Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  Ivan Shibilev was nowhere to be seen and Nikolin thought that he had gone home the other way around the village, so that they wouldn’t meet again. He was nearing the crooked pear tree when he saw him lying facedown in the snow. He called out to him, then grabbed him by the shoulder and rolled him over onto his back. Ivan Shibilev’s face had gone from purple, as he had seen it an hour ago, to bluish-white, and his mouth was full of snow.

  PART FOUR:

  STOYAN “MAN OF STEEL” KRALEV

  (FROM ILKO KRALEV’S NOTES)

  AN OLD BEAT-UP BUS belonging to a Varna man went from Varna to Zhitnitsa. In the morning around nine I got off the train from Sofia and caught the bus. It was market day, there were a lot of passengers from the villages, so I barely managed to find a spot in the back seat. As always, the bus stopped halfway on the road to the village Izvor. All the passengers got off to drink water or stretch their legs for fifteen minutes. I was going to get off too, but such a coughing fit came over me that I sat down in one of the front seats near an open window. Something cracked beneath me, I looked down and saw a newspaper. I unfolded it; inside was a gramophone record, shattered into pieces. I got so anxious that my head started aching. There were poplars growing by the water fountain, beyond them began the old woodcutting area grown over with oak brush. Most of the passengers were sitting or strolling through this brush, and among those hanging around the fountain, I didn’t see any familiar faces from our village. Finally the passengers began getting back on the bus and taking their seats. I was standing up with the broken record in my hand, waiting for its owner to come looking for it. Then I saw Nusha Pashova from Zhitnitsa. Years ago I had gone to her home to visit her brother, I remembered her as a young girl in her black schoolgirl’s smock with white collars, but now she was dressed as a young lady in a suit the color of oranges, against which her dark, sparkling eyes and her hair, which was pulled back into two thick braids, stood out. She radiated such beauty and freshness amidst the sweltering afternoon heat and workaday coarseness of the other passengers that I wanted to hide from her. Precisely because of the dejected state I had been in for several months, I had not noticed her on the bus. I had been sitting in the back seat, staring straight ahead and not daring to move, so as not to start coughing from the heat and spitting up blood in front of everyone. Besides that, I was already sure that the record I had broken was hers and I would have to tell her.

  “Hello, Mr. Kralev!” she said, stepping in front of me. “I noticed you back in the city when you got on the bus, but I didn’t have the chance to call out to you. I didn’t see you among the passengers outside, by the fountain…”

  “I didn’t get off, as I was busy making trouble for you, Miss Pashova. Is this record yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “I broke it out of carelessness. Please forgive me, I’ll pay for it or buy you a new one at my earliest convenience. What was it?”

  Nusha took the newspaper with the broken record from me and threw it out the window.

  “Some popular song. My landlady gave it to me. You can sit here, the seat has freed up. You may also congratulate me,” she added as we sat down next to each other. “I successfully graduated from high school and now am standing with one foot on the threshold of life, as our class teacher informed us.”

  “Congratulations. As for me, I’m already beyond the threshold of life.”

  She didn’t grasp the double meaning in what I said and turned toward me.

  “That means you’ve finished the university. I accept your congratulations and give you mine in return!”

  The bus had started off and we continued talking in this unnatural and affected way, like people who feel some kind of mutual awkwardness or are hiding something important that needs to be said. We had something to say to each other, but this was not the place, the villagers sitting around us were constantly eavesdropping with undisguised curiosity. Besides, I was waiting for Nusha to begin the conversation, only after we had gotten off the bus. But she couldn’t contain herself. As soon as we neared their village, she leaned toward me and asked whether I had gotten the letter she had written me about half a year ago. Actually, it wasn’t a letter, but a note of a few lines, not addressed to anyone and unsigned. The anonymous author had asked me whether I knew something about L. and to report “where I should,” but only in case I had something to tell. I never doubted for an instant that the letter was from Nusha. I had not seen her handwriting before then, but I immediately realized that she was talking about her brother, Alexander. At the university, the other students and everyone called him Sasho, but in the village and in his family, he was Lexy. He liked me to call him that as well, as his fellow villager and friend. In early 1943, Lexy had quit the medical school where he had studied for two years and left for Switzerland. He had left legally, and at first his extreme discretion was puzzling to me, as well as insulting, as we were close friends. Our mutual acquaintances were also surprised by his departure. He hadn’t shared his plans with anyone, not even his family, judging from Nusha’s note. None of them had found an excuse to stop over at our village and ask me about him. It was only a year after his departure that Nusha contacted me, and anonymously at that. I told her that I had received her letter, but that I hadn’t answered due to the conditions laid down in the note itself.

  “How did you know that I was the one who had written you?”

  “By intuition. And, of course, from the abbreviation of his name. I’m sorry that even now I don’t have any information to give you.”

  Nusha looked at me with shining eyes and gently nudged me with her elbow: “Don’t feel sorry, Mr. Kralev! We will arrive in a few minutes and then I will tell you something.”

  The bus stopped at the edge of the village by the church. We got off and headed straight toward the center of the village. As we walked past the church fence, Nusha stepped off the road and led me into the shade of a mulberry tree. There was a bench under the mulberry, we sat down and she told me that a month ago they had gotten word from Lexy. He was serving as a doctor in the Soviet Army. Doubt must have been written on my face, because she looked me in the eye and asked: “You don’t believe it? If you don’t believe it, that means you didn’t know my brother. Someday perhaps I’ll show you his letter, but not now. Not now!” And while she was saying this, she took an envelope addressed in German out of her purse and handed it to me. “Read it, read it, you know German, right, read it!”

  The letter was written in German by some “Soldat” by the name of Asclepius, who declared his most fervent love to “Fräulein Pashoff” and recalled with great tenderness the days he had spent with her during his short stay in Bulgaria. The soldier promised to greet her very soon with news of a German victory, after which he would come to take her to Berlin. There they would get married, have two boys and two girls, and so on. It was Lexy’s handwriting. I knew it as well as my own, I could also compare it to notes from the time when I had asked him about some phrases in German and he had “scrawled” them in my notebook. He spoke excellent German and Russian and sometimes liked to speak with me in both languages. There was no doubt he was the author of this letter, but for now Nusha didn’t even want to imagine under what circumstances it had been written, and how from Switzerland he had ended up on the front in the Soviet Army. She was happy that her brother was alive and was glowing with excitement.

  “Oh, Mr. Kralev!” She spoke in a trembling, ringing voice. “We have so many things to be happy about, don’t we? My brother is alive, and I finished high school, and you finished the university! Yes, we must celebrate! I won’t let you leave for your village right away. First you must stop by our place, you’ll rest for a bit and then be on your way. You’ve spent the whole night on the train, I can see the exhaustion written on your face, you look almost ill. Come on!”

  I told her that I was indeed a bit tired and that I would rest, but here on the bench, and that I couldn’t go to their place right now. I said goodbye, but promised that I wo
uld take advantage of her invitation in the next couple of days.

  “I didn’t expect you would take news of my brother so indifferently!” Nusha said. “It’s because you don’t know how much he loves you. What wonderful things he told me about you! But if I tell them to you, it’ll make me cry, I’ll just burst into tears.”

  A tear glittered in her eye and she turned away. We sat silently for a minute and I could feel how in that silence something intimate, sweet and yet vague was arising between us. I didn’t know what to tell her, I was confused and flustered. After my nightmarish days of loneliness and despair, my heart was seeking closeness and warmth. I was ready to stay with her for a long time and visit her home, but one circumstance held me back, a bitter and terrible thing that I could not share with her. It had to do with her father, and it threatened not only his honor and his life, but his entire family. I could not set foot in their home under any circumstances.

  “But you must know,” Nusha continued, “that if my brother doesn’t come home, if he dies on the front, one of the people he loved and respected the most was you. He often told me that, he told it to my parents, too, and they love and respect you as his good friend and comrade. Farewell! Forgive me!”

  Nusha got up from the bench and set off. I watched her stepping into the lush, clean grass along the churchyard fence somehow timidly and gracefully, and suddenly a terrible loneliness gripped me, such as I had never felt before. I caught up with her on the road.

  “Nusha, I’m not only tired and look sick, I really am sick. That’s why I can’t come to your house.”

  Later I tried to convince myself that I had told her about my illness as an excuse not to go to their place. But it wasn’t true. I realized that I shouldn’t give in to my cowardliness, yet still I told her that I had tuberculosis. I was looking for sympathy and tenderness from someone and my feelings told me I would find them in her.

  “You must have been sitting in a draft on the train and gotten a cold,” she said, and smiled. “You men, as soon as you sneeze or cough you immediately imagine the worst. I’ll make you oregano tea and you’ll be fine by this evening. I also caught a cold on the train on my way back from vacation, and that’s how I got better.”

  My way to the village passed by their house. When we reached the gate, the side door opened and Nusha’s mother came out. She greeted me and when she found out that I meant to continue on my way without stopping by, she started wailing and inviting me in in that thin, shrill voice that village women use when they are excited, so that the entire neighborhood already knew who had come to visit. A few minutes later I was sitting under the trellis, while Nusha and her mother were bustling around the kitchen. Nusha’s father, Bay Petar Pashov, appeared from behind the outbuildings, dressed in faded denim overalls, bareheaded, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. As he passed by the trellis, he caught Nusha’s voice coming from the kitchen, stopped, listened, and then went over to the house. Wild rosebushes were growing around the trellis, so he only saw me when he had reached the table.

  “Well, it seems we have a guest!” he said, appearing pleasantly surprised. “Whatever made you think of us! You’re more than welcome here!”

  I went over and reached out my hand to shake his.

  “Nusha and I arrived together. We met on the bus.”

  “Is that so? I just heard her voice, so I said to myself, wait, let’s see if she’s come home. We’ve been expecting her for a week now, as soon as the bus arrives, her mother’s eyes are on the road. Sit down, sit down.”

  Nusha came out of the kitchen with a tray and came over to us. In such moments, outsiders are extraneous and I felt like a fifth wheel at their reunion. But her meeting with her father, just as with her mother, passed without unnecessary ceremoniousness, as such meetings do in the village, incidentally. Nusha set the tray on the table, went over to her father and kissed his hand, while he gently touched her shoulder.

  “Well, young lady, congratulations on your high school diploma!”

  “Thank you, Daddy!”

  “Now are you going to take up the hoe, start teaching school, or will we throw a wedding party?”

  “I don’t know, Daddy, we’ll see.”

  “Is that tea? The Russians haven’t even come yet, and you’re starting to greet our guests à la ruski.”

  “Mr. Kralev caught a cold last night on the train and needs to drink tea. You ought to congratulate him as well, Dad! He graduated in law.”

  “Well, then we need something stronger than tea! A nice grape brandy’ll fix him right up. Your mother knows which one to serve.”

  With this short, joking conversation, they exchanged their greetings and Nusha went into the kitchen where her mother was. Bay Petar congratulated me on finishing university and said he hoped I would become an important lawyer or judge. Then he asked me whether I knew they had gotten a letter from Lexy.

  “Nusha let me read it just now.”

  “I told her to burn it, but she…You know how girls are!” He took a cigarette out of the pocket of his denim jacket, tapped it on his fingernail, and lit up. “I don’t understand this business. He told me he was leaving for Switzerland when he’d already bought his train ticket. Why do you feel the need to traipse around abroad, I told him, it’s wartime, anything could happen. Medicine here is nothing, he says, I’ll go and finish up there, so I know I’ve learned a profession as it should be learned. It crossed my mind that maybe they were after him because of that business of yours, maybe he’d been betrayed or something of the sort, but I didn’t dare ask him. He wouldn’t have told me anyway. He surely told you about his intentions to go abroad. He told me himself that you were the best of friends.”

  When I told him that Lexy hadn’t told me that he was going abroad, he was very surprised and clearly did not believe me.

  “If he didn’t tell you, who else would he trust about these things?”

  “He was acting according to the strict laws of conspiracy.”

  “Whose conspiracy?”

  “What do you mean, ‘whose’?”

  “Okay, fine, let’s say that’s how it was. Because of that same conspiracy you won’t tell me the truth either. I get it. But what do you think? Was the letter written by him?”

  “The handwriting is his.”

  “But what if he wrote it looking down the barrel of some gun?”

  “What gun?”

  He didn’t manage to answer me, because the women came over to us and started setting the table for lunch. Nusha saw that my tea had been left untouched, so she tossed it into the garden and promised to brew me another one after lunch. Her father lifted his glass to her, but she interrupted him and said that first we needed to toast Lexy.

  “Quiet!” her father scolded her. “Now even the stones in the fence have ears! Fine, we’ll first raise a toast to him!”

  He drained his glass in a single gulp, I took a sip, while the women merely raised their glasses. Nothing more was said about Lexy. His mother, it seemed, was the least informed about the whole business and about his fate and throughout the whole lunch she was looking at me, expecting me to say something about him. From the look on her face I could guess what strong and conflicting emotions were running through her. The father talked about the upcoming harvest and other agricultural matters, but he, too, did not manage to hide the fact that the only thing he cared about was his son’s uncertain fate. Only Nusha looked unpremeditatedly happy. Her entire being emanated a lovely radiance, which transformed everything around her with the magic of her girlish beauty and purity, making it gentle, exquisite, and beautiful. I felt that radiance penetrating into my heart and illuminating it with cheerfulness and calm, and felt my despair at my illness, my doubts and fears, giving way to those bright feelings that we are accustomed to calling the hope for happiness.

  We were finishing lunch when someone knocked on the gate. It turned out to be someone from my village, he had come looking for something from Bay Petar Pashov. The two of them
spoke in the yard, then the man left. I realized that he’d come by cart, so I grabbed my suitcase and said goodbye to my hosts. The three of them saw me out to the street and stayed there until the cart turned past the last house. My visit to them had been accidental. If Nusha and I hadn’t met on the bus, perhaps I would never have met her or her parents again due to the tumultuous events that ensued. Now I had a premonition that precisely these events would bring us together again, and that premonition was vague and alarming.

  After an hour or so I was home. I found Stoyan and Kichka in the tailor shop, he was cutting cloth on the counter, while she was sewing on the machine. As always, the villagers had their summer pants sewn right before harvesttime and the counter was stacked with rolls of blue denim. None of our reunions after my returns to the village had ever been this emotional. As soon as they saw me on the doorstep, Stoyan and Kichka left off with their work, rushed to hug me, and instead of saying “welcome,” they shouted like children: “We won, we won, we won!”

  While I had been in Sofia, we had constantly been writing letters back and forth, but of course exchanging news or making political commentaries was out of the question. Only now, undisturbed by anyone, could we share our joy over the events on the Eastern Front. The large map of the Soviet Union, which Stoyan had earlier hid in a corner of the barn, now hung in a visible place in the tailor shop for the whole village to see. With great anguish we had stuck the little red and blue flags ever farther into Soviet territory, from village to village, from town to town, to Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and the Caucasus. Now the flags were moving in the opposite direction, the red was pursuing the blue, in many places they had them completely surrounded, condemning them to certain death; flags “triumphantly waved” above Vyborg and the territory of the Belarusian Republic. A second front had been opened by Allied troops in Normandy, fascist Germany’s death throes had begun, Ivan Bagryanov had been appointed prime minister of the Bulgarian government. The Bulgarian partisan movement had become a political and military force to be reckoned with. Stoyan and I worked until the evening, commenting on the military events on the fronts to the east and west; of course, we also talked about my future work, while Kichka went to get their daughter from Kichka’s mother. During these days of intense work she couldn’t take care of both the child and the household, she had to help Stoyan in the tailor shop, now I took her place as well. Back in my school days, Stoyan had taught me how to sew summer pants, so during vacation times I helped him.