As soon as they finished eating, Nikifor Tescovina got to work cutting spruce boughs and birch twigs while Géza Hutira broke off thick hazelnut branches. At first they poked around the whole site like treasure hunters, then, using clumps of twigs tied together with cords, they swept the ash from among the beams and the other remains.
“This is what they call black-market work,” grumbled Géza Hutira. “Too bad I don’t carry a mirror around — if only you could see how you look.”
“Now what’s your problem? My daughter seems to have had a really bad influence on you. Keep your clever little opinions to yourself.”
With no ear on the side nearest Nikifor Tescovina, Géza Hutira barely heard what the other man had said. Twisting his head left and right, he looked about in confusion, probing the cinders.
In the end glazed thick with soot they found twelve sheet-metal dog tags dangling from chains. Coca Mavrodin then finally let them urinate. The warm, salty solution, she explained, would dissolve the soot, and then they’d only have to rub each tag in the crusty snow to read the engraved data.
Under the cinders and soot they’d found the dog tags of four men — which is to say, three dog tags each. But five retired forest rangers had lived in their forest retreat. Missing were the dog tags of one Aron Wargotzki.
•
Géza Hutira’s lost ear meant that I was the one who later had to find Aron Wargotzki. On their way home, the three travelers once again took a break in my road worker’s cabin, and Nikifor Tescovina and Géza Hutira were cleaned up: Elvira Spiridon soaked them with her watering can, while they, like tired horses in the rain, drooped their heads on each other’s shoulders. Coca Mavrodin meanwhile called me out to the verandah for a consultation.
“Heaven took his ear, and I need a man with good hearing. And aside from him, no one knows the woods like you.”
“That’s not my territory,” I said with hesitation in my voice. “You know perfectly well, Miss, that I’ve never set foot in the Kolinda forest in my life.”
“But I’m now asking you, Andrei. Just this much, nothing more. Then I’ll turn a blind eye to your business. Find this contagious individual for me — his name is Aron Wargotzki, remeber that — and then I promise you that you can get out of here along with your adopted son.”
From that day on, every morning I stood at the threshold, clamped on my cross-country skis, and then picked up my sweetheart, Elvira Spiridon, by putting one arm around her, and slid my way toward the Kolinda forest, dropping her off at home en route. Her husband, Severin Spiridon, was invariably waiting at the front gate. It was he who advised me to be especially alert on the tenth day; for that long a man can somehow scrape by in a dank lair of spruce cones sucking on saltless icicles, but then that’s it: after ten days he’ll crawl off on all fours to give himself up. And along the way his palms and knees will leave tracks in the snow.
For her part, this is what Coca Mavrodin said by way of farewelclass="underline"
“You know what to really keep an eye out for, Andrei? Shit.”
She wasn’t talking nonsense. As all woodsmen know, even if a nighttime snowfall covers the shit Coca Mavrodin was thinking of, by morning, once the warmth of the sun soaks through its white blanket, its lying mask melts off and once again it gleams resplendently brown.
But Aron Wargotzki left behind no tracks — not of his feet, his palms, or his knees. Nor did I happen upon his droppings anywhere in the Kolinda forest. In the end, it wasn’t ordinary human frailty that gave him away but instead his mindless desire for a life of luxury.
One afternoon before heading home — I was perhaps already into my second week of searching for him — I was taking a rest in the clearing once inhabited by the retired forest rangers, a clearing the snow had once again covered. While listening to the languid repetitive murmur of the subterranean stream as it rambled above the ground, the snow, the ice, and then back underneath, the unmistakable scent of scorched thyme hit my nose. This is what Géza Kökény smoked at the foot of his own bust, and this is what the bear wardens and sometimes the colonels themselves imbibed, too, when their tobacco ran out. On more than one occasion I’d tried it myself.
Just then the wind ceased for a few minutes, and blue tongues of smoke hovered in the blazing rays of sun shooting through the spruces and firs. In front of me in the snow, the elusive stream’s path was marked by a shadowy depression, which ended in a gaping black cavity in the earth. It was from there, from time to time, that thin smoke went curling up into the air. While I’d been roaming the snowy woods in search of shit — following Coca Mavrodin’s advice — Aron Wargotzki had been sitting there underground, smoking his Pope.
“Aron Wargotzki,” I called out. “Give me your solemn promise not to move — I ask you sincerely to stay calm. You can’t fly, I hope, so wherever you might go, your tracks would give you away.”
Aron Wargotzki kept smoking for quite a while yet. He replied only toward evening, when he’d determined that without a reply I would not budge an inch.
“All right, I promise. But only because I can’t move — half my leg’s burned off.”
“Well, sit still, take care of yourself. And don’t feel lonely, I’ll be back soon — tomorrow morning at the latest.”
I’d clamped my skis back on and had just about slid back across the clearing when his voice reached me yet again, resounding through the forest, booming along the deep and winding course of the subterranean stream.
“Géza, my friend, I want to ask you for a favor.”
“You’ve got me confused with someone else. That’s not me. But tell me what you want.”
“If you know Géza Hutira, send him here. I’ve got to talk to him.”
“I don’t think he has any time right now, but if I run into him, what should I say?”
“That Aron Wargotzki asks him to come here. It’s urgent — he should hurry up and bring along some warm milk.”
“Alright — if I bump into him, and if I don’t forget, I’ll tell him.”
“And who am I speaking to now?”
“Come on, Aron Wargotzki, you know full well I could say any old name to you — that’s really not important.”
My ski tracks had dug deeper into the snow each day, and so, concluding my business every evening, I set my skis in the grooves and slid right home to the pass, where Elvira Spiridon awaited me with a furrowed brow and gloomy eyes.
When I next appeared at the forest commissioner’s office Coca Mavrodin was noticeably happier to see me. She showed me a rat trap with a very deadly spring: she’d been storing it in her desk drawer just waiting for the day I’d arrive with some news. She’d have five or six of them made — huge ones, of course — to be placed them at those points where the stream went underground to greet Aron Wargotzki in the event that he got better and tried to take off.
But Aron Wargotzki kept his promise. He did not move. Day by day the snow remained untouched where the stream went underground. Only a slender little forest mold — hued creature scurried past now and then — perhaps the same one that had eaten Géza Hutira’s ear. Sometimes the scent of tart smoke wafted up out of the holes in the ground, and sometimes the odor of the spruce gum that had permeated this woodsman over the years.
“Listen, Aron Wargotzki,” I called out. “I’ve spoken to Géza Hutira. He’s a busy man — I’m afraid he just doesn’t have the time to come up here. You’ll have to settle for me. Tell me what’s the matter, maybe I can help.”
“Just talk him into coming by as soon as possible. I want to speak to him in private, that’s all. And in the meantime, until he has the time, he should give you a jug of warm milk to bring out here for me.”