“I’m sure you notice,” he whispered, “that I’m a bit nervous. Tonight I’ll be with a woman for the first time. Why, look — even the hair on the top of my head is trembling.”
“There’s no need to be nervous,” replied Elvira Spiridon. “It’s not as if it’s any big secret to-do — you must have heard what it’s all about.”
“I’m ashamed to say I’m a complete novice. But dwarves do have a rather good reputation.”
“That’s exactly why you should relax and also just remember, too, what an awful fix I’m in.”
Gábriel Dunka shuddered; he gave a big sigh. Without a doubt, the woman’s skin — or, rather, the disquieting whiteness which had shone from under the brown paper bag — was different than it had seemed at first sight, when, bedraggled, she’d stood before him out on the highway, her shoulders purple with fear, her nose a deathly white, her earlobes drained of blood.
“Please don’t take me for a boor,” he said in a hushed but agitated tone: “I’ve got to leave you on your own for a bit. I’ll return once I’ve calmed down. I don’t know what’s come over me, but I’ve got to go, I feel so awfully strange. I’m afraid I might even kill myself.”
“Of course, Mr. Dunka, go ahead. Take a little break. If don’t mind, I’ll fill my glass now and again while you’re out. By the time you get home I’ll be all warmed up.”
For years now there had been no street lamps on the main road through Dobrin City, which followed the course of the stream, through the bottom of the valley, and took a curve up toward the pass. People around there, if they chanced to cross paths in the night, recognized each other by their smells. Doddering along among puddles that glimmered in the distant light, Gábriel Dunka might have seemed, from afar, like a dog. Only his steps squelched differently in the mud.
He walked out of the village to the crossing gate and the guard booth at the entrance to the conservation area entrance. Gábriel Dunka was in the habit of dropping by to visit Colonel Jean Tomoioaga, who for years had manned this post alone and lived in the booth. Whenever the dwarf showed up, the colonel would spread his green-and-white checkered shirt on the floor, take out the chess pieces he’d carved himself along with some pebbles of various unusual colors, and they would play a few games.
And that’s what happened that evening, too. But Gábriel Dunka quickly became visibly tired of playing. Indeed, Colonel Jean Tomoioaga, noticing that his mind was elsewhere, discreetly pointed out his mistakes. Even so, that night the dwarf lost every single game.
“There’s no point in playing,” Colonel Jean Tomoioaga finally declared. “I’ll just keep thrashing you. What’s eating you?”
“I hope you’re sincerely interested — I can’t keep it to myself. That’s why I stopped by so late at night: I need to file a report.”
“You’re an insider — you can do it yourself.”
“I should go to Sinistra right away with the information, but after sunset I’m not allowed to use the car. It’s a serious matter: an illegal border crossing.”
“All right, I’ll take care of it in the morning.”
“Not in the morning — now. The individual must really have been up to some mischief, she didn’t have any clothes on. She can be found at my workshop. Do something — have her taken away immediately.”
The last person to see Elvira Spiridon in Dobrin was Géza Kökény. It was not a joyous occasion. As if still worried about the neighbors watching, the woman crawled out of the dwarf’s workshop on all fours, her beautiful belly arcing toward the ground as she crawled toward the jeep waiting by the bust.
Before long, Gábriel Dunka got home, where he was greeted once again by the cold silence of the window panes. The scent of soaked skin, hair, and secret crevices escaped the moment he opened the door, swept away forever by the Sinistra winds.
14. BÉLA BUNDASIAN'S FIRE
On the last day of his life, Béla Bundasian awoke to find himself all alone in Géza Hutira’s cabin. Freezing rain had been pattering all night against the wood shingle roof, and in the early morning, when it suddenly stopped, a bleak silence went on hissing in the empty room, the quivering ash droning inside the stove. But then the flue resounded with a hooting noise: the owls Coca Mavrodin had promised had no doubt arrived.
Descending from the attic, he saw that the cottage had been abandoned. Missing were Géza Hutira’s rubberized, hooded windbreaker, which at other times would have been hanging from the doorknob; his bag; his binoculars; and even his crampons. The hay on the empty plank bed still bore the impression of Bebe Tescovina’s curled up frame, and hovering in the air above it, it seemed, was the odor of nascent milk. But the happy couple was far away by now.
Outside, everything — every piece of wood, every stone, each of the few steps up to the cabin — was sheathed by the drizzle’s icy glaze. Pressing his hands against the cabin’s exterior stone wall to keep from slipping, Béla Bundasian managed to walk its length, then a few more steps over the ice to the nearby shed. There he rummaged about for screws, which he drilled into the soles of his hiking boots so he, too, could get on the road all the sooner. Once the freezing rain had passed, the peaks and mountain slopes opposite sparkled with a diamond-like light, as if liquid glass had poured all over them, and all around the cabin, blades of grass tinkled in the wind like cups clinking against each other.
From deep in the forest down in the valley came a metallic scratching, the jingling of crampons. But it was only an echo: by then Géza Hutira and Bebe Tescovina were already traversing the precipices along the top of the ridge.
Donning his glasses, Béla Bundasian soon caught a glimpse of them on high. At first the two appeared to be a single, point-like object that kept appearing and disappearing among the crags, but soon the rising sun projected the contours of the entire range onto a passing cloud of freezing rain, magnifying Géza Hutira’s silhouette. With soaring steps he swished above the ridge, carrying Bebe Tescovina on his shoulders, his head bent forward to keep from pressing against the child’s belly. Clouds carried them off toward the Ukraine.
Béla Bundasian filled the pocket of his jacket with dried mushrooms, dried cranberries, and beechnuts. With a pickaxe he then smashed in the door, bashed in the window and the roof shingles, and even managed to ravage the stone wall with a few choice blows to the corner of the cabin — paving the way for the rains and winds to come. Hands clasped, he now kneeled in front of the ruins, but when the wind swept a piece of string before him, he snatched it up and tied his glasses around his neck to keep them from being lost, when knocked off by the branches that, he knew, would tear at his face as he bushwhacked his way down the slope.
Gripping onto rocks, branches, and clumps of grass, he made his way down into the valley. Behind him, the cabin’s now exposed beams were already occupied by crows.
Further down, an ungainly mass of ice loomed near the bubbling spring. Frozen inside was a glittering red star from a gray mountain infantry cape’s collar.
At the commissary, birds whooshed about among the cabin’s broken windows and the threshold, as if now furnished with a welcome mat, was moss-covered, with two yawning marmots on top.
In the guard booth, lying on his back and snoring on the plank bed, was Colonel Jean Tomoioaga.
“Don’t take my waking you up the wrong way,” Béla Bundasian whispered into his ear, “but I’ve noticed that everyone is taking off while I stay behind scot free. Please put me under arrest.”