“Not to me, but to the party!” Stoyan Kralev said.
“So that means you don’t have your own opinion.”
“I do, and it coincides completely with that of the party. I’m talking to you as one communist to another. I’m raising the question from the party’s point of view, not from a personal one.”
“So you’re trying to say that you identify with the party.” Stoyan Kralev didn’t understand this and fixed him with an angry, questioning glance. “You’ve called me down here to judge me in the name of the Bulgarian Communist Party, that means you identify with the party. Just like the priests – they condemn or approve not in their own name, but in God’s name. In that case, I’d better be careful. If I don’t give you the answer you want, that means I’m not giving the party the answer it wants. If I insult you, I’m insulting the party. But I already told you that love is sacred and inviolable. How can you expect and demand of me that I confess my innermost feelings and intentions to you? This is blasphemy not only against my feelings, but also against me as a individual.”
“Listen, Ivan, listen, my brother! We’re not in the theater and we’re not playing parts. You know very well that the party stands above all, above any personal feelings and so on. Love has a party and class character and since that’s the case, the party has the right to meddle in the communist’s intimate life when that life is dissolute and sullies communist morality. Let me ask you again: Will you quit running around with that woman or not? If you keep carrying on, then there’s no place for either of you in the party, I’ll have you know. Rumors about your love affair have reached the party’s regional committee and from there several times they’ve most strictly ordered me to take a stand with respect to this business. The party will not allow two communists to run wild in front of the whole village. How can two communists allow themselves an adulterous affair? This is a crime against our sacred communist morality. As you know, the nationalization of property is just around the corner, and we communists need to lead the charge on both the political as well as the moral front. Otherwise people won’t follow us. As soon as the question of collectivization is raised, everyone, especially the opposition, points out a list of reasons not to join the cooperative farm, and one of those reasons is your love affair with Mona. Ivan Shibilev, they say, back in the day was always telling us about communism and the kolkhoz, but now look what his communism really is. He whores around with other men’s wives, footloose and fancy free. Is that true? It’s true. I’ve heard that you go around with other women at the theaters or wherever it is you wander off to. Since you’ve got other women there, why run around with this one? Or if you really just can’t do without her, take her and make her your lawful wife. Your love is sacred, isn’t it? Sacred, but only in word and not in deed, it seems, since otherwise you go about your usual philandering. Things can’t go on this way. Either you leave that woman in peace or you take her with you to Shumen. With the child, of course, because she won’t part with the girl. You’ll have to adopt her.”
Stoyan Kralev proceeded to explain the law on divorce, mentioning several times that Mona, if she got divorced, would take the child with her, in order to goad Ivan Shibilev into admitting that the child was his in any case. If he admitted it or even hinted at this in any way, Stoyan Kralev would have pressed his back to the wall all the harder and disarmed him completely. Ivan Shibilev listened to him with his charming smile on his face and at a certain point chimed in, as if completely casually:
“Who died and made you God?”
“What?” Stoyan Kralev pretended not to have understood this, but the deep flush that instantly sprang up on his face made it clear that he had understood very well and was deeply offended.
“I said, who made you the village dictator?”
“Listen,” Stoyan Kralev shouted. “You better watch what you say!”
“I’m all eyes and ears and I’m watching and wondering how a semiliterate peasant, who up until yesterday was stitching away at his thick homespun cloth, is now standing in front of me with the self-confidence to act as the master of my thoughts and feelings, of my heart and soul. And the most tragic part is that you yourself believe that you have the right to stick your dirty hands into people’s souls with impunity. Love, you say, has a class- and party-based character. Who taught you that supreme idiocy? If it was me, then just shoot me now and know that you’ve done a good deed. Such a cynic deserves no less. Oh, Stoyan, my boy, who would’ve thought that you’d turn into such a homespun tyrant? Our sacred ideals, for which we were ready to give even our mother’s milk, what craftsman’s hands have they fallen into, hm? And just look how you’ve transformed yourself! A jacket à la Stalin, a cap à la Stalin, a moustache à la Stalin, and your left hand tucked into the buttons of your jacket à la Stalin. You’re Jughashvili to a tee! No, Kraleshvili! Not only you, Comrade Kraleshvili, but also the comrades from the regional committee have no right to meddle in people’s personal lives!”
While he was saying this, Ivan Shibilev was smiling mildly and condescendingly, as if telling a stranger a funny story. Stoyan Kralev was so stunned by his insolence that he was literally choking with rage. No one had ever dared insult and humiliate him to such an extent, and with such calm and unabashed arrogance, no less. The worst part was that Ivan Shibilev spoke as if he could see into his soul like looking into the palm of his hand, and there is nothing more terrible than being judged by someone who knows even the most inscrutable corners of your soul. In the face of such a person you either have to throw up your hands or hate him down to the marrow of your bones. Stoyan Kralev wanted to make him understand once and for all whom he was dealing with, but he couldn’t think of anything, he kept staring straight ahead, keeping silent with his lips pressed tightly together, he was so shocked at Ivan Shibilev’s impudence. Ivan Shibilev said he had some urgent business and left, as if the two of them had merely exchanged the most common of comradely pleasantries.
About a week later Stoyan Kralev called a party meeting, which was also attended by a representative of the party’s regional committee. The meeting’s agenda consisted of a single item – reconsideration of Comrade Ivan Shibilev’s party membership for several reasons: having expressed mistrust in the regional committee of the BCP, spiritual and moral depravity, and nonobservance of party discipline. The only serious accusation was the last one, due to his frequent absences from party meetings, but Stoyan Kralev himself had declared with respect to these absences that for a true communist, the party was everywhere, as God is for believers. Now, however, he began his accusations precisely with the fact that Ivan Shibilev attended party meetings once in a blue moon, sometimes due to his absences from the village, sometimes due to negligence, while according to the regulations this was punishable by expulsion from the party organization. His surest argument for expelling Ivan Shibilev from the party were his amorous affairs, which would surely provoke the greatest outrage from party members, but that, to his greatest astonishment, did not happen. Those very same men and women who had turned his romantic liaison with Mona into a song (Stoyan Kralev had suggested they expel her as well, but the committee had refused, so as not to create even more upheaval in her family), when they found out he was to be expelled from the party, were taken aback, and when it came time to express their opinion, no one wanted to speak. Stoyan Kralev had worked over a dozen people in advance who had promised to support him, but now they, too, sat silently with their eyes fixed on the floor. He was forced to call on them by name and give them the floor, but they hardly got up from their seats, crumpling their hats anxiously in their hands, sighing or muttering that they didn’t know what to say, or that just as there is sin, there is also forgiveness, that a dog goes to a bitch that flips up her tail, and so on. Finally a tall, one-eared villager, without having been given the floor, stood up and called out as loudly as his voice would allow him: “Ivan Shibilev might be able to live without the village, but the village can’t live without Ivan Shibilev!”
<
br /> At this, the party meeting livened up. People whispered amongst themselves, female laughter rang out, while someone suggested the meeting be brought to a close. The buzz that swept the room supported the one-eared man’s statement, more voices were heard calling for the end of the meeting, because it was wrong to expel a person like Ivan Shibilev from the party. These fragmentary protests, uttered softly and meekly, also expressed the people’s love for Ivan Shibilev, ne’er-do-well and charmer, wild man and sweet-talker, actor, artist, and the man with the golden hands, Ivan Shibilev, who over the years had become something like the village’s spiritual sustenance. Stoyan Kralev said something to the representative of the regional committee, then gave the floor to Ivan Shibilev.
“I have nothing to say!” he called from his seat.
He was sitting at the end of the front row, right near the podium itself, listening and watching at almost point-blank range the deliberately serious, practically gloomy faces of Stoyan Kralev and the regional committee representative and was thinking that this whole business about expelling him was a clumsily orchestrated frame-up which even the simple village people were mocking. When Stoyan Kralev asked him whether his silence meant he was in agreement with the party bureau’s decision, he replied that it did not indicate agreement, adding that the decision by the regional committee was also unfair, since it was slander against him.
“Slander, you say?” the representative of the regional committee piped up. “So that means that the regional committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party is a slanderer?”
“You don’t need to twist my words around. Stoyan Kralev slandered me in front of the committee.”
“A party secretary is incapable of slander!” the representative cried, getting up from his chair. “The party does not pick slanderers as party secretaries. That should be as plain as day.”
“I have no intention of arguing with you. I’ve never seen or heard of you before. You’ve been ordered to make a decision to expel me, so expel me!” Ivan Shibilev said with a smile. “Everything has been decided in advance, why should we waste our time with empty words?”
Sweat broke out on most people’s faces, everyone had fixed their heavy, unmoving gazes straight ahead, the musty air was weighted with the scent of onion and sour sweat, although the most sensitive noses could also catch a whiff of ripe wheat, which was wafting in through the window facing the fields. Midnight had long since passed, roosters were crowing in the distance, the room was getting warmer and stuffier, the people, exhausted from working in the fields, were dozing off in their seats, their dark faces scorched like charred logs. Stoyan Kralev once again began calling people by name to vote, first the dozen or so he had worked over, then the rest of them. They stood up one by one, anxious and flustered, and raised their palms to their noses agonizingly slowly.
After he was expelled from the party, another misfortune befell Ivan Shibilev right as he had learned his two roles for the season and was preparing to go to Shumen. Only a week was left before his departure when Father Encho stopped by and asked him to repair the icon of Saint George the Dragon Slayer. Ivan Shibilev was an atheist, but he painted icons for the church with pleasure because the work was interesting to him. Stoyan Kralev many times had meant to turn the church into a youth club or a storehouse for grain, but the regional committee would not let him. The church, of course, stood practically empty. Church weddings and baptisms were not legally recognized, the young people were antireligious, while the older people were afraid to enter the church, thus Father Encho’s flock consisted of a few dozen elderly folks like himself, who tottered down to the church once a week to light candles in memory of the dead. In 1949 the roof of the church began leaking in many places from the spring rains and the icon of Saint George got wet. The workman who repaired the church’s roof damaged the icon even further, so Ivan Shibilev painted a new one. A few days after he put it in the place of the old one, two policemen came to get him in an old jeep and took him to the regional committee of the party. Ivan Shibilev was convinced that they had decided to return him to the party’s ranks and went into the committee in the best of moods. Stoyan Kralev, Kozarev (the regional committee representative), and two other party secretaries were waiting for him. All four of them were so somber that they didn’t even return his greeting, and without any word of introduction shoved the icon of Saint George in his face.
“Did you paint this?”
“I did,” Ivan Shibilev said.
“Explain to us what you’ve drawn here.”
“Saint George battling the dragon…”
They set the icon on a chair and forced him to sit across from it, while they stood on either side of him. Saint George, a young man in a scarlet cloak with a silver helmet, sat astride a white, enchantingly beautiful horse and with a forceful blow had driven his spear into the mouth of one of the dragon’s two heads. But this head was the head of the party representative Kozarev, somehow freakishly frightening, biting down on the spear’s head with bloody teeth. The dragon’s body resembled a frog covered in poisonous green scales, with a pinkish-white belly, spiky legs, and a mousy tail curled into a circle. The second head was that of Stoyan Kralev, already dead, with eyelids half closed over the whites of his eyes and a black moustache over the mouth, from which dark-red blood was flowing. This bloody battle was being fought against the background of a cheerful meadow of blossoming trees, the silvery glimmer of ripe wheat, and a cloudless blue sky.
“We’ve all seen dragons drawn in children’s books, we’ve also heard about them in folktales, but we’ve never seen the likes of this dragon here, with human heads, and the heads of party functionaries at that,” said one of the secretaries. “Why have you insulted our comrade leaders, why did you turn them into monsters? And is that just a coincidence?”
“I don’t know how it happened,” Ivan Shibilev said, and he wasn’t lying, nor was he afraid to take responsibility for this “insult.” He had worked on the icon so feverishly that he truly wasn’t in any condition to explain how all this had happened. He only remembered that while he was drawing, the two of them had been before his eyes, they had made such a strong impression on him when they expelled him from the party. During the whole party meeting, he had felt that they were attacking him like a pair of predators, and since they were raising one and the same accusations against him in one and the same way, it had seemed to him that they were really a single beast with two heads. Thus, while he was drawing the saint battling the traditionally two-headed dragon, he had unwittingly painted both their images. He had done it unintentionally, under the influence of the intense internal agitation they had caused him, and he was in no condition to explain how it had happened. So many and such serious accusations were showered on him that he was unable to exculpate himself. The most serious accusation was that of criminal abandonment of communist ideals and of having fallen under religious influence. It was true that before September 9 he had fought most doggedly against religion; thanks to this, most of the young people had become atheists, but this service of his, rather than alleviating his situation, made it worse. It was one thing for an ignorant peasant or a person without class consciousness to fall under the priests’ influence, but it was quite another when that person was a former self-declared atheist and communist who had betrayed his convictions precisely at the moment when the party was waging such an intense and uncompromising battle against religious fallacies. The bourgeois elements of society would certainly take advantage of this situation and point to him as an example of how a once-convinced communist renounced his ideology and accepted the idea of God and religion. However, was this communist in the past even a real communist, and not a subversive and a traitor who now, supported by the reactionary forces, was showing his true colors?
Ivan Shibilev tried in vain to show them that their accusations were absolutely unfounded and even insulting to him, that whether right or wrong, he looked upon icons as art, and not as a means of religious propaganda. As far as
his personal business and intimate life was concerned, no one had the right to meddle in them, because no one could command people’s feelings and tastes. With this conclusion, Ivan Shibilev rejected all their charges that he was guilty, and as for the self-criticism that was expected from him as an (albeit former) communist, it didn’t even cross his mind to engage in it. They sent him away even more coldly than they had greeted him. That same night he learned from Father Encho that the chairman of the village soviet, Stoyu Barakov, had given the icon to Stoyan Kralev the previous day. Barakov had stopped by, ostensibly to see how repairs to the church were going, seen the icon, taken it down, and carried it away that very minute.
Late in the afternoon on the following day, Ivan Shibilev’s neighbor told him they were going to burn the “icons.” Ivan Shibilev was reading a book on the veranda; he threw it down and headed toward the church. I happened to be in the village that day and learned about this impending event from him when we met by chance in the street. He was very agitated, he grabbed my arm and led me to the church. Quite a few people were already gathered in the churchyard, mostly young men and women, whom – as we learned later – Stoyan Kralev had called up to be present at the icon burning. Stoyan Kralev himself was nowhere to be seen in the crowd, he was also not in the church, as Ivan Shibilev and I saw when we went in. The door was open, but there was no one inside. I hadn’t gone inside there since I was a child and our teachers had led us to the church on the major holidays, and now I experienced a peculiar feeling of awkwardness and curiosity. I was surprised that inside the church, which seemed as small as a matchbox to me, it was not as oppressive and gloomy as I had imagined, but rather solemnly bright and peaceful. The icons, too, were not as uniform or darkened from candle soot as I had remembered them from my childhood, they emanated a varied, warm light that caressed the eyes, life welled forth from the saints’ faces. I got the feeling that these faces were familiar to me and that through their eyes, those near and dear to me were looking at me from a familiar background. And indeed, the longer I looked at them, the more clearly I recognized them. God the Father, for example, placed in the center of the iconostasis, was old Father Encho himself, with his fine white beard, with his desiccated hand raised to make the sign of the cross and a golden nimbus around his head, staring straight forward with a stern and even cold, piercing gaze, against a background of silvery-green wheat fields, crisscrossed by the brown strips of the roads. To the left of God the Father, in the image of Saint Petka, the patron saint of the little church, Ivan Shibilev had painted his mother, with their house and yard in the background, while in the yard stood two horses hitched to a cart. To the right was Jesus with a small, barely sprouted beard and a thin moustache, with wide-open eyes and the oblong face of one who has suffered, and that was the face of Ilko Kralev, from the time when he had cavities in his lungs and was fighting for his life. Many more men, women, and young people had been painted as saints, every one of them bright and joyful against the backdrop of the local landscape. Mona, of course, was among them as well, a young, gentle, and smiling Madonna with slightly squinting blue eyes, in a red heavily draped robe; in her lap was the young Jesus, who was a copy of Mona’s daughter, who in turn was a copy of the artist himself.
Wolf Hunt Page 31
