The Sinistra Zone

7. BEBE TESCOVINA'S BLOOD

Early one morning a mountain infantryman dropped in on the assistant coroner — the onetime blackberry and blueberry authority, Andrei — in the road worker’s cabin in the Baba Rotunda Pass.The soldier waited until Elvira Spiridon had left, disappearing into the spruces in the direction of her husband’s farm, and then he’d stepped from the woods and headed for the cabin, alone there atop the pass. For his part, Andrei Bodor, as soon as he heard the approaching steps — crackling hard on the film of ice coating the road: the sound of someone bringing terrible news — cowered behind the door and, like a dog, pissed a few drops into the corner.

But the soldier brought only a package, one that carried an intimate message. From the satchel that hung at his side he pulled a second-hand uniform — a noncommissioned officer’s — along with a pair of rubber boots and tight knee-breeches. He told Andrei Bodor that they were heading off to Dobrin City and to put them on at once.

Andrei knew this couldn’t mean anything all that bad. In the Sinistra Zone, such cast-off, chevronless uniforms were worn by the mountain infantry’s inside men.

“I came on foot so we’d have time for a chat along the way.”

“What’s the use of chatting with me? About strawberries, blackberries, and long-eared owls?”

“Then let’s just get to the point. If you’ll allow me — ”

“Why? We don’t have much common ground.”

“Oh but we do — let’s not neglect Miss Coca. She’s the one who sent me. At first she misjudged you, but her opinion’s changed since then — just between us, she now holds you in high regard. And what’s more, she’s offering you a very sensitive job — of course, only if you accept, naturally. She’d like to send you to the conservation area.”

“I don’t have access. Colonel Borcan never gave me permission.”

“Well, you’ve got it now. Miss Coca wants you to spend a night at the commissary. A little girl lives there, Bebe Tescovina. They say her eyes glow at night like a lynx. Miss Coca wants to find out if it’s true, and it wouldn’t hurt to get to the bottom of this.”

Back in the days of mining on the slopes above Dobrin, a narrow-gauge railway had led down to the loading ramps and slag heaps. Later, when ore production ceased and the bears were moved into the abandoned mine shafts, that railway came in handy to deliver fodder, fruit, trash, and horse carcasses — not to mention live donkeys — to those beasts. The former miners’ commissary still stood at the last stop on the route: now bear-keepers and forest rangers went there every night to drink, to play nine-men’s morris, dice, and dominoes, and to fry mushrooms and bird eggs on the stove.

Everyone around there knew Bebe Tescovina, the daughter of commissary manager Nikifor Tescovina, by her fiery red hair. Indeed, until the first snowstorm buried the railroad tracks, she would fly down to school in Dobrin City on a handcar, her hair like mountain ash berries blazing its way right past the gray gates and the watchful locals. Now it turned out that her eyes blazed too, and I was being asked to find out why.

“I’m no expert in such matters.”

“Don’t try kidding me. Also, there’s a little package waiting for you at the guard booth at the barracks that you are to take to Géza Hutira.”

“Géza Hutira. . Géza Hutira, who’s that? I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him.”

“He’s the meteorologist up in the conservation area. You can’t miss him, his hair reaches the ground. Hasn’t had it cut in twenty-three years.”

Andrei Bodor had waited five years for this day. Countless times he’d imagined the moment he and his adopted son would meet again. But not a muscle in his face moved on hearing the news.

“I know nothing about any of this — maybe I wouldn’t even find my way there.”

“I’m convinced you would.”

“You know, I’m not keen on rambling about the forest in the dead of winter. You can guess what I’m thinking: I might catch something. We haven’t gotten inoculations yet this year.”

“That’s true — Miss Coca stopped them. Said she didn’t like the idea of her men getting stuck full of pins. Said she’d come up with something else.”

The package waiting for Andrei at the guard booth was just a single aluminum pole. Well, not quite a pole, but a contraption of telescopic Popes extendible to quite some distance, with little holes of various sizes from which orange-red and yellow woolen threads dangled. Its purpose was a mystery. Placing it on his shoulder, Andrei headed off.

Across the road the bust of the heroic bear warden Géza Kökény was soot-black, what with the crows perched all over it. But as Andrei approached they flew off, and suddenly the monument shone snow-white from their droppings. This was both a good omen and not. The Red Cross jeep stood nearby, Coca Mavrodin’s moth-dusted face behind its window. One would not have taken her for a woman, had it not been for the pendant around her neck, emitting a fiery glitter: a five-pointed red star encased in a brass frame.

By the end of autumn passing snowfalls had only flecked the lower reaches of forest with gray slush, and even this had quickly melted off from the railway embankment and the narrow-gauge tracks. Andrei, the aluminum pole on his back, trudged right to the station to take the line-inspection handcar out to the conservation area: the tracks ended there, in front of Nikifor Tescovina’s commissary.

Halfway there, at the preserve entrance, a crossing gate barred the tracks. In his guard booth Colonel Jean Tomoioaga, noticing from a distance who was approaching, stepped onto the embankment to open the gate for Andrei.

Andrei applied the brakes and tied the handcar to the crossing gate to keep it from rolling back down the incline. The colonel, seeing that Andrei was in no hurry, pulled out the chess set from underneath his cot. Beside an open door they spread out a canvas board on the floor and pushed the ungainly little carved figures about: should anyone appear, the whole thing could be swept up in one motion.

Knowing that his friend had never gone beyond the fence, Colonel Jean Tomoioaga cautioned Andrei that after the crossing gate the grade began to ascend steeply, so it wouldn’t hurt to grease the axles thoroughly before heading out. The tallow was in a tub under the eaves of the guard booth, and in the tub was a broad wooden shovel. After the game, while Andrei went about smearing tallow over the axles, the colonel examined the aluminum pole. Extending it, he pulled the Popes out from one another until he noticed the name of the late forest commissioner, Colonel Puiu Borcan, engraved on one of the middle components.

So, even if the late colonel was not to be buried, it seemed then that the spot where he lay nailed to the ground and covered with plastic bags was to be marked with the bright aluminum pole, which could be seen from afar. The colored strings, meanwhile, especially the orange-red ones, would be visible even in thick fog, and the wind would whistle through the holes. Thus the spot could be located even at night if necessary, and even once entombed by blizzards.

“The soldiers who found him,” added Colonel Jean Tomoioaga, “say he was already a bit nibbled. By bats, of course.”

“Oh yes,” grumbled Andrei. “Very funny. Bats hibernate in winter.”

Having unfastened the handcar, Andrei stood behind the crank and drove on. Alongside the stream gushed downward with blinding clusters of foam, its din completely obscuring for him the creaking of the handcar. The sound of the wheels resounded far along the tracks, however — all the way to the last station, buzzing and droning in the trestles that signaled the end of the platform. It could be heard even in the commissary: when the handcar appeared around the final curve, Nikifor Tescovina was already waiting with folded arms at the end of the track.

“You’re looking for my little girl,” he said by way of greeting. “Unfortunately she’s not here. She went for a walk with Géza Hutira.”

Though winter was descending down the mountainsides in banks of roving gray mist, Nikifor Tescovina stood about in the mud with an uncovered head, in a tank top and moth-eaten army trousers, his bare feet in leather sandals. The mud around him was full of children’s barefoot tracks.

“First I’ll go find the meteorologist,” said Andrei. “On the way back I’ll spend the night here.”

“Yes, I know. But I might already be asleep, so let’s knock back a shot or two right now.”

The commissary comprised a single, dank room that smelled of mushrooms. At one end was a makeshift bar, behind which was a stove, ringed by sundry kitchen implements and appliances; in the corner, a wide cot. The three bear wardens cowering about in the room wore high-collared fatigue jackets glossy with grime, and cuirassed and otherwise covered with iron fittings and rivets — perhaps as protection against bear scratches. The chief warden, Doc Oleinek, was sprawled alone at a table, while the albino twins sat drinking on a narrow bench by the wall, arm in arm. According to the sheet-metal dog tags hanging from their necks, their names — and even among twins this is extremely rare — were the same: each was called Hamza Petrika. Seeing Andrei for the first time, they kept sticking their tongues out at him.

Nikifor Tescovina’s two dark-haired children now appeared as well, lured by the brilliantly-colored aluminum pole. They licked the glistening Popes and ran their fingers over the inscribed letters. They’d been the last to see Colonel Puiu Borcan alive; from the commissary the forest commissioner had headed off toward his final resting place. The colonel had been nearly transparent, so close was he to death: beside the table where he’d sat one last time to drink some hot spiced wine, only his outline trembled; translucent from fever, his great big flaccid ears had sparkled like crumpled cellophane. By the time they found him, so it was said, he’d already been nipped at and then some.

“I’m afraid I’ll be disturbing you a bit tonight.”

“Go ahead and come. As I say, I know what’s up.”

The trail that led to the meteorologist’s cabin started at the bottom of a narrow dale across a meadow full of tiny mounds from the commissary. At the edge of this meadow was Gábriel Dunka, the dwarf, roaming about among the mounds on all fours. He wore shoulder-length gloves, and from time to time stuck his entire arm into the ground, into a mysterious little shaft. For a long time he’d been doing business on the side with Nikifor Tescovina, catching marmots for him in the commissary meadow: every time a train or a hand-operated trolley approached on the tracks, the marmots streamed out among the mounds.

“Listen here,” Andrei called to the dwarf, “there’s no one around just now. I know all about your business — You’re crawling with cash. Let me borrow some.”

“You’ve got me cornered. Just how much would you need?”

“I was thinking four twenties. I’ll pay you back sooner or later, I swear. I need exactly four bills. My life depends on it.”

“Keep going now — Nikifor Tescovina’s standing behind the window.”

The valley widened a bit halfway to Géza Hutira’s cabin, and there a crimson spring trickled out of the ground into a tiny pool that fed into the main stream. It was called the Crooning Spring: the wind crooned night and day amid the mouths of the empty bottles that had been tossed into the adjacent nettle. Carbonated mineral water poured forth from the Crooning Spring, daubing the walls of the pool with rust; a furry crimson film covered the stones, the spruce bark roots, everything the water trickled over. It even smelled of blood.

And in fact it was a bit bloody. Bebe Tescovina stood above the spring splashing herself with water. Having removed her sweat suit, she was lolling about on a rock, wearing nothing but a diaper of sorts even as the frost and rime everywhere in the shade blazed coolly pink. Narrow veins of blood trickled all over her spindly, child’s thighs, her bony legs.

Géza Hutira was sitting on a stump. Just now it wouldn’t have been possible to recognize him from his ankle-length hair — that was tucked under his clothes at his neck. The aromatic smoke from his Pope, filled with thyme, drifted far. An empty bottle crooned away near his legs. Through drifting veils of smoke he scrutinized the slight body of Bebe Tescovina and the circuitous trails of blood on those scrawny, water-glistening thighs. He noticed Andrei, whose approach was cloaked by the din of the stream, only when the aluminum pole on his shoulder glistened.

“How d’you do?” he greeted Andrei. “I figured someone would come round looking for me today. Let’s be off so you can make it back in time.” Rising from the rock, the Pope clenched between his teeth, he stretched and called over to Bebe Tescovina. “I’ve got a little business with this gentleman. If you could manage it, come here tomorrow this time of day.”

Only Bebe Tescovina’s short red hair shone just now: not for a moment did she remove her eyes — eyes as bloomy and blue as blueberries — from Géza Hutira. As the two men headed off she slowly dressed, plainly disappointed.

The trail kept disappearing into the streambed, and it was apparent that the one man who walked it always wore rubber boots. The edges of the little pools of water along the way up were already covered by a skin of ice, and wagtails were dipping into those pools from their perches on glassy-glazed rocks and glistening branches.

“Live on your own?” asked Andrei, almost gasping for breath from the ascent.

“You mean me? Why do you ask?”

“Just curious how you live. I also love being on my own. Maybe we’ve got that in common.”

“In common, huh?” said Géza Hutira, giving the other man an almost sympathetic once-over. “That all depends. But I’ll tell you — there’s a fellow that lives with me. You’ll meet him, in any case.”

Géza Hutira’s cabin stood at the far end of the valley, above the tree line, amid boulder piles and the sparkling rivulets that ran between them. There, the thick forest had turned suddenly sparse, with only a few aging, odd old spruces weighed down by graybeard lichen clutching to the slopes, cut here into rifts. The clouds must have risen from there not long before — the wood-shingle roof was still glistening with rainbows of water droplets. Nearby and likewise gleaming nearby was a white, four-legged hut containing the meteorologist’s instruments; a bit further off, motionless crows huddled atop several small observation devices positioned under the open sky.

Sitting on the cabin’s doorstep — his hands clenched as if in prayer, but twirling his thumbs, and with an overturned bottle of denatured alcohol by his feet — was Béla Bundasian, Andrei’s adopted son. Beset by the early baldness common among Armenians, his tall brown forehead loomed large, and that, together with his bushy eyebrows and the thick lenses underneath, gave him a slightly owlish visage. From behind his glasses he cast his stepfather a rigid glance, bereft of either joy or surprise. He hardly stirred when Andrei, the aluminum pole on his shoulder, stopped in front of him.

“You,” he muttered, as if talking only to himself: “How the hell did you get here?”

“I’ve been looking for you,” whispered Andrei. “For five years I’ve been on your trail.”

“On my trail? But why?”

“Yes, I managed to outwit them — I wanted to see you — and now I’m here.”

“And you came to see me — that’s it?”

“I don’t have anyone besides you.”

Taking the empty bottle, Béla Bundasian patiently held it upended at his mouth: until finally, a few last drops came out. Then, after a prolonged effort to hawk up some phlegm, he spat and shook his head. “Terrible.”

Taking a pair of binoculars, Géza Hutira stepped out of the cabin: he scanned the ridgeline above the cold, deep river basin before finally setting his sights on a barren height shining with freshly fallen snow. As he peered through the lenses, the sharp crest of a pile of rocks trembled before him: Colonel Borcan lay there covered with plastic bags. The aluminum pole was to be planted beside him.

“I see you’ve come across an old acquaintance,” Géza Hutira remarked casually, handing Andrei the binoculars. “But you can count on my discretion. I won’t ask any questions.”

“Thank you, and yes, I know him — and I’d like a word with him.”

“While you two talk things over, I’ll cover my ears, or maybe I’ll go for a little walk.”

“Oh, no need for that,” Béla Bundasian interjected. “Don’t plug your ears. Why should he think I’ve got secrets to keep from you?”

Before long the three had climbed up to the plateau, which was covered by a snow dusting that looked like a mix of poppy seeds and powdered sugar. Dusk was coming on, and ice shone from the rifts in the mountainside above them — ice that gave away the winding trails Géza Hutira traversed on his way up to the rock ledges where he read his instruments. And now, having donned crampons and with a steel wire wound around his waist, he set off for the ledges on his own, the aluminum pole on his shoulder.

By the time he reached the saddleback and, eventually, the pile of rocks at the foot of which Colonel Puiu Borcan lay covered, it was already pretty dark. Down below, Andrei waited quietly with his adopted son, watching the distant figure projected against the sky until, finally, from one moment to the next, it vanished in the descending dusk. As night fell, an enormous bat suddenly swooped down over the plateau, its shadow rocking back and forth above the hoarfrost-covered mountain spruces and junipers until it, too, flitted off into the darkness — the late forest commissioner’s stray, ownerless umbrella.

All at once the wind stopped dead in its tracks and, as if into an empty bottle, silence fell between the bare walls. From high above, the sound of metallic hammering and tinkling could be heard where Géza Hutira was driving the aluminum pole into the ground, wedging in stakes all around it, the taut wires twanging. The murmur of the streams below rose up in curtains from out of the valley, like fog after a rain.

“I read your diary,” Andrei began, “thinking it would tell me what business you’d got mixed up in.”

“That was a really, really bad idea.”

“That’s why I first looked for you over at Connie Illafeld’s, though that was in vain. And that’s also how I realized that you were in a lot worse trouble than I’d thought.”

“I don’t know what sort of trouble you’re talking about — the trouble is you looking at my diary.”

“I had to. I needed to know what might have happened to you.”

“You know full well how much I hate that sort of thing — and as you can see, nothing’s happened at all.”

“All the same I found you in the end. I’ve been looking for you for years now, and nowadays I live nearby in Dobrin. I’ll take you away from here.”

“Forget about it — right this instant! Don’t bother about me anymore. I’m fine here on my own.”

“I’ll come get you sometime in the spring or, latest, early summer. Like I said, I’ve got no one besides you.”

“Well, just don’t imagine I’ll go with you. I’m staying put, and if you don’t leave me alone, I’ll make it my business to get word out about just what you’re after here in the forbidden zone.”

It seemed that Géza Hutira had finished his work, that the aluminum pole was now planted firmly among the rocks and tied down tight by taut wires, because all at once the wind stirring its way over the ridgeline began whistling through its boreholes. Soon stones began tumbling down the slopes with his approaching steps. Then the swooshing of his hurricane lamp could be heard, but Géza Hutira knew every contour of the mountainside so well that he lit it only on getting to the bottom, near the two waiting men, and suddenly the entire slope began to glitter: the rocks underneath the thin veil of snow were glowing under the lamplight — blue, green, and copper flickerings spread in waves over the scene.

Long before the bears were brought in, ore had been mined on the slopes of Dobrin and a cableway had once operated, running from the plateau down into the valley to the loading platform of the narrow gauge railway; at the supporting columns, where the mine buckets had jolted over the pulleys, a few nuggets of ore would invariably tumble out. And so it was that now these fallen pieces of ore glistened silkily under the snow.

After the mining operations along the slopes had been closed down, it was the meteorologist Géza Hutira who’d moved into the cabin there, which had been home to the cableway’s onetime maintenance man, cobbled together out of rocks and beams. With its mossy rocks and its lichen-draped, fog-drenched beams, the cabin seemed as if it had grown there on its own; it belonged to the mountainside. As the lamplight spread out, the place filled up with scurrying shadows.

“Don’t be scared of them,” said Géza Hutira. “Weasels and mole rats are man’s best friends.”

Stretching out on a pile of rags in a corner, Béla Bundasian opened a bottle, flooding the cabin with the scent of yellow gentian roots thoroughly soaked in liquor.

“I’ll bring you a blanket,” Andrei said in an effort to kick-start a conversation. “It won’t be easy, but I’ll have one stolen from some warehouse.”

“No, I hate blankets.”

“I’m sure that next time I’ll come by with good news. I’ve got an acquaintance, a trucker. He’s a foreigner.

“What are you talking about? And anyway by now you’re one of them, after all. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“That was the only way I could get near you.”

“Well,” said Béla Bundasian “I don’t want to see you again.” He pulled a tattered coverlet and some assorted rags over his head as he turned toward the wall. “And forget all this crap, I don’t talk with foreigners, or with natives, either. And I know full well how to get rid of anyone who wants to get me involved in some screwed-up business.”

“Time to get lost,” said Géza Hutira, elbowing Andrei in the side. “You’re bothering him — I know Béla, he’s sensitive. And besides, Nikifor Tescovina is waiting for you back down at the commissary.”

Although he had a flashlight, Andrei didn’t use it in the thickening darkness lower in the valley: the stream, shimmering under the starlight, unfurled before him like a ribbon of silk and led his way to the commissary. There, Nikifor Tescovina, a hurricane lamp swinging from his hands, awaited his guest.

“I pushed two tables together for you,” he said. “The kids spread freshly cut spruce boughs over them. We eat in the morning, so you can already settle in for the night.”

The tart scent of denatured alcohol and yellow gentian roots wafted over from the wide plank bed where Nikifor Tescovina and his three children slept. They’d extinguished the lamp, and the fire in the stove had long gone out — the only sound to be heard was their thick gulps as they passed the bottle. Deep within the darkness shone Bebe Tescovina’s eyes.

Spiders and larvae hissed inside the walls; dormice, weasels, and bats began stirring in the attic; tiny nails clicked across the floor. Heavy sleeping breaths wove their webs through the entire commissary. When Nikifor Tescovina arose, barefoot, causing the floorboards to creak as he stepped across the room, day was breaking. Andrei, too, sprang up from the tables he’d been sleeping on to stand on the threshold beside the commissary manager. Heads down, they stood there side by side pissing on the steps, staring at the foaming, steaming streamlets, a web of narrow black veins winding their way over the rimy earth. The dark membranes in the valley’s nooks and crannies hardly shimmered, but high up on the ridgelines of Dobrin, the aluminum pole glittered like the star of daybreak.

No sooner did daylight come than the children crawled out from under the blankets and Nikifor Tescovina started up the fire. They roasted hazelnuts, shriveled plum, custard mushrooms, and acorns on the hot stove while blueberry tendrils soaked in a pot of water. Fragrant steam coated the cold windows in an instant. To see outside, Bebe Tescovina ran her palms over the glass.

“Is this man going to live here?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” replied her father.

“He could have my place if he needs it, I’ll move away. Géza Hutira promised to take me in. Maybe even today I’ll get out of here forever.”

“Go ahead, if that’s what you want. I’ll let you go.”

After breakfast, Andrei said goodbye to Nikifor Tescovina, but as he walked across the narrow, rime-frosted meadow toward the train tracks, Nikifor sidled up beside him.

“What do you think,” asked Nikifor Tescovina, “about that fellow living up there at Géza Hutira’s?”

“Nothing much.”

“But that wasn’t the first time you’ve seen him?”

“Well, you could say that.”

“Just so you know: last night he went to the village. He’s not supposed to, and in fact he never does.”

Andrei was leaning over the bumper at the end of the tracks and unfastening the chain of the handcar, when he slowly stood up straight, patted his belly, opened his mouth wide, and threw up on the handcar’s seat. Bits of wild mushrooms quivered under knots of coagulated blood in the thick, sparkling slime.

“You’ve got an upset stomach.”

“No, no — it’s just that I leaned over and it tumbled out of me.”

“Good god, looks like your gray matter.”

Andrei wiped off the seat with his palm, sat down, and released the brake using the hand crank, so the handcar would head off down the slope on its own.

“Not even I understand,” said Nikifor Tescovina, “why the kid’s eyes light up in the dark. But it only started recently, after her first period.”

“Well then, that’s what I’ll tell them.”

“Then they should also know that she’s planning to move away. It’s best if the higher ups have plenty of time to digest any change.”

“Yes, all right, I heard so, too, and I’ll report it just that way.”

“Of course, don’t keep quiet about the fact that it’s Géza Hutira who’s taking her in.”

“Okay,” said Andei Bodor, “rest assured I’ll report exactly that.”