Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  Anyo had long been trying to get in touch with his friends from the army or some of his former fellow students whose addresses he happened to have saved. He asked them to help him find some kind of work. Of the eight people he wrote to, he managed to connect with only two of them. One – a veterinarian in Shumen – suggested he come there and “since you’re a bachelor, we’ll find you both a job and a place to live.” The second was living and working in Stara Zagora as a dump truck driver. He and Anyo had taken auto mechanic courses together in the army and had gotten licenses to drive large vehicles. This friend wrote that they were hiring drivers, so he could come right away. Anyo decided to go there and in early April he left for Stara Zagora. A few weeks later he wrote to his family that he had started work and that for the time being he was living in a dormitory.

  The Dzhelebovs’ hopes rested with their youngest, but a year later, he, too, left them, and in the midst of a scandal at that. In the course of horsing around with the girls, Dimcho had grown close to the schoolteacher Yanka Grasheva and had fallen in love with her. She was a local girl and after she had finished high school, she became a teacher at the elementary school. Their dates did not remain a secret and so as not to compromise the girl’s reputation, one evening Dimcho went to her father to ask for her hand. The elder Grashev refused him as soon as he opened his mouth and announced that he had no daughter to marry off. Yanka advised Dimcho not to go to her father a second time, nor to send his parents, because her father had sworn not to allow them to get married. The two of them continued meeting in secret and looking for a way out of the situation. Dimcho thought of going to some city and finding work and a place to live, and then sending for her, but Yanka didn’t want to be separated from him. Several months passed and they still didn’t know what to do. Dimcho fully felt then the isolation his family was trapped in. He had felt it earlier as well in people’s hints and especially in the co-op leadership’s attitude toward him (he put in the most workdays in his brigade, yet at the end of every campaign, they always declared others as the most outstanding workers), but this unfairness hadn’t offended him in the least. He was happy that he could work, and that after work he could meet Yanka at the youth club or the community center. After a few years everything would be forgotten, he would tell Yanka, my brother did an unreasonable thing, why should I have to pay for it with my happiness and my future? Yanka shared everything with him and told him word-for-word what had been said at home. Her father, her brother, and all their relatives didn’t want to become in-laws with the Dzhelebovs, because they were all reactionaries, enemies of the authorities, spies, and their sons had no future, and whoever joined their family must be like them.

  Near the end of the school year Yanka went to the city for a teachers’ conference. Her brother drove her to the city by cart and they arranged for him to come pick her up the next day, and he headed back to the village. Yanka got on the train to Shumen and at noon got off at the village of Nevsha. In this village lived their distant relatives Aunt Rusiika, her mother’s cousin, and her husband, Uncle Pasko. When she was young, Yanka had gotten some sores on her legs and her mother had taken her to the village to be treated by a famous healer. They stayed with Aunt Rusiika and Uncle Pasko, went to the healer, who covered the sores with salve and gave them some of it to use at home, and they should have left, but their hosts kept them there a whole week. They had no children and were overjoyed by Yanka, they carried her in their arms all day, pampering and indulging her and sending her home with lots of presents. Now Yanka remembered these people and decided to drop in on them. She told them she was going to Shumen for work and had decided to stop by to see them on the way. The elderly couple was pleasantly surprised and just as before was overjoyed to see her. In the late afternoon Yanka went to leave, but they stood at the door and blocked her way. They talked until midnight, quizzing her about her family, her work at the school, and, of course, wouldn’t they soon be invited to a wedding? Yanka begged them to keep what she shared with them an absolute secret, the elderly couple crossed their hearts, and she told them about her love affair with Dimcho. While telling it, she burst into tears, the elderly couple burst into tears as well, and in the end, they decided her fate: “Get the boy and come here to us! You’ll get married and live here as long as you like, you’ve got a house here, you’ve got everything!”

  As soon as the school year ended, Yanka and Dimcho disappeared from the village. The Grashevs were bristling with spite, they raised the alarm with the police and searched for their daughter at the Dzhelebovs. The elder Grashev, his son, and a policeman burst into their house, searched everywhere, and not finding the young people, turned upon Kiro Dzhelebov and his wife with curses and threats. Thus a new misfortune came crashing down on the family – their youngest son had left them as well. The Grashevs spread a rumor around the village that Dimcho had kidnapped their daughter, and since she didn’t want to go with him, he had killed her and buried her body somewhere. Blinded by rage, they also spread the absurd rumor that in order to escape from the law, Dimcho had defected abroad and joined his older brother. The Dzhelebovs were now branded, anyone could hurl stones at them, people believed the rumors and even made up some of their own. Again the interrogations, threats, and forced visits to the village soviet began and went on for almost a month, until Dimcho and Yanka wrote to their families that they had gotten married and were living in a distant village.

  And so the Dzhelebovs were left completely alone and lived like that for twelve years. Their strong blood would have its say – despite all the misfortunes that befell them, the two of them were healthy and never missed a day of work. Yet a day never passed in which they forgot their loneliness. Constant thoughts of their sons kept this loneliness in their hearts like an open wound. Of Marko, they knew only what he told them from time to time in his letters. They couldn’t take his wife and children, whom they saw in photographs, as real live people. That’s how they dreamed of them as well – as moving photographs, lacking flesh and blood, mute and colorless beings who stood in one place or moved within the small space of a postcard. Only Marko was alive among them, and he was as they had known him. In the pictures he was dressed differently, in an overcoat or a suit coat, in a sweater or a button-down shirt, but they mentally took these clothes off him and saw him as he had been dressed here. They could not imagine that he had changed, that he was living a different life among different people, they felt him close to them, yet at the same time so far away and inaccessible that perhaps they would never see him for the rest of their lives.

  Anyo came to the village with his wife and little boy only once during those years, and all in all they visited him three times in Stara Zagora. His first marriage didn’t work out and he got remarried. As they had come to understand, his first wife had turned out to be careless, inept, and barren at that, they stayed together for two years but couldn’t get along. They knew his second wife, she seemed to them a tidy, good mother and wife. She had an office job, she had a house with a yard and Anyo lived with her. Her parents were elderly, her father was so senile that they had constantly to keep an eye out that he didn’t leave the yard, yet he would nevertheless manage to slip out onto the street and head off wherever his feet led him. He couldn’t remember his address, so he would stay wherever he happened to stop, and so Anyo would spend whole nights searching for him and would find him asleep in a ditch outside the city or in some park. He, it seems, did not like his son-in-law, he would shout at him for nothing and threaten to throw him out. Anyo tolerated him because he was sick and old and, most of all, for his wife’s sake, with whom he lived in complete harmony. He had been working in an auto repair shop for several years, he also took on private jobs and made good money, yet his parents were still not at peace on his account. It seemed to them that he still hadn’t come to accept the life fate had dealt him, and since they knew his implacable character, they worried that some petty disagreement would once again break up his family.

  Dimch
o and Yanka lived only a three-hour train ride away, but they never once came to the village. After they ran away, the Grashevs disowned their daughter, they wrote to her that they did not want to see her anymore, so she didn’t dare visit them, and alongside her, Dimcho, too, did not come back to the village. Uncle Pasko passed away, while Aunt Rusiika was already well into her eighties. Until recently she had taken care of the children and the housework, but now she would sit all day on the window seat, as tidy, fluffy, and white as an angora cat, trying to knit with two pairs of glasses on her nose. Yanka had taken a few courses in Shumen and was now teaching at the middle school, while Dimcho, in the absence of a head agronomist in the village, had taken up that post for many years now. The two of them begged the elderly couple to come live with them, but the Dzhelebovs couldn’t decide. The more keenly they felt their loneliness, the more firmly they were attached to the house where they had spent their youth and brought up their children.

  “Ooooof!” He heard a voice and in a fleeting lull in the blizzard, he caught sight of Stoyan Kralev twenty steps away. “Who’s there? Kiro, is that you?”

  “It’s me,” Kiro Dzhelebov called.

  “Man alive, I’m beat…Come on and help me, mate! Here…”

  The blizzard enshrouded him once again and Kiro Dzhelebov remembered how years ago he had silently asked him for help, but hadn’t even received sympathy. The campaign to dismantle Stalin’s cult of personality had passed, Stoyan Kralev had been removed from his post as party secretary and had just been appointed chairman of the co-op. Four horses had died and the medical inspectors had established that they had been poisoned. As early as the previous evening Kiro Dzhelebov had noticed that the horses were sick, he went to inform the co-op chairman and to insist that they call a veterinarian from the city immediately. Stoyan Kralev had already gone to bed, he listened to him through the window and ordered him to stay with the horses until the morning. They sent for a veterinarian, but he arrived in the afternoon and found the horses dead. An investigation was launched and suspicion fell on Kiro Dzhelebov. The investigator not only did not interpret to his advantage the fact that he had warned the chairman in time about the sick horses, but even gave it the opposite reading, in the sense that sometimes a criminal himself reports the crime with the goal of securing an alibi. One of the horse grooms who was directly responsible for the dead horses had been gone the whole day, the other didn’t know anything. Only Stoyan Kralev could help him or at least alleviate his situation with a word, and Kiro Dzhelebov asked him to give his opinion on the matter as well. Stoyan Kralev shrugged and kept silent during the whole interrogation. In the end the investigator let him go, but gave him to understand that the absence of evidence in no way meant that he was no longer under suspicion.

  And that’s how it was with every unpleasant situation that arose in the animal husbandry brigade. If something was stolen, if any illnesses spread, if the livestock was dying off due to no fault of anyone’s or if the blame couldn’t be proven – Kiro Dzhelebov had to answer for all these damages not only as a brigadier, but as the direct perpetrator. Out of inertia, people from the brigade blamed him for anything that went wrong, and some of his ill-wishers in the co-op took advantage of this. They sabotaged the co-op’s work and then skillfully hid behind the permanent disgrace he had fallen into. For his part, Stoyan Kralev took advantage of a tried-and-true method – a disgraced man was more obedient and compliant, and could be used to carry out special jobs for the leadership. More than once in his presence Stoyan Kralev had said that certain people had gotten themselves into such a position that they had to watch very closely what the co-op members were doing, otherwise there was no way around it, they would be blamed or would be considered an accomplice to the guilty parties. He wants to make me an informer on top of everything, to make me as low as dirt, Kiro Dzhelebov thought, and at every convenient opportunity asked to be sent out to the fields to work.

  “Whatever else you might be, you’re a good worker,” Stoyan Kralev would say. “The animal husbandry brigade couldn’t get along without you, so I’m not going to send you to another job. We value good workers, Dzhelebov, and we’re not vindictive, as some people might think. We take an individual approach to every person and evaluate his qualities as a laborer regardless of whether he shows ideological weaknesses or not. It wouldn’t have cost me anything to put you in your proper place when your son emigrated, but instead of that I appointed you as a brigadier. Now I can tell you in confidence that they removed me from my post as party secretary only because of your son, for poor watchfulness. Which means if I had kept a firm hand on people like you, I’d be in a different position now.”

  At such moments Kiro Dzhelebov felt that sharp spasm in his throat, which began strangling him and washing over his body in hot waves. He often fell into this state of intense, deranged animosity, especially in those first years after Marko’s defection, but accidental circumstances always kept him from going to extremes. He could, of course, have killed Stoyan Kralev at any time, except that after getting so intensely agitated he would manage to overcome his hatred and even felt fear at such a possible murder. He would think over his situation calmly and find that it couldn’t be otherwise, given the current political circumstances, and that only time would mitigate his guilt. Relations between people will change, as they have already been changing, many things will be forgotten, hence it follows that I have to be patient and resigned. When he thought things over calmly and soberly like this, he even freed Stoyan Kralev of any blame – he was just a tool of the higher-ups and acted as they ordered him to, just as his inferiors danced to his tune. Whoever instead might have been in his place as party secretary would have acted the same way, otherwise they would have gotten rid of him. Thus even he, the other party secretary, wouldn’t be patting the back of a man who remained outside the co-op for so long and whose son, on top of everything, had committed a political crime. The only difference would be in their outward approach, but that was a question of character. Stoyan Kralev was hotheaded, he had no talent for demagoguery, whatever was on the tip of his tongue came out of his mouth. That’s why they removed him from his post, he didn’t have a way with people…

  After so many and such stinging insults, which wounded his dignity and pride to the quick, Kiro Dzhelebov perhaps would not have sought and found peace in resignation through his own moral strength if he hadn’t been drawing hope from the Bible as well. He had started peering into that book even in his younger years to see what his grandfather had written in it and what his father had later added. In the pages of their family chronicles, his grandfather Kiro had written in chemical pencil the names of all or almost all the people in their family, from his great-grandfather to his grandchildren, as well as the most important events in their lives. At the root of the large family tree stood a certain Angel, a braid maker and merchant who had lived somewhere in Thrace. After him came his two sons and his daughter, their sons and grandsons, one of whom was Grandpa Kiro, who had lived in Sliven in his younger years and from there had moved to Dobruja. Grandpa Kiro had written the date of his wedding to Grandma Grozda and the birthdates of his children. After him, the elder Marko Dzhelebov had written in blue ink the date of his wedding, the birthdates of his three sons, and the untimely deaths of his daughter and his wife. And finally – the wedding of his firstborn son, Kiro. Marko Dzhelebov died at the age of fifty-four of a heart attack while threshing, while lifting sheaves of wheat onto a stack. He was healthy until the last minute of his life, a strict and withdrawn person, he only let children get close to him, since, as he always said, only they were truly people. After his death, Kiro Dzhelebov moved into the house where they lived now, taking the Bible with him along with all the housewares, and several months later wrote Marko’s birthdate in the family chronicle. After some time his middle brother had a daughter, while his youngest brother got married; he wrote these events there too, and thus he became the chronicler for his whole extended family. When read
ing over the names of his distant forefathers, he would unwittingly rack his brains to imagine their faces, voices, their clothes and their lives, he was overcome by a strange feeling when he stopped to think that the blood of these people was running in his veins. Judging from the short notes about each one of them, they were an implacable lot, with different inclinations and fates. Among them, there were craftsmen, merchants, priests, and teachers, one volunteer revolutionary fighter,* two army officers, one exile in Anatolia, one fighter in Hadzhi Dimitar and Karadzha’s rebel band, there was also a young bride named Kirka “who killed herself with a sickle after being ravaged by Turks,” while her brother Dimo took revenge for her by slaughtering an entire family of Turks, Atanas disappeared as a communist during the events of 1923, Grandma Mina had eighteen children, while some Mircho or other ended up in Russia and his grandchildren were now living there in the city of Nikolaev. The names of all these people had been passed down from generation to generation, so that they remained alive until this very day, and this itself was a kind of miracle. The name of that first great-grandfather Angel, borne by so many Angels, was now borne by Anyo, his other son, just like his brothers’ sons and daughters bore the same names that were written in the family chronicle. He himself bore the name of the bride Kirka, who had lived in the dark days of Ottoman slavery and violence and who had preferred to kill herself rather than live defiled. He tried to imagine the dramatic fate of this young woman, as well as the fates of all the others, and in so doing he sank into the mysteries of a sprawling two-centuries-old family that was scattered across the whole of Bulgaria and abroad, which had passed through countless ups and downs, through blood and fire, so as to live on today in him and his sons, in his brothers and their sons.