Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  It’s been sixteen years since he left the village, and he’s only come back three times. Me and the wife have gone to visit them three or four times, so for all that time we’ve seen them once every three years or so. Fine, so Karlovo’s far away, but the truth is he doesn’t want to come back. If they had told me that a man could lose all love for his birthplace like that, I never would’ve believed it. He walks around the place as if on eggshells, his eyes don’t stop on anything, as if he hadn’t been born here, as if he’d never plowed or worked this land. I tell him what’s going on here with us, and he listens, but with half an ear, I can tell his mind is elsewhere. His wife and kids came to visit us twice as well. They got the fidgets too, always asking when they would be leaving, but for them it’s different, it’s not home. We’ve got two grandkids, a girl and a boy. The boy’s name is Solveig. Named after his other grandfather, Slavi, or so they say. And the girl is Kate, named after her grandma Kita. I always gave Bulgarian names even to my farm animals. One of my mares was Stoyanka, the other was Mitsa. And my dog was named Lichko. Even my fields had names – Grandma Rada, Vitanov’s Meadow, the Cherry Fields. And now my grandkids are Solveig and Kate. When they wrote to say they were coming to visit, me and the wife practiced their names over and over for a week to learn them and not mix them up. On top of that they’ve now taken to calling my wife Grandma Kate.

  Losing Koycho was like being left one-handed, I didn’t know whether to work the fields or look after the animals. Our state delivery quotas kept rising; little by little I gave ground and finally caved in. In ’52, I joined the co-op. I signed the membership form and brought it to Dragan Peshev. He was the chairman. Stoyan Kralev happened to be there with him. I dropped off the form and left, Stoyan Kralev came out after me. We walked together a ways, me toward home, him toward his place. Kinsman, he said, this whole business should have been over and done with long ago, all those brawls of ours were for nothing. No, I told him, they weren’t for nothing. You fought for what was yours, and I fought for what was mine. I’m not joining the co-op of my own free will, but at least I know I fought for my land, and when I die, I’ll die on my feet. But once I join the co-op, I mean to work hard. I’m not one for fiddling around, I’m not used to being deadwood.

  From that day on my squabbles with Stoyan Kralev came to an end. His reign ended that year too, they removed him from the post of party secretary and made him chairman of the co-op. The following year he in turn made me a crew leader. Everyone said: Ha, now we’ll see these two bulls lock horns. We worked together for ten years without any quarreling. Whatever he ordered, I carried it out to the letter. If I said something or other wouldn’t work, he agreed. You know more about agriculture, he’d say, if you see something out of line, don’t keep quiet about it. About that old business – not a word. And so on till this very day. Not that I’ve forgotten, you don’t forget that sort of thing, but I don’t hate him. Later, when they removed him from his post, he went soft, but back in the day he was a man’s man. He walked straight ahead, without glancing around, like a real man, and I can’t hate a real man. I might argue with him, I might come to blows, but hate him? Never.

  Before joining the co-op, I thought the worst thing in the world would be being left without land of my own, but now I see there’s something worse. You can live with shared land. You squint your eyes and tell yourself: “I’m working my own land,” and you get used to it over the years, just like the workers get used to the factory. Besides, the co-op got off the ground little by little, we weren’t left naked or hungry. We earn enough to make ends meet, we’ve also tucked a little aside. We’ve got pigs and chickens here at home, they gave us a half acre of vineyards, so we’ve got wine and brandy, plus our vegetable garden. It’s more than enough for this lifetime, right? I’m already past sixty, but I still pull upward of three hundred, if not four hundred, shifts a year. Your grandma Kate puts in two hundred as well. We keep on keeping on, we’re healthy, we haven’t stopped. What’s worse is something else entirely, and there’s no cure for that. Every year there are fewer and fewer of us left. Out of two hundred houses, there’s barely fifty chimneys smoking, and beneath them at most a pair of old folks knocking about. Out of eight hundred, only a hundred or so of us are left, and they’re dying off one by one. We don’t go to weddings or baptisms, we go to the graveyard. We’ve forgotten what the young men’s Christmas caroling sounded like, what the children’s New Year’s ritual was. There are no kids twittering about like back in the day, there are no youngins to sing and strike up a round dance on the village square, it’s like we never raised children, never brought up grandchildren.

  But anyway, let’s raise another toast, everything else can go to hell. Sometimes my soul feels so trapped that I feel like doing I don’t know what. Dropping everything just like that and heading off somewhere, changing my skin. It’s not easy getting old, my boy, take it from me…

  PART THREE:

  NIKOLIN “LITTLE HORN” MIYALKOV AND IVAN “PAINKILLER” SHIBILEV

  WHEN THE SIX MEN set out for the woods, Nikolin Miyalkov took up the rear, yet he was the most impatient for them to leave the village behind as soon as possible. Like the others, he, too, pretended he was going to hunt wolves, but his true goal was to get Ivan Shibilev alone and speak to him man-to-man. He had been wanting and anticipating this encounter with aching impatience, yet had not made up his mind to go over to Ivan Shibilev’s place. Many complicated and contradictory feelings had prevented him from asking a single, solitary question – bashfulness and pride and fear and hatred – and so this long-desired meeting had become an ominous inevitability. Ivan Shibilev might just pass him by with scorn, laugh at him, or tell him the truth, and the more vehemently he strove to uncover this fateful truth, the more he was afraid of it.

  Ivan Shibilev, in turn, breathed a sigh of relief when the lot he drew took him far from Nikolin Miyalkov, because something had happened between them which made him keen to avoid the other man. For this reason he hadn’t left his house for a whole week, but on the eighth day he couldn’t stand it any longer, got dressed, and dashed down to the tavern. There the traditional “Eucharist” of new homemade wines was beginning, they made room for him at the big table, where, among the other men, the hunters from the local hunting club had also taken seats. They invited him to taste the wine, and so he stayed there with them. He could have made up some excuse to go home, especially since one of those at the table was Nikolin Miyalkov, the reason he had not stuck his nose out of doors for a whole week, yet he stayed, perhaps precisely because of him. The cheerful atmosphere in the tavern took the edge off his uneasiness, which gave way to some vainglorious pride which refused to allow him to appear guilty or frightened in front of Nikolin Miyalkov. From what he could tell, no one in the village had found out what had happened between them, and this allowed him to deftly hide his feelings from the others. As always in such situations, he cracked the others up with his stories and jokes, yet at the same time he was unwittingly watching Nikolin, who was sitting across from him. He noticed that a whitish-blue ring had formed around his mouth, his cheeks were sunken, while his eyes burned with that dry, sharp glitter that revealed deep inner pain. And he wasn’t mistaken, because Nikolin ever more often and more probingly fixed him with his fiery gaze, in which pain, fury, and hatred could so clearly be read that Ivan Shibilev began thinking up ways to slip out of the tavern. At one point it seemed that Nikolin was looking at him with such unbridled hatred and had started to get up, as if to reach across the table to punch him in the face, but at that moment Salty Kalcho pushed away the soda bottle which they had poured the wine into, covered his face with his hands, and burst into tears. Many of those around the table had been at his late daughter’s ill-fated wedding and remembered the incident with the punctured soda bottle.

  This sinister memory made the men shudder, sensing that something very bad could happen between Salty Kalcho and Zhendo the Bandit, and it was right then, Lord knows why, that the i
dea of the wolves being spotted in the vicinity of the village popped into Ivan Shibilev’s head. He, of course, was joking so as to dispel the gloomy spirit of revenge reigning over the tavern, which could spark and detonate Nikolin Miyalkov’s hatred as well. But imagine his surprise when Nikolin of all people, who was the head shepherd and who should know better than everyone whether wolves had been spotted and whether they had stolen sheep, instead of catching him in this lie, was the first of the hunters to get up from the table and announce that he was going to get ready for the hunt. To Ivan Shibilev’s even greater astonishment, the other hunters followed him without a moment’s hesitation, so he had no choice but to leave with them.

  As we already know, Ivan Shibilev dawdled for more than half an hour at home, in the hope that the others had taken everything as a joke, but they wouldn’t hear of turning back and even made him lead them toward the woods. According to the lots they had drawn, he, Zhendo, and Stoyan Kralev would head for the southern edge of the woods, since from there it would be easier to get down to the Inferno where the chase would start, while Nikolin took up his post in the blind, and as always, when he thought about Ivan Shibilev, he started from the very beginning, from the day they had met.

  It was the fall of 1942. Back then he had been living and working on Mihail Devetakov’s estate in the neighboring village of Orlovo. That same year, Devetakov, for reasons unknown, had decided to sell half his land and had sent Nikolin to our village to ask Stoyu Barakov whether he would also like to buy part of his land. When he came to the first gate in the village, Nikolin stopped the buggy and looked into the yard. He wanted to ask where Barakov’s house was, so he wouldn’t have to wander every which way through the village searching for it. Judging from the single chimney on its roof, the little house he had stopped in front of had one or two rooms, while its face had only two windows and a door without an entryway. The yard was fenced in by a thorny hedge overgrown with elderberry, the wooden gate was rotting and held together by tin rings, while a gourd with a long winding neck had been hung on the door. A donkey was rolling around in the mud, kicking up dust. The grass in the yard had been grazed in circles according to where the picketed donkey could reach – the circles overlapped and created strange geometrical shapes in all possible hues of green.

  Nikolin had just decided to continue on his way when the horse shied, snorted, and jumped aside. A flat-bottomed kalpak rose out of the elderberry thicket, and from beneath the kalpak – an old man’s sheepishly grinning face.

  “Hold yer horse so it don’t bolt!” the old man said, coming out into the open and clutching at the strings of his breeches. “Today is my brother-in-law Dimitar’s name day, so we drank a few rounds to his health. But on my way back home I got struck with such a wicked case of the trots that I couldn’t even reach the privy. Just so you don’t think I’m hatchin’ a nest of eggs, squattin’ in this here hedge.”

  The old man was dressed in a new violet quilted jacket and fawn-colored breeches and was shod in new shoes, he looked neat and clean, yet somehow sluggish and at loose ends. While tying up his breeches, he looked the stranger up and down more with anxiety and even fear, rather than curiosity.

  “Well, come on in, then, come into the yard, no reason to stand out here on the road!”

  He turned to open the gate, but spotted his sash in the bushes, fished it out, and started winding it around his waist.

  “I won’t be coming in,” Nikolin said. “I wanted to ask you where Stoyu Barakov’s house is.”

  “Just a second now and I’ll tell ya, just wait a cotton-pickin’ second!”

  The sash was five or six yards long and such a bright red that it stood out against the green grass like an ember, and that ember seemed to be burning the old man’s hands. He had grabbed one end and was trying to stuff it under the ties of his breeches, but kept dropping it, getting it tangled up in his legs or winding it in the wrong direction. Nikolin jumped out of the buggy, grabbed the free end of the sash, and held it taut.

  “Come on now!”

  The old man started spinning around, while Nikolin slowly came toward him, letting out the sash little by little. The old man couldn’t keep his balance and staggered; when he finally managed to wind the sash around his waist, he flopped against Nikolin’s shoulder and belched so profoundly that the sour scent of brandy mash surrounded them.

  “I’ll be damned if that sash ain’t as long as from here to Vladimirovo! I got dizzy before I reached the end of it!”

  Nikolin climbed into the carriage and started off, and the old man trotted along beside him.

  “Hey, weren’t you coming to see me, sonny!?”

  “I stopped to ask you where Stoyu Barakov’s house is,” Nikolin said. “That’s where I’m headed.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so, my man? And here I thought you were coming to see me. So Barakov’s house, you say? When you reach the fountain, hang a right. As soon as you pass the school, keep left and you’ll see it. A big house, two stories. But wait, wait! I can take you there myself, why the heck not?”

  Nikolin stopped the horse, the old man climbed in, and no sooner had he sat down than he had managed to find out more or less all there was to know about Nikolin and also to bare his soul in return: “Well, as for me, I’m Grandpa Koyno, but they all call me Grandpa Kitty Cat. So while I was squattin’ there in that thicket, what do I see but some fancy carriage coming up the road and stoppin’ right in front of my gate. In that carriage there’s a fellow dolled up all city-like, so I say to myself, he’s gotta be from the tax office, either a taxman or a repo man. Around Saint Dimitar’s Day the villages are crawling with ’em, ’cause by then all the crops and the livestock have been brought in. Can folks of our station get away without payin’ taxes, I ask you? No, sirree. Two years ago one of ’em grabbed hold of me again on Saint Dimitar’s Day, just as I was lying there in the shade of the shed. I’ll take the last bite out of your mouth, he says, I’ll rip the shirt off your back, he says, but this time, by Jove, I’m not going away empty-handed. He’d come with a policeman, so thrashing him or running away was no use. He went into the barn, grabbed a dozen bushels of wheat, swiped two lambs from the pen, at long last picked out exactly what he needed, and took to his heels. And nowadays they’re sayin’ that Russia’s going to war, they’re sayin’ that our dear old Bulgaria’s gonna get dragged into it, they’re talking about mass mobilization, about requisitionin’ food and livestock. This fellow, I said to myself, ain’t here to spread good cheer, since he’s watchin’ me, waitin’ for me to finish my business. I can squat here till the cows come home, I says to myself, and I still won’t be rid of him, so I may as well hitch up my drawers and charge on ahead, so help me God. And here you’re one of Devetakov’s people.”

  Grandpa Kitty Cat didn’t look like a cat, he had a longish face with sunken cheeks, squinting eyes hidden like mice beneath his brows, a gray moustache trimmed to his upper lip, so Nikolin thought they must have stuck him with this nickname completely randomly, provided, of course, there was nothing feline in his nature. But Nikolin didn’t notice anything of the sort, because he spent only an hour or an hour and a half with him. Barakov wasn’t at home, so they turned back and along the way Grandpa Kitty Cat started inveigling Nikolin to come visit him. After the misunderstanding between them had been cleared up, the old man, freed of any inhibitions whatsoever, once again gave himself over to the exalted mood he had left his brother-in-law’s house in. When they reached his house, he fell into such maudlin gushing that you’d think he’d fallen in love with the unfamiliar young man, and outright begged him: “Come on now, my boy, humor an old man! You seem like a nice fellow to me, come sit for a bit and let’s shoot the breeze! Your estate’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away, you’ll fly in that buggy of yours and be home inside of an hour. We’re not mighty landowners, but since we don’t have nothing else, we pay back a good turn with fine conversation. It just ain’t right for you to pass up my gate like that!”

/>   Along the way, Nikolin had firmly refused to stop by the house, because he could see that the old man was three sheets to the wind and was inviting him in without his family’s knowledge, and under such circumstances, he didn’t dare set foot in a strange home. But Grandpa Kitty Cat was wheedling at him so insistently, so kindly, and with such childlike naïveté, that Nikolin decided to stop by his place for a short while, just long enough to humor the old man. Besides, he was thinking that when he left there, he would go looking for Barakov again and perhaps this time would find him at home. He tied the horse to a tree without unhitching it, and Grandpa Kitty Cat led him into the yard, where there was a little flower garden in front of the house, and graciously installed him on a three-legged stool. Then he pulled down a low table that had been hanging on the garden fence, set it in front of Nikolin, and darted into the house.

  The garden was awash in autumn flowers – kaleidoscopic Michaelmas daisies and dahlias, scarlet geraniums and yellow marigolds, asters and carnations. The air was steeped in fragrance, heavy and still, like years-long solitude, gentle and sad, sweetly unbearable and achingly enticing. Nikolin took it in not only through his nostrils, but also through his skin, he felt it on his face and hands like the touch of someone’s palm, and thought to himself that this scent resembled the life of this old man who, it seemed, lived all alone in the little house with its flowers and hedge, with the donkey and a few sheep, and that was why he was so eager for company. He looked around, trying to discover traces of other people, but saw neither clothes nor shoes nor any other thing. Ten minutes or so had gone by and Nikolin was feeling anxious about sitting alone in a stranger’s yard, yet leaving without saying goodbye to the old man would be even more awkward. As much time again passed and Grandpa Kitty Cat finally came out of the house. In one hand he was holding a green bottle, and in the other, two glasses as big as thimbles, slipped over his finger tips as if they truly were such.