King Stakh's Wild Hunt

by Uladzimir Karatkevich

  King Stakh's Wild Hunt

  Uladzimir Karatkevich

  “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt is a suspense mystery thriller, set against a historical background,” says the publishing house's website. “The story kicks off from the book’s first pages, throwing the reader into the atmosphere of a dark intense fear before the inevitable. It doesn’t take long for the reader to begin anxiously accompanying Belaretsky on the swamps, meeting strange personae here and there, all of them either mad or scared, or hiding something important, and at times simply miserable.

  Uladzimir Karatkevich (1930-84) was born in Orsha, Vitsyebsk region. His first published work was a poem that appeared in 1951, which was later followed by three collections of verse. Later, he turned to prose and published a large number of short stories, in collections titled, Chazenia, The Eye of the Typhoon, From Past Ages, and others. He also wrote novels, with King Stakh’s Wild Hunt (Дзікае паляванне караля Стаха, 1964) being the most popular of them. His novels deal predominantly with Belarus' historical past, including the 1863-64 anti-Russian uprising led by Kastus Kalinowski. Karatkevich also wrote a number of plays, essays, screenplays, and detective and adventure stories. His works are marked by romanticism, rich imagery and emotionalism.

  Uładzimir Karatkievič

  KING STACH'S WILD HUNT

  I am an old man, a very old man. And no book can give you any idea of what I, Andrej Biełarecki, now a man of 96, have seen with my own eyes. People say that fate usually grants long life to fools so that they should have time enough in which to acquire rich experience, experience that will make up to them for a lack of wisdom. Well then, I wish I were twice as foolish and might live twice as long, for I am an inquisitive fellow. How much that is interesting will occur in this world in the coming 96 years!

  And if someone should tell me that tomorrow I shall die, so what of it? To rest is not a bad thing either. Some day people will be able to live much longer than I have lived, and they will not have known any bitterness in their lives: in mine I have experienced everything — and life has not always been a bed of roses — what then is there to regret? I can lie down and go to sleep, to sleep calmly and even with a smile.

  I am alone. As Shelley puts it:

  When the lute is broken,

  Sweet tones are remember'd not:

  When the lips have spoken,

  Loved accents are soon forgot.

  She was a good person, and we lived together, as the old tales tell us: “Long and happily till death did us part.” However, enough! I have overtaxed your heart with sorrowful words, — I have already said that my old age is a happy one — better to tell you of those remote days of my youth. Here it is demanded of me that my story bring to an end my reminiscences of the Janoŭski family and its decline, and the extinction of the Belarusian gentry. I'll have to do that, for really what kind of a history can it be without an ending?

  Besides, it closely concerns me and there is no one but myself who can tell it. And you will find it interesting to listen to this amazing story to the very end, and then to say that it greatly resembles fiction.

  So then before beginning, I must say that all this is the truth and nothing but the truth, although you will have only my word for it.

  Chapter The First

  I was travelling in a hired carriage from the provincial city M. to the most remote corner of the province, and my expedition was coming to an end. Some two more weeks remained of sleeping in haylofts or under the stars in the carriage itself, of drinking water from earthenware pots, water that made the teeth and forehead ache, of listening to the long, drawn-out singing of the old women sitting in the yards in front of their houses, singing of the woe of the Belarusians. And of woe there was plenty in those days: the cursed eighties were coming to an end.

  However, you must not think that the only thing we did at that time was to wail and ask of the mužyk[1]: “Where are you running to, mužyk?” or “Will you awaken in the morning strong and hearty?” The real compassion for the people — that came later. It is well-known that a man is very honest until the age of twenty-five. He cannot, organically cannot bear injustice when young: however, young people are too much taken up with themselves. Everything is new to them. They find it interesting to watch the development of new feelings awakening in their souls, and they are certain that no one has ever previously experienced anything equal to their emotions.

  It is only later that the sleepless nights will come, when bending over a scrap of newspaper, you will read a notice in the same print as all the other news, that three were taken to the scaffold today — three, you understand, alive and merry fellows! It is only then that the desire will come to sacrifice yourself.

  At that time, though, I was convinced in the depths of my soul (although I was considered a “Red”), that the forests which grow on earth are not only forests of scaffolds (which was, of course, true even during the times of Jazafat Kuncevič and the Belarusian “slander” inquisition), and that it was not only moaning which we heard in the singing. For me at that time it was much more important to understand who I was and which gods I should pray to. My surname, people said, was a Polish one, though even now I do not know what is Polish in it. In our high-school — and this was at the time when the dreadful memory of the trustee, Kornilov, Muravyov's associate, had not yet been forgotten, — our nationality was determined, depending on the language of our forefathers, “the eldest branch of the Russian tribe, pure-blooded, truly Russian people!” That's right, even more Russian than the Russians themselves!

  Had they preached this theory to us before the beginning of the century, then Belarus would inevitably have broken down Germany's borders, while the Belarusians would have become the greatest oppressors on earth, going on to conquer the vital lands of the Russians who were not really Russians, especially if the good gods had given us of the horn of plenty.

  I sought my people and began to understand, as did many others at that time, that my people was here, at my side, but that for two centuries the ability to comprehend that fact had been beaten out of the minds of our intelligentsia. That is why I chose an unusual profession for myself — I was going to study and to comprehend this people.

  I graduated from high-school and the university and became an ethnographer. This kind of work was only in its beginning at that time and among the powers that be it was considered dangerous for the existing order.

  But everywhere — and only this made my work easier for me — I met with aid and attention. Many people helped me: the clerk of our small district, a man of little education, who later on mailed me and Romanov notes on tales; the village teacher, shivering for his piece of bread; and (my people lived!) even the governor, an exceptionally kind man, a rarity, gave me a letter of recommendation in which he ordered under threat of severe punishment that I should be given the aid I needed.

  My thanks to you, my Belarusian people! Even now I offer prayers for you. What then can be said about those years?

  Gradually I began to understand who I was.

  What was it that made me understand?

  Perhaps it was the warm lights of the villages, and their names, which even to this very day fill my heart with warmth and a kind of pain: Linden-Land, Forty Tatars, Broken Horn, Oakland, Squirrels, Clouds, Birch-Land Freedom.

  Or perhaps it was warm nights when tales are told and drowsiness is stealing up on you under the sheepskin coat together with the cold? Or the intoxicating fragrance of the fresh hay and the stars shining through the holes in the roof of the hayloft? Or not even this, perhaps? But simply the pine needles in the teapot, the smoky, black huts whe
re the women in their warm, long skirts made of homespun material, sing their song, an endless song more like a groan?

  All this was mine, my own. Over a period of two years I had travelled — on foot or in a carriage — across the Miensk, Mahiloŭ, Viciebsk provinces and part of the Vilnia province. And everywhere I saw blind beggars and dirty children, saw the woe of my people whom I loved more than anything else in the world — this I know now.

  This region was an ethnographic paradise then, although the tale, especially the legend, as the most unstable products of a people's fantasy, began to retreat farther and farther into the backwoods, into the most remote, forsaken corners.

  There, too, I went. My legs were young, and young was my thirst for knowledge. And the things that I saw!

  I saw the ceremony, an extraordinarily important one, called in Belarusian “załom”, that is, if an enemy wished to bewitch somebody's field, he tied together a bunch of wheatears into a knot.

  I saw the stinging nettle yuletide, the game “pangolin” (lizard), a rare one even for those days. But more often I would see the last potato in the soup-plate, bread as black as earth, the enormous eyes of the women crying their eyes out, and I would hear the sleepy “a-a-a” over the cradle.

  This was the Byzantine Belarus!

  This was the land of hunters and nomads, of the black tarsprayers, of the quiet and pleasant chimes coming across the quagmires from the distant churches, the land of lyric poets and of darkness.

  It was just at this time that the long and painful decline of our gentry was coming to an end. This death, this being buried alive, continued over a long period, a period of almost two centuries.

  And if in the 18th century the gentry died out stormily, in duels, in the straw, squandering millions, if at the beginning of the 19th the dying out bore a quiet sadness for the neglected castles in the pine groves, there was already nothing poetic or sorrowful about it in my days; it was at times rather loathsome, at times horrifying even in its nakedness.

  It was the death of the sluggards who had hidden themselves in their burrows, the death of the beggars, whose forefathers had been mentioned as the most distinguished nobles in the Horodlo privilege; they lived in old, dilapidated castles, went about dressed mostly in homespun clothing, but their arrogance was boundless.

  It was a running wild without any hope for better times: abominable, and at times, disgusting deeds, the reasons for which one could have sought only in their eyes set either too closely or too far apart, eyes of wild fanatics and degenerates.

  Their stoves faced with Dutch tile they heated with splintered fragments of priceless Belarusian 17th century furniture; they sat like spiders in their cold rooms, staring into the endless darkness through windows along which small fleets of drops floated obliquely.

  Such were the times when I was preparing for an expedition that would take me to the remote provincial District N. I had chosen a bad time for the expedition. It is summer, of course, that is a good time for the ethnographer: it is warm, all around there are attractive landscapes. However, our work gets the best results in the late autumn or in winter. This is the time for games and songs, for gatherings of women spinners with their endless stories, and somewhat later — the peasant weddings. This period is a golden time for us.

  But I had managed to leave only at the beginning of August, not the time for story-telling. One could hear then only the drawn-out songs of harvest time resounding through the fields. All August I travelled about, and September, and part of October, and only just managed to catch the dead of autumn — the time when I might find something worthwhile. In the province they were awaiting things that could not be put off.

  My catch was nothing to boast of, and therefore I was as angry as the priest who came to a funeral and suddenly saw the corpse risen from the dead. An old long-neglected fit of the blues tormented me, a feeling that in those days stirred in the soul of every Belarusian: it was his lack of belief in the value of his cause, his inability to do anything, his deep pain — the main signs of those evil years, signs that arose, according to the words of a Polish poet, as a result of the persisting fear that someone in a blue uniform would come up to you, and smiling sweetly, say: “To the gendarmery, please!”

  I had very few ancient legends, although it was for them that I was on the hunt. You probably know that all legends can be divided into two groups. The first are those that are alive everywhere amidst the greater part of the people. In the Belarusian folklore they are legends about a queen, about an amber palace, and also a great number of religious legends.

  And the second are those which are rooted, as if by chains, in some one locality, district, or even in a village. They are connected with an unusual rock or cliff at the bank of a lake, with the name of a tree or a grove or with a particular cave nearby. It goes without saying that such legends die out more quickly, although they are sometimes more poetic than the well-known ones, and when published they are very popular.

  I don't know how it is with other ethnographers, but it has always been difficult for me to leave any locality. It would seem to me that during the winter that I had to spend in town, some woman might die there, the woman, you understand, who is the only one who knows that enchanting old tale. And this story will die together with her, and nobody will hear it, and my people and I shall be robbed.

  Therefore my anger and my fit of the blues should not surprise anyone.

  I was in this mood when one of my friends advised me to go to the District N., which was even at that time considered a most out-of-the-way place.

  Did he have any idea that I would almost lose my mind because of the horrors facing me there, that I would find courage and fortitude in myself, and discover?… However, I shall not forestall events.

  My preparations for leaving did not take me long: I packed the necessary things into a medium-sized travelling-bag, hired a carriage, and soon left the “capital city” of a comparatively civilized region to take leave of all civilization as I came to the neighbouring district with its forestry and swamps, a territory which was no smaller than perhaps Luxemburg.

  At first, along both sides of the road were the fields, and among them were scattered here and there wild pear trees resembling oaks. We came across villages on our way in which whole colonies of storks lived, but then the fertile soil came to an end and endless forest land appeared. Trees stood like columns, the brushwood along the road deadened the rumbling of the wheels. The forest ravines gave off a smell of mould and decay; sometimes from under the very hoofs of the horses flocks of heath-cocks would rise up into the air (in autumn heathcocks always bunch together in flocks) and here and there from beneath the brushwood and heather brown or black caps of nice thick mushrooms were already peeping out.

  Twice we spent the nights in small forest lodges, glad to see their feeble lights in the blind windows. Night-time. A baby is crying, something in the yard seems to be disturbing the horses — a bear is probably passing nearby, and over the tree-tops, over the ocean — like forest a solid rain of stars.

  In the lodge it is impossible to breathe, a little girl is rocking the cradle with her foot. Her refrain is as old as the hills:

  Don't go kitty on the bench,

  You will get your paws kicked.

  Don't go kitty on the floor,

  You will get your tail kinked.

  A-a-a!

  Oh, how fearful, how eternal and immeasurable is thy sorrow, my Belarus!

  Night-time. Stars. Primitive darkness in the forests.

  And nevertheless even this was Italy in comparison with what we saw two days later.

  The forest was beginning to wither, was less dense than before. And soon an endless plain came into view.

  This was not an ordinary plain throughout which our rye rolls on in small rustling waves; it was not even a quagmire… a quagmire is not at all monotonous. You can find there some sad, warped saplings, a little lake may suddenly appear, whereas this was the gloomiest, the most ho
peless of our landscapes: the peat-bogs. One has to be a misanthropist with the brain of a cave-man to imagine such places. Nevertheless, this was not the product of the imagination, here before our very eyes lay the swamp…

  This boundless plain was brownish, hopelessly smooth, boring, gloomy.

  At times we met great heaps of stones, at times it was a brown cone. Some god-forsaken man was digging peat, nobody knows why, — at times we came across a lonely little hut along the roadway, with its one window, with its chimney sticking out from the stove, with not a tree anywhere around. And the forest that dragged on beyond the plain seemed even gloomier than it really was. After a short while there began to appear little islands of trees even on this plain, trees overgrown with moss and covered with cobwebs, most of them as warped and ugly as those in the drawings that illustrate a horribly frightening tale.

  I was ready to weep out loud, such resentment did I feel.

  And as if to spite us, the weather changed for the worse: low dark clouds were creeping on to meet us, and here and there leaden strips of rain came slanting down at us. Not a single crested-lark did we see on the road, and this was a bad sign: it would rain cats and dogs all night through.

  I was ready to turn in at the first hut, but none came in sight. Cursing my friend who had sent me here, I told the man to drive faster, and I drew my raincloak closer around me. But the sky became filled with dark, low rain-clouds; over the plain there descended such a gloomy and cold twilight that it made me shiver. A feeble streak of lightning flashed in the distance.

  No sooner did the disturbing thought strike me that at this time of the year it was too late for thunder, than an ocean of cold water came pouring down on me, on the horses and the coachman.

  Someone had handed the plain over into the clutches of night and rain.