Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  “Tarnation, if this bottle had been a snake, it would’ve bitten me – right under my nose and still couldn’t find it! I looked high and low for it, rummaged around in the pantry, turned everything topsy-turvy, and there it was, right in the cupboard,” he said as he pulled the paper stopper out of the bottle and filled the glasses. “Well, cheers and welcome to my humble abode!”

  The brandy was greenish-yellow and murky, smelling of sour mash gone bad and leaving a burning, unpleasant aftertaste. Nikolin took a sip and its acrid whiff went down the wrong pipe, he started coughing and tears sprang up in his eyes.

  “Darn if I didn’t forget the appetizers!” Grandpa Kitty Cat fretted. “Let me see if I can rustle up some tomato or other.”

  He drained his glass in a single gulp and went to get up, but right at that moment a young woman passed by the rosebush, coming toward them. Nikolin had spotted her as she was crossing the yard, but somehow couldn’t believe his eyes, so unreal did the girl’s appearance seem to him. It crossed his mind that she, too, was a stranger like he was and like him had stopped to ask for directions at the first house she had come across, but at the same time he noticed that the girl hadn’t called out from the garden gate, as a stranger would. She walked like city women, as if on tiptoe, while her arms were folded beneath her chest. Grandpa Kitty Cat only saw her when she welcomed the guest and gave him her hand. Nikolin got up off the stool, took off his hat, and stayed standing.

  “Hey, now there’s my girl! There’s my little girl, my little sweetheart!” Grandpa Kitty Cat exclaimed, and laughed out loud. “We live here together just the two of us, spoilin’ each other rotten. We’re just a couple of orphans, we are, me with no wifey, she with no mommy. Just like…”

  “Dad!” His daughter cut him off, as if scolding a small child. “You’ve had too much to drink and now you’re talking nonsense.”

  “For shame, Mony, what do you mean, I’ve had too much to drink? Your uncle Mitya and I raised a few glasses, so his name may live on, and that was that. Mony, this boy here’s from Devetakov’s estate. He’s a fine lad, a good lad, I’ve taken a shine to him, but he doesn’t drink, nary a drop! Here’s to you, Nikolin, my boy!”

  He tossed back another shot of brandy and it finished him off completely, he was thick tongued, reeling back and forth on his stool. He ran the risk of falling right off it when Mona grabbed his arm.

  “Dad, get up and go to bed!”

  Without a word or sign of objection, Grandpa Kitty Cat got up and his daughter led him into the house. Nikolin was left alone again and was again anxious, especially since finding out the girl was the lady of the house. She had left him without a word, so that meant he should go. He had untied the horse’s reins and had one foot on the mounting step of the buggy when he heard her voice behind him. In just a few minutes she had managed to change into a different blouse with light-purple flowers, a tight, dark skirt, high-heeled shoes, and now here she was stepping lightly and gracefully toward the carriage. The twilight had imperceptibly plunged everything around them into dark shadows, only her hair, reflecting the final gleams of the sunset, shone like a spray of coppery-golden wheat.

  “Are you going, Mr. Miyalkov? Why so suddenly? Daddy said you’d only just arrived,” she said as she came toward him. Her voice was muted and soft, her bluish-green eyes looked even lighter in the dusk. “Don’t pay him any mind, he got drunk and had no idea what he was doing and saying. He only drinks once or twice a year, it hits him hard and he can hardly stay on his feet.”

  “He’s an old man, who can blame him?” Nikolin said, still grasping the seat of the carriage with one hand. “He had a few drinks and was in high spirits. He showed me Barakov’s place, we chatted a bit, and he invited me to sit awhile.”

  “Haven’t you come to our village before?”

  “I’ve never had reason to pass through this way. We’re only half an hour away, but I’ve never been here.”

  “And I haven’t seen you before,” Mona said. “I’ve been to Orlovo plenty of times, but I haven’t seen you. But why are you rushing, why don’t you stay for a bit?” She was standing a foot away from him and Nikolin could catch the scent of her perfume. She must be a teacher, he thought, since she’s dressed like those city ladies who come to visit the estate, her manners are like theirs, and she smells nice, like they do. “I’ll take you to a wedding.”

  “To a wedding? What wedding?”

  “A girlfriend of mine from the neighborhood is getting married, just right down there, a few houses away. You can meet the local young people, have yourself some fun.” Mona was looking at him calmly and probingly, her head slightly tilted toward her shoulder, but he kept silent. “Why are you so hesitant, you’d think I was asking you to walk on hot coals! Come on, at least walk me there, since it’s already dark and I can’t go on my own. If you don’t like it, you can turn around and head back to your estate.”

  Going to a wedding, in a strange village no less, and with a girl on top of everything – that really was the equivalent of walking on hot coals for him. For eight years, he’d been living on the estate, which was only a mile away from Orlovo, but never once had he gone to mingle with the other young people at working bees, parties, or celebrations. Talking to unfamiliar people stirred up some anxiety and tension within him that he couldn’t overcome. Incidentally, we’ll get to that side of his character a bit later, let us just add now that he had only rarely had occasion to talk to women, and only then with those who had come to visit the estate. In their presence, he felt bashful and awed, as servants feel in front of ladies of the highest standing. As far as he was concerned, Mona, too, belonged to this category of ladies, whom he was used to obeying and serving, thus he had no choice but to escort her to the wedding.

  This wedding turned out to be one of the most important and most harrowing events of his life. Two lanterns had been hung in the yard, and beneath them stood barrels of wine. Men were crowded around the barrels, pouring wine from the spigots and drinking, the young people were dancing to the sounds of an accordion. Mona led him through the crowd to a veranda, where a large table had been laid out, there they were met by the bride, who settled them into the room with the “hostage.” Ivan Shibilev, that was the name of the hostage at the wedding, politely introduced himself to Nikolin and made room for him between Mona and himself. He found himself for the first time in the company of so many and such unfamiliar people, and when amidst the general hubbub he traded a few words with Mona and Ivan Shibilev, he was surprised that he didn’t feel the same anxiousness that had almost stopped him from coming to the wedding. All that lavish eating and drinking, the music, the songs, the dances, and the jokes were for him a discovery which he had never even suspected existed. And no one paid him any particular attention, just those who were closest to him at the table raised their glasses to toast with him from time to time, all of them were gripped by some unbridled, spontaneous merriment, they were talking loudly without listening to one another, shouting, singing, trying to outdance each other, and now look, the charming young man who had made room for Nikolin next to him suddenly stood on the threshold between the two tables, dressed in colorful clothes, with a red rag around his neck in lieu of a tie, with a child’s hat on his head and a violin in his hands.

  The table fell silent and they all got ready to watch and listen to Ivan Shibilev’s “artistry,” while the young people crowded around the veranda. In front of everyone’s eyes, Ivan Shibilev made a funnel out of a newspaper, pulled an egg out of it, put it into his pocket, then pulled out another and yet another. The audience was struck dumb with wonder, only one young man stepped forward and said that he’d seen tricks like that with eggs when he was in the army, only they weren’t real eggs, but wooden ones. Ivan Shibilev fell silent as if caught in an act of chicanery, then suggested somehow uncertainly to the young man that they bet a box of candy if he would test the eggs with his teeth to see if they were real or not. The young man was sure he would win the bet
and bit the egg clear in half, and yolk dripped from his mouth.

  The crowd burst into thunderous laughter, Nikolin laughed right along with them as he watched the young man spitting out shards of eggshell as stringy yolk trickled off his chin. For a whole hour laughter welled up in his chest, his heart was cheerful, free, and light, as if he had found himself in a world of carefree joy. After the trick with the egg, Ivan Shibilev played the melody of a sad love song. His violin was peeling and cracked in places, like the violins played by the old Gypsy fiddlers he had bought it from, and it’s no surprise that he played like them too, with lots of variations and flourishes, husky, yet sweet, and to Nikolin the violin seemed to be singing the words of the song: “Oh, mother, may he be damned, thrice damned, he who loves a girl but doesn’t take her to wife!”

  “Play another one, play another one!” the crowd shouted.

  Ivan Shibilev put the violin back under his chin and started imitating various animals and birds. This was his latest musical number. The audience thought he was scraping away at the strings as a joke, but when the braying of a donkey burst out amidst those scraping sounds, they again erupted in laughter. This was followed by the barking of a dog, a decrepit lop-eared dog lying somewhere in the shade resting his old bones, and as soon as it sensed a stranger in the yard, it just barely raised its head from its paws and let out a few yaps, just enough so as not to shame itself before its master. After the dog, a cat meowed, then a rooster crowed, lively and vociferously, with those quiet throaty sounds at the end that wrench themselves out of its lungs when it takes a breath. After the rooster, a hen cackled “cluck-cluck-cluck” and Nikolin could see in his mind’s eye the hen strutting dazedly around the yard on a hot summer day and pecking here and there, not because she’s hungry, but out of boredom, jabbering her chickenish nonsense to herself. Finally it was the songbirds’ turn. Ivan Shibilev put his hands on the upper end of the violin’s neck and out from under his bow flew the sonorous trills of the nightingale on May nights when it is giddy with amorous passion and improvises with reckless inspiration. Amidst these coloraturas from time to time either the fragile monotonous refrains of the finch would call, as if someone were tapping with a fork on a plate, or the soft recitative of the oriole was heard, curled at its end like a comma, or the alto aria of the blackbird hidden somewhere among the cold and thick branches of the tall trees rang out, its song bursting forth from deep in its lungs. Ivan Shibilev wrested an avian choir from the strings of his violin and directed it at the same time, turning the chilly autumn evening into a cloudless spring morning, when the world of birds is overpowered by the gentle urge to create.

  Then a shot rang out, the women screamed and covered their mouths with their hands, the room filled with smoke and fumes, a sinister silence fell, and all eyes turned to the father of the bride. He lifted up a soda bottle tied with a red ribbon, then a white cloth was shoved under his nose, his wife shouted something and started beating her head with her fists. The wedding guests froze to the spot, some smiling spitefully, others stunned and flustered, the white cloth was being passed from hand to hand, they started wrangling over some land, they were crammed cheek by jowl in the room, it grew as stuffy and tight as in a hole. After some time, Nikolin learned what had happened at the wedding, since the rumor soon reached the estate, but at the time he had sat there bewildered and crestfallen, unable to fathom how after so much singing, dancing, and laughing such confusion could suddenly take hold and cast a pall over the wedding’s good cheer, just like a hailstorm suddenly whipping up out of a clear blue sky, pummeling the crops with icy pebbles and flattening them to the ground in one short minute. The stuffy air suffocated him, his head began to spin, he wanted to ask Ivan Shibilev what was going on, but the hostage was gone, and Mona had disappeared too. He tried to get up and go outside, but behind him was a wall of people standing so tightly packed together as if they had fused. He finally made his way out around midnight with all the others, drove his carriage out of Grandpa Kitty Cat’s yard, and headed for the estate.

  The image of his daughter would constantly slip into his memory of that wedding and his first meeting with Ivan Shibilev, as sometimes happens in a phone conversation. You’re talking to someone on the phone and from time to time you start hearing an unfamiliar voice, then it disappears, only to entwine itself in the conversation again – at first soft and unclear, then growing stronger and clearer until it takes over the line and you can no longer hear the person on the other end. In the same way, the memory of his daughter now also displaced in his mind that distant memory, because the memory of her was stronger. A week or so ago he had run into her on the street in the upper end of the village on his way home from the sheep pen. She was dressed in a gray topcoat with a leather collar with some sort of fluffy hat on her head, with bright-yellow, almost white, boots on her feet. He recognized her by the boots, otherwise they might have passed by each other. It was growing dark already, and she was slinking along the fence in the dark quickly and stealthily, which made her boots shine like two flames.

  “Mela, my girl, is that you?” Nikolin called when she had already passed him.

  “It’s me,” she said, and stopped reluctantly.

  Instead of the girl stepping toward her father, he went over to her to greet her.

  “Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes! So you finally came home! So I see this girl coming along toward me and I says to myself, that sure does look like Mela. But why didn’t you write me to come meet you? How’d you get here?”

  “I took a bus to Vladimirovo, then a truck from there.”

  “Have you forgotten where we live, honey? Our house is down on the lower end. Let’s go get you warmed up, you must be freezing.”

  He reached out to take her valise from her hand, but she hid it behind her back, was silent for a moment, then said: “I’ve got to go somewhere else first.”

  “Come on, now, where are you going to go in this darkness? Come on home first, get warmed up, then go out. Let’s go, my girl!”

  The two of them set off together, Nikolin could not hide his surprise and delight and started telling her that lately he had dreamed of her often, and what do you know, his dreams had come true. He asked her whether she would stay for the holidays, where she worked and what she did, but she answered evasively, hurrying on ahead. When they came to the cross street, she took her valise in both hands and turned her head aside.

  “I’m going up this way.”

  “But why, honey?! Aren’t you going to come home first…”

  “Oof, you and your questions, questions, questions!” She interrupted him as if wanting to get away from some pest blocking her path. “I told you, I’ve got something to take care of.”

  She took a few steps and stopped with her back toward him, then slowly started coming back. Her face, veiled by the dark cobwebs of the twilight, looked perfectly white, and her eyes were two dark caverns.

  “Since you want to know where I’m going, I’ll tell you. I’m going to Ivan Shibilev’s.”

  Her words slapped him in the face like fire, he closed his eyes, and when he finally got ahold of himself and wanted to ask her if she would be at Ivan Shibilev’s for long, she was no longer standing in front of him. She had disappeared so quickly and quietly, as if she had turned invisible or flown off like a bird.

  At home he grabbed a chicken and slaughtered it on the chopping block. While waiting for its death throes to end, Nikolin watched as a pig ran across the yard with a mouthful of hay and hid inside the pigpen. A nasty cold front is coming, Nikolin thought to himself, and only now heard a distant blustering from the north. A flock of crows flew like black clouds over the yards, swooping low over the houses then suddenly soaring high into the sky, filling the expanse with their anxious screeching. He set water to boil and went into Mela’s room to light the stove. He had built it onto the house before Mela was born and the three of them, Mela, her mother, and he, had slept there. The two older rooms had been woven from stic
ks and dug into the ground, while the new room – made of bricks, spacious, light, and raised up a step – looked like a patch of new cloth on an old shirt. As a schoolgirl, Mela had taken over the room, she slept there, did her homework there, and wouldn’t even let him set foot there, and when she left she locked up the room with a padlock. Later, too, when she lived in the city and didn’t come home for a whole year at a time, he went into the room only rarely to see whether the roof was leaking or to clean the cobwebs from the ceiling. Every time he went in on tiptoe, because it seemed like Mela would jump out of some corner and scold him: “This is my world, and my world alone!” she would tell him. “And no one is allowed to sully it with their presence!” The four walls of the room were covered from floor to ceiling in colorful theater posters, photographs of actors both large and small, in color and black and white, in various poses, smiling and teary-eyed, furious and licentiously cheerful, wearing village clothing, royal robes, or even half naked, all of them somehow unreal, mysterious, and inspiring an inexplicable uneasiness. And Mela’s clothes, belongings, and jewelry had always been scattered about the floor, on the table, over the chairs, and in the wardrobe, the bed would be left unmade for weeks, while her comforter looked like a den – however she had crawled out of it in the morning was how she would slip under it in the evening. But Mela felt at home in that flea market of a room, she would stay in there for whole days, and Nikolin could hear her pacing from one wall to the other muttering something, shouting, laughing, crying, getting angry, or ordering someone, “O my dear husband, regain my honor with your sword!” or, “My soul yearns for you as the morning yearns for a ray of light!” Nikolin had remembered these words and many more, without understanding what they meant, and he grew ever more used to the thought that his daughter did indeed live in some world of her own, which he did not and could never understand. Deep inside, he did not approve of this world and her way of life, yet at the same time he told himself that he was a simple, uneducated man and had no right to meddle in her business. What bothered him most was how during vacations she would not lift a finger to help around the house or in the fields, as the other girls did. She spent the days in her room and the evenings at the youth club, coming back at midnight or sometimes even at dawn. She could go for days without eating, and never touched the pots and pans to make lunch or dinner, instead waiting for him to come home from work to make her something to eat. Ever since she was a child she had been headstrong, careless, and neglectful of everything around her in the house. No matter how hard they had tried to teach her to put everything back in its proper place, her toys, notebooks, and textbooks were constantly rolling around on the floor. Her only true concern was dressing herself up like a big girl, she wouldn’t wear just any old dresses or blouses, but had to touch them up herself. But otherwise she was a smart, curious, loving, and charming child, and with this she made up for all her carelessness and neglectfulness around the house. She was first in her class at school, she played the lead part in all the school plays, her teachers said she had a bright future, and Nikolin was very proud of her.