“Listen here,” Andrei called to the dwarf, “there’s no one around just now. I know all about your business — You’re crawling with cash. Let me borrow some.”
“You’ve got me cornered. Just how much would you need?”
“I was thinking four twenties. I’ll pay you back sooner or later, I swear. I need exactly four bills. My life depends on it.”
“Keep going now — Nikifor Tescovina’s standing behind the window.”
The valley widened a bit halfway to Géza Hutira’s cabin, and there a crimson spring trickled out of the ground into a tiny pool that fed into the main stream. It was called the Crooning Spring: the wind crooned night and day amid the mouths of the empty bottles that had been tossed into the adjacent nettle. Carbonated mineral water poured forth from the Crooning Spring, daubing the walls of the pool with rust; a furry crimson film covered the stones, the spruce bark roots, everything the water trickled over. It even smelled of blood.
And in fact it was a bit bloody. Bebe Tescovina stood above the spring splashing herself with water. Having removed her sweat suit, she was lolling about on a rock, wearing nothing but a diaper of sorts even as the frost and rime everywhere in the shade blazed coolly pink. Narrow veins of blood trickled all over her spindly, child’s thighs, her bony legs.
Géza Hutira was sitting on a stump. Just now it wouldn’t have been possible to recognize him from his ankle-length hair — that was tucked under his clothes at his neck. The aromatic smoke from his Pope, filled with thyme, drifted far. An empty bottle crooned away near his legs. Through drifting veils of smoke he scrutinized the slight body of Bebe Tescovina and the circuitous trails of blood on those scrawny, water-glistening thighs. He noticed Andrei, whose approach was cloaked by the din of the stream, only when the aluminum pole on his shoulder glistened.
“How d’you do?” he greeted Andrei. “I figured someone would come round looking for me today. Let’s be off so you can make it back in time.” Rising from the rock, the Pope clenched between his teeth, he stretched and called over to Bebe Tescovina. “I’ve got a little business with this gentleman. If you could manage it, come here tomorrow this time of day.”
Only Bebe Tescovina’s short red hair shone just now: not for a moment did she remove her eyes — eyes as bloomy and blue as blueberries — from Géza Hutira. As the two men headed off she slowly dressed, plainly disappointed.
The trail kept disappearing into the streambed, and it was apparent that the one man who walked it always wore rubber boots. The edges of the little pools of water along the way up were already covered by a skin of ice, and wagtails were dipping into those pools from their perches on glassy-glazed rocks and glistening branches.
“Live on your own?” asked Andrei, almost gasping for breath from the ascent.
“You mean me? Why do you ask?”
“Just curious how you live. I also love being on my own. Maybe we’ve got that in common.”
“In common, huh?” said Géza Hutira, giving the other man an almost sympathetic once-over. “That all depends. But I’ll tell you — there’s a fellow that lives with me. You’ll meet him, in any case.”
Géza Hutira’s cabin stood at the far end of the valley, above the tree line, amid boulder piles and the sparkling rivulets that ran between them. There, the thick forest had turned suddenly sparse, with only a few aging, odd old spruces weighed down by graybeard lichen clutching to the slopes, cut here into rifts. The clouds must have risen from there not long before — the wood-shingle roof was still glistening with rainbows of water droplets. Nearby and likewise gleaming nearby was a white, four-legged hut containing the meteorologist’s instruments; a bit further off, motionless crows huddled atop several small observation devices positioned under the open sky.
Sitting on the cabin’s doorstep — his hands clenched as if in prayer, but twirling his thumbs, and with an overturned bottle of denatured alcohol by his feet — was Béla Bundasian, Andrei’s adopted son. Beset by the early baldness common among Armenians, his tall brown forehead loomed large, and that, together with his bushy eyebrows and the thick lenses underneath, gave him a slightly owlish visage. From behind his glasses he cast his stepfather a rigid glance, bereft of either joy or surprise. He hardly stirred when Andrei, the aluminum pole on his shoulder, stopped in front of him.
“You,” he muttered, as if talking only to himself: “How the hell did you get here?”
“I’ve been looking for you,” whispered Andrei. “For five years I’ve been on your trail.”
“On my trail? But why?”
“Yes, I managed to outwit them — I wanted to see you — and now I’m here.”
“And you came to see me — that’s it?”
“I don’t have anyone besides you.”
Taking the empty bottle, Béla Bundasian patiently held it upended at his mouth: until finally, a few last drops came out. Then, after a prolonged effort to hawk up some phlegm, he spat and shook his head. “Terrible.”
Taking a pair of binoculars, Géza Hutira stepped out of the cabin: he scanned the ridgeline above the cold, deep river basin before finally setting his sights on a barren height shining with freshly fallen snow. As he peered through the lenses, the sharp crest of a pile of rocks trembled before him: Colonel Borcan lay there covered with plastic bags. The aluminum pole was to be planted beside him.
“I see you’ve come across an old acquaintance,” Géza Hutira remarked casually, handing Andrei the binoculars. “But you can count on my discretion. I won’t ask any questions.”
“Thank you, and yes, I know him — and I’d like a word with him.”
“While you two talk things over, I’ll cover my ears, or maybe I’ll go for a little walk.”
“Oh, no need for that,” Béla Bundasian interjected. “Don’t plug your ears. Why should he think I’ve got secrets to keep from you?”
Before long the three had climbed up to the plateau, which was covered by a snow dusting that looked like a mix of poppy seeds and powdered sugar. Dusk was coming on, and ice shone from the rifts in the mountainside above them — ice that gave away the winding trails Géza Hutira traversed on his way up to the rock ledges where he read his instruments. And now, having donned crampons and with a steel wire wound around his waist, he set off for the ledges on his own, the aluminum pole on his shoulder.
By the time he reached the saddleback and, eventually, the pile of rocks at the foot of which Colonel Puiu Borcan lay covered, it was already pretty dark. Down below, Andrei waited quietly with his adopted son, watching the distant figure projected against the sky until, finally, from one moment to the next, it vanished in the descending dusk. As night fell, an enormous bat suddenly swooped down over the plateau, its shadow rocking back and forth above the hoarfrost-covered mountain spruces and junipers until it, too, flitted off into the darkness — the late forest commissioner’s stray, ownerless umbrella.
All at once the wind stopped dead in its tracks and, as if into an empty bottle, silence fell between the bare walls. From high above, the sound of metallic hammering and tinkling could be heard where Géza Hutira was driving the aluminum pole into the ground, wedging in stakes all around it, the taut wires twanging. The murmur of the streams below rose up in curtains from out of the valley, like fog after a rain.
“I read your diary,” Andrei began, “thinking it would tell me what business you’d got mixed up in.”
“That was a really, really bad idea.”