Wild Tales

by Nikolai Haitov

  So I went. What else could I do? As I was saying, live and let live – it’s the only way.

  Worst of it is, they won’t let me go up into the mountains any more. And there are still such a lot of paths that need clearing out or blocking off!

  When the Engine Whistles

  My whole life was ruined by a hole – a miserable cave in the ground near the village where I was born. I was still a kid then and often used to take the oxen to graze near that hole. The old people said it had a store of haidouk guns hidden inside, and seeing as there was nothing I wanted more than a gun, I decided to slip in and steal one. But the cave was narrower than I thought, and when I wanted to get out, my jacket got caught and I was stuck in the dark, wedged so tight I couldn’t move, forwards or backwards. I yelled and I yelled, but in that godforsaken spot there was no one to hear me.

  I was stuck in the hole from midday till evening, and it’s only because I’d hung my lunch-bag on a pine outside the cave that the other lads found out where I was and got help from the village. They tied a rope round my feet and dragged me out, half dead with cold and fright. And ever since then I’ve had this terrible fear of being stuck in the dark and not being able to move. I’m perfectly healthy and normal otherwise, but shut me away in the dark and I go berserk. Phobia, allergy – call it what you like – it’s my weak spot, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Just bad luck, I suppose, but I’ve spent all my life going from one small dark hole to the next – from cellar to cellar and from prison cell to prison cell. Even as a farmer’s lad of sixteen I knew the pamphlet ‘Who lives on whose back’ by heart, and I used to recite it to the workers at the Arapovski Monastery. Only, they told the abbot, and before I knew where I was I found myself two and a half metres under the ground at the bottom of the monastery well. It was open at the top, thank goodness, so I could see the sky and that saved me.

  During the water-workers’ strike, Georgi Naidenov and me, we got arrested and locked up in the gunpowder store. Just a hole in the side of a cliff it was, with a door across, and they kept gunpowder there. We was squashed together in the dark, but I wasn’t that scared because I had Naidenov with me. They didn’t beat us that time neither, but they’d got this dumb idiot there and he nearly drove us round the bend. The warder had taught him to set light to bits of pinewood and throw them through the bars when no one was around…. With twelve cases of gunpowder right there beside us, me and Naidenov didn’t have much option : stamp out the blazing twigs with our bare feet, or get blown sky high!

  No joke, it wasn’t, that half-wit playing around with your life like that, but you could put up with it. Not like being stuck down a hole in the dark. And though we’d got burns and blisters right up to our knees, we still didn’t let on who’d organized the strike.

  When I was a soldier in the Ninth Regiment I got caught by Lieutenant Gagov with the Workers’ Herald stuck up my front. He was right keen to know how the paper had found its way into the barracks, so he whipped me and beat me with the flat of his sword. That didn’t work, so he wrapped the paper round my neck like a scarf and set light to it. Still I didn’t let on. Anyhow Gagov flew into a rage and had me marched off to the food store where they’d got a big empty barrel with a lid, left over from the Plovdiv Fair. It was just about big enough to get a man inside, and Gagov ordered the guard to shove me in. That was too much for me, and I told him I’d got the paper from Sergeant Krustyu Krustev. Krustev got demoted and I got twenty-five strokes of the birch on my bare backside in front of the whole regiment.

  That was in August 1912. The Balkan War hadn’t started yet, but people were already talking about it. I couldn’t wait for it to start, for I’d made up my mind, as soon as the shooting began, to put a bullet through my commanding officer’s head. But just before the war got going Gagov was transferred to another division and that was the end of my secret plan. If only I’d known then what part that animal would play in my life, I’d have searched high and low for him and would have bumped him off, but how was I to know we’d meet again eleven years later and he would ruin me once and for all?

  In 1912 you could count the left-wing Socialists in our area on the fingers of one hand, but after the war, when things were really bad, the Party was a force to be reckoned with. During the uprising in September ‘twenty-three our Party group in town mustered seventy-six men with rifles, two with machine guns and seven with grenades – and that’s not counting all the men with scythes…. For four days we controlled the town and held off a whole brigade of infantry, and we only retreated when the heavy artillery was brought up. We took to the mountains and gradually split up, till only a group of about twelve really tough ones was left, and we decided to continue the struggle as a reprisal brigade.

  That’s when I learned the value of salt. Close on a fortnight we’d been living off green maize, but the lack of salt was what did for us. We even tried piddling on hot stones and licking them clean, but there wasn’t that much salt in our water either and the piddling didn’t help one bit. Then the others decided to send me and another lad from our group to get some salt down in the village where I used to live. I’d moved away to town a good while back, but there were still people in the village I could call on, and I was sure they’d help us. Just our luck though – we got ourselves caught in an ambush. My pal was killed by a grenade, I was knocked out, taken prisoner, and only came to in Plovdiv, in the Tashkapi prison, if you’ve heard of it!

  Chock-a-block it was with hundreds of others, but seeing as I’d been a leading light in the local Party, I was a special catch and got a cell to myself. That same night they had me in for interrogation. They took me to a room with a military guard on it, and the first thing I saw was the epaulettes of a colonel. The colonel was rummaging about in some papers and I couldn’t see his face. I could see his ears though – kind of droopy and cut off sharp, and stuck to his head, with great black hairs growing out the side. Gagov! – that’s who it was! He raised his head, looked at me, got up from his chair and came over to get a closer look.

  ‘Well, well!’ he says, ‘aren’t you the one that got put in a barrel in the stores of the Ninth Regiment and yelled his head off?’

  There was little point in denying it, so I nodded.

  He invited me to take a seat and offered me a cigarette.

  ‘There’s just this one little thing I want you to do for me,’ he says. ‘Tell me where I can find the rest of your gang. We’re old friends, after all, and we wouldn’t want to fall out, would we?’

  I tried to lie and be as vague as I could, but somebody had already ratted on us so he knew who we were, how many, and roughly where we were operating.

  ‘Let’s have the truth!’ Gagov threatened. ‘Or else I’ll stick you in a barrel, and this time I swear by the Tsar and all that’s holy you won’t get out alive!’

  I’d have rather he’d killed me, but he knew my weak spot and didn’t need to go that far. He just kept me in the barrel. Three or four days, I can’t remember just how long it was, till my hair started dropping out and I was that scared I got the guard to tell the colonel I would do anything he wanted.

  The whole operation was planned by the colonel himself, down to the smallest detail. I was to walk along the top of the hill on my own. They would leave my hands free but would put chains, wrapped in cotton wool so as not to make a noise, round my ankles. Long enough for me to walk but not long enough to run away. At the same time two columns of soldiers would move up the valleys on either side towards the camp and trap my friends like in a vice. The colonel suspected they might not be in the camp just then, so he wanted me to walk along the top of the hill as a bait. He was hoping they’d still be waiting for me not far away, because after I’d been taken prisoner the commander of the local garrison had posted guards on all paths into the mountains so that no one would find out what had happened to me. And Gagov had got this sergeant to go with me, dressed in the clothes of my dead friend and disguised as a partisan. I’v
e got a limp, you see, and the sergeant could give me a hand from time to time. Make it look more realistic like, and if I tried signalling to my friends, he could shoot me on the spot like the colonel said.

  But there was one thing the colonel didn’t know : I’d agreed with the leader of our brigade before I left that if I wasn’t back by evening the next day, he was to assume something had happened to me and take the necessary measures. And seeing as I was sure he’d have long since left the sheepfolds where we had our camp, I set off without any great pangs of conscience.

  But that wasn’t at all how things turned out.

  We was walking along, me and the sergeant, and just coming up to the camp. A mass of beech trees all round, so you couldn’t see anything, but I’ve got a fine sense of smell and all of a sudden I smelled something burning. Singed calf leather! We’d eaten a calf earlier on and were saving the hide for making shoes, but as we had nothing else to eat we’d started hacking bits off it and roasting them in the fire, to have something to chew on and calm the hunger pains. So our lads were still there, preparing the calf’s hide! How many, I couldn’t tell, but just the thought of what might happen made my hair stand on end and I yelled for all I was worth:

  ‘Run! The soldiers will get you! Run!’

  I knew the sergeant would shoot me, but I was past caring. What I didn’t know was that the colonel’s orders had been exactly the opposite: on no account and under no circumstances was I to be killed! That’s why the sergeant didn’t in fact shoot but threw himself on me to try and shut me up. We both went flying and rolled around on top of each other with me still yelling my head off -screaming blue murder, I was! The sergeant tried to silence me by cracking me over the head with his pistol, but I grabbed his arm and the gun went off in the air. Then he got me round the throat and squeezed and squeezed till everything went black and I passed out.

  When I came to I was back in Tashkapi. Gagov was ready to bury me alive, shoot me and tear me limb from limb, because our lads had got away and crossed over into Serbia. In the end he decided to have me shot. The muskets cracked, but there were some good lads in the squad who aimed to miss, and I ended up under a pile of corpses with just a scratch down one side. I pretended I was dead, and when they tipped us into the Maritsa I managed to escape by swimming ever so slowly to the bank and scrambling out into somebody’s apple orchard.

  When things quietened down, I went straight and returned to normal life. I was a physical wreck though, and when I was asked to join the underground in ‘thirty-three I refused.

  My old comrades were shocked:

  ‘How can you refuse?’ they said. *You took part in the September Uprising, you’re a partisan and a Communist!’

  ‘That’s right,’ I tells them, ‘I am a Communist, through and through. But there’s one thing you mustn’t forget: I’ve got this defect, see, a kind of phobia. I’ve got trachoma in both eyes as well. My weight’s down to fifty-two kilos and my insides have all been a mess since ‘twenty-three. If I get carted off to the police station tomorrow and they put the screws on me, I’ll give you all away immediately.’

  That wasn’t at all how they saw things, and I got labelled a deserter!

  In ‘forty-three I supplied the partisans with flour and after Liberation Day in ‘forty-four I put my best foot forward like everyone else, but the deserter label stuck.

  Only last week my grandson came home from school crying.

  ‘Grandpa,’ he says, ‘is it true what they say about you being a deserter?’

  ‘Why, little one, who told you that?’

  Then he told me how he’d been at a Pioneers’ meeting with the town Anti-Fascists, and how a man had spoken about his experiences in ‘thirty-three during the tobacco strike and he’d said I was one of those who’d given up the struggle and gone over to the other side.

  After that his father started up as well.

  ‘It seems the time has come,’ he says, ‘when me and the children are having to pay dearly for your desertion.’

  ‘What?’ I says. ‘What are you having to pay for that’s my fault?’

  Then all his old grudges came rolling out: how if I’d been a real freedom-fighter he’d have been a director by now and not just in charge of the stores, and how his eldest son would have been studying at university instead of doing his military service!

  ‘Not exactly my fault, is it,’ I says, ‘that he got rotten marks at school?’

  But nothing I said made the slightest difference. He kept coming back to the same old thing : ‘If you’d been a recognized activist and a proper freedom-fighter, they’d have made me a director, and my son would be studying at the university!’

  And the day before yesterday I got the blame for something else: his wife, the teacher, was moved from primary school number three to number five. And if I’d not deserted, he said, it would never have happened. I’d been wondering why the daughter-in-law was in such a temper and wouldn’t look me in the face – now I knew!

  A few days earlier there had been trouble with my son-in-law.

  He drives a delivery van and gets good money for it, but he’d heard that his pals who did runs abroad with ‘International Transport’ had bought themselves Mercedes cars, so he came and asked if I couldn’t get one of my old friends to pull a few strings and get him a job on the long distance trucks as well.

  ‘They’re all dead and gone,’ I says, ‘my pals from the Uprising in ‘twenty-three. Not one left!’

  ‘You call yourself an Anti-Fascist,’ he says, ‘and you can’t do a simple little thing like that!’

  More than I could stomach, that was, so I sliced him up like a pickled cucumber:

  ‘Just because I can’t serve you up with a Mercedes doesn’t mean my time fighting the Fascists was wasted!’ I tells him. ‘I didn’t fight for flashy cars and friends in high places, I fought to rid the world of loafers and parasites!’

  Then my son-in-law started getting a few things off his chest as well:

  ‘Maybe you did fight,’ he said, ‘but you deserted too, and that’s why you go blabbering on about not having fought for flashy cars. Because nobody listens to a word you say, that’s why!’

  ‘Out!’ I shouts. ‘You little runt! You’re such weaklings the lot of you, you haven’t the strength to stand on your own two feet!’

  Since then he hasn’t set foot inside the house, nor let his wife and kids come round and see us neither. And all because I called them runts and weaklings.

  It was their fault I got into hot water with my wife as well.

  ‘If you go saying things like that,’ she told me, ‘you’ll frighten everybody away. Best keep quiet and not take any notice of them. They’re fed up with everything too.’

  ‘What have they got to be fed up about?’ I asked her. ‘Just tell me that! One’s fed up because he’s not a director and the other because he wants a Mercedes! Ashamed of his little Trabant, he is, just because it’s the only one left in town. That’s what he’s fed up about. What wouldn’t I give to take them back into the bad old days for a couple of months so they could go hoeing in Manolkyoolou’s fields with him sitting under his sunshade and counting every stroke they made. So they could spend just one winter without wood for the fire in a bare room without even a bed, like you and me had to. And not have even five stotinkas in their pocket to pay for the stamp on a medical note. Give them a taste of that kind of life and they wouldn’t just be fed up – they’d have folded up and faded away completely!’

  I told them what I thought of them all right, but my blood pressure shot up to two hundred and twenty and there was this engine started whistling in my ears something terrible! Since Wednesday it’s been doing it, and no sign of stopping.

  ‘The train’s come in, old girl,’ I says.

  ‘Train? What train?’ she asks.

  ‘The train for the next world. You’d better get my shroud ready.’

  ‘I’ll call the doctor,’ she says. ‘He’ll bring your blood pressure do
wn.’

  ‘There’s no need. Let it go up. If my time has come, I might as well go.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ my old girl says, her eyes popping out of her head.

  ‘Well, the Party’s forgiven me, I know, and I’ve been allowed to keep my Party card, but the family will never forgive me for not being a recognized activist. And as time goes by things will get worse, not better. As the family gets bigger, so my guilt will grow, because one will want to become a director, another a diplomat and a third will want to study foreign trade. Then what? How shall I look them in the face? Where shall I hide?’

  ‘Keep your hair on, Grandpa!’ the old girl says. ‘You’re not to think about such things!’

  ‘What shall I think about then?’

  ‘You can remember some nice things from the past. Why always think about the present?’

  That’s exactly what the doctor had said. He must have had a word with her as well, and now the poor girl was repeating his advice. She was getting in quite a state about it too, so I decided to make her happy and do as she asked.

  ‘Right then!’ I says. ‘Let’s remember some nice things! Where shall we begin?’

  ‘How about your childhood?’

  What was there worth remembering about my childhood? The lice that fed on me maybe? Three years I worked for Naidyu Nikolov in his tavern, two as a farmhand in Kroumovo, one in Kozlouk, and I spent two more working for Georgi Slavov in Kozanovo. Bread and onions is all he gave us, so the three of us came out on strike. We even had a slogan. ‘No more onions – give us bacon!’ And a second one : ‘No work on Sundays!’ A whole week we downed tools, bang in the middle of harvesting, so he didn’t have much option but to give us what we wanted. That’s the only nice memory I’ve got from those years! A bit later on he paid Dimitur the farmhand to crack me over the head with his hoe while we were working in the vineyard, but Dimitur had been at the bottle to give himself courage, so he hit me on the shoulder instead of the head and I got away with hardly a scratch. A lot of good it did me too! Not long after, up came Georgi the priest from Kozanovo, riding on a horse and brandishing a dagger, and he said it was all because of heretics and long-haired ‘Sicilists’ like me that there hadn’t been any rain and hail had ruined the crops….