“What’s this supposed to be?”
“My husband got it from the mountain infantrymen. The curfew is taking effect tomorrow. All the ones who must stay home have to cut off their hair.”
“There was talk of hair-cutting back in the days of barber Vili Dunka. But then it didn’t happen for some reason.”
“This time we’re supposed to do it ourselves. In fact I wanted to tell you, sir: tomorrow night, when I show up at your bedside, my hair will be gone.”
The road worker kept dipping his mug into the pickle jar and taking gulps of the blackberry wine. Elvira Spiridon meanwhile slipped under the blanket, naked, leaving just enough room beside her for the man.
When not drinking, Andrei was busy stuffing roots into the wood stove and tossing in lots of spruce cones, which burned with a strong, white light. He then reached for the clipper and sat down in the chair beside the plank bed.
“I’ve never cut my own hair in my life,” he whispered. “On the way here, I never thought today would be the day.”
Putting one arm around Elvira Spiridon’s shoulder, he positioned the clipper on the middle of his forehead, and began snipping, going on over the top of his head and down to the nape of his neck, then back again. As he might have done with some freshly ironed silk ties, he placed the fallen locks in a row over the back of the chair. Once he’d finished, and when the woman’s bare head also shone, he dipped his mug into the pickle jar one more time.
But he took only a short break: no sooner had he emptied his mug than he folded back the blanket over Elvira Spiridon and placed the clipper on her belly, under her navel. With slow, tiny snips he proceeded downward, where a thick pelt of hair loomed darkly.
“They would have let us know, sir, if we also had to do it down there.”
“This is my first time trying this,” whispered the road worker, “so please, don’t move.”
She tensed up briefly, but as soon as the clippers grew warm against her skin, Elvira Spiridon relaxed, opening up so Andrei could access every single bit of her, every little mat of fur. Finally he took her in his lap, puckered his lips, and attentively blew his way over her body until not a strand of hair or fur was left.
“If I leave this place one day,” he whispered into her ear in the middle of the night, “maybe I’ll ask Severin Spiridon if he’ll let me take you. If I were to decide to take you along.”
“Give it a try, sir,” Elvira Spiridon whispered back. “My husband would no doubt let you have me.”
“I know I am talking about leaving this place — lately these thoughts are going through my head, but I hope you’ll kindly keep this to yourself.”
“Keep it to myself? Don’t ask me such a thing, sir.”
In the morning Elvira Spiridon tied a kerchief around her head, a kerchief she’d stuffed full of all the shorn locks of hair. The road worker meanwhile went about cutting fresh firewood to set by the stove, so Severin Spiridon would have yet another surprise. As he chopped up the old spruce logs, fat grubs plopped from the peeling bark to the gray, frozen ground, and even as he was swinging his axe and wood shavings were flying all about, massive crows swooped down to pick the grubs away.
“Isn’t your belly cold?” asked the road worker as they walked in each other’s steps toward his cabin. “Tell me the truth, please.”
“I’m not exactly warm, sir.”
“God knows what came over me. My nerves are shot. I had a really strange day yesterday.”
“But sir, I think that even without hair you desire me.”
“Oh yes, very much.”
In the road worker’s cabin Severin Spiridon was stretched out in his clothes, restlessly asleep, on the plank bed. The creaking of the floor as Andrei and Elvira Spiridon entered sent the bottle under the bed rolling to the middle of the room. In the center of the table, untouched and wrapped in newspaper, was a block of cheese left behind by the man of the League. As they peeled off the damp newsprint, they saw gray letters on the cheese. Severin Spiridon soon awoke, and recounted that by the time he had gotten there that night, the man of the League was gone. He’d left behind only that block of cheese and the bottle, which had in it just a little bitter plum brandy, but the entire cabin was permeated by the dreaded train station waiting room smell.
“Turn on the radio, please,” said Severin Spiridon.
“Not now,” the road worker replied.
“I’d like to know what’s happening. The League is forming today in Sinistra. Please turn it on.”
“I’m not the sort to listen to the radio. In any case, the radio can’t be listened to just now — take a look for yourself: no batteries.” The road worker showed him the broken, empty compartment in the back of the radio where someone had ripped out the batteries.
He now produced a little bottle of denatured alcohol, poured some into two mugs half-filled with water, then mixed in some spruce shavings he’d whittled with a knife, so as to allow the resin to soak in the bouquet.
“If you’ll allow me,” said Severin Spiridon around noon, “I’ll take the woman along with me now.”
Looking them over, Andrei first rested his eyes on Elvira Spiridon’s matronly kerchief stuffed full of hair, then fixed them on her waist.
“Sure,” he nodded.
“That man’s smell has rattled me a bit, and I’d rather not be alone — let her spend the whole day with me, and at night I’ll send her on her way, as usual.”
“Take her. She’s yours, after all.”
Standing all alone for a bit at the window, which was buzzing with springtime flies, Andrei kept sipping at the liquor, staring out at the open areas beyond, and at the clouds passing by above them. Later, well into the afternoon, he took a walk on those spongy, snowmelt-sodden meadows. Not a soul stirred. About the couple of farms in the pass, only an orange-red fox tail flared up now and again behind the shriveling piles of snow by the woods, back among two purple heaps of ice.
He was on his way home again when a row of trucks, headlights beaming, approached on the steep winding road, making their way up toward the top of the pass. Each was covered by a canvas tarp. Cudgels, chains, and iron rods rattled in some of the trucks; others were packed full of slumped-over, dozing men. That suffocating scent of train station waiting rooms eddied in their wake.
Near the road worker’s cabin, in one of the tire tracks, Andrei found an eyebalclass="underline" solitary, coated with all the sticky grit and yellow fluid of mud, but an eyeball just the same — fallen, surely, from one of the canvas-covered trucks. Its oily shimmer was like one eye of that man of the League.
With the cabin still permeated by the stranger’s smell, the road worker left the door open as he stepped in, and then opened the window. Until dusk he stood in the draft, leaning on the windowsill, puffing on his thyme-stuffed Pope. Then, carrying a bucket of water and a little camp shovel, he went down to the road, figuring that no matter whose it had been, he would bury that single eye. But he no longer found it there.
An orange-red double ribbon, a sunlit vapor trail, shimmied against the purple sky like the ski tracks the road worker had left on the clearings in the pass. Sitting in front of the open window, he waited; the scents of spring already hovered in the air, and even after dusk birdsong came in waves from the forest. Smoke soon rose straight up in the absence of a breeze from the wood-tile roof of Severin Spiridon’s cabin, swathing the moon in a silvery light.
“From now on I’ll wait for her in vain,” Andrei Bodor, the road worker, thought to himself. “The curfew came into force today.”