Back then I was working for the Dobrin mountain infantry as a civilian non-staff member; alongside various secret commissions small and large, I was the deputy to the district coroner or, as the locals put it, the assistant corpse watchman. The morgue stood in a musty old corner of the barracks, and when it rang of emptiness — which is to say, when there was no work — I assisted Colonel Titus Tomoioaga in the office. Since the district fully belonged to the mountain infantry, he was the one who kept records on everyone dispatched to Dobrin and who sent all the new arrivals to work. He was a slow, dreamy, mountain infantryman with the soul of an elk, however, who would stare listlessly out the window at the birds and at the gray clouds passing by over the spruces and firs. For him, reading even the most curtly worded records was a challenge.
On the day in question, the first warm breeze had just tumbled over the southern ranges’ icy ridges — a breeze packed with heavy scents. Flower petals and willow catkin pollen hovered above the streambed: word had it that among the Old Believers it was Easter. With spring two new internees came to Dobrin.
When, dizzy from the bright sunshine and the pollen, I stepped into the dimly lit office and there saw Cornelia Illarion’s name on a Red Cross file folder, I thought I was imagining things. Yet there was her pen name too, its letters finely hatched, all this on the Red Cross-emblazoned folder — lifting its cover revealed that the individual concerned had been sent here from the Colonia Sinistra sanatorium.
I’d always been a levelheaded, disciplined fellow, but uneasiness suddenly beset me. And, though this wasn’t at all the custom in Dobrin, I started to gently pump Colonel Titus Tomoioaga for information. What did he know? How did this woman wind up here? Who was she?
“Oh, she’s no one,” grumbled the colonel a bit drowsily. “We got her from the Yellows. They’re the ones who sent her here, out of the kindness of their hearts. But if you’re actually interested in her, well then, you’ll get to know her in just a moment when you record her data.”
So that’s how things stood. Colonia Sinistra was a famous sanatorium. Even people who’d never been there knew its buildings were painted yellow and glowed at night. Among ourselves we referred to the institution’s administrators and attendants as “the Yellows.”
“And what’s the plan? Do you know where you’re placing her?”
“More or less. Colonel Coca Mavrodin-Mahmudia wants her sent to the bears right away. True, she’s not in the best shape, she babbles away in all sorts of languages like a madwoman, but Doc Oleinek will manage somehow.”
So, Coca Mavrodin was sending Connie Illafeld to the bear reserve.
It must have been clear as day on my face that I didn’t receive this news exactly with indifference. “This will all be for the best, you’ll see,” Colonel Titus Tomoioaga added reassuringly: “Doc speaks all languages, so he’ll no doubt be able to communicate with her.”
Before being taken into treatment, Connie Illafeld had lived in an alpine village, her house at the upper end of Punte Sinistra, near the watershed, beside the train station. It wasn’t a genuine station, though, just a stopping place, a sidetrack next to the rail line, where the trains ascending the mountain from either side would rest, take on water, and wait out each other’s scheduled arrivals. Just up the slope, the tracks disappeared into a tunnel, which let out purple puffs of thick smoke for hours after a train passed through; the north side of Connie Illafeld’s house had seen its share of soot over the years.
Connie Illafeld, the pen name of this last member of the Illarion family, lived as a recluse and made her living by painting everyday scenes from antiquity on small, pocket-size plates of glass; she worked on commission for Jews from Chernivtsi and Lviv, though how she managed to get them across the border to the Ukraine was a mystery. She was at least forty, her eyes were green, her skin was white, and her hair was black.
Forest rangers, road workers, and professional hunters passing through sometimes hit on her, of course, but by all appearances she was saving herself for someone. The tunnel watchman, who never slept, claimed that a foreign traveler was wooing her — a fellow from Galicia who supposedly swam across the Tisza River every night and who sometimes paid her a secret visit, too. But that was only a sleepless watchman’s story: everyone knew that an impenetrable barbed-wire border fence stretched along the riverbank. Regardless, even if Connie Illafeld had had a secret someone, she sent him packing that spring,when her true love appeared on the scene: Béla Bundasian, my adopted son.
One night the intercity slow train pulled into the Punte Sinistra station, and Béla Bundasian got off without his bag for a quick drink from a spring bubbling near the tracks. As he leaned over to quench his thirst, his shirt slipped up his back and his jacket collar fell over his neck, covering his ears, and so he didn’t hear the little trembling of the stones under the railroad ties as the train went on without him. Since the tracks descended in both directions from the Punte station, the engineers had only to release the brakes to get a train rolling on its own. That day, for some reason, the intercity train did not wait for its counterpart coming from the other direction to arrive, and so when my adopted son straightened up to wipe the water from his lips, he had just a second to notice the last car vanish into the tunnel.
Only one intercity train plied this route daily, and if such an inadvertently abandoned passenger wanted to stick to his plans, he had no choice but to wait until the next evening.
It was spring — Palm Sunday or something along those lines. The air was rich with heady fragrances, and even after sunset dizzying bird warbles streamed from the black forests of looming spruce and fir. Busily cleaning the window, Connie Illafeld was kneeling on the sill in a rolled-up skirt, her white arm lit up in the dusk. No doubt even the sound of the wet paper slipping across the glass might have been inviting, and Béla Bundasian must have planted himself by the front gate like someone come to serve notice.
Did Connie Illafeld sense which way the wind was blowing? No doubt she did. Her hand slowed on the window, and one could see through her sweet slightly parted lips her sharp white teeth as well as the unbridled bliss of her glowing green eyes — all of this was directed at my adopted son. Being half Armenian, Béla Bundasian was parchment-hued, the whites of his eyes were a tad oily, and his eyebrows were already quite bushy, and so at first glance he might well have met with the approval of just about any woman. Well aware of this, he wasted no time, playing up the role as the hapless, left-behind traveler. He’d been on his way to the paper mill in the city of Putna to get sheet music paper, when he’d had the bad luck — or was it now? — to get off the train for a drink of water. That this was indeed what had happened, Connie Illafeld could see for herself, so she invited him in to have some rest. If by chance he was still thirsty, she said, she had a bucket full of water, so he could drink to his heart’s content.
Seeing that the floor of the house was covered by a soft, thick woolen blanket, Béla Bundasian tactfully left his shoes on the threshold. So he was in his socks when he happened to step on Connie Illafeld’s bare feet. And since that felt good, he left his feet right there. The heady smell of pasta emanated from the walls, from the handcrafted rustic furniture, from the handwoven fabrics. Connie Illafeld smelled of pasta, too — her downy underarms and her pearly thighs — and even though she was old enough to have been Béla Bundasian’s mother, this scent of unbridled desire welled up out of her as if from a loaf of bread rising in the oven. In a matter of minutes they were pawing each other like mad.