“You’re dreaming, Aron Wargotzki — what’s this milk obsession of yours? Don’t you realize you can’t even swallow your own saliva? Your mouth is full of hard, dry foam. You’re on your last leg.”
“Me?”
“Yes — you’re sick, I’m afraid. Very sick.”
“Me? What are you saying? There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just that I’ve eaten all this dirt and now I’d like a little milk to balance things out.”
“Don’t kid around, Aron Wargotzki. I know exactly what’s wrong with you. That’s why I’m asking you to sit tight: it’s only for your own good.”
“I’ve already said that I can’t even move an inch, so where am I supposed to go? The flesh burned off my right thigh — or, if you’re looking at me, the left one — and what’s missing is exactly that damn bit that used to move the leg.”
“Well, just sit tight, and get through the next couple of days without milk.”
While waiting for the traps to be finished, I spent each day in the clearing from early morning to sunset. The ski tracks led me straight to Aron Wargotzki. Sometimes I had to shout above the murmuring stream, calling out until he was finally willing to acknowledge that he had a visitor; and other times he was waiting right below the opening, panting with interest like a dog.
“Tell me,” he pleaded. “What did my friend Géza say about me being here?”
“Nothing in particular, Aron Wargotzki. No one says anything about it. You know that’s how things are.”
“Well, when you bring the milk, be careful not to spill it and I’ll tell you where to pour it in. I don’t even care if you bring it in your mouth and spit it in some hole. As long as it’s milk.”
“Don’t tell me you think I’d get that close — you really can’t expect me to want to catch your flu.”
“I already told you there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just my leg that’s bad. . and maybe I ate a bit too much dirt. It would be so good to rinse out my mouth with a little milk.”
“Don’t eat dirt — you’ll get even sicker”
“And there’s another thing that’s bothering me. I’m sincerely sorry about Géza Hutira’s ear. I don’t even know how that happened, but I was so angry about that rum tasting nasty that I guess I shoved his iron Pope right back out. When I looked out, I could see at once that it broke the poor fellow’s ear off, that it was hanging on only by a little flap of skin. I’d like to apologize to him. An ear isn’t a small thing to lose.”
“All right, I’ll let him know you’re sorry. He’s a gracious, bighearted man. He’ll forgive you, Aron Wargotzki.”
•
At the end of the day the mountain infantry’s van was supposed to transport the traps to the road worker’s cabin. Elvira Spiridon’s hair, as well as the edge of her skirt, were fluttering in the twilight breeze. Beyond her, beside the fence and covered by a tarp to keep them from getting soaked in the event of a stray shower, were at least fifty bags of cement piled up in rows. Coca Mavrodin-Mahmudia had, it seemed, decided on another course of action.
“If you carry this out, sir,” said Elvira Spiridon, leaning so close to me that I could smell the menace on her breath, “I would like it if we didn’t meet while you do.”
“All right — whatever you say. You’re free — go, live your life.”
In the week it took me to carry all those bags of cement on my back to the Kolinda forest, with several round trips each day, spring began. Pale grass followed by crocuses emerged on sun-soaked mounds of earth from under the blanket of melting snow, and the marble-white ski tracks etched two lines over the expanding patches of green. Misty blue thyme smoke hovered in the sunlight above the openings through which that subterranean stream breathed.
Once all the bags of cement were positioned by the openings, I threw a blade of grass on the water to see which way it flowed. I took out my freshly polished knife, and as I rolled up the sleeves of my jacket, the sunshine reflecting off the blade bounced into one dark lair after another: Aron Wargotzki addressed me for the last time.
“You think I don’t know what you’re preparing? For that reason alone I’d like to know your name — for god’s sake tell me who you are.”
“Aron Wargotzki, I don’t think this is the moment for introductions, but the fact is I’ve been living in the Zone under the pseudonym Andrei Bodor. Please forgive the person who goes by such a name for this whole affair.”
Coca Mavrodin-Mahmudia had not quite calculated right in ordering the bags of cement. Half were still untouched when the water turned gray, and slowed to a halt in the openings: the bubbles vanished from its surface; and, in a sign that as the solution was starting to bind and plugging up, all at once the stream sprung forth in several new spots on the clearing.
Standing where I’d left my skis at the clearning’s edge was Elvira Spiridon in her new spring dress, fluttering in the wind; with her freshly washed, drying spring hair, and her enormous copper earrings glaring in the sun.
“So you’re back, after all,” I said, gasping for breath as I got near her.
“Today I began to miss you, sir.”
There was no denying it: I’d missed her, too. As usual, I stood her on the skis in front of me, and as the forest began flitting by on both sides of us, gliding away backward ever faster toward the retired forest rangers’ clearing, with my nails and my teeth I tore that new spring dress right off her, and, using my knife, I cut away at my cement-armored trousers until, finally, once again I felt her velvety behind on my lap.
11. SEVERIN SPIRIDON'S SURPRISE
The ramshackle little bus that made its way once a day over three mountain ranges between Sinistra and the Kolinda forest mainly transported the mountain infantrymen who patrolled the area, but also a few civilians who, with permits in their pockets, worked in one of the small high-altitude settlements. And when there were passengers, the bus stopped at the Baba Rotunda Pass, too, which was marked by a rust-eaten, paint-splotched iron post that would sway back and forth in the wind, its sign covered with drops of water left behind by a cloud tumbling through the pass and brushing the ground. Its creaking could be heard even through the closed window of the cabin where road worker Andrei Bodor lived.
One afternoon, well after the bus had passed by on its way from the Kolinda forest to Sinistra, a man came ambling across those snow-patched, crocus-dotted mountain meadows. His odd, sidling gait was reminiscent of a clumsy dog as he kept glancing left and right to avoid the black glitter of the snowmelt brooklets running haphazardly about. On reaching the road he paused, hesitating: he just leaned out over the paved surface, as if worried that its current would sweep him in one direction or the other. For a while he stood about, looking puzzled until he turned his head toward the creaking bus-stop sign. He then crouched down on the ground, planting himself at its foot: a wayfarer waiting for the bus.
He wore a black vinyl jacket, trousers glossy with grime, and a miner’s helmet with a black visor. Hanging over his shoulder from a crooked walking stick was a black suitcase stuffed round. His skin was gray, his face shiny and hairless, with only a bit of sparse stubble around his chin. Oily eyes sparkled from shadowy, purple sockets.
The road worker, Andrei, kept a lookout from behind the window of his cabin, taking stock of the stranger through the 8 x 30 binoculars he’d gotten from Coca Mavrodin and that always hung on the doorknob. Through its lens the gray stranger was now wriggling about on the ground.
Occasionally he rose to stand beside the iron post, cupping his ears and peering out at the horizon suspiciously this way and that, and sometimes nervously jerking his head toward a passing flock of crows. He would also stare angrily at the late afternoon sun, whose languid yellow rays broke through narrow, leech-shaped clouds. From the corner of his eye he watched the road worker’s cabin, too, as if aware that someone might be watching him from behind the window.