Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  Nusha said she was dizzy and climbed down. I followed her down, and we sat in the lush grass facing the village. It could be seen from one end to the other, sunk in the greenery of the yards, fenced off by brambly hedges and large, unhewn stones. The houses seemed to be playing hide-and-seek in that greenery, some peeked out with one eye, others showed their chimneys or a bit of their gray, old-fashioned roof tiles, only the school and the church stood at full height from the village square and looked at the world with open, light-orange faces. Here and there a thin stream of smoke curled up from a chimney, and this showed that the old women had begun cooking supper for the harvesters, who in an hour or two would come back from the fields. Nusha was sitting next to me as young girls sit, her skirt stretched over her legs to the ankles and her arms tucked under her knees, her gaze roamed in the distance and she rocked gently from side to side, as children do when they’re thinking of something that is all their own and lovely. I had a lovely feeling as well, everything around was lovely as never before. Nusha’s face glowed with a quiet happiness, a smile threatened to blossom on her lips at any moment, and then she laughed as if to herself in a thin, ringing voice, which filled all of nature and wrenched forth from her like a soft echo.

  “I’ll come to see how you’re settling in to your new place and I’ll bring you a present,” she said as she laughed. “You might not like it, but I’ll give it to you anyway…”

  “My landlord will scare you,” I said. “You’ll be disgusted by him.”

  I told her about Anani and his isolation, but she didn’t seem to hear me and continued her line of thought.

  “But before that, you need to come visit us. Mom and Dad send their greetings and told me to invite you to visit. You know, Daddy is really worried about Lexy, he can’t believe that he is alive.”

  We talked about Lexy until the sun went down. For some girls, their ideal model of a man is their brother or father, whom they adore. This adoration is likely due to various reasons of a physiological or other nature, but one such reason might be that these girls, who have not yet become women, are excessively sheltered, they haven’t looked beyond the circle of their family so they discover the male principle first of all in men among their close blood relatives. Nusha was such a girl, she idolized her brother to such an extent that it was as if he was immune to life’s ups and downs, she believed that he was alive and well and sooner or later would return, crowned with the glory of a legendary hero. Her brother was a myth and a legend to her, and she was pained even by the fact that her father harbored some doubts about her brother’s fate. She talked about her brother as if he had gone to the city to take care of some business and would be back today or tomorrow.

  “Do you believe that he’s alive?” she asked me, just as she had asked me during our first meeting by the church fence.

  “I do,” I told her.

  And this was the truth – the truth of the love that fully united me with her being and did not allow me to think differently than she did. Besides, I, too, had been enchanted by Lexy’s personality, I, too, idolized him as did his sister, but in her absence, I wondered why he had left incognito to go abroad just as I wondered whether her father was the one who betrayed our comrades. My happiness depended solely on solving this puzzle, and every puzzle gives rise to doubt. Just as every doubt in turn succumbs to the most unfounded arguments, until it transforms into a form of self-torture. I’m not sure whether my brother understood that, but from the very start he began trying to fill me with doubts about Nusha’s intentions, since he believed that she was throwing herself at me due to some impure calculations on the part of her family. At first he was more condescending, he advised me not to get mixed up with women at all (“I thought you wanted peace and quiet?”), because it was harmful to my health, until one evening he openly attacked me and accused me of being a renegade.

  Nusha came to visit me that same day. It just so happened that Anani was at home too, and we spoke for the first time, if you don’t count our conversation about my coming to live with him, which took place in the field and in the dark, at that. He was coming back from the field, I jumped up into his cart behind him, asked him if he would rent me a room, he agreed and that was that. Since I had become his tenant, however, he had been avoiding me. In the morning he got up before dawn, while I was sleeping, and went out to the fields, while in the evening I came back when he was already asleep. Sometimes there was a light in his window, but as soon as he heard me in the yard, he turned out the lamp and lay low. I nevertheless managed to observe him. In the morning he hitched up the cart and before going out to the fields he got a barrel of water, watered the vegetable garden, weeded, or did some pressing housework. Even though he assumed I was sleeping at that time, he still walked on tiptoe, ready to dart into the barn or somewhere behind the house if I were to appear at the window or come out into the yard. But I slept very lightly or didn’t sleep at all, I still couldn’t get used to my new living situation, I would read until my eyes ached and doze off with a book in my hand. No matter how carefully he crept out of his room, I heard his footsteps on the veranda and on the stairs, which were beneath my window, I got up just as carefully from my bed and watched him. In the first few days I hid in the farthest corner of the room, because I was afraid he would notice me, I didn’t dare look at him from up close. At the same time, I felt pangs of conscience about this man who had upended his previous way of life for me, I was upset that I couldn’t express my gratitude to him for taking me in under his roof. I couldn’t overcome my revulsion toward him, he knew it and despite that tiptoed around in his own home as to assure peace and quiet for an unfamiliar and infectiously ill person.

  I had to get over my revulsion at all costs, otherwise I would make his life even harder. I started hiding in the front corner near the window, so I could watch him from a yard away when he was coming up or down the stairs. My efforts to get close to him became an obsession. I was constantly listening for his footsteps and would rush to take up my place in the corner by the window, deliberately waiting for him to appear. I was curious to peek into his room, but an enormous padlock invariably hung from the door. He forgot to lock it only once and I snuck into his room. Judging by the neatness of the yard and the house’s exterior, I hadn’t expected to find the stinking den of a recluse, yet I was nevertheless surprised by its tidiness and coziness. Bluish-white walls, a floor spread with a layer of red clay and covered with colorful rag rugs, a wooden bed with flowers and figures carved into the head- and footboards, a pine trunk in the corner, above the trunk shelves with dishes – in short, a picture out of a children’s magazine showing the interior of a typical village home. (Back then I didn’t yet know that Anani spent his spare time woodcarving.) Three pictures hung on the wall behind glass in wooden frames – three portraits of Anani in his army uniform. In two photos he was with friends, in one he was alone, a close shot from the waist up. I recognized him by his forehead and his eyes, which were the same even now, the wide, square forehead, dark eyes slightly squinted and slanted toward his nose. Those eyes, which had turned into two sanctuaries of hermetic solitude, in those years had gazed out with the boldness of hope. In place of that repulsive nothingness that the handkerchief now hid, he had had a straight Roman nose, a long, high-cheekboned face, a thin moustache, shapely lips pressed tightly together, and a slightly dimpled chin. I noticed something else, which actually struck me the most. Between the stove and the back wall, there was a little round table covered by a blue tablecloth with white stripes, and on top of the tablecloth there were five bowls, five wooden spoons, and five forks of tarnished nickel. In front of each of the five place settings around the table stood low four-legged stools. One place setting and one stool showed signs of long years of use. Did that mean that throughout his years of loneliness, Anani had lived with an imaginary family made up of a wife and three children, with whom he ate lunch and dinner every day? Didn’t other people in the village do the same thing, setting out plates of fo
od for children who had died young, hadn’t our mother set an extra place at the table even after our father’s death? Anani had been living in an invented reality; wasn’t I, too, living with the illusion that I was healthy, that Nusha loved me, and that we would soon be married and have a family and children?

  After that, I had another image of Anani, an inner picture of a young soldier with a Roman nose and high cheekbones, who had become a forty-year-old man not resigned to his misfortune and who had managed to turn it into a meaningful life of hard work. How this small miracle occurred in me, by the power of suggestion or due to excessive empathy, to this day I still cannot explain. But the truth is that I managed to subject myself to visual and spiritual deception, I managed to replace Anani’s actual physical appearance with my internal image of him and to talk to him like any other person. On that day he had stayed at home to rest or to finish up some housework, but as of three o’clock he still had not shown himself outside, perhaps because I was in my room. A meeting of communist and Fatherland Front members, to be held in the woods, had been scheduled for that evening, and I needed to give a report about the political situation. The Soviet Army had reached the Bulgarian border with Romania and we had received instructions to be ready to seize power. I had already scribbled out my report when I heard Anani come out of his room. I went out as well and met him on the veranda. He froze for a moment and wanted to slip down the stairs, but I stood in front of him.

  “Bay Anani,” I said. “It’ll soon be a month since I’ve been living here, but we never seem to find time to see each other and talk.”

  He stepped toward the veranda railing and turned his shoulder toward me.

  “Lotsa ’ork, you know, out in the ’ields e’ery day…”

  We talked about the harvest and lots of other things, we talked about the war as well, because he was interested to know how far the Russians had gotten. We stood shoulder to shoulder and no matter how many times I turned toward him, he turned his head the other direction so I wouldn’t look him in the face. He was nervous, I could hear his breath catching, he felt the ends of his handkerchief to make sure they were still tucked under his hat, his fingers were trembling. That’s how Nusha found us. She had come through the garden gate and suddenly stepped out from behind the house. Anani saw her first because he was looking in that direction the whole time, he pushed me aside and hid in his room.

  “See how I found you?” Nusha was saying, pushing her bike along with one hand and holding a cardboard box in the other. “Since you didn’t come to see us, I came to you. Like in that saying about Mohammed and the mountain.”

  “Please, I never promised,” I said, going down to her in the yard.

  “You didn’t promise, but you didn’t say no, either. And now here’s your present!” While I untied the string around the box, Nusha smiled as if she had gotten up to some mischief and was now counting on my indulgence. “You won’t laugh, right, you promise?”

  Me, laugh at her? Good God! Even now I am moved at the thought of that present. In the box was a dark-brown shaggy teddy bear with black eyes and a blue ribbon around its neck. There was no doubt about it, I was touched and my heart melted, as always in her presence, and I probably exaggerated the significance of that gift to the level of a symbol, but back then I thought that through this bear she was giving me the purity of her childhood. While she, in the most touching way, didn’t realize that, she was looking at me with her warm, hazelnut eyes and telling me that her father had bought her that bear when she was eight, she had played with it until a few years ago, and now, “I don’t know why,” it had occurred to her to give it to me. “You’re not insulted by this joke, are you?”

  Stoyan surprised us in the early evening as we were sitting at the end of the yard. He didn’t come in to us, but called to me from the gate and hid behind the hedge, thus making it clear that he didn’t want to talk to Nusha. Never before had I felt so pathetic and guilty, as if caught at the scene of a crime. I hadn’t promised Stoyan that I wouldn’t see Nusha, yet I still felt guilty in his eyes. And not only in his, but in my own eyes as well. Now this terrible thought crossed my mind – that I felt guilty for loving Nusha. Why, I asked myself, and I couldn’t answer. I hadn’t thought about it, plus my nerves were frayed to the extreme and I couldn’t control myself. I crossed the yard weak in the knees and went out into the street. Stoyan had fallen into some quiet rage. His nose had gone white, and there seemed to be a white circle around his mouth and that circle was smiling. Everything around us was sunk in elderberry and wormwood, their heavy poisonous scents invoked desolation and grief. But Stoyan was smiling with his pale lips and unrelentingly fixing me with his narrowed eyes.

  “The meeting tonight is called off.”

  At lunch we had discussed my report point by point, and besides, calling off the meeting was impossible. There was no way to tell everyone, since they were scattered among the fields. I realized he was lying to me and told him so. He reached out and grabbed the bear, which I had forgotten in my hands. He turned it around, looking at it from all sides and tossed it into the elderberry thicket with a gesture of disgust.

  “There’ll be a meeting tonight, but you won’t be going. The comrades are afraid of you, since you’re making love to Petar Pashov’s daughter.”

  That was a lie too. I was sure that none of the communists had said anything of the sort, unless he himself had suggested it to one of them, to have an ace up his sleeve against me. He had come to discuss the report one more time or was just passing along the street by chance, and when he had seen Nusha, he had taken advantage of the situation to distance himself from me or at least to scare me.

  “Since you won’t let me come to the meeting, I won’t insist.”

  What else could I say?

  “It’s a well-known fact that you’d rather stay with your lady visitor here. It’s not me but the comrades who don’t want you, they’re afraid you’ll give us away to Pashov. The fascists are at their most merciless now, since they see that the end is near, and they’re killing without judge or jury, all they need is a reason to suspect you. Since they know you aim to become his son-in-law, folks are afraid you’ll let some of our business slip in front of him and he’ll turn us over to the police. Everyone knows he’s a traitor, and they figure if we had partisans in these parts, they would’ve liquidated him by now. He won’t get off the hook later, either, but who can guarantee that he’ll keep silent until then? You can’t guarantee it either.” Stoyan was whispering, but his whisper was so maliciously loud and echoed so painfully in my brain that it seemed to me that it could be heard throughout the entire village. “He just might keep quiet, to save his skin, but only under the condition of marrying into our family. He’s hoping we’ll hush up his treachery. So tell me, does that young lady know you’re sick with TB?”

  “Of course she knows.”

  “Now that’s exactly what I wanted you to tell me, dearest brother, exactly that!” Stoyan said, and a diabolical smile twisted his face, which was burning as if from fever. “You’ve taught me everything, whatever I know in this world I learned from you. You’ve got my most sincere brotherly gratitude now and forever and ever, amen, as the priest would say. I don’t dare try to teach you anything, but I’ll ask you, I’ll just ask you, what girl would want to join her life to a sick man? Why, and for how long? You think your Nusha doesn’t know about her father’s sins? Not only does she know, but she’s been instructed in detail to keep up her affair with you. If you recover, you’ll recover no sooner than a year and a half from now, that’s what the doctors say, isn’t it? The war’ll be over in a few months, not more, and we’ll start building a new life, and folks like Petar Pashov will just go on living their lives, safe and sound. It’s not surprising they’d try to think up some contributions to the cause. Isn’t their son a communist? Yes, he’s a communist, but where is he? If he’s the great communist they make him out to be, what government would give him a passport to go abroad and why would
they give it to him? But if you don’t recover…what I’m trying to say…Sorry, I’m speaking to you for the last time and I’m obliged to say everything, absolutely everything. If you don’t recover, it won’t be any sooner than a year and a half, and things still come out all right for the Pashovs…I’m trying to say that if you die, you’ll die because of that woman, because of her you didn’t go get treatment and stayed here in this hellhole. So let’s say that one day you get married and start living together, what will people say then? Those Kralevs have been talking about class war since who knows when, and now they’ve taken a rich man’s daughter into their family, the daughter of an ideological enemy and a traitor, at that. How will you face the world then? Everything we’ve achieved over all these years, you’ll destroy it because of one woman, you’ll disgrace your ideals and your honor as a communist. Go ahead, go on over to Petar Pashov, and warn him to watch out, and just throw us to the wolves. Maybe you’ve already let him in on some of our secrets…”

  Stoyan had grown hysterical and said much more than I can remember now, all of it feverish and rambling, he repeated the same things over and over, begged, threatened, and prophesied my ignoble end as a turncoat. When he finally left, I found the bear in the bushes and went back into the yard, but didn’t find Nusha there. Had she heard what my brother was saying and run away for good, or had she not dared to call out to me before she left? I went back to my room and didn’t come out for two days and two nights. I lay there, trying to read, thinking things over. Those were some of the worst days of my life. Just at the thought that I would never see Nusha again, my heart burst with pain, but I shouldn’t see her again. I couldn’t even tell her the real reason for our parting, because her father might take advantage of that. Whenever I thought about him and his son, I always told myself that I shouldn’t let prejudice get the best of me. I was a future lawyer or judge and I knew that I needed to judge myself and others with blindfolded eyes. I knew that every person to a greater or lesser extent was swayed by the power of suggestion, and I strained my will to guard myself against this weakness. Even back in high school our psychology teacher had done experiments with us to show us that people were influenced by suggestion. Once he had us sniff a test tube filled with some liquid. Thirty people – thirty different smells. But the test tube was filled with pure water.