“Yeah, that’s crossed my mind. But it’s simple: I just won’t think about you two.”
“I’d like to be up-front — I wouldn’t want it to look as if I’m up to no good behind your back. I wouldn’t want you to think that.”
“For me, you two are history. Most of my things are still there, with her. Take anything you want. My undershirts, slippers, underwear — that’s all there, and we’re about the same size. All I’m taking with me are scissors, razors, shaving cream and a couple of brushes. My barber’s supplies, you know. Everything else is yours.”
“That’s really decent of you.”
“What the hell can I do?”
“Then again, who knows what’s going to happen — as you can see, they’ve called me in here, too.”
“But you don’t have a bag with you. You can stay. At least for a while.”
“I sure hope so — that’s why I’m taking the liberty of asking for a few words of advice. How should I behave — what are her habits, her womanish whims?”
“Damn it, man, just concentrate on her big white shanks, not her whims. But all the same, let’s just say that if she’s busy sewing, don’t even think of making a move. With her, duty always comes first. And now I’ve got to be on my way — all the best.”
“Thanks. Take care of yourself, okay?”
With that, Vili Dunka, the former barber of Dobrin, headed off. From the hallway window I watched him make his way past the glistening puddles all over the yard to the porter’s gatehouse in the towering concrete wall that surrounded the property. He waited at the booth for an officer to open the gate and let him out. I kept watching as his path on the opposite side of the wall was indicated by sparrows taking flight. Vili Dunka disappeared down the road to the station, and that was the last anyone ever heard of him.
It was late afternoon by the time I was called in for my interview. Seated in the forest commissioner’s chair was the coroner, Colonel Titus Tomoioaga. Explaining that Coca Mavrodin was occupied at the moment, he reassured me that she was reviewing my application for the trackman’s job. He added that there was, however, a little hitch: my files had been lost while being taken to the records office. Until they turn up, he said, they would solicit personal references about my character from a few trustworthy individuals. And, who knows, even if the trackman’s job wasn’t possible, Coca Mavrodin might just employ me as a courier of sorts; for someone was needed to take messages into the conservation area.
It seemed they wanted to send me to the very place I’d been banned from until then. After waiting for so many years, perhaps finally I would cross paths once more with Béla Bundasian. Feigning indifference, I conjured up a lackluster expression, as if this was not quite what I’d had in mind. Indeed, after waiting so long for just such a turn of events I couldn’t even bring myself to be too happy about the news. Besides which, to be honest, my thoughts were still on Vili Dunka, who sat waiting at the station with that complimentary ticket in his pocket. The sound of a short train-whistle would mean he had left. It would be nice, I thought, to try on his slippers that very night.
Being late autumn, night was already coming on as I left the base and passed along Dobrin City’s empty streets, with their vagabond fogs and the barking of dogs. More than a few years had passed since the power lines had been cut, so for the most part the local houses cowered each and every night in muted darkness; even now, early in the evening, hurricane lamps and tallow candles glinted here and there.
A pale window shone faintly like daybreak from deep inside the yard of Aranka Westin.
For a long time I peered through the gaps in the curtain, watching her rummage about in a widowed sort of way, watching her patch up those heavy wool-felt uniforms in the flickering candlelight. A thick wool shawl was draped over her back in a triangle: its tip reached her bottom, its two wings nestled onto those thighs Vili Dunka had called “shanks.” No doubt she was a bit cold. It seemed she hadn’t had the time to light a fire that day.
I went around the house to the woodshed, bundled a few logs into my arms, grabbed some kindling, then went back around and, without knocking, opened the door by pressing down the handle with my knee. Aranka Westin looked up momentarily, flashing me another quick look or two as I clumsily closed the door, again using my leg. If her eyes were indeed seamstress sharp, she might have noticed the trousers trembling just so around my leg — perhaps, she might have thought, from the draft. At least five years had passed since I’d been with a woman.
I waited for the first encouraging sign: for the furrows to subside on her chin, for her toes to slacken invitingly in her slippers; and, above all, for her to finally drop from her hands the officer’s greatcoat she was painstakingly equipping with new pockets of gray felt. This little venture of mine was a sure thing, I knew, and I knew another thing, too: not even by chance should I try anything as long as the sewing went on.
4. COCA MAVRODIN'S NAME
When it was announced that Colonel Puiu Borcan had been found on one of the windswept heights over Dobrin, I shook the dust from my quilted jacket and soaked my muddy rubber boots in the stream. Then I looked up Gábriel Dunka, the dwarf, to have him trim my hair a bit. Colonel Puiu Borcan had been forest commissioner for the Sinistra Zone, so it was only proper that I, who managed the wild fruit depot, should show up at his burial looking decent.
It soon turned out that all the fuss was in vain. The ceremony was not to be: Colonel Izolda Mavrodin, the newly appointed commander of the mountain infantry, had banned all public gatherings well in advance. While still on her way from Dobruja to her new post in this northern mountainous region, she’d sent word that Colonel Puiu Borcan was to stay up there on the mountaintop exactly at the spot where the fever had done him in, and that no one should dare even touch him. Presumably this meant not even if, by chance, badgers or foxes wandering that way were to close in on the colonel’s corpse.
So Colonel Borcan was succeeded at the mountain infantry in Dobrin by a woman. It was said that Mavrodin was but an alias, that her real name was Mahmudia, and that she didn’t mind being called Coca. Practically no one got any sleep in Dobrin City the night before her arrival, judging from the anxious whispers snaking their way through town. For a while, though, it seemed plausible that what I was hearing was instead the squealing of the track watchman’s clarinet by the tunnel or, say, late-migrating wild geese passing over the valley. As I sauntered through the yard in the middle of the night toward the outhouse — the denatured alcohol I downed every evening served to clear my bowels often enough — I noticed a yellowish fog looming in the dark beyond the village’s unlit houses. All the lights were on in the barracks, and the watchtower lights looked like huge tufts of cotton candy in the dank night. Screeching sounds also came from the barracks: the mountain infantrymen were no doubt busily polishing the hallway floors with pillows tied to their feet and scrubbing windows with damp newspapers.
Izolda Mavrodin arrived early the next morning in a Red Cross military jeep. Someone had fingered her nickname into the furry white film coating the peak of her cap, as well as onto the vehicle’s windshield and its mud flaps: Coca. The bitter smell of medicine — or of squashed bugs? — permeated the streets of Dobrin City as the jeep whizzed past. Having surged out in continuous waves as it billowed through the village, this odor collected like rainwater in roadside ditches and in yards.
That very day Coca Mavrodin-Mahmudia selected some fifteen to twenty villagers based on appearance alone; which is to say, they all looked virtually the same: long-necked, goose-headed, button-eyed, colorless youth. She had their frieze coats discarded, whereupon each was given a gray suit, a pair of black oxfords, and a silvery necktie. Locals wasted no time in dubbing their transformed neighbors “the gray ganders.” Not that there was time to train them, but they figured out on their own what they were to do; and from the start they proved adept at casting weighty stares at everyone wherever they went. Whenever they headed off somewhere as a team, their leather-soled shoes click-clacked against the wet pavement.