Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  This war captured the interest of villagers from our far-flung region and awakened political passions in them. The successes of the “Deutschers” in Europe and even their entrance into our country had not made any particular impression on them, who knows why. But now most of the men left their fields at noon and stopped by to hear the news, while in the evening the community center was full of people. The secret of the Soviet Union, which had formerly prevented them from making comments, now came to light – if such a huge nation, with so many millions of people, could not stop a nation three times smaller, it was clear that under the Bolsheviks there was no order and discipline, instead just a jumble of hungry kolkhozniks who ran away or surrendered; the Bolsheviks only had common pots of porridge and common women, there was only one pair of pants for every two people, so when one was wearing them, the other had to sit at home in his underwear.

  The propaganda in the newspapers and on the radio was picturesque and easily graspable by the common folk, everyone knew the refrain by the rhymester who would sing out the news accompanied by guitar:

  Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo

  each one true to the fight

  we will see a new world order

  thanks to the Axis might!

  In the fall, before I left for Sofia, Stoyan wanted to gather together all the communists to explain the political situation to them, but only two men came to the tailor shop. The rest openly and frankly declared that they didn’t want to be considered communists anymore. “Leave off about that party, for Pete’s sake, there ain’t a shred left of Russia, and you still want to blabber on to us about communism!” I left Stoyan feeling lonely. Everything he had achieved with his sociopolitical campaign collapsed in a few months. The men and youth who earlier had openly showed him their gratitude, respect, and trust, now avoided talking to him and even made sport of him with his “invincible Russia.” Stoyan was bitter, but not despairing. Before a year’s gone by, he said to me as we parted, all those who skedaddled will come crawling back to us. That’s how it is with a simple man, he only believes in something when he sees it in black and white…

  I didn’t sleep the whole night and could hardly wait until dawn. Kichka had left my suitcase in the little room the previous day, I quietly opened the door and went inside to get it. As I was leaving I saw Stoyan on the veranda. He told me I could’ve slept a bit longer, the man with the cart would be coming to get me in about an hour, plus I needed to eat breakfast before setting out. I told him that I had decided to stay in the village and cure myself. Since it was dangerous to live with people, I would go to Noseless Anani, whom I had spoken with a few days earlier. The sanatorium didn’t give me a more certain guarantee of recovering than a separate room at Anani’s, where I would live apart from people in peace and quiet.

  “At the sanatorium, you’ll be under the constant care of doctors and have all the right conditions for getting well,” Stoyan said after hearing me out.

  “According to the doctors, the first condition for getting well is peace, and I’ll only feel peaceful when I’m here. You shouldn’t take that away from me.”

  I grabbed my suitcase and set out to leave. Stoyan caught up with me in the yard and blocked my way. He rightly assumed that I was offended by our conversation about Nusha the previous evening and that I had decided to slip out of the house without taking advantage of his offers to help. He begged me not to be childish and to take the money he’d set aside for me. He couldn’t stop me, but he couldn’t leave me alone, either. We went out into the street, I started off toward the neighborhood farthest away, while he set out alongside me, confused and tormented. The sun still hadn’t come up, but people were pottering about the yards and streets. The first sheaves of barley had ripened a few days earlier and most people were going out to reap. We neared Anani’s house, but Stoyan still didn’t believe that I was going to live under one roof with him. The whole village was revolted by the man and no one dared even set foot in his yard, but I went in. Stoyan, now totally dumbfounded, stopped at the gate. At that moment Anani came into view, coming from the house with a sack on his shoulder and a sickle in his hand.

  “The house’s o’en, go on in!”

  Despite our agreement, it seems he had not believed I would set foot in his house. Pleasantly surprised, but also nervous that I might change my mind when I saw him up close, he turned his head aside and rushed past us like a man pursued. He had no nose, nor any lips, so he couldn’t pronounce certain consonants. His face was flat and covered with a handkerchief from below his eyes to his chin, he had tucked the ends of the handkerchief under his hat at the back of his head. Between his eyebrows, where the base of his nose should have been, a small hole gaped like a tiny abyss. From beneath the kerchief the contours of his teeth and cheekbones stood out, one imagined his face as a half-naked skull and felt horror and disgust, since the handkerchief was wet with spit and secretions. Anani had caught syphilis during his army days and since then had lived exiled by his family and strangers alike. He knew people were disgusted by him, so he himself avoided them. In the fields, he worked apart from his brothers, they on one end, he on the other. They left his food far from the common table and he ate alone, with his back turned to the others. He drew water from the well only at night, he grazed his horses apart from the other horse herds, he didn’t come out amidst the crowds on holidays, and no one ever went to see him. His house was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, in the village, but far from the most dilapidated. It had three rooms and a wooden veranda on the front, it was whitewashed, the door and window frames were painted blue, while the foundations were made of brownish-black local dirt. With its drooping eaves, concave walls, and jutting transverse beams, it looked like a centenarian grandmother who was just skin and bones, yet still hardy, tidy, and welcoming.

  As children, we had been afraid to pass by this house. A certain Milan Manasev had lived there with his wife, he was from another village and was a horse thief, a dark and dangerous character in the minds of our sedate locals. One morning Milan Manasev and his wife were found slaughtered, likely by Romanian smugglers they had dealings with. After their death the house was abandoned and turned into that mysterious place which exists in every village. It was inhabited by all the mysterious forces from folk superstition – karakondzhuli (bogeyman-like satyrs), samodivi (wood nymphs), and all manner of evil spirits – whom many people had seen with their own two eyes. They had also seen both Manasev and his wife standing on the roof of the house at night, or dancing a round dance in the yard, dressed in white clothing, following villagers through the streets at night, or slaughtering livestock left forgotten in the fields. Later Anani had moved into the house to atone in solitude for the sins of his youth, while I went to him to await my death.

  The cart Stoyan had hired to drive me to the bus loaded up my luggage instead and brought it to my new home. A little table with wobbly legs, a wooden bed, a blanket, a gas lamp, and books. There were many of them, hundreds of tomes, wrapped in paper and tied with string. While I was studying in high school and at the university, my main concern had been to acquire more books. Whatever money Stoyan had managed to send me during those lean years, whatever I had earned on my own in restaurants and other places, I had spent it all on books. We arranged my things in the room then went out on the veranda. Stoyan had been silent the whole time, depressed and bitter about my decision to stay here, he was still silent now. I felt a coughing fit rising in my chest. Already back in Sofia I had found a shallow metal box which I carried in the pocket of my jacket, I turned aside and spit blood into it. The cough was deep, coming from the very bottom of my lungs, and with every straining cough I saw stars. When everything was over, I hid the little box in my pocket and then I saw that Stoyan was crying. He was standing in profile, as if watching something over the tops of the trees, taut as a string from the effort of controlling himself. Tears gushed from his eyes, gathering in large drops under his chin and falling on his chest. His hands were clenched in fis
ts and his whole body was shaking with tension. I felt guilty for causing him suffering, but I could not change my decision. At the same time, I felt somehow proud and elated because I was seeing him cry for the first time, and his tears were a man’s tears, bursting from the depth of his brotherly heart. We took our leave silently. He turned around, passed behind me, and went out into the yard.

  From that day on, everyone in the village knew I was sick with consumption and started looking upon me as doomed. Wherever I turned up, were it the community center or on the street, my presence made people anxious, while the children didn’t dare approach me. I was the first and only college graduate in the village and just as earlier they had simple-heartedly shown me respect, now in the same way they showed me pity. The poor boy, what a waste, I heard them whispering behind my back, since TB’s gotten ahold of him, he’s done for! But I didn’t feel so doomed and exiled from the world. Ever since the doctors had discovered the cavity in my lung, I knew I was going to die and death was the only thing I thought about. I thought about it especially during the days and nights when I started to seclude myself in my room. As soon as they found out I was sick, my comrades ceased assigning me tasks, they gathered up money and decided to send me to a sanatorium for those ill with tuberculosis. I refused to go and not only did I refuse, I ran away from the village. It seems that I had resigned myself to death or had become apathetic, only a single aspiration lived in my heart – to go back to the village and die there. This aspiration likely fed on my fear of meeting death among strangers, without receiving any final comfort from my nearest and dearest. Or it was an atavism found in some animals which, with their last ounce of strength, drag themselves to their lairs, so as to die where they had begun their lives, to unite the end with the beginning.

  Whatever it was, resignation or apathy, in any case I had gotten used to thinking about death as a law of nature that did not spare any single living creature. I philosophized, loading my consciousness with all sorts of arguments in favor of that natural law so as to console myself that everything mortal was doomed to die. In this war millions of young people like myself had died and were dying on battlefields, who was I to cry out, I thought to myself, why should I writhe like a worm in the face of the inevitable? What difference did it make when I died, now or in ten or even one hundred years? The idea was to get used to the thought that whenever death did come, I would fear it again. Of course, with this sophistry I did not completely succeed in overcoming my fear, but at least I managed, as far as I could tell, to stand face-to-face with the inevitable without faintheartedness and sniveling.

  From the books I had read, I had understood that even the most insightful authors did not manage to fully express in words their human thoughts and feelings. There was always something for my imagination to add after reading, and this was likely the case with all readers. The word is powerless to fully express the complex and elusive movements of the heart and mind, they can only be experienced and reflected upon. Since this is the case, how could I express with my impoverished speech what I felt after my encounter with Nusha? I was filled and overflowing with her, that’s what it was. She was my new life, my reincarnation. All my sophistic jabbering about resignation to death disappeared immediately like so much smoke. A rebellion against nature itself and its primordial laws welled up inside me. Is not Mother Nature a blind force that creates so as to destroy? I could not resign myself to her amorality, my will to live erupted like a volcano, burning up with its lava my despair and resignation. In the morning I did exercises, I walked in the fields for hours, I ate like a wolf. Stoyan had secured hearty food for me – honey, butter, fresh meat – and Kichka cooked for me. Every day I ate lunch and dinner at their place under the awning of the barn, I also had food at home. After lunch and dinner I would go to the community center to listen to the news. The authorities had long since placed a seal on the radio dial so we could not change the station, but the omnipresent Ivan Shibilev made short work of that.

  After the official news, when the others went home, Stoyan, a few others, and I would stay in the community center, Ivan Shibilev would take off the back panel of the radio, fiddle around with some mechanisms, and find a Soviet radio station, usually Moscow. Even from the local radio station it was clear that the Germans were retreating in panic on all fronts in the east and west, but we wanted to hear the Russian language, the Kremlin’s clock striking the hour, and Levitan’s solemn voice. We got chills when that voice announced that in only five days Soviet troops had pushed back the enemy’s lines of defense more than five hundred kilometers, freeing more than a thousand villages. We imagined the Soviet Army as a living avalanche destroying any resistance in its path, we could not contain our joy and ecstasy and broke into “Shiroka strana moya rodnaya” or some other Soviet song.

  After leaving the community center, Stoyan always walked me back to Anani’s house. From the very first evening I noticed that as we walked, his high spirits fell abruptly, as it were. He was silent or talked about inconsequential things, as if only minutes earlier we had not been rejoicing over the victorious advance of the Soviet Army and been singing songs. Obviously, Anani’s house reminded him every time of my absolute refusal to go to a sanatorium and that darkened his mood. However, I could also sense that he still hoped that loneliness and cohabitation with the noseless man would depress me and drive me from the house. Before we would say good night, he would stand in front of me for a minute and then I could see his eyes glittering in the dark, I could hear him stifling a deep sigh in his chest. I had the feeling that my improved mood gladdened him on the one hand, while on the other it troubled and irritated him, since he saw it as an expression of flippancy. He wanted to ask me something but didn’t dare. He himself seemed to realize that his questions would be unpleasant for me, and he had promised not to disturb my peace. It was not hard to guess what he wanted to know – how long would I stay in that hellhole and had I seen Nusha Pashova? If he had asked, I would have answered him that I had come to this hellhole not to await my death, as I wrote above, but to wait until I recovered, and that I hadn’t seen Nusha, but that I was waiting for her always, both in my dreams and while awake. But he kept silent and thus for the first time the secret of unshared thoughts and feelings settled between us.

  Paging through these notes, I see that I have used the word “insight” several times in the sense of an infallible premonition almost like clairvoyance. After she had come to our home, Nusha and I had not made plans to meet, or at least I didn’t remember due to the obliviousness I had fallen into during our meeting, but I expected her every day. I didn’t bother to think how she would get here on her own and whether her desire to talk to me in the future was as strong since she had found out that I was sick with tuberculosis. I had become a medium, I communicated with her at all times, I saw her incarnated in everything around me – in the sunflowers, in the clouds, which, as soon as I looked at them, took on her shape. I was so afraid that if she went looking for me at home, my brother and sister-in-law would insult her terribly and throw her out of the house, that I went walking through the fields every day so as to meet her outside the village. I strolled before lunch and in the late afternoon, as these were the times most convenient for her to visit me, and only in the western part of the village fields, where the road to Zhitnitsa passed. Here the summer crops had been sown – sunflowers, corn, and melons – and there were no people, because they were all reaping on the other side of the village land. I would walk amidst the crops, reach a small wood, rest for a bit, then walk back. In this way I watched the road between the two villages for a whole week. On the eighth day late in the afternoon, when I was already on my way back to the village, I heard a bell behind me. I looked back – Nusha was riding a bike. She was wearing a white shirt and had a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head.

  I remember almost all the details of our second meeting. Nusha had not expected to see me in the fields and had almost passed me by. She only recognized me when I called
out to her, she made some exclamation and her face flushed bright red. The bicycle brakes squeaked abruptly, she reeled to the side and put one foot on the ground. My sudden appearance was like a miracle to her and she couldn’t seem to believe her eyes. These were her first words: “I can’t believe my eyes.”

  “If you had looked for me at home, you wouldn’t have found me,” I said. “I don’t live there anymore.”

  “I for my part have cut off all my hair,” she said, taking the straw hat off her head. “Mama was really mad at me, she said I looked like a coquette from the city. Do I really look so ridiculous?” She glanced toward a nearby tumulus and her face took on an ecstatic expression, as if something endlessly tempting was standing before her. “Do you know that I’ve never climbed a grave mound? There are ancient grave mounds in all the village fields around here, only ours doesn’t have one. Do you want to climb up and see the view from on top?”

  Nusha left her bicycle in the bushes and set off on the narrow path toward the tumulus. She ran on ahead of me, waving her straw hat, and I felt a gentle puff of wind, saturated with the scent of blossoming sunflowers, I watched how her dark-brown hair fractured the sun’s gleaming reflections and hung free about her shoulders. The grave mound was no more than twenty yards high, but on the plain it looked as imposing as a small mountain, grown over with wild multicolored grasses and bushes, hiding in its virginal womb the historic secrets of our land. On its top was a little clearing with lush grass and a small pyramid of rotting beams, the remains of an earlier triangular tower. We climbed up the pyramid and looked in all directions. In the distance the air was translucent and motionless, all the neighboring villages could be seen, the distant circumference of the horizon could also be seen, where the ashen blue of the sky and the land touched in a thin, straight line. The evening wind blew from the west, as always at that time of day, curling the verdant expanse into silvery waves and immersing us in the illusion of a sea. But it was not an illusion. I truly felt and saw the grave mound rocking like a ship, and that rocking filled my soul with a sweet vertigo.