Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  Ivan Shibilev’s life underwent a change, the likes of which no one expected for a person of his character. His insatiable passion for roaming, for theater, where he now could become a full-time actor, for books and for drawing and for many other things suddenly turned into another, even greater passion – for his child. Up until Mona’s death, he somehow could not feel that the child was his own. From the very first, when she claimed it was his, he suspected she was doing it to hold on to him as long as possible. For a woman like her, whose love had not been fully reciprocated and who had been compromised, it was absolutely within the realm of possibility that she would use a lie to get revenge or at least to torment his conscience for some time. Even after Mona’s marriage, just as before he did not clarify his feelings for her, he got swept away by other women, but with his every return to the village, he would somehow completely naturally return to her, without considering the consequences of this affair. When he found out that she had gotten married and had a child, he didn’t feel pain or jealousy, but rather a certain dissatisfaction, as if he had been deprived of some convenience that he had grown accustomed to over the years. There was also a time when he avoided seeing her, because he felt disgusted by the thought that she was coming from her husband’s bed or from his child’s arms. The very first time they met after her marriage, Mona, who was extremely worked up and sobbing, had told him that the girl was his and that she had named her Melpomena, because he had told her more than once that if he someday had a daughter, he would name her after the patroness of the theater. He did not believe her, yet unwittingly he began peering at the child and gradually discovered that she resembled him. Nevertheless, if Mona hadn’t died, he likely would have worked in some theater or somewhere else, he might even have gotten married and had children and lived far from the village. Mela would never have found out that he was her real father, and it just might have happened that he never would have seen her again as long as he lived. But as it was, after Mona’s death everything within him was subordinated to the single goal of remaining close to the child and not letting her out of his sight.

  Nikolin could not look after the child himself and shortly after her mother’s death, he hired an elderly woman, Mona’s aunt, to take care of her. To Ivan Shibilev it seemed that this aunt did not take care of the girl as she should, that she didn’t feed her enough and keep her clean and tidy. When the weather was nice the girl would go out into the street to play with the other children in the neighborhood, and Ivan Shibilev always found time and excuses to pass by that way to see her. For a long time after her mother’s death, in the little girl’s eyes, which were a warm brown and slightly slanted up toward her temples just like Ivan Shibilev’s eyes, there was some hidden sorrow, which gave her the look of a lonely, abandoned child. She had long known Ivan Shibilev, because she had often seen him in the street, the community center, or in other places where her mother had spoken to him. At these meetings, he always gave her some treat, and when she was little, Mela had grown so accustomed to these treats that she herself would reach toward his pockets. Several days before they sent him to the labor camp, Ivan Shibilev had run into Mona and the girl by chance on a side street and in a rush of feelings for the girl he had taken her into his arms and showered her with kisses. At the camp he had often recalled that sweet, heady scent of a child’s flesh, which the little girl still gave off, and his heart would be filled with tenderness. Now that she had been left without a mother, he wanted more than ever to hug and kiss the girl, but she had changed, she no longer took sweets from him and even avoided talking to him. Auntie doesn’t let me take anything from you, she would say, turning her back on him, when he would meet her and try to talk to her. The old woman likely knew, as did everyone in the village, that he was her real father, and didn’t want to let him near her.

  With a heavy heart Ivan Shibilev waited for her to grow up and start school. So he could be with her more often and more closely, he founded a children’s theater, selecting children from all grades, and by May 1 they had put together two plays. They were so popular that people even came from the neighboring villages to watch them. The little stage in the old mud-brick community center was transformed into a fairy-tale nook where the children, dressed in brightly colored, beautiful costumes, danced, sang, and recited to the accompaniment of a choir. During rehearsals, Ivan Shibilev had the chance to see Mela, to talk to her and to stroke her hair several times a week, and those were his happiest days and evenings. He had decided to stay where she was, but he had no job, the village leaders didn’t know how to act toward him and what job to give him. They hoped that after a week or two, as had always been the case until now, he would take off for the city, and after everything that had happened to him, perhaps he would never come back to the village again. It was the winter holidays and every night people came to invite him to get-togethers, Christmas Eve celebrations, and name days. Stoyan Kralev and Barakov sent people to these gatherings to watch and listen to him at the homes he visited, but all their spies reported one and the same thing – Ivan Shibilev didn’t talk about politics or even about village business, when they asked him how the labor camp had been, he would say that he’d had a nice rest there, he’d picked more peppers and tomatoes than you could shake a stick at, and had played clarinet in the evenings. Stoyan Kralev and Barakov didn’t know how to interpret his behavior, as resignation or as spite hidden behind a calm veneer. In any case, the two of them were on their guard where he was concerned, because you never knew what to expect from a person like Ivan Shibilev.

  One day in the early spring he himself came to see them at the party club, where the two of them were discussing plans for the impending sowing time. As soon as they saw him on the doorstep, they both stood up as if on command and stared at him, trying to guess his intentions. These intentions, of course, could not be peaceable in any case and Stoyan Kralev, expecting some show of vengeance, put his hand on the handle of the drawer where he kept his pistol. Barakov was clearly very unnerved and even frightened. He had no means of defense if the need arose and when he saw Stoyan Kralev trying to open the drawer, he stepped to the side and stood next to him. But Ivan Shibilev closed the door behind him, greeted them, and just stood there. They did not return his greeting and kept looking at him with undisguised suspicion.

  “I’ve been waiting for more than two months for you to call me in, so here I am finally coming to you,” Ivan Shibilev said, smiling somehow guiltily. “Aren’t you going to find some job for me here in this village? Or should I start going around begging?”

  The two village leaders exchanged glances, then Stoyan Kralev pointed at a chair by the wall.

  “Sit down! Aren’t you going back to the theater?”

  “I have no intention of going back.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever.”

  “Should I believe you?”

  “Do what you like, but I’m staying here.”

  “Fine,” Stoyan Kralev said after thinking it over. “You’ll have your answer tomorrow. Stop by around noon.”

  Ivan Shibilev left, and the two men stood there staring at the door in silence – they felt shamefaced and guilty in his presence, whereas he had acted as if nothing bad had happened between them.

  “You know what a playactor he is, he makes himself into whatever he wants to be,” Barakov said. “When he feels like laughing, he laughs, when he feels like crying, he’ll shed the biggest crocodile tears you’ve ever seen. He acts like butter won’t melt in his mouth, but who knows what he’s got up his sleeve. His type are fair-weather friends. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”

  Stoyan Kralev also didn’t believe he would stay around and thus was generous with him. They appointed him as accountant in the co-op in the hopes that after a few months he would dash off somewhere and leave the position free, since it had been intended for a girl from the village who would finish with her accounting courses in July. But July rolled around, the girl came back fr
om her studies to take up the accounting duties, but Ivan Shibilev stayed in the village and had no intention of leaving it. They were forced to assign him to the woodworking shop, since he had a knack for woodworking, but since there wasn’t enough work for three men there, the following year they sent him to the machine-tractor station. They shoved him off from job to job, from place to place, always in the hopes of finally being rid of him, but never once did he raise his voice in protest or accuse them of unfairly having expelled him from the party and having sent him to a labor camp. He only rarely recalled these unpleasant things, and even then without malice or hard feelings. They were like nightmares, which he would forget a minute after having been reminded of them for some reason. His desire to live with and for Mela was becoming more and more overpowering, and his heart had no room for other feelings or thrills besides her. Almost every day or every other day he looked for convenient excuses to catch a glimpse of her at least for a minute, when she was playing with the other children or on her way to or from school. He didn’t dare stop her on the street or caress her, for fear of awakening Nikolin’s jealousy and suspicion. In bad weather, when it was snowy or muddy, Nikolin would take Mela to and from school. Ivan Shibilev watched how he would pick her up and press her face to his and his heart would sink in anguish.

  In the meantime the elderly woman looking after Mela got sick and passed away, and now Nikolin was looking after his daughter on his own. How long would things go on this way and would Mela ever learn who her real father was? How could he hint at it to her at this young age? If he tried to tell her in some way, she surely wouldn’t understand him, and even if she did understand – she would be torn psychologically, traumatized, and Nikolin wouldn’t let her see him anymore. On the other hand, if he left her to find out later, she would grow so attached to Nikolin that she would never part from him for anything in the world. There was only one possible way to make her attached to him: theater. Only there could he be close to her, envelop her in attention and tenderness, satisfy her childish caprices. And everything turned out as it once had with her mother. Mela was quickly and permanently drawn to the stage. She liked getting up in front of people, with them clapping and admiring her. She learned her parts at the first rehearsal, she was agile and inventive, she could embody different states so naturally that after only a few performances she stood out as the most talented child in the village. Ivan Shibilev was happy when leading rehearsals for a play or student performance, which allowed him to spend many hours and whole days with Mela, to make her up and costume her such that she truly became a little angel. In irrepressible outbursts of affection, he took every opportunity to hold her little hands, to stroke her and kiss her and happily noticed that she accepted his caresses ever more calmly, asked him to explain some lessons to her or told her what her father had said or done at home. In this way Ivan Shibilev found out that Nikolin was having a hard time looking after her himself, and he was afraid he might get remarried. A rumor was going around that Nikolin was going to marry a widow with two children, and that possibility cast a dark cloud over Ivan Shibilev’s happiness, because the stepmother, like every stepmother, would shut Mela up at home and load her with housework right when she was growing attached to him.

  Folks from the neighboring village really were trying to make a match with Nikolin, but he could not even think about a second marriage. After Mona’s death he had fallen into such despair that many people thought he would go out of his mind from grief. When he saw her body, he fainted, and at her funeral he again lost his self-control, sobbing heart-wrenchingly and asking her like a child: “What did we ever do to you, our dear sweet mother, to make you leave us alone? You’ll never come back to us, it’s better for us to come to you! Why are you leaving us here to suffer, dearest mother, take us with you!”

  His grieving moved people to tears, but also unsettled them. Mona’s aunt, the same woman who would later look after the child, led Nikolin home by the hand and kept watch over him the whole night, afraid that he might make an attempt on his own life. Nikolin was lying on his back, raving deliriously with open eyes. In front of his eyes appeared – sometimes separately, sometimes together – all his departed loved ones: his parents, his uncle, Auntie Raina, the cook from the estate, Mihail Devetakov, and Mona. They all smiled and called him to come join them, only Mona begged him to stay at home, to look after their child and to come to her grave to tell her whether the girl was alive and well. The cook Auntie Raina led him around the vegetable garden while handing him hot dishes of food, and at the same time gently advised him to tuck some money away for rainy days; his uncle was sitting near a tree, big tears rolling down his cheeks, and saying in a thin, womanish voice that all the lambs this spring had been born naked as jaybirds; Mihail Devetakov was sitting on a pile of books, drinking tea from a colorful porcelain cup, and saying: “She is dead. Up until yesterday, she was a person, now she is nothing. How is it possible to change from something into nothing?” “What do you mean, ‘nothing,’ ” Nikolin would say: “I can see her, I can hear her, she ordered me to tell her about our child, how can that be nothing?”

  For a long time, when he had the chance, Nikolin would go to Mona’s grave every day. The cemetery was close to his house, so he could go there at any time. Nikolin did not light a grave lamp or a candle as the old women did, but he always kept the grave clean. He had hidden a hoe in the bushes and every time he went he would hoe around the flowers and clear away the weeds. While doing this or while sitting by the cross, deeply lost in thought, he would hear Mona’s voice coming from the ground every time, muted and distant, yet so clear that he understood her every word. Mona would ask first of all about the girl, and he would tell her in the greatest detail how she had gotten up, what she had eaten, what she had said, whom she had played with, and what she had played during the day.

  “Did you comb her hair?” Mona would sometimes ask. “Don’t let her go around dirty and unkempt! Tie the blue ribbons on her braids. They are in the wardrobe, on the upper-left-hand shelf.”

  “Your aunt ties on her ribbons…She cleans her plate and plays either by herself or with the other kids in the neighborhood.”

  “Does she ask about me?”

  “She does. Why doesn’t Mommy come home? We tell her that you’ve gone to the city to a doctor to get well, and she keeps asking when you’re coming back.”

  “She’ll be starting school this fall, make sure to get her shoes and warm clothes.”

  “I’ve already gotten everything ready. Today she learned the letter M. The mousie makes music, she was saying, the mousie moves. She was saying that over and over all day…”

  While talking to Mona, Nikolin felt heavy spasms welling up in his heart and tightening his throat, round, hot tears ran from his eyes, and he was overtaken by a deep, sweet grief that filled his soul with the purifying blessing of human weeping. This was the howl of his very being, which in some inexplicable way lightened his soul, his grief for Mona little by little transformed into a resignation to fate and the hope for a new life devoted to his child. Even before, he had been strongly attached to her, but now that she was left motherless, he felt called to be her only support and mainstay. But the child, too, turned out to be the only mainstay and meaning in his life from then on. He wanted to quit shepherding, so as to be closer to his child, and Stoyan Kralev honored his request and appointed him as a brigadier in the animal husbandry brigade. He worked in the village and could stop by the house several times a day.

  The old woman he had hired to look after the girl had gotten sick already in the second year and passed away, and since then Nikolin had been taking care of Mela on his own. All the usual childhood illnesses came one after another: measles and chickenpox, mumps, whooping cough, scarlet fever – all of which Mela got before she was ten. Her last serious illness was malaria. Every day at noon she would start shivering with cold, her teeth chattering, her body convulsed by seizures. He would pile several blankets on her, but she kept tr
embling with cold, yet after an hour she would be burning up and wanted to be out in the cold. Nikolin would strip her down to her undershirt and take her into the cool shade of the walnut tree, he daubed her lips and forehead with water, but the fire inside her burned ever hotter and she lay limp in his arms as if dead. This went on for two whole weeks, and during the worst heat wave of July, at that. No medicines helped at all and she was so exhausted that she couldn’t even walk from the house to the street on her own. Finally Nikolin cured her on his own following an elderly woman’s advice. He boiled walnut leaves and he bathed Mela every night in the water, which took on the color of iodine. After the seventh such bath, she took a turn for the better, her emaciated little body and limbs, which looked like sticks, grew rounded again and by the fall she was completely healthy.

  Nikolin had thought she wouldn’t make it many times that year and had fallen into despair, hundreds of nights he hadn’t slept a wink and cried as he watched her succumbing to the illness and turning into a tiny bloodless doll. At the worst moments he would go to the graveyard for a minute to talk with Mona, he would ask her whether the child would recover, but he could no longer hear her voice. He would take her silence as a bad omen and would return home, his heart heavy. Mona either didn’t dare or didn’t want to give him such terrible news, which could only be the child’s death. He stayed awake whole nights, cleaning and cooking, sewing and patching clothes, exhausted to the point of complete helplessness, he lost weight and went around as unkempt as a hermit, many times he woke up on the floor, and sometimes even out in the yard, where he had fallen, overwhelmed by the need for sleep. But thank God, the sicknesses passed one after the other, Mela got better, grew stronger, and at fourteen she was already a slender and pretty girl. She had wanted to continue her education since she was young, so Nikolin sent her to high school in the city. Whatever he earned at the co-op, whether in cash or in kind, went to support her. Once a month he went to the city to leave money for her, while he scraped by as best he could. During her third year, Mela didn’t come home during Christmas vacation, but sent a letter saying that she had to stay in the city to take part in some New Year’s program. She wrote that she would come home during Easter break, but she didn’t come then, either. Nikolin waited a week for her and when he didn’t get a letter, he went to the city to see why she hadn’t come home. Her landlady said that Mela had left school at the beginning of the year, had become an actress, and had moved into another apartment. He looked for her at the theater, but the doorman said that some Mela had been hanging around there at one point, but that was a long time ago.