“Exactly my plan.”
“And then, in the scent of fermenting fruit, you could sleep and sleep.”
“In that case, now I’m really curious to know how the blackberries are around here. I’ve been thinking mainly about blueberries and blackberries.”
“I’m not really sure. The truth is, it all depends on the bears, on what they want. They’re the ones who will be eating what you collect. A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty of them are kept in the preserve: they are why Colonel Borcan liked your idea.”
All day long I leaned out the window, waiting for Colonel Borcan to show up, gazing at those mountain peaks that seemed by turns headstrong or capricious. But for weeks on end, only shadows — sometimes of clouds; other times, of flocks of crows — made their way across that meadow that stretched out between the Sinistra River and Dobrin City. Spring rain came from the west, from the Sinistra peaks, and the clouds, colliding with the steep walls of Mount Dobrin, lingered for days around the icy summits. A mass of cottony clouds would sometimes descend from all sides upon the peaks like a veil of plush fabric draped over a sculpture. When it finally lifted days later, there stood Mount Dobrin once more, still glistening white even as below it, spring had taken hold all around. Whenever Nikifor Tescovina arrived toward night with that daily bag of food, we’d sit on the building’s lukewarm threshold and breathe in the scent of laurel rising from the stream.
“As you can see,” he would reassure me again and again, “you enjoy our complete confidence — no one will ask where you came from, and you won’t tell anyone, either. If someone starts badgering you with questions, go ahead and lie.”
“All right — I’m sure I’ll get into the swing of things. And what the hell, I could always just say something different to everyone.”
“That’s perfect — you’re getting the picture. And as far as your name is concerned, forget it right now. If you hear your name hissed somewhere nearby, don’t turn a hair — always a poker face, OK?”
The darkness that enveloped Dobrin after sunset every day was so thick that above the dark contours of the village houses the only light to be glimpsed came from the distant windows of the military base. Sometimes flashes of light shot out in purposeful signals from the mountain infantry’s watchtowers as well. And then there were the lightning bolts that might rip through the nighttime clouds up above Mount Dobrin, the faraway accompanying murmur of thunder intermingled with the hooting of the owls from down in the woods. The foggy yellow light of dawn invariably found me leaning out the window.
One day Nikifor Tescovina arrived with his little girl. Even from a distance, the child’s short, blazing red hair gleamed through the fog like a cluster of ripe mountain ash berries in the fall. They were near the mill by the time I noticed that the father had his daughter on a leash. A stone’s throw from the entrance, he tied her to the tall, yellow post that marked the place, and then he entered the building alone.
That day Nikifor Tescovina brought along a bottle of denatured alcohol as well as a sheet-metal mug and charcoal in a metal pot that had been drilled full of tiny holes. For it to be drinkable, he explained, the alcohol had to be filtered through charcoal into another container. In the absence of charcoal, he said, timber fungus or blueberries would also do the trick.
“It’ll make you puke at first, but you get used to it.”
“I bet.”
He’d already begun to pour the liquid over the charcoal, holding the mug underneath and watching for the first drops.
“Soon you can get to work. The colonel has already ordered up the tubs and the buckets, and he’s also hired a team of women to harvest the fruit. They’ll swarm around you like honeybees, but watch yourself. Like I said before: no matter what, keep that poker face.”
“Lately I’ve been the soul of self-discipline.”
“Good — make sure you keep it up if you run across a fellow named Géza Kökény. He’ll tell you that he’s famous, that there’s a bust of him on the riverbank, but don’t you believe him.”
“I won’t even hear him out.”
“That’s the spirit. Over there, by the way, is my little girl, Bebe,” he said, extending an open palm toward the meadow, where the redheaded youngster tied to the post was now sitting about on the grass. “You’ll get to know her. She’s just eight, but she wants to leave me already.”
“Don’t you let her.”
“She’s fallen in love with Géza Hutira.”
“I don’t know the name — sounds like an alias.”
“Hmm, who knows. He’s the meteorologist in the preserve. About your age — fifty, at least, but with his hair down to the ground, and he’s got my little girl’s heart in his hands.”
I’d been holed up in that abandoned water mill with voles, bats, and barn owls keeping me company for four, five, maybe six weeks already when Colonel Puiu Borcan finally looked me up in person. He dropped by with my new name. Winter returned that day for a couple hours to the forests of the Sinistra Zone. An icy mist descended on the blossoming meadow, a shimmering glassy mush formed on the backwater tributary, and mountain clearings shone in all their snowy resplendence over the village below. I glimpsed the two approaching figures through drifting wisps of fog. One of them was my benefactor, Nikifor Tescovina. The other — a baggy-faced, big-eared man in an officer’s greatcoat — adjusted his hat on his forehead as he came. His hand held a big black umbrella. Although icy drops of vapor from the passing storm still permeated the air, his umbrella was closed, its sodden black fabric limp as the wings of a sleeping bat. An enormous pair of binoculars swung from his neck.
This, then, was the forest commissioner, Colonel Puiu Borcan.
Later, once I’d earned his respect, I too had the opportunity to peer through those binoculars. On one occasion I accompanied the colonel way up into the woods, and while he went on alone into a thicket, he entrusted me with them along with his umbrella. It was Revolution Day, so I knew the mountain infantrymen were playing badminton down by the stream with the Dobrin railway workers. To this day I recall how that tiny snow-white birdie kept flashing back and forth above the prairie of swaying virgin grass that was taller than any of the men.
Anyhow, on that first day of our acquaintance Colonel Borcan came to a halt on the threshold, the binoculars about his neck and the umbrella hanging from his hand. His expression was woeful and a bit clammy. Reflected off the distant snowy clearings sunlight was shining right through his earlobes, and on the tufts of hair frizzed out from underneath his hat. The freezing rain had already come and gone that day, but drops still clung to the stubble on his chin.
“So you’re the one.”
“Yes.”
“And what’s your name?”
“I don’t know — I lost my papers.”
“Well, fine, then.”
From his pocket he removed a sheet-metal dog tag that dangled, glistening from a watch chain. On it, freshly engraved: ANDREI BODOR. My alias. Colonel Puiu Borcan himself put it around my neck, and then clamped the loose ends of the chain at my nape with little pliers. No sooner had he done so than the metal began warming my skin. Andrei, now that part of my new name I especially liked.
3. ARANKA WESTIN'S WINDOW
For weeks, months, maybe years I’d been living in the Sinistra Zone under the alias Andrei Bodor when a trackman’s job opened up at the narrow-gauge forest railway. Sheet-metal-sheathed freight cars and scrapped mine cars ran along this route hauling fruit, horse carcasses, and other provisions to the bears in the conservation area. There, somewhere inside the fence surrounding the preserve, far from the world, lived my adopted son, Béla Bundasian. It was on account of him that I’d moved to this mountainous area up north to begin with. So as soon as I heard that the trackman Augustin Konnert had been found in several pieces one morning beside the rails, I applied for his post.