‘Oh no you won’t! Here, give me that sack!’
That gave him a shock, I can tell you. Then he tried to get away, but I pulled him back. There was a bit of argy-bargy but I got the sack off him and tipped all the papoutsis out onto the pavement. Then I caught hold of Spotty Kolyo’s chopper and set about hacking them to pieces. The whole street came rushing out:
‘Don’t, Kosta! Kosta, stop!’
‘No “stopping” and no “don’ting”!’ I cried. ‘To hell with koundouri-making! And with papoutsis, and with Bakish and its bloody tsurvoulis’. And to hell with my customers too, robbing me left right and centre. To hell with the whole cock-eyed world, which is too blind to see what it’s heading for!’
I went on cursing and chopping till I’d mashed those papoutsis to pulp. Then I threw down the chopper and left. I didn’t go home, though. I went down to the river. My head was on fire and I wanted to get away from everybody and everything. I sat meself down by the river and shoved my head into the water. Cooled me off nicely, the water did, and I perked up again: no more credit, no more tax collectors and greedy policemen, no more Bakish sucking me dry! Finished ! Finished with the whole damn lot of them!
All very well, but I still had a house and a wife to look after. And a mother-in-law as well. Never left me alone, she didn’t. Forever snooping around to see how much I was earning. And if it was less one week, there was always that special look she gave my wife: ‘You see! What did I tell you?’ She’d tried to talk her out of marrying me. Wanted her to marry Hadji Fanitsa’s grandson instead, with his four-acre orchard. But Minka took me, and her mother never forgave her for it. How could I look her in the eye now, without a penny in my pocket? Best stick my head in the river and put an end to my shame!
I gets up, walks along the bank a bit to find where it’s deepest, crosses meself, says goodbye for ever to Minka, and head first into the muddy water I goes. I’d wanted to dive in real deep and get it over quick like, but I knocks into something slimy on the way down. I opens my eyes -a cat! A dead cat, floating in the water. Made me want to throw up, it did, so I paddled like mad for the bank. While I was sitting there drying off I started thinking again. ‘Why drown yourself?’ I thought. ‘And leave Minka to Hadji Fanitsa! Why not skedaddle to America and earn enough for two orchards, and shut Minka’s mother up for good?’
There was these two pals of mine from up the new end of Cheshnigir, who had run away to Detroit before the Balkan War. Good little patriots, they were, and when the war started they came sailing back across the ocean to lay down their lives for Bulgaria. They got put in our company under Captain Chelbov, and one day, when we was marching through a patch of mud, one of them went a bit close to the captain and spattered his uniform. Up went our brave warrior’s whip. ‘Watch where you’re going, you stupid ass!’ he shouted, and down it cracked across the back of the American’s neck. Never been in the army before, the American hadn’t, and he wasn’t used to military discipline, so he answered the captain back. ‘Stupid ass yourself!’ he shouted. Chelbov pulled out his pistol, and but for us the American would have had his chips. Instead he was sentenced to twenty-five strokes. I was Chelbov’s batman, so I asked if the sentence couldn’t be carried out in a tent, in private like, and not in front of the whole company, so the lad wouldn’t be caused too much shame. After all, no one had forced him to come back and lay down his life for Bulgaria. The captain agreed and ordered me to carry out the sentence. I took the American off to the tent and told him to scream like merry hell. So while I clobbered an old rucksack, he hollered for all he was worth. We got up to twenty like that, and then I gave him the last five on the proper place, so he’d have something to show for it, like. That day I earned myself a friend for life. The young American would have cut off his right hand for me.
‘Kosta,’ he said, when we was demobbed, and our ways parted, ‘you can’t call it living, with guys like Chelbov around. Come and join me in America. Make your pile, and then, if you want, go back home!’
I remembered these words and made up my mind. America or bust! Helped a good few already, America had. Perhaps it would help me too. I was happy as a king when I got home. Not a word to the women, though. I wrote off to my mate and a month later I got a reply. ‘Yes, come! Expecting you. We’ll give you a welcome fit for a king!’
I got meself a passport – no trouble, it wasn’t, getting a passport in those days – but I still didn’t let on to my wife. No point having her screaming and shouting. I’d decided to creep away all secret, and write to her once I got there. And I’d even decided on the date – August 22nd. When the day came, my wife made me some gyuvech, like I asked, we finished our meal, and then I got up and left. But when I was going through the town, just me by myself, I came over all sad. ‘You never said goodbye to your wife,’ I thinks. ‘At least you can say goodbye to the town !’ There was still time till the train…. So I went down through the market to the big plane tree where the officers had their club. There was lights inside. Just one last look at a Bulgarian uniform! Little low windows, the clubhouse had, so I bent down and looked in. There they was, the rogues – the officers, I mean – sitting round a table with a barrel in the middle, drawing off some kind of yellow frothy stuff and drinking it. ‘That must be beer!’ I says. I’d heard about beer before, but never actually seen it, nor tasted it neither. All them officers sitting in there drinking and banging their mugs together, and me outside looking in.
Suddenly I remembered what old Ali had said. ‘If the world has stopped wearing papoutsis,’ he’d said, ‘it won’t change its mind for us. It’s stopped wearing baggy breeches, so it’ll stop wearing papoutsis too! And who knows what else as well!’ So that’s the latest craze – drinking yellow piddle, if you’ll pardon the expression! But the officers were going great guns on it, because it was something new. ‘This time, though,’ I thinks to myself, ‘the froth on that piddle’s going to make me rich – you see if it doesn’t! America won’t run away and my passport can wait too.’ And off I toddled to Pranga, the village where I was born.
‘Dad,’ I says to my old man, ‘you brought me into the world – help me be born again!’ That gave the old boy a bit of a shock, I can tell you.
‘Hold on, Kosta,’ he says, ‘you can’t be born twice!’
‘Oh yes I can,’ I says, ‘if you give me my share of the orchard, I can sell it and get to work on the scheme I’ve got.’
And I told him all about the little wheeze I’d stumbled on. Done a spell in the police, my old man had – kind of forest warden – so it didn’t take him long to cotton on. And, may his soul rest in peace, he gave the plan his blessing. I tied ten gold pieces in my handkerchief, bought myself a licence, went to Plovdiv and got the beer and a cask of ice, a barbecue for kebabche sausages and a couple of plates and mugs, and when I was ready I went along to Vangelaki the icon painter to get him to do me a signboard – St George on his horse with a foaming mug in one hand, and a lance with a grilled kebabche on the end in the other. And under the picture I got him to write in huge black letters on a yellow background the words: ‘ICE-COOL OFFICER BEER!’
Talk about crowds! You should have seen them swarming in! No holding that lot, once they gets stuck on something. And the beer was as bitter as hell! But those idiots didn’t seem to be worried. Some of them even asked me why it was called officer beer.
‘That’s what it’s called when they brings it,’ I says.
And when the photographer saw all those happy crowds round my stand, he set himself up next door with his camera and started taking pictures of them, standing under St George and holding a mug of beer. Them as was a bit merrier than the rest, they got their picture taken wearing a yellow helmet, like what the firemen have.
I got Vangelaki to give me a hand. He looked after the kebabches while I doled out the beer, and by midday we’d gone through the lot, beer and all. Not a drop left. And a whole drawer full of money!
Then I said to Vangelaki: ‘Vangelaki,’
I says, ‘isn’t it time you chucked it in with those saints of yours? Not all that interested in saints, people aren’t, these days. Why don’t you come in with me? You grill the kebabches and I’ll dole out the beer.’
‘Done!’ he says. ‘There’s not a soul in this town as has any feeling for pictures and icons. And seeing as you like my kebabche sausages, I might as well join you! I’m a bit of a sculptor too, you know, I’ll make you some real fine ones!’
We bought a buffalo in Izbegli and made ourselves a load of mince. Then Vangelaki got to work with his long fingers and made a whole pile of lovely curly sausages. I got in ten barrels of beer and away we went! No holding us, there wasn’t – we even got Bakish going green round the grills! And the money – it came rolling in! By evening we’d collected a whole sackful. There was so much neither of us wanted to count it.
‘You count it,’ says Vangelaki, handing me the sack. ‘I’m too tired.’
‘No, you!’ I tells him, shoving it back at him. ‘I’ve had enough for one day.’
In the end we agreed he’d count it one evening and me the next. I was right chuffed by the way things had gone. I even went out and bought my wife a length of silk for a skirt. Told her to get it made up by the best seamstress in town. But she showed the silk to that mother of hers and got bragging about where she was going to get it sewn up, and as usual the old woman flew off the handle.
‘Are you crazy? Who ever heard of a sausage-seller’s wife having her clothes made up in town? What that husband of yours earns is hardly enough for bread and oil, and you go putting on airs like you was living with Hadji Fanitsa!’
The day after I asks the wife why she isn’t wearing her new dress.
‘I haven’t had it sewn,’ she says, and tells me about her mother carrying on and not letting her.
‘Right!’ I says, ‘you tell that mother of yours to wait up for me tomorrow evening. She’s not to go to bed before I gets in.’
Come the evening, I stuffs the money into a sack – not counted, it wasn’t – throws the sack over my shoulder and heads straight for home. They was sitting there waiting for me, so I says to the wife:
‘Spread a blanket on the floor!’
She spread it out, like I said, and I emptied the whole sack of money onto it. Money everywhere, rolling all over the floor!
And the old woman, I thought her eyes would pop right out of her head!
‘Now then, Mother-in-law,’ I says, ‘let’s get to work and see what we’ve got here! You count the silver. Minka, you take the coppers, and I’ll count the notes.’
That shut the old woman up. Three times she rubbed her eyes to make sure she wasn’t dreaming, then she started counting. Some job it was, I can tell you! And when we was finished, I gathered up two great handfuls of notes and emptied them into my wife’s lap.
‘Here!’ I says, ‘that’s for the seamstress! And that,’ I says, emptying two handfuls of silver pieces into the old woman’s lap, ‘that’s so you won’t forget the day when the world stopped wearing baggy breeches!’
And I didn’t forget old Ali, neither! I paid him a wage to rattle his tongs and attract the customers. After all it was him taught me where to tickle the piglet, as we say, he showed me what’s what – and saved me from Bakish.
Pretty good at rattling his tongs, old Ali was. His neck may have been crooked and his turban in shreds, but when he did anything, he did it like he meant it. Only he couldn’t say ‘ice-cool’, and it came out ‘a-nice-cool’ instead :
‘Beer! Beer! A-nice-cool! A-nice-coo-o-o-ool!’
Fear
One day the head forester called me in. He made sure the door was shut and then….
‘Poryazov,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a tricky little job for you -and I want it kept secret. Seems the forest warden in Karakouz has been done in. It’s two weeks since anyone’s seen him on his rounds, and he hasn’t called in at the office neither. As you’re the senior warden I want you to go up to Karakouz and find out whether he’s still alive or what.’
‘Yessir!’
‘Take your gun and some cartridges, and mind how you go. It’s a border area, Pomak country, and you know people are saying AH Bekir and his band are up to their old tricks again. So keep your eyes skinned!’
‘Yessir! I certainly will!’ (In those days you still said ‘Sir’ and not ‘Comrade’.)
I packed food for three or four days into my rucksack, hopped on my horse and away I went. I didn’t take my rifle, though. Too big, a rifle. You can’t hide it. But I took my pistol. I had a six-shooter with a revolving drum and at a hundred and twenty paces I could put a bullet clean through a beech leaf.
It’s seven hours’ ride to Karakouz, but by taking short cuts I made it in five. And even then I still had time to look around and stop off for a drink and such-like at springs along the way. Right big the mountains are up there, and the forest is real wild – huge great trees and crags full of eagles. Plenty to see, but I had that forest warden of ours going round in my head. I was wondering what could have happened to him and whether they’d really bumped him off.
While my horse went on climbing up the mountain I couldn’t get the warden out of my mind. What the hell could have happened to him? Almost anything can happen to a forest warden. That’s the kind of job it is – making sure folk don’t come stealing wood and grazing their animals where they didn’t ought. It’s the easiest thing in the world to end up with a knife in your ribs or a bullet in your back. Like what happened some years back to the warden from Sredok. He caught some goats grazing on a patch of cleared ground in the forest, so he took the bells off of the two billies. Well, you know what shepherds are about bells! That keen to get them back they were, they laid in wait for the warden, and when he came by, they clubbed him to death. All because of a couple of rusty old bells!
Damn near got skewered once myself by Gammy Salih and Bourounsouz from Karamoushitsa. Salih himself told me afterwards. ‘If you’d tried to run for it,’ he said, ‘you’d have felt my knife in your back. Split a pinewood plank at thirty paces, I can. You saved your life by not being afraid!’
With people like that around, it was no easy matter guarding the forest. Especially seeing as they all took their example from Ali Bekir. Ali came from one of the villages in Drama over in Greece. He was a Bulgarian Muslim and he used to come over the border, steal our mules and then sell them in Greece. Him and three others. Once they bumped off a tax-collector for the sake of his horse, and another time they did for a shepherd who’d refused to roast them a lamb over his fire. And from that day on every ruffian had the name of Ali Bekir on his lips. Morning, noon and night they thought of him, and with that name they drove fear into people’s hearts. To tell the truth it wasn’t so much Ali Bekir himself as scared me. I was more worried that in times like that almost anyone could bump off a forest warden or a gamekeeper, and Ali was sure to get the blame.
A right strong horse I had, and by midday I was already in Cold Springs. From there it’s downhill all the way, with the path twisting and turning, through bushes and wild plums, over rocks and down the side of cliffs right the way into Karakouz.
Not really a village Karakouz isn’t, just a few farmsteads scattered over the hills. Down by the river, a short way off from the farms, the peasants had built a wooden mosque with a minaret, and on Fridays they went there to pray. There wasn’t no mayor, nor any tax-collector neither. Only some deputy fellow at the nearest farm, and he was out threshing, so all I could do was go and see the hodja at the mosque.
I found him sat in the shade under some willows. He’d taken off his papoutsis and was mending a pack-saddle. He wasn’t wearing his turban either, on account of the heat. He wasn’t old, nor young really – someone had been to work on his beard with a pair of scissors, so you couldn’t rightly tell how old he was. ‘Hoj geldinV he says. ‘Ho§ buldukV I answers. He invited me to sit down and threw my horse some hay. Then, after talking about this and that, I began asking him about the warden a
nd whether he’d seen him lately.
‘This past couple of weeks I’ve been out threshing,’ the hodja answered. ‘Haven’t seen a soul. And it’s only the funeral kept me home today.’
Someone called Metko from up at the next farm had died, he said.
‘And what brings you to these parts?’ the hodja asked. So I told him I was just touring round.
‘Lucky you caught me in,’ he said. ‘I can fix you up with a bed for the night at the mosque, and you can be on your way tomorrow at the crack of dawn.’
More like a shed really, their mosque, a tumbledown affair with mud-and-wattle walls: one large room for lessons, and a smaller one for the hodja. In the small room there was a bed, made out of a couple of pieces of wood with boards between, and covered with woollen rugs and goatskins piled one on top of another – five or six at least. There was a chair too, and a table and a brazier. It was clean, the floor had been swept, and there wasn’t a single squashed bed-bug on the walls: for just the one night it would do very well. The hodja showed me how to bolt the door, which rug to cover myself with and which to put underneath, and then pulled a watch out of his sash -a great big thing like an oversize salt-cellar with a couple of lids – glanced at it and ran off to the minaret to call the faithful to prayer…. He did all the usual wailing and singing stuff, and then, at the end, he turned to face the nearest farm and bellowed :
‘He-e-e-y! Rassim! There’s a Giaour here! Bring some food!’
While all this hollering and shouting was going on, the funeral procession arrived – all men! They were carrying the dead man wrapped in a rug, and at the back there was an old boy with a beard who kept calling out:
‘Allah, Allah! Allah, Allah!’
They all went into the mosque with the hodja while I hobbled my horse so it could graze. Then there was this noise like a stampede, and the men came charging out of the graveyard and rushed off in different directions with their hands behind their heads. They didn’t once look back – as if death itself was after them. When I saw the hodja with them I remembered I’d heard about that strange custom before: at Muslim funerals, as soon as the first shovel of earth falls into the grave, everyone must run like mad and not look back.
Wild Tales Page 5