From the start, on glimpsing this stranger, Géza Kökény dubbed him the Red Rooster. And sure enough, since no one knew his real name, this simple but exact nickname stuck.
A dappled calfskin satchel adorned with brass clasps and fittings hung from the man’s shoulder, and a semitransparent plastic bag swung from his right hand. Wriggling about inside, like a silver-bellied fish, was a shiny platter. Sometimes he would approach the locals working in the forests or fields and offer it for sale, though surely he must have known that they hadn’t any use for platters. For a while everyone was guessing about just what, in fact, the fellow was up to: prying about, getting a sense of shopping preferences in these parts, was he? Out to determine just how friendly the locals were? The mountain infantrymen hassled him for a day and a half, asking repeatedly for his papers. But then, it seems, they were told to let up: from then on they hardly gave him a second look. Besides, nobody so flamboyant, however he tried, could possibly make it as a spy.
Each and every morning, the lower reaches of forest were tinged a pearly gray with hoarfrost or sheathed by a film of passing nighttime snow, so the regular trail of footprints from Pop Ivan Mountain toward Dobrin was visible even from a distance on those downy hills. Sometimes a whole flock of waxwings — which make their appearance in the Sinistra valleys from the north, as a harbinger of winter’s numbing winds — accompanied the stranger in his wanderings. Meandering over on those blanched fields with the birds swirling above his head, this redheaded stranger seemed not to have come from the Ukraine at all, but straight out of an old picture book.
Waxwings, by the way, were not too well liked around there. Most locals chased them away with stones, and clever folks just spat at them — it was believed that where these birds flocked, the Tungusic Flu would be follow in short order — the very fever that, in the end, did in Colonel Borcan.
The colonel, poor fellow, looked me up again — something he didn’t do too often — only days before his death. Practically begging, he grilled me one more time about that package.
“Come on, Andrei, tell me the truth. Didn’t someone leave a plastic bag for me at your place? With a fish inside, that’s all. It’s okay if you ate it, but at least tell me.”
Although I swore up and down that nothing had come, the colonel left with a brooding look of suspicion and resentment. We never met again. Before long, Nikifor Tescovina, the commissary manager in the conservation area, spread the news that the forest commissioner had disappeared. All the bear wardens and colonels frequented the commissary, so he knew all there was to know.
And it was indeed Nikifor Tescovina who soon announced that Colonel Borcan had been found, dead as a doornail, on a bare mountaintop. A bird had already built a nest in the colonel’s gaping mouth. Later, someone — a poacher dressed in a mountain infantry uniform, no doubt — nailed the corpse to the ground, thrusting bayonets through the hands and clamping the feet between the rocks, so as to keep the griffins from tearing away his flesh.
Not long after that, the Red Rooster looked me up at what was then my workplace, the wild fruit depot. There I coordinated the harvesting of not only fruit — blueberries and blackberries — but also mushrooms. Actually, I lived there too, in the storage building, amid the scent of fermenting fruit emanating from so many tubs, buckets, and barrels.
I recall that incident perfectly, because on that same day a new harvester, Elvira Spiridon, stopped by to drop off a load of berries. I suppose there’s no harm in adding that Elvira — the wife of Severin Spiridon, who lived up in the mountains — would later become my lover. In any case, that day she introduced herself with a large basket of blackberries and a satchel full of parasol mushrooms.
A few hundred bears were kept in the Dobrin conservation area, and since they were partial to blackberries and parasol mushrooms, we delivered these from the fruit depot I oversaw.
As I couldn’t help but notice, this woman — a trembling, fidgety tendril, a fiery snake, and a red-hot titmouse all at once — was suddenly limping dramatically. That got me thinking: if only a thorn were to pierce the sole of that foot, why then it would be my job to remove it. Well, it may have been a ridiculous wish, but Heaven heard it. While I emptied the basket of blackberries into a barrel and spread the mushroom caps about on a sieve, Elvira Spiridon sat on my threshold and, to my delight, with the bronze loops of her enormous earrings flashing about, she set about wrestling with the sandal strap around her ankle. I didn’t hesitate a bit. I knelt down before her, placed her foot in my lap, and unwrapped the white felt rag she used for a sock. Her stubby little foot was still tan from gathering in the hay that summer, and a purple web of veins filigreed over the surface. Her sole was tender, moist, and practically pink, as if she tiptoed all day. Cutting into it was not a thorn, really, but a thin, tiny, and nonetheless prickly golden-silvery thistle leaf. Naturally I pulled it out with my teeth. Then, after letting it glitter a moment on the tip of my fingernail, I licked it before tucking it under my shirt. Meanwhile I was clutching Elvira Spiridon’s foot in my hand. Had someone spotted us just then, he might have understood that I was simply introducing myself to her.
Sure enough, someone really was lounging about nearby. Without so much as a rustle, all at once a silhouette with colored edges appeared on the threshold: the Red Rooster. Could it have been anyone else? The leather satchel’s mounts and clasps gleamed blindingly. In his right hand was a plastic bag, and wriggling about in the murky water inside this bag was a silver-bellied fish shaped like an oval platter.
“Andrei,” he said, addressing me without further adieu by my first name: “Take this to Colonel Borcan. Before the sun sets.”
“Sure,” I agreed, embarrassed by the proximity of Elvira Spiridon. “Just put it down over there.”
By then Colonel Borcan was no longer alive, but that wasn’t any of the Red Rooster’s business. I threw the plastic bag, with the fish inside, into an empty barrel, and as soon as the stranger left I hurried after Elvira Spiridon — who, glittering earrings and all, was dashing away in fright into the marshy meadow with one foot still bare, the sandal dangling in her hand. In vain I conjured up one flattering word after another: they flew past her ears to no avail. It seemed she had lost heart on encountering the Red Rooster.
Back then, in any case, I happened to be wooing Aranka Westin. As far as I could tell from subtle cues, the old bag wasn’t exactly indifferent to me, and so I got to fantasizing: maybe, just maybe, one night while her boyfriend made his rounds of the barracks, cutting the infantrymen’s hair, Aranka would scurry right out of the village in nothing but a flimsy nightshirt or perhaps even stark naked and make her way along the little stream straight to the fruit depot, where I lived all alone. She, too, worked for the mountain infantry, as a seamstress, so apart from such fantasies I would in fact regularly check in on her, sometimes late in the day, on the pretext of frayed collars or dangling buttons.
This is what happened after the Red Rooster’s sudden autumn visit: I woke up in the middle of the night to the cackling of wild geese driven toward the Sinistra peaks by the thick clouds of chimney smoke enveloping the open country to the east. The dead silence of such frosty nights was broken regularly by the passing birds, whose stifled calls — not at all unlike the occasional mewlings of the track watchman’s clarinet — rattled down chimneys and echoed in ash-laden stoves until the crack of dawn. As on that night, this disquieting sound invariably woke me up, reminding me of my solitude and conjuring up thoughts of Aranka Westin.