“I got this two days ago. I went to the city to mail him a letter. To wish him a Happy New Year. There’s a clerk at the city post office, a relative of your auntie Tanka’s, when a letter comes from him she sets it aside and gives it to me directly. The local folks here would open it up and rake me over the coals. You’ve got a letter, the woman said, read it, then send what you’re going to send. I sat down and read the letter. Marko wrote that he was sick. He’d been having pain in his chest for more than two years, now he was in the hospital and didn’t know when he would get out. I read the letter and the woman called to me through the window. You just got a telegram as well, she said. It was clear she was trying to prepare me for the worst and that’s exactly what it was. I hid the telegram and as of now, no one knows anything. I don’t want them either to feel sorry for me or to rub their hands with glee. I haven’t told his mother or his brothers. Let them think that he’s alive and well. I will bury him in my heart all by myself, I’ll be his priest, I’ll be his grave. He had an unlucky fate. And now I’ll never see his children. Their mother’ll turn them into Germans by the time they’re grown up. As of now, both of them know some Bulgarian. The older one is named after me – Kiril. He writes a real fine Bulgarian, as if he had gone to school here. Grandma and Grandpa, he writes, why don’t you come visit us, we’ve got a car, we’ll take you around everywhere. Marko always wanted to work the land and he was working the land there. Whether he himself earned it, or whether it was his wife’s land, I don’t know. He just wrote that he had a small estate of around twenty-five acres. Here he is in a picture that he sent us two years ago.”
The color photo he handed me was taken such that the viewer could see very well as much of Marko’s prosperity as possible. He and his wife were sitting on chairs in a yard awash with flowers and greenery, the children were sitting in front of them on the grass. Behind them their house with its veranda and pointed roof could be seen, beyond the house, under the eaves of some outbuilding stood a blue car and a small tractor the color of a tomato. Both children were dark like their father, while the mother was light blond, almost as white as an albino.
We heard footsteps on the stairs outside, my host grabbed the photo out of my hands and put it in the drawer of the table and signaled to me to keep what we had been talking about a secret. Auntie Tanka came in, saw me, and cried in her ringing voice: “Well, look who came to visit us! Good God, we had guests and here I was fiddling around in the village! I went to the store to get this and that, then I stopped by my sister Ivana’s, as she’s a little under the weather.” She set what she had been carrying on the table and fixed her kerchief. “Now let me give you a proper welcome!”
She held out her hand, as the village women do in greeting, and I kissed it. I always reminded her of Marko, I could see the grief rising in her eyes, but she, like her husband, never spoke of him. I wanted to tell her that I was glad to see her so spry and healthy, but she stepped toward me, got up on her tiptoes and silently kissed my left shoulder. This simple woman’s gentle gesture touched me, I put my arms around her head and gently stroked it, she let out a sob, covered her face with her hands, and tears sprang out from between her fingers.
“I dream of him every night! Dressed in white clothes, with red flowers in his hands…”
“Come on now, don’t wail as if for the dead, it’s downright sinful!” her husband scolded her. “Folks haven’t come to visit to hear about your worries! Go get us something to eat.”
“Fine, fine, fiiine,” Auntie Tanka said with quiet reproach, and left the room. “We always have to keep silent, always keep silent. How hard your heart must be! Drink another round, I’ll be right back with food.”
“Women! It’s just like them to bawl over anything and everything,” Kiro Dzhelebov said as we sat back down at the table, as if he himself hadn’t been crying just a few minutes earlier. “No one’s eternal in this world. A man is born wrapped in a black sash and as long as he’s alive he has to deal with all sorts of things. It’s easy to deal with the good stuff, but with the bad, you’ve got to go out and meet it. Either you tackle it or it tackles you, but you can’t live just sitting there with your hands in your pockets…Help yourself to some more sausage, we’ll be eating in just a bit. The food is ready, Auntie Tanka cooked before she went out. Come on now, cheers! I told you, didn’t I, that this is last year’s wine, I’ll open up this year’s one of these days. This year the grapes were late, but sweet. Forty days I waited for the must to clear up, it was just bubbling away…”
It was not difficult to guess that he was talking to me about the vineyard, the wine, and other things so as to erase the traces of the sentimentality he had shown earlier. In just a single minute he had managed to give his face such a calm expression that if I hadn’t read the message about Marko’s death, I would have no idea of the anguish he was going through. Auntie Tanka soon set the table. She, like her husband, had managed to change the expression on her face, she was smiling, as befit a hospitable host, and was constantly urging me to help myself to everything.
“Why, you eat no more than a sparrow, my boy! Eat up, eat up!”
This lunch was a difficult ordeal for me, and as they say in the village of such cases, I had to carry all the food on my back. I swallowed with great effort and said whatever came to my head, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was at a wake after a funeral and that I was a coconspirator in a terrible secret which Marko’s mother had managed to uncover through the mysterious conjectures of her heart and only out of respect for me was she not giving free reign to her grief. In her husband’s silence there was a desperate pride, and in my hypocrisy – a sacrilege against her deep and holy grief. At the very start of the lunch I had announced that I needed to get ready to travel, and as soon as lunch was over, I got up from the table. Auntie Tanka started bewailing the fact that she hadn’t had time to get a gift ready for my trip back to Sofia, she hunted through the house and in the end thrust a few links of fresh flat sausage into my hands. I took my leave of her on the stairs, while Kiro Dzhelebov saw me out to the street.
“I beg your pardon for burdening you with our problems, but that’s how it worked out,” he said, holding out his hand to shake mine. “But if the weather turns bad and you can’t travel, come down to the horemag Sunday morning, we’ll be holding Holy Communion with the new wines.”
I went back to the old house of my aunt, who still lived in the village. She had lit the iron stove, it was warm in the room, it smelled of fresh-split logs and herbs, while outside snowflakes were already swirling and a strong wind bent the branches of the trees. I lay down on the colorful cover of the bed and tried to read, but by the very first page I couldn’t concentrate and set the book aside. I thought about Marko, deceased, and saw him at different ages, from a child until the day he had taken that photo with his family. I knew that we had been sitting side by side since first grade, but I remembered him from second grade, when Pesho the schoolteacher came into class one day with Miss Hortensia and lined us up along the wall for a checkup. It had to be the beginning of the school year, because I remember we all had brown stains on our hands and mouths from the unripe walnuts, while our newly shaved heads shone like tin-plated bowls. Pesho the schoolteacher ordered us to unbutton the collars of our shirts and to take off our left shoes and socks, took the pointer from the blackboard, and started off down the line. First of all he inspected our necks and ears for grime, then checked our collars for lice, and finally our hands and feet for untrimmed nails. For untrimmed nails and a grimy neck you got three switches to the palm, for lice – five. The more chickenhearted among us started crying even before he wound up to strike, and hid their hands, but the inveterate defender of hygiene grabbed the crying children’s hands, turned their palms up and delivered the necessary number of blows. He had been teaching since the school had opened, and in the village, from the children up to the grandmothers and grandfathers, there wasn’t a single person who hadn’t been beaten by him at
least once. As the doyen of the teaching staff, he was given the honor of carrying out this execution and he carried it out so conscientiously and impeccably that Miss Hortensia burst into tears and left the room. In those days of campaigns against filthiness, especially at the beginning of the school year when we arrived at school straight from the fields as wild and headstrong as the livestock we had spent the summer with, in the classrooms you could hear screams like those during a police interrogation, after which we all ran home to our houses. Till late in the evening a fire would be burning in every yard, our mothers would strip us naked, delouse us, wash us, and scald our clothes in a cauldron.
I remember Marko from that day, perhaps because he alone out of all those singled out for punishment instead received praise. Pesho the schoolteacher scrutinized him for quite some time, surprised, and perhaps disappointed, that for the first time in his long years of teaching, he could not make use of his rights as executioner. He stripped him naked to the waist, inspected his clothes down to the last seam, but his unprecedented cleanliness was irrefutable and in the end he was forced to point him out as an example before the whole school. As a student, however, Marko did not stand out, he had neither failures nor great successes, with effort and diligence he passed from grade to grade with Cs and sometimes even Bs. Our friendship was not completely disinterested, but was nonetheless mutually beneficial. I soon noticed that Marko would glance at my notebook and during recess he would ask me about the lesson for the next class. I would tell him what I knew, while he would return the favor however he could – sometimes by giving me an eraser or his pocketknife, which was linked to his pocket with a little chain. In late autumn and winter there were days and weeks when the village was sunk in mud and snow. Our fathers carried us to and from school on their backs. We brought our lunches in bags and at lunchtime we all ate at our desks. For lunch, Marko brought a piece of banitsa, a slice of grilled meat, a bit of sausage, butter or cheese, and I would start glancing at his feast, just as during class he glanced at my notebook. I was most interested in his bread, usually the heel of a big, fluffy loaf with a pinkish crust and soft as cotton. Because of that bread I began to put more systematic effort into Marko’s education. I would test him on the following lesson, I helped him do his homework, while his menu became ever more varied and plentiful, he would place it on the middle of the desk and invite me to help myself, and so I would. Thus from a very early age I started selling my intellectual labor to satisfy my most vital material needs.
When the time came to go to high school, Kiro Dzhelebov himself suggested that Marko and I live together in an apartment. The boys are used to being together here, let them live together in the city as well, he said, but his offer was hardly the result of sentimental motives, especially since other boys, and wealthier ones at that, would also go to study at the high school. He was a fair to middling farmer, he showed a certain indulgence to our family, yet it seemed that he had valued the help I had given his son in primary school and hoped that I would “prop him up” in high school as well. In any case, they found us an apartment, bargained with the landlords so we could eat with them, discussed how much and which foodstuffs to deliver, then he and my brother left, and on that day Marko and I became high school students.
The city didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Marko or at least it didn’t change his way of life. Right after the very first day he wrapped all his textbooks and notebooks in blue paper, stuck labels on them, and arranged them in one corner of the cupboard; after dinner he looked over his lessons and went to bed. In the morning he got up an hour earlier than me and shined his shoes, brushed his clothes off, washed at the fountain in the yard, and then woke me up. And that’s how it was for the five years we lived together. Marko didn’t demonstrate any particular talents in high school, either, and never budged a bit from his C average. Like a good parent who gives equal attention to each of his children, he equally distributed his efforts over all his subjects as if having weighed them on a pharmacist’s scale; thus on his report cards and later on his high school diploma, his results were written in the form of a column of Cs. This column of Cs was like a chain made of identical links and gave the impression of mediocrity, but also of proverbial persistence and spiritual resolve. His father, who was otherwise ambitious and demanding in his work, did not go after his son to try for better grades. When you set your mind to some task, he would say, it gets going on its own and sooner or later brings you success.
During the vacations and especially the summer vacations, Marko spent more time in the fields than at home, dressed like the illiterate village boys, in a simple shirt, leather sandals, and a straw hat on his head. They had around fifteen acres of “well-tended fields” and he, like his father, felt himself to be the true master of this land. In the last year of high school, his younger brother also came to study with us, and his youngest brother had finished middle school, so the family had four fully capable workers. Kiro Dzhelebov could rely on any one of them, even the youngest, who was not yet strong enough for the hoe or the scythe, yet who could look after the livestock no worse than adult farmers. In the fields Kiro Dzhelebov would reap in the center to keep the rows straight, while his sons would work to his left, both stripped to the waist “city style,” tanned and as husky as grown men. If rain hadn’t fallen the previous day, the three of them would stay to sleep in the fields. They would eat supper in the dark, spread sheaves of wheat beneath the pear tree, and immediately fall asleep. The youngest, Dimcho, would go to graze the horses in the Inferno and would sleep there with the other horse herders, and in the morning he and his mother would bring food to the fields. Kiro Dzhelebov would wake up several times during the night, he would check to see how the boys were sleeping, would guess what time it was by looking at the stars, and would lie down again, but he always slept with one eye open. He would have vague dreams and at the same time he would hear the sounds of the night, he would catch the scent of the grasses, the wheat, and the land. And that’s how he would pass the night until the first hoarse and sleepy rooster’s crow came from the village. He would get up quietly, so as not to wake the boys, who were sleeping soundly with their eyes tightly shut, and would go to the other end of the field to pull up grass to bind the sheaves. In the east, the dark blue of the sky would be growing ever paler, spilling over into purple, pink, and finally golden yellow. During that time he would be twisting grass into rope and as soon as he went to put it under the pear tree, the boys would hear his footsteps and would jump to their feet like soldiers at attention. Sleep a while longer, it’s still early, he would say to them, but the boys were already splashing their faces with water from the jug and grabbing their scythes. In the first few days of the harvest their hands got blisters and bled, in the morning they could hardly open their fingers, but instead of complaining they joked that they had become delicate city ladies. They had been used to working hard since they were children and patriarchally revered their parents, who suffered so much deprivation on their account. At home, in the fields, or wherever they were, as soon as their mother or father appeared they were on their feet, they never reached out for food at the table before their parents did, and did not take any liberties in their presence. Kiro Dzhelebov did not bore them with lectures about the benefits of hard work, since he was convinced that a person would not fritter away whatever strength and ability he was given. They, for their part, never asked him for money or clothing, because they knew he would give each of them what they needed when the time was right. Consanguine solidarity made them trust one another and they had no memories of any arguments or spats within the family.
They would have reaped a row or even two by the time the sun was up. An ethereal twilight hung over the field, tiny droplets of dew glittered on the ears of wheat, the quails tried to outsing one another right at the boys’ feet. The three of them hurried to finish before the heat and worked in silence, while behind them the sheaves of wheat stacked up, as neat and orderly as skeins of wool. A
nd when the sun rose a bit in the sky, now shrunken and red-hot with fury, their cart would appear on the road. The youngest brother, Dimcho, would be driving the horses, while their mother would be sitting in the middle of the cart making sure the pots of food didn’t spill. She, too, got up at the first rooster’s crow and set about lighting the stove, milking the cow and buffalo, then driving them out to meet the cowherd, feeding the chickens, and finally making food for the fields. By the time the men got back to the pear tree, by the time they washed up, she would have spread a tablecloth in the shade and arranged the dishes she had cooked at the crack of dawn: chicken stew, yogurt, banitsa, cucumbers, wild plum compote or water with grated garlic, sugar, and vinegar to slake their thirst, all of it in pans, in earthenware dishes and pots, wrapped in white strips of cloth or covered over with pumpkin leaves. The boys ate like wolves, she would peck at the food, just enough so as not to be sitting there twiddling her thumbs, and she never took her eyes off them, as she had no other chance to get her fill of watching them. In the morning they got up early, in the evening they came back when it was dark, and before she knew it the summer would turn to autumn rain and they would be putting on their school uniforms and leaving for the city.
“Why are you sitting off to the side there? What, did you cook just for us?” Kiro Dzhelebov would say, as he saw her barely pecking at the food like an uninvited guest.
“Don’t bother with me, you eat up, eat your fill, ’cause reaping is the hardest bit of fieldwork, you need your strength,” she would answer. “While I was cooking, I tried a bit of this, a bit of that, and got filled up before I knew it.”
All three of them were the spitting image of their father, dark with bristly black hair and bluish-green eyes, as hardworking and adept as he was. She caressed them in her mind and in her dreams, otherwise she didn’t dare touch them. Even the youngest didn’t allow any cuddling, he would frown, ashamed that the older boys might think he was still a child. One after another they passed: reaping, threshing, stacking, the Assumption with the first baskets of grapes, and before you knew it on September 14 early in the morning several carts would be driving the students off to Varna, Dobrich, Provadia. Kiro Dzhelebov was now sending off three students, two to Varna and the youngest to the Model Estate Institute near Ruse.
Wolf Hunt Page 51
