Deep inside the village yards, through the latticework of denuded plum tree branches, light still issued from her window. I tore a button off my jacket and, after stealthily climbing over a few fences, before long I was there, tapping on Aranka Westin’s window.
She reached out for the jacket. Stitching while I stood there at her window, she asked, “What the hell was that red stranger doing up by you?’
“You mean the Rooster? Oh, I don’t even remember — nothing, I think. He only asked if he could use the outhouse.”
“Now, now, Andrei, don’t you get mixed up in anything. Everyone knows he left a plastic bag with you. I hear there’s a silver fish inside, a really nice one.”
This irritated me so much that, on getting home, I took the fish, which was still busily writhing in the barrel, to the outhouse at the far end of the yard and dropped it in the hole. I wanted to keep my mouth shut about the whole thing; I had no desire to wind up in some affair that would get me banished from the Sinistra Zone — where I’d gone years earlier after getting wind of the fact that my adopted son, Béla Bundasian, had been exiled to a conservation area there. I’d come here hoping to pick up his trail. It would have been a shame to now let down my guard and ruin everything I’d managed to attain by now; after all, I’d gotten myself appointed Harvest Coordinator.
But something was up. At dawn the following day the Red Rooster came back again. Unkempt, bathed in sweat, his hair matted, and mud-stained up to his thighs, he made his way hastily across the weedy meadow. His hair didn’t even look fiery now; but his skin, his ears burned with terror and rage, and his nostrils flared.
“For god’s sake, Andrei,” he hissed, “Why didn’t you tell me Colonel Borcan was dead?”
Why, indeed. I shrugged. Because.
He wanted the fish, and as soon as he realized that I hadn’t eaten the thing, and knew where it could now be found, he ran off to scoop it out. He then scrubbed it clean in the stream, wrapped it in a burdock leaf, tucked it into his dappled calfskin satchel, and left, disappearing forever from Dobrin.
A new forest commissioner, Izolda Mavrodin, arrived to replace Colonel Borcan as commander of the mountain infantry. My life changed. And one blustery spring day I, too, disappeared from there.
Many years later, a Greek passport in my pocket, I rolled about the roads of the Sinistra Zone in my sparkling new, four-wheel drive, metallic green Suzuki jeep and spent a day, just a day, in Dobrin. I arrived via the Baba Rotunda Pass, figuring I’d take a quick look for my one-time lover, Elvira Spiridon, amid those meadows of thyme; or, more precisely, on the upper floor of the cottage she shared with her husband, Severin Spiridon, in a roadside clearing.
But where their house had once stood lay just a heap of dark blue cinders drenched with rain and ice. Tender young blades of grass, along with fresh sprouts of nettle and saffron, encircled the spot: almost certainly their grave.
It was late afternoon. The eastern horizon was ablaze with clouds of woe: a heavy, orange-red cumulus bank. Lately, such distant passing clouds — creamy, puffy, resplendent towers that faded into the purple veils of night — had been conjuring up the past and making me a bit sad. I left the jeep by the side of the road and, crestfallen, walked along the edge of the forest to a few familiar spots.
Winding through the clearing before me were two tight parallel bands of depressed soil that sparkled in the reflection of the clouds — ice or, it seemed, maybe glass. All at once it hit me that these were my own old ski tracks. Left over from the final winter I’d spent here in the pass, they snaked their way through the incandescent spring grass and, finally, into the darkness of the forest. Anyone who has skied through woods knows how the snow — if you pass over your own tracks several times — gets packed down underneath, sometimes melting just so, then freezing over and over again. Even once such a double set of tracks melts, an impression is left behind, a silky, silvery sheen that fades entirely only by early summer. Sometimes it never does.
•
That last winter I skied every day along the meandering subterranean streams of the Kolinda forest, which break the surface here and there. A few unauthorized recluses had been hiding there from the mountain infantry in dank, underground lairs and caves; no promises or requests could get them to emerge. At first the authorities had me set traps for them; then, in the end, we simply cemented up the cave openings. That’s why I skied about this area with sacks of cement on my back, always on the same tracks, for weeks on end. Cement is heavy, mind you, and under my weight the snow had crystallized, like diamonds.
Lost in reveries of my bygone life, I then noticed two parched red wigs hanging from a spruce tree, swinging back and forth in the wind. Skewering them with a twig, I examined the wigs up close: one was a head of hair; the other, judging by its form, was a beard. In a shaded corner of the clearing lay a young man, stretched out on the slimy fallen leaves of spring, snoring loudly in his dreams as flies buzzed all around him. On his side, a mottled calfskin satchel; beside him, an empty bottle, tipped over. He resembled someone I knew. I hurried away.
Now a foreigner, I took a room in the Dobrin Inn after registering my arrival with the authorities. But once darkness fell — and after just a couple of drinks, of course — I sneaked out and spent the night with my onetime girlfriend, Aranka Westin. She was the one who then informed me that Colonel Borcan had been sentenced posthumously to death — it turned out that he and a Polish colonel had been cooking up some scheme, and the Pole had been in the habit of smuggling messages, and sometimes real dollars, across the border to Colonel Borcan in the bellies of fish.
But I didn’t want to hear a thing about that affair.
After all, as an essential part of the story, it should also be noted that we didn’t let all the time that had passed us by keep us from a little reunion that night, under the cover of darkness. There I was lolling beside her, feeling my pulse, and just beginning to muse about staying near Aranka Westin for at least one more day, when that clarinet-like, caterwauled shrieking from high above us broke the spelclass="underline" wild geese were announcing their presence in the clouds over Dobrin. As could be heard unmistakably through the silence of the night, they were coming from the south, from the Kolinda forest, and turning overhead suddenly north, toward Pop Ivan Mountain. I felt their calls to the tips of my little fingers. There’s not a sound more disquieting than theirs.
So when the mountain infantry came to get me around dawn — stating that since I’d secretly left my designated lodgings, they must revoke my residence permit and ban me forever from the Sinistra Zone — I’d long been wide awake, waiting for morning, waiting to finally be done with the place.
2. ANDREI'S DOG TAG
One spring day I arrived by bicycle at the Baba Rotunda Pass, and it was from there that I first glimpsed the imposing peaks at the foot of which I would later all but forget my life up to that point. In the valley below, the Sinistra river basin reposed before me under the long, sharp shadows and orange light of the afternoon. Willow groves and sparse rows of village houses loomed in the distance along the river bends; shingled roofs glistened on distant, sunbathed slopes; and further yet, the icy peaks of Pop Ivan Mountain and Dobrin shimmered above their thick black collars of spruce and fir. Behind them: the icy green, foreign, northern sky.
There were no more roads from there. The conservation area where I planned to lie low was surely somewhere near, under those steep mountainsides. And deep in that wilderness lived Béla Bundasian, my adopted son. For years I’d been searching for him.