One of my shepherds was still waiting for me though, Todor from Shiroka Luka. ‘Todor,’ I says to him, ‘what kind of crook have you got there?’ ‘Best cornelian cherry,’ he answers. ‘Right,’ I says, ‘if it’s cherry-wood, I’ll lie down and you bash me as hard as you can. No questions now! Get on with it! Or you won’t get paid a single penny!’
Ten of the best Todor gave me, and then we got on our horses and rode off home. I felt like sitting down and crying, but the tears wouldn’t come. I tried getting sloshed, but wine and brandy left me cold…. ‘You’re in a bad way,’ I says to myself, ‘a really bad way.’ And how was I to know this was only the beginning and worse was yet to come? Two days later Perpelan, the police sergeant from Dyovlen, turns up in the village with a couple of constables, and without so much as a by your leave, comes marching straight in the front door!
‘In the name of the law you’re under arrest!’ he says. And he tells his constables to tie me up.
‘What’s all this about then?’
‘Never you mind! Move!’
We arrived at the police station and the interrogation began.
‘What were you doing with that spy?’
‘Spy? What spy? I don’t know any spy!’
They got to work on me with their sticks, and gradually I got the picture. That Adil fellow, who I’d invited into my house and entertained, and had done business with, had been a spy. And he’d not only relieved me of my money, he’d landed me in this hole as well. I insisted I knew nothing, but you couldn’t really expect them to believe me. I was dragged from one police station to the next, interrogated by one policeman after another, and finally ended up once again all by myself in the garrison lock-up. I was tried and sentenced to be shot. And if it hadn’t been for Adil getting caught himself, I would have been sent to join the angels. As it was though, the police discovered I was telling the truth and let me go.
From that time on the most I’ll agree to has been to tell a ewe from a ram, a kid from a lamb or a fat animal from a thin one. But as for telling what’s good from what’s bad, there’s no knowing how things will turn out in the end, and I’d rather not try.
About a couple of years ago, aye, about then it must have been, my son Angelachko came wanting some advice. ‘Father,’ he says, ‘I’ve met this girl from Krichim. She’s a good lass. Do you think I ought to marry her?’
‘How do you know she’s good?’ I asks him.
‘I can tell by looking at her.’
‘If you could tell what’s good and what’s not just by looking, my son,’ I says, ‘I’d be the area director by now. I’d have taken to the woods and joined the partisans…. Only, in those days you couldn’t tell for the trees what was good and what was bad.’
Anyhow Angelachko married the girl and they did very well for themselves. He was working up at the quarry and earning a packet. But you know how it is with money -you can never get enough – and he kept on at his wife to become a telephonist in town. A few little presents here and there and the job was hers.
‘Well Father,’ he said, ‘now I’m happy. We own a fine new house and when I’ve bought myself a clothes cupboard, everything in the garden will be lovely!’
That’s what he thought, but his wife had other ideas and took up with the chief telephonist. My lad caught them at it and gave her a thrashing. She ran off back to her village, and he was so depressed he had himself a skinful and set fire to his house. Wanted to forget her and his home for ever, he did.
Everyone felt sorry for us: ‘How awful! What a tragedy!’ And I could hear what they were all saying too. ‘Milyu’s getting old. He’s going soft in the head. You can tell by that daft smile on his face, God preserve us!’ But it was water off a duck’s back to me and I quietly went on fingering the beads on my bead-string. I knew that sooner or later the clouds would melt away, and the sun would shine once again.
And how it shone! We was shifting what was left of the house after the fire and had just pulled down a wall of old Angelachko’s place next door. And guess what we found? A copper jug with the old boy’s hoard of coins: thirty Austrian imperials and a hundred Turkish liras!
Now you try and tell me what is for the best and what isn’t. As I was saying to my son Angelachko : ‘Son,’ I says, ‘this old world of ours is a crazy, topsy-turvy place. There’s just no telling the good from the bad, or how things will turn out in the end.’
Ibryam-Ali
He was a real man, make no mistake about it! A bandit he may have been, but a fine fellow all the same! We met a good few times, me and Ali. He used to call on me at the sheepfolds, looking for bread, and the more I saw of him the more I admired him. A game cock if I ever saw one! He’d come creeping up, and you’d be tripping over him before you knew he was there. And even the dogs never caught his scent. Delissivko had four guarding his place, but Ali got into the yard, climbed into Delissivko’s bedroom, stuck a red-hot trivet over his head and made off without a woof or a whine from a single one of them. After that Delissivko chained them up, took his double-barrelled gun and shot them dead, for not raising the alarm.
Once I asked Ali how he did it:
‘How is it the dogs never notice you?’ I said.
‘I rub myself down with a paste made from billy-goat’s balls,’ he told me. ‘That kills any smell I may have!’
Whether he was telling the truth or only joking, I couldn’t say, because he never laughed. In fact you never knew when he was joking and when he wasn’t, for his face always stayed the same. Only once did I see him show any feeling: when he was caught the first time. They confronted him with his mother and tried to make her say he’d brought Delissivko’s money home with him. She denied it, and Fandukli the field-keeper grabbed her by the plaits and hit her. Ali may have been bound hand and foot, but a twist of his body sent three policemen tumbling to the ground and a crack from his knee up-ended the field-keeper over t’other side of the room.
People said that later, up at the police station, the field-keeper burned Ali’s neck with blazing straw and tried to break his leg with a lump of wood.
And what was all the fuss about?
Ten Turkish liras!
Ali worked as a farmhand for Delissivko, and one day Delissivko announced that Ali had robbed him of ten liras. Ali got locked up in the police station and was given such a thrashing the skin hung in strips off his backside – if you’ll pardon the expression. The thrashing wasn’t all though – for nearly three whole weeks they dragged him from one police station to the next, till he got the chance to give them the slip. Just taking him across a river, they was, when he shoved his escort into the water and made off into the mountains.
After Ali got away it came out that Delissivko’s eldest son Marin had pinched the ten liras and had run off with the songstress from up at the pub. When Marin got back and found out what had happened he went like a man to his father and confessed it was him took the money. Ali was still at the police station then, and that’s where Delissivko made his big mistake. Instead of letting Ali go and saying he was sorry, he ordered Marin to shut up and keep quiet.
Ali’s first victim was the field-keeper who’d tried to break his leg. He caught him out in the meadows by Azmak and killed him. Then he sent Delissivko a note. He couldn’t write himself, so he got a wood-cutter to do it for him: ‘Just you wait!’ Then he cut his finger and instead of writing his name, he signed with a cross of blood at the bottom.
Delissivko got the wind up good and proper but seeing as he was rich he had plenty of friends in high places, and got the whole police force out looking for old Ali. When they couldn’t find him they got hold of his mother. They tortured her and tormented her, but she wouldn’t give her son away and in the end the old woman died. If they hadn’t done this, most likely Ali would have made his peace with Delissivko and called it a day, but when his old mother was killed the final link between him and the world snapped. He turned wild, like a wolf, and became, as they say, a real desperado. He set fir
e to Delissivko’s sheaves, burned down his sheepfolds, attacked his shepherds and destroyed the creamery where the cheese was made. Two hundred head of sheep he stole from Delissivko and drove them over the border. Later he began stealing from others as well, but never from the poor. The roads weren’t safe. The authorities were at a loss what to do and in the end a five thousand lev reward was placed on his head. And money was worth something in those days!
Delissivko added another thousand, but still no one wanted to go after Ali and try and bump him off. Except for one Karakachani, who got hooked on the money. He tried to do the dirty on Ali, but Ali got wind of it, caught him and spiked him with his dagger. Then he chucked him on an ant-hill and let the ants gobble him up alive.
At one point I was accused of giving him bread. But what would you have done in my place, up there in the mountains with his knife at your throat? You’d have done what he told you or you’d have danced the horo! And besides, we knew he hadn’t always been a bandit. Delissivko made him into one. And he had such a beautiful voice too! Nobody could match the songs Ali sang. There was one in particular: ‘Roufinka lying sick and fading’. When he sang that song and his voice spread over the fields and meadows, the mowers laid down their scythes and the reapers their sickles – just so they could listen to his singing. Many a heart had beaten faster at that song of his, and the heart of Djinko’s daughter Fatma from Kozlouk was one of them. She had been ready to become his bride, but her father wouldn’t let her marry a farmhand. She had even been ready to defy her father and run away with Ali, and they had already agreed on the time and place, but Ali was not to know then that fate had other things in store for him: instead of ‘snow-white Fatma with eyes so black’, clubbings and whippings were to be his lot!
So Ali became a bandit. He was hunted beneath every blade of grass and wisp of straw, but he never forgot that song. Folk told how they’d heard him sing it on the barren hillsides and how the head forester from Belitsa had once followed Ali’s singing and had wounded him, even killed him perhaps. To prove it the forester had brought back a blood-stained leather bag, embroidered with little blue beads, and with thirty gold napoleons inside. Ali would never have parted with a bag like that! Not unless he’d been in danger of his life.
That’s what the fellow from Belitsa said, anyway, and everyone agreed with him. Delissivko, the old fox, believed the story too. He breathed freely once more, paid his thousand levs to the head forester and settled down to a life of peace and quiet. He started going out again, went to church, turned up at the village hall in a big fur coat and cursed and swore at the farmhands just as if nothing had ever happened…. Little by little us shepherds also began to think Ali must have died from his wounds, ‘specially as not a single wood-cutter or shepherd had seen him around.
Things went on like this till one morning we heard that Ali had got into Delissivko’s place during the night. And the best of it was, no one knew quite what he’d done. Delissivko hadn’t been hurt – I saw him myself a couple of weeks after, walking round his yard: straight back, no limp, and no groaning and moaning neither. But his eyes never left the ground, and he no longer shouted and cursed.
Delissivko spent close on a month shut up in a room with three others – two keeping watch while the third slept – but he himself, or so the story went, never slept a wink the whole time. If he started to doze off, something would jerk him awake. He’d leap from the bed and start crawling round the floor, crying out: ‘He’s here! He’s come!’
‘There’s no one, Master, no one’s come,’ the servants told him. But he kept on : ‘He’s here! He’s here!’
One evening he told the servants to leave the room for a moment so he could put on a clean shirt. When they went back they found he’d hung himself.
It was about a week after Delissivko’s funeral when the big hold-up took place and Ibryam-Ali was wounded a second time. Father Basil’s son Kecho was there and he told me what had happened. He and about ten others, cattle-dealers mostly, were on their way to Karamoushitsa to do some buying. Up by Karakoulas they stopped for a drink of water and two characters with red scarves over their faces came leaping out.
‘Hands up! One move and you’re dead!’
One was holding a pistol and the other a grenade. The one with the pistol was Ali and he was giving the orders. He told the cattle-dealers to file past and throw their money at his feet.
‘That money belongs to the poor!’ he shouted. ‘The miserable price you pay for their cattle, it’s downright robbery !’
Two filed past, then three more, but when it came to the sixth, instead of taking out his purse, he took out a dagger, hurled himself at Ali and tried to kill him. There was one hell of a fight, but no one felt like getting involved. The cattle-dealers were afraid of the grenade, and the fellow with the grenade was afraid of the cattle-dealers, so they let the two men get on with it and waited to see who was killed first. The cattle-dealer cut the belt holding Ali’s trousers and, if you’ll pardon the expression, got a fistful of bollocks and started twisting and squeezing. Well, even Ali could see he was in a bit of a fix and he shouted to his mate to let fly with the grenade.
‘Throw it!’ he yelled. ‘Even if it kills us both!’
His mate threw the grenade at the struggling pair. The grenade went off, and when the smoke cleared the merchant lay dead on the ground and Ali was sitting up right as rain. Just a splinter in his thigh, that’s all. But it still gave me a fright when I saw the wound. About ten days later, it was. I’d just got back to the sheepfold, done the milking and shut the sheep up for the night. I sat meself down outside the hut and was about to boil up some milk for supper when I heard someone call my name:
‘Becho-o.’
I got up, looked round – not a soul! ‘Must have imagined it,’ I thought and went back to the fire. I’d hardly sat down when I heard it again :
‘Becho!’
I went into the hut, just in case someone was hiding there. No, no one. I looked round outside – it wasn’t quite dark yet – no one there neither. Just the sheep standing as quiet as could be, and the dogs lapping up their bran swill from the trough without a care in the world. I was right scared, I don’t mind telling you. Then there was a rustling above my head, and a thud, and out of nowhere Ibryam-Ali appeared in front of me! He had a wide leather belt with brass buckles round his waist with two or three daggers sticking out the top, a knitted cap on his head and a pair of sandy moustaches twirled down and almost meeting under his chin. He’d got a pistol on a small chain slung over his shoulder and proper revolver stuck in his belt. His face was brown, and a bit thinner than before, I’d say. Anyhow, he made me jump that much I clean forgot to wish him ‘good evening’ or ask him in.
‘Seems I gave you a bit of a fright,’ said Ali.
‘What d’you expect, flying down out of the sky like that?’
‘Call a pine tree the sky! When you sit down and make a fire and boil up some milk, don’t you first look and see if it’s all clear up the pine tree?’
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him I was a shepherd and not a bandit like him, and the trees were no concern of mine, but I thought better of teasing him just then.
‘Can you spare me some milk?’ he said.
I put the whole pail in front of him. Then he took the pistol from his belt and pointed it straight at me.
‘Catch me a ram!’ he said.
‘All right, I’ll get you one,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to point that thing at me!’
‘It’ll be better for you if I do,’ he answered. ‘Because when you go down to the village hall tomorrow evening you’ll be able to say I was here and forced you to give me the ram. Otherwise they’ll accuse you of trying to help me. No point you getting into trouble on my account.’
We spent the whole night roasting the animal, and while we sat there we talked about sheep and rams. He wanted to know about the bells, what kind I’d got, where I’d got them from and whether they had a good ring.
He even started giving me advice:
‘This one, and that one there need changing. They don’t go with the others. And that one needs beating out a bit to “freshen it up”.’
While he’d been hiding in the pine tree he’d heard all my bells, sized them up, so to speak, and had worked out what to do to get a perfect peal.
‘You need two new bells,’ he said, ‘one for a deep bass “dong”, and the other, with a drop of silver in it, for a gay light tinkle. They’ll spur each other on,’ he said, ‘and do a useful job of work at the same time. If I’m in danger, tie the large bell on the big ram. And rub his belly with stinging nettles so he starts scratching and rings the bell, and then I’ll know to keep out of the way. If I hear them both ringing, I’ll know it’s all clear. And if you should need me for anything, tie the small bell to a mule, jump on and ride from here to Chamjas. And if I’m alive and well I’ll answer your call.’
‘Do you find it difficult,’ I asked, ‘being a bandit?’
‘It wouldn’t be so bad,’ he said, ‘if I could only sing where and when I liked. Come on, let’s sing something now – very quietly!’
And he began to sing. He’d got these hard, very stern, gravelly eyes, and when he looked at you it was like having your belly-button shaved with a pair of scissors, but when he started to sing they went all kind and tender – soft and smooth like olive oil.
‘Singing quietly like this,’ he said, ‘is like lying with a beautiful woman with your hands tied together.’
These were his last words. The forest rustled and he was gone. I didn’t say a thing to anyone in the village, but I did what he said about the two bells. They both rang out just like we’d agreed, signalling that all was well and the coast was clear, but Ali never came back. People said he’d gone over the border and been killed somewhere in Greece.
Wild Tales Page 10