Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  “That’s the truth,” Nikolin said. “As long as we’re healthy and happy, what more could a person want!”

  Mona was coming in and out of the room through a small door to the pantry, bringing bread, cheese, a potato stew, finally she also brought out a wicker-covered jug of wine.

  “It’s still young,” Grandpa Kitty Cat said, pouring it into chipped little glasses left over from Lord knows when. “My brother-in-law gave it to me the other day to try it.”

  The wine had the scent of ripe grapes and its taste was sweet and sourish. As soon as they’d taken their first sips Grandpa Kitty Cat couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer and started grilling him, as was fitting, from A to Z, about how he’d been living since they’d last seen him and how he figured to go on living in the future. Nikolin wasn’t bothered that he was quizzing him in such detail, because he could sense in his curiosity the sympathy that his soul had been longing for. He told them about Devetakov’s death, about the thefts from the estate, and about Ilko Kralev, whom he was going to live with.

  “Don’t you even think of it, my boy!” Grandpa Kitty Cat said. “How’re you gonna live with those two sickos under one roof? One of ’em consumptive, the other’s face rotted away, if you don’t catch TB you’ll get sick just from looking at them. Mony, you tell him too!”

  “As if he would listen to me!” Mona said. “He’s a man, let him decide for himself. Ilko ran away from home to not infect his family, while others are going to him of their own free will to catch consumption.”

  Nikolin didn’t know what to say. The old man’s advice was sincere and well intentioned, but, on the other hand, Ilko was the only person he could take shelter with. Otherwise he would have to go back to the estate this very minute, to condemn himself to loneliness again, and to spend his nights fighting ghosts and thieves. It was better to die with the sick man than to live exiled like that from the world.

  “You’re a fine lad, Nikolin, my boy! From the first moment I laid eyes on you, I knew what kind of person you are,” Grandpa Kitty Cat said, a vague smile veiling his face. “I just can’t figure out why you’ve got it in your head to waste your life on Ilko. That damned TB cut down plenty of folks here in the village, it doesn’t show any mercy. If you don’t have anywhere to go, stay here with us. I mean it! Stay here a day or two, think it over, and then decide, don’t just go running blindly off any which way. Are you gonna spend your whole life worrying about the sick and the dead? If you like it here with us, stay as long as you like. We won’t throw you out, we won’t let you go hungry. And besides…”

  “Dad, you’d better get to bed,” Mona said, taking the glass out of his hand.

  And again it was like the first time he had visited. The old man walked over to the bed as if enchanted by his daughter’s words and started getting undressed. He left his hat, quilted jacket, and shoes on the floor and slipped under the blanket in his breeches. Soon a steady purring could be heard from under the blanket. Mona seemed angry or ashamed at her father’s words, and Nikolin once again got up to leave.

  “Stay a little while longer to chat,” she said, glancing over at the bed. “He’s asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow. Where are you going to go at this time of night, it’s already dark outside. I can see your heart is heavy, the loneliness is torturing you, you don’t have anyone or anywhere to turn to. Why do we make you uneasy?”

  “I do feel uneasy,” Nikolin admitted. “I’m not used to letting night catch me in strangers’ houses.”

  “What, are your other troubles not enough already that you need to add that worry to the pile? Good God, so there are people who can be made to feel uneasy even by us!”

  A thin, gentle smile lit up Mona’s face and it was as if this smile caressed his soul. There was none of Mishona’s depraved teasing in it, nor any of Madame General’s suppressed scorn. The one, after wasting her life in careless frivolity, made sport of him and turned him into a wastebasket into which she threw the trash of her soul, while the other, having lived until recently in luxury, bit her lips to overcome her pride and hatred of him, so as to beg a bag of food off him. From the start he had felt awkwardness and an inward fear of these women, because he knew that between them stood a high and hard wall, which separates a servant from ladies of high standing, and perhaps because of this they were a mystery to him, which gave rise to a vague urge to peer into that mystery. His attraction to Madame General was blind and reckless and it turned into a painful humiliation, and when he started to feel sorry for her, he felt guilty in her eyes and felt a sense of disgust toward himself. At his first meeting with Mona, he had also felt her to be far superior, since he had assumed that she was a teacher or a secretary, and most of all because she was a pretty girl whom he’d never met. Now he felt calm with her, as we all feel calm and trusting with our equals.

  “From now on, you’ll have to get used to living with strangers, since you’re lonely on the estate,” Mona went on. “Living alone is no life at all.”

  “It’s tough,” Nikolin said. “Even if you’ve got a house like a palace, and even if you’ve got land, since you’re alone, it’s like you’ve got nothing. A man can’t enjoy anything by his lonesome.”

  “I’ll make up a bed for you in the other room, get a good night’s sleep, then do what you have to do tomorrow.”

  Nikolin put his hat on his head, stopped by the door, and asked: “Where should I put up the horse?”

  Mona led him to the barn, where there was only one cow, tied the horse to the end of the manger, and the two of them went back to the house. Grandpa Kitty Cat was sleeping with the covers pulled up to his chin like a child, with his eyes half open and his hands on his chest. Mona called Nikolin into the other room, showed him the bed in the semidarkness, and went out. He stood in the middle of the room until his eyes got used to the darkness, undressed, and tiptoed over to the bed. It was wide like all village beds, filled with straw and covered with a striped blanket. The straw rustled at his every move and gave off the scent of dried grass, in the middle there was a dip formed by Mona’s body. The strip of light coming from under the door went out and the house sank into silence. He didn’t dare move, as he felt that the rustling of the mattress would be heard in the other room, he lay on his back with his hands behind his head and stared at the blue square of the window. He was thinking about the twists and turns of fate that had brought him to a girl’s bed completely by chance, and was wondering whether some happy omen was not hiding in this happenstance. He was also wondering what the old man would say if tomorrow and the next day and the day after that he were to stay at his house, would he really take him in, as he had promised that night, or was his invitation merely drunken blather? If his invitation was sincere, that meant he wanted him for a son-in-law, otherwise how would he let some young bachelor live in his home? And would Mona have him, or would she send him on his way with a wave and a smile, as all guests are sent off? He had never thought of marriage and now it seemed to him as absurd as it did pleasant, because he could not get the image of Mona out of his mind. I won’t fall asleep, I’ll get up early and leave, he kept telling himself, sensing that the silence was rocking him into some sweet daze, his thoughts were scattering and his eyelids were growing heavy.

  He woke up late, feeling as light and chipper as a person who has slept soundly after many sleepless nights. Grandpa Kitty Cat had gone to the fields in the donkey cart to bring back a little corn, but Mona was waiting for him in the other room. She had put breakfast on the table and was sewing on some cloth such that when he opened the door, the first thing he saw was her, with her hair neatly combed back and tied in a bow, as pretty and tidy as a doll.

  “I really overslept!” Nikolin said, when he saw the sun was almost at high noon. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “Since you feel like sleeping, sleep. There’s no work waiting for you. Why don’t you shave?”

  Nikolin was overcome by a pleasant sense of carefreeness that he had never fe
lt before. The sorrows, worries, and loneliness that had suppressed his heart’s youthful impulses disappeared as if miraculously and he gave himself over to the hope for a new life, easier and more cheerful than his life thus far had been. Wherever he turned, his eyes saw only beauty and tranquil joy, as if the world around him had transformed itself in only a single night. The warm autumn day was quiet, calm, and lovely, the little house was lovely and cozy like his parents’ home, and from the flowers in the garden wafted a sweetly sad scent, and Mona was the loveliest girl he had ever seen in his life. He was so dazed by this joyful premonition of his future life that he didn’t even stop to think whether he was annoying her, whether she was not being so polite to him merely out of decorum, waiting for him to realize on his own that every visit must come to an end. He took the cage of birds out of the buggy to let them roam around the yard with the others and caught one. He asked for a knife, slaughtered it, and handed it to Mona. She went to the summer kitchen to light a fire, while he took one of his two suitcases and carried it into the room. The suitcase was made of yellowish-brown leather, while its inside was covered in blue silk. It was full of all the shaving implements he had found in the house – two razor strops, brushes, two straight razors, a whole dozen bars of soap, a little bottle of cologne, and face towels. Mona scooped him up a pitcher of warm water, fixed a little mirror to the chimney of the hearth, and he shaved. Then they plucked the chicken – she held it by the legs and he by the head – they cleaned it, sliced it, and set it in the pot to boil.

  That’s how Grandpa Kitty Cat found them at noon, sitting together in front of the hearth of the summer kitchen. Nikolin expected him to ask what he had decided – would he be staying with them or going – but the old man seemed to have forgotten that he had been their guest only since last night, and called him to help push the full cart behind the house next to the corncrib. During lunch he also did not ask, and when he got up from the table, he went off into the village on some errand. Mona and Nikolin went behind the house to shuck the corn and by evening, they had finished it. Grandpa Kitty Cat again lay down and fell asleep instantly, while Mona made up Nikolin’s bed in the other room. He had just laid down when she came in to him. She stood by the bed for about a minute, then sought out his hand and took it in hers.

  “I came to visit you, hey, wake up! Do you want to talk?”

  His throat was tight and he said something that even he did not understand. He squeezed her hand tightly and starting drawing her toward him, breathless from excitement and bashfulness.

  “Don’t pull me like that or I’ll get mad and leave!”

  He let go of her hand, ashamed that he couldn’t say even a word of what he had been thinking of telling her all day. She leaned over him and started stroking his face with one hand, and his shoulders with the other.

  “You may think badly of me, but I…” she said, sinking onto his chest and pressing her face, hot and wet with tears, to his. “Don’t leave me, I’ve taken a liking to you.”

  Nikolin didn’t realize how she had stripped down to her blouse and slipped under the covers with him, nor did he know how he ended up on top of her between her naked thighs. Her hands were locked around his waist like a ring and that ring was pulling him toward her, while she was moaning: “Oh, it hurts!” What hurts, why does it hurt, he thought to himself and tried to pull away, but the ring of her arms pressed him ever more firmly to her body. As soon as he felt her warmth, she again let out long, muted moans and again pressed him to her, while he kept wondering what was hurting her and why. This went on for a long time, a very long time, to the point of exhaustion, and he finally felt himself sinking into some warmth and his body all at once relaxed into sweet helplessness.

  In the morning he hitched up the buggy and headed to the estate. He and Mona had decided to get married the coming Sunday and he wanted to take a few things for their future household. Grandpa Kitty Cat had already quizzed him as to what was left in the estate house, and having gotten wind of big game, he set off in his donkey cart after Nikolin and he wasn’t disappointed – the housewares had not yet been plundered. He ran from room to room, shouting: “This ain’t a house, but a royal palace!”

  Nikolin took a few tablecloths, a crystal pitcher with glasses, a pair of boots, forks, spoons, plus a few more housewares and wanted to leave, but Grandpa Kitty Cat grabbed on to the door handle and refused to let him lock it.

  “Are you plumb out of your mind? You’re gonna leave all this loot to be plundered by strangers?!”

  “I don’t need that junk, nor do I have anywhere to put it.”

  “You call this junk?” Grandpa Kitty Cat was walking around the parlor, touching the furniture. Give me the keys, you go on back if that’s what you want. I’m not budging from here till I’ve taken what needs to be taken.”

  Nikolin didn’t feel like arguing, so he gave him the keys and left him to run wild in the house. He’d only been away from Mona for an hour, and already it seemed that he hadn’t seen her for a whole eternity, he hurried to get back as soon as possible to see her, to hear her voice, to delight in her presence, to make sure it wasn’t all just some happy dream, but that he was happy wide awake.

  Grandpa Kitty Cat returned late that afternoon with an overloaded cart. And the next day he went back to the estate with a horse cart he’d borrowed from his friend Petko Bulgaria. For several days the two of them set out and came back with the cart crammed full, until they had carried off everything that wasn’t nailed to the floor. And so, if Nikolin was in seventh heaven, then Grandpa Kitty Cat was even a little bit higher than him, in eighth heaven. He, too, was living in another world, in the world of that old fairy tale in which the daughter of a poor peasant marries the king’s son. The house, the barn, and the yard were filled with leather sofas and armchairs, with Persian rugs and tables, beds with bedsprings and chests of drawers, tins full of lard and cooking oil. He’d also brought the radio, the gramophone, the paraffin lamps, the chickens, the geese, the turkeys and a pig, the shovels, the picks and axes; there, too, were all of Devetakov’s clothes, underclothes, and shoes, as well as the little varnished table he had been sitting at the day of his suicide.

  Mona wanted to have a civil wedding, because they weren’t prepared to throw a big reception, and in any case the house was so crammed full of things that they could barely make their way through the cramped space. They signed their names on the dotted line at the village soviet, came back home and had lunch, and that was the extent of their wedding celebration. Nikolin had decided to build a new house the next year, but the close quarters forced him to move up his plans and only a few days after the wedding he started looking for builders and materials. The village was uneasy, there were rumors that a cooperative farm would be founded, rumors of a new war, of nationalization, of state delivery quotas, people had split into parties, they went to meetings every night, arguing, fighting, settling old political scores. Nikolin knew about the happenings in the village from Mona, who went to the youth meetings and informed him of everything, but these events didn’t interest him, much less move him. Up until then he had lived far from social life and he knew neither the passions nor the problems of that life. He had given his entire being over to the magic of female flesh, which made him deaf and blind to the world around him, and only in his fleeting moments of sobriety did he wonder and try to figure out with no success why people split into parties, why they argued and fought, when there was so much love and so many caresses in life, so much happiness and beauty.

  The local folks from the village in turn wondered what kind of person this newcomer was. They knew he had twenty-five acres of good land and a big estate house, they figured he had money, too, and the word was that he was either very foolish or very presumptuous to be setting out to build a new house at a time when no one was sure of his property, and most were getting ready to flee to the cities if they founded a co-op. Because they didn’t know his nature and since he kept his distance from everyone, the locals f
elt a mix of jealousy, scorn, and curiosity toward the newcomer and no one tried to get to know him. The only one in the village to stop by his house was Ilko Kralev, and he did so only very rarely, since he was sick.

  Nikolin didn’t manage to find materials, so he built only another room onto the old house. By the New Year, the room’s plaster was dry, they outfitted it with Devetakov’s furniture and moved in. In January Mona found she was pregnant and gave birth to a little girl at the end of May. After she got up from childbed, she went down to the village soviet on her own and officially named her Melpomena.

  The first order of business for the village wiseacres was, of course, to stick the newborn with a nickname, so in case, God forbid, she were to die before she was registered down at the soviet, they would have some way of putting her down in the books in the afterworld. They nicknamed her without any particular creative exertion, instead making use of traditional familial succession – they added an adjective to the mother’s nickname and the newborn became the Little Grand Dame. Then the child’s name caught their attention. No one had heard that name in these parts and the local wiseacres gave their all trying to get to the root of it. They dug around in Grandpa Kitty Cat’s family tree back nine generations, they dug through Nikolin’s and even Devetakov’s, but their etymological investigations led nowhere. Finally Mona, after savoring the satisfaction of keeping them in the dark for a long time, explained that she had named her daughter after some goddess of the theater. On its own, this explanation didn’t mean anything to them, but since it was a question of theater, it was clear to everyone that only Ivan Shibilev was capable of coming up with such a name. For the time being the wiseacres were silent regarding the mystery surrounding the child’s paternity. It had been born in the seventh month of the marriage and perhaps it was premature, but it just might turn out to be the offspring of one of Ivan Shibilev’s countless “tricks.”