On Christmas nights, Bucharest residents often told the story of Doctor Carniol. His legend rolled through long winters, from Calea Moșilor to Cișmigiu, carried by frozen lips, sometimes whitened by the frost of December mornings—for in those days, winter was truly winter, with ground ice at dawn and glazed snow along every street. And among all these, Carniol’s story compelled you to listen, because it left behind large, glittering questions—the kind you truly savor only in winter—questions strung like tinsel, spoken in long sentences filled with the infinite pleasures of rhetoric, questions that bring sparks into the eyes. That is precisely why, when I wrote Zavaidoc in the Year of Love, I could not leave him outside this world. Doctor Carniol enters the novel as one of those enigmatic presences—seemingly secondary, yet essential to the hidden weave of the story.
Doctor Carniol lived briefly, but intensely. In 1923, he had a practice on Moșilor, in a newly built house from the 1920s, the kind with one floor—a small blockhouse that was more a villa. For the curious, one from that series still exists today at the Eminescu intersection, absorbed into a socialist block yet still bearing the visible traces of a life from a hundred years ago. In such a building, Carniol, a junior doctor at Filantropia Hospital, with patients in all the good districts of the city, had bought the ground floor, divided into three apartments—one for living, the others for a clinic. In a spacious room he had installed the consultation couch, leading into a small laboratory for urgent investigations. In the third apartment, his fiancée, a dentist, was to set up her own refined practice. In the novel, this urban geography matters: Carniol is not merely a tragic doctor, but a figure placed at the very nerve of interwar Bucharest, where love, bohemia, ambition, and disaster intersect.
They were both Jewish—she from a small town in Moldova, he a third-generation Bucharester. They had fallen in love as students, and after years of hard work in various hospitals, they had managed, not without effort, to buy the ground floor of a house on Moșilor.
Their wedding was to take place soon, but in that very week, a band of young, drunken gods descended—small ethereal beings fallen from the sky after a long season of revelry. And that accident produced other accidents, as it usually does. In Zavaidoc in the Year of Love, it is precisely this intrusion of the unpredictable, this entry of obscure forces into human life, that shifts destinies and pushes the story from social chronicle into urban mythology.
Doctor Carniol was killed three days before his wedding, shot in the chest. The bullet passed by the heart, pierced the lung, and stopped, astonishingly, near the spine, from where it was later removed during the autopsy and placed with honors into a small silver box—where it remained for nearly a hundred years.
What stirred interest and endless discussion was something else. Carniol had been shot after three in the morning, yet until dawn he lay in bed, waiting to die—perhaps checking his watch, assessing his condition.
When the maid woke up, several hours had already passed. She sensed something was wrong, but to silence her, the doctor sent her to fetch morphine—which means the pain had become unbearable. He had a telephone. He worked in a hospital. And yet he chose to die in a wait as fierce as it was lucid.
When the maid returned from the pharmacy, she noticed the blood. She saw that the doctor had changed his shirt, and finally realized that he refused to address the matter, insisting that he had only had a nosebleed—which was too much to believe. So she called the police, and the hospital.
Carniol was rushed in and laid on one of the beds he himself had once supervised as a doctor, and he lived for nearly another day. The police questioned him. His parents wanted to know who had shot him. His friends insisted, demanding clues. Everyone was outraged—but especially the journalists, who wrote incessantly, launching an investigation parallel to that of the police.
For weeks, newspapers wrote about the crime on Moșilor, spinning theories. In the middle of the night, a tall woman had been seen leaving his house. Some believed he had a lover he had abandoned in order to marry—no doubt for advantage. Once this detail was published, entire lists of lovers began to circulate, culminating in a literature student from the Napoleon district. In the end, the doctor had become a sort of Don Juan—a typical womanizer of Bucharest streets, a city, as we know, full of affairs and parties given in the name of Eros. This network of rumors, passions, and shifting identities draws him naturally into the world of my novel, where love never arrives alone, but is accompanied by disguise, guilt, blindness, and destiny.
It was assumed that a woman had shot him. Some said a mistress, others his sister, outraged for obscure reasons. In any case, his fiancée was excluded, since she had spent the entire week in the provinces preparing for the wedding—shoes, dresses, and the bridal festivities. She claimed to know nothing of any lover, refused to comment, and seemed resigned, determined not to keep the Moșilor property.
Carniol’s death inspired me, and from its details—known only to me—emerges one of the climactic moments of Zavaidoc in the Year of Love. He does not appear there by chance, as mere period décor, but as a character caught in the same web of passions, events, and signs that binds Matilda, Zavaidoc, and the others. It was astonishing to see his photograph in the newspaper. He seemed an intelligent man, attentive to the details of dress (if we judge by his glasses), perhaps even shy. As it later turned out, the women in his life had been his patients, all claiming they had been merely friends with a man who valued friendship, generous and always ready for a small conversation. In his short life, he treated many people—among them Zavaidoc himself—which places him squarely at the heart of the novel, not at its margins.
What remains mysterious is the way he chose to protect his killer. From this we understand that he knew him—that perhaps it had been an accident, or, better still, that for Carniol it did not matter whether the culprit was punished or not. He had lived the ultimate experience: becoming his own patient, clinically observing his own exit from life.
But beyond these—mere vulgar suppositions—there is the true truth: those young gods, those ideal-less rascals, were not entirely unknown to him. He had encountered them before, and thus understood perfectly well that he had become the victim of an accident, insignificant in the vast universe. Faced with a choice between truth and whatever life might follow, Carniol chose, of course, to remain in favor with the gods—and to leave behind a truth that would no longer serve anyone. That is why, in the novel, Doctor Carniol is not merely the victim of a crime, but one of the figures through whom we see how love, death, and chance work together, secretly, within the great theatre of Bucharest.
