“I can’t. Don’t even ask — you’ve been erased from the records — as far as we’re concerned you no longer exist. Get out of here, leave.”
“For god’s sake you could at least try. You got rid of Elvira Spiridon — and I killed someone, after all.”
“Whether you killed someone or not, that’s your business. I suggest you steer clear of Dobrin: no one around here knows you anymore.”
Willow catkin pollen hovered in the air above the Sinistra River along with the sound of thrushes singing and the heady fragrance of daphnes.
Once he was near the village, Béla Bundasian veered off the road, went around a boggy meadow full of dwarf birches and black alders, and then went around Dobrin City itself, which was for all intents and purposes off limits to him. At the far end of the village, at the foot of Pop Ivan Mountain, he finally reached the north-south highway. Glaring in one fold of the slope were the blue and yellow walls of the gas station.
“What day is it today?” he asked on arriving at the station.
“Monday, Tuesday, something like that,” replied Géza Kökény, the attendant.
“So it’s not Thursday.”
“Not a chance. That much I know.”
Béla Bundasian lay down for a rest, stretching out on his back for a little while in a roadside clearing. He stared up at the clouds, at the birds passing by above him, at the insects zigzagging about in the air. Then he sat up and watched the winding mountain road. Hours passed; not a single vehicle went by. He staggered to his feet, moved his numb limbs, stretched, and walked around the gas station.
“How about a round of nine-men’s morris?” asked Géza Kökény.
“I just happen to have the time — if you agree not to cheat.”
They drew the board on the oily ground and moved the pieces — stones and pieces of wood — around with their feet. No one disturbed them; no one pulled up to the station. In the afternoon, a solitary horse strode over the meadow across the highway on its way to a nearby watering hole. Its pale, badgery hue was like that of the snowmelt-soaked mountainside.
The two men followed this horse with their eyes: like some divine messenger, secret signals of light glimmered all along its mane as it ambled silently on.
“And if by chance it was Thursday, it still wouldn’t do you any good. Mustafa Mukkerman isn’t coming anymore. So there’s no point in waiting around here.”
“That makes things look different: maybe I should rethink my day.”
“I couldn’t keep silent about it. Here at the station you can get oil and gas, but unfortunately I can’t help out with anything else.”
On finishing the game, Béla Bundasian once again walked around the station, and again he stretched out on the roadside clearing, chewing on the seeds, the dried mushrooms, and the dried cranberries in his pocket. He dozed off a bit, too, amid the distant rumble of the mountain infantrymen’s jeeps as they crossed from smooth, grassy ground onto the rough highway. Then, silence anew. He awoke with a start, patted down his empty pockets and the rest of his body, and staggered to his feet. He stretched, spit once or twice, farted, then ambled over to the gas station and woke up Géza Kökény.
“All right, then give me a can of gasoline and a container of oil.”
He paid with the twenty dollar bill his stepfather had once given him. He got so much change in return — in coins in the local currency — that all his pockets were overflowing. Swinging the can of gasoline at his side, he crossed the road to the meadow, ambled along the tracks left by the badger-hued saintly horse, toward the far end, over by the old mill, the onetime fruit depot.
By now he felt to the bone that these were the final steps of his life, and a wild passion came over him: at first his ragged trousers showed only a bulge, but then his penis broke through the front buttons and sprung out into the air, pointing at the sky.
Béla Bundasian stopped at the bank of the stream, where the grove of willows obscured his view of the village; above the bloomy catkins slowly vanishing diamond peaks still shone. Freshly blossomed dark blue flowers — dwarf gentians — fluttered in the yellowish-green grass before his feet like burning candles. He removed his hiking boots, placed them carefully beside each other, and stuffed his toe-rags inside. Like before bedtime, he would have been happy to take a piss, but he quickly gave up on the idea: as a man he knew that that was a no-go just now, not with his member as stiff as a flagpole. There was nothing to be done about that. And so he listlessly picked a gentian flower and tried pinning it to the opening of his urethra. But it just popped back out, falling to his feet like a tiny blue candle — a candle whose flame, he imagined, would soon set him ablaze.
Even his fingernails glowed red hot; his ears and the tip of his nose threw off sparks; his pockets ripped out, sending all those coins bouncing about the ground, scorching the grass, smoldering the dirt. Even the frames of his glasses melted, but the heat kept the lenses hovering before his eyes for a good long while yet, and so before he went sprawling into the stream, to be swept away like flakes of lichen, he must have caught a glimpse of the curious onlookers assembled around him, their eyes reflecting the scene all with the glassy indifference that is a stranger’s due, and no doubt he was almost sorry about the whole thing.
Years later I turned up once again in Dobrin, and there met Géza Kökény, too. He swore it wasn’t the stream that had swept him away but, rather, the wind, which had carried him off bit by bit over the course of a week or two, sizzling and smoldering among the blossoming gentians like a wet log in a fire, and during that time the badger-hued horse avoided the meadow on the way to its watering hole.
15. GÉZA KÖKÉNY'S NIGHT
For years I had owed Gábriel Dunka four twenty dollar bills, and one day, intending to finally settle the debt, I set out to look him up in his old place. It was a spring afternoon when I arrived in the Baba Rotunda Pass in my brand new, metallic green, four-wheel-drive Suzuki jeep, a Greek passport in my pocket. After so many years, it was as if I were glimpsing the Sinistra river basin for the first time. At the far end of its kaleidoscope of colors and shadows stood the lofty peaks of Mount Dobrin, swathed by the glowing, turquoise hues of the nighttime horizon.
I thought I’d leave the jeep in front of the road worker’s cabin — where I’d once lived myself for a couple of months — and walk around the summit, but I found neither the road worker’s cabin nor Severin Spiridon’s farm; their exact locations could only be guessed on the basis of a few dark blue rain-soaked heaps of cinder and ash. Nothing else had changed in the Baba Rotunda pass: a metal post glistened on a nearby ledge; a bat with ragged wings hovered above the western horizon; and an enormous, orange-red cloud hovered to the east. Even my old ski tracks still wound their way toward the Kolinda forest. The marble-hued double ribbon, winding over grass whose verdant green shimmered in the reflection of a passing cloud, went along past illuminated resin-splotched tree trunks and secret mountain meadow corners.
As was customary, in Dobrin I reported at once with the mountain infantrymen, who designated the newly built inn as the accommodation where I could pass the twenty-four hours allowed for my visit. The young colonel, still practically a child — her face caked with powder, her lips smeared with lipstick — warned me to occupy my room soon and not to leave it that day, since the curfew took effect at sunset, as it had every evening for years. Night was falling fast: beyond the springtime leaves, Géza Kökény’s bust seemed to be submerging into the crimson light of the setting sun.