Often, on Christmas nights, Bucharest residents used to speak of Doctor Carniol. His legend rolled through the long winters, from Calea Moșilor to Cișmigiu, carried by frozen lips, sometimes whitened by the morning frost of December—because in those days winter truly was winter, with crushed ice at dawn and glazed snow on every street. And among all the stories, Carniol’s compelled you to listen, because it left behind large, lingering questions—questions you truly savor only in winter, tinsel-laden questions, spoken in long, winding sentences filled with the infinite pleasures of rhetoric: questions that spark little lights in the eyes.
Doctor Carniol lived briefly, but intensely. In 1923 he had a medical practice on Moșilor, in a new building erected in the 1920s, a one-story structure, a sort of small blockhouse that was more villa than block. For the curious: one of those buildings still exists today, at the Eminescu intersection, wedged into a socialist block, yet still bearing visible traces of life from a hundred years ago. In such a building, Carniol—a resident physician at the Filantropia Hospital, with patients in all the city’s better neighborhoods—had purchased the ground floor, comprising three apartments: one for living quarters, the other two for a clinic. In one spacious apartment he installed the examination couch, which led into a small laboratory for urgent investigations. In the third apartment, his fiancée, a dentist, planned to open her own elegant practice.
They were both Jewish—she from a small Moldavian town, he a third-generation Bucharest native. They had fallen in love as students, and after years of grueling hospital work, they managed, not without effort, to buy the ground floor of a building on Moșilor.
Their wedding was to take place soon. But that very week, some young, drunken gods descended—small, ethereal beings fallen from the sky after a long spree. And this accident produced other accidents, as usually happens.
Doctor Carniol was killed three days before the wedding. He was shot in the chest, the bullet passing close to the heart, perforating the lung, and stopping—astonishingly—near the spine, from where it was removed during the autopsy and placed with honors in a small silver box, where it would remain unmoved for nearly a hundred years.
What stirred interest and endless discussion was something else. Carniol had been shot after three in the morning, and until daylight he lay on his bed, waiting to die—perhaps checking his watch, clinically assessing his condition.
When the maid woke, several hours had already passed. She sensed something was wrong, but to quiet her, the doctor sent her to fetch morphine—proof that the pain had become unbearable. He had a telephone. He worked in a hospital. And yet he chose to die, in a waiting that was as ferocious as it was lucid.
When the maid returned from the pharmacy, she noticed the blood, saw that the doctor had changed his shirt, and finally realized that he was avoiding the subject, claiming he had suffered a nosebleed—which was too much to believe. She called the police and the hospital.
Carniol was rushed to the emergency ward, placed in one of the beds he himself had overseen as a physician, and lived for nearly another day. The police questioned him; his parents wanted to know who had shot him; friends insisted, demanding clues. Everyone was outraged—especially journalists, who wrote incessantly, launching an investigation parallel to that of the police.
For weeks, newspapers reported on the crime on Moșilor, spinning suppositions. A tall woman had been seen leaving his apartment in the middle of the night. Some believed he had a lover whom he had abandoned in order to marry—out of interest, of course. Once this idea was published, entire lists of lovers began to surface, culminating in a literature student from the Napoleon district. In short, the doctor had become a sort of Don Juan, a scoundrel of love, a skirt-chaser typical of Bucharest—a city, as everyone knows, full of affairs and parties thrown in the name of Eros.
It was assumed that a woman had shot him. Some said a lover, others his sister, outraged for obscure reasons. In any case, his fiancée was excluded from suspicion: all that week she had been in the provinces, preparing for the wedding—shoes, dresses, the bridal party. She knew of no lover and refused to comment. She seemed resigned and determined not to keep the Moșilor property.
Carniol’s death inspired me. On details known only to me rests the climax of my novel about Matilda, Zavaidoc, and others—among them Doctor Carniol. What astonished me was seeing his photograph in the newspaper. He appeared intelligent, attentive to sartorial details (judging by his glasses), perhaps even shy. As later emerged, the women in his life had been his patients, all insisting they had been merely friends of a man who valued friendship, generous and always ready for a small chat. He treated many people in his short life; among his patients was Zavaidoc.
What remains mysterious is the way he chose to protect his killer, from which we can infer that he knew the person—that perhaps it was an accident, or better yet, that for Carniol it no longer mattered whether the culprit was punished or not. He had lived the supreme experience: becoming his own patient, clinically supervising his own exit from life.
But beyond these vulgar suppositions lies the true truth: the young gods—ruffians without ideals—were not entirely unknown to him. He had encountered them before, and thus understood all too well that he had become the victim of an accident, insignificant to the great universe. Faced with a choice between truth and his future life, Carniol decided to make peace with the gods, leaving behind a truth that would no longer serve anyone.
