“I can tell you’re worried,” said Colonel Titus Tomoioaga. “You’re worried about something, but let me reassure you it’s not necessary — this individual will be in good hands.”
“To hell with it all,” I spat out, recklessly again.
“Hey, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing, I swear.”
When Connie Illarion returned to the office at Doc Oleinek’s side, she wore a shiny metal nameplate on her hairy neck, one that hung from a brand new chain whose end had been welded shut so no one could ever remove it again. There was no denying that the name — once that of a seductress — was now worn by an animal.
Before they left, Doc Oleinek — my old drinking buddy — devoted a couple of minutes to me as well. It was from him that I learned that same morning, my adopted son, Béla Bundasian, had been given a day off even though it wasn’t due him. They had come down from the conservation area on the handcar, and now he was drinking up at the station, where denatured alcohol had been handed out to the forest rangers.
“Come along with us if you want to meet up with him,” said Doc Oleinek. “You can have a shot or two together. Today is Easter among the Old Believers.”
“No,” I replied. “I’m not in the mood today.”
“Maybe you’ve got a message for him.”
“No, at the moment I’ve got nothing to say.”
Doc Oleinek now headed down the hallway, the hairy Connie Illafeld following along behind like a lapdog, the sheet-metal nameplate swinging from her neck. Once they were out in the yard, in the sun, it began to glitter against the walls, the trees. It was brand new. From now on, anyone who saw her would know just who they were dealing with. They were on their way to the narrow-gauge railway station, where my adopted son, Béla Bundasian, was waiting by the handcar.
Before long I got booted from my corpse-watching job. And on the morning I had to hand over my position to my successor, Toni Tescovina, as I was about to show him the tricks of the trade, I found the body of Connie Illafeld, alias Cornelia Illarion, spread out on the gray stone table. The blood on her neck — where someone had ripped off her dog tag with no little violence — was dark blue, like clotted blueberry juice or, like the blood of the Illarions, Ruthenian boyars. By the time she wound up in there, her clothes, stiff from grime, had been cut right off her in the morgue, and when I chanced to touch her, she felt colder than the stone table she was on. Having lost its shine, like some sort of blackened hoarfrost, her hair peeled off her with a hushed rustle until finally, once that operation was complete, there she lay, buck naked, before us.
“Where do you wash up?” asked Toni Tescovina on the way out. “I’m on my way to the square. Géza Kökény mentioned on the way over that tomorrow is Easter. And I’m all covered with hair.”
“Damn it,” I grumbled. “I’ve had a bit too much of Easter. And as for the hair, you’d better get used to it. It’s a hairy job.”
10. GÉZA HUTIRA'S EAR
That year the coldest day came at the start of spring. The night before, when the fire died down and the valley’s cold slithered down the chimney into the cabin, Géza Hutira could no longer sleep. Instead he tried to keep Bebe Tescovina warm. For a while he held her tight in his lap, and then after covering her with every old rag at hand, he arranged her, lying down on himself, and covering her with his hair and even his beard. Although he did doze off for a bit, he could hear even while half-asleep a scraping and squeaking of snow from the valley: someone was approaching along the frozen, silent streambed. Before long the stamping of feet had reached the threshold, and when Géza Hutira shone his flashlight upon the hoarfrost-coated figure — with gleaming tusks of ice hanging from its his nostrils which were issuing comet-like puffs of steam — he recognized him as Nikifor Tescovina, and Géza thought he’d come to take his child home.
But the commissary manager didn’t so much as glance at his daughter. He was looking for Géza Hutira.
“Get something warm on, now,” said Nikifor Tescovina. “And make sure you’ve got some tobacco, something to chew on. We’re headed off for a couple of days.”
“I don’t leave home much in the middle of the night,” grumbled Géza Hutira. “And it’s never happened that I haven’t read my instruments on time. Who do you think will register the measurements for me?”
“Oh, come on — you know full well that no one gives a shit about those observations of yours.”
“If I must go, then which way, where?”
“They’ll tell us.”
When on the threshold they’d tied on their snowshoes only the snow still shone. The meteorologist’s house was above the tree line, so it was in the open that the two men now trudged their way up the mountainside and crossed a narrow plateau before descending down the other side into the Baba Rotunda Pass. Waiting for them in the road worker Andrei’s cabin was Colonel Coca Mavrodin of the Dobrin mountain infantry.
“We’re off to visit the sick,” she announced when her two men arrived: “We’ll look around the Kolinda forest a bit, where the retired forest rangers live. Word has it that they’re not in great shape. Indeed, health-wise I can only report the worst. Let’s go see what we can do for them.”
Stretched out at the foot of the Kolinda forest was a tiny village of towering snowdrifts, shaped by the wind from the slopes, and looming between its scattered sun-faded and fog-washed houses. Once they arrived there, the jeep skidding and floundering along, finally came to a halt in front of a small wooden church at the end of the road. Lolling about on the verandah of the parsonage, leaning on his elbow, was a pale young man, the parish priest: Father Pantelimon. Out in the yard, blanketed in fog, were three black horses.
Rather than wearing his usual vestment, the priest was dressed like anyone else around here or, more precisely, like the mountain infantrymen: a black vinyl jacket over a roughly knit grass-green wool sweater; threadbare military trousers; and sandals on his bare feet. Not even in the kitchen did the snow melt off his naked toes.
“You’ve got to wait a bit,” he said, “the fellow hasn’t gotten here yet. Maybe he got held up along the way.” He then unfolded the newspaper-wrapped package in his hands to reveal a few half-frozen boiled potatoes, a couple of onions, and some withered apples: “Something to keep your bellies going — who knows when you’ll be done.”
Walking down the well-trodden purple snowy path, past thick steam swirling above the horses, he now crossed the yard toward the open sacristy. From inside came a sound reminiscent of a distant reed organ: the creaking of a door. But the wind swept through the yard, seizing every trace of that sound.
It was the coldest day of the year, but the door to the kitchen stayed wide open all the same, with only the rainbow-hued curtain of steam fluttering before it. From the cracked walls came the cold smell of mice along with the sound of plaster being scratched at and crumbling. The table was covered by a sticky tablecloth of waxed linen, with a nine-men’s morris board drawn in indelible pencil in the middle. Reaching in a pocket of her greatcoat, Colonel Coca Mavrodin produced the black and white pieces and lined them up on the edge of the table.
Returning from the sacristy, Father Pantelimon brought saddles — carrying two on his shoulders and dragging one behind him in the snow. Throwing them over the horses’ backs, he tightened the girth under their bellies. The bird shit that dotted the shoulder of his vinyl jacket sparkled like a colonel’s stars. As for the two colonels themselves, for the time being they just sat in silence at the kitchen table playing nine-men’s morris. The door was wide open all the while. Out in the bitter cold, the horses stamped their hooves while sparrows and crows occasionally landed on their fresh, steaming hot manure.