The Trace of the Wolf

by Siegfried Wittwer

  "No, I couldn't hunt with a bow and arrow. I'd starve to death." Proschin stroked the slight curvature of his belly. "I use pitfalls. But I rarely eat meat. Most of my food consists of acorns, wild berries and mushrooms. I collect them in large quantities and dry them for the winter. Here in the cave I keep only a part of my supplies. I have three more camps in different directions, each one a days walk from here. If they discover me here and I can escape, I have nothing to fear. I find shelter and food everywhere."

  "Don't you ever leave your precinct to go among people?" Mischka wanted to know.

  "Rare, very rare. I have some faithful Orthodox members from the underground church in the villages further south. They provide me with things that I can't get myself. I sometimes celebrate Christmas or Easter with them in a cave that few know. But most of the time I'm alone. Nobody knows I'm hiding here. You're the first one I've shown my hiding place."

  "Your trust honors me, Proschin."

  "Well, maybe I just got tired of being alone."

  "I think you're a thoroughbred priest. Like many clergymen, you have a helper syndrome, a tendency to self-sacrifice. You just had to take me under your wing."

  "Well, don't get sarcastic," Proschin jokingly threatened, "or I'll keep you upside down until you look like a tomato."

  "I'll keep my mouth shut," Mischka gave back. "But be honest with me. Do you want to spend the rest of your days here, or don't you sometimes long to return to the security of a family, the comfort of a settlement or the cultural offerings of a city?"

  The old man nodded. "Yes, sometimes I dream about it. Sometimes I wish I could live like before my arrest, eat like everyone else, sleep in a comfortable bed, have weekly church services and work as a minister. I also wish for the security of a family, the laughter of the children and the loving look of my Dascha. But," Proschin sighed, "it was not granted to me."

  He drove his hand through the air as if to wipe away his thoughts. "Let's go back to the present and try to make the most of it. You're right, I'm glad you're here and I can help you. Yes, I have a helper syndrome."

  The next day Proschin allowed Mischka to get up for a short time.

  "I can see your condition and muscles have become weak quite a bit." He looked at his patient from top to bottom. "A week of bed rest requires two weeks of training until you're as fit as you were before. But avoid all overexertion. "Violent cures only do the opposite."

  Every morning Mischka trained his abdominal and back muscles to relieve the spine. He made visible progress. In the second week he was finally completely free of all ailments.

  He roamed with Proschin through the surrounding forests to collect winter supplies, although it was only in the middle of summer. He got to know new plants and tricks that made survival in the wilderness easier. For a priest, the old man had an extraordinary knowledge of the secrets of nature.

  Proschin also initiated him into the possibilities of escape if they were discovered one day by chance. Behind the wall hanging in the cave there was a second hidden exit, which was secured by a rockfall trap. Here Mischka kept his packed backpack to be ready for escape at any time.

  Down by the river lay a row boat that Proschin had brought with him when he had moved into the wilderness. With him he transported his hunting booty or utensils, which he got as a gift from members of the underground church.

  Mischka grew to like his host more and more. Despite his age he was still a bear of a man and mentally so agile as if he were twenty years younger. Nevertheless, Mischka felt driven to move on. His walk wasn't over yet. He had no intention of spending the rest of his life in the wild, as outlaws did sometimes. The very thought of having to spend another winter in a cave made him uneasy. Proschin's presence might make some things easier, but it could also happen that this man's idiosyncrasies and pious allusions annoyed him in the dark winter months.

  When a low-pressure area sent long-lasting rain showers across the country, Mischka became quieter from day to day. His thoughts began to revolve around the question of what his future would look like. Did he even have a future? Wasn't the hope of escaping to the free west an illusion, a dream that rises like a soap bubble to become fragile and finally burst?

  Proschin watched him with growing concern. He knew the warning signs of an incipient depression and knew that a young person could lose all life forces through such an emotional disorder.

  "What's the matter with you?" he finally wanted to know. "I've been watching you all week. Something seems to be bothering you. You're not talking to me anymore. You stare into the fire for hours and chew on the venison as if it were your shoe sole. Go ahead and say it. Maybe we can solve your problem together."

  "Oh, it's nothing special," Mischka muttered, "I don't feel well somehow."

  "Surely there's a reason for that. Do you want to talk about it, or should I leave you alone?"

  Mischka was silent for a few minutes, and Proschin did not push him any further. He was an experienced pastor who knew that talking and silence, listening and answering had their time. But suddenly it broke out of the young man, as if he had to free himself from an inner pressure:

  "I can no longer stand it here, in this cave, in this wilderness, in this land. I want to finally be free, to no longer have to live under constraints and limitations. What is this existence that I'm being condemned to? I'm surrounded by walls everywhere, by orders and unjust laws. Even if I were no longer persecuted, I would still have to live in an impoverished society, without any hope of improving my life situation. Should my wishes never come true? Is a life of renunciation and cowardice my destiny? Am I condemned to suffer to my last breath, to suffer only ever? – No! I want to be free and happy! I want to enjoy my life. That's why I have to go. I can't stay here any longer. As soon as the rain stops, I'll head west again. I've got to make it!"

  The hermit looked at him and said: "You long for freedom. You want to be able to go where it takes you. You want to be allowed to say what you think, and you want to possess what you wish for, and you think then you will be happier than you are now."

  Mischka nodded silently.

  "People in the west have these freedoms! But is that why they're happier?" The old man laughed for a moment. "No, my boy! Happiness does not depend on having everything you dream of, on being able to say and do what you want. Most contented and happy people on this earth could not realize such idealistic dreams! – If you want to hear my opinion, it's really your attitude, your attitude to life, whether you're happy or not."

  "Should I close my eyes? Should I become blind to the misery of my life and surrender fatalistically to my destiny? – No, Proschin! I can't turn off my thinking! I am not a Muslim who surrenders without objection to the will of Allah and murmurs his Kismet with his head bowed."

  "Typical youth," the priest replied gently. "You still think strongly in extremes. If something's not white, it’s black."

  Proschin shook his head and threw a log into the embers of the fire. Then he turned to Mischka again. "Mr. Student, the world is more colorful than you can imagine, and it has many shades of gray. The truth seldom lies to the right or to the left. Only fanatics suspect them there. But with it they shorten reality and radicalize their disciples. Extreme views have repeatedly plunged mankind into suffering, sowed hatred and discord, but have also put thousands into the chains of depression. I haven't asked myself for a long time: On whose side do I find the truth: with the communists or the capitalists, with the liberals or the conservatives, in the east or in the west, with women or men? I've found that the truth is mostly somewhere in the middle. Already Aristotle taught his pupil Alexander the Great: Absolute formulations are mostly wrong. So, don't search the answers to your questions in extremes."

  "What's all this philosophical talk about?" Mischka interrupted the old man. "I don't think you understand me."

  "Yes, I understand you very well, because I thought the same way you did. I too have my Siberian cave fever behind me. Believe me, I feel for you.
But don't let your feelings drive you into extreme attitudes. Don't go blind against your fate, but don't hang your head either. Neither one nor the other is the solution. You have to take control of your life, as you have done before. You have to fight against the negative and try to change bad conditions. But when all doors of fate are closed, no wild hammering with fists will help!"

  Proschin cleared his throat and continued: "It makes more sense for you to come to terms with your life situation and try to make the best of it. Do you hear me, Michail Wulff? You must always try to make the most of the limitations of your life. Then you have a chance to be happy."

  Proschin smiled at the young man. "If you actually reach the free west, you will remember my words when you see the many joyless figures driven by consumerism. They can afford almost anything. They can do what they want and say what they think. But their hearts are lonely and empty."

  The words of the hermit had torn Mischka out of his dull brood and raised questions that he had always suppressed. He sat there motionless for minutes thinking. Proschin stood up and dug into supplies stored on the shelf of birch trunks. He didn't want to disturb the young man in his thinking. The time for silence had come.

  Mischka suddenly continued the conversation: "You are right, Proschin. Freedom, prosperity and a full belly are no guarantee that we are happy and satisfied. Isn't it love that makes our lives meaningful?"

  The old man looked at him with his head inclined. "Are you sure about this? If that's true, then my hermit existence wouldn't make much sense."

  "Yes, that's exactly how I see it," Mischka replied and looked at him provocatively. "Here in the wilderness, you can't realize your purpose in life. You're a priest. You're supposed to bring people closer to your God. That's the job you chose to do. But instead of following your vocation, you hide in this deserted wasteland."

  Proschin grumbled something into his beard. Obviously, the young man had hit his sore spot. He breathed audibly. "Well, Mischka, I must say that you are right, but only a little. If I wanted to follow my calling, I'd have to go back among people. But then the KGB would grab me and put me in a labor camp."

  "But even there you are among people and can pursue your life's work."

  "Not long, my boy, not long. If I wanted to talk about my faith there, they'd put me in jail immediately. I'd be just as alone as I am in this cave."

  "Um, isn't this argument a cover for your fear of suffering?" Mischka asked and raised his right eyebrow.

  "I am a human being like you," Proschin replied slowly, as if thinking every word, "and I am indeed afraid of blows, hunger and cold. I do not believe that God has destined me to suffer. Even as a priest, I can be happy. But back to your thoughts. You're like me, a lone wolf in a Siberian wasteland. What are you talking about? If we find neither freedom, prosperity or love, was our life meaningless? If love fails, is it all over?"

  These words penetrated Mischka's soul like thumbtacks. He stared confused at Proschin. Questions and shreds of thoughts swirled through his head, mixed with repressed feelings and made him restless. If hopes fail, if desires remain unfulfilled and love fails, then nothing more comes?

  That question had hit him. Was his life meaningless, and would it one day end without hope and goal? What did his life actually consist of? Was it just a doomed search for freedom? What was he living for?

  "And, what answer have you found for yourself and your life?" Mischka spoke with a husky voice.

  Proschin smiled like a teacher who is happy about the progress of his students. "My answer will not satisfy you because it does not fit into your world view."

  "I still want to know it," Mischka insisted.

  "Well, Michail, I found my purpose in life in my faith. I am convinced that death will not be the last word to speak of my life. There's a future for me without suffering."

  "Oh, I might have guessed," Mischka threw in contemptuously. "You're a priest. Therefore you have only the Christian standard answer, like Tima Bekow in the camp at that time. He explained everything to his God. I thought I could learn something important from you or hear something interesting."

  Proschin leaned forward and replied: "What is more interesting or important than the certainty that this short and suffering life is not everything? That there's a light at the end of the tunnel? That there is hope for a future in which hatred, war, hunger, disease and death are forever removed from people's vocabulary? What could be better than a world where peace, freedom and love reign?! What?!"

  Mischka frowned in disbelief. "And your God will change all of this, you believe that as a priest, don't you?"

  Proschin nodded. "All that we human beings have created so far is a plundered, poisoned and hateful earth, wars after wars, famine and death, and we will never learn. In the Middle Ages the church enslaved people with its claims to power. Today our government runs a huge concentration camp, although it wanted to create a classless paradise. You see, we humans fail again and again, no matter how idealistic our ideas may be. Human paradises and God-states have therefore always been hell on earth. – Yeah, don't look at me like that! Even though I am a priest, I clearly see the suffering that the Church has caused. We will never create a perfect and love-influenced world, because the destructive urges and evil determine our actions, and because selfishness poisons our innermost like a death germ. History proves my words.

  When have we ever learned from the mistakes of the past? We want progress, the happy future, and we stumble over our ignorance and our inability again and again. We allow ourselves to be dominated by negative feelings and do not think about the consequences of our actions. Evil continues to hold us prisoner.

  I have stopped hoping for man, for his insight and for his good will to change the world. How, for example, can someone demonstrate for peace when he tyrannizes his own children and yells at or hits his life partner? No, I can't believe we're going change the world anymore. Such a change can only come from one who is more powerful and more knowledgeable than we are, whose action is determined by love."

  Mischka just shook his head at those words. "That sounds good at first. But what's the matter with your God, Father? Why does He keep us suffering for so long? Why doesn't He smash the communist system that keeps millions of people like fatlings? When does He finally begin to act?"

  Proschin's eyes flashed under the bushy brows, while his bony pointer finger pierced Mischka's chest.

  "I'm telling you, there are deep cracks in the communist system! One day, and you will experience it, one day it will crumble like a rotten clay vase, and God will sweep the fragments together and throw them onto the rubbish heap of history! You can count on it!"

  Mischka remained silent. He had not expected this inner fire from the old man. A shiver ran down his back as the hermit continued: "One day thousands of these godforsaken atheists will flock to religious assemblies and renounce a philosophy that has only put off a better future that no one will experience! The others, however, who do not want to know anything about it, will be in danger of losing any hold. Communism has killed the soul of our people. When its compulsion falls, people will have no sense of justice, no morals and no support. Many will vegetate dulled and only concerned with filling their growling stomachs, while the sense of good and beauty in their hearts will decay. Believe me, even the indifferent wealthy citizens of the free world, who are building their little paradise here and now, will start thinking when hurricanes sweep away their houses, when fields wither under the embers of the sun and environmental toxins devour their bodies. Then questions will gnaw at their souls that they have so numbed with the pleasure of their lives."

  Mischka jumped up agitated. It got too cramped for him in the cave. His thoughts drove him out into the cold summer night. Outside he sucked the cool air in deeply, as if he wanted to cool the inner embers with it. The cloud cover had been torn open in the meantime and pulled off to the east. But he had no eyes for the shimmer of the millions of stars that stretched like a veil over the firmamen
t.

  The priest's words had stirred him up. In former times, as a student, he would have laughed at such thoughts and swept them off the table with a few ironic remarks. But here, in the loneliness of the wilderness, in the daily struggle for survival and on the run from his huntsmen, the questions raised by Proschin had a completely different weight.

  Yeah, the old man was right. The question of the meaning of life, of a hope that does not fail even in the face of death, he had to clarify for himself. He hadn't had time for that before. In the uniform daily grind and in search of fun and variety, he had had no interest in such profound thoughts.

  Probably one must first be thrown off course, he thought, before one questions one's own life, the usual rituals of the day and the thought patterns that always repeat themselves uniformly. If one has been condemned to inactivity by illness, if family life is like a shambles, if death tears a gap or depression and feelings of inferiority drive one into isolation, one may find access to such questions. In a personal crisis, one will rarely be able to sweep the thoughts about the meaning and purpose of existence under the carpet.

  And in old age? Mischka brooded. Why do older people rarely ask these questions? Could it be that they are afraid of the consequences of the answers? Or are they too frozen in their thinking? Are they consciously repressing any inquiry into their lives, or are they no longer able to absorb something new and change their view of the world? – What about me? Am I ready to face the answers?

  The gold prospectors

  Suddenly they stood in the entrance of the cave, their rifles at the ready. Mischka couldn't believe his eyes when he looked into the ironic and confidently smiling faces of Lieutenant Litschenko, Karatajew and Chrapow. Out and over! he thought at first. It's over and done with! All the hardships of the past months have been in vain! They caught me after all. Now I'm back to detention, beatings, hard work and barbed wire.