The Sinistra Zone

9. CONNIE ILLAFELD'S HAIR

One fine spring day, back when I worked as an assistant corpse watchman, I finally got to know Connie Illafeld — it wasn’t exactly the most delightful meeting I’d ever had, seeing as how, for all practical purposes, she no longer spoke any one single language. Instead she mixed them left and right, and the only people who could communicate with her somewhat had to know Ukrainian, Swabian German, Romanian, and Hungarian, and it didn’t hurt to know Carpathian German and Ruthenian dialects as well. Few such people lived in the Dobrin forest district, but one of them happened to be the chief bear warden, my friend Doc Oleinek.

Connie Illafeld was a sort of pen name. The progeny of the Illarions — landowning, serf-holding Bukovinian boyars — this woman, who lived among simple mountain folk on her family’s onetime estate, had originally been named Cornelia Illarion. Perhaps some other person around there might conceivably have been known as either Cornelia Illarion or Connie Illafeld, one person alone could lay claim to both these appellations.

So when I happened to notice one day the name Cornelia Illarion on a file folder emblazoned with the Red Cross — a folder destined for the clerk’s desk — and that this name was followed by her pen name in a flourish of red and in quotes. I knew it was her — practically a relative of mine, my adopted son’s onetime lover. I was dying of curiosity: I had to see for myself the being who, years earlier, had stoked the wild side of Béla Bundasian.

Back then I was working for the Dobrin mountain infantry as a civilian non-staff member; alongside various secret commissions small and large, I was the deputy to the district coroner or, as the locals put it, the assistant corpse watchman. The morgue stood in a musty old corner of the barracks, and when it rang of emptiness — which is to say, when there was no work — I assisted Colonel Titus Tomoioaga in the office. Since the district fully belonged to the mountain infantry, he was the one who kept records on everyone dispatched to Dobrin and who sent all the new arrivals to work. He was a slow, dreamy, mountain infantryman with the soul of an elk, however, who would stare listlessly out the window at the birds and at the gray clouds passing by over the spruces and firs. For him, reading even the most curtly worded records was a challenge.

On the day in question, the first warm breeze had just tumbled over the southern ranges’ icy ridges — a breeze packed with heavy scents. Flower petals and willow catkin pollen hovered above the streambed: word had it that among the Old Believers it was Easter. With spring two new internees came to Dobrin.

When, dizzy from the bright sunshine and the pollen, I stepped into the dimly lit office and there saw Cornelia Illarion’s name on a Red Cross file folder, I thought I was imagining things. Yet there was her pen name too, its letters finely hatched, all this on the Red Cross-emblazoned folder — lifting its cover revealed that the individual concerned had been sent here from the Colonia Sinistra sanatorium.

I’d always been a levelheaded, disciplined fellow, but uneasiness suddenly beset me. And, though this wasn’t at all the custom in Dobrin, I started to gently pump Colonel Titus Tomoioaga for information. What did he know? How did this woman wind up here? Who was she?

“Oh, she’s no one,” grumbled the colonel a bit drowsily. “We got her from the Yellows. They’re the ones who sent her here, out of the kindness of their hearts. But if you’re actually interested in her, well then, you’ll get to know her in just a moment when you record her data.”

So that’s how things stood. Colonia Sinistra was a famous sanatorium. Even people who’d never been there knew its buildings were painted yellow and glowed at night. Among ourselves we referred to the institution’s administrators and attendants as “the Yellows.”

“And what’s the plan? Do you know where you’re placing her?”

“More or less. Colonel Coca Mavrodin-Mahmudia wants her sent to the bears right away. True, she’s not in the best shape, she babbles away in all sorts of languages like a madwoman, but Doc Oleinek will manage somehow.”

So, Coca Mavrodin was sending Connie Illafeld to the bear reserve.

It must have been clear as day on my face that I didn’t receive this news exactly with indifference. “This will all be for the best, you’ll see,” Colonel Titus Tomoioaga added reassuringly: “Doc speaks all languages, so he’ll no doubt be able to communicate with her.”

Before being taken into treatment, Connie Illafeld had lived in an alpine village, her house at the upper end of Punte Sinistra, near the watershed, beside the train station. It wasn’t a genuine station, though, just a stopping place, a sidetrack next to the rail line, where the trains ascending the mountain from either side would rest, take on water, and wait out each other’s scheduled arrivals. Just up the slope, the tracks disappeared into a tunnel, which let out purple puffs of thick smoke for hours after a train passed through; the north side of Connie Illafeld’s house had seen its share of soot over the years.

Connie Illafeld, the pen name of this last member of the Illarion family, lived as a recluse and made her living by painting everyday scenes from antiquity on small, pocket-size plates of glass; she worked on commission for Jews from Chernivtsi and Lviv, though how she managed to get them across the border to the Ukraine was a mystery. She was at least forty, her eyes were green, her skin was white, and her hair was black.

Forest rangers, road workers, and professional hunters passing through sometimes hit on her, of course, but by all appearances she was saving herself for someone. The tunnel watchman, who never slept, claimed that a foreign traveler was wooing her — a fellow from Galicia who supposedly swam across the Tisza River every night and who sometimes paid her a secret visit, too. But that was only a sleepless watchman’s story: everyone knew that an impenetrable barbed-wire border fence stretched along the riverbank. Regardless, even if Connie Illafeld had had a secret someone, she sent him packing that spring,when her true love appeared on the scene: Béla Bundasian, my adopted son.

One night the intercity slow train pulled into the Punte Sinistra station, and Béla Bundasian got off without his bag for a quick drink from a spring bubbling near the tracks. As he leaned over to quench his thirst, his shirt slipped up his back and his jacket collar fell over his neck, covering his ears, and so he didn’t hear the little trembling of the stones under the railroad ties as the train went on without him. Since the tracks descended in both directions from the Punte station, the engineers had only to release the brakes to get a train rolling on its own. That day, for some reason, the intercity train did not wait for its counterpart coming from the other direction to arrive, and so when my adopted son straightened up to wipe the water from his lips, he had just a second to notice the last car vanish into the tunnel.

Only one intercity train plied this route daily, and if such an inadvertently abandoned passenger wanted to stick to his plans, he had no choice but to wait until the next evening.

It was spring — Palm Sunday or something along those lines. The air was rich with heady fragrances, and even after sunset dizzying bird warbles streamed from the black forests of looming spruce and fir. Busily cleaning the window, Connie Illafeld was kneeling on the sill in a rolled-up skirt, her white arm lit up in the dusk. No doubt even the sound of the wet paper slipping across the glass might have been inviting, and Béla Bundasian must have planted himself by the front gate like someone come to serve notice.

Did Connie Illafeld sense which way the wind was blowing? No doubt she did. Her hand slowed on the window, and one could see through her sweet slightly parted lips her sharp white teeth as well as the unbridled bliss of her glowing green eyes — all of this was directed at my adopted son. Being half Armenian, Béla Bundasian was parchment-hued, the whites of his eyes were a tad oily, and his eyebrows were already quite bushy, and so at first glance he might well have met with the approval of just about any woman. Well aware of this, he wasted no time, playing up the role as the hapless, left-behind traveler. He’d been on his way to the paper mill in the city of Putna to get sheet music paper, when he’d had the bad luck — or was it now? — to get off the train for a drink of water. That this was indeed what had happened, Connie Illafeld could see for herself, so she invited him in to have some rest. If by chance he was still thirsty, she said, she had a bucket full of water, so he could drink to his heart’s content.

Seeing that the floor of the house was covered by a soft, thick woolen blanket, Béla Bundasian tactfully left his shoes on the threshold. So he was in his socks when he happened to step on Connie Illafeld’s bare feet. And since that felt good, he left his feet right there. The heady smell of pasta emanated from the walls, from the handcrafted rustic furniture, from the handwoven fabrics. Connie Illafeld smelled of pasta, too — her downy underarms and her pearly thighs — and even though she was old enough to have been Béla Bundasian’s mother, this scent of unbridled desire welled up out of her as if from a loaf of bread rising in the oven. In a matter of minutes they were pawing each other like mad.

In one of her drawers Connie Illafeld kept a dried herb — the flowers, leaves, and crumbled stems of sweet woodruff. She now sprinkled this concoction all over the woolen blanket, and within intoxicating fragrance the two of them lolled about nonstop for two or three weeks, fogging her windows up with the vapors of true passion. Much later — by which time everything was long over — I peered into Béla Bundasian’s diary, which had chronicled those weeks and months of love. That’s how I know all this. He wrote that getting his fill of her was impossible, it only took a glance at her and he’d be overwhelmed with the sensation that lurking even between her toes was a hungry little pussy, so it was best to just gulp the whole of her down like a glass of water. And yet — by a secret, circuitous route — the end of the love affair was of course already at hand.

Back in those days I rarely saw my adopted son. When he traveled to Moldavia for sheet music paper — his occupation involved copying scores — he’d vanish for weeks on end. As fond as I was of the boy, I let him do whatever he wanted, figuring that he wasn’t my own blood, after all, and could go through his baptism by fire: I resolved to intervene only in an extreme situation.

And that time finally came. During one of his extended absences, a stranger came in the form of a gray-haired gentleman with yellow eyes and a narrow mouth who left a package wrapped in newspapers and tied up with string. No sooner had this gray-haired man left than I opened the bundle. It held notebook pages written in Polish: a mimeograph. I naturally burned them at once, mixing the ashes in water and pouring them all over the garden. At that point, however, it didn’t matter one bit. Béla Bundasian had gotten mixed up in something.

After the Polish notebooks incident, my adopted son never showed up again. Granted, I’d suspected from the start that something was up, but where could I have searched for him?

I boarded the intercity train to Moldavia, and after one night of travel in bone-chilling cold and the dizzying smell of coal smoke, I arrived in Punta Sinistra. The wind died down by evening and the warm scent of hay rose from the barns and settled over the surrounding rimy meadows.

And yet it wasn’t a particularly pleasant feeling that came over me — no, in the light of the train cars rolling away toward the tunnel I noticed immediately that Connie Illafeld’s door was festooned with official-looking stamps and that a Red Cross ribbon hung from the knob — anyone visited by the Red Cross could not be in good straights. The Red Cross on a door or a gate was a clear sign that something was wrong, terribly wrong.

Not that the tunnel watchman was in an especially talkative mood, but he did say this much: Cornelia Illarion had indeed lived in the house over there. Yes, lived, not lives. In fact, hardly a couple of days or weeks earlier, two gentleman had come with official papers declaring her insane. And they had taken her off to that renowned asylum, Colonia Sinistra, right away.

As for my adopted son, Béla Bundasian, I finally met up with him here in the Dobrin forest district only four years later, in the house of the meteorologist, Géza Hutira. It turned out that on the same day that Cornelia Illarion was taken away, his longtime benefactor, Colonel Velman, was waiting for him by the evening train. The colonel was an unsolicited, uninvited good friend who at times assumed the role of confidential well-wisher by looking Béla Bundasian up and providing him with various sorts of advice. On this occasion the Colonel didn’t mention the Polish notebooks, but warned that he could count on some unpleasant consequences on account of his dubious romantic dealings. Word had it that he’d been spending lots of time in the provinces of late — sleeping in the home of a female individual unaccountable for her own actions — he may have been in Connie Illafeld’s bed — and this was very close to what the law called rape. He, as Béla Bundasian’s longtime benefactor, would try his best to smooth things over, so maybe he’d be let off easy, with just a couple years of internment.

This was all I knew about Connie Illafeld when I saw her name on that file folder, but soon enough I spread her documents out in front of me. All these details — nice and slow — went through my mind as I sat there, accompanied by the fact that the woman had wound up among the bears on the reserve at the behest of Colonel Coca Mavrodin.

Béla Bundasian lived there, too, but way higher up, above the tree line, at the meteorologist’s place. He’d learned to read the instruments and the weather vanes and even during holidays or when he got leave every six months or so, he never budged from there. At most he would pay a visit to the bear wardens to play dice, nine-men’s morris, and blackjack.

“You’ll see, this will all be for the best,” said Colonel Titus Tomoioaga.

“But still,” I began, and then paused, unsure of what to say.

“What is it,” Colonel Titus Tomoioaga asked, now looking me over suspiciously. “What’s your problem?”

“Nothing.”

Once again I glanced at the folder, then asked for permission to go to the restroom, which was at the end of the hallway. Of course I was full of curiosity to see her for myself — my adopted son’s enchantress, this stunning woman I’d often imagined, that zesty little dish who, as I read Béla Bundasian’s diary, without ever having actually seen her, I’d almost coveted for myself.

Success was not in the cards. I opened the door to the hallway and saw, on the bench where people waited to be called inside, a gray-skinned, coughing, slumping, stretched-out fellow in a miner’s helmet. Beside him was a figure cloaked in a threadbare quilted jacket, praying away, whose clasped hands and face were almost completely covered by a knotted mass of hair.

“Listen,” I said, turning back to Colonel Titus Tomoioaga, “I don’t know what sort of woman we’re talking about. There’s not a single lady waiting out there — maybe she took off?”

“She’s there, all right.”

“There’s only a miner sprawled out on the bench along with another fellow with hair all over him. No one except them.”

“Well, but she’s there, in any case.”

Connie Illafeld was indeed waiting in the hallway. Colonel Titus Tomoioaga soon summoned her. At first he called her name, but then he realized that maybe she wouldn’t take that in, so he stepped out into the hallway and, placing a hand under one of her arms, helped her inside. It was the hairy figure.

From between the strands of silky black hair that covered her face her green eyes glowed. She did not know her own name. Trying my best to be good-humored about the situation, I sought out Colonel Titus Tomoioaga’s eyes to exchange a knowing glance. And I even forced a smile or two, as one often does in the presence of a person not quite right in the head.

“People forget everything in there,” explained Colonel Titus Tomoioaga, “everything trickles out of a person, like shit.”

“But to not even remember her name. .”

“Well, maybe that’s not all bad.”

“And maybe you see things differently. . but I for one think there’s a little too much hair on her.”

“It is a fact,” said Colonel Titus Tomoioaga, “that she had very thorough treatment. They must have overdosed her on something. I wouldn’t be surprised if maybe something else even grew on her.”

“You mean a weenie?”

“Yep. . and maybe someone will go looking for it.”

Once I’d finished the paperwork, Colonel Titus Tomoioaga asked me to escort the prospective bear warden to the metal shop, where one of those little sheet-metal dog tags would be hung around her neck, too.

But just then, Doc Oleinek, the chief bear warden, who supposedly spoke all possible languages, stopped by the office. In no time he engaged Connie Illafeld in a conversation of sorts, and it seemed they quickly understood each other. In the end he was the one who accompanied her to the metal shop.

“I can tell you’re worried,” said Colonel Titus Tomoioaga. “You’re worried about something, but let me reassure you it’s not necessary — this individual will be in good hands.”

“To hell with it all,” I spat out, recklessly again.

“Hey, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I swear.”

When Connie Illarion returned to the office at Doc Oleinek’s side, she wore a shiny metal nameplate on her hairy neck, one that hung from a brand new chain whose end had been welded shut so no one could ever remove it again. There was no denying that the name — once that of a seductress — was now worn by an animal.

Before they left, Doc Oleinek — my old drinking buddy — devoted a couple of minutes to me as well. It was from him that I learned that same morning, my adopted son, Béla Bundasian, had been given a day off even though it wasn’t due him. They had come down from the conservation area on the handcar, and now he was drinking up at the station, where denatured alcohol had been handed out to the forest rangers.

“Come along with us if you want to meet up with him,” said Doc Oleinek. “You can have a shot or two together. Today is Easter among the Old Believers.”

“No,” I replied. “I’m not in the mood today.”

“Maybe you’ve got a message for him.”

“No, at the moment I’ve got nothing to say.”

Doc Oleinek now headed down the hallway, the hairy Connie Illafeld following along behind like a lapdog, the sheet-metal nameplate swinging from her neck. Once they were out in the yard, in the sun, it began to glitter against the walls, the trees. It was brand new. From now on, anyone who saw her would know just who they were dealing with. They were on their way to the narrow-gauge railway station, where my adopted son, Béla Bundasian, was waiting by the handcar.

Before long I got booted from my corpse-watching job. And on the morning I had to hand over my position to my successor, Toni Tescovina, as I was about to show him the tricks of the trade, I found the body of Connie Illafeld, alias Cornelia Illarion, spread out on the gray stone table. The blood on her neck — where someone had ripped off her dog tag with no little violence — was dark blue, like clotted blueberry juice or, like the blood of the Illarions, Ruthenian boyars. By the time she wound up in there, her clothes, stiff from grime, had been cut right off her in the morgue, and when I chanced to touch her, she felt colder than the stone table she was on. Having lost its shine, like some sort of blackened hoarfrost, her hair peeled off her with a hushed rustle until finally, once that operation was complete, there she lay, buck naked, before us.

“Where do you wash up?” asked Toni Tescovina on the way out. “I’m on my way to the square. Géza Kökény mentioned on the way over that tomorrow is Easter. And I’m all covered with hair.”

“Damn it,” I grumbled. “I’ve had a bit too much of Easter. And as for the hair, you’d better get used to it. It’s a hairy job.”