The Sinistra Zone

11. SEVERIN SPIRIDON'S SURPRISE

The ramshackle little bus that made its way once a day over three mountain ranges between Sinistra and the Kolinda forest mainly transported the mountain infantrymen who patrolled the area, but also a few civilians who, with permits in their pockets, worked in one of the small high-altitude settlements. And when there were passengers, the bus stopped at the Baba Rotunda Pass, too, which was marked by a rust-eaten, paint-splotched iron post that would sway back and forth in the wind, its sign covered with drops of water left behind by a cloud tumbling through the pass and brushing the ground. Its creaking could be heard even through the closed window of the cabin where road worker Andrei Bodor lived.

One afternoon, well after the bus had passed by on its way from the Kolinda forest to Sinistra, a man came ambling across those snow-patched, crocus-dotted mountain meadows. His odd, sidling gait was reminiscent of a clumsy dog as he kept glancing left and right to avoid the black glitter of the snowmelt brooklets running haphazardly about. On reaching the road he paused, hesitating: he just leaned out over the paved surface, as if worried that its current would sweep him in one direction or the other. For a while he stood about, looking puzzled until he turned his head toward the creaking bus-stop sign. He then crouched down on the ground, planting himself at its foot: a wayfarer waiting for the bus.

He wore a black vinyl jacket, trousers glossy with grime, and a miner’s helmet with a black visor. Hanging over his shoulder from a crooked walking stick was a black suitcase stuffed round. His skin was gray, his face shiny and hairless, with only a bit of sparse stubble around his chin. Oily eyes sparkled from shadowy, purple sockets.

The road worker, Andrei, kept a lookout from behind the window of his cabin, taking stock of the stranger through the 8 x 30 binoculars he’d gotten from Coca Mavrodin and that always hung on the doorknob. Through its lens the gray stranger was now wriggling about on the ground.

Occasionally he rose to stand beside the iron post, cupping his ears and peering out at the horizon suspiciously this way and that, and sometimes nervously jerking his head toward a passing flock of crows. He would also stare angrily at the late afternoon sun, whose languid yellow rays broke through narrow, leech-shaped clouds. From the corner of his eye he watched the road worker’s cabin, too, as if aware that someone might be watching him from behind the window.

Someone was in fact watching him. Andrei had spent the previous night sitting up beside a dead bear warden — though he’d been officially relieved of his job as corpse watchman, he was often called upon to help out — and in the morning, when Colonel Titus Tomoioaga began his shift, the two of them had shared a little bottle of watered-down denatured alcohol. The colonel let Andrei in on the fact that a curfew was now in effect in Sinistra, and that maybe one would be announced here, in Dobrin City, as well. During the night someone had toppled the statue of Géza Kökény, so everyone would do well to stay home. Ever since the Sinistra puppeteers had held a dress rehearsal on the streets and the mountain infantry had opened fire on them, patrols were roaming the village streets as well. Wherever you looked, long-necked young men, the gray ganders, were peering over fences into yards. Coal-scratched graffiti loomed on front gates and plank fences, slogans like “WE'RE WITH YOU!” or “THE LEAGUE IS WAITING FOR YOU TOO.” With a heated iron bar, someone had burned into a wood fence: “PIGS.”

It was toward the end of March, and the air was laden with disquieting scents; catkin pollen and flies were flitting about. At the bottom of the valley, the stream raged from all the snowmelt. Andrei had been on foot, halfway to the pass on the winding mountain road, when the afternoon bus passed by coming from the opposite direction, from the Kolinda forest. All its windows were smashed in, and its passengers were not mountain infantrymen, but gray-skinned men in miner’s helmets. A heavy, suffocating smell had lingered in their wake.

He was sipping at his first drink of the day in the road worker’s cabin when the stranger flashed before him at the far end of the clearing against the backdrop of the distant patches of snow. Before long his miner’s helmet glimmered near the road as the man planted himself at the foot of the iron post. He kept turning his head this way and that, but mostly toward that corner of the clearing beyond which, behind a cluster of spruces and firs, smoke was pouring from the chimney of Severin Spiridon’s cabin. Then he refocused his attention on a stray dog crossing a nearby clearing — and once again he looked suspiciously at the road worker’s cabin, behind the window of which Andrei, the road worker, was watching him. Every time the stranger looked up, his hard vinyl jacket crackled over his frame.

Time passed — the hopeless silence of twilight enveloped the clearings along with purple mists — and finally the stranger had had enough of waiting. He stood up beside the iron post and headed up the slightly ascending trail toward the road worker’s cabin. His helmet shimmered before him, reflecting sunlight that kept disappearing and then reappearing from behind a passing cloud. He went up the steps, and was just in the process of casting a shadow over his face with his palm, so as to peer through the window, when Andrei opened the door.

He looked exactly as he had in the binoculars: skin shiny and gray, unshaven but not bristly; he was the sort of fellow with just a sparse, hesitating film of stubble over his chin. His smell was staggering, as suffocating as a rural train-station waiting room — liquor, flea powder, and the kerosene used to mop the floors.

“What do you know about the bus?” he inquired quietly. “I mean, why doesn’t it come?”

“It’s already passed by,” said the road worker.

“And the next one?”

“Only tomorrow afternoon.”

Brushing against Andrei’s chest, the stranger now stepped over the threshold and proceeded to walk once around the table in the middle of the cabin. He himself then closed the front door and turned the key in the lock from the inside. Letting it slip off the end of his hiking stick, his suitcase plopped to the floor with a heavy thud, as if packed full of rocks.

“Then I’m sleeping here,” he said, unfastening his hard, cracked vinyl jacket; it crackled as he sat down at the table. Meanwhile his odor, like oil on water, spread through the cabin. As the jacket opened in front of his belly, it was apparent that his trousers were held up not by a belt but by a thick wire, which had a big loop where a buckle would have been, and lodged within that loop was a sharp-edged rock. He pulled a bottle from his inside jacket pocket.

“Want some?” he asked, glancing curtly at the road worker as he uncorked the bottle.

“Maybe later,” said Andrei, declining the offer, pushing a mug over the table to the stranger.

But the other man drank straight from the bottle, sending bubbles racing the moment it touched his lips. After the first couple of gulps he removed his vinyl jacket and his helmet, placing them both on the table. His shiny gray scalp was matted with thin, sweaty strands of hair.

“Lie down for a rest now,” said Andrei. “You can’t stay here for long. I don’t spend my nights alone, but with a woman.”

“I said I’m staying here.”

Andrei stuffed the stove with sawdust, spruce cones, and hard juniper roots, then lit a fire. He then went out to the verandah to bring in an armful of damp logs to dry out inside. By the time he returned, the stranger had moved from the table to the edge of the plank bed.

“Really no need to make a fire on account of me. My dad was an ice seller. We used to go out to the Kolinda forest to saw blocks of ice in the ice caves. The old man used to wrap them up in hay and carry them on his own back to the market for the rich people. Our family doesn’t get chilled easily.”

“This is the first time I’ve heard of the Kolinda ice caves.”

“You’ll never hear about them again, either. From what I hear, all sorts of people started to use them as hiding places, so they sealed them shut. With cement.”

He stretched out his legs under the table and rolled up the sleeves of his grass-green sweater and the shirt underneath. His arms, laced with blue veins, were hairless and gray. Above a thin sinewy neck was a blunt chin. His eyes were oily, like elderberries.

“Are your papers in order?” asked the road worker.

“Mine?”

“This is a border zone, in case you didn’t know, They keep government bears nearby.”

“My papers? Yes indeed, mark my words. In perfect order. Mine, of all papers! You can rest assured about them —”

“Okay, well then get yourself some rest. If you leave in the middle of the night, by morning you can catch the early morning train in Dobrin.”

“That’s what I figured, too.”

The road worker took the binoculars off the door knob and then scanned the snowmelt-soaked meadows visible from the window. Night was coming, and dusk, which had already consumed the forest, now began enveloping everything at its edge. This was when Elvira Spiridon usually left home.

“Can I take a look, too?”

“Sure, go ahead. But you won’t see anything worth looking at.”

“I just want to see what you do.”

“Here, take a peek. And tell me, if it’s not a big secret: which way are you headed?”

After scanning the meadows, the stranger raised the binoculars higher to take in the ranges, and finally to the single cloud, which was glimmering like mother-of-pearl above the ridge in the light of the moon.

“Which way? I’ve got to be in Sinistra by morning, at the market. Something will be happening there.”

“I’ve never seen you around here, you know.”

“You’ve never seen me? No, you’ve never seen me. I’m not, you see — to use your words — from around here. My father and I would dare to go only as far as the Kolinda forest to saw blocks of ice. Earlier, as you know, that’s where the border was. I don’t know my way around here. I wanted to take a shortcut but lost my way. And meanwhile that damn bus went by.”

Night was falling; Elvira Spiridon had set off from home. Although the stranger still held the binoculars, the woman’s path could be made out from the birds taking flight before her. When her sloshing steps could be heard in the mud, Andrei went down to the road to get her.

“There’s a man here,” he said.

“The one with the black bag?”

“Yes.”

Elvira Spiridon turned on her heels and headed back toward the house that was in fact her home. The road worker looked after her helplessly, staring with desire at the pleats of her skirt swaying back and forth over the curves of her behind. He kept his eye on her until she vanished amid a thicket of spruces and firs at a bend in the road. It was dark; every last cloud had disappeared from the sky; cold had descended into the pass; and between the rocks the mud began rustling as it hardened in the sudden freeze.

“I saw you send her away,” said the stranger, breaking into a smile. “What a shame. Where’s the poor thing going now?”

“To her husband.”

The stranger’s plum brandy was bitter. The steam surging from his nostrils as he gulped it down flashed hypnotically in the light of the fire. The road worker placed a tin plate in front of him along with a little water in a sheet-metal mug.

“If you get hungry, eat your cheese. I can smell it on you. You can get that sort of thing in your parts these days?”

“Oh, no. The only ones who got cheese got it on the road today. It would have been damn good to get to Sinistra by tonight. Like I said, something is happening there tomorrow.”

“Get yourself some rest. Then make sure you’re on your way before daybreak. Are you with the army?”

“With the army? I’ll find that out tomorrow, too. The league will tell us who we’re with.”

The stranger presently loosened his trousers at the waist, and the sharp-edged rock fell from the loop to the floor and rolled away. The road worker got a pair of long-nose pliers, and while helping the stranger set the rock back into its mount, he noticed that the wire belt wrapped around the man’s waist several times. The man sat patiently as Andrei tinkered at his belt.

“And what’s it you do?”

“I work for the mountain infantry,” said Andrei. “I’m in charge of this stretch of highway.”

“Well, that’s something! I thought it had to be this stretch of road. I figured you’re an important fellow.”

“Whatever you say, but you know, all the territory around here is off limits. It’s all the mountain infantry’s.”

“Yeah, of course. Who’s in command of the mountain infantry?”

“Coca Mavrodin.”

“A woman? You’re telling me it’s a woman?”

“You got it.”

“Well, it’s not out of the question then that tomorrow, as soon as we take power, I’ll have intercourse with her.”

“Oh yes, when she sees you,” said Andrei, taking stock of his guest, “she’ll really want that, too.”

The road worker now trimmed the wick on the hurricane lamp, lit it, and hung it on a long pole fixed to the gable of the cabin. They nearly had a falling out over this, for the stranger preferred that the cabin remain inconspicuous that night. But Andrei took the official list of road workers’ rules and regulations off the wall and stuck it in the other man’s face.

“All right already,” said the stranger, rejecting the gesture with an open palm. “You don’t seriously think I’m about to read all that, do you? Get it out of my face. All I’m saying is that I don’t want some drifter winding up here on account of that flickering light. I don’t mean the lady, of course.”

“Later on I might fetch her, but I’ll wait till you’re asleep. It would be nice after you’ve gone to find her warm backside near me. In the meantime you can stretch out on the bed.”

“Forget it. Don’t you dare leave this shack — get it through your head that there won’t be any more coming and going around here.”

“I usually stand on the porch to piss.”

“I’ll go with you. How do I know you wouldn’t be bringing some shady character down on my neck. After all, I don’t really know you.”

From the window the stranger had watched the road worker hang the hurricane lamp from the gable, disappearing around the corner of the cabin but soon reappearing out front, having walked around it. The moon was already above the ridgeline, the mud had frozen, and the pitter-patter of the stray dog’s paws could be heard from the clearing. When Andrei got back inside, the stranger happened to be browsing the wall calendar — an old, fly-stained calendar from many years before, left there with its curled yellow corners, from the days of the previous road worker, Zoltán Marmorstein.

“What is this all about?” asked the stranger. “What sorts of numbers are these?”

“These numbers just show the days of the year, that’s all.”

“Are you Hungarian?”

“Half.”

“Hm. That’s nothing.”

The stranger now stretched out on the plank bed, with his feet still in rubber boots propped on the headboard. Even while lying on his back he seemed to drink comfortably enough; only his Adam’s Apple kept jumping about wildly as the plum brandy in his bottle fizzled with thick bubbles. Slowly the fire waned, then died out, and the crackling of the flue as it cooled down lulled the stranger to sleep. His head nodded to the side, his mouth opened halfway, and drool began to flow, forming a narrow sparkling band to his shoulder. The league’s man had fallen asleep.

In his briefcase the sharp-edged rocks stirred, all by themselves.

Andrei the road worker tiptoed out of the cabin, removed the hurricane lamp from the gable, and carefully, to avoid crackling the veil-thin coating of ice under his feet on the freshly frozen puddles, crossed the road. On the clearing opposite him the stray dog’s silhouette tottered, its eyes sometimes flickering with the light of the hurricane lamp. For a while it trailed in the road worker’s wake, but midway there it sensed Severin Spiridon’s dog in the dark and, breaking into a lively pace, moved on ahead. By the time the road worker reached the gate, the two dogs were already silently chumming up. Severin Spiridon was crouching under the eaves, leaning up against the side of the cabin.

“You’ve crossed my mind several times,” he said to Andrei. “I’d gladly spend the night in the road worker’s cabin in your place. I couldn’t even shut my eyes; I just kept thinking of you.”

“The fellow is asleep.”

“But like I’m saying, I could have gone down right away, from the start — it just didn’t occur to me at first. I’m not afraid of these people. And besides, I’d do anything for you, you know.”

“Thanks.”

“If you want to stay here, I can still go down. I’m sure I’ll get along with him. I think I know his sort. The league is forming tomorrow in Sinistra.”

“Okay with me. Go ahead if you want. But be careful: his bag is full of sharp-edged rocks. He wears the sharpest of them on his belt, in place of the buckle, mounted in wire.”

“Trust me. Like I said, I get along with people like him.”

Severin Spiridon headed off as Andrei, standing on the steps, watched. Elvira Spiridon now emerged beside him in silence, their hips already touching, the steam mixing in front of their faces as they waited for the flashlight to fade away at the end of the rimy meadow.

“Have you already slept with him?” asked Andrei.

“Only a little, sir.”

“We should have a drink.”

They drank blackberry wine, with its mousy aftertaste, ladling it from a wide-mouthed pickle jar into small mugs. A labyrinthine, branching metal object glinted at times against the sole source of light in the room, from the open door of the stove. It was a hair clipper, which lay alone on the middle of the tablecloth, its fine blades protruding menacingly like a row of tiny horns where the handles met. Andrei reached toward it, warily; it was cold, delicate. He looked it over thoroughly.

“What’s this supposed to be?”

“My husband got it from the mountain infantrymen. The curfew is taking effect tomorrow. All the ones who must stay home have to cut off their hair.”

“There was talk of hair-cutting back in the days of barber Vili Dunka. But then it didn’t happen for some reason.”

“This time we’re supposed to do it ourselves. In fact I wanted to tell you, sir: tomorrow night, when I show up at your bedside, my hair will be gone.”

The road worker kept dipping his mug into the pickle jar and taking gulps of the blackberry wine. Elvira Spiridon meanwhile slipped under the blanket, naked, leaving just enough room beside her for the man.

When not drinking, Andrei was busy stuffing roots into the wood stove and tossing in lots of spruce cones, which burned with a strong, white light. He then reached for the clipper and sat down in the chair beside the plank bed.

“I’ve never cut my own hair in my life,” he whispered. “On the way here, I never thought today would be the day.”

Putting one arm around Elvira Spiridon’s shoulder, he positioned the clipper on the middle of his forehead, and began snipping, going on over the top of his head and down to the nape of his neck, then back again. As he might have done with some freshly ironed silk ties, he placed the fallen locks in a row over the back of the chair. Once he’d finished, and when the woman’s bare head also shone, he dipped his mug into the pickle jar one more time.

But he took only a short break: no sooner had he emptied his mug than he folded back the blanket over Elvira Spiridon and placed the clipper on her belly, under her navel. With slow, tiny snips he proceeded downward, where a thick pelt of hair loomed darkly.

“They would have let us know, sir, if we also had to do it down there.”

“This is my first time trying this,” whispered the road worker, “so please, don’t move.”

She tensed up briefly, but as soon as the clippers grew warm against her skin, Elvira Spiridon relaxed, opening up so Andrei could access every single bit of her, every little mat of fur. Finally he took her in his lap, puckered his lips, and attentively blew his way over her body until not a strand of hair or fur was left.

“If I leave this place one day,” he whispered into her ear in the middle of the night, “maybe I’ll ask Severin Spiridon if he’ll let me take you. If I were to decide to take you along.”

“Give it a try, sir,” Elvira Spiridon whispered back. “My husband would no doubt let you have me.”

“I know I am talking about leaving this place — lately these thoughts are going through my head, but I hope you’ll kindly keep this to yourself.”

“Keep it to myself? Don’t ask me such a thing, sir.”

In the morning Elvira Spiridon tied a kerchief around her head, a kerchief she’d stuffed full of all the shorn locks of hair. The road worker meanwhile went about cutting fresh firewood to set by the stove, so Severin Spiridon would have yet another surprise. As he chopped up the old spruce logs, fat grubs plopped from the peeling bark to the gray, frozen ground, and even as he was swinging his axe and wood shavings were flying all about, massive crows swooped down to pick the grubs away.

“Isn’t your belly cold?” asked the road worker as they walked in each other’s steps toward his cabin. “Tell me the truth, please.”

“I’m not exactly warm, sir.”

“God knows what came over me. My nerves are shot. I had a really strange day yesterday.”

“But sir, I think that even without hair you desire me.”

“Oh yes, very much.”

In the road worker’s cabin Severin Spiridon was stretched out in his clothes, restlessly asleep, on the plank bed. The creaking of the floor as Andrei and Elvira Spiridon entered sent the bottle under the bed rolling to the middle of the room. In the center of the table, untouched and wrapped in newspaper, was a block of cheese left behind by the man of the League. As they peeled off the damp newsprint, they saw gray letters on the cheese. Severin Spiridon soon awoke, and recounted that by the time he had gotten there that night, the man of the League was gone. He’d left behind only that block of cheese and the bottle, which had in it just a little bitter plum brandy, but the entire cabin was permeated by the dreaded train station waiting room smell.

“Turn on the radio, please,” said Severin Spiridon.

“Not now,” the road worker replied.

“I’d like to know what’s happening. The League is forming today in Sinistra. Please turn it on.”

“I’m not the sort to listen to the radio. In any case, the radio can’t be listened to just now — take a look for yourself: no batteries.” The road worker showed him the broken, empty compartment in the back of the radio where someone had ripped out the batteries.

He now produced a little bottle of denatured alcohol, poured some into two mugs half-filled with water, then mixed in some spruce shavings he’d whittled with a knife, so as to allow the resin to soak in the bouquet.

“If you’ll allow me,” said Severin Spiridon around noon, “I’ll take the woman along with me now.”

Looking them over, Andrei first rested his eyes on Elvira Spiridon’s matronly kerchief stuffed full of hair, then fixed them on her waist.

“Sure,” he nodded.

“That man’s smell has rattled me a bit, and I’d rather not be alone — let her spend the whole day with me, and at night I’ll send her on her way, as usual.”

“Take her. She’s yours, after all.”

Standing all alone for a bit at the window, which was buzzing with springtime flies, Andrei kept sipping at the liquor, staring out at the open areas beyond, and at the clouds passing by above them. Later, well into the afternoon, he took a walk on those spongy, snowmelt-sodden meadows. Not a soul stirred. About the couple of farms in the pass, only an orange-red fox tail flared up now and again behind the shriveling piles of snow by the woods, back among two purple heaps of ice.

He was on his way home again when a row of trucks, headlights beaming, approached on the steep winding road, making their way up toward the top of the pass. Each was covered by a canvas tarp. Cudgels, chains, and iron rods rattled in some of the trucks; others were packed full of slumped-over, dozing men. That suffocating scent of train station waiting rooms eddied in their wake.

Near the road worker’s cabin, in one of the tire tracks, Andrei found an eyeball: solitary, coated with all the sticky grit and yellow fluid of mud, but an eyeball just the same — fallen, surely, from one of the canvas-covered trucks. Its oily shimmer was like one eye of that man of the League.

With the cabin still permeated by the stranger’s smell, the road worker left the door open as he stepped in, and then opened the window. Until dusk he stood in the draft, leaning on the windowsill, puffing on his thyme-stuffed Pope. Then, carrying a bucket of water and a little camp shovel, he went down to the road, figuring that no matter whose it had been, he would bury that single eye. But he no longer found it there.

An orange-red double ribbon, a sunlit vapor trail, shimmied against the purple sky like the ski tracks the road worker had left on the clearings in the pass. Sitting in front of the open window, he waited; the scents of spring already hovered in the air, and even after dusk birdsong came in waves from the forest. Smoke soon rose straight up in the absence of a breeze from the wood-tile roof of Severin Spiridon’s cabin, swathing the moon in a silvery light.

“From now on I’ll wait for her in vain,” Andrei Bodor, the road worker, thought to himself. “The curfew came into force today.”

He was a bit annoyed at having been duped: his sly neighbor had secretly counted on that when taking his wife along home. And yet the road worker also imagined that the other man, too, would be in for a bit of a surprise when, kneeling in the sharp incandescence of glowing hot spruce cones, facing Elvira Spiridon’s bare belly, he would face the naked truth.