“Hey, look,” said Nikifor Tescovina when they had almost finished eating. “This onion ring here, why, it looks just like an ear.”
“An ear? Stop kidding me.”
“Take a closer look.”
“Oh, it is an ear, a real ear, but how did it end up here?”
An entire ear lay among the cold potato skins and sliced onions and apples. A tad hairy, a tad bloody, clearly it had broken away — a fresh break — from somewhere or other not long before.
“If you don’t mind my saying so,” whispered Nikifor Tescovina, “you know, I think it is yours.”
Géza Hutira clutched his head where his winter cap should have held down his ears. He groped about, then held out his palms before his face. One hand was still dry; the other, sticky, smudged, slightly brown.
“Hmm. Damn it. I must have hit something. I don’t have a clue how this could have happened,” he whimpered, as if making excuses. “Maybe it was that iron Pope, when I pulled it back out. It did knock against me a bit.”
Coca Mavrodin was not asleep, after all. Sitting up straight in the steam wisps hovering about the horse’s head, she cleared her throat and called out:
“Are you two kidding around, or is that really our comrade’s ear? I’d like to take a look — let me see.”
Géza Hutira had curled his palm around the hole where his ear had been so as to hear exactly what Coca Mavrodin wanted. He seemed to brood over what he’d just heard, and then, once he’d in fact understood, he sadly shook his head.
“Too late. . ”
A four-legged little greenish-brown creature, the size of a squirrel or a weasel, was just then scampering away over the crusty snow with the ear in its mouth. Its companion waited at a distance, and soon the crackle of Géza Hutira’s cartilage could be heard as they crunched the ear between their teeth.
“I’ll come up with something,” said Coca Mavrodin much later on the way down from the Kolinda forest, “some sort of compensation. As far as I know, the Soviets are already making artificial ears. But if you’ll excuse me for saying so, you might have been a bit more careful.”
“No excuses necessary.”
As before, they rode Indian file in each other’s tracks, only this time they made a clearly visible groove on the left side of the road. The snow between the two trails remained untouched.
The stove was burning that night in Father Pantelimon’s kitchen, and roasting on top were potato slices, mushroom caps, and whole unpeeled apples. The two colonels once again played nine-men’s morris, though standing up this time, and with the door wide open. They kept playing, pushing the pieces across the tablecloth in silence, until the snowmobile once again buzzed in from beyond the snowdrifts. Now it pulled a sled loaded with rattling cans of gasoline and diesel oil. The driver might have been the same one who’d delivered the rum that morning, but it was impossible to telclass="underline" he had on a thick, glittery outfit; a copper helmet of the sort firemen wore; and boots that came right up to his knees. He didn’t even get off.
“Can I get all the way out there with these?” he shouted over. His voice was as otherworldly as that of Géza Kökény. Coca Mavrodin and the priest went out to the verandah.
“All the way,” replied Coca Mavrodin. “Just keep your eyes peeled. We left a groove of tracks on each side of the trail, so if you stick to the middle, following their shadows in the headlights, you’ll get there, no problem.”
•
“Now I’d ask the two of you,” Coca Mavrodin put in as she left in the morning once again on horseback with her men for the Kolinda forest, “not to piss along the way, no matter how much you have to go. Until I say now you can, hold it back. You’re men, after all. It’s not out of the question that we’ll need a bit of warm fluid.”
With his palm Géza Hutira formed a shell around the hole of his ear so as to hear what she was saying. Even so, Nikifor Tescovina had to explain what it was that Coca Mavrodin wanted.
They now proceeded between the two sets of hoofprints they’d made the previous day, on the snowmobile tracks, until they reached the point where only a narrow trail led the rest of the way to the clearing. There the horses came to a sudden halt, and no amount of goading could get them to continue. Only by getting off and pulling them by the reins could Coca Mavrodin and the two men drag the beasts to the final destination.
The place looked different than it had the day before. The snow was no longer white but gray, purple-blue, and in places completely black, and it was covered with hard blisters budding with purple lights and iron-gray flakes. And hovering in the frozen air was the smell of abandoned stoves and discarded flues. It was as if it had snowed ash all night long.
The boarded-up cabin where the retired forest rangers had once lived was gone. Undulating in the breeze, around a few obsolete, knotty black beams in the middle of the clearing, was a velvety mass of soot and ash. The snow after melting had frozen hard with ash flakes and glimmered everywhere like marble under the light of the passing clouds. A flock of birds, jackdaws, circled up high like a mass of trapped, swirling smoke from the conflagration. Scattered all about were discarded cans of gasoline and diesel oil.
After Coca Mavrodin wound a scarf around her neck up to her chin, she got back on her horse, and started to trot about on the cinders: the horses now got to sneezing from all the stirred-up soot. Suddenly spurring her horse, she began to trample through the ruins. All the many clamps, clasps, and nails that had fallen out of the beams and the retired forest rangers’ tools and sheet-metal pots now jingled under her horse’s hooves. Colonel Coca Mavrodin then rode to the edge of the clearing and there stopped, waiting for her two men to follow.
“Come along now,” she shouted, “There’s nothing to worry about — the germs are all roasted away.”
“What’s she saying?” asked Géza Hutira, trying to catch Nikifor Tescovina’s eye. But, sensing what he wanted, the other man looked away.
“Leave me out of this,” warned Nikifor Tescovina, after a pause. “I don’t have an opinion about any of it.”
“I just thought you might have noticed what you’ve gotten mixed up in.”
“What?! I don’t know what you’re talking about — we both work for Miss Coca, that’s all I know.”
Meanwhile, almost without realizing it, they too were trampling through the cinders at a slow trot and arriving at the far edge of the clearing. The horses kept snapping their feet up from the snow as if it were still hot.
“Let’s have a bite,” proposed Coca Mavrodin. “And today it’s not just any old lunch. I brought a nice big jar full of carp with onions and crushed barley. And then, once you’ve had your fill, I’d like you to find the dog tags. I want three for each: like you they wore one on their necks, but they also had one on their wrists and their ankles. I’d appreciate your finding every last one.”
Coca Mavrodin had carried the jar in her greatcoat pocket, but it wasn’t necessary to unscrew the lid, because along the way the already congealed liquid had frozen, bursting the glass. Picking away the shards and slivers, she slowly freed the frozen cylinder of crushed barley and little dark blue fins. Next she broke it into pieces with her fingernails so they could be picked handily from her palms.
Lying all about on the crusty snow were various dead birds, their feathers charred black — crows, jackdaws, and thrushes. The fire must have awoken them, and no doubt they’d roasted in the air, but perhaps the heat had kept them afloat for a time, and then when the clearing below them cooled they’d plopped to the ground, scattered about.