The Sinistra Zone

14. BÉLA BUNDASIAN'S FIRE

On the last day of his life, Béla Bundasian awoke to find himself all alone in Géza Hutira’s cabin. Freezing rain had been pattering all night against the wood shingle roof, and in the early morning, when it suddenly stopped, a bleak silence went on hissing in the empty room, the quivering ash droning inside the stove. But then the flue resounded with a hooting noise: the owls Coca Mavrodin had promised had no doubt arrived.

Descending from the attic, he saw that the cottage had been abandoned. Missing were Géza Hutira’s rubberized, hooded windbreaker, which at other times would have been hanging from the doorknob; his bag; his binoculars; and even his crampons. The hay on the empty plank bed still bore the impression of Bebe Tescovina’s curled up frame, and hovering in the air above it, it seemed, was the odor of nascent milk. But the happy couple was far away by now.

Outside, everything — every piece of wood, every stone, each of the few steps up to the cabin — was sheathed by the drizzle’s icy glaze. Pressing his hands against the cabin’s exterior stone wall to keep from slipping, Béla Bundasian managed to walk its length, then a few more steps over the ice to the nearby shed. There he rummaged about for screws, which he drilled into the soles of his hiking boots so he, too, could get on the road all the sooner. Once the freezing rain had passed, the peaks and mountain slopes opposite sparkled with a diamond-like light, as if liquid glass had poured all over them, and all around the cabin, blades of grass tinkled in the wind like cups clinking against each other.

From deep in the forest down in the valley came a metallic scratching, the jingling of crampons. But it was only an echo: by then Géza Hutira and Bebe Tescovina were already traversing the precipices along the top of the ridge.

Donning his glasses, Béla Bundasian soon caught a glimpse of them on high. At first the two appeared to be a single, point-like object that kept appearing and disappearing among the crags, but soon the rising sun projected the contours of the entire range onto a passing cloud of freezing rain, magnifying Géza Hutira’s silhouette. With soaring steps he swished above the ridge, carrying Bebe Tescovina on his shoulders, his head bent forward to keep from pressing against the child’s belly. Clouds carried them off toward the Ukraine.

Béla Bundasian filled the pocket of his jacket with dried mushrooms, dried cranberries, and beechnuts. With a pickaxe he then smashed in the door, bashed in the window and the roof shingles, and even managed to ravage the stone wall with a few choice blows to the corner of the cabin — paving the way for the rains and winds to come. Hands clasped, he now kneeled in front of the ruins, but when the wind swept a piece of string before him, he snatched it up and tied his glasses around his neck to keep them from being lost, when knocked off by the branches that, he knew, would tear at his face as he bushwhacked his way down the slope.

Gripping onto rocks, branches, and clumps of grass, he made his way down into the valley. Behind him, the cabin’s now exposed beams were already occupied by crows.

Further down, an ungainly mass of ice loomed near the bubbling spring. Frozen inside was a glittering red star from a gray mountain infantry cape’s collar.

At the commissary, birds whooshed about among the cabin’s broken windows and the threshold, as if now furnished with a welcome mat, was moss-covered, with two yawning marmots on top.

In the guard booth, lying on his back and snoring on the plank bed, was Colonel Jean Tomoioaga.

“Don’t take my waking you up the wrong way,” Béla Bundasian whispered into his ear, “but I’ve noticed that everyone is taking off while I stay behind scot free. Please put me under arrest.”

“I can’t. Don’t even ask — you’ve been erased from the records — as far as we’re concerned you no longer exist. Get out of here, leave.”

“For god’s sake you could at least try. You got rid of Elvira Spiridon — and I killed someone, after all.”

“Whether you killed someone or not, that’s your business. I suggest you steer clear of Dobrin: no one around here knows you anymore.”

Willow catkin pollen hovered in the air above the Sinistra River along with the sound of thrushes singing and the heady fragrance of daphnes.

Once he was near the village, Béla Bundasian veered off the road, went around a boggy meadow full of dwarf birches and black alders, and then went around Dobrin City itself, which was for all intents and purposes off limits to him. At the far end of the village, at the foot of Pop Ivan Mountain, he finally reached the north-south highway. Glaring in one fold of the slope were the blue and yellow walls of the gas station.

“What day is it today?” he asked on arriving at the station.

“Monday, Tuesday, something like that,” replied Géza Kökény, the attendant.

“So it’s not Thursday.”

“Not a chance. That much I know.”

Béla Bundasian lay down for a rest, stretching out on his back for a little while in a roadside clearing. He stared up at the clouds, at the birds passing by above him, at the insects zigzagging about in the air. Then he sat up and watched the winding mountain road. Hours passed; not a single vehicle went by. He staggered to his feet, moved his numb limbs, stretched, and walked around the gas station.

“How about a round of nine-men’s morris?” asked Géza Kökény.

“I just happen to have the time — if you agree not to cheat.”

They drew the board on the oily ground and moved the pieces — stones and pieces of wood — around with their feet. No one disturbed them; no one pulled up to the station. In the afternoon, a solitary horse strode over the meadow across the highway on its way to a nearby watering hole. Its pale, badgery hue was like that of the snowmelt-soaked mountainside.

The two men followed this horse with their eyes: like some divine messenger, secret signals of light glimmered all along its mane as it ambled silently on.

“And if by chance it was Thursday, it still wouldn’t do you any good. Mustafa Mukkerman isn’t coming anymore. So there’s no point in waiting around here.”

“That makes things look different: maybe I should rethink my day.”

“I couldn’t keep silent about it. Here at the station you can get oil and gas, but unfortunately I can’t help out with anything else.”

On finishing the game, Béla Bundasian once again walked around the station, and again he stretched out on the roadside clearing, chewing on the seeds, the dried mushrooms, and the dried cranberries in his pocket. He dozed off a bit, too, amid the distant rumble of the mountain infantrymen’s jeeps as they crossed from smooth, grassy ground onto the rough highway. Then, silence anew. He awoke with a start, patted down his empty pockets and the rest of his body, and staggered to his feet. He stretched, spit once or twice, farted, then ambled over to the gas station and woke up Géza Kökény.

“All right, then give me a can of gasoline and a container of oil.”

He paid with the twenty dollar bill his stepfather had once given him. He got so much change in return — in coins in the local currency — that all his pockets were overflowing. Swinging the can of gasoline at his side, he crossed the road to the meadow, ambled along the tracks left by the badger-hued saintly horse, toward the far end, over by the old mill, the onetime fruit depot.

By now he felt to the bone that these were the final steps of his life, and a wild passion came over him: at first his ragged trousers showed only a bulge, but then his penis broke through the front buttons and sprung out into the air, pointing at the sky.

Béla Bundasian stopped at the bank of the stream, where the grove of willows obscured his view of the village; above the bloomy catkins slowly vanishing diamond peaks still shone. Freshly blossomed dark blue flowers — dwarf gentians — fluttered in the yellowish-green grass before his feet like burning candles. He removed his hiking boots, placed them carefully beside each other, and stuffed his toe-rags inside. Like before bedtime, he would have been happy to take a piss, but he quickly gave up on the idea: as a man he knew that that was a no-go just now, not with his member as stiff as a flagpole. There was nothing to be done about that. And so he listlessly picked a gentian flower and tried pinning it to the opening of his urethra. But it just popped back out, falling to his feet like a tiny blue candle — a candle whose flame, he imagined, would soon set him ablaze.

Even his fingernails glowed red hot; his ears and the tip of his nose threw off sparks; his pockets ripped out, sending all those coins bouncing about the ground, scorching the grass, smoldering the dirt. Even the frames of his glasses melted, but the heat kept the lenses hovering before his eyes for a good long while yet, and so before he went sprawling into the stream, to be swept away like flakes of lichen, he must have caught a glimpse of the curious onlookers assembled around him, their eyes reflecting the scene all with the glassy indifference that is a stranger’s due, and no doubt he was almost sorry about the whole thing.

Years later I turned up once again in Dobrin, and there met Géza Kökény, too. He swore it wasn’t the stream that had swept him away but, rather, the wind, which had carried him off bit by bit over the course of a week or two, sizzling and smoldering among the blossoming gentians like a wet log in a fire, and during that time the badger-hued horse avoided the meadow on the way to its watering hole.