Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  The Gagauz were famous for their bravado, for their beautiful horses, and especially for their ability to perform the tropanka, or stomping dance. With their undeniable artistry for performing this dance, they managed to overcome the barrier of centuries-old intervillage antagonism and win the admiration of the surrounding villages. In every square in the villages nearby, there was always one circle known as the “Gagauz’s threshing floor,” there was one in our village square too, where the dances were held. In that circle they performed their famous tropanka two or three times a year, and performed it such that no grass ever grew there. Their flute players stood shoulder to shoulder in the center of the circle, while the dancers, tightly holding each other’s belts, began slowly and lightly, then they lowered their heads forward like rams, gathered tightly in next to one another, narrowed the circle taking squatting steps forward until their hats pressed in on the flute players, and began to stomp their boots on the ground so furiously that the whole square shook, while the people watched them enraptured, captivated by their primitive strength and passion. After they had performed their hit number, the guests would leave with shouts and gunshots, and the dust from their carts would still be hanging over the road when it was found that they had managed to make off with one of the local girls. It was precisely these hulking young men who displayed the sharpest dislike toward my brother’s urban garb and threatened that if he didn’t take it off, during their next visit they would strip him naked in the middle of the dance, and would tie the scraps of his suit on a stake in the melon fields. And so my brother, Stoyan, lit the first spark from which the war between the Old and New Fashions blazed up.

  The Old Fashion barricaded itself behind the walls of Tradition’s centuries-old bastion and from there pointed its cannons at the enemy; its barrels spewed a fire of curses, threats, and Old Testament dogma. The champions of the New Fashion walked on ahead empty-handed, their only weapon was their fanatical belief in victory. Each time they stormed Tradition’s walls, their cry was not the usual “hurrah,” but rather “down with conformity,” they were ready to block the barrels of their enemies’ cannons with their own bodies. None of them knew what the slogan “down with conformity” meant – it had been casually tossed out by Ivan Shibilev – but this slogan inspired them precisely because it was unfamiliar and new. The Old Fashion was waging a positional, defensive war, and no one has ever won that kind of war, especially if it is being waged in the name of a cause that has outlived its time. After a mere few months of siege, Tradition waved the white flag and capitulated once and for all.

  This war had not only its moral and material cost, but also took human victims. Three fathers died of heart attacks, several young people were left crippled after intrafamilial civil wars, while one girl, in a sign of protest against her parents who would not let her cut her hair, left home, hired herself out as a servant in the city, and from there fell into disrepute. As was to be expected, the conquerors began mercilessly taking out retribution on the conquered, all of her external attributes were tossed out from the ravaged bastion of Tradition and replaced with heretofore unseen high-heeled shoes, gauzy stockings, flannelette, voile scarves, silk for the young ladies, and shoes made of buckskin or juft, cloth caps, bowler hats, English herringbone cloth, stripes and cheviot, double-breasted coats, and for young men, pants with legs as wide as a priest’s sleeves. The women cut off their braids to bob their hair, and threw such a quantity of hair on the trash heap that Buchenwald’s future executioners could have kept a whole industry going on it. Looms, heddles, carding combs, and spindles were one by one tossed into attics due to competition from factory-made fabrics. And if anyone had tried after just half a year to bring back the old fashions, everyone would have laughed at him.

  Leading the charge in these reforms was my brother, Stoyan. Indeed, the idea for the reform had come from Ivan Shibilev, but, as we already mentioned, urged on by some inner restlessness, he was constantly shuttling from the village to nearby cities and didn’t succeed in – and perhaps was incapable of – putting into practice a single one of his ideas. While he was roaming who knows where and why, Stoyan had taken charge of all the civic and educational activity in the village. Like Kemal Atatürk, whom he loved to quote, he believed that if people changed their outward appearance, they would change their lives as well, but since he didn’t have the power like Atatürk to issue a decree banning fezzes and shalwars, he decided to carry out this reform in the most democratic way – from the ground up, and, of course, above all to set a personal example. After being the first young man to don a modern suit, he also became the first tailor in the village to sew modern men’s clothing. In our times, as I’m making these notes, fashion has a lot of theoreticians. According to their ideological and aesthetic viewpoints, all of them “treat” fashion in different ways, but wherever they might search for its ideological roots, in society’s socioeconomic relations or in the morals of the individual, no matter how they explain the phenomenon, no one denies that it is above all a mania for newness, and a fear of being démodé. People believe that clothing makes them more beautiful or even better people, even though in ancient times they had already invented the saying, “You may greet a man according to the clothes he wears, but you bid him goodbye according to the manners he has shown.” This belief has changed into vanity, and vanity is easy to manipulate, it succumbs to mass culture and mass taste. It is precisely this tendency toward imitation – which is perhaps a kind of curiosity, a curiosity which brought irrevocable misfortune to our biblical forefathers – that has allowed even madmen or eccentrics to make some item of clothing fashionable. Such cases exist in the history of fashion. For a young man with an eighth-grade education and a sharp mind like my brother, it was not hard to understand this peculiarity of the mass psyche and to use it as a weapon in the war against the social system in place at that time.

  As I look back at them now, Stoyan’s efforts to transform society and his belief that he could do so through a change in clothing make me smile at his youthful naïveté. But that night, as I was lying under the awning of the barn, surprised and disconcerted by his harsh and merciless attitude toward me, I found a certain hope in just such memories, I wanted to see him as he had been at that time, gentle, compassionate, and selflessly devoted to the common good. I fondly recalled how we had lived with love and concern for each other. Being orphaned and destitute had drawn us so close and made us such equals that I didn’t call him bati, or “older brother,” as was expected, but rather by his name, even though he was six years older. He had finished middle school with straight As in three different villages, because at that time middle school, which sometimes included every grade, sometimes not, was only offered in certain villages depending on the number of students. Every autumn Stoyan would find out which villages had which middle school grades and would go there on the mare, only on the worst winter days would he spend the night there. Without taking into account our family’s dire situation, he started harrying my mother, an illiterate and sickly woman, to send him to study in the city. A most oppressive atmosphere settled over our family; on the one hand, our mother’s illness grew increasingly incurable, on the other, Stoyan fell into a deep melancholy, as fragile youthful souls so easily do. When our mother died, he was out of his head with grief, he stroked my hair, comforted me, and wouldn’t let me in to see the dead woman so that I wouldn’t be frightened. I suspect that during these difficult years he gathered in his heart a great hatred for and bitterness toward that way of life, toward material and spiritual poverty, and this determined his lifelong political outlook. After our mother’s death, as sometimes happens when one finds oneself looking into the abyss of a terrible impasse, a quick change came over him, his despair and gloomy outlook on the future transformed into physical and spiritual energy. You have to study, he would tell me, since I didn’t manage to, you’ll study as long as you can and I’ll help you as much as I can to escape from this misery so you can live a different life! He
would speak to me as if he were talking about himself, as if he would be living a “different life,” he identified with me, and was most sincerely ready to dedicate and sacrifice himself. And when I started studying and entered into the world of science, art, and history, I never anywhere found a more beautiful example of brotherly love, devotion, and obligingness than Stoyan’s love for me.

  Given the poverty he lived in, Stoyan could only from time to time send me a little wood, a boiled chicken, some beans, potatoes, and a bit of flour, but in any case, I didn’t need anything more. Life was cheap in those times, morals were strict and frugal, people showed a noble condescendence to poverty, the town hall gave me a certificate of hardship so I didn’t have to pay school fees. I didn’t pay rent for an apartment, either. I lived under the veranda of a house, which was once a storage space for wood and odds and ends, but which had been refashioned into a living space, whitewashed and outfitted with a bed, a table, and a small cylindrical stove. Upstairs in two rooms lived an elderly, ailing woman who had long been widowed, and so as not to be all alone, she rented out the room to high school students. She didn’t charge rent, however; after school I would bring fresh water from the school fountain, I would shop for her, buy her medicines from the pharmacy, in the winter I would chop wood. If Stoyan managed to send me some food, I would give it to the old woman to cook and then I would eat lunch and dinner with her. The rest of the time I ate at Bay Micho’s diner. His requirements were not particularly complicated or strict – all you can eat in exchange for washing dishes when I had free time or was hungry. Petty clerks and villagers on market days ate at the diner. On the counter there was a large notebook to which a chemical pencil was tied with string; the clerks wrote down their lunches and dinners in the notebook and paid at the end of the month. I, too, wrote my lunches and dinners in that notebook when I didn’t have time to wash dishes. I shopped for my landlady at the shop in the same way; there, too, was a notebook with a chemical pencil and the shopkeeper wrote down the purchases for the whole month with complete trust in his clients. Those years were the heyday of credit, of discounts, and of mutual trust between seller and buyer, thanks to which many of us poor kids from villages and cities managed to graduate from high schools and universities. Later, when the crisis of the war years struck, those same establishments put up signs: “Respect to all, credit to none!” – the official expression of the vanished trust between shopkeepers and customers. At that time I was studying in Sofia, and thanks to the experience I had gained in the provinces, I was able to enter the highest gastronomic circles. I worked as a waiter in the most celebrated restaurants, but I was “under a microscope” – every time I was late or made a mistake, they docked my wages.

  The support Stoyan gave me was above all moral and for precisely this reason it was invaluable. For that time and for him, a young man of nineteen, oppressed by unenlightened ignorance and destitution, this support was tantamount to an act of heroism. With his lively intellect and his native intelligence, he had recognized my bent for books, which over time turned into a painful obsession, and for my sake he deprived himself of the joys of youth. He lived alone in the village, without the coziness of a family of his own, without a soul mate (“I won’t get married until you finish high school!”), he worked alone in the field and was forced to do all the housework himself, to do the laundry and knead and bake bread. Despite this, during vacations I found the house spick-and-span, as if some woman had had a hand in it, while he himself was tidy, clean, and cheerful, joyfully affectionate now he was seeing me again, he would hug me tightly, pressing me to his chest. Our time together during vacations was the greatest holiday for both of us, we shared all the thoughts and feelings that had moved us during the months we had been apart, we discussed political events, I told him about books I had read and brought them for him to read.

  During my second Christmas vacation, I came home to find a tailor shop and a tailor. Our house was a very old Tatar house, dug into the ground and built of woven sticks, there were two little rooms with a cattle barn attached. Stoyan had walled off part of the barn with bricks, taking away living space from the two oxen and the cow, and had opened a door and a window out onto the street. At the counter, standing on a stool, Master Stamo was cutting cloth – the same tailor who had made my first school uniform. Master Stamo had been working in the neighboring Gagauz village, but Stoyan had learned that he knew how to sew city clothes and had taken me to him. Back then I had been a little afraid of Stamo, and I was on tenterhooks all the while he was taking my measurements. He was a dwarf, no more than three feet tall, with the head of a normal man and his face a cobweb of wrinkles, on his back and chest he had enormous humps, such that his head stood between them like the head of a turtle jutting out of the opening of its shell. As he later told us, he had been born in Tulca, Romania. He had learned his trade from his father, a famous master tailor, but also a very enlightened man. He rebelled against the Romanian authorities, they tossed him into prison and he never came home again. Stamo’s sister was married in another city, and his mother had passed away. He left Tulca, worked in various towns, moving ever farther south with the goal of getting closer to Bulgaria. Finally he settled in a little village on the border and waited for an opportune time to cross over. Bulgarians would secretly come to the village to visit their relatives, he met one such man, paid him what was due, and one night the man carried him over the border in a sack.

  Like every enterprise, the tailor shop, too, had a company sign hung between the eaves and the upper sill of the door, the likes of which only Ivan Shibilev was capable of composing and writing out in large, colorful letters: “Au Bon Marché.” There was also such a shop sign on the main street in the city, and although there it suggested provincial pretentiousness, here hung on the Tatar hovel, sunk amidst the brambles and knee-deep mud, it looked like an absurd joke. In this joke, however, lay hidden the ambition and boldness which also filled Stoyan. Master Stamo had sewn him a new suit of cheviot, he looked inwardly and outwardly transformed, ecstatic and cheerful as a man finally standing on the cusp of a dream that was coming true. I was infected by his enthusiasm as well, I was glad that he had discovered his calling, I was happy that I could now love him more than anyone in the world without the pangs of conscience I had felt until then, due to the fact that thanks to him, I was happier than he was. I spent every day of my vacation in the tailor’s shop, I tried to help him, I lit the coals outside for the iron, brought wood for the stove, swept, and the rest of the time I read aloud the newspapers, magazines, and books I had brought from the city. Outside, either snow was falling gently or a blizzard was howling, but inside it was warm, food for lunch or dinner was bubbling on the stove, Master Stamo, standing on his stool, would trace a pattern on the cloth with chalk or a piece of homemade soap, and after that Stoyan would take the enormous, heavy pair of scissors and cut it.

  In the evenings, Master Stamo would stay in the tailor shop to finish up some work or to go to sleep, while Stoyan and I would go down to the community center. From the very founding of the center, Stoyan had been its irremovable chairman, he felt at home there, he would stay late dealing with financial or educational issues, put together programs for the youth parties, or dole out roles for an upcoming theatrical performance. If Ivan Shibilev happened to be absent from the village, Stoyan would direct the plays, make up the actors, and play the leading – and most often female – roles. The girls’ parents forbid them from playing parts in the “teatro,” while the schoolteachers went back to their hometowns during vacations, thus we were forced to cut down the number of female roles. But still, we couldn’t cut out all the female roles, so we would leave at least two – Stoyan would play one, and I would play the other. My beard hadn’t grown in yet, but I had the bristly beginnings of a moustache, so I had to start shaving before my time. Stoyan also shaved off his moustache, and during the theater season, the two of us became women. We rehearsed our parts in falsetto voices, we learned to spin w
ool on a spindle, to walk, laugh, and cry like women, before the performance we slathered our faces with pomades and powders, put on dresses, on our heads we wore ladies’ hats or kerchiefs, depending on what the role called for. I don’t remember the names of the characters we transformed in to anymore, nor can I recall the plots of the plays themselves (Yonchev’s Inns, The Tatar Khan, Sonny Boy), but I still remember the sense of compromised dignity I felt walking out onstage and the effort it took to speak in falsetto for two hours, which made my throat ache for weeks. What’s worse is that the village wiseacres had changed our names to the female versions – Ilka and Stoyanka – and called us the Kralev Sisters. Stoyan was already a grown man, but he didn’t think he was undermining his manly dignity by playing female roles. There’s no such thing as degrading and shameful work when you’re doing it for the good of the people, he would say, they may be laughing at us and reproaching us today, but tomorrow they’ll realize what we were doing and praise us.