2
ANDREI'S DOG TAG

One spring day I arrived by bicycle at the Baba Rotunda Pass, and it was from there that I first glimpsed the imposing peaks at the foot of which I would later all but forget my life up to that point. In the valley below, the Sinistra river basin reposed before me under the long, sharp shadows and orange light of the afternoon. Willow groves and sparse rows of village houses loomed in the distance along the river bends; shingled roofs glistened on distant, sunbathed slopes; and further yet, the icy peaks of Pop Ivan Mountain and Dobrin shimmered above their thick black collars of spruce and fir. Behind them: the icy green, foreign, northern sky.

There were no more roads from there. The conservation area where I planned to lie low was surely somewhere near, under those steep mountainsides. And deep in that wilderness lived Béla Bundasian, my adopted son. For years I’d been searching for him.

The main road, after winding its way down from the pass, followed the railroad embankment for some distance until all at once the double set of train tracks disappeared into a tunnel. The track watchman stood at the entrance, playing a clarinet. And then, further down, near the village, the embankment ran up alongside the road once again, and before long the main tracks were joined by a local, narrow-gauge railway line. Bicycling along, I arrived at the terminal of the Sinistra branch railway almost simultaneously with the train.

The tracks came to an end by a ramshackle one-story building. Hanging from its eaves was a wooden board painted with the name of the village: DOBRIN. That wasn’t all. Someone had sketched on the wall below with mud: CITY.

It was spring when I arrived in Dobrin City, toward evening.

Having propped my bike up against a railing, I waited for the throng of silent passengers who’d just gotten off the train to pass by. Some wore rubber boots; others, sandals. I figured if someone seemed agreeable, I’d strike up a conversation. This was my first time in Dobrin.

Smoke stirred above the station — wood smoke, for the trains around there ran on timber — and a few clouds even crept upward along the main road, away from the station, as if pulled along by the passengers now walking home. A man with olive-brown skin stood leaning against the wall of a loading platform across the street. Blinking incessantly, he eyed the openings that formed in the departing crowd. He wore a dirty white tank top and stained army trousers; sandals held his bare feet. I had no intention of greeting him, but once the passengers had dispersed, he jumped off the ramp and ran directly over to me across the now empty space.

“You look,” he said in a soft, greasy voice, “as if you need a place to stay.”

“Well, something like that.”

“I know a place.”

That is how I met Nikifor Tescovina. His name was obvious from the start: a sheet-metal dog tag dangled on a chain around his neck. For his part, he didn’t want to shake hands, much less know my name. “Let’s not hurry things,” he said. “Just who you are can wait until Colonel Borcan looks you up.” He explained that the forest commissioner who commanded Dobrin’s mountain infantry would, among other things, decide on a name for me.

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but nobody here rides a bicycle. You won’t need yours anymore — just leave it there, someone will take it.”

He was always one step ahead of me as we walked through the village, which stretched out across the bottom of the valley. More than once he stepped into a puddle to wash the dust off his sandaled feet, as if summer had arrived, though in fact hardly had the sun disappeared for the day behind the peaks to the west than a cuticle of ice had started to form around all the puddles. A narrow, weasel-shaped patch of snow glistened on the steep mountainside above, and the cut power lines that dangled from the utility poles along the main road in Dobrin City swung back and forth as a cool evening breeze, spiced with the scent of spruce buds, swept down into the village

“Everything here belongs to the mountain infantry,” Nikifor Tescovina explained in that same soft, greasy voice. “The place you’ll live in, too — they take care of people around here.”

“Up to now I’ve seen them only in pictures,” I replied, in as hushed a tone as possible, “but I’ve heard the mountain infantrymen are decent soldiers.”

“Oh yes — and make sure to tell them you lost your papers. Colonel Puiu Borcan will pretend he believes you.”

“Oh! My papers —” I said with a start. “I stuffed them under the bicycle seat. I should go back and get them.”

“Oh, forget about them — your bike’s gone by now, anyway. Forget those papers ever existed.”

Toward the end of the village, a stream passed in white torrents under a covered wooden bridge, and beside it sat a dwarf, soaking his feet. Before long Nikifor Tescovina turned off the road into an alley that soon narrowed into a trail. Making its way along a small stream whose soggy banks were overgrown with weeds, this trail passed between the village yards out into a meadow. At the far end of the meadow, beside a cluster of spruces, willows, and black alders, stood a decrepit old building with a dented but glistening roof. It looked as if it used to be a water mill, but the stream had changed course, leaving the mill high and dry on the meadow. Birds nested in the building’s broken windows and twilight showered down from the sky through the cracks in the wood-shingle roof like a mass of thin, many-colored, shimmering blades. The mill’s axles, grindstones, and other onetime furnishings had long been removed, and the evening scent of the meadow blew gently through gaping holes in the wall.

Nikifor Tescovina passed through a hollow space between those walls and straight up to the second floor and stopped before a wide-open, rickety door. In a corner of the adjacent room, which seemed to have been used to store tools and other things, was a berth of freshly torn spruce branches.

“You can lie low here,” said Nikifor Tescovina. “No one’s going to ask you a thing.”

“How did you know I was coming?”

“Ever since you set foot in the Sinistra Zone, Colonel Borcan has followed your every move. This area attracts people like you — they follow the Sinistra River upstream and don’t stop until they reach Dobrin.”

“Then the colonel knows I’m just a simple wayfarer, that’s good to hear.”

“Oh, of course he knows. And what is the simple wayfarer planning to do? You seem versatile.”

“Well, I’m at home in the woods — I know about trees, bushes, mushrooms, fruit. I’ve worked at food markets. I can work at a lumberyard or help peel trees. I could even set traps.”

“Sounds good. I’ll tell the colonel. But until he comes by, don’t leave — In fact, don’t even step outside.”

“And what should I do if nature calls, in a big way?”

“Just stick your ass out the window.”

Nikifor Tescovina waved good-bye by putting a palm to his forehead. By the time he reached the far end of the meadow, where the village fences began, dusk had swallowed him up. Leaning over the windowsill, I kept looking his way until from behind me an owl flew outside, amid a great buffeting of wings.

Days passed before he deigned to show himself again, but every morning I found a little bag hanging on the doorknob, a bottle of water always inside it along with a few congealed boiled potatoes; onions; a handful of prunes; and some hazelnuts. Those days there, spent consuming such fare, fused together as quickly as the fog passing over the meadow; for a long time I had no idea whether it was Monday, Wednesday, or Saturday. The passing of time was signaled by the changing shape of the patches of snow on the mountainside above Dobrin.

One morning, though, there he was again: Nikifor Tescovina, seated on the threshold beside the dangling bag of grub.

“I’m glad to see you’ve been sleeping so well,” he said. “I’ve stopped by more than a few times but didn’t want to wake you. I thought: let the guy get his sleep. In the meantime, though, Colonel Puiu Borcan and I got to talking about you.”

“You mean he has time to think about me?”

“Of course he does — he’s the forest commissioner, right? He wants to see you — so he’ll come by soon. It looks like you can stay here in Dobrin.”

“If you’ve really arranged that, I’ll repay you someday. I’d like to make a go of it here. Something tells me this is this is the place I’ll make something of my life.”

“That could well be. Colonel Borcan figures that if your proposal to oversee wild fruit harvest is serious, something can be worked out. He thinks the harvested fruit could be stored here at the mill in barrels and tubs.”

“Exactly my plan.”

“And then, in the scent of fermenting fruit, you could sleep and sleep.”

“In that case, now I’m really curious to know how the blackberries are around here. I’ve been thinking mainly about blueberries and blackberries.”

“I’m not really sure. The truth is, it all depends on the bears, on what they want. They’re the ones who will be eating what you collect. A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty of them are kept in the preserve: they are why Colonel Borcan liked your idea.”

All day long I leaned out the window, waiting for Colonel Borcan to show up, gazing at those mountain peaks that seemed by turns headstrong or capricious. But for weeks on end, only shadows — sometimes of clouds; other times, of flocks of crows — made their way across that meadow that stretched out between the Sinistra River and Dobrin City. Spring rain came from the west, from the Sinistra peaks, and the clouds, colliding with the steep walls of Mount Dobrin, lingered for days around the icy summits. A mass of cottony clouds would sometimes descend from all sides upon the peaks like a veil of plush fabric draped over a sculpture. When it finally lifted days later, there stood Mount Dobrin once more, still glistening white even as below it, spring had taken hold all around. Whenever Nikifor Tescovina arrived toward night with that daily bag of food, we’d sit on the building’s lukewarm threshold and breathe in the scent of laurel rising from the stream.

“As you can see,” he would reassure me again and again, “you enjoy our complete confidence — no one will ask where you came from, and you won’t tell anyone, either. If someone starts badgering you with questions, go ahead and lie.”

“All right — I’m sure I’ll get into the swing of things. And what the hell, I could always just say something different to everyone.”

“That’s perfect — you’re getting the picture. And as far as your name is concerned, forget it right now. If you hear your name hissed somewhere nearby, don’t turn a hair — always a poker face, OK?”

The darkness that enveloped Dobrin after sunset every day was so thick that above the dark contours of the village houses the only light to be glimpsed came from the distant windows of the military base. Sometimes flashes of light shot out in purposeful signals from the mountain infantry’s watchtowers as well. And then there were the lightning bolts that might rip through the nighttime clouds up above Mount Dobrin, the faraway accompanying murmur of thunder intermingled with the hooting of the owls from down in the woods. The foggy yellow light of dawn invariably found me leaning out the window.

One day Nikifor Tescovina arrived with his little girl. Even from a distance, the child’s short, blazing red hair gleamed through the fog like a cluster of ripe mountain ash berries in the fall. They were near the mill by the time I noticed that the father had his daughter on a leash. A stone’s throw from the entrance, he tied her to the tall, yellow post that marked the place, and then he entered the building alone.

That day Nikifor Tescovina brought along a bottle of denatured alcohol as well as a sheet-metal mug and charcoal in a metal pot that had been drilled full of tiny holes. For it to be drinkable, he explained, the alcohol had to be filtered through charcoal into another container. In the absence of charcoal, he said, timber fungus or blueberries would also do the trick.

“It’ll make you puke at first, but you get used to it.”

“I bet.”

He’d already begun to pour the liquid over the charcoal, holding the mug underneath and watching for the first drops.

“Soon you can get to work. The colonel has already ordered up the tubs and the buckets, and he’s also hired a team of women to harvest the fruit. They’ll swarm around you like honeybees, but watch yourself. Like I said before: no matter what, keep that poker face.”

“Lately I’ve been the soul of self-discipline.”

“Good — make sure you keep it up if you run across a fellow named Géza Kökény. He’ll tell you that he’s famous, that there’s a bust of him on the riverbank, but don’t you believe him.”

“I won’t even hear him out.”

“That’s the spirit. Over there, by the way, is my little girl, Bebe,” he said, extending an open palm toward the meadow, where the redheaded youngster tied to the post was now sitting about on the grass. “You’ll get to know her. She’s just eight, but she wants to leave me already.”

“Don’t you let her.”

“She’s fallen in love with Géza Hutira.”

“I don’t know the name — sounds like an alias.”

“Hmm, who knows. He’s the meteorologist in the preserve. About your age — fifty, at least, but with his hair down to the ground, and he’s got my little girl’s heart in his hands.”

I’d been holed up in that abandoned water mill with voles, bats, and barn owls keeping me company for four, five, maybe six weeks already when Colonel Puiu Borcan finally looked me up in person. He dropped by with my new name. Winter returned that day for a couple hours to the forests of the Sinistra Zone. An icy mist descended on the blossoming meadow, a shimmering glassy mush formed on the backwater tributary, and mountain clearings shone in all their snowy resplendence over the village below. I glimpsed the two approaching figures through drifting wisps of fog. One of them was my benefactor, Nikifor Tescovina. The other — a baggy-faced, big-eared man in an officer’s greatcoat — adjusted his hat on his forehead as he came. His hand held a big black umbrella. Although icy drops of vapor from the passing storm still permeated the air, his umbrella was closed, its sodden black fabric limp as the wings of a sleeping bat. An enormous pair of binoculars swung from his neck.

This, then, was the forest commissioner, Colonel Puiu Borcan.

Later, once I’d earned his respect, I too had the opportunity to peer through those binoculars. On one occasion I accompanied the colonel way up into the woods, and while he went on alone into a thicket, he entrusted me with them along with his umbrella. It was Revolution Day, so I knew the mountain infantrymen were playing badminton down by the stream with the Dobrin railway workers. To this day I recall how that tiny snow-white birdie kept flashing back and forth above the prairie of swaying virgin grass that was taller than any of the men.

Anyhow, on that first day of our acquaintance Colonel Borcan came to a halt on the threshold, the binoculars about his neck and the umbrella hanging from his hand. His expression was woeful and a bit clammy. Reflected off the distant snowy clearings sunlight was shining right through his earlobes, and on the tufts of hair frizzed out from underneath his hat. The freezing rain had already come and gone that day, but drops still clung to the stubble on his chin.

“So you’re the one.”

“Yes.”

“And what’s your name?”

“I don’t know — I lost my papers.”

“Well, fine, then.”

From his pocket he removed a sheet-metal dog tag that dangled, glistening from a watch chain. On it, freshly engraved: ANDREI BODOR. My alias. Colonel Puiu Borcan himself put it around my neck, and then clamped the loose ends of the chain at my nape with little pliers. No sooner had he done so than the metal began warming my skin. Andrei, now that part of my new name I especially liked.