Leaving the station, it took us some hard seesawing, as the tracks began their steep ascent, to roll our way out of the village. The screeching of the wheels shot right up the tracks, announcing our presence, and before we knew it, the barking of dogs undulated in waves all along the embankment and up the mountainside.
Along the way, I asked, “Does this means a position has opened up at your place?”
“Maybe even two.”
“I’d go to the woods with you,” I went on. “I could have a word with that lieutenant colonel, the medical orderly, about pulling some strings and maybe getting me an inoculation after all. If it’s okay with you, I’d gladly like to go. I’m not saying I know much about bears, but I could learn.”
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
“But, all the same, maybe I could come?”
“We’ll see. For now, I’d like to be on my own for a while.”
I accompanied Doc Oleinek on the handcar as far as the entrance to the conservation area, where a crossing gate topped by a red lit hurricane lamp closed the tracks. In the guard’s room lived my old chess-playing pal, Colonel Jean Tomoioaga. Setting out, I’d counted on whiling away a bit of time at his place; drinking a bit, and that I’d amble back down to the village in the middle of the night on my own two feet.
The hurricane lamp soon found its way to the threshold, where Colonel Jean Tomoioaga switched its red lens to white, and then got out the chessboard. We played with ungainly, little home-made figures on a checkered shirt he laid out on the floor. The whole thing could be swept up in a moment — the mountain infantrymen did not take kindly to games.
In no particular hurry himself, Doc Oleinek also took a seat near the doorway and the lamp, watching us to line up the pieces, not in a mood to go on just yet.
“I see you’re going back on your own,” Jean Tomoioaga said to him. “Our friend Hamsa got a little extra leave?”
“Well, I let him go.”
From underneath his plank bed Jean Tomoioaga took out a bottle and set it on the floor in easy reach. Tossing about inside was the bluish-gray fluid of denatured alcohol filtered through wood coal — it’s said that coal is healthy.
“And when is he returning, if I may ask? You know I have to record every movement in my log.”
“If he comes, then he does, and you can write whatever you need to write. If he doesn’t come, you don’t have to write a thing.”
“You’re a character.”
Colonel Jean Tomoioaga and I were on our second or third game when, in front of the door, against the black velvet of the valley, Hamza Petrika’s feather grass hair flared up. Not the Hamza Petrika who’d impaled himself, but the other one. He stood by the open door, bloomy and glistening with little droplets of dew, without a trace of blood scent about him.
“Where is he?” he asked Doc Oleinek seriously.
“You can see for yourself that he’s not here.”
“I want to speak with my brother right away.”
“You can’t, not now.”
Hands in his pockets, he just stood there by the door and, glancing behind us, gazed around the little guard room.
“I see you brought his boots with you, Doc. So why should I ask where my brother’s feet wound up?” And he pointed a finger at me. “Say, is he going to fill our shoes by any chance?”
“The future will decide that,” said Doc. “But as long as you’re starting to catch on, listen up: you too can take off. You’re free, so get going. Somewhere, who knows where, your brother, Hamza Petrika, is waiting for you. I promised him that I wouldn’t have them start searching for you right away.”
Hamza Petrika sat down on the ground and ran his fingers through his hair, which was so feathery that his hand stayed empty. He spit into his palm, then smoothed down his hair. After that, he got up and stretched. His face suddenly smoothed out; he was calm.
“All right, Doc. I’m off; I’ll go pack up our things. But you promise not to come right after me.”
“If that’s what you want, fine. For how long? Will twenty minutes do? Or maybe a half-hour?”
“That’s exactly what I had in mind. That’s how long I’d like to be completely alone.”
“Okay, you’re all right — take your time.”
Without a word Hamza Petrika tucked his brother’s rubber boots under his arm and started back toward the bear reserve, letting out colossal farts on the way, as if his soul was fast departing his body. He’d gone only a few steps, though, when the murmur of the brook and the velvet darkness closed in behind him.
Doc Oleinek, not that he had a watch, waited generously. Surely twice as much time had passed as he’d promised when he began to stretch. Listlessly he slung the satchel full of bottles onto his shoulder and headed toward the handcar.
“Good seeing you.”
“Please,” I called after him, “think about it.”
“All right, all right, we’ll see.”
A bit later I headed off, too, ambling down along the embankment toward Dobrin City. Some people are soothed by walking on railroad ties, some are irritated, and others are driven to reflection. I simply got it into my head that on reaching the edge of the village, rather than heading for the Baba Rotunda Pass, I’d take a detour to the station, where perhaps I could exchange a few words with Hamza Petrika. What sort of words, I had no idea, but something was sure to come up. Nothing did come of this chitchat however, after all.
By daybreak I reached the station. The sky had started to turn yellow in the distance, above the purple contours of the pass, and with each step I waited for Hamza Petrika’s scarecrow silhouette to loom large against the sky. I went all along the fence but found him nowhere. Sitting in a row on the loading platform, dangling their legs and stretching their necks, were the gray ganders.
At the spot where Hamza Petrika had lit a cigarette the previous evening, half of one of the fence posts was missing, sawed off about waist high. A thick layer of fragrant sawdust covered the ground at its base. A sole competing smell was in the sharp early morning breeze — a bit metallic, a tad salty and a tad sweet, exactly like blood.
It was getting light, but I figured that rather than try to get some rest I’d go look up the lieutenant colonel who served as medical orderly — maybe he’d really do me a favor. Getting that inoculation was my big opportunity to settle into life as a bear warden.
9. CONNIE ILLAFELD'S HAIR
One fine spring day, back when I worked as an assistant corpse watchman, I finally got to know Connie Illafeld — it wasn’t exactly the most delightful meeting I’d ever had, seeing as how, for all practical purposes, she no longer spoke any one single language. Instead she mixed them left and right, and the only people who could communicate with her somewhat had to know Ukrainian, Swabian German, Romanian, and Hungarian, and it didn’t hurt to know Carpathian German and Ruthenian dialects as well. Few such people lived in the Dobrin forest district, but one of them happened to be the chief bear warden, my friend Doc Oleinek.
Connie Illafeld was a sort of pen name. The progeny of the Illarions — landowning, serf-holding Bukovinian boyars — this woman, who lived among simple mountain folk on her family’s onetime estate, had originally been named Cornelia Illarion. Perhaps some other person around there might conceivably have been known as either Cornelia Illarion or Connie Illafeld, one person alone could lay claim to both these appellations.
So when I happened to notice one day the name Cornelia Illarion on a file folder emblazoned with the Red Cross — a folder destined for the clerk’s desk — and that this name was followed by her pen name in a flourish of red and in quotes. I knew it was her — practically a relative of mine, my adopted son’s onetime lover. I was dying of curiosity: I had to see for myself the being who, years earlier, had stoked the wild side of Béla Bundasian.