Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  The events of September 9, 1944, found Marko and me doing our mandatory army service. He was serving in Varna, I was in Shumen. When we were discharged, the village was so stirred up that we could hardly recognize it. Our folks had been telling us regularly in letters everything that was going on, yet still we were surprised by the changes that had occurred and above all by the irrepressible political passions. Before September 9, only a few of the students had talked openly about their political convictions and two of them had landed in prison, several adults were known to be communists or Bulgarian Agrarian Union supporters, but now everyone had joined some kind of party. There were socialists and Zveno adherents, there were also radicals who had earlier not even heard of these parties, much less been familiar with their political platforms. They held meetings at their clubs, made decisions, accepted or expelled members, fought amongst themselves, and fought with the supporters of the other parties. Many skeletons were dragged out of the closet, old scores were settled, so much so that an outsider might have thought that our villagers were charging at each other with bayonets bared in a massive free-for-all. Later it became clear, however, that our local folks were not so socially and class-conscious so as to wish to slaughter one another. All this political hysteria was due to their fear of the cooperative farm. Many believed that if they didn’t join the communist party, but rather some other party, then the nationalization of land would somehow pass them by. Since the communist party made its own members join a common farm, let them do it with their land, landowners from other parties would keep working their land as they had until now. To protect themselves in this way, in many families fathers, sons, and brothers were members of different parties; they sold land or signed it over to heirs so they would owe less in state delivery quotas and fewer taxes.

  Kiro Dzhelebov was one of the few, if not the only person in the village, who steered clear of all political parties. If he was called to the pan-village meeting, he never refused to go, he would listen to what was said from start to finish and then he would go home. There were a dozen people who had to be handled more carefully due to their authority in the villagers’ eyes. It was thought that if they dug in their heels and refused to join the co-op as founders from the very beginning, they would make the others lose their nerve, and vice versa – if they joined, they would drag the others along after them. Stoyan Kralev ordered us to speak to these people almost allegorically on the question of collectivization, we needed ever so gently to “finagle” them, to flatter them and convince them that as good farmers in the co-op, they would also enjoy great respect. Kiro Dzhelebov had given us no reason to put him in the category of “tough nuts to crack,” he had never shown even the slightest hint, but his pensive attitude toward the events of those days of general overexcitement led us all to believe that it would be hard for him to decide to join the co-op or that perhaps he would never come to that decision. At the same time, however, all of us expected from him some pleasant surprise, namely that after thinking it over and considering the circumstances better than the others had, one day, perhaps the last day, or even at the last minute of the meeting in which the co-op would be founded, he would rise up from the back row in the hall, where he always sat, and silently submit his application to join. With these divergent feelings toward him, Stoyan Kralev gave me very detailed instructions to finagle him ever so gently and to win him over to our side at all costs.

  “I don’t need to tell you what kind of man he is, you know him best. They’re your people, you know how to talk to them, get to work!”

  Stoyan Kralev assigned me this task with a sense of certainty that obliged me, and the very next day I found an excuse to stop by to see Kiro Dzhelebov. Everyone knew that we young propagandizers considered the number of people each of us got to join the co-op as a matter of prestige, and that propagandizing itself had its romantic side for us. Our local folks, so divided in their support of various political parties and so suspicious of one another, unexpectedly showed a united front against us, yet we ourselves turned into phantoms and found holes through which we slipped into their homes. We found ourselves in various situations, most of them unpleasant, some sent us away with kind words, others threw us out with curses and set their dogs on us, they stymied us with questions that Marx himself wouldn’t have been able to answer, they laid traps for us. We responded to all this with the patience of missionaries inducted into the great mystery and set out with unprecedented self-abnegation to share this mystery with the poor of spirit; we knew our jaws should never stop flapping at top speed under any circumstances. For the “village masses,” in other words, everyone but the dozen people mentioned earlier, Stoyan Kralev gave us clear and firm instructions. “Once you’ve got your hands on him, don’t let him go until he softens up. Wherever you meet him – on the street, in the fields, in the tavern – you’ll tell him the advantages of collective farming over private farming, about the exploitation by the estate-holders and kulaks, and most of all about the prosperity of the Soviet kolkhoz members. Keep the declaration in your pocket – if he says ‘yes,’ give it to him to sign!” And we carried out his instructions with the greatest enthusiasm and delight. Everything that we had read and heard about the Soviet kolkhozes we retold to the villagers so graphically and with such inspiration it was as if we ourselves had become grain producers, stockbreeders, and machine operators. And so as not to leave the slightest hint of doubt in their mistrustful souls, at the end we flung before them the final and most shattering argument for the prosperity of the kolkhoz workers, precisely that the kolkhoz members at the end of the year take only a small part of their remuneration, because this small part is so large that it is enough to satisfy all their needs. What’s more, the kolkhoz member can use as much as he wants of the common property. That means if somebody feels like slaughtering ten chickens today, he can go ahead and slaughter them and nobody will stop him, but he wouldn’t do it anyway, he wouldn’t cause harm to his comrades, because he is a conscious Soviet man, the new man, and so on and so forth.

  Kiro Dzhelebov was shoveling manure in his backyard. Stripped down to his shirtsleeves and shod in old galoshes, with his pant legs rolled up, he was jabbing the metal pitchfork into the thick pulpy mash and throwing it into an oxcart. Steam was rising from the dung heap and the astringent scent of aged manure hung in the air, several chickens were right at his feet, getting in his way, and every time he lifted the pitchfork they lunged forward greedily to peck at the worms. He carefully pushed them aside, scolding them like mischievous, gluttonous children: “Don’t poke around in there, you’ll be skewered on my pitchfork before you can say boo! You’re pecking around with those busy beaks of yours and still there’s no filling you up. Shoo, get out of my way!”

  Absorbed in his work, he only saw me when he heard the garden gate creak, he stuck the pitchfork into the dung heap and came to meet me.

  “I won’t shake your hand,” he said, “because my hands aren’t clean, but it’s sure good to see you! I was thinking to take a little manure to the fields near the grove. This year I planted it with sunflowers, but on one end they didn’t grow worth a darn. I said to myself, the place is on a slope, and the rains have washed away the soil, so why don’t I toss down a cartload or two of manure? Come on inside, your auntie Tanka will treat us to a bunch of grapes or the like.”

  At that moment Auntie Tanka came out onto the veranda, saw me, and invited me into the house. I told her I had just stopped by for a bit on my way to somewhere else, but in the next few days I would come to visit them properly. She started hanging braids of onion and garlic under the eaves of the veranda, while her husband and I stayed by the dunghill. I asked him if he had gotten a letter from Marko, who had been a student in Sofia for two months, I asked him about his other sons as well. He said Marko wrote regularly, that he was doing fine, he was living with another young man from a village near Plovdiv. He had enrolled in agronomy. Before leaving for Sofia, he had thought to study at the polytechnical institu
te, but when he got there he decided to sign up for the agronomy department. Well, since he wants agronomy, let him study agronomy, that’s his business. We sent him a little package the other day with this and that so he can eat a square meal now and then, since the food in Sofia was a bit scarce. Anyo was slogging away in his military service, and Dimcho would graduate from the Model Estate Institute this year, God willing.

  While he was telling me about his sons in a few short phrases, as one gives short reports to outsiders, Kiro Dzhelebov unwittingly took up the pitchfork, and while tossing manure into the cart, he started talking about the chickens, who were pecking for worms at his feet: “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the chicken is as greedy as a goat. If you leave a goat to graze all day, it’ll never get full, while a chicken will keep pecking away with its beak from morning till night like a sewing machine. From the looks of it, its throat isn’t even the size of your hand, but there’s no filling it. Especially this one here, the red one, a Stara Zagora breed, it’s always got its eye on the grain. The Rhode Island breed eats less, but grows bigger. Whatever it pecks up goes straight to its back. The Plymouth Rock is the same. Whereas the Leghorn is better for laying eggs. It more or less lays eggs year-round, and every day at that. Only you’ve got to feed it milk sops and mix in a little chicken feed or sunflower. They don’t lay eggs well on corn or other grains. A chicken’s a chicken, but it still wants things just so. But at any rate, a chicken is soil’s worst enemy. Let it rove around the garden for a week, who knows what it does to the soil, but if you don’t fertilize afterward with manure, you can kiss next year’s crop goodbye.”

  After this short but exhaustive lecture on poultry farming, Kiro Dzhelebov brought over the oxbow that had been leaning against the cattle shed and set about putting it on the cart shaft, I wished him a good day and left. I hadn’t been expecting to have any particular success in my mission, because I knew the first meeting was only the beginning, yet I still had the feeling that it would keep getting harder and harder for me to meet up with him. It seemed to me that I would insult his dignity if I set about trying to convince him to turn his life upside down by giving up private property in the same way as I had been convincing the other farmers. I could go see Salty Kalcho, for example, whenever I wanted to, or I could stop him in the street. At first he flat out refused to hear about “that there durn co-op,” but gradually he got drawn into the conversation and when I managed to convince him (and I always managed to convince him) that on the common farm all the fieldwork would be done with machines, he would simple-heartedly exclaim: “Well, that sounds mighty fine!” However, as soon as I handed him the membership declaration to sign, he would reply: “That’ll happen when the time is right, it’ll happen, don’t you worry!” And he really did become a founding member of the cooperative farm. I saw Zhendo Ivanov several times a day, because our two families essentially shared the same yard, which was symbolically divided by a rotting, thorny hedge. For many years, I, like everyone in the village, didn’t know why they called him “the Bandit,” especially since he was a respectable and hardworking farmer. Clearly his christener had heard a little something about his biography during his younger years, but since Zhendo came from a different village and had never once showed his “bandit” character, we all thought he had been given this nickname by mistake. Only a few days before the wolf hunt did I find out why the local folks called him “the Bandit.” I had “stopped by” his place, we had a few drinks as is only fitting, and fell into a long and involved conversation. The wall across from me had an open cupboard built into it, in which had been placed some kitchen utensils and, among them, a rusty revolver. I picked up this antique to look at it and then Zhendo told me his story, which we already know. Whether what he told me was true in its details, whether he wasn’t attributing others’ feats to his own name so as to sound more interesting – that doesn’t really matter much. The important thing is that even if he had made up the story from beginning to end, he told it as his own and insisted that I believe every word of it. All signs indicated that he had decided suddenly and unexpectedly, even to himself, to reveal his life’s “secret,” which he had for years been hiding “under his tongue.” This is precisely what made the strongest impression on me. Much later it occurred to me that he had told me his life story only a few days before the wolf hunt, and I found in his confession a tragic omen.

  Nikolin Miyalkov and four more of my “parishioners” signed membership declarations without dramatic agonizing, only Nikola Denev repeated one and the same question during every conversation of ours: “So, we’ll plow up the dividing lines and all the little fields will become one big field, is that right?” Yes! “And we’ll drive all the livestock into a common barn, is that right?” Yes, we will. “And we’ll work together like one big family?” One night he disappeared with his wife and two children without telling anyone. He had three acres of land which he left to the future farm and kicked off the wave of migration to the cities. “Is that right?”

  My work with these people was not easy, my determination to undermine the foundations of their patriarchal way of life led them to keep their distance from me, they were worked up and curious, they asked, argued, rejected, and threw me out or else like sick men sought me out to give them relief. (“You’re one of our boys, well educated, I’m joining the co-op on your word, if you’re fooling me, sonny boy, you’ll be the one to blame!”) In a word, they let me get close to them. With Kiro Dzhelebov it was like knocking on an open door. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he refused to join the co-op, because he wouldn’t be the only one in the village refusing. What was painful about the situation was that he wouldn’t let me get close to him. The simplest thing to do would have been to ask him: Uncle Kiro, so on and so forth, what are your intentions regarding the cooperative farm? But I couldn’t do it. I was quite young, and my pride must have been too young and painfully sensitive for me to try to propagandize him, simply to risk him looking me in the eye and saying: “So that’s why you’ve been hanging around me – trying to teach me what to do.” Not only did my pride prevent me from “teaching” him, I also felt for him the feeling which they call “respect” and which is hard to explain. Even Stoyan Kralev felt it, in the beginning, and it’s no coincidence that he himself didn’t deal with him directly, but rather sent me to “sound him out,” and very carefully at that. “Sounding him out,” however, did not mean showing him that his way of life heretofore had been incorrect and depraved from the point of view of the new times and that everything he had built and looked after – his land, livestock, equipment – which bore the traces of his heart and soul, must be handed over to the cooperative farm today or tomorrow at the latest, just like that, suddenly, as if it had never been his.

  I had promised to come visit him and so I went, but again on my way elsewhere and just for a few minutes “because I’m busy with the upcoming meeting for founding the collective farm.” And other times, when I ran into him by chance, I was always saying that I couldn’t come visit him because from morning till night we were “rushing around” finishing tasks for the meeting, in the hopes that he would show some interest in such an important event, but he would always say: “Well, fine, when you’re free, stop by our place, Marko sends his greetings!” I wondered whether he didn’t realize that he was doomed as a private farmer, and if he did realize it, how he could keep his composure, when all around him life was roaring like the sea. Indeed, at that time he seemed like some sort of Gulliver, looking down from his gigantic height at the hundreds of little dwarves crawling around at his feet, stirred up by some worry of theirs, and he was being careful not to step on them. I also wondered whether he hoped that this common fate would pass him by, and if so, what his belief was based on. Stoyan Kralev, for his part, began asking me ever more often what was going on with “my man” and I would reply that my man was hesitating and still couldn’t make a decision. That’s how they are, Stoyan Kralev would say, citing the canons of class
theory, they’ve got to moan and groan before they crawl out of their petty bourgeois shell. Don’t leave him too much time to philosophize over it, work him over good and hard so he doesn’t think the party will be tickling him with a feather his whole life…

  I, however, didn’t know whether Kiro Dzhelebov was hesitating, or whether he even had an opinion about the future co-op at all. People wrongly believed that he and I were “close” and “on good terms.” Even our families hadn’t grown close, as one might have expected. Auntie Tanka would stop by our house now and then “to see what they would be sending to the schoolboys,” my mother would stop by their place in the same way. They were always promising to have a nice, long visit and they never quite got around to doing it. Kiro Dzhelebov had only once come to our house, for fifteen minutes, he and my father talked about our school business and he even declined to drink a glass of brandy. Both he and his wife were sitting as if on guard, as if they didn’t dare touch the objects around them, so as not to get dirty. They scorned our impoverished furnishings or didn’t want to worry us with their presence, since they noticed that my parents were indeed worried by their visit. Otherwise, Kiro Dzhelebov frequently came to our place, but only to the gate, he would put whatever my parents had prepared for me into the cart and take it to the city. In our apartment in the city, too, he was always “just passing through,” he would leave whatever he had brought and set out for the village again as soon as the horses were rested.