Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  Now it is exactly midnight, but he is still not asleep, he’s reading his Bible. For some time now he has started reading it again every night. I looked – he left a scrap of newspaper where it tells about some Job or other. I don’t know whether you’ve tried to read the Bible, I’ve tried and it immediately gave me a headache. I wonder how Dad can read those tiresome and ridiculous Bible stories for hours, he even knows a lot of them by heart. I can still hear him wandering around the room, going out into the yard and coming back. I don’t dare go to bed before he’s fallen asleep, I don’t think Mom is sleeping either. We’re a little bit afraid for him. Today, as we were driving the livestock to the co-op, he was joking again. He said that since a man can live without his parents and brothers, then living without his livestock should be no problem at all. I guess I’m feeling a little sad, too. The yard looks empty to me. Any other night, as you know, a sheep would be bleating, a horse would be whinnying, and now it’s quiet, only the dog barks now and then. But what had to happen has happened, and now we won’t have any more problems with our studies. If you’re sick of pushing a pencil there, drop it, come back to the village and we’ll do some day labor for the co-op, mostly to buck up Dad, while in the fall you’ll go back to the university. Write Dad right away, you’ll make him happy and calm him down. It wouldn’t be bad for you to take some vacation and to come home. Come back, we all need to be with Dad right now.

  Marko wrote in early May from West Germany. He said that he had been sent there for a month for his work and that on the very first day he had met a really nice girl. They had grown close and she had invited him to her house. He was going to their place almost every day. The girl’s father was a communist, he had spent a few years in a fascist concentration camp and wanted to send his daughter to Bulgaria to study Russian language and literature at any cost. The girl had suggested that they get engaged, so what could he do? He agreed. According to German custom, an engagement is not as binding as in Bulgaria. There any young man and woman who have been going out for at least a week announce themselves as engaged, so his engagement was practically a formality. If the girl came to study in Sofia, they could get married, but only if she agreed to live in Bulgaria. And so on.

  The letter was brought by their neighbor who had gone to the post office in the city. The postal worker there, a relative of theirs, had likely been disconcerted by the stamps and postmarks belonging to the capitalist country from where the letter had come, and had therefore put it in a plain, local envelope, so that people in the village wouldn’t see it. Anyo opened it, and even while he was reading it he realized that everything in it was a lie meant to temporarily fool the authorities and thus to delay and soften the blow on their family. Under the power of some strange, inexplicable premonition, he never doubted for a moment that his brother had taken a desperate and irreversible step that would turn out to be life changing for him and for their whole family. He could only not explain how and through which channels he had emigrated, whether he had done it in a fit of despair, just as his father had attempted suicide, or if he had thought everything out beforehand. To be completely sure of his defection, he wrote the very next day to Marko’s landlady in Sofia, and she replied that “Comrade Marko Dzhelebov left the apartment a month ago, and before that he had not worked in any office, but on a construction site as an unskilled worker.” Now their roles were reversed. Just as his father had pretended that by joining the co-op, nothing much had changed in his life, in the same way Anyo tried to cover up his brother’s defection, and in the same way, no less: with jokes and made-up stories from his personal life.

  It never crossed Kiro Dzhelebov’s mind that his son might lie to him about anything whatsoever, and it seems he was not very familiar with the political situation at that time, either, so he believed in his son’s business trip abroad and was more satisfied than concerned. (“Our folks here won’t give him a simple note of reliability, whereas those folks in Sofia have sent him all the way to Germany on state business!”) But an engagement with a faraway and unknown girl seemed to him a naïve and light-minded move.

  “Their customs there may be different than ours,” he mulled it over, “but an engagement is still an engagement. Once you get engaged to a girl, you have to bring her back to your house or stay at her place. Otherwise how can you just take your hat and up and go?”

  “Marko has experience with this stuff, it’s not his first time,” Anyo said. “He’s a ladies’ man.”

  “How so, a ladies’ man?”

  Kiro Dzhelebov had no inkling of his sons’ personal lives, since they had grown up and become men far away from him, but he had always thought that despite the temptations of the urban setting, they would live as chastely as the adults in the village. The closer Marko came to graduating from the university, the more often Kiro Dzhelebov spoke with his wife about his settling down, they tried to guess which girl he would marry and when, and believed that when he found a girl, he would tell them and, as was only proper, ask for their blessing. Thus they imagined their sons’ marriages village-style and didn’t even stop to think that while they were studying, they might become mixed up in “that nonsense with women,” and that they might unbeknownst to them get engaged and unengaged. This is why Kiro Dzhelebov felt somehow offended by the news that Marko was a “ladies’ man.”

  “Well, he had lots of girlfriends. He’d go with one for a while, then dump her, then take up with another. They were always throwing themselves at him!”

  “Well now, just think what kinds of women he was getting mixed up with! And this one there, this German, she must have thrown herself at him too.”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure that he’ll dump her and come back by himself. He doesn’t let himself get tied down too easily.”

  “Humph! Let’s hope that’s true! Go to the post office in the city tomorrow and see if there’s a letter from him.”

  “Why would he write us another letter? His business trip’ll be done in two weeks, he’ll write from Sofia. But if you insist, I’ll go.”

  Their conversations about Marko’s engagement began and ended in one and the same way, and Anyo was amazed that his father, who otherwise was a sagacious person, did not notice this and continued to believe in the letter, even though he felt increasingly bitter at Marko’s thoughtlessness. In his opinion this engagement was a betrayal of the family’s tradition of mutual trust and agreement on all questions. For the first time, one member of the family had decided something so important “on his own,” and perhaps precisely because it was the first time, this filled him with indignation and concern for the future. And even though he condemned Marko’s “ladies’ man” ways, his only hope lay therein – since he didn’t let himself get too tangled up with girls (brothers knew each other’s secrets!), he would tell her a simple auf Wiedersehen and that would be that.

  Anyo was convinced that his brother’s defection would become known very soon, in a month at the latest, as the relevant government bodies were waiting for the end of his “business trip” to pass, but he continued to keep up the illusion in front of his parents, while trying to prepare himself little by little for the awful truth. Marko wrote a second letter in which he reported that after the engagement the marriage itself would very soon have to follow. She was a nice, pretty girl, she had come to love him, and his conscience wouldn’t allow him to leave her “high and dry,” especially since the question of her coming to study in Sofia was already settled. After the marriage, he would have to stay in Germany “for a month or so,” but he had informed his employers of this in time and had gotten their permission. This letter also had no return address. Anyo hid it and thus sowed yet another lie in the family, more sinister and destructive than any other lie, since it was a betrayal of a sacred parental hope. If his father hadn’t looked upon the whole business so naïvely, and his mother, too, alongside him (“Whatever Kiro says!”), they would all have borne the brunt of this misfortune together, and for him it would have been som
ehow easier. But here an inevitable question kept popping into his head: “What if Dad has guessed that Marko has defected and is playing naïve for the sake of the rest of us? What if he has already taken the blow and his heart is broken, but continues smiling so as to shield us from the intense shock? He has already shown that he is capable of such a supreme sacrifice for our sake. But how can I find out whether he has already come face-to-face with the inevitable, and how will he react when this becomes known to all of us?”

  These days were some of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, of his life. At first, it was as if the “technical” side of his brother’s defection interested him the most, he strained his mind to imagine how and where his brother had crossed the border, what documents he had traveled with, where and how he was living now – in short, he had the feeling that he had begun reading some adventure novel, agonizing yet nevertheless fascinating. But the more he thought about the consequences of this defection, the stronger and more contradictory became his feelings, tearing apart his soul, the future looked ever more hopeless to him. He was especially tormented by the mystery of his own presentiment – how had he, from the very first moment, believed that his brother had defected, without having any direct proof? What unknown force had made him believe this so unreservedly? Had he suspected it even before, when the conflict arose between their family and the village leaders? Or had he suspected that he himself was capable of defecting, if the circumstances were propitious, as they had been for Marko? No, I would never for anything in the world decide to leave my parents and brothers, he thought to himself honestly and sincerely. Perhaps it’s due to cowardice, but still, I would never decide to defect, no matter what happened in life. But how did Marko decide to take that fateful step, our stable, good, reasonable Marko, who weighed his every word, his every intention! How could he not miss us terribly, how could he have written us off forever, pushed us out of his heart as if we were dead? This is precisely what tormented him the most cruelly – why and how had Marko, their blood brother and son, decided to follow a destiny different from theirs, full of uncertainties, full of sorrow and loneliness, and perhaps even lifelong suffering? Perhaps he had become mentally deranged, or had he consciously decided on eternal exile?

  Anyo constantly sought and failed to find in his memory cases when his brother, albeit only with a word or a hint, had expressed his intention to defect from Bulgaria. Indeed, in the last few years their family had lived in worry and want, they had had to pinch and scrape so they could study, but even in the darkest days, even when they denied them the right to continue studying at the university, Marko did not rail against Stoyan Kralev with any particular passion, nor against the party’s system as a whole. He was unhappy, of course, but not hopeless. “By now we should have convinced Dad to join the co-op,” he would say. “No matter how hard it is for him to do it, there’s no other choice. And we would have gotten by somehow, like poor students always have. But we’ll wait, in a year Dad will have joined.” Anyo remembered from his life with his brother only mutual trust, warmth, and love, both between the two of them, as well as between everyone in the family. He also recalled that in his attempt at suicide for their sake (they were convinced that this was why he had done it), their father had shaken them down to the marrow and fused them in consanguineous unity as never before; his tragic attempt to bring about his own demise seemed to have inspired strength and confidence in them to stand shoulder to shoulder and to overcome all the ups and downs on their path. But Marko had torn apart and desecrated that unity. He had closed his eyes and hurled himself into the abyss of the unknown. Why? From weakness, from egotism, or from a desire for adventure?

  Anyo realized with horror that an ever more insistent, unpleasant, and bad feeling toward his brother was creeping into his heart. It’s terrible for me to judge him, he would think, while tormented by this feeling, for deciding to take such an extreme step, he must have had insurmountable reasons that I don’t know about. I shouldn’t judge him, I shouldn’t, that is base on my part, it is the equivalent of fratricide! Yet in spite of his will, he judged him all the same. His empathy for Marko gave way to doubt and reproach, until he started blaming him as well. Whatever the motives for his defection may have been, he would think, it was in fact egotism, cruelty, and betrayal. He knew the political situation in Bulgaria and he knew very well what consequences his defection to the capitalist camp would have for our family. He should have taken his brotherly share in our common fate and it wouldn’t have been so terrible. Now look, Dad joined the co-op and in only a few months we would have been back studying at the university. In only a few months! Now Dimcho and I will never continue our education and who knows what paths fate will push us down. Isn’t it egotism to save yourself through defection at the expense of four people, your full-blood brothers and parents at that? And will you really save yourself? What if you die an absurd death in foreign lands and cause our parents even more suffering?

  Every other day late in the afternoon, the postal carrier’s horn could be heard. At that time Anyo would be in the field, hoeing corn on the co-op land with fifty women and girls. The bugle’s hoarse sound carried from the village like a lonely bird exhausted from the heat, the girls would straighten up with their hoes in their hands and say in unison: “The postman’s here.” They would start squawking like magpies, wondering aloud who was expecting a letter from whom, they would tease one another, laughing simple-heartedly and foolishly. Anyo knew he would not receive the letter he had long been wanting, yet every time he found himself waiting for the postman’s horn to blow. His heart quivered with despondency and loneliness, he hated the exhausted women for their naïve conversations and jokes, his life seemed more boring, stupid, and pointless than ever, he felt a wild urge to run away wherever his feet would take him and to never come back. He worked more diligently than the others, he worked with a desperate fury, in the evenings he could not fall asleep until late, he was thinking about his brother, he was also thinking about the girl from whom he had not gotten a letter in a long time. Her name was Slava, they had been in the same year at university, they had sat next to each other and lived on the same street a few houses apart. They had already grown close in the first few days of the school year, because they walked to and from the university together. Their classmates from the very beginning had started looking on them as a couple. Anyo would grow flustered at their unambiguous hints, while she acted as if she had not heard them or did not want to hear them. She would sit next to Anyo during lectures or would always be close by him, as if sticking near to a relative or a friend from childhood. Indeed, it was the fact that they were neighbors and their classmates’ attitude that made them grow close. If Slava happened to be absent from a lecture, they would ask Anyo about her and vice versa. Even Anyo’s landlady found excuses to tell him that he and Slava were perfectly matched and that her parents “really liked him.” Slava’s father was a carpenter and worked in a shipbuilding yard, while her mother was a homemaker. They had a tidy brick house a story-and-a-half high with a vine arbor in front of it; under the trellis was a cement patio with a table and chairs. Once Slava and Anyo were talking through the gate and her father saw them. As soon as he caught sight of the older man, Anyo said goodbye and turned to leave, but her father called very casually after him: “Hey, boy, where are you running off to?”

  “Oh no…please!”

  “Why don’t you get acquainted?” Slava said. “Dad, this is my classmate Anyo.”

  “I know him, we are neighbors, after all. Well, come on in, what are you waiting for?”

  The autumn was still warm, they sat under the trellis, Slava’s mother soon came to join them as well. She, too, had long known Anyo, because she had constantly seen him with her daughter going to and from lectures, so she, too, greeted him very warmly, almost as if he were a frequent guest of the family. Her father told them about some event at the shipyard, then he fell to talking with the mother about household concerns, while Slava
and Anyo were left to chat about their studies. Anyo was shy and even though he frequently stopped by Slava’s house after that, he never managed to relax around her parents. He was disconcerted by them and was afraid that if they found out about his feelings for Slava, they would be offended precisely because they had treated him as a trusted friend of the family; he didn’t dare take advantage of their trust. For the same reason he was disconcerted by Slava herself and could never decide whether to hint at his feelings for her. She also acted unpretentious and natural around him, as if she considered him a trusted friend, and when she would ask him for some small favor, she would say: “Aren’t you my little gentleman friend?” just as the older girls would patronizingly speak to the neighborhood boys when they had an intimate relationship with some other man. At the same time, Anyo was sure she didn’t have a boyfriend, or if she did, he didn’t live in Varna and would only come back during the holidays. This last possibility tormented him terribly and caused him to suffer bouts of suspicion and jealousy. He observed her very carefully and noticed that sometimes she was very distracted, especially during lectures. While he diligently took notes in every subject, she would sit there lost in her thoughts, looking off to the side and seeming to be daydreaming. “Hey, where are you?” he would ask her in a whisper, and she would nudge him in a special way with her elbow and both affectionately and angrily reply: “Leave me alone!” But if she had a boyfriend who studies or works in another city, Anyo wondered, why would she go out and about only with me, wouldn’t that be compromising in his eyes, even if she was only using me as a “little gentleman friend” so as not to go around the city by herself?

  Anyo was in love, but in love Dzhelebov-style, proudly, devotedly, and bashfully. He knew that in such cases the gentleman had to reveal his feelings to the lady first, yet his pride was every bit as strong as his love. If Slava were to be surprised by his confession, even if she only said that she would “think about it,” he would have to run away from her once and for all, he wouldn’t be able to bear only friendship. It was all or nothing. By and by, they were now going to the cinema together as well. She herself had invited him “to escort her,” because she didn’t feel comfortable going alone. Once (it was after Christmas vacation) they were watching a film about the war and in one brutal scene Slava grasped his hand and squeezed it in her palm. Anyo placed his other hand on top of hers: “Don’t be scared!” The episodes on the screen went from calm and cheerful to horrifying and painful, and Slava’s hand remained clasped in his until the end of the film. It was cold outside, a piercing February wind was blowing, the sidewalks were iced over like skating rinks. Slava’s gloves were very thin, she kept her hands in the pockets of her overcoat, and if she slipped, she would not have been able to keep her balance. Anyo took her arm to keep her from falling, and so they walked all the way to the gate. Two more times it happened to be very cold when they went to the cinema, and both times they returned home arm in arm.