The Sinistra Zone

Back when I lived in Dobrin, where I’d gone on the trail of my adopted son, there was a single photographer in the entire forest district. And even he worked only for the mountain infantry. Not that his job was to immortalize either camouflaged soldiers trudging up mountainsides or red-lipsticked secretaries at headquarters. No, he was out there pursuing the conservation area’s Prussian bears — there were some 130 or 140 of them — for official record-keeping purposes.

Photographer Valentin Tomoioaga, himself a colonel, would roam the woods for weeks at a time. Although his good connections probably meant he received a whole host of inoculations, the Tungusic Flu got him, too, in the end. He fell ill at the edge of the woods above Dobrin City, in a cluster of denuded, barkless spruces that could be seen even from the village. Although he was discovered early on — the trim on his mantle kept fluttering about in the wind, which made him especially easy to spot — Valentin Tomoioaga was not admitted to the sick ward at the barracks. To the contrary, stakes were driven into the ground all around him as he lay there, sprawled out, in the throes of fever. Planks were then nailed all over the stakes, attached by beams the dead spruces — all to ensure that he didn’t hobble off somewhere and infect anyone else. Ears of corn were stuck through the gaps in the hastily erected plank fence for the photographer to chew on; as for drink, there was dew.

The Tungusic Flu stirred great dread around there, so it invariably seemed best if those stricken by the contagion, even if they happened to be colonels, were never again allowed back into the barracks, the village, or anywhere else, for that matter.

While no successor was named for the ailing Valentin Tomoioaga, the day soon came when the need arose for a substitute photographer. No, not someone to visit the bears or some top secret site in the conservation area. Instead, the search was on for someone with a camera to head up to the Ukrainian border, where a foreign trucker was expected that very day. This meant there was surely something suspicious about the man, who was none other than the meat-trucker Mustafa Mukkerman, though I myself had often seen him at the wheel of his truck — a silvery vehicle daubed all over with various colorfully painted figures — as he rolled by along the main, north-south highway that skirted its way around Dobrin.

Why was I, of all people, summoned to fill in for the photographer, who by now was sick as a dog and staring death in the face? Granted, I was known to be a jack-of-all-trades, but the decision could solely be chalked up to unpredictable, womanly whim. Indeed, it will forever remain a mystery why Colonel Coca Mavrodin chose me when she might have selected any of the numerous sly, secretive mountain infantrymen.

True, no sooner had she succeeded Puiu Borcan as forest commissioner than their differences became apparent. From my perspective, the winds of change fluttered about on tiny slips of paper, private letters of sorts, on which Colonel Coca Mavrodin summoned me repeatedly to headquarters. That’s how it happened in this case, too. One morning near the fruit depot I noticed scraps of paper bags rustling on utility poles, tacked to fences, and tied to tree branches hanging over the road. All bore the same, charcoal-scribbled summons: “Hurry, Andrei, Miss Coca is waiting for you.”

Izolda Mavrodin-Mahmudia — Coca was her nickname — sat in the armchair of the late Colonel Puiu Borcan with two enormous cameras on the desk before her: a Konica and a blunderbuss of a Canon. It was no problem if I didn’t know a whole lot about picture-taking, she said, noting that these machines did practically everything themselves. All they needed was a trustworthy, sensitive soul to hold them, to change the film now and again, and to press the buttons.

The Ukrainian border, where Mustafa Mukkerman was to arrive, ran along the nearby crest of Pop Ivan Mountain. Even from Dobrin, flares could sometimes be seen at night shooting through the air, as could the watchtowers’ spotlights as they panned, flashing against the clouds. By day, though, the very same apathy came sliding down the slopes of Pop Ivan Mountain toward the valley as from any nearby peak; nothing much had happened there in decades.

Huddled before me in the commander’s chair, Coca Mavrodin was already dressed for the drafty pass, bundled up in a hooded gray greatcoat of the sort worn by the mountain infantry. To protect herself from the wind she’d stuffed her ears with yellow cotton; the sour-bitter stink of bugs hovered about her. Word had it that she’d wound up here in the frigid north from the miasmic delta down south, from that danger-fraught world of giant catfish and pelicans.

“Whenever I have the chance,” she said, “I’m pleased to work with civilians. So I thought of you, Andrei. But there will be two more individuals with us, from the younger generation.”

It was an amphibious Red Cross military vehicle that took us over streambeds, bogs, and soggy meadows all the way to the foot of Pop Ivan Mountain, then up along a dirt road full of hairpin turns that wound its way to the narrow pass. Behind the wheel was Coca Mavrodin. I sat beside her, cameras hanging heavily from my neck; on the back seat were the gray ganders, two nearly identical young men wearing glum expressions, winter coats, scarves, suits, and oxfords. They were accompanied by a pair of Dobermans that also looked exactly alike.

From our confidential conversation along the way, it turned out that the international trucker Mustafa Mukkerman was arriving from far away with a load of frozen mutton. Passing through once a week on his way to the southernmost reaches of the Balkans, he crossed the border without fail every Thursday at noon.

He was no run-of-the-mill creature. A giant of classic proportions, Mustafa Mukkerman was said to weigh more than half a ton. In the back seat, the two gray ganders were now racking their brains over his colossal limbs, and who would get which side of him once it came time to commence the body search; they’d come along with the aim of finding something on him.

As we made our way up to the border in that amphibious vehicle, at bends in the road we sometimes caught glimpses of Pop Ivan Mountain’s weasel-hued bluffs and its rocky crags, pale-red veins which ran down from the summit deep into the forest below. But all this faded as the pass neared and the weather turned worse. Winter arrived with a vengeance that day up there on the heights of Pop Ivan Mountain.

The border station comprised nothing more than a one-room guard booth and a camp tent; the road in front was closed off by a blue-and-yellow iron crossing-bar. This was the highest point along the old dirt road that crossed the mountains, and here the double-sided slopes contracted into what could just about be called a pass. It was a miserable, drafty place of murmuring bluffs and hoary strips of lichen swaying from the spruces and firs. On the distant, translucent horizon glimmered the disquieting colors of the north.

But on this day, by the time we reached the top the weather had taken a sharp turn for the worse. At first this meant a grayish mix of slush and freezing rain splotching incessantly on the vehicle’s galvanized iron shell and its plexiglass windshield. Then, suddenly, silence, followed by an increasingly thick veil of feather-sized snowflakes. There we were, deep in the pass, swamped by a wintertime murkiness broken only by the red stars glowing on the border guards’ caps.

All at once came a boom of thunder. And although flashes of lightning now repeatedly tore apart the thick veils of snow, one of the guards hung a hurricane lamp on the crossing gate all the same, presumably so its red light might just keep Mustafa Mukkermann from plowing into the bar were he to arrive at the height of the storm. They knew he wouldn’t be late: for years now he’d crossed the border every Thursday at noon. He was the punctual type. It was said that on his father’s side — the Mukkerman side, that is — Mustafa was partly German.

The Dobermans now lolled about underneath the amphibious vehicle but Coca Mavrodin walked slowly forward to the crossing-bar. The snow kept falling, yet all the while she waited there, resting her elbow on the blue-and-yellow iron bar; so that not even by chance should she miss the moment when Mustafa Mukkerman’s headlights would glimmer through the thick white mass of falling snow along the hairpin turns below, on the far side of the pass. Only the puffs of steam occasionally rising up signaled that a living being was bundled in that wool-felt greatcoat there in the biting wind. Before long, just as much snow had piled up on top of her as on the crossing gate and on the nearby open crate of sand kept in case of fire. Above her fur cap a little eddy of snow swirled in the wind, and finally a bird landed on her shoulder.

The dogs were the first to sniff out Mustafa Mukkermann’s arrival. The snow-packed gusts of wind had yet to even carry the slightest drone of that still-distant motor bellowing under the weight of all that cargo when the Dobermans began to yawn, in a clear signal that something had caught their attention. The truck, veiled by fleeting clouds of fog, was already ascending the nearest gradient with its full load of frozen mutton. The two dogs, their ears perked and their stubby tails flinching, came out from underneath the vehicle, smudged with oil. Coca Mavrodin, who knew her dogs, and knew just what to make of the fur billowing on their necks, straightened up at once. The snow coating her back cracked, falling to the ground in big soft cakes.

The bird on her shoulder teetered before plopping stiffly with ice-covered wings into the snow. Apparently it had landed on her in order to die. The bird that carries the Tungusic Flu from the north, so it is said, also succumbs to it in the end.

All fell silent on Mustafa Mukkerman’s arrival. The wind died down, the snowflakes froze in the air. Only the thick grayness remained, strafed no longer by lightning but by the truck’s headlights. The soldiers raised the crossing-bar to let him pass. The silver-painted walls of the truck were daubed with all manner of drivel which could occur only to a trucker who roved homelessly over international borders: an eyesore of blue palm trees and green monkeys against a purple sky on one wall; another wall decorated with a woman’s breast, solitary and profoundly drooping.

The two gray ganders now emerged from within the amphibious vehicle and kicked the snow off the truck’s license plate to verify that, indeed, this was their man. Touching their fingers to its silver walls they walked around the truck. Shadows of disapproval crossed their eyes at the sight of the cheaply painted figures all over it.

Meanwhile, Mustafa Mukkerman rolled down his window. Stretching out his enormous, bag-like, bare, rounded arm, he made a fist, which he shook a few times by way of greeting — both by bending his elbow and his wrist. The gray ganders looked at each other: were they really seeing this? Hardly a good omen, that much was certain.

Coca Mavrodin elbowed me, as if urging me to get on with it: I could now begin snapping away. When a light flashed under my fingers, she explained, I would have to insert a new roll of film. I peeped through the viewfinder: the decoratively daubed truck, its driver, the two gray ganders, and the two Dobermans came to life at once in miniature on the nonreflecting glass.

In the meantime, Mustafa Mukkerman brought a piece of machinery into operation that opened the wall of the cab and lifted the driver — that colossal sack of skin — out along with his seat before finally lowering him to the ground, where he then got to his feet. Huge, round masses of flesh and blubbery wattles of skin quivered under his red coveralls. The air around him quivered, too, and the snow began to melt. On noticing two gaunt customs officers step from the booth, he waved to them convivially; they must have been old buddies. Then, clutching the grips built onto the side of the truck, no doubt for this very purpose, and jingling his keys, he made his way toward the back to open the cargo-hold, and so allow them to pass their flashlights over the rimy, looming meat. He was about to break the lead seals off the lock when Coca Mavrodin intervened, announcing that they shouldn’t waste their time with “this sort of thing.”

At which the gray ganders hurried over to Mustafa Mukkerman, stood on either side and commanded him to undress, there and then. This was the colonel’s order, they explained, but being a woman, she was reluctant to pronounce it herself, lest he misunderstand her intentions.

“This is my first such job,” Colonel Coca Mavrodin quietly observed beside me. “You know, I was posted before on a pelican farm in the tepid south.”

“Good luck with it.”

The snow was dying down. The gray ganders consoled Mustafa Mukkerman by noting it wouldn’t be any warmer in the guard booth — not that he would fit inside anyway. And again they ordered him to strip, the sooner the better.

“Naturally,” said the trucker with a nod. “My pleasure.”

“Where did you learn our language so well?” Coca Mavrodin called over.

“Where? Oh, just in passing through. Comes through the window, you know.”

“You know, I think it’s really too bad that things have come to this. And with you of all people, such a respectable man.”

“For me it’s a pleasant surprise,” said the trucker Mustafa Mukkerman with a grin. “I wanted to show you all my dick, anyway.”

Coca Mavrodin first looked away, then glanced suddenly at me to gauge from my expression whether she’d heard him right. Pulling a sharpened indelible pencil from her pocket, she seemed intent on writing on her palm, or in the air, what she had just heard, while the two gray ganders stretched out their necks at the fleeting words. As if waiting precisely for this moment, Mustafa Mukkerman now pulled the zipper down over his chest and belly to slip off his clothes. The unusual coveralls seemed custom-tailored to his proportions: hardly had he given the now-unzipped outfit — already slackened here and there — a shake than it fell right off him. All at once, just as a moment before had been requested, he stood there completely naked, his vast folds of flesh quivering amid all those silvery snowflakes.

“Don’t think I’m getting a kick out of this,” said Coca Mavrodin, turning toward me. “This is not my thing; I can’t stand the sight of naked people. But I got a tip-off from our Polish comrades that this individual is planning to smuggle something through our country hidden among his folds of skin. Just what, unfortunately, they didn’t say.”

Quivering flesh and wattles of fat hung from Mustafa Mukkerman’s shoulders, shoulder-blades, and waist like drooping wings; not that such reaches of his body could be recognized as shoulder-blades or a waist. The gray ganders had to grab the two Dobermans by their collars and pull them near, goading them to sniff over the trucker. The dogs couldn’t have cared less — Mustafa Mukkerman didn’t interest them one bit.

“It would be best,” Colonel Coca Mavrodin said after a little while, “if you just handed it over — then we’d be over the hard part.”

“I’m not in a rush.”

“But I doubt you want my men to put their hands all over you.”

“Why not. I love it when someone scratches my dick.”

Coca Mavrodin only stood there, the pencil trembling between her fingers as the gray ganders commenced the body search. They probed frills and folds, slowly pulling their fingers hopefully, with feeling, along each trench between those sausages of skin. They even stretched apart Mustafa Mukkerman’s ass cheeks, peering somberly inside. And they rocked his scrotum and its sleepy dumplings back and forth. When they completed their job, they hardly dared to look at each other: not even in the most secret pouches and intimate orifices of skin on this Turkish trucker had they found a thing.

Mustafa Mukkerman still stood there with his legs spread wide in a sort of expectant straddle, as if sorry the whole thing was over so soon. From beneath fatty eyelids he glanced about, absentmindedly lifting his feet again and again from the newly formed slush.

“You think there’s something to smirk about?” Coca Mavrodin demanded, casting me a sudden stare: “What the hell?”

“First of all,” replied Mustafa Mukkerman in my place, having overheard the question, “I prefer to look respectable in pictures. That aside, I had a dream about this whole thing, and so unfortunately I don’t have on me what you were looking for just now.”

Coca Mavrodin stared at the gray ganders, and accorded even me another fleeting glance. Then she took that indelible pencil of hers — which no doubt she’d been saving for something or other — and broke it in two at one crack, its halves plopping into the snow. That done, as if signaling that for her the mission was complete, she started off toward the amphibious vehicle with the two stern-faced gray ganders in her wake, and I was turning to follow as well, the cameras heavy around my neck.

Which is when our eyes met — mine and Mustafa Mukkerman’s. His were full of goodness, affection, velvety human warmth. Extending a hand toward me, he curled his giant index finger invitingly. From his glove compartment he then fished out a pack of Kents; a little cellophane bag of Haribo fruit gummies; and finally, from somewhere or other, he produced a Kinder chocolate egg, the hollow sort with a toy hidden inside. He offered all this to me on his enormous outstretched palm. Yes, on that sleety morning there in the mountain pass, on the very day that winter arrived, a stark naked Turk gave me — the recently sacked wild berry expert — gifts.

“Listen,” he whispered: “No doubt one day you’ll get tired of all this. Just let me know. I’d be glad to take you with me to the southern Balkans. Down to Thessaloniki, the Dardanelles, Rhodes. I’ll stick you in the back with the sheep. You won’t be warm, but you’ll come dressed for the occasion. No one will find you in there.”

“Please stop.”

“Get yourself a nice thick sheepskin coat, the sort that reaches down to your heels. I pass by here every Thursday, stopping at the gas station — you know the one, down on the main north-south highway. But you can also flag me down along the road. Just try to make sure it’s not raining that Thursday: if there’s one thing you can’t do, it’s sit among those icy hunks of meat, in the freezer, in wet clothes. All right, you’d better go — Allah be with you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I haven’t heard a thing — but you really do know the language.”

“Nonsense. I only parrot words from memory.”

The amphibious vehicle was waiting for me, its motor running, its galvanized iron shell trembling. No sooner did I take my seat than Coca Mavrodin headed off, slipping and sliding over the fresh snow, to descend slowly along the serpentine road toward the Sinistra valley. Already sucking on a Haribo gummy, I looked back, between the heads of the two gray ganders at the fading scene out the rear window: Mustafa Mukkerman still standing there naked in the snow, gazing after us until he disappeared behind our first curve.

“I bet he invited you to come along to the Balkans,” remarked Coca Mavrodin. “To the coast of Greece, to Olympia.”

“He touched on the notion.”

“Well, don’t get all excited about such plans just now.”

After reaching the bottom of the valley and cutting back across the streambed, the vehicle floundered across those soggy meadows once again. Bracing on their forelegs, the two Dobermans gazed out the window and the gray ganders’ eyes sparkled with alertness, though there could hardly have been much worth noting down there in the valley. On nearing the village, Coca Mavrodin, her forehead glistening with sweat, asked me to adjust her cap.

“Next time I’ll surprise him,” she said. “Really, I mean it — I’ll let the air out of the tires, or maybe I’ll have the tubes turned inside-out. So he’ll lose his taste for us forever.”

“And,” offered one of the gray ganders, “to think he dreamt about it . . .”

“I bet our Polish comrades were playing a trick on us,” observed the other.

“I suggest you two keep your traps shut,” said Coca Mavrodin.

Soon, Mustafa Mukkerman whizzed by along the main highway, his truck daubed all over with palm trees, monkeys, and that solitary, drooping woman’s breast. Of course he noticed the amphibious vehicle floundering over the meadow, glassy from sleet — he gave a long honk and waved. The snow his truck had whipped up swirled about and sparkled in his wake: he’d brought winter with him, but he was heading for the sunny Balkans.

The wild fruit depot, where I lived at the time, stood outside the village alone on a meadow and could be reached from the Dobrin railway station only by way of a narrow wagon track. Coca Mavrodin braked at the turn and, after I jumped from the still-moving vehicle, cut the engine.

“Of course I won’t have the tubes cut out of his tires,” she called after me. “Don’t believe such things about me. I knew he had nothing on him. ”

“I figured you were just kidding about the tires.”

“And if you think about it, you’ll realize the whole thing was planned this way in advance with our Polish colleagues — it was a drill.”

“I guessed as much.”

“No, you didn’t. You learned this key bit of information only now, from me: I let you in on it.”

Winter was descending in those very hours down the slopes of Pop Ivan Mountain into the Sinistra valley. Icicles were forming from the water trickling over the eaves of the former mill that now functioned as the fruit depot. I had the impulse to crack open my chocolate egg — what sort of clever little trifle lay hidden inside? But now with autumn nearly over, darkness came early, so I saved that pleasant moment for the next day. In the pitch-black hallway I dipped my mug haphazardly into the fermented fruit juices with which I flavored my regular drink, watered-down denatured alcohol. Then I crouched in my little nook in the corner of a storage room, where each night, the spirits lit me up inside out by lighting up my veins.

Before long I was hungry, so I soaked mushrooms and cold boiled potatoes in the watered-down denatured alcohol, then sucked away at this concoction while blissfully perking my ears to the organ-like tunes outside: the wind playing against icicles. In keeping with my habit — rain or shine, every night — I knelt down by the window before dozing off and pissed into the yard.

But, now, my timing wasn’t so good. No sooner had I laid down than a beam of light started bouncing its way amid the barrels on those moldy floors and about the dank walls until finally zeroing in on my straw mattress in the corner. And who stood there but one of the gray ganders, sopping wet.

“Please don’t do that again,” he said softly, sternly. “If you’ve got to take a piss, we’ll be happy to walk you across the dark yard any time. From now on you’ll always find one of us nearby.”

Of course, I should have guessed as much: from this day on I ranked among Coca Mavrodin’s confidants. I’d glimpsed one of her secrets, so from now on the gray ganders would keep an eye on me, too. In proof of which one of them already stood there before me, slushy with piss.

Around dawn, when, in keeping with propriety, I got up to trudge to the outhouse at the far end of the yard, I said to him:

“You’ve got to be tired. If you come inside, I’ll dig up some sacks you can lay down on. A new day’s about to begin, get some rest.”

“No way,” he said, brushing me off. “You’re a stranger. How do I know what sort of bed you’re offering me?”

“Then forget I said anything.”

Morning was at hand. No sooner did the sunlight pour over the slopes than the barking of dogs billowed up; then, along the road, beyond the stream, the mist around the bust of Géza Kökény began glowing yellow.

The barking came again and again. Whenever it ceased for brief intervals, the dead silence would be broken by a howl from Valentin Tomoioaga — the photographer-cum-colonel whose shoes I’d filled for all of a day, and whom I had to thank for Mustafa Mukkerman becoming my friend.