Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  All we had left to do was to pack up and transport the books from the lowest shelves of the bookcases when Ilko found a roll of papers tucked between the pages of a French novel. The first sentence, which had been continued from a previous, missing page, caught his interest and he read all the remaining pages. They were numbered, but not in order and there was no connection between them. They were written clearly in black ink, but with many things crossed out and added in, which led us to believe that they were excerpts from the draft of a diary or notes for some essay. Ilko looked through all the volumes at his home in hopes of finding the whole manuscript, but alas, he did not discover a single line more. Years later I copied down this roll of papers from Ilko’s notes, and now I am tempted to insert them into my story, even though I realize they do not hold any original thoughts. Besides that, Devetakov is one of the most episodic characters in this story, the reasons for his suicide will hardly pique the reader’s interest, and yet I cannot pass over in silence these pages, from which gush an inhuman thirst for life and an apocalyptic horror of death. So here is the sentence, with which the roll of papers, whose first half is missing, begins:

  …from which it follows that the instinct for life is stronger than its meaning.

  How I hate Nature! If only because I came into this world not of my own free will, but of her will. She thrust me upon the world. She is a blind force which creates indiscriminately, with no plan, no goal, nor any emotion.

  Before man invented something as simple as the wheel, and many other things of that sort as well, thousands of years had to pass. To create the most complicated thing in the world – man himself – all that is needed is a blind instinct. No one thinks when creating a person, because he has given himself over to carnal passion. What’s more, a person is often born from unregenerate drunkenness, from violence or from flirtation, from accidental encounters, by accidental people. Despite this, Nature endows him with a mind, feelings, imagination, he can feel pain and spiritual excitement. Therein, too, lies her baseness, if we can charge her with this vice.

  My father died of a stroke at the age of fifty-five. He was exceptionally vigorous and strong. They say that in his youth he wrestled at village fairs and often beat the strongest contenders. He had a gentle nature, a subtle sense of humor, as well as musical talent. I remember how he would “play around” on the flute or violin during his free time. He played by ear. He would perform Russian romances and other melodies he had heard from other musicians and most often from gramophone records. Studying music was unthinkable in his day and age. My grandfather, a half-literate peasant, didn’t want to hear about any studies whatsoever. My father left school after seventh grade, but he was naturally intelligent and, unlike the other large landowners in these parts, read books by Bulgarian and foreign authors. He bought my sister a piano, hired a teacher for her from town, but she didn’t show any aptitude for music. Much to his chagrin, I showed no interest in music either. But as a consolation, he was very proud that I graduated from university abroad.

  My father was generous and loved guests. He loved to wine and dine them, to treat them to various drinks and to listen to their conversations. The guests – who were always different – created a holiday atmosphere for him. He was very social and in their presence felt inspired, joyful, and happy. But as luck would have it, it was in the presence of guests that he fell ill. He went to the other room to get something, was gone a long time, and when we went to look for him, he was lying on his back on the bed. He couldn’t speak or move. We called a doctor in the morning, and he found that my father had had a stroke on his right side. From that day on, my father was mute and paralyzed. I was horrified. I kept asking myself why such a kindhearted man with such a lust for life would be punished so cruelly by fate, why wasn’t he at least sent some more tolerable illness. He who had done Ms. Clara such a good turn was now suffering even more terribly than she was. He would sit in the house all day, or, if the weather was good, out on the veranda. But the worst and most unbearable part was that he was aware of his own suffering. His mind was completely intact, but instead of words, bellowing came out of his mouth. He suffered most when the man we had hired from the village undressed him, wiped, and dried him. Then he would bawl like a child, staring at the icon of the Virgin Mary – perhaps he was praying to her to end his misery as soon as possible. I had never seen and will never see such terrible suffering in anyone’s eyes.

  Yes, nature not only causes man undeserved suffering, she downright mocks him.

  An ancient king said to a poet who had praised him in an ode and compared him to the sun: “Before you compare me to the sun, you need to see my chamber pot!” The king was sincere and spoke the truth.

  Before we fall in love with a woman, we, too, must first of all see her “chamber pot.” Even the most tender love between a man and a woman is nothing but a sexual urge. Trite, but true. Otherwise lovers would still delight in and enchant each other from afar. They wouldn’t feel attraction to each other the very moment they met or even before meeting. And perhaps this is precisely the reason that man since time immemorial has glorified the object of his attraction as an unearthly creature and has called this attraction “love.” He sings the praises of his love precisely because he doesn’t dare call it by its true name, so as not to lower himself to the level of animals. In this way he rises in his own esteem. Animals mate only at certain times of year so as to further their kind, while man does it constantly for pleasure alone, which degenerates into fornication. And fornication leads to tragic consequences. Man’s love is corrupt. It serves as a medium of exchange for espionage and all sorts of shady undertakings.

  In this way, man shows that his love is an instinct from whose power he cannot free himself, not even when he sees that it could cost him his honor, his freedom, and his life.

  I have to kill this instinct within myself. It suppresses my will and my freedom. I must also kill the feeling of ownership. It is one of the worst vices. A crime against those who live in squalor and want. What do I need all this land for? I have a little money in the bank, deposited there years ago by my father, it is enough for me. From now on I have nowhere to travel to, I have nothing to buy. I want for nothing.

  If I give my land to the poor villagers, I will make them happy their whole lives. Not only them, but their children as well. I sense that I will be happy too. Or at least I’ll be trying to make sense of my life to some extent. Going on living as I have until now is unbearable. I’ll go to the villagers and, for you – this much, for you – that much! How simple it all is, yet for years I have not been able to do it. My will is not strong enough, I have the feeling that I will be left helpless and insignificant, without support and solid ground beneath my feet. But it won’t be like that. Since I know that I myself have deprived myself of something, I won’t miss it at all. If only I could at least sell my land at half price, but I can’t even do that. Because I am greedy and depraved. Because I am a true evildoer. And I haven’t even lifted a finger for thvis land. I inherited it.

  On March first I will go to the town hall and will look at the property tax records. I will see how much land the villagers have and give mine away to the poorest of them.

  On March first, and not a day later!

  They say that a supreme harmony exists in nature. In fact, chaos reigns there. Even the ancients, and after them the Christian thinkers, too, have said that nature is imperfect. However, there are some “great minds” who find harmony even in the existence of the millions of kinds of insects, all manner of reptiles and lower organisms. The mosquito, they say, feeds on the blood of man and the other animals and that is in accordance with natural harmony. The subterranean creatures, too, which never see daylight and destroy the poor villagers’ crops, are also part of this harmony. Wars, violence, the devouring or killing of those weaker by the stronger maintains the supreme balance in the world. This balance is immoral and bloodstained, but scholars and philosophers accept it and justify it in elegant s
ystems. They can’t understand nature, so they create systems to show off their intellectual prowess to the world. They even go so far as to consider death necessary for this natural harmony. While death is nature’s most criminal act. It robs life of meaning.

  Since the most ancient times people have been tormented by the transience and pointlessness of life. Gilgamesh, the hero of the Ancient Babylonian epic, was horrified by death. He met with all the wise men of his time, seeking consolation from them, but they all told him that the gods had doomed men to death and kept immortality for themselves. It would have been better if we had never been born than to have to live in a world of sin and suffering without understanding why things happen as they do – so says the Book of 4 Esdras.

  In Ancient Greece, which distinguishes itself with its life-affirming philosophy, we find no less grief and sorrow. “For of all creatures that breathe and walk upon the earth, there is none more miserable than man,” says Homer in the Iliad. And in the works of many of the early poets such as Simonides, Theognis, and others, written in the sixth century before the Common Era, there is much hopelessness: “Best of all for mortal beings is never to have been born at all, nor ever to have set eyes on the bright light of the sun.”

  Later, Sophocles, too, would say: “To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.”

  Centuries later we also hear Pascal’s sad howl: “You have no foundation beneath your feet, beneath us is the abyss. It is terrifying to feel how everything you have disappears.”

  There are philosophers who claim that the suffering and death of the individual atones for the happiness of humankind. Death is evil, of course, but in this case it is transformed into a virtue. From it is born new life that eternally renews itself. From here stems the theory of immortality through the generations or even through some action. A pitiful consolation. Or more precisely a posthumous indulgence of our vanity. I’m not there, but my children, grandchildren, and everyone from my “line” will live one after the other and I will live on through them. Do my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfathers live on through me? No, of course not. I am alive, and they are dust, or not even dust, rather nothing. Just some names, some ideas, long-forgotten ones at that.

  I am gone, but I will live on through my deeds in the minds of future generations. An even more pitiful consolation. So what of it that someone at some point will open a book and perhaps read that so-and-so did such-and-such for the good of humanity? He invented a machine, painted a picture, uttered a wise, immortal thought. What good have Archimedes or Socrates, for example, done for humanity? Or Shakespeare, or Michelangelo? None whatsoever. Literally, none. They’ve distracted themselves with various endeavors and ruminations so as to divert their thoughts from their inevitable death. They have distracted themselves and others and this is the only good they have done. At any rate, humankind keeps on dying as before and all those Aristotles and company are nothing but names written in books.

  I don’t want to be any one of those grand names, I want to be immortal. To live even after the end of the world. Let them live on “in the minds of grateful humankind.”

  The Ancient Greeks, as we know, bowed down before implacable fate, which renders the separate individual helpless in the name of shared universal harmony. Heraclitus was awed by the constant stream of life that flowed thanks to the death of the individual man. Thus the immortality of the human race is assured.

  After a man dies, what good to him is the life of nature, of the universe! What meaning does my sacrifice have for maintaining the life of the universe, since it is not a living creature and cannot be aware of it? Since it exists, both with and without me? Nature constantly creates through the power of its blind instinct and constantly kills, thus the world, in fact, is an endless graveyard. This alternation of life and death, of birth and disappearance into nonbeing, scared Heraclitus himself, too, and in the end he compared universal harmony, the life of nature, to a heap of trash or some such thing.

  Today Malayi brought Ms. Clara to play the piano. While she was playing (at this point very poorly and painful to listen to), I was thinking of what a tragic thirst for life this woman has. When she and her husband arrived here, she was such a pretty young woman that people from the surrounding villages, as well as our acquaintances from town, came just to see her. We already knew that she and her husband were political emigrants. In our eyes her selfless love and self-sacrifice gave her the halo of a saint. After a year or two she became paralyzed and we were all stunned. Whenever death is mentioned, she pales in horror.

  Her suffering, one might say, is nothing in comparison to that of one of my cousins. He is forty years old, but he cannot walk or even sit. He crawls around on his hands and knees, and outside in the yard, they take him out in a handcart. He looks like a four-legged insect. Outsiders, if they happen to catch sight of him crawling around on the floor, are horrified. Two or three times a month, I get a note from him asking for some books. He reads all sorts of books, but prefers those that describe journeys to far-off lands. You can talk about anything with him, as he is a true encyclopedia. He remembers not only what he has read in magazines and newspapers, but also what he has heard on the radio. He knows all the political happenings around the world, all the politicians’ names, as well as the movements of the military units along the German-Russian front. He knows French and speaks only French with me. He learned it with a private tutor.

  His memory is well trained, but not mechanical. As a child he had two teachers and since he could not write, he had to learn his lessons by heart. They don’t hide him from me, because we are relatives, and I bring him books and newspapers that his brother, whom he lives with, cannot always find for him. When Licho (his name is Iliya) and I talk, he lies on his stomach on the bed, and I sit in a chair across from him. Our conversations are encyclopedic. From everyday problems to philosophy.

  Sometimes we talk about life and he says that he is a heap of suffering. I have been punished by God more than all the people on the earth, he says, why am I alive? I am a freak. Why don’t I die or put an end to my torments?

  That’s what he says, but as soon as he gets a little cold or sneezes, he wants them to call a doctor right away. Yes, the instinct for life is insurmountable. It is stronger than the worst suffering, than the most hopeless despair, than the meaning of life.

  How can I overcome that blind, incomprehensible force? Was it Euripides who said that perhaps life is death, and death life? If this is the case, then crossing over from one state to the other should not be so frightening.

  These notes are by Alexander Pashov. This is his handwriting. I remember how his notes looked when he was talking about Lenin’s The State and Revolution, a Russian edition printed abroad, which I brought him from Paris. Ilko Kralev also managed to read it.

  How pure the two of them are, in love with humankind. Platonically in love. They are ready to sacrifice themselves on the “altar” of their ideals. How they thirst for knowledge and action for the good of the poor and downtrodden classes! I do not share their ideology. It is the most humane of all ideologies, but it is impossible to put into practice. Man is built far more complexly than young idealists and other theoreticians think. Yet still I admire them, because their ideals are noble, selfless, and lofty.

  In them, I see myself at their age. Didn’t I, too, “embrace” suffering humankind? I wanted to become a village teacher to teach the peasants to read and write. A doctor, so I could heal them free of charge. A lawyer, to fight their cases for them and to defend them in court. My father didn’t laugh at me and didn’t oppose me. As I found out later, he had gone through his own phase of romantic populism and patiently waited until life showed me its other faces as well.

  I envy the two young men their pure, sincere faith in the fulfillment of their ideals. What happiness it is to believe. If I felt any happiness in my youth, it was because of my faith that if I sacrificed myself for the people, I would make them happy. Now I cannot believe. I wa
nt to but I cannot. Now I know that no ideals and no revolutions have changed or will ever change man. The theoreticians, and especially the materialists, do not know human nature. For them, man is a material with which they try to realize their theories in practice. They don’t want to know that man is an abyss, whose bottom no one has yet managed to glimpse.

  The communists, like all revolutionaries, also believe that their idea is the most just and the most applicable to social life, hence everything before them was imperfect. But who would make a revolution if he didn’t believe that his cause was the final word in human justice?

  Revolutions are carried out with violence and I’ve always wondered how you can reach a humane end with inhumane means. Some time ago, when I was talking with Alexander Pashov and Ilko Kralev, this question arose and they tried to prove to me that the revolution (they meant the socialist one) is not and could not be unethical and immoral. Revolution is a fundamental change to the economic – and as a result also to the spiritual – life of society. Every day we make revolutions in various spheres of life, albeit on a smaller scale. Watering crops, spreading manure, interbreeding animals with the goal of getting a better breed, medicines, surgical operations, science as a whole, and civilization – are these all not “violence” against evolutionary development? Revolution is necessary to man.

  Thus laid out with simple and clear examples, the motives for revolution look logical and convincing. In other conversations on similar topics Alexander Pashov and Ilko Kralev freely cited economists, scholars, and philosophers, and I have the feeling that, theoretically, they are very well prepared. Especially Alexander Pashov, who thoroughly knows the works of Marx, Lenin, Plekhanov, Stalin, and others. On the whole he is exceedingly well read for his age. He is able to improvise and to convince his interlocutor calmly and logically, without pushing his knowledge on him. Conversations with him are democratic, if I may put it that way. On top of this he is reserved and resourceful and it seems that he lives a Spartan lifestyle, despite the comfortable conditions his father has secured for him. Overall, I feel he has all the qualities necessary for a public figure, for a functionary of the highest rank or even a party leader.