“Something like that.”
“Too bad you’re too old for that sort of thing.”
Not long before, a rain cloud had passed over the river basin, and now a glassy roe of freezing raindrops shone among the spongy clumps of grass. The cabin’s stone wall shimmered with thawing gray spots. On the inside, the window was covered with steam, which a hand sometimes wiped off so a face could peek outside.
The plank bed stood under the window, and on it, stretched out under a ragged blanket, was Géza Hutira. He held Bebe Tescovina with one arm, his beard mingling with the little girl’s hair. The light of the snow-covered mountainside fell on their listless faces through the now open door.
“You’ve never come this way before,” said Géza Hutira to Coca Mavrodin. “Something must have happened.”
“I’m only curious to know the weather forecast. What do the instruments say?”
“I haven’t had the time to take readings lately. Desire has had me in its fiendish grip.”
“I only see now that we’re the same age,” Andrei Bodor interrupted as he pinched Géza Hutira’s dog tag for a closer look. “We were both born in thirty-six.”
“Don’t let him tie those on us,” Bebe Tescovina now said. “Please don’t say another word to them.”
“Yes, ’36,” grumbled Géza Hutira, “that was a very good year. We all made something of ourselves.” He stroked, then ran his fingers through, Bebe Tescovina’s short red hair. “Let him tie it on you if that’s what he wants. Once they leave, we’ll take them off.”
The only sheet-metal dog tags left on the table were Béla Bundasian’s. As if the three tags bore different names, Coca Mavrodin held each one up to the light and read them one by one before flicking each one out the open door onto the icy grass, the stones. She removed her cap. Then, who knows why, she rolled up the sleeves of her greatcoat just a bit and began climbing the ladder to the attic until her head reached the ceiling.
“I’d like for you to finally introduce me to your stepson, Andrei. I hope we find him at home.”
With one hand she pressed open the trap door, and through the opening she peered into the darkness of the attic, which was broken only by the blades of light flashing through the cracks in the roof’s wooden shingles. Béla Bundasian’s eyeglasses sparkled among them.
“Allow me,” said Andrei, standing on the ladder behind Coca Mavrodin, “to introduce Béla Bundasian, my stepson.”
“Pleased to meet you, Bundasian. I’ve got to start with a confession — the Devil knows what came over me, but a moment ago I threw your dog tags out the door. They’re not needed anymore. I came by to let you know.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’ve erased you from the records. From what I know, your father has an acquaintance who will take the two of you far from here. You’re strangers, so leave this place.”
“I don’t know you. How can I know what you want?”
“I promise — get out while you still can.”
“At the moment, leaving is out of the question.”
“Don’t start making a fuss.”
“Even you know I killed someone. I can’t leave this place.”
“Killed? Of course you haven’t. You’re mistaken, Bundasian; everyone is alive and well around you.” On noticing that Béla Bundasian had dug his hands into the hay mattress and was now pressing some straw against his ears, as if he didn’t want to hear another word, she added, “I’ll send bats and owls here to squeak and hoot into your ears until you think it’s over. If I’ve let you go, then — go.”
By the time they climbed back down to leave the cabin, Géza Hutira and Bebe Tescovina were not to be seen. Only laughter bubbled out of the holes in the lovers’ blanket, along with the jingling of the dog tags on their intertwined ankles and arms.
“What will you get by on when you leave?” Coca Mavrodin asked as she and Andrei walked back down. “How will you earn your living?”
“I’ve been thinking of bone carving, Miss.”
“What am I supposed to make of that?”
“While wandering about the woods I’ve found lots of bones, and I’ve been giving carving a try: flowers, deer, mushrooms, colonels standing watch. People go for that sort of thing.”
Every single window of the commissary was smashed, and birds fluttered in the empty room inside. Moss had already encroached over the threshold, and the door suddenly creaked with age in the wind. On it hung Nikifor Tescovina’s cloak, which he’d tied with wire, piece by piece, out of Gábriel Dunka’s marmots. It even had a hood, and from it hung a piece of birch bark scribbled with these words: “I’m taking a twenty after all, Andrei. You’ll need this cloak of mine, otherwise you’ll freeze among all that cold mutton.”
13. GABRIEL DUNKA'S NAME DAY
At the age of thirty-seven, Gábriel Dunka saw a naked woman for the first time in his life. True, he was a dwarf. He was on his way home in his red van from the building site of the new Sinistra prison when Elvira Spiridon flagged him down. Sleet had been falling since early morning and a dank fog enveloped the spruces and black alders along the stream, and wind-whipped wisps of it were drifting over the road. The drenched form of the woman stood glimmering within them like a porcelain figurine. She was completely nude but for her thick head of hair, matted against her neck like an old, threadbare scarf. Her wet thighs, her loins strewn with spruce needles and with blue, white, and yellow flower petals had seemingly blossomed in the spring storm.
Gábriel Dunka recognized the woman, who lived in the Baba Rotunda Pass and sometimes passed along the fence of his house on her way to the fruit depot with a mushroom-filled satchel or a pack basket full of blueberries or blackberries. Never would he have thought that one day, stark naked at the side of the road, she would flag him down — him, of all people. Reluctantly, he picked her up.
Rather than have her sit next to him up front, concerned that someone might see her there instead he had her lie down in the back among the wood frames he used to keep window panes apart while being transported. The station wagon was not actually his own. He used it only to drive the glass between his workshop in Dobrin City and the construction site in Sinistra; the prison directorate and the mountain infantry commander drove those roads by special permit. Explaining himself would have been a challenge, were some official or even a local peasant to notice that he was now, while on duty in his yellow-plated official car, transporting nude women. Having stretched out Elvira Spiridon beside the frames, Gábriel Dunka slammed the rear door shut.
Gábriel Dunka was only as tall as the woman’s belly, and having breathed in the intermingled scent of her navel and the rain on her skin, he was now a bit dizzy.
As soon as he got home — the shed, set in a simple, bare village yard, was also his workshop — he backed in right up to his door so as to get the woman inside without attracting attention. The neighbors across the stream watched his every move through binoculars, he knew — for many people could never get their fill of the spectacle of a dwarf.
As might be imagined, Elvira Spiridon hadn’t exactly been engaging in innocent pastimes. That morning she had tried to flee the country along with her companion, but the attempt turned out badly for her from the start.
Mustafa Mukkerman, the Turkish trucker, transported frozen mutton from the Beskids range to the southern tip of the Balkans and sometimes, on the side, he smuggled out desperate people by stashing them among the halves of icy sheep, which hung on hooks. On this day he had left her behind. It turned out — as they discovered only just as they were clambering up — that he had long before sworn to himself never to transport women; some nervous wench had once messed up the whole truck. So while her companion, Andrei, the road worker, was put aboard, she, Elvira Spiridon, had to stay behind on the road, and stark naked at that.