Someone was in fact watching him. Andrei had spent the previous night sitting up beside a dead bear warden — though he’d been officially relieved of his job as corpse watchman, he was often called upon to help out — and in the morning, when Colonel Titus Tomoioaga began his shift, the two of them had shared a little bottle of watered-down denatured alcohol. The colonel let Andrei in on the fact that a curfew was now in effect in Sinistra, and that maybe one would be announced here, in Dobrin City, as well. During the night someone had toppled the statue of Géza Kökény, so everyone would do well to stay home. Ever since the Sinistra puppeteers had held a dress rehearsal on the streets and the mountain infantry had opened fire on them, patrols were roaming the village streets as well. Wherever you looked, long-necked young men, the gray ganders, were peering over fences into yards. Coal-scratched graffiti loomed on front gates and plank fences, slogans like “WE'RE WITH YOU!” or “THE LEAGUE IS WAITING FOR YOU TOO.” With a heated iron bar, someone had burned into a wood fence: “PIGS.”
It was toward the end of March, and the air was laden with disquieting scents; catkin pollen and flies were flitting about. At the bottom of the valley, the stream raged from all the snowmelt. Andrei had been on foot, halfway to the pass on the winding mountain road, when the afternoon bus passed by coming from the opposite direction, from the Kolinda forest. All its windows were smashed in, and its passengers were not mountain infantrymen, but gray-skinned men in miner’s helmets. A heavy, suffocating smell had lingered in their wake.
He was sipping at his first drink of the day in the road worker’s cabin when the stranger flashed before him at the far end of the clearing against the backdrop of the distant patches of snow. Before long his miner’s helmet glimmered near the road as the man planted himself at the foot of the iron post. He kept turning his head this way and that, but mostly toward that corner of the clearing beyond which, behind a cluster of spruces and firs, smoke was pouring from the chimney of Severin Spiridon’s cabin. Then he refocused his attention on a stray dog crossing a nearby clearing — and once again he looked suspiciously at the road worker’s cabin, behind the window of which Andrei, the road worker, was watching him. Every time the stranger looked up, his hard vinyl jacket crackled over his frame.
Time passed — the hopeless silence of twilight enveloped the clearings along with purple mists — and finally the stranger had had enough of waiting. He stood up beside the iron post and headed up the slightly ascending trail toward the road worker’s cabin. His helmet shimmered before him, reflecting sunlight that kept disappearing and then reappearing from behind a passing cloud. He went up the steps, and was just in the process of casting a shadow over his face with his palm, so as to peer through the window, when Andrei opened the door.
He looked exactly as he had in the binoculars: skin shiny and gray, unshaven but not bristly; he was the sort of fellow with just a sparse, hesitating film of stubble over his chin. His smell was staggering, as suffocating as a rural train-station waiting room — liquor, flea powder, and the kerosene used to mop the floors.
“What do you know about the bus?” he inquired quietly. “I mean, why doesn’t it come?”
“It’s already passed by,” said the road worker.
“And the next one?”
“Only tomorrow afternoon.”
Brushing against Andrei’s chest, the stranger now stepped over the threshold and proceeded to walk once around the table in the middle of the cabin. He himself then closed the front door and turned the key in the lock from the inside. Letting it slip off the end of his hiking stick, his suitcase plopped to the floor with a heavy thud, as if packed full of rocks.
“Then I’m sleeping here,” he said, unfastening his hard, cracked vinyl jacket; it crackled as he sat down at the table. Meanwhile his odor, like oil on water, spread through the cabin. As the jacket opened in front of his belly, it was apparent that his trousers were held up not by a belt but by a thick wire, which had a big loop where a buckle would have been, and lodged within that loop was a sharp-edged rock. He pulled a bottle from his inside jacket pocket.
“Want some?” he asked, glancing curtly at the road worker as he uncorked the bottle.
“Maybe later,” said Andrei, declining the offer, pushing a mug over the table to the stranger.
But the other man drank straight from the bottle, sending bubbles racing the moment it touched his lips. After the first couple of gulps he removed his vinyl jacket and his helmet, placing them both on the table. His shiny gray scalp was matted with thin, sweaty strands of hair.
“Lie down for a rest now,” said Andrei. “You can’t stay here for long. I don’t spend my nights alone, but with a woman.”
“I said I’m staying here.”
Andrei stuffed the stove with sawdust, spruce cones, and hard juniper roots, then lit a fire. He then went out to the verandah to bring in an armful of damp logs to dry out inside. By the time he returned, the stranger had moved from the table to the edge of the plank bed.
“Really no need to make a fire on account of me. My dad was an ice seller. We used to go out to the Kolinda forest to saw blocks of ice in the ice caves. The old man used to wrap them up in hay and carry them on his own back to the market for the rich people. Our family doesn’t get chilled easily.”
“This is the first time I’ve heard of the Kolinda ice caves.”
“You’ll never hear about them again, either. From what I hear, all sorts of people started to use them as hiding places, so they sealed them shut. With cement.”
He stretched out his legs under the table and rolled up the sleeves of his grass-green sweater and the shirt underneath. His arms, laced with blue veins, were hairless and gray. Above a thin sinewy neck was a blunt chin. His eyes were oily, like elderberries.
“Are your papers in order?” asked the road worker.
“Mine?”
“This is a border zone, in case you didn’t know, They keep government bears nearby.”
“My papers? Yes indeed, mark my words. In perfect order. Mine, of all papers! You can rest assured about them —”
“Okay, well then get yourself some rest. If you leave in the middle of the night, by morning you can catch the early morning train in Dobrin.”
“That’s what I figured, too.”
The road worker took the binoculars off the door knob and then scanned the snowmelt-soaked meadows visible from the window. Night was coming, and dusk, which had already consumed the forest, now began enveloping everything at its edge. This was when Elvira Spiridon usually left home.
“Can I take a look, too?”
“Sure, go ahead. But you won’t see anything worth looking at.”
“I just want to see what you do.”
“Here, take a peek. And tell me, if it’s not a big secret: which way are you headed?”
After scanning the meadows, the stranger raised the binoculars higher to take in the ranges, and finally to the single cloud, which was glimmering like mother-of-pearl above the ridge in the light of the moon.
“Which way? I’ve got to be in Sinistra by morning, at the market. Something will be happening there.”
“I’ve never seen you around here, you know.”
“You’ve never seen me? No, you’ve never seen me. I’m not, you see — to use your words — from around here. My father and I would dare to go only as far as the Kolinda forest to saw blocks of ice. Earlier, as you know, that’s where the border was. I don’t know my way around here. I wanted to take a shortcut but lost my way. And meanwhile that damn bus went by.”