Wild Tales

by Nikolai Haitov

  When the hodja had finished with his funeral he came over to say goodbye. He pointed out the hill where he had his farm and was about to go when he said:

  ‘I’ll send one of the men out this evening to have a look for that forester of yours. You go off to bed and get some sleep, and tomorrow early I’ll bring you round some fresh maize porridge.’

  He hadn’t been gone long when a Pomak with a right mangy beard came over from the farm across the way. He was carrying a copper jug and a bag of food, so I knew he must be the Rassim the hodja had called out to from the minaret. He put the food down and turned to go.

  ‘No need to go rushing off,’ I says. ‘What’s your name?’

  A sort of gurgling came from his throat and I realized he’d had his tongue cut out. I made up my mind to ask the hodja in the morning who’d cut it out and why, but so much happened during the night I clean forgot about Rassim and his tongue. I was pretty well struck dumb myself.

  Rassim went off and I was left on my own. From where I was I could see the farmsteads on the hills, but the nearest one was a good rifle-shot away. Not a soul about, there wasn’t, no one to chat to or share a fag with.

  I went up to my room. It smelled of the hodja and I tried opening the window. No good – it was nailed up. So I opened the door and went outside. I lit a fire to keep warm, ate my supper, and very soon it was dark. All at once something called out from the minaret, ‘Tu-whit-tu-whoo! Tu-whit tu-whoo!’ Barn owls! And a screech owl joined in too. All it needed now was for wolves to start howling and I’d have felt alone and forgotten in the back of beyond! ‘Come along now, Georgi,’ I says to meself, ‘best be off to bed. There’s no telling what tomorrow may bring.’ I put out the fire and went inside. I struck a match to see what was where, jammed a lump of wood against the door, stood the jug of milk on the table, and seeing as there was nothing else to cover it with, used the hodja’s Koran as a lid. Then I lay down without getting undressed. All I took off was my belt and cap, and I put my revolver under the pillow.

  There’s nothing like bed to quieten you down, as they say, and little by little I went off to sleep. How long I’d been asleep, I couldn’t say, but all of a sudden, still half dreaming, I heard this tearing sound. Like someone tearing paper. I was wide awake by now, but I kept quite still. ‘Must be a mouse,’ I thinks. I listens again : ‘No, that’s no mouse … it’s someone tearing up a book, page by page!’ I reach for my revolver, but the boards creak and – crash! – the jug with the milk goes flying. Then – deathly silence. Only the sound of breathing. For a moment I thought it might be the sound of my own breathing coming back off the wall. I held my breath but the breathing went on. What the hell could it be? My hair was standing on end. I groped for my revolver and with my finger on the trigger I felt a bit better. ‘If there’s someone there,’ I thought, ‘I’ll put a bullet through him!’ But then I remembered that the window was nailed up and the door not only bolted, but jammed shut with a lump of wood. Not even a fly could get in. ‘But what about under the bed? What if someone had hid and waited till I’d gone off to sleep?’

  ‘Don’t move!’ I shouted, ‘or I’ll shoot!’

  Before I knew what I was doing I was on my feet and had fired three shots. Suddenly I realized I was standing barefoot on the bed with my revolver in my hand. Very slowly I knelt down, and keeping hold of the gun, felt for the matches. Pressing the box down on the bed with my knee, I struck a match and held it up: the door was still jammed shut, the window was still nailed fast, and there was no one in the room. Only the Koran and the jug, lying in a pool of milk on the floor.

  While the match lasted I looked all round without believing my eyes. Then I lay down again, but I didn’t let go of my revolver. I even thought of getting up and going out, but I felt that weak – as if someone had cut off my arms and legs so I couldn’t move. My old heart was pounding away fit to burst, and my back and legs had gone quite numb. So that’s what it’s like, being half dead with fright! If Ali Bekir himself had come in at that moment, I would have thrown my arms round him and kissed him like a brother, never mind whether he’d have carved me up or hung me from the ceiling! But Ali Bekir didn’t come. Instead the chair creaked as if somebody was making himself comfortable on it. The chair wasn’t standing straight on the wooden floor and was see-sawing to and fro as if someone was rocking it from side to side. I wanted to scream, but my throat was set solid and nothing came out. Not even a whisper. ‘Maybe it’s a dream,’ I thought. But you can tell when it’s a dream and when it’s for real: no dream, it isn’t, when your teeth start chattering and you come out in a cold sweat behind the ears! You’d never believe it, the things that were going through my head – dragons and ghosts and specially that dead man from the day before. Maybe he’d climbed out of his grave and had come to get me as I lay on my bed. My only comfort was the three bullets I’d got left in my revolver, but a fat lot of good bullets are when you’re dealing with corpses!

  How long the chair went on rocking I can’t remember now, but the moment it stopped there was an almighty clatter and all the bowls came crashing down off the shelf. I was that scared, I let fly with the last three cartridges. When the sound of the shots died away, everything was quiet. But then this rustling and scrabbling started. ‘I must be going mad!’ I thought. So I stuck my fingers in my ears to see if it wasn’t my own head doing it. The rustling stopped. So there was someone there, rustling and scrabbling away – I was scared as hell and I don’t mind admitting it. I threw down the revolver, grabbed hold of the bedclothes with both hands, closed my eyes tight and rolled myself into a ball so I wouldn’t hear or see the horrible thing when it jumped on me.

  How long I spent under the bedclothes, I couldn’t say : it seemed like a hundred years. And all the while that noise going on. You can’t imagine what it’s like – that rustling and scrabbling right next to you, and you haven’t a clue what it is. I’ve been in a fight with a bear, I got my arm bit – here’s the scar, look! And then there was this poacher I was taking to court. He wanted me to drop the case, so he emptied his gun into my belly, and in the War I chucked a live grenade back to where it came from. Can’t say I were ever that scared, but up in the hodja’s room I really thought I’d snuffed it. Frightened to death I was, and God strike me down if I tell a lie, I mean it, proper petrified! My blood ran cold and I was about to give up the ghost, when this cock starts crowing. Whose it was, I don’t know. The hodja’s maybe, or from one of the farms on the hill, but it seemed to come from miles away, from underground like. Anyhow it saved me, I reckon, and bit by bit I came back to life. I didn’t move though, not till it got light. Then I heard another cock and another, crowing away in the distance, and right glad I was to hear them. Better than all your medicines.

  Very soon they was crowing all over the place, each one louder than the next, and I realized it had got light. I threw back the bedclothes, and the first thing I saw was the bowls all over the floor. I sat up and noticed something else – a great pile of grain right by the bed. The window was still in one piece, nailed up like before, and the door was still jammed shut, but there was this pile of grain as high as the bed and pretty well burying the table. I stuck my hand in it – yes, grain, it really was. And the room was quite light, so I wasn’t seeing things.

  I got up off the bed – stiff as hell – and what do you think I saw behind the pile of grain? Crouching down by the upturned jug of milk was a little black-and-white creature no bigger than a dog. It had lapped up the milk and was licking its chops and staring at me. I stared back. A couple of minutes must have gone by before I realized what it was – a badger! An ordinary badger – sitting there, with milk on his whiskers looking up at me and licking his chops. So that’s who’d sent the dishes flying and been rocking the chair! The cheek of it! I was wild. I grabbed the piece of wood jamming the door and tried to clobber him with it. He got the message and beeded off round the table and under the bed. In after him I went, but he got away and all I saw was the ti
p of his tail disappearing through a hole in the wall. So, still holding the lump of wood, I races off outside, and who do I meet coming in but the hodja, with an early-morning smile on his face, a skinned lamb in one hand and flagon of wine in the other.

  ‘Why all the rush?’ he asks.

  ‘A badger! … I’ll beat the living daylights out of him!’

  ‘Affedersin!’ the hodja caught my arm. ‘Don’t, Mr Warden! Stop! he lives here – a kind of master of the mosque, like…. He comes in through that hole every evening and the house is his as much as mine. Every night I puts some milk out for him. Oh dear! How stupid of me! If only I’d asked you to fill his bowl he wouldn’t have missed his supper and you wouldn’t have had such a fright.’

  … It was all I could do to stop myself bringing the lump of wood down on the hodja’s head….

  ‘All right,’ I says, ‘so the badger lives here and does what he likes, but where in heaven’s name did the grain come from?’ And I opened the door and pointed to the pile on the floor.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’ he shouted. ‘However did that happen?’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know too,’ I says. ‘You and your badger are in charge of this bloody mosque. You tell me!’

  The hodja shoved his hands into the grain.

  ‘Yes, it’s my grain all right – wheat and oats…. Here, look!’

  ‘Where do you keep it, then?’ I asks.

  ‘In the loft.’

  I looked up. The ceiling was made of rough boards -pine with a coating of whitewash, and right in the middle there was this small black hole, quite fresh, just big enough to poke a finger through. ‘So that’s it!’ I thought. ‘When I let fly with my revolver one of the bullets went clean through the ceiling, and all the hodja’s grain came pouring down …’ and that was the noise that had terrified me.

  Now that everything was clear I came over awful weak. I was that bad I went and sat down for a couple of hours by the river under some willows. I felt I was going to be sick. My lips were all dry and I had this bitter taste in my mouth. My bottom lip split open and it started pouring blood. The hodja got proper scared – must have thought I was going to snuff it. He kept spraying me with cold water, giving me wormwood tea to calm me down and whispering all kinds of spells over glowing coals. In the end I came round. For a good six weeks though, I felt like I was recovering from a serious illness. For a while I had these terrible nightmares, I was talking in my sleep, and I thought I was really going mad. But I got over it. The only thing I didn’t get over was the cockerels. Better than Jesus Christ and all his disciples, my cockerels are. That’s why I always keep a dozen or so and won’t let a soul come near them. I can’t help feeling that if there weren’t no cock-a-doodle-doos to drive away the darkness, dawn would never come.

  May they multiply and be fruitful, and may the Good Lord protect them! When the first cock crows the dark is driven out, all the owls fall silent and the song-birds start up. At the first cock-a-doodle-do I ain’t scared no more. I know the sun will rise, a new day will be born and the world will come to life again. And to my way of thinking there’s nothing more wonderful after the dark than the birth of another day!

  And what about that warden I was looking for? Well, he’d got himself hitched up with some young widow, and seeing as her brothers were against it, he’d taken her off to the woods. He’d built a hut and was treating himself to a honeymoon, the old dog!

  A Tree With No Roots

  So you want to know my name… ? Thank you, thank you very much! Twelve months I’ve been here in this town and pretty well every day I’ve sat on this same bench. And all the while not a soul has asked my name. Not a soul. You’re the first and I want to thank you for it. May the Good Lord watch over you and may he keep you and preserve you from a fate such as mine!

  Not that I’m hungry or thirsty. To look at from the outside I’m all plump and round, as you can see for yourself. I’ve a daughter, married she is, with a bonny child living in the village, and her husband’s chairman of the co-operative farm. My son, he’s at the Ministry. First secretary they call it. He’s an engineer with a diploma as big as a bedspread, and he gets fetched and carried in a motor car. His wife, she’s a doctor, on a salary, and they’ve got a great porcelain trough to bathe in. I get all the food I want, I’ve a bed to sleep in and a room to myself. Yet I’m right down in the dumps. I’ve touched bottom, all washed up and fading fast. Off my food, don’t sleep at night and these queer things go buzzing about in my head…. The worst of it is, there’s not a soul I can tell about it. And even if I did, they’d think I was off me rocker.

  Take something straightforward, like yoghourt, say. I was telling my son Kircho; Kiro, I says, why don’t you let me go and buy the yoghourt? Off I’d go, there and back – I’d see people, they’d see me. Liven things up a little.

  ‘You’re not going,’ he says. ‘You’re that absent-minded you’d get yourself squashed by a bus or something. And who’ll get the blame? Me, of course! You stay back home, have fun, enjoy the good life!’

  So I stays back home. Nothing else for it. And what a house it is too. Big enough to ride a horse in, a real apartment ! Spick-and-span, neat and tidy, not a thing out of place. Trouble is, it makes you feel like a left-over. So many carpets, there’s no place to walk. And the parquet’s so shiny, one step and you’re flat on your back!

  ‘Make yourself at home,’ he says. ‘Enjoy yourself, eat and drink. Don’t worry about a thing, and have a life worth living!’

  Fine, my friend, but how? Who with? With the sideboard, perhaps, or the dining-room? My son and the daughter-in-law are out all day…. Off early and back late, and when they do get in they just stay stuck to the telly till its time for bed, and then it’s ‘Good night, sleep tight….’ ‘Good night’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Good night’, that’s about all we’ve said to each other for a year and more.

  When the kiddie was home, it wasn’t so bad. You could have a game, a bit of fun and get the fuzziness out of your head, but that daughter-in-law of mine, the stupid creature – Lord have mercy on her! – she took it into her head to send him to the kindergarten, and now he only comes home at weekends.

  And if only you knew why she sent him away! So as I wouldn’t go teaching him country words! So I couldn’t spoil his Bulgarian by making him speak like a peasant. You’d think I’d been teaching him to swear…. And all I said was ‘switcher’ – you know, a little stick to whack things with. Called a ‘switcher’ in the country, it is. Whack! it goes and round it curls. I gave one to my grandson for his horse.

  ‘Here, take a switcher,’ I says, ‘so you won’t tumble over.’

  You should have seen his mother’s face!

  ‘What’s all this about a “switcher”? Can’t you call it a stick like everyone else, instead of spoiling his Bulgarian with words that aren’t nice!’

  ‘Come, come, daughter-in-law. There’s no harm in the kiddie knowing a word like that. A “stick” is a big fat one, but a small thin one is called a “switcher”. Why shouldn’t he know the word? It might come in handy.’

  ‘Come in handy, my foot! He won’t be a cowman to need a “switcher”. He’ll go to a special school for foreign languages, and they’ll teach him what he needs to know. He’ll get along very well without your “switcher”.’

  So all because of one silly little ‘switcher’ they bundled him off to a kindergarten.

  ‘Best if I went back to the village,’ I said to Kircho, her husband. ‘Then the kiddie could stay back home.’

  But he soon shut me up.

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind! I’m not having you moping around in the village on your own with everyone saying I don’t care a damn about my poor old dad. You stay here, make yourself at home, eat and drink, and don’t worry about a thing!’

  Eat, huh! How do you find an appetite for warmed up mush in a tin? Kebabs in tins, stuffed vine leaves in tins, salami in tins – everything in tins! They open
a tin, turn out the mush and if that daughter of mine has anything to do with it, they tip mayonnaise on the top…. Been to Germany, she has. She’s seen them eating mayonnaise with everything! And now she’s bought herself a machine so she can make the stuff herself. When one lot’s gone she makes some more, so we never get to the end…. Veal, pork, stuffed vine leaves – mayonnaise with everything! You haven’t a clue what you’re eating – could be anything. And it’s no use leaving it neither. She just gets wild if you do.

  Then one day I says to Kircho:

  ‘It’ll be the death of me, that mayonnaise!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Gives me the gripes, it does.’

  ‘Good God!’ he says, ‘don’t say you’ve caught an ulcer. First thing tomorrow I’ll get you looked over, and if they find anything, it’ll have to come out.’

  ‘That’s right. Go on, have me cut up!’

  Jesus, was I desperate! Ready to let them slice me up, I was. Have my old stomach ripped to pieces, just to be shot of that mayonnaise of hers.

  Then there was the time I thought I’d do myself some garlic, and mash it up with salt and vinegar. Have a bit of proper grub for once. After all that sweet mayonnaise stuff, something with a bit of bite at last. Like a tonic, it was. So I did it again, and again. But then I slipped up – forgot to open the windows afterwards, and the lady doctor got a whiff of garlic.

  ‘And what, may I ask, is this filthy smell?’

  No point in trying to get out of it, so I told her : ‘Garlic’

  ‘And what is garlic doing in this house?’

  ‘Er, well, I did myself some and ate it’

  You should have seen her! When she gets mad, there’s no shouting and screaming, nothing so vulgar. She speaks very softly, all sweetness and light, but it doesn’t half hurt.