Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  But he is also a theoretician, and a young one, at that. Panta rhei and the fact that you can never step into the same river twice means that it is changing every moment. But this is a mechanical change. The materialists attribute this characteristic to man as well, but the analogy is faulty. Man changes, but also mechanically. He improves his material and technical culture, but in the moral sense he does not change. And the goal of every revolution is precisely moral change.

  I envy the dead. They have overcome the horror of death and have crossed over into the void. Why do I feel horrified by that void? Billions and billions of people have sunk into its bosom, I, too, will sink into it. The years I have left to live out will be filled with an anticipation of death and a horror of it and that agonizing anticipation cannot be justified by anything. The man who has reached the truth that life is meaningless should not fear death. Free and happy is he who can arrange his life as he sees fit. Finally, if I’m deprived of this earthly life, I have nothing to lose, but if there is life “up above,” then I have everything to gain.

  Yes, here is the only meaning of life – immortality.

  If there is no second life, nature is a criminal. A recidivist. But where would that second life take place? Here on earth? No. “Up there,” in the other world? It does not exist, it was made up by religions. And religions are the most indisputable proof of man’s striving to overcome death. All of man’s activities ever since he has existed have been a struggle against this so-called natural necessity. Belief in the afterworld is a negation of death. Religion is a hope for immortality. There are real hopes, for example, the hope that next spring what was sown will sprout, grow, and in the summer bear fruit. The likelihood of natural disasters destroying what was sown is only one percent, and not even every year. But there are also fantastical hopes. One of them is the hope for the afterlife, resurrection.

  Man’s thirst for the immortality of the soul is so great that he goes to absurd extremes to believe in that immortality. Religions say that God created man, when it is precisely the opposite. Man created God as a belief and a hope.

  Where is God to help and console us?

  Everything is possible for God, religious thinkers claim. But some add that there is no absolute guarantee of his existence. Man can always doubt and deny him. We ought not seek to discover him through the path of reason, he is not in ordinary being but in spirit. And since everything is possible for God, then faith in him is a struggle for possibility. It opens up the path to immortality.

  Yes, God is our only hope, our one salvation. If we manage to raise ourselves up to his level, we will conquer the void. Only we mustn’t forget – God cannot be reached by the path of reason. Our reason is mistrustful and limited. It seeks truth, justice, and goodness here on earth via a logical path and thus creates law, and through the law creates sin. Reason has created man’s greatest suffering, but who created man himself? God, of course, who else could it be?

  But why?

  Some philosophers answer this question by saying that God created everything, but reason and morality have not been created. They are primordial. A fine answer, what more could one say? An escape hatch from the labyrinth of that clear contradiction. That way an answer is also assured for the question of why God is so indifferent to man’s fate. Since he did not create morality, goodness, too, is not his creation. He exists incognito in this world and has nothing to do with wisdom, morality, and truth. They have been thought up by reason.

  To the ancients’ reasoning that regardless of whether the soul is immortal or not, we must be virtuous, Saint Augustine replied with an aphorism: Namely, that pagan virtues are merely splendid vices.

  Splendid indeed, but an aphorism nonetheless.

  What’s more: “God is everywhere from whence ignorant people come and worship the sky.”

  And why did Jesus teach us virtues here on earth? He really did say that blessed are they who are not tempted by virtue, but at the same time he counseled us to give one of our shirts to the poor. Is that not a virtue?

  The other day Ilko Kralev told me Alexander Pashov had left half a year ago for Switzerland to study medicine there. I had been asking Ilko about him for a long time, but Ilko had claimed not to know where he was. He only told me a few days ago. I have the feeling that despite being such good friends, or perhaps precisely because of this, Alexander Pashov’s making such a move during the height of the war was a mystery to him. This is why I did not consider it necessary to tell him that about two months ago I had seen Pashov in Zurich, on my way back from Munich. I was trying to slip into Paris with a heap of recommendations from Sofia acquaintances, but only made it as far as Munich. At first I wasn’t completely sure that the young man I saw at the Zurich hotel was Pashov. Since I didn’t expect to see him abroad, in the first instant I thought I’d mistaken someone else for him. Later, as I all the more often and in ever greater detail re-created my memory of his gait, his height, the expression on his face and in his eyes, the more I became convinced that it had been him. We passed within a few feet of each other by the reception desk. I was going into the hotel, he was coming out. His gaze fell on me for a bit longer than usual and when I opened my mouth to greet him, he turned away and hurried toward the exit. He was dressed elegantly in a light overcoat of gray cloth, a wide-brimmed gray hat, and gray gloves.

  Now I was absolutely sure that it was him, so sure that I wanted to catch up with him. But then I thought that since after having visited my home regularly for three years, he pretended not to know me, with that he was trying to tell me that he had serious reasons to pass me by. What could these reasons be? He didn’t come to see me that evening, nor on the following morning. The hotel administration told me there was no one by that name registered at the hotel. The gentleman I had seen here had likely come to meet someone. Throughout my whole return journey and even until recently I had been trying to explain to myself why he had passed me by in that Swiss hotel and finally came to the conclusion that perhaps he was working in international espionage.

  What a dreadful world! What a complicated creature man is. If Pashov was working as a spy, which side was he on? The fact that he spoke so passionately about communism did not at all mean that he was serving Soviet Russia, on the contrary. Perhaps he preached communist ideas so openly in order to hide his work for the fascists.

  I have gotten quite a lot of information about Soviet Russia from the French press. It is extremely contradictory. Some are horrified by the harsh dictatorship there, others are ecstatic about the Soviet government. A government that is waging a difficult war against the economic backwardness of Tsarist Russia, in the name of the masses. Some Frenchmen, as well as other foreigners who have visited Soviet Russia, say that a great renaissance of humankind is underway there.

  But I am familiar with fascism. Both here in Bulgaria and abroad. It is a political paroxysm. I saw it in occupied France, I saw a democracy crushed under a heavy boot. I also saw it in Germany. Nowhere else has such a herd-psychosis been forced on a people. Nowhere else has individuality been so suppressed and unified on account of a mediocre, bloodthirsty Führer. And on account of a suite of windbags. How can a people be ruled by a band of bums with the impudent self-confidence that they will transform the world? How we praise “the people,” when they are nothing more than a mob whom anyone can oppress if he has the ambition and the talent for it. Death has a hand in this, too. Fear of it turns people into a herd. The oppressor, the called-upon oppressor, knows this.

  Fascism is madness. How could Alexander Pashov serve such madness? Is it possible for a monster to be at work in a person like him? I don’t want to believe it, but who knows? You can expect anything from a man.

  And so, to secure immortality for ourselves, we must reject rational thinking. Faith begins where thinking ends. Could there be a more impossible condition for immortality? And how was this truth reached if not through reason? Isn’t it the case that as soon as a person opens his eyes to the world, he wants to
see, touch, and find out everything? He asks a hundred questions a day and this is reason.

  Your God, who does not want the impossible, is not God, but a repulsive idol. This was said by one of Dostoyevsky’s characters. The one from underground. An old, ancient biblical chimera transformed later by religious writers into an irrevocable condition for true faith. Isn’t it true that even ancient Abraham, at God’s first call to sacrifice his son Isaac, raised his knife, ready to slaughter him like a lamb? And if God hadn’t stopped his hand, he would have killed the boy without batting an eye. But God, of course, stopped his hand, thus we can’t really find out how strong Abraham’s faith actually was. And whether he was truly prepared to kill his son.

  What a shallowly constructed legend. Its whole point, if it has one, lies in the fact that faith is an unbelievable paradox and it is precisely this paradox that can transform a murder into a sacred act. And return Abraham’s son to him.

  But to believe like Abraham, I must lose my individuality, suppress my will, lose my I. Give up my soul. “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” Or: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”

  Some Ignatius or other, brought to Rome to be ripped apart by wild beasts, begged the Christians there not to try to save him. “Nothing can stop me from going to join Christ. I would rather die for Jesus Christ than rule to the utmost ends of the earth. I am burning with desire to die as he did.” Indeed, whole generations of martyrs joyfully accepted death out of love for Christ. And they even hungered to give themselves over to the greatest suffering and death so as to experience his agonies and death.

  Mystics. Or people with troubled minds, freaks, madmen, prone to fainting fits, mentally ill. They dream of God or see God while wide awake and imagine that they are one with him. Pascal, too, was given to raving in moments of spiritual crisis. He was mentally ill, too.

  Today I listened to a speech of Hitler’s on the radio and now I think that rulers and especially dictators actually use the tried-and-true practices of religion. They, like God, demand total submission and devotion to the death from their subjects. They don’t acknowledge anyone’s personal freedom and individuality at all. Or they acknowledge it on paper, but in actuality suppress it with every means at their disposal.

  The truth is that there should be a God, but there isn’t. Oh, if God did exist, he would not live “incognito” in this world. He would not be so indifferent to people, he would not put them in such difficult, impossible conditions in order to unite them with himself.

  But I am getting confused. I am confused. Isn’t God spirit? If he exists, he really must be spirit. The world we live in is so absurd, so pointless, that perhaps only uniting with the spirit will save us. Now therein lies the mystery of religion. In reality, it is a struggle for a good life here, on earth. It tempts us with resurrection in the afterworld, because here we are doomed to meaningless death. Hence it follows that our salvation is in the spiritual world. As soon as we accept this, that insurmountable natural necessity will no longer exist for us. In this way we will already be made perfect and we will have lived out our lives happily here on earth, and that is the meaning of our existence.

  As far as the afterworld, resurrection, and eternal life are concerned, that is now eschatology. A dream – and none of the living can ever find out whether this dream is attainable or not. But after we’ve lived out our lives so happily, we won’t even have any need for it. Religion is beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful poetry ever created by man.

  Just poetry.

  While death, absurd, senseless death, still hangs over man’s head like a terrible judgment. The thought of it strips the rest of my life of meaning. To overcome it, I must accept it. Yet I have not the strength for this. The eternal darkness into which I must sink plunges me into horror and paralyzes my will. I cannot, I cannot overcome my instinct for life. This blind force holds me in its clutches.

  How happy are those madmen, those poor in spirit, those freaks, the mentally afflicted, who burn with impatience to die so as to go join their God.

  Ilko Kralev is ill with tuberculosis. He is sentenced to death. Does he know it? He shows no sign, literally no sign, that he is suffering. He spits into his tin box so conscientiously, as if carrying out some ritual. From whence that self-control? Or is his hope stronger than despair?

  Why does he not rail against this absurdity?

  In the first days of October, Nikolin hitched up the carriage and set off for Ravna so as to move in with Ilko Kralev. He had loaded up the most necessary of his possessions – two suitcases of clothes and bedding, a trunk full of kitchenware, food, and a cage full of a dozen chickens on top of everything. He was bringing them for Ilko, who lived a solitary life, without any possessions whatsoever, plus his illness demanded nourishing food. He had known him for a long time and believed that he was the only person after Devetakov that he could live with. To him, Ilko seemed to resemble Devetakov in nature and even in his outward appearance, thus his life with Ilko would be a continuation of his previous life. He, just like Devetakov, could not live without books, let him read, I’ll take care of the housework, I’ll cook for him and take care of him until he gets better. Tomorrow I’ll go back to the estate to get the rest of the birds, the pig, and whatever’s left of the food, plus the money I have will last us a long time.

  While hatching such plans about his future life, he had reached the first house in the village without realizing it, and he would have passed it by if someone hadn’t called him by name: “Nikolin, why are you just passing us by like that?”

  By the gate stood the blond girl with whom he had gone to that ill-fated wedding with the disgraced bride two years earlier. He had long remembered that wedding, and the blond girl along with it. Over time the memory had faded, but when he saw her by the gate, he immediately remembered her name, he remembered his unusual meeting with her father, Grandpa Kitty Cat. And everything was exactly the same as he had seen it a few years ago – the rotting gate with the gourd slipped over the side post, and the dunghill at the far end of the yard where the donkey was rolling around, and the grass grazed in circles, and the house nestled amidst the bushes and trees. Even the time of day was the same, late afternoon, the sun was shining just as brightly and the thorny hedge was already casting a bluish shadow. And Mona was the same. She was looking at him as she had then, with her head cocked slightly toward her shoulder, and was smiling, her hair gleamed in the sun like a stalk of ripe wheat. She came over to the carriage and gave him her hand.

  “So you’ve forgotten me, have you?”

  “I haven’t forgotten you,” Nikolin said. “I just didn’t see you.”

  “How could you pass us up without stopping by! Your buggy’s loaded up like a Gypsy’s cart, where are you headed to?”

  “I’m going to Ilko Kralev’s…”

  He wanted to add that he was going to live at Ilko Kralev’s, but she, just as her father had done back then, opened the gate and invited him to stop by their place for a short while so politely that he couldn’t refuse. He tied up the horse without unhitching it to the same tree and Mona invited him to sit on the three-legged stool next to the same rosebush in the garden in front of the house. She chatted with him and behaved so familiarly with him that he got the feeling that they had met here in the flower garden not two years ago but two days ago. The crooked gate squeaked and Grandpa Kitty Cat came into the yard. He looked at the buggy from all sides and cried: “Well now, if this buggy ain’t one of Devetakov’s! And lookee here, Nikolin’s come to visit! Where have you been, my boy? So much time has passed and you haven’t thought to look us up! We heard Devetakov passed away, may he rest in peace, and me and Mony here were wondering whatever happened to Nikolin. And now here he is – alive and kicking.” Grandpa Kitty Cat was the picture of affability and was beside him
self with joy, as if seeing his dearest friend. “But why are you sitting out here? Why don’t you go into the house? Mony, invite our guest in.”

  “I invited him in, but he turned me down. He’s in a hurry.”

  “Where do you have to hurry to at this time o’ day? It’s already getting dark.” Nikolin got up, but Grandpa Kitty Cat put a hand on his chest. “You go ahead and hurry, my boy, but it’s not a matter of life and death. Cool your heels for a bit, let’s chew the fat, then you hurry on your way! Yessiree!”

  Nikolin was used to living in the large house and the room looked like a matchbox to him, the ceiling beams hung right above his head like the ribs of a skeleton, the light of the sunset was filtering through the little window as through a knothole in a barn. It was spick-and-span, but meagerly furnished and impoverished. The square table, covered with a hard and shabby oilcloth with red flowers, three wooden chairs, a small stove with a crooked pipe, in the corner stood a wooden bed, above the wooden bed a square piece of needlepoint with square pieces of homemade cloth, embroidered with red and green crosses and flowers, just like the ones his mother had once embroidered. The little rugs on the floor woven from colorful rags, and the copper basin with the dented-up aluminum pitcher, and the gas lamp with its round, fly-encrusted mirror reminded him of the poor, old, and shabby furnishings in the house where he had been born.

  “You’re coming from a lordly life, you’re used to nice things, but don’t find fault with us or be disgusted by us,” Grandpa Kitty Cat said, as if guessing his thoughts. “As long as you’ve got a big heart, the rest’ll figure itself out, that’s what I say!”