“Whenever I have the chance,” she said, “I’m pleased to work with civilians. So I thought of you, Andrei. But there will be two more individuals with us, from the younger generation.”
It was an amphibious Red Cross military vehicle that took us over streambeds, bogs, and soggy meadows all the way to the foot of Pop Ivan Mountain, then up along a dirt road full of hairpin turns that wound its way to the narrow pass. Behind the wheel was Coca Mavrodin. I sat beside her, cameras hanging heavily from my neck; on the back seat were the gray ganders, two nearly identical young men wearing glum expressions, winter coats, scarves, suits, and oxfords. They were accompanied by a pair of Dobermans that also looked exactly alike.
From our confidential conversation along the way, it turned out that the international trucker Mustafa Mukkerman was arriving from far away with a load of frozen mutton. Passing through once a week on his way to the southernmost reaches of the Balkans, he crossed the border without fail every Thursday at noon.
He was no run-of-the-mill creature. A giant of classic proportions, Mustafa Mukkerman was said to weigh more than half a ton. In the back seat, the two gray ganders were now racking their brains over his colossal limbs, and who would get which side of him once it came time to commence the body search; they’d come along with the aim of finding something on him.
As we made our way up to the border in that amphibious vehicle, at bends in the road we sometimes caught glimpses of Pop Ivan Mountain’s weasel-hued bluffs and its rocky crags, pale-red veins which ran down from the summit deep into the forest below. But all this faded as the pass neared and the weather turned worse. Winter arrived with a vengeance that day up there on the heights of Pop Ivan Mountain.
The border station comprised nothing more than a one-room guard booth and a camp tent; the road in front was closed off by a blue-and-yellow iron crossing-bar. This was the highest point along the old dirt road that crossed the mountains, and here the double-sided slopes contracted into what could just about be called a pass. It was a miserable, drafty place of murmuring bluffs and hoary strips of lichen swaying from the spruces and firs. On the distant, translucent horizon glimmered the disquieting colors of the north.
But on this day, by the time we reached the top the weather had taken a sharp turn for the worse. At first this meant a grayish mix of slush and freezing rain splotching incessantly on the vehicle’s galvanized iron shell and its plexiglass windshield. Then, suddenly, silence, followed by an increasingly thick veil of feather-sized snowflakes. There we were, deep in the pass, swamped by a wintertime murkiness broken only by the red stars glowing on the border guards’ caps.
All at once came a boom of thunder. And although flashes of lightning now repeatedly tore apart the thick veils of snow, one of the guards hung a hurricane lamp on the crossing gate all the same, presumably so its red light might just keep Mustafa Mukkermann from plowing into the bar were he to arrive at the height of the storm. They knew he wouldn’t be late: for years now he’d crossed the border every Thursday at noon. He was the punctual type. It was said that on his father’s side — the Mukkerman side, that is — Mustafa was partly German.
The Dobermans now lolled about underneath the amphibious vehicle but Coca Mavrodin walked slowly forward to the crossing-bar. The snow kept falling, yet all the while she waited there, resting her elbow on the blue-and-yellow iron bar; so that not even by chance should she miss the moment when Mustafa Mukkerman’s headlights would glimmer through the thick white mass of falling snow along the hairpin turns below, on the far side of the pass. Only the puffs of steam occasionally rising up signaled that a living being was bundled in that wool-felt greatcoat there in the biting wind. Before long, just as much snow had piled up on top of her as on the crossing gate and on the nearby open crate of sand kept in case of fire. Above her fur cap a little eddy of snow swirled in the wind, and finally a bird landed on her shoulder.
The dogs were the first to sniff out Mustafa Mukkermann’s arrival. The snow-packed gusts of wind had yet to even carry the slightest drone of that still-distant motor bellowing under the weight of all that cargo when the Dobermans began to yawn, in a clear signal that something had caught their attention. The truck, veiled by fleeting clouds of fog, was already ascending the nearest gradient with its full load of frozen mutton. The two dogs, their ears perked and their stubby tails flinching, came out from underneath the vehicle, smudged with oil. Coca Mavrodin, who knew her dogs, and knew just what to make of the fur billowing on their necks, straightened up at once. The snow coating her back cracked, falling to the ground in big soft cakes.
The bird on her shoulder teetered before plopping stiffly with ice-covered wings into the snow. Apparently it had landed on her in order to die. The bird that carries the Tungusic Flu from the north, so it is said, also succumbs to it in the end.
All fell silent on Mustafa Mukkerman’s arrival. The wind died down, the snowflakes froze in the air. Only the thick grayness remained, strafed no longer by lightning but by the truck’s headlights. The soldiers raised the crossing-bar to let him pass. The silver-painted walls of the truck were daubed with all manner of drivel which could occur only to a trucker who roved homelessly over international borders: an eyesore of blue palm trees and green monkeys against a purple sky on one wall; another wall decorated with a woman’s breast, solitary and profoundly drooping.
The two gray ganders now emerged from within the amphibious vehicle and kicked the snow off the truck’s license plate to verify that, indeed, this was their man. Touching their fingers to its silver walls they walked around the truck. Shadows of disapproval crossed their eyes at the sight of the cheaply painted figures all over it.
Meanwhile, Mustafa Mukkerman rolled down his window. Stretching out his enormous, bag-like, bare, rounded arm, he made a fist, which he shook a few times by way of greeting — both by bending his elbow and his wrist. The gray ganders looked at each other: were they really seeing this? Hardly a good omen, that much was certain.
Coca Mavrodin elbowed me, as if urging me to get on with it: I could now begin snapping away. When a light flashed under my fingers, she explained, I would have to insert a new roll of film. I peeped through the viewfinder: the decoratively daubed truck, its driver, the two gray ganders, and the two Dobermans came to life at once in miniature on the nonreflecting glass.
In the meantime, Mustafa Mukkerman brought a piece of machinery into operation that opened the wall of the cab and lifted the driver — that colossal sack of skin — out along with his seat before finally lowering him to the ground, where he then got to his feet. Huge, round masses of flesh and blubbery wattles of skin quivered under his red coveralls. The air around him quivered, too, and the snow began to melt. On noticing two gaunt customs officers step from the booth, he waved to them convivially; they must have been old buddies. Then, clutching the grips built onto the side of the truck, no doubt for this very purpose, and jingling his keys, he made his way toward the back to open the cargo-hold, and so allow them to pass their flashlights over the rimy, looming meat. He was about to break the lead seals off the lock when Coca Mavrodin intervened, announcing that they shouldn’t waste their time with “this sort of thing.”
At which the gray ganders hurried over to Mustafa Mukkerman, stood on either side and commanded him to undress, there and then. This was the colonel’s order, they explained, but being a woman, she was reluctant to pronounce it herself, lest he misunderstand her intentions.