10
GÉZA HUTIRA'S EAR

That year the coldest day came at the start of spring. The night before, when the fire died down and the valley’s cold slithered down the chimney into the cabin, Géza Hutira could no longer sleep. Instead he tried to keep Bebe Tescovina warm. For a while he held her tight in his lap, and then after covering her with every old rag at hand, he arranged her, lying down on himself, and covering her with his hair and even his beard. Although he did doze off for a bit, he could hear even while half-asleep a scraping and squeaking of snow from the valley: someone was approaching along the frozen, silent streambed. Before long the stamping of feet had reached the threshold, and when Géza Hutira shone his flashlight upon the hoarfrost-coated figure — with gleaming tusks of ice hanging from its his nostrils which were issuing comet-like puffs of steam — he recognized him as Nikifor Tescovina, and Géza thought he’d come to take his child home.

But the commissary manager didn’t so much as glance at his daughter. He was looking for Géza Hutira.

“Get something warm on, now,” said Nikifor Tescovina. “And make sure you’ve got some tobacco, something to chew on. We’re headed off for a couple of days.”

“I don’t leave home much in the middle of the night,” grumbled Géza Hutira. “And it’s never happened that I haven’t read my instruments on time. Who do you think will register the measurements for me?”

“Oh, come on — you know full well that no one gives a shit about those observations of yours.”

“If I must go, then which way, where?”

“They’ll tell us.”

When on the threshold they’d tied on their snowshoes only the snow still shone. The meteorologist’s house was above the tree line, so it was in the open that the two men now trudged their way up the mountainside and crossed a narrow plateau before descending down the other side into the Baba Rotunda Pass. Waiting for them in the road worker Andrei’s cabin was Colonel Coca Mavrodin of the Dobrin mountain infantry.

“We’re off to visit the sick,” she announced when her two men arrived: “We’ll look around the Kolinda forest a bit, where the retired forest rangers live. Word has it that they’re not in great shape. Indeed, health-wise I can only report the worst. Let’s go see what we can do for them.”

Stretched out at the foot of the Kolinda forest was a tiny village of towering snowdrifts, shaped by the wind from the slopes, and looming between its scattered sun-faded and fog-washed houses. Once they arrived there, the jeep skidding and floundering along, finally came to a halt in front of a small wooden church at the end of the road. Lolling about on the verandah of the parsonage, leaning on his elbow, was a pale young man, the parish priest: Father Pantelimon. Out in the yard, blanketed in fog, were three black horses.

Rather than wearing his usual vestment, the priest was dressed like anyone else around here or, more precisely, like the mountain infantrymen: a black vinyl jacket over a roughly knit grass-green wool sweater; threadbare military trousers; and sandals on his bare feet. Not even in the kitchen did the snow melt off his naked toes.

“You’ve got to wait a bit,” he said, “the fellow hasn’t gotten here yet. Maybe he got held up along the way.” He then unfolded the newspaper-wrapped package in his hands to reveal a few half-frozen boiled potatoes, a couple of onions, and some withered apples: “Something to keep your bellies going — who knows when you’ll be done.”

Walking down the well-trodden purple snowy path, past thick steam swirling above the horses, he now crossed the yard toward the open sacristy. From inside came a sound reminiscent of a distant reed organ: the creaking of a door. But the wind swept through the yard, seizing every trace of that sound.

It was the coldest day of the year, but the door to the kitchen stayed wide open all the same, with only the rainbow-hued curtain of steam fluttering before it. From the cracked walls came the cold smell of mice along with the sound of plaster being scratched at and crumbling. The table was covered by a sticky tablecloth of waxed linen, with a nine-men’s morris board drawn in indelible pencil in the middle. Reaching in a pocket of her greatcoat, Colonel Coca Mavrodin produced the black and white pieces and lined them up on the edge of the table.

Returning from the sacristy, Father Pantelimon brought saddles — carrying two on his shoulders and dragging one behind him in the snow. Throwing them over the horses’ backs, he tightened the girth under their bellies. The bird shit that dotted the shoulder of his vinyl jacket sparkled like a colonel’s stars. As for the two colonels themselves, for the time being they just sat in silence at the kitchen table playing nine-men’s morris. The door was wide open all the while. Out in the bitter cold, the horses stamped their hooves while sparrows and crows occasionally landed on their fresh, steaming hot manure.

It was past noon by the time a snowmobile arrived through the snowdrifts with a great roar — the sort of fast, narrow contraption used by the Dobrin mountain infantry. This one was driven not by a soldier, however, but by a man in a quilted jacket, a lambskin cap, and rubber boots. On the threshold he left behind a saddlebag that, from the sound of it, was packed full of glass bottles. No sooner had he arrived than he turned the snowmobile around and drove off.

The bottles must have been corked in a hurry, for the scent of cheap rum flooded the kitchen in no time. Father Pantelimon poured equal amounts of the drink into two plastic containers, meanwhile asking the two men, who were helping him, not to so much as lick their fingers afterward.

The saddlebag, now bearing the plastic containers, wound up on the pommel of one of the saddles. Then all three — the two men and Colonel Coca Mavrodin — got on the horses. Chewing on a matchstick, the priest looked after them from the verandah of the parsonage as they rode the beasts out of the village on a narrow, well-trodden trail.

Coca Mavrodin asked her two men to proceed Indian file if possible, and always only on the right side of the trail, so as to cut a clearly visible groove through the snow. The Kolinda forest covered an amorphous, hulking beast of a mountain whose plateau-like summit sprawled out flat, far, and wide amid other, taller ranges. The Baba Rotunda Pass, though hardly an hour or two away, always seemed to hover in brownish wisps of fog on the eastern horizon. The forest covered even the top of the mountain, its slopes consequently featured not a lacework of snowy meadows but instead only a few odd rectangular clear cuts which shone brightly in the sun.

Not even by afternoon did the freeze let up. Half-frozen crows perched on rimy spruces, looking like enormous cones against the gray sky. Frigid water pearls took shape on Coca Mavrodin’s wool-felt greatcoat each time she exhaled, and whenever one of the horses broke wind, a comet of hot steam hissed forth from its behind.

The trail hardly ascended, and they had to follow the muffled babbling of the brook underneath the snow. Finally, though, they reached the basin, spread out completely flat, with the forest’s undulating spruce boughs closing in above — a still-narrow path led to an almost sizable clearing. And all around, an incessant bubbling murmur rang through the Kolinda forest; secret, subterranean streams broke the surface here and there.

In the middle of the clearing, with snowdrifts all around it, stood the retired forest rangers’ refuge. Like some sort of box full of secrets, its doors and windows were all boarded up. Even its tile roof was covered with freshly cut logs fastened with clamps to discourage anyone from trying to get in or out. And yet there was still life inside: tangled wisps of pale smoke hovered above the cracks in the tile roof, deliberate cracks that in these parts functioned as chimneys. Indeed, those within heard their steps approaching.

“Who goes there?” came the dull, hollow words from between the walls, as if from within a sealed box. “Who is it, and what do you want?”

“It’s only us,” declared Colonel Coca Mavrodin in her lusterless voice.

“Thank goodness. I recognize your voice, Miss. So you all came, after all, to let us out.”

“Not quite yet. There’s a little problem with your health, you know for a while longer. We can’t be too careful. The weather’s not too good, either — out here your colds would only get worse.”

“It’s good all the same that it’s you people. Feels good to hear a familiar voice.”

“Naturally it’s us. And we brought you folks a little drink. I’m not even sure if it’s a liqueur or rum. In a minute we’ll figure out how to get it inside. We’ve got an iron Pope, so it would be best if we managed to pour it in through that.”

“Liqueur or rum? Why, we thank you kindly in advance. Mr. Toni Waldhütter is here nudging me in the side, asking if the rum is Jamaican or Puerto Rican, because to him they’re not the same sort of thing. I’m glad the old man has his voice back, though of course his question is just a joke.”

“I understand, Mr. Toni Waldhütter — I too am picky about my drinks. Tell him he can taste it shortly. We’ve got Géza Hutira with us. He’s a clever, resourceful man. No doubt he’ll find a crack in the wall to stick the Pope in, and then in no time at all you can be drinking from the other end. It would be good if you hurry up and find a bowl to hold under the end of the Pope.”

“Thank you kindly. We’ve been getting a bit low on provisions, too, in fact — enough for two days at most.”

“Rest assured that you won’t be needing any more — divide that up between you.”

“Great — we’ll get by.”

At the edge of the clearing, just opposite the boarded-up house, were the three horses with their riders still mounted. Steam hovered all around them. Hoarfrost coated the riders’ hair, and the men’s beards and stubble. Even the yellow bits of cotton in Coca Mavrodin’s ears had turned white.

“What’s brewing here?” Géza Hutira whispered to Nikifor Tescovina.

“What do you think? Take a guess.”

“Come on, really, what’s up?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Feel free to ask questions,” Coca Mavrodin interrupted the two men. “I’ll answer them. One of the retired forest rangers fell ill with the flu. And so now they’re under quarantine.”

“I didn’t ask a thing, not a thing.”

Géza Hutira spit on his palm: he must have understood that he’d be the one to now give the retired forest rangers a drink. Getting off his horse, he removed the saddlebag containing two containers of rum from Coca Mavrodin’s pommel; tied beside them he saw the long iron Pope she’d mentioned. He searched out the crack in the house the voices came through, slid the Pope in until he felt someone grab hold at the other end, then heard the Pope clink against the bowl they placed underneath. Slowly he began to pour. The rum, having congealed along the way from the cold, flowed sluggishly, like crystallized honey.

Meanwhile Coca Mavrodin, as if on a weekend outing, dismounted and took some snacks out of her coat pocket. She spread newspaper on the crusted snow, anchoring its four corners with chunks of ice to keep the wind from blowing it away. After tearing at the half-frozen potatoes with her nails, she asked Nikifor Tescovina for his pocketknife, with which she then sliced the onions. Next, as if yielding her portion to the men, she got back up on her saddle, bent her head down on the horse’s neck, and seemed to doze off. Sunlight was fast fading from the clearing: twilight was approaching from the forest, and nighttime itself from the east.

“If by chance I also catch this illness,” she grumbled, “you know what I’ll do? I’ll make my way through the barracks, spitting into the mouth of every single mountain infantryman.”

“Probably not a bad idea,” said Nikifor Tescovina, “but if you don’t mind me saying so, I’ve heard that people who come down with the bug can’t spit at all — even though their mouths are foaming.”

“You still don’t know me — I was just kidding. But where did you hear that about foaming mouths?”

“Doc, the bear warden. He said your mouth fills up with thick dry saliva — it’s like a sponge, impossible to spit out.”

Géza Hutira threw aside the now-empty containers and gazed after them, watching how easily they slid away over the snow. Then he knelt down beside Nikifor Tescovina over the spread-out newspaper and the two began chowing down. Darkness was descending. The colorful light that had been streaming through the clouds now shone pale over the wind-swept snowdrifts.

“Hey, look,” said Nikifor Tescovina when they had almost finished eating. “This onion ring here, why, it looks just like an ear.”

“An ear? Stop kidding me.”

“Take a closer look.”

“Oh, it is an ear, a real ear, but how did it end up here?”

An entire ear lay among the cold potato skins and sliced onions and apples. A tad hairy, a tad bloody, clearly it had broken away — a fresh break — from somewhere or other not long before.

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” whispered Nikifor Tescovina, “you know, I think it is yours.”

Géza Hutira clutched his head where his winter cap should have held down his ears. He groped about, then held out his palms before his face. One hand was still dry; the other, sticky, smudged, slightly brown.

“Hmm. Damn it. I must have hit something. I don’t have a clue how this could have happened,” he whimpered, as if making excuses. “Maybe it was that iron Pope, when I pulled it back out. It did knock against me a bit.”

Coca Mavrodin was not asleep, after all. Sitting up straight in the steam wisps hovering about the horse’s head, she cleared her throat and called out:

“Are you two kidding around, or is that really our comrade’s ear? I’d like to take a look — let me see.”

Géza Hutira had curled his palm around the hole where his ear had been so as to hear exactly what Coca Mavrodin wanted. He seemed to brood over what he’d just heard, and then, once he’d in fact understood, he sadly shook his head.

“Too late. . . .”

A four-legged little greenish-brown creature, the size of a squirrel or a weasel, was just then scampering away over the crusty snow with the ear in its mouth. Its companion waited at a distance, and soon the crackle of Géza Hutira’s cartilage could be heard as they crunched the ear between their teeth.

“I’ll come up with something,” said Coca Mavrodin much later on the way down from the Kolinda forest, “some sort of compensation. As far as I know, the Soviets are already making artificial ears. But if you’ll excuse me for saying so, you might have been a bit more careful.”

“No excuses necessary.”

As before, they rode Indian file in each other’s tracks, only this time they made a clearly visible groove on the left side of the road. The snow between the two trails remained untouched.

The stove was burning that night in Father Pantelimon’s kitchen, and roasting on top were potato slices, mushroom caps, and whole unpeeled apples. The two colonels once again played nine-men’s morris, though standing up this time, and with the door wide open. They kept playing, pushing the pieces across the tablecloth in silence, until the snowmobile once again buzzed in from beyond the snowdrifts. Now it pulled a sled loaded with rattling cans of gasoline and diesel oil. The driver might have been the same one who’d delivered the rum that morning, but it was impossible to tell: he had on a thick, glittery outfit; a copper helmet of the sort firemen wore; and boots that came right up to his knees. He didn’t even get off.

“Can I get all the way out there with these?” he shouted over. His voice was as otherworldly as that of Géza Kökény. Coca Mavrodin and the priest went out to the verandah.

“All the way,” replied Coca Mavrodin. “Just keep your eyes peeled. We left a groove of tracks on each side of the trail, so if you stick to the middle, following their shadows in the headlights, you’ll get there, no problem.”

•

“Now I’d ask the two of you,” Coca Mavrodin put in as she left in the morning once again on horseback with her men for the Kolinda forest, “not to piss along the way, no matter how much you have to go. Until I say now you can, hold it back. You’re men, after all. It’s not out of the question that we’ll need a bit of warm fluid.”

With his palm Géza Hutira formed a shell around the hole of his ear so as to hear what she was saying. Even so, Nikifor Tescovina had to explain what it was that Coca Mavrodin wanted.

They now proceeded between the two sets of hoofprints they’d made the previous day, on the snowmobile tracks, until they reached the point where only a narrow trail led the rest of the way to the clearing. There the horses came to a sudden halt, and no amount of goading could get them to continue. Only by getting off and pulling them by the reins could Coca Mavrodin and the two men drag the beasts to the final destination.

The place looked different than it had the day before. The snow was no longer white but gray, purple-blue, and in places completely black, and it was covered with hard blisters budding with purple lights and iron-gray flakes. And hovering in the frozen air was the smell of abandoned stoves and discarded flues. It was as if it had snowed ash all night long.

The boarded-up cabin where the retired forest rangers had once lived was gone. Undulating in the breeze, around a few obsolete, knotty black beams in the middle of the clearing, was a velvety mass of soot and ash. The snow after melting had frozen hard with ash flakes and glimmered everywhere like marble under the light of the passing clouds. A flock of birds, jackdaws, circled up high like a mass of trapped, swirling smoke from the conflagration. Scattered all about were discarded cans of gasoline and diesel oil.

After Coca Mavrodin wound a scarf around her neck up to her chin, she got back on her horse, and started to trot about on the cinders: the horses now got to sneezing from all the stirred-up soot. Suddenly spurring her horse, she began to trample through the ruins. All the many clamps, clasps, and nails that had fallen out of the beams and the retired forest rangers’ tools and sheet-metal pots now jingled under her horse’s hooves. Colonel Coca Mavrodin then rode to the edge of the clearing and there stopped, waiting for her two men to follow.

“Come along now,” she shouted, “There’s nothing to worry about — the germs are all roasted away.”

“What’s she saying?” asked Géza Hutira, trying to catch Nikifor Tescovina’s eye. But, sensing what he wanted, the other man looked away.

“Leave me out of this,” warned Nikifor Tescovina, after a pause. “I don’t have an opinion about any of it.”

“I just thought you might have noticed what you’ve gotten mixed up in.”

“What?! I don’t know what you’re talking about — we both work for Miss Coca, that’s all I know.”

Meanwhile, almost without realizing it, they too were trampling through the cinders at a slow trot and arriving at the far edge of the clearing. The horses kept snapping their feet up from the snow as if it were still hot.

“Let’s have a bite,” proposed Coca Mavrodin. “And today it’s not just any old lunch. I brought a nice big jar full of carp with onions and crushed barley. And then, once you’ve had your fill, I’d like you to find the dog tags. I want three for each: like you they wore one on their necks, but they also had one on their wrists and their ankles. I’d appreciate your finding every last one.”

Coca Mavrodin had carried the jar in her greatcoat pocket, but it wasn’t necessary to unscrew the lid, because along the way the already congealed liquid had frozen, bursting the glass. Picking away the shards and slivers, she slowly freed the frozen cylinder of crushed barley and little dark blue fins. Next she broke it into pieces with her fingernails so they could be picked handily from her palms.

Lying all about on the crusty snow were various dead birds, their feathers charred black — crows, jackdaws, and thrushes. The fire must have awoken them, and no doubt they’d roasted in the air, but perhaps the heat had kept them afloat for a time, and then when the clearing below them cooled they’d plopped to the ground, scattered about.

As soon as they finished eating, Nikifor Tescovina got to work cutting spruce boughs and birch twigs while Géza Hutira broke off thick hazelnut branches. At first they poked around the whole site like treasure hunters, then, using clumps of twigs tied together with cords, they swept the ash from among the beams and the other remains.

“This is what they call black-market work,” grumbled Géza Hutira. “Too bad I don’t carry a mirror around — if only you could see how you look.”

“Now what’s your problem? My daughter seems to have had a really bad influence on you. Keep your clever little opinions to yourself.”

With no ear on the side nearest Nikifor Tescovina, Géza Hutira barely heard what the other man had said. Twisting his head left and right, he looked about in confusion, probing the cinders.

In the end glazed thick with soot they found twelve sheet-metal dog tags dangling from chains. Coca Mavrodin then finally let them urinate. The warm, salty solution, she explained, would dissolve the soot, and then they’d only have to rub each tag in the crusty snow to read the engraved data.

Under the cinders and soot they’d found the dog tags of four men — which is to say, three dog tags each. But five retired forest rangers had lived in their forest retreat. Missing were the dog tags of one Aron Wargotzki.

•

Géza Hutira’s lost ear meant that I was the one who later had to find Aron Wargotzki. On their way home, the three travelers once again took a break in my road worker’s cabin, and Nikifor Tescovina and Géza Hutira were cleaned up: Elvira Spiridon soaked them with her watering can, while they, like tired horses in the rain, drooped their heads on each other’s shoulders. Coca Mavrodin meanwhile called me out to the verandah for a consultation.

“Heaven took his ear, and I need a man with good hearing. And aside from him, no one knows the woods like you.”

“That’s not my territory,” I said with hesitation in my voice. “You know perfectly well, Miss, that I’ve never set foot in the Kolinda forest in my life.”

“But I’m now asking you, Andrei. Just this much, nothing more. Then I’ll turn a blind eye to your business. Find this contagious individual for me — his name is Aron Wargotzki, remeber that — and then I promise you that you can get out of here along with your adopted son.”

From that day on, every morning I stood at the threshold, clamped on my cross-country skis, and then picked up my sweetheart, Elvira Spiridon, by putting one arm around her, and slid my way toward the Kolinda forest, dropping her off at home en route. Her husband, Severin Spiridon, was invariably waiting at the front gate. It was he who advised me to be especially alert on the tenth day; for that long a man can somehow scrape by in a dank lair of spruce cones sucking on saltless icicles, but then that’s it: after ten days he’ll crawl off on all fours to give himself up. And along the way his palms and knees will leave tracks in the snow.

For her part, this is what Coca Mavrodin said by way of farewell:

“You know what to really keep an eye out for, Andrei ? Shit.”

She wasn’t talking nonsense. As all woodsmen know, even if a nighttime snowfall covers the shit Coca Mavrodin was thinking of, by morning, once the warmth of the sun soaks through its white blanket, its lying mask melts off and once again it gleams resplendently brown.

But Aron Wargotzki left behind no tracks — not of his feet, his palms, or his knees. Nor did I happen upon his droppings anywhere in the Kolinda forest. In the end, it wasn’t ordinary human frailty that gave him away but instead his mindless desire for a life of luxury.

One afternoon before heading home — I was perhaps already into my second week of searching for him — I was taking a rest in the clearing once inhabited by the retired forest rangers, a clearing the snow had once again covered. While listening to the languid repetitive murmur of the subterranean stream as it rambled above the ground, the snow, the ice, and then back underneath, the unmistakable scent of scorched thyme hit my nose. This is what Géza Kökény smoked at the foot of his own bust, and this is what the bear wardens and sometimes the colonels themselves imbibed, too, when their tobacco ran out. On more than one occasion I’d tried it myself.

Just then the wind ceased for a few minutes, and blue tongues of smoke hovered in the blazing rays of sun shooting through the spruces and firs. In front of me in the snow, the elusive stream’s path was marked by a shadowy depression, which ended in a gaping black cavity in the earth. It was from there, from time to time, that thin smoke went curling up into the air. While I’d been roaming the snowy woods in search of shit — following Coca Mavrodin’s advice — Aron Wargotzki had been sitting there underground, smoking his Pope.

“Aron Wargotzki,” I called out. “Give me your solemn promise not to move — I ask you sincerely to stay calm. You can’t fly, I hope, so wherever you might go, your tracks would give you away.”

Aron Wargotzki kept smoking for quite a while yet. He replied only toward evening, when he’d determined that without a reply I would not budge an inch.

“All right, I promise. But only because I can’t move — half my leg’s burned off.”

“Well, sit still, take care of yourself. And don’t feel lonely, I’ll be back soon — tomorrow morning at the latest.”

I’d clamped my skis back on and had just about slid back across the clearing when his voice reached me yet again, resounding through the forest, booming along the deep and winding course of the subterranean stream.

“Géza, my friend, I want to ask you for a favor.”

“You’ve got me confused with someone else. That’s not me. But tell me what you want.”

“If you know Géza Hutira, send him here. I’ve got to talk to him.”

“I don’t think he has any time right now, but if I run into him, what should I say?”

“That Aron Wargotzki asks him to come here. It’s urgent — he should hurry up and bring along some warm milk.”

“Alright — if I bump into him, and if I don’t forget, I’ll tell him.”

“And who am I speaking to now?”

“Come on, Aron Wargotzki, you know full well I could say any old name to you — that’s really not important.”

My ski tracks had dug deeper into the snow each day, and so, concluding my business every evening, I set my skis in the grooves and slid right home to the pass, where Elvira Spiridon awaited me with a furrowed brow and gloomy eyes.

When I next appeared at the forest commissioner’s office Coca Mavrodin was noticeably happier to see me. She showed me a rat trap with a very deadly spring: she’d been storing it in her desk drawer just waiting for the day I’d arrive with some news. She’d have five or six of them made — huge ones, of course — to be placed them at those points where the stream went underground to greet Aron Wargotzki in the event that he got better and tried to take off.

But Aron Wargotzki kept his promise. He did not move. Day by day the snow remained untouched where the stream went underground. Only a slender little forest mold–hued creature scurried past now and then — perhaps the same one that had eaten Géza Hutira’s ear. Sometimes the scent of tart smoke wafted up out of the holes in the ground, and sometimes the odor of the spruce gum that had permeated this woodsman over the years.

“Listen, Aron Wargotzki,” I called out. “I’ve spoken to Géza Hutira. He’s a busy man — I’m afraid he just doesn’t have the time to come up here. You’ll have to settle for me. Tell me what’s the matter, maybe I can help.”

“Just talk him into coming by as soon as possible. I want to speak to him in private, that’s all. And in the meantime, until he has the time, he should give you a jug of warm milk to bring out here for me.”

“You’re dreaming, Aron Wargotzki — what’s this milk obsession of yours? Don’t you realize you can’t even swallow your own saliva? Your mouth is full of hard, dry foam. You’re on your last leg.”

“Me?”

“Yes — you’re sick, I’m afraid. Very sick.”

“Me? What are you saying? There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just that I’ve eaten all this dirt and now I’d like a little milk to balance things out.”

“Don’t kid around, Aron Wargotzki. I know exactly what’s wrong with you. That’s why I’m asking you to sit tight: it’s only for your own good.”

“I’ve already said that I can’t even move an inch, so where am I supposed to go? The flesh burned off my right thigh — or, if you’re looking at me, the left one — and what’s missing is exactly that damn bit that used to move the leg.”

“Well, just sit tight, and get through the next couple of days without milk.”

While waiting for the traps to be finished, I spent each day in the clearing from early morning to sunset. The ski tracks led me straight to Aron Wargotzki. Sometimes I had to shout above the murmuring stream, calling out until he was finally willing to acknowledge that he had a visitor; and other times he was waiting right below the opening, panting with interest like a dog.

“Tell me,” he pleaded. “What did my friend Géza say about me being here?”

“Nothing in particular, Aron Wargotzki. No one says anything about it. You know that’s how things are.”

“Well, when you bring the milk, be careful not to spill it and I’ll tell you where to pour it in. I don’t even care if you bring it in your mouth and spit it in some hole. As long as it’s milk.”

“Don’t tell me you think I’d get that close — you really can’t expect me to want to catch your flu.”

“I already told you there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just my leg that’s bad . . . and maybe I ate a bit too much dirt. It would be so good to rinse out my mouth with a little milk.”

“Don’t eat dirt — you’ll get even sicker”

“And there’s another thing that’s bothering me. I’m sincerely sorry about Géza Hutira’s ear. I don’t even know how that happened, but I was so angry about that rum tasting nasty that I guess I shoved his iron Pope right back out. When I looked out, I could see at once that it broke the poor fellow’s ear off, that it was hanging on only by a little flap of skin. I’d like to apologize to him. An ear isn’t a small thing to lose.”

“All right, I’ll let him know you’re sorry. He’s a gracious, bighearted man. He’ll forgive you, Aron Wargotzki.”

•

At the end of the day the mountain infantry’s van was supposed to transport the traps to the road worker’s cabin. Elvira Spiridon’s hair, as well as the edge of her skirt, were fluttering in the twilight breeze. Beyond her, beside the fence and covered by a tarp to keep them from getting soaked in the event of a stray shower, were at least fifty bags of cement piled up in rows. Coca Mavrodin-Mahmudia had, it seemed, decided on another course of action.

“If you carry this out, sir,” said Elvira Spiridon, leaning so close to me that I could smell the menace on her breath, “I would like it if we didn’t meet while you do.”

“All right — whatever you say. You’re free — go, live your life.”

In the week it took me to carry all those bags of cement on my back to the Kolinda forest, with several round trips each day, spring began. Pale grass followed by crocuses emerged on sun-soaked mounds of earth from under the blanket of melting snow, and the marble-white ski tracks etched two lines over the expanding patches of green. Misty blue thyme smoke hovered in the sunlight above the openings through which that subterranean stream breathed.

Once all the bags of cement were positioned by the openings, I threw a blade of grass on the water to see which way it flowed. I took out my freshly polished knife, and as I rolled up the sleeves of my jacket, the sunshine reflecting off the blade bounced into one dark lair after another: Aron Wargotzki addressed me for the last time.

“You think I don’t know what you’re preparing? For that reason alone I’d like to know your name — for god’s sake tell me who you are.”

“Aron Wargotzki, I don’t think this is the moment for introductions, but the fact is I’ve been living in the Zone under the pseudonym Andrei Bodor. Please forgive the person who goes by such a name for this whole affair.”

Coca Mavrodin-Mahmudia had not quite calculated right in ordering the bags of cement. Half were still untouched when the water turned gray, and slowed to a halt in the openings: the bubbles vanished from its surface; and, in a sign that as the solution was starting to bind and plugging up, all at once the stream sprung forth in several new spots on the clearing.

Standing where I’d left my skis at the clearning’s edge was Elvira Spiridon in her new spring dress, fluttering in the wind; with her freshly washed, drying spring hair, and her enormous copper earrings glaring in the sun.

“So you’re back, after all,” I said, gasping for breath as I got near her.

“Today I began to miss you, sir.”

There was no denying it: I’d missed her, too. As usual, I stood her on the skis in front of me, and as the forest began flitting by on both sides of us, gliding away backward ever faster toward the retired forest rangers’ clearing, with my nails and my teeth I tore that new spring dress right off her, and, using my knife, I cut away at my cement-armored trousers until, finally, once again I felt her velvety behind on my lap.