In the bar at the inn, floating in a little puddle of stinking grease in an open metal can, was a wick whose flickering flame lit up the scruffy face of the bartender — my onetime chum and chess partner, Colonel Jean Tomoioaga. He stood there in a tank top; in patched-up, stained army trousers; with long, pointy griffin-like toenails drooping floorward from the end of his leather sandals. The posh scent of cedar that no doubt hovered about me seemed to take him aback along with my silver hair — tied up in a knot just now with a dark blue ribbon of silk. From that point on, though, neither my face nor my voice seemed to interest him. Did he recognize me behind this pageantry of fragrances and colors? I could only guess.
Inquiring about a certain dwarf named Gábriel Dunka, I expressed my hope that I’d find him in good health at his old address. Although he had known him well — he had been another of his chess partners at one time, after all — the bartender Jean Tomoioaga now didn’t even bat an eye.
“Dwarf? Can’t say I know.” He shrugged his shoulders, looked out the window. “Don’t come looking for a dwarf here. Even if there had been one at one time, he’s no longer here.”
“Maybe he moved?”
“You might say so, sir. But that’s enough already. If you wish to know more, inquire in person in Sinistra, at the museum’s natural history collection.”
He poured me a tiny dose of cheap rum — into a glass with a bit of tart gentian root at the bottom. Though the liquor stung my throat a bit, I was so partial to this sort of bouquet that I would gladly have downed one or even two full shot glasses. But the bartender Jean Tomoioaga rushed me away: “It wouldn’t hurt if you now turned in, too, sir. In case you haven’t noticed, folks around here have long gone to bed.”
I kept staring out the window of my room at those lofty peaks until, finally, they were swallowed up by the purple darkness approaching from the east. But the moon was also taking shape behind Mount Dobrin, its coppery light flooding the sky around it. A furry, fluffy little cloud now settled on one of the ridges, its shape practically the same as that of the little creature which so long ago had eaten Géza Hutira’s ear.
That brought to mind Géza Hutira, who, it was said, had not shaved in twenty-three years. He in turn brought to mind the sacked barber of Dobrin, Vili Dunka, who then brought to mind his onetime live-in lover, Aranka Westin — whom I’d parted from exactly seven years earlier without so much as a farewell. Perhaps it was not yet too late to make my excuses.
Stepping out of the window into the inn’s yard, which was overgrown with nettles and docks, I passed into the darkness and through familiar yards toward my old girlfriend’s house. My plan of a little joke — sneaking in on all fours and stretching out on the rag rug by her bed like a groveling dog — fell flat, however. Aranka Westin must have been on the alert, for all at once she swung open the door before me. Not that she could have seen me without electricity to turn on a light, nor could she have recognized me by my silhouette alone. At most, I might have given myself away by the tart fragrance of spotted gentian, which on my breath that evening, as in the old days, was always one step ahead of me. She knew just who I was, addressing me by my old pseudonym.
“I knew you were alive somewhere, Andrei. And I also knew I’d cross your mind some day.”
“I came by,” said I, practically choking with emotion, “to apologize.”
Out of propriety we exchanged small talk for a while, but in the darkness our hands, while undoing buttons and laces, met in ever barer places, until finally we’d shed every bit of clothing from our bodies. As if water were trickling from under her, her skin was cool; the bed of fur under her belly had long gone extinct; and our knuckles thumped against each other like juniper roots. What happened, happened, and never will I regret it.
Languidly, tapping at my artery, I lay there nestled close to her warmth when, all at once, wild geese honked from the clouds above us. They’d long settled on this homebound route toward Scandinavia. I swear there’s not a sound more disquieting than theirs. As could be heard unmistakably through the silence of the night, they were coming from the south, from the Kolinda forest; and on arriving above Dobrin they’d turned suddenly north, toward Pop Ivan Mountain. Their calls stirred the pit of my stomach.
So when the mountain infantry soon came to get me — saying I’d abused the people’s hospitality by leaving my designated lodgings, and so they would have to revoke my permit and ban me forever from the Sinistra Zone — I hadn’t even gotten to sleep yet. Like a sentry I’d been long been alert, waiting for morning, waiting to finally be able to leave this place.
Parked nearby in the frosty nighttime was my jeep, with Géza Kökény himself, like a statue, watching over it.
The shortest route toward Greece led once again over the Baba Rotunda Pass. In the dead of night, against the silence of the setting moon, I arrived at the top. Even now, I saw my ski tracks winding their way in a silver ribbon over those meadows toward the subterranean streams of the Kolinda forest. One last time a pleasant little warmth came over me there, in the Sinistra Zone: I wouldn’t vanish from here without a trace, after all.