Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  The lid of the pot was jumping from the pressure of the steam, droplets were running down it, falling on the firebrands and hissing. Mishona fell silent, listening. She had had her eyes shut the whole time and when she saw Nikolin next to her, she seemed startled and jumped up off the chair. Then she laughed and lifted the lid of the pot.

  “The food is ready! Let’s have dinner!”

  “You two go ahead and eat, I’ve got some work to do,” Nikolin said.

  “You don’t have any work to do at this hour, darling! We’ll have dinner together. Help me take everything upstairs and set the table. You are the head chef, aren’t you?”

  After dinner, they stayed at the table, listened to the radio and talked about many things. The whole time Nikolin could not shake off the nagging thought of where Mishona would sleep – in a separate room or with Devetakov, and whether he would accept her, after he had slept with Ms. Fanny. When the last news bulletin on the radio finished, Devetakov said “good night” and went to his bedroom. Nikolin wanted to help Mishona clear the table, but she told him to go to bed and so he did. The moon dangled right in front of the window as if hung there and filled his room with a white, ghostly light. From the parlor he could hear the clinking of plates, he also heard Mishona’s footsteps on the wooden floor and he followed her movements anxiously. She went into the neighboring room, which was connected to the parlor, put wood in the stove, then he could hear her footsteps by the wall where the bed was, and then there was silence in the house. Nikolin calmed down, but not ten minutes had passed when the door to his room opened slowly, and cautiously, Mishona came in and silently made her way toward his bed. She was in her nightgown, her hair was swept up in a bun, which made her neck look as thin and delicate as a doe’s. Her nightgown was low-cut and her breasts, bluish white like milk, were partially exposed. She walked like a ghost, smiling and bending slightly forward, she sat down on the bed and touched his face. Nikolin lay there as if paralyzed, not daring to breathe, while she slipped her hand down his shirt and dug her fingers into the bristly hair on his chest. Her hand was hot as tongs, her face radiated the dizzying scent of cigarettes and perfume. Nikolin got ahold of himself and retreated to the other end of the bed.

  “Where are you running to, dummy?” she whispered, moving next to him. “You can’t think I’m going to sleep with you! I just came to show myself to you, to let you touch a woman, so you don’t die wondering.” She took his hand, placed it on her breasts, and Nikolin felt something warm and soft as jelly in his palm. “Touch me, darling! Come on, Nicky, touch me!” she said, leaning ever closer to his face, warming it with her breath, but he had clenched his hands into such tight fists that no power on earth could have opened them. Then she whispered something dirty in his ear, took off her nightgown and was naked. Nikolin closed his eyes, but she dived under the covers and pressed herself to his body like a leech. She stayed next to him for only a minute or two, but touched him everywhere most shamelessly, then put on her nightgown and left.

  Nikolin was afraid she would come back, so he leapt out of bed and locked the door. He didn’t hear any noise out on the veranda, but he stood by the door, ready to hold it shut with his shoulder if Mishona tried to come back in. Only when he heard her go to bed behind the wall did he lie back down too, pulling the covers up over his head.

  “Nicky, I’m begging you, don’t think badly of me!” she said the next day as he was driving her to the station. “I’m sorry I joked around with you like that. You won’t think badly of me, will you? Promise me!”

  “I won’t,” Nikolin said, but was on his guard in case she tried to play some other joke on him.

  On his way back home, and over the following days, he thought only of her, wondering what kind of person she was and not being able to come up with an answer. He remembered how even years ago she had teased him: “What a wild sort of handsomeness that boy has!” she would say, and invite him to dance, while he, wishing the earth would swallow him up from shame, would run outside, hounded by the guests’ laughter. He didn’t know where she was from, why she was called Mishona, whether she was married or not, just as he didn’t understand whether she was just making sport of him or really wanted to draw him closer. Now that he knew how much she had been through in her life, he thought that she had a good and compassionate heart and wasn’t haughty like the other women, but he felt some instinctive fear of her, the same fear village men feel toward loose city women.

  Soon after Mishona left, Mrs. Sarmashikova – or Madame General, as they once had called her – arrived in a cart from the village. That morning Devetakov had left for Varna and hadn’t said how many days he would stay there. Madame General stopped in the yard hesitantly, then went into the house and set her oilcloth shopping bag on the chair. After that, everything unfolded as it had with the other visitors. She also asked for ingredients to make dinner, he gave her what she needed, showed her which utensils and pots and pans were in which cupboards, and went about his work in the yard. Of all the women who had come to visit the estate, Madame General was the least talkative and somehow indifferent toward the others. Her thoughts seemed to be far away and only from her faint, almost imperceptible smile could you see that she was listening to and following what was being said around her. Nikolin had never exchanged a word with her, but she struck him as the most pleasant of them, he loved looking at her and hearing her deep, sonorous voice. She was at that ripe age when women tend to plumpness and become rounded, but not only does this not detract from their beauty, it gives them a particular appeal. The previous guests had said that she would come to the estate without fail, and Nikolin had secretly been waiting for her with an excitement that he could not explain. Mishona had turned his chasteness upside down and awakened in him an attraction to a woman, and that woman was Madame General. When he remembered how Mishona had come to his bed that night, her image in some inexplicable way turned into Madame General and she would tell him: “Come on, touch me!” He dreamed shameful, agonizingly delicious dreams of closeness with many of the women he knew, he even dreamed of the deceased cook, Auntie Raina, who was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, lifting the skirt of her dress to her thighs and telling him: “Look here, my boy, look what I’ve got up under here!” She and all the other women with whom he committed such unbridled and shameful fornication had the face, voice, and body of Madame General, he sank into her incorporeal flesh as if into an abyss, only to awaken exhausted and swimming in the sticky wetness of pollution.

  He assumed that Madame General, like Ms. Fanny, would not invite him to dinner but would leave his food in the kitchen, so his heart skipped a beat when she called him by name from the veranda. He quickly washed up and went upstairs, his knees shaking and slightly out of breath. Madame General had set the table and was waiting for him. She pointed at the chair across from her and said: “Bon appétit!”

  “Thanks, same to you!” Nikolin replied.

  Madame General handled her silverware daintily and quietly, she lifted the fork slowly toward her mouth and chewed just as slowly with her mouth closed. Nikolin was nervous, he ate as slowly as she did and did not even taste the food. As he had noticed earlier, her thoughts were far away and she was staring at some point in space in front of her. From time to time he dared to glance at her generous, rounded breasts, which welled up beneath the light-blue fabric of her dress, at her face with its slightly prominent, dark cheekbones, and the dark circles beneath her eyes, which made them even larger and deeper, her dark hair gathered at the nape of her neck in a clasp with a silver pin. At every noise outside, she stopped eating and pricked up her ears, and for the first time since he had been living with Devetakov, Nikolin hoped that he wouldn’t come home that night. Madame General glanced at the little watch on her wrist and said: “Michel won’t be coming back tonight. The evening train has come and gone.” She wiped her lips with her napkin and sat back in her chair.

  “Wait, I forgot to get wine,” Nikolin said, to keep her longer at the
table, but she said she didn’t drink. “I don’t drink either, but I just thought because of the guest…”

  Nevertheless, when Madame General began clearing the table, he went down to the storeroom beneath the barn and drank half a bottle of wine in a single gulp. His face blazed up immediately, and his head felt pleasantly dazed. He went back to the house but didn’t find Madame General in the parlor. He thought she’d gone outside, so he sat down to wait for her. Not imagining that she would have gone to bed without telling him, he went to the door of the room where she had once slept with her husband during their visits, grabbed the knob and turned it, but the door was locked from the inside.

  “What is it?” Madame General called.

  “Uh, nothing…I was just wondering where you were…”

  “I’ve already gone to bed.”

  He stood in front of the door, tempted to say something more to her, but then he felt ashamed and went to his room as if duped. His only hope was that Madame General would come looking for him the next day, asking for food to take back to the city. Mishona had told him that she, like Chileva, had been forcibly resettled from Sofia and was hungry and wouldn’t leave empty-handed. But in the morning Devetakov came back, filled her bag with food, and Nikolin drove her to the train station.

  And so it was the whole summer. The three women would come, spend a day and night there, and go home with their suitcases full, without ever running into each other as if by mutual agreement. But “that quiet thing” had again settled in Devetakov’s soul. The three women, it seemed, were familiar with this state of his from before or simply pretended that they didn’t notice it, and were not offended that he wasn’t as attentive and polite with them as before and didn’t even greet them or see them off, spending all day in his room or walking around the garden, withdrawn and indifferent to everything and everyone.

  One day, who knows how or why, the three of them all arrived, first Mishona on the morning train, then Ms. Fanny and Madame General on the afternoon one. That day Nikolin was out working in the fields and came back in the late afternoon. The visitors were sitting in the gazebo in front of the house. Mishona met him in the yard and made him come sit with them. As soon as he sat down he realized that the visitors were not in a good mood, not only because they had crossed paths and they couldn’t stand each other, but also because they’d had an argument. Their faces were drained by that paleness which drains ladies’ faces when they are furious and have to keep their temper. All around it was quiet and cool as befitted the sunset after a sweltering day, a light, translucent darkness crept up from the fields. At one point, Ms. Fanny said out of nowhere: “Nikolin, please bring me a glass of water!”

  “No,” Mishona cried, grabbing him by the arm. “Don’t you dare move! Her throat is dry from spewing spite, let her go drink water in the kitchen.”

  “Don’t make a fool of yourself in front of the man, you shameless hussy!” Ms. Fanny said quietly, getting up from the bench.

  Mishona broke into ringing, malicious laughter.

  “What, is anyone a more shameless hussy than you? Don’t you make a living by…” Here she said something vulgar, which made Nikolin bow his head. “Back in the day, you cuckolded Chilev for fun, now you do it out of necessity.”

  “Scum! You spend your whole life eating our scraps, and now…”

  “ ’Cause you priced me out of the market.” Mishona clicked a crude military cigarette lighter made of a cartridge case and lit up a cigarette. “I’ll tear you to pieces if I have to, but I’m never letting you set foot here again. Earn your keep somewhere else! You’re still healthy, you’ll still last through plenty of men…”

  “Shut up!” Madame General couldn’t take any more. “Why are you fighting, why are you talking such nonsense!”

  “My utmost respects to you, Madame General!” Mishona turned to her. “I beg your pardon. Stay calm, my dear! If you’re in a bad mood, you won’t truly be pleasing to Nicky. Isn’t that right, Nicky? You don’t like sulky women in your bed.”

  “You worthless trash! I spit in your ugly face!” Ms. Fanny said, and spit in Mishona’s face.

  Mishona jumped forward and gave her such a slap in the face that Ms. Fanny shrieked and staggered backward. Madame General grasped her by the hand and the two of them went inside the house. Nikolin stood as if paralyzed, not knowing what to do.

  “Don’t you give them even an ounce of food!” Mishona told him. “They stuffed themselves on other people’s pain back in the day, now let them earn their own daily bread. Don’t you even drive them to the station, if they go to leave. Let them go on foot!”

  But that very evening Nikolin drove them to the station and gave them a trunk of food “for the trip” to share between them. Very early the next morning he drove Mishona to the station, too, and gave her a suitcase full of food.

  “Forget last night’s brawl, Nicky!” she said as they parted, bursting into tears. “That’s what we are, bitches. Three hungry, low-down bitches.”

  Those were her final words, he never saw or heard from her again. Devetakov killed himself only a few days after their departure. No one from the village came to his funeral besides the ancient Grandpa Stavri, the late cook Auntie Raina’s husband. The four of them buried him under the old walnut tree at the far end of the garden – Nikolin, Grandpa Stavri, Malayi, and Ms. Clara. A few days later he and Malayi were called into town, to the notary public. The dead man had left a will, the notary opened it and read it. Devetakov had willed the twenty-five acres and the house to Nikolin, the threshing machine and the tractor to Malayi, and his library to Ilko Kralev from Ravna. That very same minute Malayi signed over the threshing machine and the tractor to the village. A week later he and Ms. Clara left for Sofia, where their son and daughter were, and from there – for Hungary. A car came from the city to pick them up. Malayi hugged Nikolin, and Ms. Clara kissed his forehead and started to cry. That’s how he remembered her – with tears in her merry, blue, girlish eyes. They organized a demonstration, gave speeches, and the whole village saw them off triumphantly, since they were communist emigrants and the Hungarian government had requested their return from the Bulgarian government.

  Nikolin was left completely alone. No one came looking for him for any reason, while he had no one to visit. During the day he worked in the yard or in the fields and didn’t feel so lonely because he could see people in the fields and on the roads, but the nights were unbearable. The dead man’s ghost hovered around him, Nikolin dreamed of him every night, while during the days Devetakov himself seemed to be in the room and he kept waiting for him to step out onto the veranda. Before he realized it, Madame General also began appearing in his dreams. She would be sitting across the table from him, she would reach over the plates, take his hand in hers, and tickle his palm with her fingers with an expectant, seductive smile, the table would split in two, she would come closer and closer to him, pressing him to her breasts. Other times he would be carrying her in his arms just as the Hungarian had carried his wife, or else she would slip naked into his bed and scorch his ear with her breath: “Come on, touch me, aren’t you a man?” while Devetakov would be sitting by the stove, he would raise his eyes from his book with a sad smile, shaking his head: “Oh, Nikolin, Nikolin, so this is who you really are?” After such deliciously agonizing dreams Nikolin would think of Devetakov as if alive and would suffer pangs of conscience that he had profaned his master’s memory. He would go to his grave and pray for forgiveness with his whole heart and soul: “This grass still hasn’t grown over your grave, Uncle Mihail, and this is how I, miserable ingrate that I am, repay you for putting your hand on my shoulder and becoming my mother and father. You didn’t sleep with Ms. Fanny that night, Mishona herself told me how pure your soul is, and I know it, too, since you never sullied yourself with a woman before my eyes, and now I’m defiling your precious memory by dreaming of you with a woman. My whole mind and soul rails against these dreams, but they keep coming to me when I’m fast asleep,
they stalk me and swoop down on me like a band of thieves. I won’t sleep at night, I’ll sleep only during the day so I won’t dream!”