Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  Mela finally came back in the autumn. She had spent almost a year at the Burgas Theater and now she wanted to rest. She didn’t give her father any further explanations, but even this was enough for him. To him, the most important thing was that she had returned alive and well, so where she had been and why didn’t matter anymore. His heart filled with joy and hope, even though Mela was neither happy nor calm. She spent her days alone in her room, talking aloud to herself, while in the evenings she would go to the community center and come back late. Nikolin made food for her, but she hardly touched it and quickly went to her room. He wanted to talk to her, to ask her how she had gotten along in those far-off cities, whether something wasn’t bothering her, but as soon as he brought it up, she would fall silent or give one-word answers, and even then with great reluctance. Nikolin could see that she didn’t want to confide in him, and with sadness he asked himself how she could possibly have changed so much, it was as if only yesterday she had been that cheerful, playful, loving child who had met him with happy shrieks at the door and had thrown herself into his arms crying: “Daddy! Daddy!”; as if she was not that same little girl who only a few years ago had taken medicine from him, her face burning with fever and her eyes wide open and trusting. Sometimes he thought to himself that his daughter was now a young woman and her “troubles” were a woman’s troubles, but he didn’t dare ask her, he was afraid of making her angry and causing her to go off to the city even earlier. But she didn’t stay longer than two weeks. One morning an old beat-up truck with a canvas cover pulled up to the house and honked its horn. An elderly man climbed out of the cab and asked after Mela. She had heard the horn and signaled to the driver to come in. She led him into her room and a minute later he carried out a large bundle, put it in the truck bed and came back again.

  “It’s the rug Mom was saving for me,” she said when she saw her father standing in the yard watching in amazement as the stranger carried off various things. “I’m taking the armchair, too, because my apartment is empty and I don’t have anywhere to sit.”

  She asked the driver to wait for her, got dressed, grabbed her suitcase, and got in the cab next to him.

  “Why leave so suddenly, Mela, honey?” Nikolin was saying, flustered and alarmed by her sudden departure. “If you’d told me a day or two in advance, I could’ve put together something for you for the road.”

  “I don’t need anything,” Mela said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t need anything, my girl! You’re going to live among strangers…”

  While grumbling away like this, he had managed to put a loaf of bread, a chunk of cheese, a couple of links of flat sausage, and a slab of bacon in a bag for her, he gave her all the money he had on him and sent her on her way.

  She would always come and go so suddenly, always carrying off some piece of Devetakov’s furniture that her late grandfather had dragged back from the estate so many years earlier, and he always saw her off with a heavy heart, not knowing when or how she’d be back again. Tormented by loneliness and uncertainty, he often wondered whether Mela wasn’t lying to him that she was acting at some theater, and if she was acting, why was she always going from city to city? How could he set her straight, how could he tell her that that kind of life would ruin her when she was still young and green? Filled with love and awe for her, he didn’t dare scold her or give her advice, since he realized that as a simple, illiterate peasant he was far beneath her and had no right to meddle in her life. Her nose was always buried in a book, she was always sharpening her mind, how can I, who can hardly count the fingers on one hand, sit her down to teach her reason and common sense! That’s how he consoled himself, but deep in his heart he knew that his daughter wasn’t living as she should. He saw something indecent, affected, and crazy in the fact that she would spend whole days shut up in her room like a prisoner talking to herself, laughing, crying, or yelling at someone, even though he knew that she was learning some part. One time she didn’t come back for ten months and he realized that only Ivan Shibilev could know something about her. The two of them put on performances together every vacation at the community center, Ivan Shibilev himself had been an actor in the city in his younger years, he had taught her to act since childhood, so she surely had confided in him. Nikolin met him by chance that very same day in the street and was very surprised to see that Ivan Shibilev was extremely flustered and even went pale, as if Nikolin had insulted him with his question.

  “How should I know what theater she’s at!” He acted as if he was in a hurry and went on his way.

  “Sorry if I somehow…” Nikolin watched him go and added to himself: “Since you don’t know, you don’t know, but why get so mad when I ask you?”

  Ivan Shibilev knew exactly where Mela was and what she was doing, but he wouldn’t tell Nikolin for anything in the whole world. This chance encounter with him not only upset him, but it scared him as well. He thought that Nikolin had already found out how far his relationship with Mela had gone and had decided to try to get even with him for stealing away his daughter. He spent several days expecting Nikolin to come looking for him, he locked the doors of his house during the daytime and went around the yard on guard, but Nikolin did not come. After some time they met again by chance and Nikolin greeted him and passed on by. By the look on his face he didn’t seem to be harboring any feeling of hatred, but rather something like awkwardness, and once again Ivan Shibilev was faced with the man’s mysterious character, wondering whether he was monumentally stupid, naïvely trusting, or completely lacking any personality whatsoever. Thus he reached the conclusion that he did not possess a sense of self-respect and pride, hence there was no reason to fear him. Sometimes, however, who knows why, he was gripped by the suspicion that the man’s calmness hid a great internal strength, and if that was the case, he knew about his late wife’s extramarital affairs (many of his informers had bragged publicly about how they had told him this and how he had kept silent or just smiled foolishly) and that the child was not his, but he had borne everything, because his love was stronger than jealousy and humiliation. Perhaps he was one of those types who got a thrill out of his own suffering, or else one of those who got satisfaction watching others, after having found out their secrets, playing hide-and-seek and pretending to be honorable, while at the same time, they knew that he knew that they were deceiving him? In that case it turned out that Nikolin had been watching him and Mona the whole time through a peephole, he had heard their every word, he had followed their every move. When he imagined that, Ivan Shibilev experienced some strange feeling of outrage and helplessness, as a person feels when he finds out that he has been watched in his most intimate moments.

  Time proved that such thoughts were mere fantasies born of books and theater, or the figments of his guilty imagination, yet still Nikolin’s character (if he had any character at all) again and again appeared before him as a mystery. It was unthinkable for a man to know that his wife was having an affair with another and that their child was not his own, or not to suspect the one and the other when he had been told so clearly and so many times that both the one and the other were true, and after all that to act so indifferently toward his rival. There was something monstrous in that and precisely this would turn out to be the most difficult obstacle to surmount in tearing Mela out of his clutches one day, since no one could in any way prove to him that she was not his daughter. On the one hand, Ivan Shibilev’s relations with Mela had advanced to the point that in her letters she addressed him as “my dear second father,” jokingly explaining that she called him that because he understood her and cared for her no less than her real father. In conversation she didn’t call him that, but had already confided in him that she had received anonymous notes from fellow villagers telling her that he was her real father. Ivan Shibilev didn’t deny, but also didn’t confirm, this, because he was afraid that she would announce it to Nikolin in a way that would wound him so badly that he would keep her at home or turn to the authorities for
help. He placed his hope in time, which was on his side. He wrote to Mela using the code he had developed for her mother, but with different names, since no one suspected they were in correspondence. With touching frankness, Mela would tell him about herself, and this, instead of making him happy, flung him into despair. She was following in his footsteps with such stunning precision that in her he could see himself at that age. She, too, had been a good student, but had also left high school in her third year, swept away by theater and music, and she, like him, could not resist the urge to wander. At the age of fifty, Ivan Shibilev had looked back on his life and was forced to admit that he hadn’t lived it as he should have. This thought was especially insistent on those days when he felt the whole weight of the mediocrity and poverty of spirit that surrounded him, when he felt his talents fading from year to year as he became more and more of a villager at heart. He was conscious of and suffered from this rustification, yet he couldn’t manage to overcome it, he had become so firmly and permanently caught in the trap of this simple life, filled with the most basic needs, stirred up by political intrigues and concerns about private ownership, a life that had turned him from “our Leonardo” into a village painkiller.

  In fact, he hadn’t had any particular ambitions and had lived solely following the urges of his many talents and passions, thus looked at from the other side, his life hadn’t been spent so badly after all, on the contrary, perhaps it had even been a happy one. Yes, it had indeed been happy, because in that complicated time, oppressive in its intense political struggles, social upheaval, and wars, he had lived free as a bird and flown off wherever his desires had led him. Wasn’t that real life – to be working constantly, regardless of what, for whom, and where, and at the same time to be following the call of your aspirations? And even now, at this age, wasn’t he still playing at weddings and fairs like your average, ordinary tavern musician? At every village celebration and fair in the vicinity he would stand up in one of the seats of the Ferris wheel and play while in motion – clarinet or violin, and would perform joking songs or poems:

  I’ve got two little neighbor girls

  Two neighbor girls, with silks and curls

  The dark-eyed beauty’s name is Ginka

  While the blonde is called Kalinka

  Or (to the tune of “Greensleeves”):

  Alas, my nose doth run and run

  I’ve blown and blown it continuously

  My handkerchief has been wrung, and wrung

  Disintegrating, and that’s why you see…

  He would wipe his nose on his sleeve, while down below the audience would cheer approvingly and clap. He realized that his jokes were shallow and even trite, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to make them laugh, to amuse and entertain them, to see their smiles and the warmth in their eyes. He had long ago noticed that people were at their best when they were laughing or crying from the bottom of their hearts. In the first case they forgot their troubles, while in the second they regretted all the wrongs they had done to others or forgave those who had done them wrong. Every time he would discover that those listeners who were known as malicious, thieving, and two-faced, when they laughed or cried, it was like they were born again and became completely different people. And he himself, while acting onstage, singing, or playing, felt at his best and happy, he was gripped by ecstasy and ready to give away what was most precious to him if they asked for it, or to perform the most heroic feats in the world.

  But if he nevertheless found that he hadn’t lived his life as he should have in his younger years, it was because of the life Mela was leading. It seemed to him that if he had lived differently, she, too, who was now going down his very same path with some fatal tenacity, would be living better. But whatever his former life had been, good or bad, happy or not, it was the life of a young man. He had found himself in unpleasant and difficult situations, in which a young girl like Mela would be unconditionally ruined. He knew a lot about her even back when she had started high school, because he always found an excuse to meet her or visit her “by chance,” while recently, when they had definitively grown close, to stay with her and even spend months living in the city where she was living. He would turn up at the slightest hint that she was facing some difficulty or had to make an important decision, so as not to allow anyone else to come to her aid, since that someone else could only be a man. She was very beautiful and feminine and, as she had already confided in him, men had been after her even when she was still in high school. Now, wherever she went, men flocked around her, she had “tons” of suitors, especially among actors, musicians, and artists. They all tried to flirt with her, while the directors who gave her parts in their plays wouldn’t leave her in peace. Women always hated her, were jealous of her, and gossiped about her behind her back, she despised them and gave as good as she got, and thus she would be forced to look for work in some other city…

  Ivan Shibilev was painfully familiar with the alluring, glittering, and bittersweet life of a young amateur actor, filled with feverish hopes of success onstage, with tension, failures, and rivalries with professional actors, with intrigues and love affairs, with jealousy and hatred, it was the life of people striving to scale the heights of capital-A Art and fame, people who were noble and treacherous, poor and generous, naïve and merciless in the struggles for parts and success. In any case, he couldn’t tear Mela away from this life, which he compared to a sea of passions, so he was at least trying to teach her to swim a bit better so she wouldn’t drown in the very beginning. Her talent, if she had any, had not yet blazed forth, at twenty she had achieved a few modest successes in several small roles, and this made her anxious, closed-minded, and quarrelsome. Her situation made her easy prey for men, and Ivan Shibilev invested all his efforts in convincing her that she shouldn’t trust the fleeting impulses of her heart, which are most often deceptive, and that she shouldn’t abuse her womanly charm – her beauty might win her the goodwill of some directors and theater managers, but such success would be fake, bought at the price of her degradation. True success was achieved only through hard work and patience, and through an honest appraisal of one’s own abilities, thus if she didn’t succeed in theater, she would remain a decent woman without pangs of conscience and spiritual wounds that would haunt her her whole life long. Finally, to move her and play on her sense of pity, he threw down his final ace – he told her how after her mother’s death, he had given up his acting career right when they had appointed him to the Shumen Theater under Article 9, so he could dedicate the remainder of his life to her alone and to her future. She was truly touched by his self-sacrifice, she burst into tears and promised to be more sensible from then on. They had this conversation in her apartment in the regional town of R., where she had moved at the insistence of the director of the local theater, who had promised her parts in two plays.

  That same day Ivan Shibilev went back to the village, and three months later, a dozen days before the New Year, Mela arrived and went straight to see him. For the first time she entered his home, for the first time she called him “Daddy” and threw herself into his embrace. He scooped her up in his arms and crying tears of joy, he began kissing her forehead, her eyes, her hair, and her hands, as one kisses a small child.

  “My darling, my sweet little daughter, my little girl, my heart’s delight!” he said, out of his mind with excitement while carrying her around the room and showering her with kisses, yet at the same time a bad premonition was gnawing at his heart, precisely because she had returned so suddenly and come straight to him, without stopping by her former home. She had lost weight and was pale, her eyes, which seemed large and dry, burned with anguish and anxiety, her whole body was painfully tense.

  “Something terrible has happened!” she said, once they were sitting down across from each other.

  And she told him how the manager of the theater, who was also a director and actor, had started insistently making advances on her and declaring his love. They had known each other
from her previous theater and when he had left for the town of R., he had told her that if she would come there, too, he would give her parts regularly, and most importantly, he would convene a commission from Sofia, headed by Boyan Danovski, who was a friend of his, and if she did well in her role, they would accept her into the National Academy for Theater Arts without a competition. He was forty years old, divorced with two children. He welcomed her very kindly and even helped her find an apartment, and he really did give her a part and they began rehearsals. He often invited her to his place, but she would either decline or go with others from the theater, but for some time now she had begun visiting him on her own, and as luck would have it a week earlier he had died from a heart attack when they were together during the night. Frightened out of her wits, she had started screaming and woke up the landlords. When they realized what was going on, they detained her and called the police. Interrogations and medical examinations followed, then finally everything was over and she had come home to think over what to do next.