The Sinistra Zone

1. COLONEL BORCAN'S UMBRELLA

Two weeks before he died, Colonel Borcan took me with him on reconnaissance to one of the barren heights in the Dobrin forest district. He asked me to keep my eyes open, especially on the mountain ash trees, whose clusters of little red berries stood out in the roadside scrub, to see if the waxwings had yet arrived. It was mid-autumn, and the brush was abuzz with unfamiliar sounds.

Such patrols by the forest commissioner began with a visit each morning to the bear reserve, where he sized things up. On the way home — while ambling along some mountain ridge, breathing in the intoxicating silence of the preserve, and perking his ears to the babbling brooks in the valleys below — he would formulate a report on what he had seen. Now, though, making his way along all but impassable trails by following markers left by the mountain infantrymen, he was headed straight for a secret lookout. Word had it that the waxwings had indeed arrived, and in their wake so too had the fever that visited this forested region each winter and that, in the Sinistra Zone, was for some odd reason called the Tungusic Flu.

An open rest area of sorts constructed out of lichen-splotched rocks and padded with moss awaited Colonel Borcan at the summit. On reaching it he dropped his leather umbrella, the sort used by the mountain infantry, on the grass nearby. Then he loosened his greatcoat and found a comfortable spot to sit down. He removed his cap, too, anchoring it under on a few rocks. Bareheaded, his hair fluttering in the wind and his earlobes turning red, he sat there for hours on end, eyes glued to binoculars he trained on the eastern horizon.

This secret vista — a crag that jutted out slightly beyond the spruces and firs — formed a rocky part of the crest of Pop Ivan Mountain. From it you could see far across the border to the bluish, rolling, forested hills of Ruthenia. Dark smoke rose from behind the furthest hills, perhaps from as far away as the open country beyond. As if night were already coming on, a purplish curtain draped the horizon to the east, but it faded with the rising sun.

When, hours later, the valley filled with the opalescent lights of afternoon, the forest commissioner packed away his binoculars and picked up his hat: the reconnaissance had come to an end.

Whether he had in fact caught a glimpse of what he sought on the slopes across the way — of the waxwing or some other sign of the Tungusic Flu approaching from bush to bush — this was to forever remain his secret; nor did I ever figure out why he had taken me — a simple harvester of wild fruits, and a stranger at that — along to the Ukrainian border that day.

On the way home, once we were down in the valley, he asked if I’d seen a waxwing. “I did,” I replied, “two, maybe three,” whereupon Colonel Borcan announced he would put in an order for inoculations.

We were already near the barracks when the colonel — the only mountain infantryman who roamed those dank forests both summer and winter with an umbrella under his arm — once again dropped that umbrella on the grass and removed the binoculars from their case; for it so happened that the stranger whom folks around there called the Red Rooster was at that very moment walking along the edge of the blanched autumn hayfield beyond the stream.

Feet hardly touching the ground, the Red Rooster moved along the ridge of turf that marked the border between forest and field; his red hair and beard blazed against the black of the spruces and firs. Through his binoculars Colonel Borcan followed him until the Red Rooster disappeared into a lustrous yellow swarm of birch leaves. Then he spoke to me, in a hushed, almost intimate tone.

“Andrei, you sure you didn’t get a little package for me, by mistake?” He must have gathered from my confused stare that I barely understood what he’d said, for he added, “Just a freshly caught fish?”

Although the question was odd, as was his bereft expression when I replied that I had no package for him, I would no doubt have forgotten the episode entirely — except that not long after that, the Red Rooster called on me at the fruit depot, with a fogged-up plastic bag swinging from his hand: in a little water, glistening at the bottom, was a fish. This bag and its contents would rightly have been the forest commissioner’s. By that time, however, Colonel Borcan was no longer alive.

Most residents of the Sinistra Zone have dark brown or black hair. Blondes are awfully rare; redheads, nonexistent — with one exception: Bebe Tescovina, the commissary manager’s little girl. Everyone around there knew Bebe for her orange-red hair, shining from afar like mountain ash berries. Since the locals weren’t in the habit of dyeing their hair, whenever another redhead chanced to turn up, everyone knew at once, even from a distance, that it could only be a stranger passing through.

The Red Rooster seemed to be an idle wanderer. As he cut across the slopes with those easy steps of his, his hair and beard would suddenly glimmer against the blackness of the spruces and firs like a rosebush full of luminescent red hips. It was mid-autumn when he arrived, and the rosehips were in fact ripening under the bite of early frosts. One morning, tracks left behind by foreign-made rubber boots appeared on those frosty trails. His boots.

He was a slight, wispy fellow who spoke Ukrainian, Romanian, Hungarian, and even Carpathian German. But he spoke none of these well. The Red Rooster probably didn’t have a decent command of a single language spoken around here. Even his way of walking, a self-assured swagger, wasn’t the way the locals walk. Besides, he seemed to spend all his time outside, as if to leave no doubt in anyone who might see him that the only reason he was rambling along the Sinistra River was to gaze in awe at the mist-shrouded mountaintops.

In the vicinity of Dobrin, where this stranger paid his respects almost every day, the Sinistra branched off into various smaller streams, and steep valleys cut deeply down the ascending face of Pop Ivan Mountain. Winding their way along water-worn ravines up to the mountain’s rocky ridge were barbed-wire-wrapped steel rods, concrete posts, and watchtowers: the gullies were laid with traps. The border ran along this watershed ridge. The thick web of fences, ditches, and various other obstacles opened at just one crack in a drafty mountain pass: only from there did the old dirt road go somersaulting into the hills beyond, bathed in the foreign lights of the north.

At that point a blue-and-yellow crossing gate blocked the road, and a tiny guardhouse stood beside an old canvas tent full of shivering soldiers. Although this was the only operating border post in the Sinistra Zone, the gate was lifted just once a week, for a few hours every Thursday morning. The soldiers on patrol marked the occasion by nosing about each other’s side of the border for a bit in the spirit of military brotherhood, and the two or three civilian vehicles with a permit from the regional authorities to travel this route would then cross over.

The Red Rambler, as he was also called — whose hair, dress, and slapdash posture gave him away as a foreigner even at a distance — did not show up for the first time on a Thursday, but on a Saturday. Masons dismantling the forest chapel happened upon his tracks one morning; and hours later, Géza Kökény, a night watchman who spent his insomniac days in a watchtower at the edge of the village, spotted the redheaded stranger descending the slopes of Pop Ivan Mountain. He seemed to move as easily as the wind about the barbed-wire-tangled brush. Down below, he was asked more than once for his papers, but the infantrymen found his I.D. in order even if it was, after all, presumably forged.

He wore brown rubber boots and a gray felt jacket of the sort worn on the far side of Pop Ivan Mountain — a jacket with patches of green corduroy. His narrow-brimmed hat, ornamented with kestrel feathers, dangled on his back from a long cord. Fluttering from the top of his head was that crest of red hair, and a rakish beard, parted down the middle, decorated his chin.

From the start, on glimpsing this stranger, Géza Kökény dubbed him the Red Rooster. And sure enough, since no one knew his real name, this simple but exact nickname stuck.

A dappled calfskin satchel adorned with brass clasps and fittings hung from the man’s shoulder, and a semitransparent plastic bag swung from his right hand. Wriggling about inside, like a silver-bellied fish, was a shiny platter. Sometimes he would approach the locals working in the forests or fields and offer it for sale, though surely he must have known that they hadn’t any use for platters. For a while everyone was guessing about just what, in fact, the fellow was up to: prying about, getting a sense of shopping preferences in these parts, was he? Out to determine just how friendly the locals were? The mountain infantrymen hassled him for a day and a half, asking repeatedly for his papers. But then, it seems, they were told to let up: from then on they hardly gave him a second look. Besides, nobody so flamboyant, however he tried, could possibly make it as a spy.

Each and every morning, the lower reaches of forest were tinged a pearly gray with hoarfrost or sheathed by a film of passing nighttime snow, so the regular trail of footprints from Pop Ivan Mountain toward Dobrin was visible even from a distance on those downy hills. Sometimes a whole flock of waxwings — which make their appearance in the Sinistra valleys from the north, as a harbinger of winter’s numbing winds — accompanied the stranger in his wanderings. Meandering over on those blanched fields with the birds swirling above his head, this redheaded stranger seemed not to have come from the Ukraine at all, but straight out of an old picture book.

Waxwings, by the way, were not too well liked around there. Most locals chased them away with stones, and clever folks just spat at them — it was believed that where these birds flocked, the Tungusic Flu would be follow in short order — the very fever that, in the end, did in Colonel Borcan.

The colonel, poor fellow, looked me up again — something he didn’t do too often — only days before his death. Practically begging, he grilled me one more time about that package.

“Come on, Andrei, tell me the truth. Didn’t someone leave a plastic bag for me at your place? With a fish inside, that’s all. It’s okay if you ate it, but at least tell me.”

Although I swore up and down that nothing had come, the colonel left with a brooding look of suspicion and resentment. We never met again. Before long, Nikifor Tescovina, the commissary manager in the conservation area, spread the news that the forest commissioner had disappeared. All the bear wardens and colonels frequented the commissary, so he knew all there was to know.

And it was indeed Nikifor Tescovina who soon announced that Colonel Borcan had been found, dead as a doornail, on a bare mountaintop. A bird had already built a nest in the colonel’s gaping mouth. Later, someone — a poacher dressed in a mountain infantry uniform, no doubt — nailed the corpse to the ground, thrusting bayonets through the hands and clamping the feet between the rocks, so as to keep the griffins from tearing away his flesh.

Not long after that, the Red Rooster looked me up at what was then my workplace, the wild fruit depot. There I coordinated the harvesting of not only fruit — blueberries and blackberries — but also mushrooms. Actually, I lived there too, in the storage building, amid the scent of fermenting fruit emanating from so many tubs, buckets, and barrels.

I recall that incident perfectly, because on that same day a new harvester, Elvira Spiridon, stopped by to drop off a load of berries. I suppose there’s no harm in adding that Elvira — the wife of Severin Spiridon, who lived up in the mountains — would later become my lover. In any case, that day she introduced herself with a large basket of blackberries and a satchel full of parasol mushrooms.

A few hundred bears were kept in the Dobrin conservation area, and since they were partial to blackberries and parasol mushrooms, we delivered these from the fruit depot I oversaw.

As I couldn’t help but notice, this woman — a trembling, fidgety tendril, a fiery snake, and a red-hot titmouse all at once — was suddenly limping dramatically. That got me thinking: if only a thorn were to pierce the sole of that foot, why then it would be my job to remove it. Well, it may have been a ridiculous wish, but Heaven heard it. While I emptied the basket of blackberries into a barrel and spread the mushroom caps about on a sieve, Elvira Spiridon sat on my threshold and, to my delight, with the bronze loops of her enormous earrings flashing about, she set about wrestling with the sandal strap around her ankle. I didn’t hesitate a bit. I knelt down before her, placed her foot in my lap, and unwrapped the white felt rag she used for a sock. Her stubby little foot was still tan from gathering in the hay that summer, and a purple web of veins filigreed over the surface. Her sole was tender, moist, and practically pink, as if she tiptoed all day. Cutting into it was not a thorn, really, but a thin, tiny, and nonetheless prickly golden-silvery thistle leaf. Naturally I pulled it out with my teeth. Then, after letting it glitter a moment on the tip of my fingernail, I licked it before tucking it under my shirt. Meanwhile I was clutching Elvira Spiridon’s foot in my hand. Had someone spotted us just then, he might have understood that I was simply introducing myself to her.

Sure enough, someone really was lounging about nearby. Without so much as a rustle, all at once a silhouette with colored edges appeared on the threshold: the Red Rooster. Could it have been anyone else? The leather satchel’s mounts and clasps gleamed blindingly. In his right hand was a plastic bag, and wriggling about in the murky water inside this bag was a silver-bellied fish shaped like an oval platter.

“Andrei,” he said, addressing me without further adieu by my first name: “Take this to Colonel Borcan. Before the sun sets.”

“Sure,” I agreed, embarrassed by the proximity of Elvira Spiridon. “Just put it down over there.”

By then Colonel Borcan was no longer alive, but that wasn’t any of the Red Rooster’s business. I threw the plastic bag, with the fish inside, into an empty barrel, and as soon as the stranger left I hurried after Elvira Spiridon — who, glittering earrings and all, was dashing away in fright into the marshy meadow with one foot still bare, the sandal dangling in her hand. In vain I conjured up one flattering word after another: they flew past her ears to no avail. It seemed she had lost heart on encountering the Red Rooster.

Back then, in any case, I happened to be wooing Aranka Westin. As far as I could tell from subtle cues, the old bag wasn’t exactly indifferent to me, and so I got to fantasizing: maybe, just maybe, one night while her boyfriend made his rounds of the barracks, cutting the infantrymen’s hair, Aranka would scurry right out of the village in nothing but a flimsy nightshirt or perhaps even stark naked and make her way along the little stream straight to the fruit depot, where I lived all alone. She, too, worked for the mountain infantry, as a seamstress, so apart from such fantasies I would in fact regularly check in on her, sometimes late in the day, on the pretext of frayed collars or dangling buttons.

This is what happened after the Red Rooster’s sudden autumn visit: I woke up in the middle of the night to the cackling of wild geese driven toward the Sinistra peaks by the thick clouds of chimney smoke enveloping the open country to the east. The dead silence of such frosty nights was broken regularly by the passing birds, whose stifled calls — not at all unlike the occasional mewlings of the track watchman’s clarinet — rattled down chimneys and echoed in ash-laden stoves until the crack of dawn. As on that night, this disquieting sound invariably woke me up, reminding me of my solitude and conjuring up thoughts of Aranka Westin.

Deep inside the village yards, through the latticework of denuded plum tree branches, light still issued from her window. I tore a button off my jacket and, after stealthily climbing over a few fences, before long I was there, tapping on Aranka Westin’s window.

She reached out for the jacket. Stitching while I stood there at her window, she asked, “What the hell was that red stranger doing up by you?’

“You mean the Rooster? Oh, I don’t even remember — nothing, I think. He only asked if he could use the outhouse.”

“Now, now, Andrei, don’t you get mixed up in anything. Everyone knows he left a plastic bag with you. I hear there’s a silver fish inside, a really nice one.”

This irritated me so much that, on getting home, I took the fish, which was still busily writhing in the barrel, to the outhouse at the far end of the yard and dropped it in the hole. I wanted to keep my mouth shut about the whole thing; I had no desire to wind up in some affair that would get me banished from the Sinistra Zone — where I’d gone years earlier after getting wind of the fact that my adopted son, Béla Bundasian, had been exiled to a conservation area there. I’d come here hoping to pick up his trail. It would have been a shame to now let down my guard and ruin everything I’d managed to attain by now; after all, I’d gotten myself appointed Harvest Coordinator.

But something was up. At dawn the following day the Red Rooster came back again. Unkempt, bathed in sweat, his hair matted, and mud-stained up to his thighs, he made his way hastily across the weedy meadow. His hair didn’t even look fiery now; but his skin, his ears burned with terror and rage, and his nostrils flared.

“For god’s sake, Andrei,” he hissed, “Why didn’t you tell me Colonel Borcan was dead?”

Why, indeed. I shrugged. Because.

He wanted the fish, and as soon as he realized that I hadn’t eaten the thing, and knew where it could now be found, he ran off to scoop it out. He then scrubbed it clean in the stream, wrapped it in a burdock leaf, tucked it into his dappled calfskin satchel, and left, disappearing forever from Dobrin.

A new forest commissioner, Izolda Mavrodin, arrived to replace Colonel Borcan as commander of the mountain infantry. My life changed. And one blustery spring day I, too, disappeared from there.

Many years later, a Greek passport in my pocket, I rolled about the roads of the Sinistra Zone in my sparkling new, four-wheel drive, metallic green Suzuki jeep and spent a day, just a day, in Dobrin. I arrived via the Baba Rotunda Pass, figuring I’d take a quick look for my one-time lover, Elvira Spiridon, amid those meadows of thyme; or, more precisely, on the upper floor of the cottage she shared with her husband, Severin Spiridon, in a roadside clearing.

But where their house had once stood lay just a heap of dark blue cinders drenched with rain and ice. Tender young blades of grass, along with fresh sprouts of nettle and saffron, encircled the spot: almost certainly their grave.

It was late afternoon. The eastern horizon was ablaze with clouds of woe: a heavy, orange-red cumulus bank. Lately, such distant passing clouds — creamy, puffy, resplendent towers that faded into the purple veils of night — had been conjuring up the past and making me a bit sad. I left the jeep by the side of the road and, crestfallen, walked along the edge of the forest to a few familiar spots.

Winding through the clearing before me were two tight parallel bands of depressed soil that sparkled in the reflection of the clouds — ice or, it seemed, maybe glass. All at once it hit me that these were my own old ski tracks. Left over from the final winter I’d spent here in the pass, they snaked their way through the incandescent spring grass and, finally, into the darkness of the forest. Anyone who has skied through woods knows how the snow — if you pass over your own tracks several times — gets packed down underneath, sometimes melting just so, then freezing over and over again. Even once such a double set of tracks melts, an impression is left behind, a silky, silvery sheen that fades entirely only by early summer. Sometimes it never does.

•

That last winter I skied every day along the meandering subterranean streams of the Kolinda forest, which break the surface here and there. A few unauthorized recluses had been hiding there from the mountain infantry in dank, underground lairs and caves; no promises or requests could get them to emerge. At first the authorities had me set traps for them; then, in the end, we simply cemented up the cave openings. That’s why I skied about this area with sacks of cement on my back, always on the same tracks, for weeks on end. Cement is heavy, mind you, and under my weight the snow had crystallized, like diamonds.

Lost in reveries of my bygone life, I then noticed two parched red wigs hanging from a spruce tree, swinging back and forth in the wind. Skewering them with a twig, I examined the wigs up close: one was a head of hair; the other, judging by its form, was a beard. In a shaded corner of the clearing lay a young man, stretched out on the slimy fallen leaves of spring, snoring loudly in his dreams as flies buzzed all around him. On his side, a mottled calfskin satchel; beside him, an empty bottle, tipped over. He resembled someone I knew. I hurried away.

Now a foreigner, I took a room in the Dobrin Inn after registering my arrival with the authorities. But once darkness fell — and after just a couple of drinks, of course — I sneaked out and spent the night with my onetime girlfriend, Aranka Westin. She was the one who then informed me that Colonel Borcan had been sentenced posthumously to death — it turned out that he and a Polish colonel had been cooking up some scheme, and the Pole had been in the habit of smuggling messages, and sometimes real dollars, across the border to Colonel Borcan in the bellies of fish.

But I didn’t want to hear a thing about that affair.

After all, as an essential part of the story, it should also be noted that we didn’t let all the time that had passed us by keep us from a little reunion that night, under the cover of darkness. There I was lolling beside her, feeling my pulse, and just beginning to muse about staying near Aranka Westin for at least one more day, when that clarinet-like, caterwauled shrieking from high above us broke the spell: wild geese were announcing their presence in the clouds over Dobrin. As could be heard unmistakably through the silence of the night, they were coming from the south, from the Kolinda forest, and turning overhead suddenly north, toward Pop Ivan Mountain. I felt their calls to the tips of my little fingers. There’s not a sound more disquieting than theirs.

So when the mountain infantry came to get me around dawn — stating that since I’d secretly left my designated lodgings, they must revoke my residence permit and ban me forever from the Sinistra Zone — I’d long been wide awake, waiting for morning, waiting to finally be done with the place.