“Of course, don’t keep quiet about the fact that it’s Géza Hutira who’s taking her in.”
“Okay,” said Andei Bodor, “rest assured I’ll report exactly that.”
8. HAMZA PETRIKA'S LOVE
The two Hamza Petrikas worked on Doc Oleinek’s bear reserve in the Dobrin conservation area and impaled themselves on one of the last nights of autumn. A couple of days before, they’d been seen in the village: it was Revolution Day, and the game wardens had a holiday. They had been loitering about all afternoon in front of the knife-throwers’ tent, which was pitched on the bank of the Sinistra alongside those of the other showmen. Now, the Hamza Petrikas may have had their eyes trained on those glinting blades as they hit their target one after another, but the people standing were staring at them instead. No one had ever before seen two young men — blue skin, red eyes, feather grass hair — who looked so much alike. Albino twins, they so resembled each other that even their thick, bear-warden overalls creased at the very same places; and, judging by the way that steam issued from their nostrils simultaneously, they even breathed in sync. But to top it all off: the little sheet-metal dog tag hanging from their necks proclaimed that they both were called Hamza Petrika.
Only a few men who worked behind the barbed wire and plank fencing of the conversation area could enter the village by special permission, and each wore his name on a dog tag dangling from a chain around his neck. In the winter, even though they were inoculated now and again, these forest dwellers often fell victim to the recurring epidemic, and if one of them strayed off and stretched out in the brush, never to rise again, that inscribed tag came in very handy. The banks of the Sinistra were flanked by ancient wild forests, so the dead weren’t always found quickly.
There was only one clinic in the Dobrin forest district, and when news spread that Colonel Puiu Borcan had been felled by the Tungusic Flu, the doctor’s courtyard was overrun by lumberjacks, road workers, mushroom hunters, and, of course, bear wardens. Each demanded an inoculation. They waited there in front of the closed clinic for four or five days on end, sitting about on the verandah steps or on the rocks scattered about the yard; the luckier ones, though even they looked increasingly pale and sickly, got spots at the foot of the fence, which was painted all over with red crosses. From inside, the medical orderlies peered nervously out from behind gauze curtains. One of them — wearing a tattered, soiled white smock over pale green army trousers, and with sandals on his bare feet that revealed nails brown with dirt, long pointy toenails that resembled griffin claws — occasionally stepped out onto the threshold to call upon everyone waiting outside for patience. By way of excuse, he invariably said that the time for inoculations was not yet officially here, and yet late autumn was no doubt upon them: the silvery steam of all those men breathing in the yard hovered about in the bright sunshine.
Toward evening on the fourth or fifth day, along with the dispiriting lights of dusk, the gray ganders all at once arrived and told everyone to go home. These were Coca Mavrodin’s men: long-necked, button-eyed figures with light tufts of spider’s web hair around their ears, thin, transparent skin, and not a wrinkle on their faces. They really did look like geese.
The ganders announced that everyone should go on home in peace since this winter would be epidemic-free, and there would be no need for inoculations. After coaxing the medical orderlies out of the clinic, the gray ganders went inside and personally brought the boxes full of medicine out to the yard, stomping to bits every last one of them. All those glass vials crackling under their feet sent the sour vaccine smell wafting over the fences of nearby homes, descending onto the plum trees and stacks of hay in the yards, and mixing with the damp odor of forest mold.
This was good news: the game wardens dispersed along with all those other, not particularly sociable characters of the same stripe, all of them practically tiptoeing away, a bit embarrassed with relief. And yet the rustle of rubber boots treading along the dewy trails that led up the mountain slopes did not die down so fast. Everyone left except for Géza Kökény — he, of whom it was said that no illness could catch him — smoking his Pope there at the bottom of the steps.
I too now headed off along the dark main road, at the end of which loomed the lights of the train station. Before getting far from the clinic, though, I met up with Doc Oleinek, the chief bear warden, and one of the two Hamza Petrikas. Doc was my occasional drinking buddy, whom I recognized first on account of his smell as he trudged along in front of me — though not the smell of medicine (he was a doc in name alone, for he spent all his time tending to the bears). He had a wild, nauseating smell, like a bush pissed on for days, weeks, months. Sixty or seventy bears — or one hundred and sixty, one hundred and seventy? — were kept in abandoned mines and in a ramshackle old chapel in the conservation area, and were looked after by my friend and the albino twins.
Doc Oleinek offered to buy me a drink, and as we were making
our way toward the station along that soft, silent, dewy road, all at once I noticed the feather grass hair of one of the Hamza Petrikas lit up not far away. He’d of course been walking with Doc, though like some sort of toy poodle, slinking along behind at a proper distance. The other Hamza Petrika had evidently stayed behind in the woods, with the bears.
A narrow-gauge railway led to the reserve, and that’s how fodder was delivered to the bears. And until the first snowfall, those few men who worked there would go into Dobrin City on a handcar.
A hurricane lamp hung from the eaves of the loading platform, and a bunch of people were waiting under its hazy orb of yellow light. Every night on the branch line from Sinistra a train arrived that comprised two third-class passenger cars together with a freight car. Once a week, on Sunday nights, a load of denatured alcohol arrived with the other cargo, and a portion of that was distributed on the spot, though of course only to those authorized to receive it. Doc Oleinek fished the alcohol ration coupons out of his bag, pressed them into Hamza Petrika’s palm, and told him to go stand in line and redeem them as soon as the train pulled in.
Denatured alcohol — strained through bread, spongy mushrooms, or crushed blueberries — is the favorite drink up in these woods. If no blueberries or bolete mushrooms happen to be available, a bit of a sock will also do. Or a handful of earth.
From the other side of the main station a narrow-gauge railway led toward the conservation area, which meant having to make one’s way past the purple lights of the switches and over the dewy glow of the tracks. It wound its way along the plank fence of the lumberyard and out of the village. To render the frequent burglaries a bit harder to pull off, each plank had been sharpened at the top not long before, and in the mist of distant lights they now gave off a honeyed sparkle. Below them was the handcar, chained to the bumper that marked the end of the tracks. Doc Oleinek and I sat down on the handcar and watched for the evening train, whose rattling could already be heard as it made its way over distant bridges, its whistles resounding between the Sinistra Valley’s steep walls.
“They’ve postponed the epidemic,” observed Doc Oleinek.
“Yeah.”
“You believe that?”
“Why not.”
Whenever a strange mood got hold of me and I didn’t feel like talking, there was no shaking me out of it. This would have been the perfect opportunity to start firing away questions about things up in the conservation area — maybe he knew something about Béla Bundasian, my adopted son, that I would never find out otherwise — but it felt better to keep quiet.
Rather than forcing a conversation, Doc tucked himself into that bear smell of his. We were drinking buddies who plied our pastime in silence. Rare moments came along, though, when we’d exchange an indifferent, empty word or half-sentence, but for the most part we expressed companionship by clearing our throats. When Hamza Petrika could be heard approaching, however, the bottles knocking against each other in his satchel, the chief bear warden sprang up and ran to meet him.