.
Besides the umbrella, his estate was far from negligible: a neglected vineyard, twenty fathoms of land, a cart, three oxen, a “bluish mare,” a black heifer, four large pigs. Among valuables were listed a flask (freshly cleaned and “retinned”), a pair of saddlebags made of goat hair, a white fur cap—and… “a new cortel.”
This is the little umbrella that hovered through his mind, following him into the afterlife, floating near his temples in the delirium of typhus. Of course, it was not in prison, but hidden under his bed. The entire story begins with this object, which had filled him with delight.
He first saw it in the possession of a traveling peddler, a man from the edge of the village, who hauled trunks and bundles filled with trifles—beads, needles, tiny mirrors, dolls with magnets, scarves, silk shoes, and anything light enough to carry. And in one of his chests lay this umbrella, asleep atop a bed of bracelets.
Somehow, after several attempts, on an October afternoon, the lemon-colored cortel clung to Danciu’s hand. And with it came misfortune—small, sticky, and insidious.
That very evening, bandits broke into his house. Many of them, armed to the teeth. They did not want to rob him; their plans were larger than a heifer and a few oxen. They needed an informant—one of their own. Danciu did not hesitate. He mounted the mare, and from that moment on his actions were recorded in another document.
He was alive then, a collaborator, so the constables caught him later, stealing a few things from his yard in the process. What had he done? What were the charges? He had led the thieves to the house of the peddler—the wealthiest man he knew, the former owner of the cortel, seller of pearls. That was all.
In exchange, the thieves had been generous: they gave him one coin and thirty copper bits—enough for a basket of fish.
He did not concern himself with what they would do next. He slept peacefully, the umbrella under his bed.
The peddler was tortured; the women in his household were abused until they revealed where the money was hidden: a necklace of German gold coins and sixty-five silver talers.
The thieves were never caught. Someone, however, had seen Danciu and denounced him. Arrested, taken to the armory prison, beaten until he confessed everything.
From his inventoried and hastily sold possessions, the damage to the peddler was paid. Among the items sold was “a new cortel.”
One of the buyers was a monk, who immediately developed an inexplicable passion for the amber-colored umbrella. And within its folds of silk slept the sigh of a man from the other world.
