“Not really. He had to do it sometime.”
“Once he recovers, I’m going to interrogate him. I’ll ask him what the hell he was watching through those binoculars. Yes, he can give me a nice little explanation.”
“He’ll say he wasn’t watching anything. Or else just us. I know these types.”
Having turned the jeep around, Coca Mavrodin killed the engine and let the vehicle roll silently down the winding mountain road.
“Well,” she said, “I know these types, too. He’s just trying to get on my nerves.”
As the vehicle rolled down from the Baba Rotunda Pass over the pothole-pockmarked road, Coca Mavrodin kept turning the wheel with one hand, and with her other hand poking about in her ear. No doubt her ears were popping constantly. So she wasn’t lying: this was the first time she’d been on mountain roads. Once we finally stopped down below, she reached over me and opened my door herself.
“The gray ganders, as you people call them, will take you to the border in the morning. Now get going and forget all about this.”
“Too bad,” I said. “I was hoping you’d change your mind. I could kick myself over that business involving the fish — that’s the root of all my problems.”
“What kind of ‘fishy business’ are you talking about?”
“As I mentioned earlier, Colonel Borcan was looking for a fish and he thought I was hiding it from him.”
“A dead colonel is not a colonel.”
I spent the night — my last one in Dobrin City and the Sinistra Zone, it seemed — at Aranka Westin’s. She had a wooden tub fit for bathing. I filled it with warm water. Meanwhile I stirred up more than one shot — denatured alcohol, resin, and water — to get in the right frame of mind to tell her the truth: that within hours I’d be leaving for good. We then sipped away at those spirits, and by resting our feet on each other’s shoulders, we managed to squeeze into the tub.
In the middle of the night the gray ganders found me at Aranka Westin’s. Still a bit drunk, I lurched out to the jeep in underpants whose moist love splotches froze solid the moment I stepped outside. Coca Mavrodin-Mahmudia’s face shone through the brambly darkness like one of those faraway salt-white hills she’d spoken of. With the Sinistra River roaring in the background, she informed me with a shout that she’d had second thoughts: for a while, as long as she saw fit, I could stay on in Dobrin.
“The gray ganders will come up with a nice new name for you — or, what the hell, just keep the old one — it isn’t your real one, either.”
Coca Mavrodin was an enigmatic woman. A capricious soldier. It seemed that all that time she’d been toying with me: in fact, she’d wanted to keep me on. Years later, on visiting Dobrin, I heard that she had met with a cryptic end. Having dozed off in the woods, she was caught unprepared by a freezing rain, and, motionless, like a sleeping moth, she froze into a crystalline mass under the ice. Later the wind tipped over this block of ice, which broke to pieces and melted. Only a pile of rags remained — it smelled of dead bugs and yes, was pinned all over with colonel’s stars.
5. MUSTAFA MUKKERMAN'S TRUCK
Back when I lived in Dobrin, where I’d gone on the trail of my adopted son, there was a single photographer in the entire forest district. And even he worked only for the mountain infantry. Not that his job was to immortalize either camouflaged soldiers trudging up mountainsides or red-lipsticked secretaries at headquarters. No, he was out there pursuing the conservation area’s Prussian bears — there were some 130 or 140 of them — for official record-keeping purposes.
Photographer Valentin Tomoioaga, himself a colonel, would roam the woods for weeks at a time. Although his good connections probably meant he received a whole host of inoculations, the Tungusic Flu got him, too, in the end. He fell ill at the edge of the woods above Dobrin City, in a cluster of denuded, barkless spruces that could be seen even from the village. Although he was discovered early on — the trim on his mantle kept fluttering about in the wind, which made him especially easy to spot — Valentin Tomoioaga was not admitted to the sick ward at the barracks. To the contrary, stakes were driven into the ground all around him as he lay there, sprawled out, in the throes of fever. Planks were then nailed all over the stakes, attached by beams the dead spruces — all to ensure that he didn’t hobble off somewhere and infect anyone else. Ears of corn were stuck through the gaps in the hastily erected plank fence for the photographer to chew on; as for drink, there was dew.
The Tungusic Flu stirred great dread around there, so it invariably seemed best if those stricken by the contagion, even if they happened to be colonels, were never again allowed back into the barracks, the village, or anywhere else, for that matter.
While no successor was named for the ailing Valentin Tomoioaga, the day soon came when the need arose for a substitute photographer. No, not someone to visit the bears or some top secret site in the conservation area. Instead, the search was on for someone with a camera to head up to the Ukrainian border, where a foreign trucker was expected that very day. This meant there was surely something suspicious about the man, who was none other than the meat-trucker Mustafa Mukkerman, though I myself had often seen him at the wheel of his truck — a silvery vehicle daubed all over with various colorfully painted figures — as he rolled by along the main, north-south highway that skirted its way around Dobrin.
Why was I, of all people, summoned to fill in for the photographer, who by now was sick as a dog and staring death in the face? Granted, I was known to be a jack-of-all-trades, but the decision could solely be chalked up to unpredictable, womanly whim. Indeed, it will forever remain a mystery why Colonel Coca Mavrodin chose me when she might have selected any of the numerous sly, secretive mountain infantrymen.
True, no sooner had she succeeded Puiu Borcan as forest commissioner than their differences became apparent. From my perspective, the winds of change fluttered about on tiny slips of paper, private letters of sorts, on which Colonel Coca Mavrodin summoned me repeatedly to headquarters. That’s how it happened in this case, too. One morning near the fruit depot I noticed scraps of paper bags rustling on utility poles, tacked to fences, and tied to tree branches hanging over the road. All bore the same, charcoal-scribbled summons: “Hurry, Andrei, Miss Coca is waiting for you.”
Izolda Mavrodin-Mahmudia — Coca was her nickname — sat in the armchair of the late Colonel Puiu Borcan with two enormous cameras on the desk before her: a Konica and a blunderbuss of a Canon. It was no problem if I didn’t know a whole lot about picture-taking, she said, noting that these machines did practically everything themselves. All they needed was a trustworthy, sensitive soul to hold them, to change the film now and again, and to press the buttons.
The Ukrainian border, where Mustafa Mukkerman was to arrive, ran along the nearby crest of Pop Ivan Mountain. Even from Dobrin, flares could sometimes be seen at night shooting through the air, as could the watchtowers’ spotlights as they panned, flashing against the clouds. By day, though, the very same apathy came sliding down the slopes of Pop Ivan Mountain toward the valley as from any nearby peak; nothing much had happened there in decades.
Huddled before me in the commander’s chair, Coca Mavrodin was already dressed for the drafty pass, bundled up in a hooded gray greatcoat of the sort worn by the mountain infantry. To protect herself from the wind she’d stuffed her ears with yellow cotton; the sour-bitter stink of bugs hovered about her. Word had it that she’d wound up here in the frigid north from the miasmic delta down south, from that danger-fraught world of giant catfish and pelicans.