In his younger years, when he opened up the first pages of the Bible, Kiro Dzhelebov was surprised to find that there, too, the genealogy of a family was told, and that was the family of mankind. The very first stories about the creation of the world, about Adam and Eve and the flood, seemed to him as naïve as fairy tales for children, and he was curious as to whether this enormous book was filled only with such tales. And so he read about Abraham’s family, about Sodom and Gomorrah, about how Sarah became the pharaoh’s wife, and when he read the tempestuous, moving story of Joseph, he found himself in a world of horrors, struggles, suffering, and miracles, which he could no longer tear himself away from. For years on end he slowly entered into that world of vague and contradictory events, he would get confused and reread them, and at the same slow pace would make sense of them and separate out the truth from the legend. He didn’t share with anyone what he had read, since his sons didn’t show any interest in the book, they called it “Daddy’s book,” and he was not angry with them for their good-natured mockery. They were young and could not discover the truths about life in these parables and legends, just as he at their age could not discover them. There was even a time when he considered these writings to be an entertaining read or like the tales in One Thousand and One Nights. Because he had also read that book (one of the schoolteachers had given it to him), as well as the short retelling of the Iliad, which he had found in Marko’s high school textbooks. The first of these two books had drawn him in with the endless vicissitudes of the plot, while he had not understood the latter due to the brief and dry presentation, and also due to his lack of familiarity with Greek mythology. He was to some extent a well-qualified reader. He alone of the villagers would pick up the newspapers and magazines at the community center, he had read many books belonging to the schoolteachers who had lived in his home, as well as his sons’ old textbooks and books they had left behind, he also borrowed books from Ilko Kralev. However, no one besides his wife knew that during the long winter evenings he would read whatever he could get his hands on. He did not like to share with anyone what he had read, so as not to appear in the others’ eyes as a person who had taken up a calling unnatural to him; what’s more, his generation of villagers had long nursed an innate scorn for “bookish folks.” This was why even his sons had no inkling of how inquisitive he was and how many books he had read. He listened carefully to what they said on various topics, just as he had listened to the schoolteachers, and thanks to the former and the latter he had learned to speak and write as properly as they did. As a child he had finished fourth grade and he still remembered the lessons, short stories, and poems they had studied, just as he remembered almost everything he had read.
Out of all the books he had come across, the Bible made the biggest impression on him. He was stunned by the fact that the life described in it from thousands of years ago fully resembled present-day life, only the names of the countries, cities, and people were different. Everywhere there were wars, poverty and misery, treachery and lies, violence and slavery, joy and happiness. Why had mankind lived all these millennia, since nothing had changed in the least, not getting any worse or any better, he would ask himself and then answer: People seem to have merely reproduced in this world and nothing more. He found himself liking some of the stories more and more and he would often reread them, the people they told about seemed to come alive before his eyes, as if he had met and talked to them. When he read about Joseph, he imagined as if seeing it in real life how his brothers threw him down a well, sold him into slavery, and lied to their father that he had been devoured by wild beasts, he also saw the lonely Ruth walking through the rich man’s fields, gleaning wheat after the reapers had passed, just as he had seen poor women from the village gleaning wheat in the fields after the reaping was done, he also saw Job sitting on the dung heap in front of his house scraping the pus from his boils with a potsherd, he could hear his voice: “Let the day perish on which I was born! Have I not kept silent, have I done anyone wrong?” Over the years, when many misfortunes befell him, Kiro Dzhelebov would once again reread the stories about these and many other biblical figures and was comforted by their fate. All these innocents had suffered, yet they were not angry with anyone and did not seek revenge for their suffering, and in the end they were rewarded for their uncomplaining patience. And then he believed that patience and resignation were man’s supreme virtues and that every evil deed gave rise to more evil. Whoever took revenge and killed, even if the law was on his side, thinking that he would be doing away with one evil, in fact had brought about yet another evil. In killing your brother’s murderer, you bring about for his loved ones, who are innocent, the same evil that he brought about for your loved ones. Instead of ten, twenty people would suffer – the evil will have been avenged, but not eliminated.
This was how Kiro Dzhelebov managed to smother the hatred that had blazed up in his soul that morning in the yard outside the horse barn. But life constantly tempted him toward vengeance – either a new misfortune would occur at the co-op, for which they would suspect him and reproach him, or his sons would suffer some setback precisely because Stoyan Kralev and others like him had put the whole family in this miserable situation. And it always happened such that Stoyan Kralev as an official functionary would be the first to express his indignation and hatred toward him. The sharp spasm in his throat would begin to suffocate him, and the thought that everything could be made right with death would once again grip his mind. This thought had conquered him once and forced him to attempt suicide, he knew its strength and knew that if he let it overwhelm him again, this time he would inevitably commit murder. In hours of extreme agitation, this idea pushed him toward the crime, he was ready to commit it and only his strenuous struggle against it returned him to mental equilibrium. But the idea lived in him and was constantly eating away at him, and over the years it turned into an intense illness which was only waiting for a stimulus in order to cloud his reason and conquer his will. Like every sick man, he sought a cure for his illness and found it in resignation. But even resignation did not help him in decisive moments, and he resolved to swallow the bitterest of pills – self-abasement. Only this could act upon him as an antidote to his grueling desire for revenge and as we already know, he decided to turn his primordial enemy into a friend.
Stoyan Kralev interpreted Kiro Dzhelebov’s desire for friendship as repentance for his unexpiated guilt and allowed him to grow close in the naïve belief that all opponents of the new life sooner or later realized the error of their ways, while for him this was a moral reward for his years-long efforts to win over such people to his cause. Stoyan Kralev arranged with the police to get Kiro Dzhelebov a hunting license and a rifle and accepted him into the village hunting party, and in so doing gave him to understand that he accepted his repentance and put an end to their former enmity. Stoyan Kralev, of course, did not feel guilty for this enmity and had no idea that Kiro Dzhelebov was committing outrages against his own pride out of fear that he would give in to his own hatred and kill him. Kiro Dzhelebov really did do everything he could to grow close to him and become tied to him, and even went so far as to turn into his servant, offering up his services himself, he did much work for him around the yard, invited him over, and would himself go to Stoyan Kralev’s house now and then. Four or five years passed and no disputes cropped up between the two of them. In the beginning, Kiro Dzhelebov suffered from his own hypocrisy and could not sleep whole nights, especially when he learned that the village wiseacres had stuck him with a new nickname – “the Bodyguard” (of Stoyan Kralev, of course). On the other hand, however, he felt relief from his deadly passion for revenge, while his efforts at toadying up to Stoyan Kralev and playing the role of the repentant ever more strongly pushed his worries about his sons and life as a whole to the back burner. Thus with exorbitant efforts of the will, he managed to replace in his consciousness the thought of revenge with the virtue of resignation. Besides that, he discovered new features in Stoyan K
ralev’s character, which earlier he had not been able to or due to his bias had not been willing to see. He showed solidarity with his comrades in the hunting party, he patiently listened to the co-op members’ criticism and advice, if the occasion permitted he would have a drink and make merry right alongside the others, and sometimes he would even criticize certain irregularities in the running of the village. Whether years ago his official position demanded that he act differently with people, or whether he was now pretending to be someone else, was not so important at the end of the day. What was important was that Kiro Dzhelebov had already tasted the fruits of his resignation. He and his wife worked at the co-op, they were healthy, their sons and their families were healthy, he went hunting on his days off, in the winter they would get together on holidays or at comradely gatherings – in short, after numerous misadventures, life had once again set off down a well-beaten path and his soul became more peaceful. We only have one life, right? So we’ll live it out, just so long as we’re healthy, he would think, remembering the old saying: “With patience, even water can be carried in a sieve.”
He tried to take the news of Marko’s death as a terrible twist of fate which could befall a man at any time, and decided to take on the anguish of this great misfortune alone. He hid the telegram from his wife, and while he was preparing her for the tragic news, he also asked their relative who worked at the city post office to keep it a secret. He purposely delayed his return to the village, so as not to find his wife at home; for several evenings she had been going to a neighborhood working bee. She had left his supper on the table, he set it aside, got the ink and the Bible, and opened it to the pages of the family chronicle. The original pages had long since been filled and he had glued in new pages from his sons’ school notebooks. On them he had noted his joining of the co-op, Marko’s defection, his other sons’ weddings, and the birth dates of his grandchildren, the birth of a lamb with two heads, the big hailstorm two years earlier, and other important events connected to the life of the family. On the final page there were two blank lines and he wrote:
My eldest son, Marko Kirov Dzhelebov, died in Germany on December 20, 1965 May he rest in peace!
He read what was written and anguish suddenly overcame him as if from an ambush, it pierced his heart and his breast so sharply that it stopped his breath, as if Marko’s death had become real and irreversible only after he had written it in the family chronicle. He paced around the room, then opened the window and stuck his head outside for some fresh air. The wind had grown stronger, snowflakes whirled in the light from the window, he could hear the branches of the acacia tree creaking, a freezing, inescapable sorrow wafted in from the night. Kiro Dzhelebov sensed that he had never felt a more intense pain or stronger spiritual shock. As always in such states he realized that now, too, he must find the strength to bear his suffering, he tried to comfort himself with the simple and indisputable truth that death did not pick and choose, but took those it had marked beforehand. This time, too, he tried to find consolation in the Bible. He opened it to a page which he had marked with a scrap of paper the last time, and it was the story of Job. He started reading somewhere in the middle, but his consciousness was split, he was wondering why, in fact, Job had been punished with such suffering, and at the same time he was imagining Marko lying in a coffin in some hospital, alone in his death among foreign people in a foreign land. After that he saw him as a baby with his soft, elongated skull, kicking unswaddled in his crib, which had been hung right there on that hook in the ceiling, he remembered how, when Marko was three, he had gotten scared by the neighbor’s dog and with a shriek had snuggled in his embrace and he had inhaled the intoxicating scent of a child’s flesh, while feeling with his palm the fast beating of his little heart. That flesh and that heart are now dead, he thought to himself, while reading about Job’s friends who asked why and how it was that innocent people were made to suffer. One of his friends says that suffering is not always punishment for sins that have been committed and that sometimes God tests the faith of his most devoted mortals by subjecting them to the most harrowing trials. And God himself tells Job that he is tormenting himself in vain trying to discover the reasons for his suffering, because God’s intentions cannot be fathomed, they are beyond human understanding. This thought stunned him, because after many years he only now made sense of it. Until that minute he had not thought about the nature of God, out of habit he had taken him as an omnipresent and impersonal force that stood behind everything in the world. Now he saw him in the image of a hoary-headed old man, as he had once dreamed of him, an inaccessible, merciless despot who played with human fates with impunity and disposed of them however he saw fit. He remembered how he had led him to the Crag in his dream and had forced him to slaughter his firstborn son, just as he had forced Abraham to sacrifice his son. He had read that story many times as well, but only now did he make sense of it, too. The all-powerful God was not certain of his strength and his right to lord over people, and in order to impose his cult upon them, he stopped at nothing, even laying waste to whole nations. He was not even certain of those who were endlessly devoted to him, and he subjected them to the most terrible suffering, he wanted them to prove their faith with that which was dearest to them, with their flesh and blood. “What is this cruel, unappeasable, bloodthirsty God?” – Kiro Dzhelebov cried out, and for the first time, in a state of intense agitation, he did not realize he had fallen into a frenzy, he was talking to himself and pacing around the room from wall to wall. “People have made him up, because they realized they were weak and they needed someone to protect them and to rule them. Fine, but why did they think up such a God? He wants people to believe in him, but he himself doesn’t believe in them, he asks for resignation, but himself takes revenge. They need to think up a new God, this one is godless! This one is only concerned with himself, with his own glory and power, while he derives the poor little people of their individuality, so they serve him and glorify him. Job, Abraham, and many others like them were robbed of their character, they aren’t men at all, since they accept their suffering without complaint so as to appease his caprices. Abraham is a criminal, with a clean conscience he raised a knife to his son in order to prove his faith, but what is that faith that has to be proven with a crime? If he was a true father, he would have to sacrifice himself for his son or to take revenge for him. Yet he is ready to give away what is most sacred to him so as to pander to his God and to receive happiness, glory, and blessings from him. I, too, was like Job and the others; I, too, curled my tail between my legs in the face of my tormentor. He, too, demanded obedience and resignation from me, and constantly took revenge on me for others’ sins. He’s still taking revenge on me even now by pretending to have forgotten what evils he has done to my family. As if that wasn’t enough, he has even ‘forgiven’ me for those evils, he ‘forgives’ me for having killed my son. He killed him! If he hadn’t driven him to wander hungry in foreign lands, he wouldn’t have come down with that sickness in his lungs. Who knows what hardships he had to pass through before he found his footing, what terrible worries he carried in his heart, what anguish he felt for us, for his brothers, for his home. And my other sons would have stayed here, they wouldn’t have gone wandering to strange homes like apprentices, they wouldn’t be ashamed to set foot in their home village. For so many years I spit in my own face, I turned myself into a bootlicker in people’s eyes out of fear of washing away this shame. Out of fear alone, and nothing else. I thought up everything else, but deep down I knew that it was out of fear…”
The dog barked on the veranda, signaling that someone was coming, he soon heard footsteps on the stairs as well. Kiro Dzhelebov got ahold of himself and saw that he had left the window open and that the room had grown cold. He closed the window, put the Bible away, and bent down to put more wood in the stove. This is how Auntie Tanka found him, bent over the stove, still wearing his coat. He told her that he had sent Marko a New Year’s telegram, that on his way back he had got
ten delayed at the co-op office and had only now come home. While she was making up the bed, he ate, then drank a glass of wine and went to bed. When Auntie Tanka had cleared the table and lain down beside him, he was already asleep or had at least drifted off. A strange peacefulness came over him, as was to be expected after extreme spiritual agitation. He slept deeply, and in the morning awoke a bit later than usual and went to the co-op. After icing everything over in the night, the blizzard had grown stronger and covered everything in deep snowdrifts. He spent two days around the barns, he returned home for lunch, and after supper he went to bed. On the third day, Sunday, he filled two bottles with new wine, took a bit of roasted pork as an appetizer, and around ten o’clock went to the tavern. Despite the blizzard, all the vineyard owners arrived one by one, sat down, and started tasting the new wines. An hour later, when Ivan Shibilev suggested that the hunters set out on a wolf hunt, Kiro Dzhelebov didn’t ask himself whether this was wise or wonder whether he should go out into the fields in such weather, he got up serenely with the other hunters and went home to get his rifle. Auntie Tanka had lit the oven in the room on the ground floor, she was working on something there and didn’t hear him. He went upstairs, put on a pair of wool socks, grabbed his rifle and his cartridge belt, and went to leave, but then thought of something and returned from the doorway. He took the Bible out of the cupboard, took out the ink, and just as he was, with his rifle slung over his shoulder, he wrote in the margins of the last page of the family chronicle:
Wolf Hunt Page 60
