I reminded him of that incident, he was none too pleased, started hemming and hawing. True, you did a great service to the party, I can’t deny it, but the harm you’re doing to the people’s government is even greater still. And without saying another word, he took the revolver and left. It didn’t cross my mind then to hand it over to him in front of witnesses so they could see it wasn’t any weapon to speak of, and that turned out to be a huge mistake. The summer came and went, the campaign to get new members to join the co-op gathered steam. Stoyan Kralev started calling private farmers down to the party office and posed the question to them this way: either – or. Some of them signed the membership declaration, others put it off, while still others went into hiding. Stoyan Kralev lumped all the private farmers into one barrel – opposition supporters, and the opposition had been outlawed. If you were with the opposition, that meant you were an enemy of the people, so it turned out that half the people were enemies of the people. He called me in, too, and gave me the choice of either joining the co-op in a week’s time or hitting the road. Since you’re breaking with the people, he says, and adding fuel to the enemies’ fire, we’re going to start playing hardball too. We found a weapon at your place and that’s no coincidence. We’ve got intelligence that says you’re one of the leaders of the opposition, so just keep that in mind if you don’t come to your senses. I didn’t say anything, I just left. After that, I didn’t meet up with anyone; as soon as dusk fell, I would go home. I was afraid they would try to set me up. I know my own nature, if somebody takes a swing at me, I’m not just going to stand there with my hands in my pockets. And if I so much as lifted a finger against one of his men, my goose would be cooked. Word got around the village that a hidden weapon had been found at my place, that I’d been organizing the opposition to rise up in armed resistance. Stoyan Kralev started that rumor so he’d have an ace up his sleeve against me and all the other private farmers.
The week passed and again I was called down to the village soviet. Stoyan Kralev was alone in the office, he met me at the door, gave me a chair to sit down on, while he stayed standing. He was pacing back and forth, keeping silent. His cap was pure Stalin, all he was missing were the boots. So, kinsman, what did you decide? I’ve got nothing to decide. So, that’s it, you’re refusing to join us? Listen, my man, don’t you realize, he said, that we’re struggling for the good of all? We want to make the land common land, to work it together, so there won’t be rich and poor anymore. Don’t you pin your hopes on any Americans or Englishmen. Fascism was defeated, the victors divvied everything up into zones of influences – this is for you, that’s for us, end of story. Are you stupid enough to believe that America and England are going to take up arms again? You do realize, right, that if they’re going to declare war on the Soviet Union over Bulgaria, then they’re going to have to declare war over Yugoslavia and Albania, too, over Czechoslovakia and Poland, over Romania, Hungary, and East Germany, over half of Europe. How do you think that’s going to work? Come on now, folks, declare World War Three, sacrifice another however many million men to pander to our opposition here, is that it? Even if they wanted to do it, they couldn’t. There’s no going back, and since there’s not, why lose time, why not lay the foundations of the cooperative farm sooner rather than later? There’s no socialism without the kolkhoz. The people want it.
Come on now, I say, the people aren’t chomping at the bit for that kolkhoz, if they really wanted it, you wouldn’t have to force them into it, they’d do it on their own. And when something’s done by force, nothing good’ll come of it, that’s clear even now. Aren’t most folks in the collective farm already? So why are they getting twenty cents a day? Because they’re not working like farmers, but like petty clerks. Some brigadier or warden has to come and goad them into doing what they’ve always done without anyone breathing down their necks. And this whole business won’t get anywhere without that constant goading, because people aren’t ants or bees. Greed guides the fez best, as the saying goes, that’s how it’s been, and that’s how it’ll always be.
He talks, I listen. Then I talk, he listens, and so on for an hour or so. At one point he interrupts me and starts yelling. I’ve long seen you for what you really are, he says, but I’ve always reckoned you clung to your private property out of ignorance or stubbornness. But now I see that you’re an enemy of socialism down to the marrow of your bones and your proper place is alongside your ideological leader Nikola Petkov.* This very minute, he says, I’m arresting you and turning you over to the people’s militia because of the weapon I found at your house. He called the policeman who was waiting outside and the two of them shoved me down in the cellar. You’re a killer, he said. You killed Kalcho Statev’s daughter and now you’re trying to wash your hands of it by giving him back his land. They locked me up and left the policeman standing outside by the little window, while Stoyan Kralev went back up to the office.
I could let the other business slide, but when he called me a killer, that really cut me to the quick. In my younger years I had gotten up to all kinds of mischief, sometimes with good reason, sometimes without, but I never stained my hands with blood. We had condemned two men to death, and only then Romanian colonists in Inner Dobruja who’d killed some of our folks. Both times someone else in the group did the dirty work. And I didn’t kill my daughter-in-law. To this day I haven’t told a living soul about her secret meetings with the foreman. You’re the first person I’ve ever told. The very next day after the wedding I started spreading the rumor that she’d been meeting Koycho, and I just kept mum at the wedding so as to fleece her ninny of a father out of five acres. I did it to spare her people’s wagging tongues. To Koycho and my wife, I told them that these things happen to some girls just like that. That’s what I told the girl, too. Like every one-day wonder, it would blow over too. And that’s exactly what happened. No man from the village boasted that he’d made love to her, and nobody had seen her with the foreman. Everyone believed what I’d said and even started congratulating me for being sly enough to get my hands on such a hefty dowry. Koycho didn’t take the whole business to heart, either, and grew very fond of his young bride. And we were fond of her too, treated her like our own daughter. She hadn’t thrust herself on our family, she wasn’t to blame for anything. If she’d been any other girl, she wouldn’t have batted an eye, she would’ve gotten on with her life as if nothing had happened. But she was cut from a different cloth. She felt guilty, her conscience kept gnawing at her. She withdrew, she didn’t dare look anyone in the eye. If you didn’t invite her to the table, she wouldn’t eat, if you didn’t tell her to go to bed, she wouldn’t lie down. She was the first up in the morning, the last to bed in the evening, never stopping to rest even for a minute. And always silent. If you asked her something, she’d answer, but if you didn’t talk to her, she’d keep quiet, her eyes could see what you were trying to tell her. We prodded her to go out and about, to go visit her mother, to take her mind off things, she didn’t want to. In the evenings I could hear her and Koycho talking in the other room, but what they talked about, I couldn’t tell you. Around the winter holidays Koycho and I went to the city, we bought her fancy shoes, a fur coat, a silk shawl. She tried them on once and never so much as glanced at them again. She spent the holidays at home, wouldn’t poke her nose outside.
In the first few days of February, Koycho got called up for army duty. They took him early, put him on labor service, and trucked him all over the new territories, building roads. The girl completely sank into her own world, her eyes always red, crying whenever she was alone. The wife and I wondered what to do, how to console her. Once Koycho was gone, we got even more attached to her. The poor child was plainly suffering, and you couldn’t do a thing to help her. We tried our damnedest to distract her, to cheer her up, sometimes she’d smile, but her eyes were full of misery, it was enough to break your heart. She’s not a person, she’s a little angel, my wife said, and that’s exactly how it was. I cursed myself a thousand
times for getting greedy over her father’s land, but what’s done is done. I’ve gone through plenty of hardships, my life has been hanging by a thread more than once, but believe you me, I never had a worse time of it than I did then. To watch a child melting away like a candle before your eyes and you can’t do a damn thing to help her! I wanted to take her to a doctor, she was having none of it, crying as if I were trying to skin her alive. I’m fine, she’d say, there’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing wrong, my eye; she was thin as a wraith. She got a letter from Koycho. The postman gave it to me, I read it. The army, he wrote, well, what can I say, I’ll be out someday, but most of all I miss you. He told her a hundred times over to eat well, dress warmly, and be careful of the cold, because in the summer, fingers crossed, he would be coming home on leave. Look after your health, little darling, he wrote, because if something happens to you, that’ll be the end of me, too, I’ll have you know. I gave her the letter, she shut herself up in the other room and didn’t come out till dark. I thought to myself, when she sees how much Koycho adores her, she’ll get up her courage, she’ll pull herself together. Dinnertime rolled around, come on now, come and eat, I’ll be there in a minute, I’ll be there in a minute, but still she didn’t come. I sent the wife to call her and she was gone a good long while, came back half an hour later. She found her writhing in the bed, asked her what was wrong – nothing, she just felt a little sick. When she pulled off the cover – bathed in sweat from head to toe. The wife wanted to change her shift, she curled up in a ball, wouldn’t let her. She made her undress and what did she see? The girl was pregnant. As if in her sixth month, my wife said, that’s how big her belly was.
Now that’s something I hadn’t expected. When I went to make the match, who knows why but it never even crossed my mind that she might’ve been in a family way from the foreman. Those were wartimes, we were expecting Koycho to get called up any day or even for me to get mobilized, so I was only thinking about how to have the wedding as soon as possible. The old folks have a saying – a child belongs not to those who bore him, but to those who raise him. That’s a nice little saying, but I must admit when I heard the girl was six months pregnant the first thing that popped into my head was that it’d better be stillborn. To think of my son raising another man’s child, my grandchild a bastard – it made me sick. But the girl denied she was pregnant, said she’d had stomach problems since she was a kid and got bloated up now and again. I hope that’s it, I said to myself. Fine, but women have a sense for these things. She’s with child, my wife said, and in her sixth month at that, only she won’t admit it, she’s ashamed, I was ashamed in front of my mother-in-law too. And it’s true, when my wife was carrying Koycho, she hid it from my mother up until her eighth month. My mother had been ashamed in front of her in-laws too, and my father was away in the army, so she all but had me right out there in the field. That’s a holdover from the olden days, young brides are ashamed and hide their bellies from the old folks. My wife started worrying that only four months had passed since the wedding, while the bride was in her sixth month. I told her that Koycho and Radka had made love before getting married and that’s why I’d rushed the whole wedding along, so as not to disgrace the girl. She believed it, and I had no choice but to believe it too. Since the child would be born in our house, it would be ours, and that was that.
And that’s how it would’ve been, but the girl never got up out of bed again. She’d only get up to come to the table, eat two bites, and go back to the other room. The wife didn’t let her lift a finger around the house. Once when she was cleaning up around her bed, she found two little bottles under her pillow. Girl, she said, what’s in these bottles? Medicine, my mother sent it to me. My wife took a whiff of the bottles, one smelled like geranium, the other like onion. A thought flashed through her mind, she took the bottles. That night she met me worried, crying and carrying on that the girl had taken medicine to get rid of the child – geranium and boiled peels of red onion. Are you sure you’re not mistaken, I said, why would she want to get rid of it? How should I know? But I knew, so I told her not to let the girl out of her sight. She stayed in her room a whole week, sleeping by her, feeding her like a child. One evening we went out for a bit – we were godparents to these folks, Iliya Dobrev’s family, they’d invited us to a christening, so there was no way we could refuse. Just for a short while, just for a short while, but before we knew it, it was midnight. We came back home, what did we see? – the light was on in the girl’s room, and Granny Kerka was there with her. You know her, she was the midwife when you were born too. As soon as she heard us coming, she took to her heels. I grabbed her scrawny arm and led her back to the house. What were you doing here at this time of night and who called you? Well, your daughter-in-law Radka called me. Did she go on her own to your place to call you? On her own. Is she with child? No, her stomach’s just hurting, she’ll be burning holes in the chamber pot these next few days. I’ll burn so many holes in you, I told her, that you won’t be able to put your raggedy old bones back together! If you ever set foot in my house again, you won’t leave it alive. If I’d known what she’d done to the girl, I really wouldn’t have let her leave the house. I chased her out and went to the girl’s room. Why, my girl, why did you get out of bed to go out in the dark all the way to the other end of the village? In your condition, should you be going out at all, you might catch cold. I wanted to take you to the doctor, I told her, but you wouldn’t hear of it, now here you went on your own to call that old hag. But you’d have better luck getting a word out of this chair here. She was like a wounded animal. Wants help from you, but scared at the same time.
The wife stayed with her to sleep, while I went back to the other room. I fell asleep at dawn and dreamed of Koycho naked. He was supposedly there somewhere at his army base, but it was really here in our yard, right over there, by the fence. The other soldiers all dressed, and he’s naked as a jaybird, digging with a pickaxe and laughing. Why don’t you get dressed, I tell him, aren’t you ashamed to stand around like that, everybody else dressed and you naked? I’m not ashamed, he says, why should I be ashamed? And he starts laughing again. Right then, some big bird flies in from somewhere, its belly is torn open, you can see its guts, blood’s dripping from it. Whether it was a raven or an eagle, I couldn’t say. It swoops down on Koycho, picks him up under the arms with its talons, and caw-caw – carries him up toward the sky, and he’s still laughing and laughing. I got scared that it would drop him from so high up, so I cried out and woke up. Dreaming of nakedness is a bad sign. I got up and went quick to ask how the girl was. When she saw me in the corridor, my wife came out of the room in tears and said our bride was writhing in pain, she’d passed out and was babbling deliriously. Talking now about Koycho, now about some Kuncho? Who’s this Kuncho? How should I know, I told her, a sick person talks all kinds of nonsense. But Kuncho was the foreman. Just a bit earlier she had come to and said: “I’m going to have the baby and die. Last night Granny Kerka tore up my belly with a spindle. She didn’t want to do it, but I gave her one of the gold coins and she gave in.” After the wedding I’d given her four gold coins, and here she went and gave one to that witch. Run and get a doctor, my wife said, find a doctor from somewhere and bring him here. But where could you find a doctor out in the villages back in those days? I could only find a doctor in Dobrich, and who knows whether he’d be willing to come right away?
While we were dithering over what to do, we heard a scream from the room. My wife ran inside, I went to hitch up the horses. I’d just gone into the barn when my wife called from the house, telling me to wait and not go anywhere just yet. The girl was howling as if being skinned alive, I was waiting outside, not daring to peek in there and see what’s going on. At one point the wife came out and said she’d lost the baby. I dug a little grave behind the house and we buried the child. In the meantime the girl had fallen asleep. My wife went in every hour to check on her, I looked in on her too. Her face pale as death, her lips bluish
and bloodied from where she’d bitten them, crazed with pain. Let’s hope she survives, we said to ourselves. We hadn’t eaten a bite in two days, there wasn’t any bread. The wife sat down by the trough to knead a loaf and fell asleep, her hands covered in dough, that’s how exhausted she was. I let her doze awhile and looked in on the girl. I checked on her three times – still sleeping. I looked in on her a fourth time, and she’d gotten out of bed and was crawling around the floor. Little bride, I said, why are you up, why don’t you lie down? Her eyes yea big, looking at me as if she wanted to say something but didn’t. Go to bed, I tell her, and see that you get a good rest, once you’re rested up you’ll get better. I leaned down to pick her up, but she fell on her face and went rigid. I could see she was giving up the ghost, so I went over to the wife, woke her up, and headed straight to the barn. I hopped on my horse and galloped straight for Vladimirovo. There was a medic there, he would come around to the village on horseback every now and then. So I rode over there, praying to God to find him at home, he’d be able to give some help in any case. I couldn’t find him. I searched the whole village, house by house, he wasn’t there. His horse was there, but he was nowhere to be found.
I came back at dusk and ran into Salty Kalcho at the gate. I looked at him and couldn’t believe my eyes – he was carrying the girl in his arms. I thought he’d come over to take her back to their place. They hadn’t set foot in our house since the wedding, not him or his wife. Only his youngest daughter, Mitka, stopped by every so often, she’d chat a bit with her sister then go on her way. Salty Kalcho knew Radka wasn’t in a good way, but he never even came once to see her. Angry with me, and with his daughter as well. Shoot, even if my child was dragged down to hell, I’d fight the devil himself with my bare hands, I’d risk my own life just to see what kind of jam he was in. So at first I thought he’d been biding his time, waiting till I was far away from the village to take her back to their place. This ticked me off, but since I knew her life was hanging by a thread, I didn’t dare yank her out of his arms. Since he wants her, I told myself, let him have her. She might get better faster over at their place, and when Koycho comes home from the army, she’ll come back here, she can’t play the widow as long as her husband’s alive. It’s only when I went into the yard that the wife told me he’d carried our bride off dead. I flew into a rage and decided to kill him. And I would’ve caught up with him on the street and killed him, I would’ve spattered my hands with blood over one big nothing if my wife hadn’t stopped me. What, are two deaths in one day at your home not enough for you, she said, that you want a third one, too?
Wolf Hunt Page 11
