Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  “Well, did you recognize who I am?” the old man finally said.

  “I did,” Kiro Dzhelebov said, stunned by fear and delight. “You are God!”

  “Well, lookee here how he recognized his good old God!” The old man smiled. “And your good old God has come to help you. To see what’s weighing on your soul.”

  They were standing across from each other and Kiro Dzhelebov could look him in the face. A hoary-headed old man’s face, yet unusual, giving off a radiance that Kiro Dzhelebov felt in his soul, and his soul rejoiced, intoxicated by some sweet bliss. God, God, he thought to himself, and didn’t know how to express his delight and joy. God has come down to me, he has never come down to any person before, only to me.

  “Do you believe in me?” God asked him.

  “I believe, God, I believe!” Kiro Dzhelebov replied, and heard his voice resounding like an echo in the rocky wasteland.

  “Now we’ll see about that,” God said. He drew a large knife out of the sleeve of his robe and handed it to him. “You will be saved from all suffering. Your property will be yours, and from your hands it will pass into your sons’ and grandsons’ hands. But you must prove your faith in me.”

  Kiro Dzhelebov took the knife, looked God in the eye, and noticed that one of his eyes was bluish-green, moist and bleary like Father Encho’s eyes, while the other was dark brown with a sharp glitter like the eyes of Stoyan Kralev. And his face had transformed into two faces, one half into the face of Father Encho, the other half into the face of Stoyan Kralev.

  “I’ll prove it, God!” When he said that, Kiro Dzhelebov sensed that internally he was shaken by God’s strange incarnation, but yet also in awe of his grandeur and omnipotence.

  “Sacrifice him!” God said.

  “Sacrifice who?”

  “That one! Your firstborn!”

  Kiro Dzhelebov glanced aside and saw his three sons standing next to one another in a line, they had come straight from the fields in their work clothes, with smiling, sunburned faces. In front of them lay a large oak stump, hewn with hundreds of cuts from the blade of an axe, the same stump he chopped wood on in the winter. Marko stepped away from his brothers, lay down on his back, and put his head on the stump. His neck stretched and his veins were standing out such that along them the steady beating of his heart could be seen.

  “I can’t, he is the dearest to me!” Kiro Dzhelebov cried.

  “Then I can’t save you,” God said. “Decide for yourself!”

  “Slaughter me! Kill me, since you need a life sacrificed.”

  “I don’t need your life,” God said.

  Kiro Dzhelebov got scared that perhaps God would make him slaughter his son and threw the knife aside as hard as he could. The knife flashed in the air, landed on a large rock, and gave out a loud sound like the ringing of a bell. Other sounds followed this, clear and fast, as if the church bell was ringing to sound the alarm. There must be afire, he thought, and wanted to head to the village and saw that he was in the middle of the field, buried up to his waist in the earth, alone and helpless, yet he didn’t ask what he was doing there, nor was he frightened by his isolation. The conversation with God repeated itself many times (he would have to kill now his eldest son, now his middle son, now his youngest son, and about each one he would say that he was dearest to him), it happened simultaneously at the Crag amid the large gray rocks and here, in the harvested melon field, where he could see amid the scorched stems tiny little melons, some whole, others split from overripeness, still others squashed by a cart’s tires. The sun was beating right on his face, he bowed his head to shade it with the rim of his straw hat and then he saw the whole field before him, sparkling with the morning dew, he heard the rattling of a cart racing down the soft roads. He was tormented by thirst and his right hand stretched for hours toward one little melon, as large as a fist, split from being overripe, with red flesh and black seeds, his head flopped down onto the ground and he again sank into a dream or a faint.

  The ringing of the church bell had not been a hallucination. Early in the morning they had told Stoyan Kralev about Kiro Dzhelebov’s disappearance and he ordered them to ring the church bell. The people gathered in front of the church and Stoyan Kralev asked all of them to check their yards and gardens for him, and then also their fields. The missing man might have been killed and tossed in some yard to cover up the traces, he could have fallen somewhere in the fields from a heart attack, he might have ended his own life, thus people peeked with fear into the hidden corners of their yards and gardens. On the third day, he was accidentally found by a young man. In the morning he was late getting to the fields, so he went straight through the village lands and came across him. He first saw the spade and the hoe, then a few meters from them a man chopped in half at the waist. The young man was so frightened of this corpse chopped in half that he rushed back to the village and started shouting in the streets: “There’s a man chopped in half in the Barakovs’ melon patch!” He couldn’t explain who the person was and he hadn’t even thought that it might have been Kiro Dzhelebov, for whom they had been searching for two days, but everyone was sure that it was Kiro Dzhelebov and the tragic news of his death spread through the village in less than half an hour.

  Kiro Dzhelebov’s family was already dressed in mourning, but when they told Auntie Tanka that they had found her husband’s body, she, who knows why, did not let the sexton ring the church bell. “Let’s bring him home first, then we’ll ring it.” She also did not allow her sons to take part in carrying his corpse home, so as not to be upset at seeing him disfigured. She sent someone to call Aunt Ivana (the same one who had knitted sweaters for her sons), the two of them climbed into the cart and set out for the Barakovs’ melon patch. When the cart reached the fields and started across them, men and children flocked in from all sides and set off after her. The old woman drove the horses, while Auntie Tanka sat behind her, and they did not exchange so much as a word the whole way. Soon the cart turned off the path and entered the melon patch. Someone was standing at the other end of the patch and as soon as he saw or heard the cart, he started toward it, running and waving his arms. The sun was behind him so they couldn’t recognize him, nor could they hear what he was yelling. Only Auntie Tanka, it seems, heard him or guessed what he was yelling and jumped down from the cart as it was still in motion.

  “Good God, oh my God!” she cried, clasping her hands to her chest, and to the amazement of everyone watching her, there was a hint of joy in her voice. “Oh, oh!” She sighed, standing with her head bowed forward, as a person exhales when a heavy weight has been lifted and he feels the aching sweetness of having been freed of the burden. The man coming toward her was no longer running, he wasn’t waving or yelling, but still no one could recognize him, while Auntie Tanka’s face lit up with a bright radiance, just as the earth brightens on a cloudy day when the sun finds a chink in the clouds. As soon as the man’s silhouette had appeared at the other end of the field, she seemed to have guessed by the movement of his arms and by his gait that he wanted to give her some comforting news. And that’s how it turned out.

  “He’s not chopped in half, he’s not chopped in half,” the man shouted when he was within fifty feet of them. “He’s buried up to his waist and he’s looking around, but not talking.” It was Grandpa Pondyo. He lived at the edge of the village, and as he explained later, the young man had first told him about the murdered man and he had immediately come to see with his own two eyes what the situation was. “He won’t speak, but he’s alive. I was just saying to myself that I needed to unbury him, when I saw…”

  The crowd raced to the other end of the field and in a few minutes they had started digging out Kiro Dzhelebov. He was lying on his chest, his head flopped down on his arms, as a man lets his head rest on a pillow in a deep sleep, his face was stretched taut in a deathly yellowish dryness, only his eyelids opened from time to time and moisture flashed in his eyeballs. Several days later (and for years afterward), when he came
to, he would try to explain the state he had fallen into, and he would remember only the image of his wife, blurred and disjointed in colorful blotches; how despite this he recognized her well, he felt the urge to tell her something, but he couldn’t do it; how he sensed the silence around himself and in this silence he heard only the slight crunching of the spade in the dirt; how his body was freed from the heavy stiffness and was being carried toward the heads of the horses, and after that lifted over the cart, and all of this was an unbelievable mix of colors, voices, people, and objects, unclear and painful, yet at the same time familiar and close. He also felt a strong sense of shame, especially in front of his sons, that he had allowed himself to lose his will and his reason, and so that they wouldn’t think he was mentally ill, he often found reasons to laugh at himself: “Well, I sure pulled a stunt, boys, just like a dog out in the fields. I turned out to have a few screws loose, so now folks have someone to laugh at!”

  His sons didn’t think that his suicide attempt was the result of mental illness, but due to a momentary nervous breakdown, which was expressed so strongly because for years on end he had been withstanding the tempestuous events in the village with his legendary reserve. They had long since understood that their father was painfully proud, and it was from this pride that he spoke almost like a communist about the necessity to do away with private property to show that he understood the times as well as anyone else, while, in fact, hiding the wholehearted attachment to his property that ran in his blood. Inwardly his sons had given up that property, and in this lay the seed of a tacit discrepancy with their father, imposed by the unrelenting reality that they knew and now understood even better than he did. They would never express this openly because of their innate reverence for and filial piety toward him, and now also due to his unprecedented readiness to sacrifice himself for them, just as they would never even hint to him that precisely because of this self-sacrifice, he was ruining their futures. Thus they lived in deeply camouflaged duplicity, fearing that their father might sense this and again lose his mental balance. For his part, Kiro Dzhelebov also realized that he was destroying his sons’ future and often said that there was no two ways about it anymore, he needed to join the co-op if they invited him, but neither did he go to submit a request for membership, nor did anyone from the co-op come to invite him. After his suicide attempt, the co-op leaders didn’t dare disturb him, and Stoyan Kralev, too, had ordered them to leave him to “get over it,” without, of course, giving his sons proof of political reliability.

  Kiro Dzhelebov was completely recovered after two weeks, like a man who had spent nearly sixty hours from the waist down in a cast of soil, and went to work with his sons. As always, the three of them went out to the fields before dawn and returned after dark, but they didn’t feel the same sense of satisfaction with the work as before. Uncertainty hung over the family and no one dared to mention it, plus they had given up half their land, so the fieldwork was done very quickly. They harvested the corn, plowed, sowed the autumn crops, and went back to the village. Whatever work there was around the yard, they finished it as well and were left with nothing to do. The autumn rains came as well. Long days dragged on, the streets were swollen with mud, the whole village retreated to dry ground. The three young men went to bed and got up early out of habit and the whole day they mooned around the house empty-handed.

  In November the rains stopped and Marko left for Sofia. He wanted to see if he could somehow sign up for the semester without a certificate of political reliability, he knew students who had studied without such notes. If he didn’t manage to enroll, he would return for the holidays. After a dozen days, they got a letter from him. He wrote that he had moved back into his old apartment, had been going to lectures, and hoped that one of his professors would help him. About a week later, they got another letter from him. He asked his father to stop sending him money. The lectures this semester were repeats of the lectures from the previous three years, he was only required to go to them twice a week, while the rest of the time he was working in an office and earning a salary. “Plus, there’s nothing for me to do in the village until spring, two workers there are enough,” Marko wrote by the by. But Kiro Dzhelebov stopped on that sentence, read it several times, and gave the letter to Anyo so he could read it too.

  “What is your brother trying to say?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’!” Anyo replied. “As far as I understand him, he wants to say that if he can’t figure things out with his studying, he’ll work as a clerk so he won’t be wasting his time.”

  “Well, that’s true…”

  Kiro Dzhelebov understood very well what Marko was hinting at, yet he still wanted to hear the opinion of his younger son, to make completely sure. Marko wrote regularly every ten days, but didn’t mention anything about his studies, even though his father asked him about them in every letter. And so it was until the first day of spring. They had eaten lunch and while Auntie Tanka was clearing the table, Kiro Dzhelebov said to his son: “Boy, give me a sheet of paper and the inkwell! The time has come for the bear to dance in our yard as well!”

  Auntie Tanka, who had been heading for the door, stopped for a moment, then went out of the room. Her face flushed scarlet, but she didn’t even turn around toward her husband, so as to show him that she didn’t attach any significance to what he had decided to do. Anyo had long been waiting for this moment, but he also acted as if his father were about to do something completely ordinary. He set the paper and the inkwell on the table and started to joke: “Dad, why don’t you let me write the request? I can see your hands are shaking, we don’t want you to go and knock over the inkwell on the paper like last time!”

  “You mean to say you don’t want the demons to get ahold of me again and for me to bury myself alive in the ground,” Kiro Dzhelebov laughed, “that’s not going to happen. In any case our land has been in the co-op for a year already, and we can’t get by with these four acres of someone else’s land. Last time I tipped over the inkwell because I was insulted. That scoundrel Stoyan Kralev cussed me out in front of a whole slew of people, it was enough to make me see red. Well, we all know it wasn’t only the curse that made me go off the deep end. But whatever I tell you, you won’t understand me. Back then I didn’t talk to you very much about that business. No matter how dear to you that land is, it’s not in your blood. Your eyes are turned elsewhere, you have other hopes. We’ve been saying that for as long as the world’s been turning, for the first time private property is becoming common property. No, there was a time when people lived in a primitive social system. Isn’t that how you and your brothers put it? Only that was a million years ago so it may as well not have been. So for the first time man has to give up what’s his. To make everyone equal, so we’ll all be good. For a long time now I’ve been thinking: What does equality have to do with goodness? There are poor and good people. There are rich and bad people. So goodness doesn’t depend on how many shirts a man has on his back, but on something else. From now on they’ll order people to be equal, so that means they’re ordering them to be good as well. Let’s hope they are! And I’ve been thinking something else as well. What is good for a man, and is the good man skillful and useful to others? Now that’s the sort of thing I’ve been thinking to myself and getting myself all muddled up, I haven’t got the brains to make sense of it. Anyway, grab the quill and write! We’ve got nowhere to retreat to anymore, so onward! We’ve got to dance to their tune.”

  Anyo wrote to his brother a week later:

  Today we drove the horses, the oxen, and the sheep into the common barn. Dad was appointed brigadier of the animal husbandry brigade. A boss from his very first day. I congratulated him, he chuckled and said if things kept going this way, he could be chairman of the co-op by next year. Before going to turn in his membership request, he wanted Mom to pour out a cauldron of water so as to guarantee “smooth sailing,” she told him to get lost, and he poured out the water himself and headed to the co-op office. Yo
u should have heard how he was joking about everything and about himself, how he had gotten carried away with philosophizing before he joined. He was talking about the history of society, about biblical legends and many other things. When we see each other, I’ll tell you everything in more detail, just let me note here that until now we did not really know our father well. I suspect that he was soaking up everything you, Dimcho, and I talked about in his presence, just as children soak up what they hear from their parents. I also suspect that he has secretly been reading our books and textbooks. I’m worried that this “intellectual” outburst, as well as his desire to joke around as never before, may be due to some intense mental agitation that he is trying to hide. That’s why I’m always looking to stay close to him. The day before yesterday they called a meeting to accept new members. It turned out that all the two dozen families who had not joined the co-op, as soon as they found out Dad had joined, immediately submitted membership requests too. I was at the meeting as well, only outside. I hung around the community center for almost an hour, and as soon as the meeting was over, I hurried and beat Dad home. I wanted to see how he looked and what he would say. We sat down to dinner and chatted about this and that – not a word was said about the co-op. Only when we were done eating did he tell Mom that from tomorrow onward we would go to the common field whistling and we’d come back whistling as well.