The Sinistra Zone

For weeks, months, maybe years I’d been living in the Sinistra Zone under the alias Andrei Bodor when a trackman’s job opened up at the narrow-gauge forest railway. Sheet-metal-sheathed freight cars and scrapped mine cars ran along this route hauling fruit, horse carcasses, and other provisions to the bears in the conservation area. There, somewhere inside the fence surrounding the preserve, far from the world, lived my adopted son, Béla Bundasian. It was on account of him that I’d moved to this mountainous area up north to begin with. So as soon as I heard that the trackman Augustin Konnert had been found in several pieces one morning beside the rails, I applied for his post.

Although I probably wasn’t the only one who applied, in no time I was summoned to the base for an interview. While waiting in the hallway I met up with the barber of Dobrin, who had just been banished from the Zone. That day marked the beginning of my lifelong friendship with Aranka Westin.

This was around the time that the wild fruit depot in Dobrin had been shut down, and although I had immediately lost my job as harvest manager, I was allowed to stay on in the storage building, sleeping in a small room among the barrels and tubs. The depot was situated in an abandoned water mill on a meadow, along a stream that was in fact a backwater tributary of the Sinistra; this stream had long ago changed course, veering away from the mill during a spring flood — leaving the old stone mill isolated on the meadow in the company of spruces, mountain ash, willows, and black alders. The spot was marked by a tall, yellow-painted post that could be seen from far away even on cloudy days, so the women arriving from nearby mountainsides after harvesting fruit could find their way there even in thick fog.

On the morning of that memorable day, a brown slip of paper torn from a bag fluttered on that now superfluously towering yellow post. On it, in hastily scrawled letters, were these words: “Andrei, hurry to the office. Serious business.” The message was for me, written by Colonel Coca Mavrodin herself, the new mountain infantry commander in Dobrin. I recognized her handwriting from the backward n’s and s’s. The unknown messenger must have tacked the note to the post in the early hours — tracks made by rubber boots groped their way about the rimy soil near the post. Autumn was drawing to a close.

Circumventing the trail through the meadow, I flanked the willows along the stream and didn’t meet up with a soul except for the bust of Géza Kökény, which appeared through the latticework of denuded tree branches. Dobrin stretched out beyond the stream, and beyond the village, almost on the mountainside itself, stood the mountain infantry barracks, looming gray at the bottom of the precipice like some massive pile of fallen boulders. Further yet, in one of the valleys extending to the border, lived Béla Bundasian, my adopted son.

It’s a simple, everyday story, this tale of ours. One fine day Béla Bundasian did not return home from Moldavia, where he went regularly to get sheet music paper from black marketeers, and I never saw him again. For a week or two after his disappearance, it seemed conceivable that once again he was passing the time with his lover, Cornelia Illafeld, a hot-blooded woman who lived somewhere right in the middle of the Carpathians, near a railway tunnel. But when he hadn’t shown up even weeks later, and hadn’t sent so much as a sign of life, it was safe to assume he’d gotten mixed up in something or other.

He’d gotten mixed up in something, all right. But only a year and a half later did it become clear that Béla Bundasian had been resettled in the vicinity of the Ukrainian border and was now living in a conservation area within the Sinistra Zone. All this I learned from an anonymous well-wisher — perhaps some local official — by way of a note etched with a needle onto a coin dropped into my mailbox.

Such news is far from a cause for celebration, perhaps, but it elated me nevertheless. I soon gave up my job with the main office at the food market, where I had been working at the time as an inspector and, on occasion, a specialist identifying wild mushrooms. Having done so, I traveled north, hoping to land a job in some mountain village along the Sinistra River. I followed my nose all the while, and finally — years having passed in the meantime — I ended up precisely there, in the vicinity of the conservation area in question: dank, drafty Dobrin City.

Harvesting wild fruit and mushrooms is a sure way of getting by even in the leanest of times, for you can always fill up your own satchel in addition to the government-issue pack basket. Blueberries, blackberries, and chanterelles are, of course, much appreciated by many people. But it wasn’t some big canning factory we supplied, just the nearby conservation area: bears were locked up in the ruins of a chapel and caged in abandoned, caved-in mines. Through dropped hints and wily inquiries, I figured out that Béla Bundasian was living in the meteorologist Géza Hutira’s cottage — above the timber line, amid snowcapped peaks. Not that he had anything to do, but as a favor to the meteorologist he would sometimes go outside and note the positions of the weather vanes on the cliffs or take readings from various measuring instruments scattered about the mountainsides. He never did come into the village, so I waited for our paths to cross once again by chance.

As if he had seen right through my plans, the region’s previous forest commissioner, Colonel Puiu Borcan, had been unwilling to sign a pass that would have allowed me to harvest on the preserve. But then Puiu Borcan came to an unexpected end, failing to return from one of his patrols. For a while people waited for him to return, figuring that maybe he’d reappear after some drawn-out escapade, but when a solitary black umbrella floated over Dobrin City like some sort of giant bat, carried by the wind — only he, mind you, the commander of the mountain infantry, used such an umbrella on his patrols — everyone knew the colonel was no more.

Colonel Puiu Borcan was succeeded as commander of the mountain infantry in Dobrin by a woman, Izolda Mavrodin, who went by the nickname “Coca.” She was a slender creature — quiet, diaphanous, like a dragonfly. Whenever she wanted to see me, she’d send me a note, just a few short words, and ragged at that, invariably torn from a paper bag. What’s more, recognizing her messages was easy, and such brown, coal-scrawled strips of paper fluttered even now, as I walked, tied to dry stalks and denuded twigs along the trail that led to the base: “We’re waiting for you, Andrei, on very important business.”

Coca Mavrodin had summoned others that day to the office as well, and the hall was full of spruce-gum-scented lumberjacks, forest rangers, and the like. So it was that while awaiting my turn, I met up with the barber of Dobrin, Vili Dunka. As if no longer recognizing anyone at all, he was just leaving her office with hurried, disdainful steps. But I went after him — after all, we sometimes got together for a drink or two.

Vili Dunka, however, was no more pleased to see me than anyone else. He was in a hurry, he said, explaining that he had to clear out of the village, in fact, the whole Sinistra Zone, on the first train. That morning he’d been summoned to the base with orders to bring only a traveling bag, a change of underclothes, and his most cherished personal effects: from there he was headed straight for the station. The barbershop had been closed in Dobrin City, as had the bars; all the venues where people had been in the habit of chitchatting or lingering about had been shut down. As if to prove his story, Vili Dunka pulled forth a complimentary train ticket allowing him to travel for free to his designated new abode.

“And what does Aranka Westin have to say about this development?” I asked.

“Nothing. It doesn’t apply to her; she’ll go on patching up officers’ greatcoats. She’ll be staying here.”

The woman in question was the base’s seamstress, and until that day had lived with Vili Dunka.

“I ask because as you know,” I said, continuing my initial line of thought, “you’ll be away for many years. In fact, you might never come back at all.”

“That’s how it looks — I’m ready for anything.”

“Well, I don’t know if you ever noticed, but my mouth has always watered for Aranka Westin. Now that you’re leaving, I’ll do everything in my power to fill your shoes.”

“Yeah, that’s crossed my mind. But it’s simple: I just won’t think about you two.”

“I’d like to be up-front — I wouldn’t want it to look as if I’m up to no good behind your back. I wouldn’t want you to think that.”

“For me, you two are history. Most of my things are still there, with her. Take anything you want. My undershirts, slippers, underwear — that’s all there, and we’re about the same size. All I’m taking with me are scissors, razors, shaving cream and a couple of brushes. My barber’s supplies, you know. Everything else is yours.”

“That’s really decent of you.”

“What the hell can I do?”

“Then again, who knows what’s going to happen — as you can see, they’ve called me in here, too.”

“But you don’t have a bag with you. You can stay. At least for a while.”

“I sure hope so — that’s why I’m taking the liberty of asking for a few words of advice. How should I behave — what are her habits, her womanish whims?”

“Damn it, man, just concentrate on her big white shanks, not her whims. But all the same, let’s just say that if she’s busy sewing, don’t even think of making a move. With her, duty always comes first. And now I’ve got to be on my way — all the best.”

“Thanks. Take care of yourself, okay?”

With that, Vili Dunka, the former barber of Dobrin, headed off. From the hallway window I watched him make his way past the glistening puddles all over the yard to the porter’s gatehouse in the towering concrete wall that surrounded the property. He waited at the booth for an officer to open the gate and let him out. I kept watching as his path on the opposite side of the wall was indicated by sparrows taking flight. Vili Dunka disappeared down the road to the station, and that was the last anyone ever heard of him.

It was late afternoon by the time I was called in for my interview. Seated in the forest commissioner’s chair was the coroner, Colonel Titus Tomoioaga. Explaining that Coca Mavrodin was occupied at the moment, he reassured me that she was reviewing my application for the trackman’s job. He added that there was, however, a little hitch: my files had been lost while being taken to the records office. Until they turn up, he said, they would solicit personal references about my character from a few trustworthy individuals. And, who knows, even if the trackman’s job wasn’t possible, Coca Mavrodin might just employ me as a courier of sorts; for someone was needed to take messages into the conservation area.

It seemed they wanted to send me to the very place I’d been banned from until then. After waiting for so many years, perhaps finally I would cross paths once more with Béla Bundasian. Feigning indifference, I conjured up a lackluster expression, as if this was not quite what I’d had in mind. Indeed, after waiting so long for just such a turn of events I couldn’t even bring myself to be too happy about the news. Besides which, to be honest, my thoughts were still on Vili Dunka, who sat waiting at the station with that complimentary ticket in his pocket. The sound of a short train-whistle would mean he had left. It would be nice, I thought, to try on his slippers that very night.

Being late autumn, night was already coming on as I left the base and passed along Dobrin City’s empty streets, with their vagabond fogs and the barking of dogs. More than a few years had passed since the power lines had been cut, so for the most part the local houses cowered each and every night in muted darkness; even now, early in the evening, hurricane lamps and tallow candles glinted here and there.

A pale window shone faintly like daybreak from deep inside the yard of Aranka Westin.

For a long time I peered through the gaps in the curtain, watching her rummage about in a widowed sort of way, watching her patch up those heavy wool-felt uniforms in the flickering candlelight. A thick wool shawl was draped over her back in a triangle: its tip reached her bottom, its two wings nestled onto those thighs Vili Dunka had called “shanks.” No doubt she was a bit cold. It seemed she hadn’t had the time to light a fire that day.

I went around the house to the woodshed, bundled a few logs into my arms, grabbed some kindling, then went back around and, without knocking, opened the door by pressing down the handle with my knee. Aranka Westin looked up momentarily, flashing me another quick look or two as I clumsily closed the door, again using my leg. If her eyes were indeed seamstress sharp, she might have noticed the trousers trembling just so around my leg — perhaps, she might have thought, from the draft. At least five years had passed since I’d been with a woman.

I waited for the first encouraging sign: for the furrows to subside on her chin, for her toes to slacken invitingly in her slippers; and, above all, for her to finally drop from her hands the officer’s greatcoat she was painstakingly equipping with new pockets of gray felt. This little venture of mine was a sure thing, I knew, and I knew another thing, too: not even by chance should I try anything as long as the sewing went on.