Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  My brother and I sought the answers to these questions together. However, no matter how much we racked our brains, we could not solve the mystery of Alexander Pashov. Our only hope was that he had “infiltrated” some foreign espionage agency and was waiting to be exposed so he could go home and contact his family. Fate had given me my life back, why shouldn’t it give me Lexy and brotherly love back as well? Nevertheless, fate turned out not to be so generous to me – after I recovered, Nusha fell ill with tuberculosis. Just as I, at the beginning of my illness, had refused to go get treatment at a sanatorium, she, too, categorically refused to leave her home. Both her mother and I, as well as the doctor, urged her in vain to go, she preferred to live alone in a hut in the woods, but she would not part from us. There could be no doubt that I had infected her. I had not been vigilant enough in my efforts to protect her and this tormented me terribly. Snow fell and the weather grew cold, but I went every day or every other day to her village to visit her, just as she had visited me when I was sick. My heart shriveled with pain as I saw her growing paler and coughing up blood more and more often, but she didn’t seem to be worried about her illness, since she, like me, would overcome it and recover. She believed this, and I believed it too, but there came the time when she no longer had the strength to move. I took her in my arms, carried her over to the open window, and held her in my lap. She had become a little girl with a pale, tiny face and delicate hands covered with a lacy network of veins, which made them look touchingly exquisite.

  “I’m not going to get better,” she would say with an indifference that showed that her thirst for life had died out. “Until recently I had some hope, but now I have no hopes for anything. Last night I dreamed of Lexy again. He was holding a wedding crown, he wanted to put it on my head, but I pulled away and he laughed. If I were healthy, we would get married, wouldn’t we? What would I have looked like as a bride? Mama has put together such a dowry for my wedding. Now she’ll have to give it to my cousin. That’s what I told her, and she started crying.”

  “Don’t hurry to give away your dowry, because I won’t marry you if you come with nothing,” I would reply. “I have nothing of my own, and if you come with no dowry, how will we get by?”

  “We just weren’t fated to be together, you and I, my dearest fiancé. Oof, I need to lie down, all my strength is gone. I can’t breathe. Help me get to the bed!”

  I grabbed her by the shoulders and she, slowly and hesitantly, like a baby taking its first steps, walked toward the bed. She lay down on the blanket, closed her eyes, and drifted off. Her mother appeared at the window and called me outside. She wanted me to get a bucket of water from the well, I brought the water and asked her to make up a bed for me in Lexy’s room, where I had been sleeping until now.

  “Go home, my son!” she said. “Come and eat now, then go home to sleep. Get some rest, then you’ll come back tomorrow. My sister and I will stay here with Nusha.”

  Early the next day, before noon, a villager from Zhitnitsa came. He climbed out of his cart, opened the gate to the yard, and started toward the house. I happened to be on the veranda and from the expression on his face, I realized that the worst had come to pass. Nusha didn’t experience the miracle I had had the year before. Her tuberculosis was a fast-moving case and it took her life in less than a year. It seems that her mother had foreseen the end, which is why she had sent me home to rest and gather my strength. I spent the following night with Nusha. Around nine o’clock in the evening, when the others had left and it was just the three of us – Nusha’s mother, her aunt, and myself – I asked the two women to go rest in the other room. They were worn out from exhaustion and grief, her mother in particular could hardly stay on her feet. They went into the other room and seemed to fall asleep, while I was left alone with Nusha. She was lying on the same table where her deceased father had lain two years ago, her coffin, too, was made of the same roughly hewn pine boards. I was sitting next to her, looking at her and thinking that I never would have expected to sit next to a dead person and feel a strange sort of peace. It seems my feelings were blunted from stress and pain, I was gripped by a spiritual desolation, yet my mind was working as usual, perhaps it was even sharper and quicker. For example, I was thinking that in the final words spoken to us by our dearest one, we must find some deep, ambiguous meaning or enigma, which, after their death, we must puzzle out and interpret as a legacy. This is what literature leads us to expect, but I nevertheless found that the final words Nusha had said to me were so simple and insignificant in comparison to the feelings we felt for each other: “Help me reach the bed!” No matter how much I tortured myself, I could not find any particular meaning in those words. Then I remembered Devetakov’s notes, which I had found in his books. He wrote that death made life meaningless. When I was sick, I had known that I was doomed, and if I had had some hope, it was only one percent. Despite that, I didn’t think about death, I didn’t believe that I would die. I believed it in my mind, but not with my heart. I sometimes fell into deep, agonizing despair, but my thirst for life was so strong that it conquered the despair. Some inner force was pushing me onward toward the future and I forgot that death was inevitable. If I were to fall now into a similar despairing state, I surely would not survive.

  But that night, as I was watching over the dead Nusha, I truly believed that death made life meaningless. What did it matter that Nusha was nineteen years old, beautiful, innocent, filled with light and joy, that she looked upon the world with angelic eyes, with selflessness and love? What did it matter that with her love she had perhaps brought me back to life, while she herself fell victim to her love’s excess? What was the use of all these feelings and romantic yearnings, these hopes, these sufferings and joys, since they had to disappear once and for all? The phenomenon of death stood before me like a painful puzzle and I could not make sense of it. I could not understand how her eyes, which only last night had warmed my soul with a single glance, and filled me with happiness and faith, had now had their light extinguished forever; how her voice, so ringing that it pierced my whole soul, had now fallen silent; how her lips, from which I had heard so many tender things, had now gone cold and not a word nor a smile would ever come from them again.

  While I was looking at her face, deep within myself I could not accept that she was dead. Despite death’s cruel obviousness, in my heart a small seed of hope sprouted that Nusha was not dead, that it was impossible that she was dead. Could she have fallen into a coma? I thought, and how could I check? I looked for a mirror in the room to hold before her lips, but couldn’t find one, I took the candle from her hands, blew it out and set it on a plate. I wanted to check her pulse, but then it seemed to me that her temple was throbbing, while her face took on a gentle rosiness. Her eyelashes slowly opened, she rose up from beneath the flowers and sat in the coffin. She looked all around and then fixed me with a puzzled smile.

  “What am I doing in this coffin? You didn’t think that I’d died? Good God!…I was just really tired and fell asleep. Don’t look at me so scared like that! I just fell asleep, and you prepared me for burial.”

  “Yes, we thought you were dead, Nusha. For half a day you didn’t give any signs of life. But I didn’t believe you were dead, Nusha. I just wanted to check your pulse and you woke up.”

  “Oh, I love you so much!” she said. “I’ve never told you before how much I love you, have I? More than anything in the world. More than anything in the world…Please, take me in your arms. I want you to carry me around the room a bit.”

  I carried her around the room, and she pressed her sweet little face to mine and seemed to drift off. Oh God, oh God, she said at one point, but that was not her voice, but her mother’s. I had fallen asleep with my head lying by the coffin, her mother was standing next to me, saying:

  “Oh God, oh God, my sister and I fell asleep, and when I came in here I saw that you had dozed off too. Oh my son, what anguish has come down on us!”

  I had not promised never
to forget Nusha, but it so happened that even now, twenty-five years after her death, I am living with her memory. In the first years after her death I could even imagine someday getting married and having a family. Later, when the pain had dulled a bit, this thought passed through my head, especially on lonely days, but my memories of Nusha were so fresh that I saw her as if alive between me and the woman with whom in my imagination I could replace her in my heart. Our relationship had remained platonic, I hadn’t even dared to kiss her on the lips, so as not to infect her with my illness, yet she had been ready to follow a doomed man until his dying breath. No, I could not fool myself, as well as some other woman, especially if she turned out to be good and honorable…

  In the autumn of the following year, the collective farm fell apart. The impoverished collective hadn’t inspired my confidence and I shared this with my brother, which became grounds for our relationship to become strained once again. I insisted that he shouldn’t rush to found another collective, since the poor villagers didn’t possess enough land or good livestock or tools. When one hundred paupers band together, they don’t become rich, unless they have something that gives them an advantage over the private farmers, for example, machines. With shrewd foresight, Stoyu Barakov had already sold his threshing machine, seeder, harvester, and tractor around the Ninth, and now the collective farmers worked using antediluvian plows, seeded by hand, and threshed with threshing boards. There were not any common barns yet and everyone wanted to work with his own livestock and look after it at home. I kept the collective’s books and saw that the situation was catastrophic – a day’s labor came out to eighteen cents in the money of that time and the co-op members survived by payments in kind. In the days when the collective fell apart, Stoyan happened to be in Sofia taking courses. When he got back, there was no longer any collective, all the members had taken their livestock and their tools back home. The common property remained only on the books, over which I had racked my brains whole nights at a time. Things were in a complete jumble, which took us months to untangle.

  Stoyan had come back from the city via the bus to Zhitnitsa and from there had walked home on foot. It was around ten o’clock at night when he entered the party clubhouse. He saw that the light was on, so he stopped by. I had kept him constantly informed about the state of the co-op, about all the failures that were piling up day by day over the course of a year and a half, he himself knew everything, but when I told him that the people had ransacked the inventory and made off with the tools and livestock, he became hysterical. He shouted only: “Why did you let that happen?” His face went pale, he was shaking, his legs gave way, he sat down on the floor and began kicking like an angry child and screaming himself hoarse. I was stunned, I tried to pull him to his feet, but he lay down on his back, started kicking again and shouting even more loudly: “They’ll all bring it back, they’ve signed membership declarations, they’re obligated to come back!” He went on like this for several minutes, then he went silent and got up. His face was bathed in tears and, so that I couldn’t see, he turned his back to me and shouted: “To put so much into something and everything just goes to hell! Why? Because we didn’t put the screws on them, we didn’t show the necessary harshness. First thing tomorrow we start working on reestablishing the collective!”

  And indeed, the very next day everything capable of propagandizing a return to the collective farm was called to heel: elderly men and women, young men and girls, children and teachers. Ivan Shibilev (if he was in the village), Kichka, Mona Koynova, the teachers, and I held rallies and performances several times, we also held parties and working bees. Stoyu Barakov also joined the propaganda efforts. Circumstances had worked out such that he was forced to hand over his land with a smile on his face. Who knows what kind of tremor was shaking him inwardly, but outwardly he looked happy that his son’s ideas were finally being put into practice. He was talkative, he took the floor at every meeting, inviting the people to join the collective farm. What an ironic twist of fate, I thought to myself, while listening to his long-winded, tiresome speeches. The most prominent enemy of the new government and a criminal was preaching socialism and acting as a benefactor for the future cooperative farm because he was giving the most land. The former co-op members met us in their homes anxious and guilty, they hemmed and hawed, complained of their poverty, but they wouldn’t hear a word about rejoining the collective. “We’ve already gotten burned by the co-op, let others join it now, and when we see that it’s good, we’ll join up too” – that’s what they all said, as if taking the words right out of each other’s mouths. They were dejected from the arguments and losses when the co-op fell apart, and in that state, it was better if we left them alone, at least for a while, all the more so because we failed in our mission, and it was precisely their loss.

  But my brother was inexorable and inexhaustible. During the day, he would go around to houses, while in the evening he would call meetings. I would listen to him speak, and every time I was astonished by his will, energy, and enthusiasm. Only an incorrigible idealist with pure and strong impulses in his soul could so stubbornly defend the rightness of his deeds, without sparing his efforts, nerves, and health. But at the same time, he began losing patience and growing anxious. They called him in to the party’s regional committee once or twice a week, and after every return from there he would be even more impatient. The committee had declared autumn as the final deadline for the reestablishment of the cooperative farm, they wanted to send their own representative to the village to help him, which to him meant that they doubted his organizational abilities. The committee was constantly suggesting to him that he had to use a firmer hand, that he wouldn’t attract the hesitating villagers into the co-op with words alone, to say nothing of those who were outright opposed. He was forced constantly to dog them, to wrangle with them, and to put up with their hardheadedness and ignorance, and this filled him with disappointment and rage. “Why are these wretched folks giving us such a hard time?” he would ask sometimes in despair. “Why do they growl at us like a dog, as if we’re trying to take the bone out of its mouth? Why do they resist and not understand that all this is being done for their own good, and for their children’s future? No, I don’t have any strength left to argue with them. I can see it in their eyes, they’re afraid of me and hate me. I’d best go to the committee and say that I can’t do the task that’s been assigned to me. That they should appoint another party secretary or send a representative. I, too, need to sleep soundly for at least one night…”

  This is how he would bemoan the situation in moments of exhaustion, but shortly thereafter, abashed at his own chickenheartedness, he would claim that the co-op would be founded not by whining and giving up in the face of difficulties, but by firmness and perseverance. If we waited for those lacking class consciousness to awaken, or for the opposition members to hand over their property to the cooperative farm themselves, we’d be waiting until the second coming. Nothing’s going to get done with prayers, but with plows. That’s why we’re revolutionaries – to go before the others and to show them the way for a hundred years to come! This also determined his attitude toward the villagers – the attitude of an adult toward youngsters who needed their ears boxed when they didn’t listen or fathom their own futures. Only that sometimes he didn’t merely “box” the ears of the disobedient, but rather stretched them to the point of tearing them right off.

  At that time almost all the families sent their children to study in the cities, but to be accepted into high schools or the university, they had to present so-called Fatherland Front certificates attesting their political trustworthiness. I issued these certificates in my capacity as chairman of the Fatherland Front organization, but my brother began using them as a means of coercion against those parents who refused to join the co-op. Many of the young people were denied an education or finished their education after a few years’ interruption. The first young man to suffer in this way was Kuncho, who later became an associate pro
fessor in the Department of Physics and Mathematics. It turned out that as a first-year student in high school, he had been a brannik, a member of the fascist youth league, for half a year. The branniks championed a Greater Bulgaria that stretched from “the Danube to the Aegean Sea,” but it wasn’t their patriotic ideals that might cause a young boy from the village to fall into their ranks. Before September 9, the communist youth league, the legionnaires, and the branniks all competed to recruit “cadres” from among the newly arrived students. Those village youths who found themselves in the city without a prior political orientation often ended up in an absolutely unsuitable organization. This was the case with Kuncho as well. We would never have found out about his brannik past if he himself had not later talked about his political ignorance. My brother, however, took advantage of his openness and blacklisted him. Kuncho’s father dug in his heels, spent three whole years outside the cooperative farm, and Kuncho entered the university three years later than he should have.

  My brother found many other ways of putting the screws to people when they didn’t want to join the co-op. One of the surest means for putting pressure on one of the wealthier villagers was to declare him a kulak. These wealthy villagers had about twenty-five acres of land each and had never used hired hands, but when necessary had practiced medzhiya – two or three families would join together to finish some fieldwork more quickly. The kulak had been declared the most notorious enemy of the people and socialism, and we never missed a chance to mock and stigmatize him in our speeches, propaganda campaigns, and theatrical performances.