“You know my viewpoint on that question, it’s pointless to argue anymore,” Ilko said.
“Because you don’t want to dirty up your dainty little hands! You spew your liberal drivel to pass as the good guy. We’re the bad guys, because we force people to join the co-op. We make revolutions, while you sit around philosophizing about what’s violence and what’s not. Only a few short years ago you were saying morning, noon, and night that the truth is with the majority. With the majority! And that’s a fact. The fact is that now seventy percent of the villagers are co-op members, that means they’re the majority, the truth is on their side, reality about life is on their side. What does this truth oblige us to do? To totalize the co-op by the end of autumn, to not leave a single farmer outside it. Not a single one! That’s right. So now you know my ‘viewpoint’ on that question, it’s pointless to argue anymore. Brigadiers, stay here with me, the rest of you are free to go.”
At the same time, Kiro Dzhelebov climbed up to the second story of his house and sat down on the veranda. He flopped down into an old chair and felt a sharp pain in his back. He had just been stepping over the threshold of the party club when something hit him right there, between the shoulder blades. He went to turn around to see who had hit him and why, but at the same moment he realized that Stoyan Kralev’s curse had crashed down on his back like a heavy stone. His head was blazing with the effort of maintaining his self-control, so as not to go back to Stoyan Kralev and spit in his face. He felt dizzy, the ground was crumbling beneath his feet, the sun was rocking right above the upper edge of the village. He felt nauseous, the pain in his back pierced him like a knife. A tree was in the way right in front of his face and he recognized it – the old mulberry near the bend in the road – nausea welled up in him, he hugged the trunk of the mulberry tree and threw up. He realized he had given in to weakness and looked all around him to make sure no one was watching him. “I can’t go all soft like this,” he kept telling himself, “it’s downright shameful! What had to happen has happened, it’s not going to pass anyone by, it’s not going to pass me by, either.”
But bad luck always arrives early and catches us unprepared, even when we are expecting it. Kiro Dzhelebov knew that joining the co-op was inevitable, yet he turned out to be so unprepared for the event that it tore him out of his usual state. None of the village leaders had come to try to convince him, as they had with other private farmers, and this little by little had given him hope that the others’ fate would somehow pass him by. A completely nonsensical hope, but don’t we all know that we will die sooner or later, yet still don’t believe it? Besides that, it seems Kiro Dzhelebov was betting on the fact that two of his sons were studying at the university. Actually, that was the only thing that explained the village leaders’ loyal attitude toward him, and he believed they would leave him to work his land for another year or two, until his sons graduated. But now his turn had come and he lost his mental balance to such an extent that he didn’t suspect even in the slightest that Stoyan Kralev would insult him so cruelly at that moment of extreme agitation, and then expect him to change his opinion the next day. The fear that man had inspired in him for some time now, even if indirectly, now suddenly came flooding over him and was like a shock, such that he couldn’t find the strength to withstand it or to wait a few days at least, as Ilko had advised him. He went into the next room, where his sons kept their books on a small bookshelf, put the inkwell on the table, took a piece of graph paper, and started writing out his membership request to the co-op’s administrative council.
I wish to be accepted as a member of the Stalin Labor-Cooperative Agrarian Farm. I have seven acres of land and the following equipment and livestock, which as of tomorrow, September 11, 1950, I will turn over to the cooperative farm: 1 horse cart, 1 oxcart, 2 horses, 2 oxen, 1 cow, 28 sheep, 2 plows, 2 pigs weighing 130 lbs each. I obligate myself to…
Here the quill got stuck on the paper and dripped a large blotch of ink over the next word. He grabbed the inkwell, poured it over the paper, and left it lying on its side. The ink spread black over part of what was written and ran from the paper onto the tablecloth.
There was no one home. His wife had gone out somewhere, and his sons were harvesting sunflowers. They had about a quarter-acre left and had told him that they wouldn’t come home until they had finished harvesting it. They needed to leave for school in a few days, so they were looking to finish as much of the fieldwork as they could before then. This was the last thing he thought about the real world. He went out into the yard as if in a dream, passed through the garden, looked in at the birds, and then went under the awning of the summer kitchen. Various tools were lined up in the shed next to the oven so they would be close at hand, he took a spade and a hoe, put them over his shoulder, and went out through the garden gate. The sun had gone down, but a bright golden light was streaming from the sky, bathing the fields from end to end, the expanse echoed with the evening sounds of the village, the scent of lit hearths and the delicious aromas of food wafted through the air. Kiro Dzhelebov was walking in no particular direction through the unharvested cornfields, through the stubble fields and fallow land, he turned left and right and finally stopped in a melon patch that had already been harvested. He set the hoe down and started digging with the spade. The soil was crumbly and clean, the spade sank in up to its footrest and after fifteen minutes the pit was deep enough that when he stood in it, it reached his waist. He reached out, grabbed the hoe, and started filling in the hole, first of all toward his back, scooping in as much as he could without turning around, then along his sides, and finally in front of himself. When he had buried himself up to his waist, he threw the hoe, then tossed away the spade as well, crossed his arms over his chest and stood like that, buried and motionless, as if he had finished some ordinary bit of fieldwork and now needed to rest.
Auntie Tanka came home as the sun was setting and went about cooking dinner. If she had looked toward the garden gate when she came into the yard, she would have seen her husband with the spade and the hoe over his shoulder heading toward the fields, but she hurried to put what she was carrying in the lower room and went to the summer kitchen. While the food was stewing over the fire, she milked the cow, penned up the chickens, and by that time it was completely dark. The men would come back from the field any minute and she set the table so they could eat dinner right away and then lie down to rest. The boys came back from the field, unhitched the horses, put them in the barn, and went to the well to wash up. The well’s chain rang out with delicate glad tones and a moment later from beneath the earth came the rumble of the heavy wooden bucket as it plummeted down to the water. Auntie Tanka could hardly make out the boys’ profiles in the twilight, but she knew that it was the middle boy, Anyo, who had let the empty bucket down so recklessly. Two of them quickly turned the crank on the well, set the full bucket on the stone ring, stripped down to the waist, and started pouring water over each other’s heads. She could hear them snorting with satisfaction under the cool stream, they were talking, laughing, and slapping each other’s backs.
“Come on, you’ll catch cold!” Auntie Tanka shouted at them.
The boys dashed under the awning of the kitchen and simultaneously each took a towel from their mother’s hands. They dried off, got dressed, and looked impatiently toward the dinner waiting on the table. They combed their hair, sat down on either side of the table, but didn’t dare reach for the food without their father.
“Where’s Dad?” Anyo asked.
“What, he isn’t with you?” Auntie Tanka said. “Here I was thinking he had stayed in the barn with the livestock.”
“When it was still light he went to the village to get our Fatherland Front notes from Ilko.”
“Is that right? He must’ve gotten to talking to someone there. You go ahead and eat, don’t wait for him this time, he might be late.”
While the boys were eating voraciously, Auntie Tanka as always picked away at her plate like a guest, and wa
s telling them how Aunt Ivana had knit Anyo’s sweater. In the late afternoon she had gone to get it and Anyo needed to try it on now or tomorrow before they went out to the fields so if there was some problem it could be fixed. She wondered whether she hadn’t forgotten to get them some food ready for their trip, she asked them, too, and so it went during the whole dinner. At one point they heard a noise coming from the gate, the three boys stopped eating and stared in that direction, listening.
“Now what could be holding that man up, for crying out loud!” Auntie Tanka said. “Could they have roped him in to some meeting?”
The black cauldron over the fire came to a boil, Auntie Tanka poured the water into a washbasin and soaked the dishes in it. A cow mooed from the neighboring yard, most likely forgotten out on the street, the night grew lighter with the stars and they could see all the way to the end of the garden. A cold breeze blew, the boys fell to talking about their upcoming departure, they were yawning and looking toward the gate. Auntie Tanka washed the dishes and set two plates on the table – one with food, the other with bread – covered them with a towel, and left her hand resting on the plate with bread.
“Just look what time it is and your father still isn’t home!” she said quietly, looking toward the garden, which in the gleaming starlight appeared as if covered in a delicate frost. The boys turned to her and fell silent. She kept sitting there with her hand on the plate of bread, listening to the ghostly silence of the night.
“Well, go out and look for him in the village!”
The boys jumped up as one from the table and darted toward the street. Once they were out of sight, Auntie Tanka covered her mouth with her hand and rushed to the house. She dashed up the stairs in a single bound and peered into the three rooms: “Kiro, Kiro, are you here, did you fall asleep?” The beds were empty, but she ran her hand over them, then she got scared and went back out to the summer kitchen.
The boys soon returned out of breath. They had run to the horemag, to the town council building, to the party club and the store, everything was locked up, they only saw light coming from a single house. They stood there next to one another, shoulder to shoulder, not knowing what else to say to their mother.
“Dear God!” She sobbed and her face turned white as lime, lost its lively expression, and turned into an ugly mask foretelling horror.
“Oh no, oh no!” Marko said, with this exclamation confirming his mother’s terrible suspicions.
The boys only now noticed that her kerchief had fallen down around her shoulders, and saw in this a sinister omen. A few more seconds passed in this stupor, then the mother took the lamp down from the beam and headed toward the house. She was walking with an even, heavy step, and the yellow light did not flicker in her hand. Her sons followed her, as perhaps people had once followed their priestess in a midnight ritual procession. While they covered the thirty or so steps to the house, they could sense their mother transforming and becoming the head of the family, ready to lead in case of a misfortune, just as her husband had led them until now.
“We’ll look for him,” she said as they went into the middle room, as if sharing a family secret between four walls. “Find the lantern and light it!”
She wanted to say something more, but the ink stain on the paper caught her eye with its dark sheen. Her sons also noticed it. Marko cautiously righted the upset inkwell and went to the other side of the table to read what was written. Anyo tried to read it upside down, and their mother, her arms firmly crossed beneath her chest, looked from one to the other, to see which of the two of them would first read out loud what was written.
“A membership request to the administrative council of the cooperative farm,” Marko said. “But it’s not finished. He wrote a few sentences and then stopped. He accidentally spilled the inkwell on the paper and left it for tomorrow to rewrite it.”
Their father’s request reminded them of a suicide note, left unfinished in a fit of deranged impatience to put an end to one’s life; the overturned inkwell indisputably bore witness to his mental state when he had written “I obligate myself to…” and when he had realized precisely the nature of the obligation to the cooperative farm that he was taking upon himself. This phrase was the border between two lives, a fateful border that he had been unable to cross, but his sons believed that they knew their father’s character as well as they knew their own and did not suppose that he would have paid for the entrance to the cooperative farm with his life. No one had pressured him until now, and it was unthinkable that someone would have pressured him precisely this afternoon, and so brutally that he would have been forced to sit down and write out his membership request. There had long been talk in the village about “totalizing” the farm – in other words, making absolutely everyone join – and their father had joked ever more often that since the bear was dancing in their neighbor’s yard, it would soon be dancing in theirs as well. The full collectivization of the land was already a fact that one could dispute, but which one could not escape. Insofar as they had talked about their impending entrance into the co-op (and that had been only rarely), they had not noticed resistance or concern in their father, as if he had taken this event as the fate of the times, which no one could or even should resist. The question had arisen of putting off “this business” as long as they could, until they finished their education, and “from then on, we, too, will go where all the others have gone.” Thus what was written on the piece of paper remained a mystery, and the boys did not connect it with their father’s disappearance, if he had even disappeared at all. In a few days the harvested sunflower field would need to be plowed up and they suspected he had gone to the neighboring village to get the plowshares he had given to the blacksmith there to sharpen. But their mother, like every wife and mother, suspected the worst. Her face changed its shape and expression, and while her sons were discussing various conjectures, her whole being was concentrated on the outdoors and her pricked-up ears caught even the softest noises of the night. And then a howl resounded, loud and ominous, as if the dog were standing on the doorstep. The woman shuddered, a dark atavistic sob tore from her heart with a sinister foreboding, her hand rose to her forehead and made the sign of the cross. The dog’s howl sounded again, even more drawn out and sinister, again filling the room with an ominous portent.
“We forgot to unchain him,” Marko said. “I’ll go let him off.”
“Take the lantern,” their mother said.
They let the dog off the chain and he dashed around the yard with happy whimpering and from there headed toward the street. The three of them stepped toward the sheep pen. Auntie Tanka went in first with the lantern in her hand, she held it high over her head and looked at the ceiling from one end to the other. They went into the barns and the lower rooms of the house, they searched every corner of the yard and went into the garden. Auntie Tanka always walked in the lead with the lantern in her hand, looking at every tree and every bush, and her sons followed her. When they reached the fence, two men were suddenly standing before them, asking what they were doing out in the garden at that time of night. True to the Dzhelebov custom of keeping their family business a secret, the three boys fell silent, it seemed absurd and shameful to admit that they were looking for their lost father, but they couldn’t come up with another reason, either. The men beyond the fence were silent too. They were from the night watch and this wandering about in the garden in the dead of night seemed suspicious to them. Many of the private farmers made illegal threshing floors, slaughtered their livestock, or buried grain underground, and the night watch had to make sure they weren’t committing any violations.
“Auntie Tanka, what are you doing here?” one of the watchmen asked again.
“Iliycho, is that you?”
“It’s me, Auntie Tanka.”
“What are we doing, you ask? Look, the sun is about to rise and your Uncle Kiro still hasn’t come home. We thought perhaps he’d taken ill and fallen somewhere here in the yard.”
I
liycho was one of the brigadiers who happened to be in the club when Stoyan Kralev had raked over the coals first Kiro Dzhelebov, then his own brother.
“Well, I just saw him this afternoon at the party club. He had come to ask for some notes, but the party secretary was giving him a hard time.”
“About what?”
“About those notes he wanted for the boys. When you join the co-op, he says, then you’ll get ’em.”
“And what did Kiro say?”
“He didn’t say anything. He just got up and walked out.”
Auntie Tanka and the boys went back home, while Iliycho and the other watchman set out to make the rounds of the streets. Within a few hours, the whole village knew that Kiro Dzhelebov had disappeared from his home.
But at that time Kiro Dzhelebov was walking with an old man along some elevated ground scattered with big round rocks and grown over with strange trees, bushes, and flowers. The trees were heavy with so much and such varied fruit that he couldn’t take his eyes off them, while the scent of the flowers filled him with bliss. From both sides of the path, playful little streams trickled down, birds with golden plumage strolled around the meadows, down at the foot of the elevation sparkled a river of clear blue water. Kiro Dzhelebov was looking at this heretofore unseen wonder and at the same time trying to recognize the old man. He was looking askance at him and it seemed to him that it was the old priest, Father Encho, who had put on his gold-laced sticharion as if he had just come from celebrating a service. But Father Encho did not have such white and luxurious hair as that which was hanging in soft waves around the old man’s shoulders, and besides, he limped with one leg and was a chatterbox, they could not have walked together for so long without him starting to talk. Kiro Dzhelebov tried to get ahead of him to see his whole face, but all his efforts to move his feet forward met with some invisible barrier. When he again tried to recognize the old man, his profile transformed into that of Stoyan Kralev with a slightly hooked nose, a hard graying moustache, and a chin that jutted forward, beneath which the collars of his homespun jacket could be seen. The slope they were walking up also changed, just like the old man’s face – now it was a bare meadow, strewn with round gray rocks, now it was some fantastical garden. When they reached the peak of the slope, Kiro Dzhelebov realized that they were at the Crag – a desolate place with a deep, dry ravine, at the end of the village lands. He looked back and saw that the dry rocky path was strewn with little bunches of colorful flowers in the form of human footsteps, and those were the old man’s footsteps.
Wolf Hunt Page 54
