Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  However, the village did not accept the name in its original form and ruminated on it for a long time until it fit every mouth. To give it a local flavor, the name had to be stripped of its exoticism and strangeness and be ironed out till it was smooth as a white bean, so as not to prick the palate when pronounced. After this prolonged articulation, in which the young and old alike took part, from Melpomena, through Mena, Melpa, Melmena, etc., the name arrived at its most perfect form – Mela.

  Only Grandpa Kitty Cat had no inkling that his granddaughter bore the name of the ancient muse of tragedy, and from the looks of it he had no inkling at all that his granddaughter even existed. He rarely picked her up and never boasted to anybody that he had the most beautiful and cleverest grandchild in the village. While his granddaughter made her first attempts to charm those around her with toothless smiles and to enrapture them with her cooing, Grandpa Kitty Cat was living out his material ascendency and all his attention was fixed on how to savor it to the hilt and, more importantly, how to show it off. As always, he got up in the morning after the sun had risen, went out into the yard, and yawned three times, and his yawns sounded like a cat’s meowing – meeeooow – hence the source of his nickname. Depending on the weather, his meowing could be heard throughout the whole village or just in the neighborhood, but in any case it always carried past two houses to the third, from where at the same time came the tobacco-fueled coughing and hacking of his friend Petko Bulgaria. “Mornin’, Koyno, mornin’, Petko!” After this exchange of morning greetings complete with meowing and coughing, Grandpa Kitty Cat would wet two fingers from the spigot in the sink, touch them to his eyelids and thus quickly and economically wash up. If it was a holiday and sunny, Grandpa Kitty Cat would stretch out somewhere in the yard or garden. There were little niches everywhere strewn with hay or some little rug where he loved to lie down and nap like a tomcat. About an hour later, Petko Bulgaria would show up and say: “Long live Bulgaria! What’ll it be today?” The order of the day was whatever Grandpa Kitty Cat wanted – backgammon or sixty-six with cards made out of cigarette boxes decorated with little crosses, squares, radishes, a priest, a boy, and a girl. They would settle into some feline lair and play without a whit of gamblers’ zeal, lazily and silently, for lack of anything better to do. Just as in the morning when they exchanged greetings with meowing and coughing, when they were playing they would have one and the same inarticulate dialogue: “Mmm?” “Uh- huh!” “Mmm?” “Uh-huh!” This dialogue could be an expression of classical sloth, but it might also conceal some deeper meaning, known only to the two of them, for example: “I really stuck it to you that time, didn’t I?” “Not so fast, don’t you know in the end you’ll be the one getting walloped!”

  Every weekday Grandpa Kitty Cat faced the same dilemma – to go out to the fields or not. It always seemed to him that he could put off the job until the next day, but when he saw his neighbors filing out toward the field, he would decide that he and Mona should go too. Immediately, however, some clairvoyant premonition would overtake him that it might rain or that a strong wind might come up. He would strain his mind to remember how the sunset had been the previous day, had it been wrapped in bloodred clouds or not, had the roosters been crowing at any old time, had there been a halo around the moon, and if he remembered any of these omens, he would put off the work until the following day. Thanks to his meteorological acumen, acquired over the years through close observation of natural phenomena and the behavior of animals, Grandpa Kitty Cat could guess the weather forecast a day in advance and never once had he allowed the elements to surprise him far from home. Even when his forecasts were inaccurate, he still managed to outrun the elements, because the whole day while he was hoeing, reaping, or mowing, he never took his eyes off the sky. If a cloud appeared, even if only as large as his hat, he was ready to ditch his work and hightail it back to the village. Such clouds often appeared in the worst heat waves of summer, floating like balloons through the azure sky, their shadows passing over the heat-scorched field like ghosts. Sometimes they swelled, turning from golden to ashen blue and showering a few droplets down. One of these droplets would inevitably strike Grandpa Kitty Cat’s straw hat and he would immediately grab his bag from the pear tree: “Mona, let’s go!” And they would leave right in the middle of the day so as to escape the rain that never fell. Only then would people from the neighboring fields look up and say: “Koyno must’ve felt a raindrop!” Koyno Raindrop, that was Grandpa Kitty Cat’s second nickname, which was used only when he was working in the field, hence very rarely. All in all he had about five acres and no matter how symbolically he and Mona worked the land, they somehow managed to sow, hoe over, and reap it – sometimes on their own, sometimes with the help of his brother-in-law, relatives, and neighbors.

  Nikolin transformed their lives like a magic wand. Their house expanded by one room and was filled with luxurious furnishings, their land grew from five acres to thirty, and they had cold hard cash on hand. Mona no longer had to stalk the chickens in their nests for eggs to trade for a piece of cloth from the village shop; now Kichka Kraleva made her blouses and skirts of the finest cloth, which she bought from the city. Now she really had become a grand dame, curvier after giving birth and somehow wantonly beautiful, self-assured, and fully aware of her feminine charms. Grandpa Kitty Cat also changed his attire, by refashioning and altering the clothes he had swiped from the late Devetakov’s wardrobe. Nothing quite fit him because he was short, so he looked like a boy wearing his older brother’s hand-me-downs. The only thing he couldn’t replace was his red quilted jacket, since Devetakov’s suit coats were too big for him, but to make up for it he wore a pocket watch on a silver chain that he had found on one of his marauder’s raids on the estate house.

  “Long live Bulgaria, I tell you, Koyno, you sure did strike gold!” Petko Bulgaria would tell him every time they played backgammon or sixty-six.

  “Better to be born lucky than born rich!” Grandpa Kitty Cat would reply with the satisfaction of a man convinced that lady luck was obliged to favor him at any cost. “I may not be much of one for digging in the fields, but this time I struck gold and then some!”

  They would be playing as always in their silent, lazy way, out of a lack of anything better to do and conversing inarticulately: “Mmm?” “Uh-huh!” Now, however, they did not hole up in some feline lair in the yard or garden, but sat in the house or, if the weather was nice, under the awning of the barn. Grandpa Kitty Cat would sit in the dark-brown leather armchair, while Bulgaria would take the chair upholstered in red velvet, and they would play on the little varnished table that Devetakov had been sitting at on the day of his suicide. Grandpa Kitty Cat loved nestling in that deep armchair that swallowed him up to his ears in its maw, he couldn’t get enough of its softness and the distinctive scent of the leather. Even though his straw mattress had been tossed out long ago and replaced by a bed with springs, by day he purred away in the armchair and sometimes even spent the night there. His other favorite item was the gramophone. The young couple had moved into the new room and taken the radio, leaving the gramophone to him. He would put it on when he was napping in the house or outside, he’d also put it on when he and Petko Bulgaria played backgammon. There were lots of records with all kinds of music, their melodies were strange and unfamiliar, but Grandpa Kitty Cat played them so people would know he had a gramophone at home, the likes of which could only be found at the community center. In nice weather, he would take the gramophone outside, its snoring, shrieking, and gasping melodies would waft over the village and everyone nearby would stop to listen to them.

  But out of everything, Grandpa Kitty Cat was most addicted to the buggy. He would hitch up the horse, sit in the shiny two-wheeler, and set off to make the rounds of the village at any old time of day. The handsome gray horse stepped slowly and solemnly, while Grandpa Kitty Cat sat even more solemnly in the seat, all ears and eyes to see whether people were looking at him and whispering. He especially liked going
down to the village store in the buggy at dusk, where the men gathered to shoot the breeze, or to the horemag – a combined hotel, restaurant, and store. Earlier he had never set foot there, because he didn’t have a cent to order a glass of wine, but now he would sit there for hours on end. He couldn’t stand alcohol and cigarettes, but he ordered both one and the other, so that everyone could see that he had a purse and that his purse was chock full. Indivisibly by his side, of course, sat his loyal friend Petko Bulgaria. They were like two peas in a pod and the sudden difference in their material standing did not undermine but only strengthened their years-long friendship. Bulgaria did not feel that envy arising from differences in material standing which divides the rich from the poor like a chasm; on the contrary, he became all the more attached to his friend and became his orderly of sorts. He had a little land and a son to work it, he went around as ragged as a tattered flag and was so scrawny that, as the locals put it, you could hear his bones creaking a mile away when he moved. He was the very personification of destitution, which only underscored Grandpa Kitty Cat’s superiority in every respect. Bulgaria reinforced that superiority with his toadyism and verbal praise for his friend, and as a reward for his efforts Grandpa Kitty Cat magnanimously allowed him to taste of the earthly blessings fate had so generously bestowed upon him. The two of them did everything together, they rode in the buggy wherever and whenever the spirit moved them, they went to visit the neighboring villages, listened to the gramophone, and at the horemag Bulgaria drank the wine and smoked the cigarettes that Grandpa Kitty Cat ordered for prestige alone.

  At first the locals looked upon Grandpa Kitty Cat as a lucky devil who had won the state lottery, with surprise and a bit of envy, but without hard feelings, since he had attained his prosperity through blind chance, which is blind precisely so it can show its favor to one in a million. He, however, was not capable of enjoying this blessing of fate humbly and decently and was constantly irritating people with his nouveau riche antics. At that time everyone was worried about impending events and didn’t know what tomorrow would bring (the agitprop brigades for the cooperative farm were after them day and night, committees were going door to door to collect state quotas of grain, wool from slaughtered sheep, and milk from dry cows), but Grandpa Kitty Cat looked down on all that from the heights of his newfound abundance and said: “I delivered my quotas, yessiree! The grain and the wool and the milk to boot. Whatever we didn’t have enough of, my son-in-law bought on the black market, and we rounded out our deliveries right as rain. I can sleep soundly at night.”

  His insolent smugness, his round pink face, and the satisfied glint in his beady little eyes soon turned him into a living caricature, and the local folks’ good-natured mockery mutated into scorn and hatred. Few sat down at his table besides Bulgaria, and when they did it was only to toy with him and laugh at him later. As subsequently became clear, the family’s brief economic ascendancy was due to a mix-up on the part of the authorities in the two neighboring villages. Nikolin had abandoned the land he’d inherited from Devetakov as soon as he left the estate, but the authorities in Orlovtsi had absentmindedly thought he was delivering his quotas here in our village, while our folks here thought he was giving them to Orlovtsi. Only when it came time to found cooperative farms in both villages did the Orlovtsi people discover that Nikolin owed them deliveries for twenty-five acres of land, a cow, a pig, thirty sheep, and they forced him to hand them over. Nikolin bought the grain, the milk, and the meat on the black market, his savings melted away completely, and he became a founding member of the co-op with five acres of land. Alongside his wife, who often brought him to the youth club parties, theater performances, and on visits to fellow villagers’ homes, he little by little joined society, and again under his wife’s influence he started to participate in some community endeavors. We lived in the same neighborhood and he was among the group of landowners Stoyan Kralev had charged me with recruiting for the future co-op. Knowing the story of his life up until now, which had been spent in lonely and sad isolation, and also knowing that interacting with other people perturbed and upset him, I never supposed he would agree to join the co-op as soon as I opened my mouth. He didn’t even give me the chance to “propagandize” him when we met in the street one evening and he invited me to his place to see his little daughter. Mona showed no interest in our conversation, which revolved around the future co-op, while the head of the household and the owner of the land didn’t put up the resistance I had expected. He made some exclamations that gave me to understand that since the land would become the property of everyone and since “everyone would work it,” that “everyone” clearly excluded himself. He agreed with only a single condition – that we not touch his horse and buggy, “as for the rest, they can do what they like with it.”

  Anyone else in my place likely would have been surprised by how lightly these people took joining the co-op, especially knowing that almost all landowners came to that decision after dramatic equivocations and teeth-gnashing. Since we were neighbors and I had the chance to observe them up close, it wasn’t difficult for me to explain why they “stepped from one era into another” with such indifference – they were possessed by feelings and passions so strong and insurmountable that they were blind to everything happening around them in that difficult time. Grandpa Kitty Cat was living out his second youth, he had gotten it into his head to find himself a “granny” and tirelessly disconcerted the elderly widows in our village and the surrounding ones with his belated Don Juan shtick. He and Bulgaria went around on “matchmaking visits” but could never quite find a lady to their liking. They were capricious and hard to please, because the candidates offered themselves up willingly as soon as they saw the groom step out of his buggy all rounded and rosy-cheeked and self-assured, such that his looks alone said: “Whoever makes a match with me will come into my house wearing only her slippers, leave the rest to me!”

  Nikolin was completely devoted to his wife and child, for him everything in the world was just and beautiful. He didn’t even worry about the state of his home, where the Baroque exquisiteness of Devetakov’s furnishings was so grotesquely combined with things suited to an impoverished hovel; he didn’t notice the plebian boasting and clownish antics of his father-in-law, which made them the laughingstock of the village. Mona was preoccupied by her love for Ivan Shibilev and by uneasy thoughts about the future of this love. At first they had been “paired up,” as the village did with young men and girls who showed a liking for each other or simply because they lived in the same neighborhood and were frequently seen together. This “pairing up” didn’t mean there was any romantic connection between the young people, it was a playful vow between the boy and the girl and only rarely ended in marriage. They had paired up Ivan Shibilev and Mona this way when she had become a young woman, because they always saw them together in the community center rehearsing plays or creating some cultural-education program for the youth club parties. Ivan Shibilev gave her the romantic leads, put her name first on the playbills, and was ecstatically enthusiastic about her acting, while she for her part repaid him with selfless devotion even in the theater troupe’s difficult early years when girls were not allowed onstage. She joined the troupe while still in middle school, along with Kichka Kraleva, and hadn’t left the stage since. Due to a dearth of women, Ivan Shibilev often gave her two roles in one and the same play and she managed to transform herself into an elderly woman and a young girl equally convincingly. She was the village’s unequivocal beauty, and Ivan Shibilev dressed her and made her up such that onstage she looked even more charming and brilliant.

  The village realized that her love for Ivan Shibilev was fateful when she became a young woman and the bachelors started circling around her. Candidates turned up not only from our village and the neighboring ones, but from the city as well, they were everything from simple to educated, rich to poor, and all were sent packing with their tails between their legs. Finally the son of Rich Kosta from Vladimirovo tr
ied his luck, too. Rich Kosta really was the richest villager in the region, he had one hundred and fifty acres of land, a steam mill, and two stores. He was so sure of his success that he sent his matchmakers to see Grandpa Kitty Cat in broad daylight in all their old-fashioned splendor, in a painted sleigh pulled by four horses, with gifts, bagpipes squealing, and guns blazing. The matchmakers didn’t even haggle, but asked what day the engagement would take place. The engagement never did take place, because they never so much as caught sight of the would-be bride. When she found out about their arrival, Mona hid at a cousin’s house and only came home the next day. Before running away from the house, she had told her father not to negotiate with the matchmakers, but to send them away. But how can you send away Rich Kosta’s envoys? In the morning, Mona found her father as crestfallen as a newly bankrupted millionaire, a bankruptcy that was entirely his daughter’s fault. His despair had transformed him from a sleepy Kitty Cat into an enraged lynx, and as soon as he saw her, he leapt in front of her in a single bound, ready to sink his claws into her face. This transformation came over him for the first and final time and lasted only a second, because the next moment he once again had become a peaceful house cat. His daughter’s blue eyes, which so bewitched the young men, hypnotized him like the eyes of a snake, robbing him of his will. Nevertheless, he managed to pour out his rage at the top of his lungs.

  “Your mother! You’re just like your mother!” By affronting the memory of his deceased wife, who when alive, it seems, had hypnotized him with her gaze in exactly the same way, Grandpa Kitty Cat indirectly wanted to affront his daughter, except that she was not insulted in the least, so he couldn’t contain himself and shouted: “I know why you’re acting so high and mighty. Because of that jester Ivan Shibilev, whose hammer never falls in the same place twice. He’ll put such a banana peel under your feet that when you fall there’ll be no getting up!” After uttering that sad prophecy, Grandpa Kitty Cat lay down on his bed, pulled the covers up to his chin, and fell silent before adding: “Turning away Rich Kosta’s matchmakers! I can’t even get my mind around it!”