“This is my first such job,” Colonel Coca Mavrodin quietly observed beside me. “You know, I was posted before on a pelican farm in the tepid south.”
“Good luck with it.”
The snow was dying down. The gray ganders consoled Mustafa Mukkerman by noting it wouldn’t be any warmer in the guard booth — not that he would fit inside anyway. And again they ordered him to strip, the sooner the better.
“Naturally,” said the trucker with a nod. “My pleasure.”
“Where did you learn our language so well?” Coca Mavrodin called over.
“Where? Oh, just in passing through. Comes through the window, you know.”
“You know, I think it’s really too bad that things have come to this. And with you of all people, such a respectable man.”
“For me it’s a pleasant surprise,” said the trucker Mustafa Mukkerman with a grin. “I wanted to show you all my dick, anyway.”
Coca Mavrodin first looked away, then glanced suddenly at me to gauge from my expression whether she’d heard him right. Pulling a sharpened indelible pencil from her pocket, she seemed intent on writing on her palm, or in the air, what she had just heard, while the two gray ganders stretched out their necks at the fleeting words. As if waiting precisely for this moment, Mustafa Mukkerman now pulled the zipper down over his chest and belly to slip off his clothes. The unusual coveralls seemed custom-tailored to his proportions: hardly had he given the now-unzipped outfit — already slackened here and there — a shake than it fell right off him. All at once, just as a moment before had been requested, he stood there completely naked, his vast folds of flesh quivering amid all those silvery snowflakes.
“Don’t think I’m getting a kick out of this,” said Coca Mavrodin, turning toward me. “This is not my thing; I can’t stand the sight of naked people. But I got a tip-off from our Polish comrades that this individual is planning to smuggle something through our country hidden among his folds of skin. Just what, unfortunately, they didn’t say.”
Quivering flesh and wattles of fat hung from Mustafa Mukkerman’s shoulders, shoulder-blades, and waist like drooping wings; not that such reaches of his body could be recognized as shoulder-blades or a waist. The gray ganders had to grab the two Dobermans by their collars and pull them near, goading them to sniff over the trucker. The dogs couldn’t have cared less — Mustafa Mukkerman didn’t interest them one bit.
“It would be best,” Colonel Coca Mavrodin said after a little while, “if you just handed it over — then we’d be over the hard part.”
“I’m not in a rush.”
“But I doubt you want my men to put their hands all over you.”
“Why not. I love it when someone scratches my dick.”
Coca Mavrodin only stood there, the pencil trembling between her fingers as the gray ganders commenced the body search. They probed frills and folds, slowly pulling their fingers hopefully, with feeling, along each trench between those sausages of skin. They even stretched apart Mustafa Mukkerman’s ass cheeks, peering somberly inside. And they rocked his scrotum and its sleepy dumplings back and forth. When they completed their job, they hardly dared to look at each other: not even in the most secret pouches and intimate orifices of skin on this Turkish trucker had they found a thing.
Mustafa Mukkerman still stood there with his legs spread wide in a sort of expectant straddle, as if sorry the whole thing was over so soon. From beneath fatty eyelids he glanced about, absentmindedly lifting his feet again and again from the newly formed slush.
“You think there’s something to smirk about?” Coca Mavrodin demanded, casting me a sudden stare: “What the hell?”
“First of all,” replied Mustafa Mukkerman in my place, having overheard the question, “I prefer to look respectable in pictures. That aside, I had a dream about this whole thing, and so unfortunately I don’t have on me what you were looking for just now.”
Coca Mavrodin stared at the gray ganders, and accorded even me another fleeting glance. Then she took that indelible pencil of hers — which no doubt she’d been saving for something or other — and broke it in two at one crack, its halves plopping into the snow. That done, as if signaling that for her the mission was complete, she started off toward the amphibious vehicle with the two stern-faced gray ganders in her wake, and I was turning to follow as well, the cameras heavy around my neck.
Which is when our eyes met — mine and Mustafa Mukkerman’s. His were full of goodness, affection, velvety human warmth. Extending a hand toward me, he curled his giant index finger invitingly. From his glove compartment he then fished out a pack of Kents; a little cellophane bag of Haribo fruit gummies; and finally, from somewhere or other, he produced a Kinder chocolate egg, the hollow sort with a toy hidden inside. He offered all this to me on his enormous outstretched palm. Yes, on that sleety morning there in the mountain pass, on the very day that winter arrived, a stark naked Turk gave me — the recently sacked wild berry expert — gifts.
“Listen,” he whispered: “No doubt one day you’ll get tired of all this. Just let me know. I’d be glad to take you with me to the southern Balkans. Down to Thessaloniki, the Dardanelles, Rhodes. I’ll stick you in the back with the sheep. You won’t be warm, but you’ll come dressed for the occasion. No one will find you in there.”
“Please stop.”
“Get yourself a nice thick sheepskin coat, the sort that reaches down to your heels. I pass by here every Thursday, stopping at the gas station — you know the one, down on the main north-south highway. But you can also flag me down along the road. Just try to make sure it’s not raining that Thursday: if there’s one thing you can’t do, it’s sit among those icy hunks of meat, in the freezer, in wet clothes. All right, you’d better go — Allah be with you.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I haven’t heard a thing — but you really do know the language.”
“Nonsense. I only parrot words from memory.”
The amphibious vehicle was waiting for me, its motor running, its galvanized iron shell trembling. No sooner did I take my seat than Coca Mavrodin headed off, slipping and sliding over the fresh snow, to descend slowly along the serpentine road toward the Sinistra valley. Already sucking on a Haribo gummy, I looked back, between the heads of the two gray ganders at the fading scene out the rear window: Mustafa Mukkerman still standing there naked in the snow, gazing after us until he disappeared behind our first curve.
“I bet he invited you to come along to the Balkans,” remarked Coca Mavrodin. “To the coast of Greece, to Olympia.”
“He touched on the notion.”
“Well, don’t get all excited about such plans just now.”
After reaching the bottom of the valley and cutting back across the streambed, the vehicle floundered across those soggy meadows once again. Bracing on their forelegs, the two Dobermans gazed out the window and the gray ganders’ eyes sparkled with alertness, though there could hardly have been much worth noting down there in the valley. On nearing the village, Coca Mavrodin, her forehead glistening with sweat, asked me to adjust her cap.
“Next time I’ll surprise him,” she said. “Really, I mean it — I’ll let the air out of the tires, or maybe I’ll have the tubes turned inside-out. So he’ll lose his taste for us forever.”
“And,” offered one of the gray ganders, “to think he dreamt about it. .”
“I bet our Polish comrades were playing a trick on us,” observed the other.
“I suggest you two keep your traps shut,” said Coca Mavrodin.
Soon, Mustafa Mukkerman whizzed by along the main highway, his truck daubed all over with palm trees, monkeys, and that solitary, drooping woman’s breast. Of course he noticed the amphibious vehicle floundering over the meadow, glassy from sleet — he gave a long honk and waved. The snow his truck had whipped up swirled about and sparkled in his wake: he’d brought winter with him, but he was heading for the sunny Balkans.