Wild Tales

by Nikolai Haitov

  The Test

  It took me six years to become a cooper : two going round the forest learning which trees make the best boards; one just splitting trunks, another just chopping, and another two planing and matching the pieces. Then, to see if you are fit to be a master-cooper, you have to make a barrel blindfold. Twelve master-coopers sit there, with you working blindfold in the middle! And when you’ve got it done, they fill the barrel with water. If a single drop drips through you stay an apprentice. If the outside remains dry, they give you a special belt, and you are a master-cooper at last!

  It was a tough test all right, but the test I got landed with later is something I’ll not forget as long as I live!

  I’d had my master’s belt six months already, but there was still only a trickle of work coming in. Leaving aside the three or four troughs, for which I had to accept curds in payment, five pails is all I made during that time. And if Mother hadn’t gone collecting mushrooms to boil for supper, we’d have starved. Father was old, and too ill to work. And me being a healthy young lad, it was time I gave a thought to getting myself wed.

  Then one day Kara Soulyu Byalkovski from Hambardere turned up at my place.

  ‘I want you to make me a barrel,’ he says, ‘big enough to take three hundred oka of curds. And I must be able to scrape round the bottom with my hand when I bend. Can you do it?’

  ‘Of course! No trouble at all!’

  ‘Three hundred oka and shallow enough to scrape round ?’

  ‘Aye, three hundred oka and shallow enough to scrape round!’

  ‘To work then!’ Soulyu says. ‘It must be in Hambardere by St Konstantin’s Day at the latest!’

  Not a word about money. He jumped on his horse and away he rode. And it was only then I noticed there was something funny about his order. How could you have a barrel big enough to hold three hundred oka of curds, yet shallow enough to touch the bottom with your hand? For you to touch the bottom, it would have to be right shallow, and for a shallow barrel to hold three hundred oka, it would have to be as wide as it was high.

  So I went and asked Father what he thought.

  ‘Father,’ I says, ‘I’ve been asked to make a barrel of such and such a shape. What should I do?’

  ‘If you call yourself a cooper,’ he says, ‘go ahead and make it! If you refuse to make it, you’ll get yourself a bad name, and that’s the last thing you want!’

  So I set to work on the barrel. I put everything I’d got into it and it came out perfect! A prize barrel, if I ever saw one : as wide as it was high – lovely smooth pine-wood as white as cheese! A hundred times I checked whether you could scrape round the bottom with your hand – and you could! I took it to pieces, loaded everything onto a mule and – quick march, off to Hambardere! I put it together again in Soulyu’s yard, and had just finished tightening the hoops, when the master of the house himself came in. He was right pleased to see the barrel and felt it all round. But when he came to the wooden hoops his pleasure vanished and a black look came over his face.

  ‘A fine barrel you’ve got there, my friend, but the hoops spoil it…. A great big barrel like that, big enough to hold three hundred oka, and you expect hazel hoops to hold it together? Has the world run short of iron or something?’

  ‘When you next go in to town,’ I says, ‘you can buy yourself some iron hoops, and I’ll come and put them on for you. In the meantime wooden ones will do the job -they’re tougher than iron ones anyway.’

  ‘Tough or not, I want iron ones! Otherwise people will be saying Kara Soulyu couldn’t afford iron hoops for his barrel and had to make do with hazel instead.’

  While Soulyu and I were carrying on like this, a fair old crowd had gathered in the yard – his wives and their kids, various neighbours and the hodja too. In that godforsaken spot they’d most likely never seen a barrel big enough to take three hundred oka, so they’d come to look. Clouds of smoke rose from the chibouks, old men stroked their beards and there was much clicking of tongues.

  ‘How about that, then? That’s a barrel and a half if I ever saw one! Pity about the hoops though, if they’d been iron, it would have been perfect.’

  Kara Soulyu asked the hodja what he thought.

  ‘With those miserable little hoops,’ the hodja answered, ‘you’ll be lucky if you get it as far as your cellar in one piece!’

  I explained to the hodja that if you take the wood from the sunny side of the forest and make sure it’s got plenty of sap, and then give it a good soaking in rain water, hazel hoops will last for ever.

  ‘Just because we’re Pomaks,’ the hodja shouted back at me, ‘there’s no need to treat us like idiots. Roll that barrel of yours round the yard, and if the hoops hold I’ll shave off my beard, right here and now!’

  Then I reckon the devil must have got into me….

  ‘Hodja,’ I says, ‘you’re on! I’ll roll my barrel for you, but not just round the yard. The yard’s not big enough. I’ll roll it right the way down to the river! If the hoops snap, you’ll have had your fun, but if they hold, I’ll shave your beard off for you !’

  ‘Right you are,’ says the hodja. ‘You go ahead!’

  When the Agas saw I meant business, they started poking the hodja in the ribs, but he wouldn’t listen.

  ‘If you throw a stone into the gorge,’ he said, ‘it breaks into a thousand pieces. His barrel won’t stand a chance. It’ll get smashed to smithereens!’

  ‘Right!’ I says. ‘Give me some water!’

  They brought me a bucket and I gave the hoops a good soaking. Then I rolled the barrel to the edge of the gorge. My God! When I looked down and saw how steep it was, with all those sharp rocks sticking up and the river frothing and foaming at the bottom, I thought I might as well kiss my barrel goodbye! I didn’t show I was afraid though. I stood up, gave the barrel a shove and turned round so I wouldn’t see what happened. There was a ‘boo-oom!’ Then nothing for a long time. Then another ‘boo-oom!’ And again silence. The barrel must have flown through the air before landing a second time. Then such a rumbling and rolling went thundering round the gorge I thought the whole mountain would come crashing down.

  The goats on the hillside opposite got a terrible fright! All their bells started jangling, dogs barked and people began shouting across from the other hill: ‘A barrel! A barrel’s gone over!’ ‘So it’s still in one piece!’ I suddenly thought, and turned round just in time to see the barrel smack into the river, disappear and then bob up again, all nice and white and in one piece. Then it got caught in a whirlpool and went spinning round and round, banging into the rocks first on one side of the river and then on the other. ‘Crash!’ it went on one side. Then ‘boo-oom!’ on the other, as the water whirled it round and threw it back again. ‘Boom! boom!’ just like a cannon. The hodja went white as a sheet. The Agas stared at the ground and steam began to rise from the top of Soulyu’s head. He’d taken off his fez and his head was steaming away like a fresh cowpat.

  ‘Sit yourself down!’ I says to the hodja. ‘And I’ll see about shaving that beard off!’

  ‘No!’ begs Soulyu. ‘I’ll pay you double. Only leave the hodja’s beard alone! How can he be the hodja without his beard?’

  ‘He should have thought about that before! Bring me a razor!’

  I was told there wasn’t one.

  ‘Scissors, then!’

  At that point the Agas joined in too:

  ‘We’ll pay you three times over for your barrel, only don’t shave the hodja !’

  ‘You can pay me five times over if you like, but the hodja’s beard is mine!’

  Two or three took out their daggers.

  ‘Back!’ I shouted and grabbed hold of my axe. The women screamed and the kids scattered in all directions. ‘Otherwise I’ll skin you alive!’

  Makes me right scared, it does, when I remember how I carried on. But I was such a young hothead I didn’t give a damn what happened to me. And can you blame me? -I’d sweated blood to get the barrel right,
and those sods had wanted to send it back. And they’d poked fun at my craftsmanship too.

  ‘Sit down!’ I says to the hodja. ‘I may have to shave you with an axe, but shave you I will!’

  I took the saddle off my mule and sat the hodja down. Soulyu’s wife brought me a pair of scissors, and I started. Hair by hair I shaved him clean. The sweat streamed down behind the hodja’s ears, but I kept going. And all the while the barrel was booming away below: ‘Bam! boo-00m! boo-oom! bam!’ Everywhere people were perched on the walls and roofs, watching. The Agas didn’t dare look up and were still staring at the ground. Except for Soulyu, who couldn’t take his eyes off my hands.

  ‘That’s enough ! Stop !’ he kept saying.

  And when he saw I’d snipped off the very last hair he took his head in his hands and burst into tears.

  ‘We’ve lost our hodja! Our hodja’s gone!’ he cried.

  I jumped on my mule and shouted to the Agas as I rode away :

  ‘Farewell! Now maybe you’ll remember Liyu the master-cooper and how you tried to make fun of him! Farewell!’

  But not a single ‘farewell!’ or ‘adieu!’ came back in reply.

  I’d had my bit of fun, and my heart was happy as I rode away, for I’d done nothing to harm my reputation as a cooper. I didn’t remember about the money till I was almost home. My father was old – he had trouble with his breathing and needed to prop himself up when he coughed, but I was scared of him all the same. Why, I don’t know. But when he gave me that look of his, I became as timid as a lamb.

  Anyhow, I arrived home. I was hardly through the door when Father came out to meet me. He didn’t even say ‘hello’, just:

  ‘Did you sell the barrel?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why not?’

  I told him what had happened, without hiding anything or making anything up.

  ‘Get down on the floor!’ he said. ‘Troundafila!’ (Troundafila was my mother’s name.) ‘Bring me your stick – the one you use for threshing hemp!’

  Mother brought the stick, they closed the outside door, and Father started to thump me – on the seat, where nature intended. He thumped me five or six times, but he got so out of breath he had to hand over to mother, and while she beat me he counted up to ten.

  ‘Up you get, you chump!’ he said. ‘And let me give you a hug! For being such a hothead you got what was coming to you, but for shaving the hodja’s beard you deserve a pat on the back. Well done!’ And he gave me a kiss. ‘Now you’re a real man!’ he says. ‘And in the autumn we’ll see about finding you a wife !’

  ‘What about the money?’ Mother asks.

  ‘He’s got a trade,’ Father tells her, ‘the money will come.’

  And Father was right. Just a couple of days after I shaved the hodja’s beard, Tubby Mehmet’s second son and Gammy Salih came over from Hambardere.

  ‘Come and catch that barrel of yours,’ they said. ‘The Agas will pay you for it, but first they want you to fish it out of the river.’

  We were still a good way from Hambardere, but I could hear the barrel: ‘bam! boo-oom!’ banging against the rocks like a big bass drum. The Agas were waiting.

  ‘We’ll pay you three times over for your barrel,’ they said. ‘But get the damned thing out of the river and stop it booming! It’s frightening the children, and nobody’s had a wink of sleep for three nights now.’

  All very well – ‘Get it out of the river!’ – but how? Fifty-foot cliffs both sides of the river and such a rushing and a roaring and foaming and frothing down below you had no way of telling what was rocks and what was water! The whirlpool where the barrel had fallen had planed the rocks so smooth you couldn’t get anywhere near it, and the cliffs were that steep even a lizard would have lost its grip. I didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘A rope!’ I says. ‘Give me a rope!’

  They took the pack-saddle off a donkey and brought me the rope. One end they tied round my middle and the other I gave the men to hold. I told them to let me down very gently, and when I’d got the rope round the barrel to pull us both up again.

  Going down was all right. They let the rope out till I was dangling in the whirlpool up to my knees, and I don’t mind telling you, I was bloody scared! The water bubbled and boiled like it was alive. Swirling round me like mad it was, greeny-blue and the bottom nowhere in sight! The last time I had anything to do with water was when I was christened and I couldn’t swim a stroke! Anyhow I yelled to the men to let me down a bit further to see if I could touch the bottom. They let out a bit more rope, and in I went up to my neck. Still no sign of the bottom! I shouted again to get them to pull me up, but they didn’t hear. The water was making one hell of a row, but I reckoned they were only pretending they couldn’t hear. ‘So that’s it!’ I thought. ‘They’re trying to drown me!’ And I could hear these two voices inside me : ‘Go back up before it’s too late!’ one was saying, while the other was telling me to go on : ‘Better die than be called a coward!’ it said. I decided to listen to the second one and called to the men to keep a tight grip on the rope, so I could thresh around in the water with my legs and try to grab hold of the barrel as it went past.

  Round and round it went and then it came nearer. ‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘I’ll lift my legs and hook them round it.’ But my breeches were so full of water my legs were like two lumps of lead and I couldn’t move them. The barrel floated up – and away again! Hell! – what could I try next? There was nothing for it, my breeches would have to go …! I got them off all right, but then the women, who were standing behind the men on the cliff, started squealing and squeaking and rushing around in all directions at once! Anyhow I waited for the barrel to come round again, and this time I managed to catch hold of it. I got a grip on it with my hands and called to the men to pull me up.

  They started to heave on the rope, but I could see that the more they heaved the heavier it got. The wood had soaked up the water and the barrel was five times as heavy as before. They lifted us a couple of inches and then stopped.

  ‘Come on!’ I shouts. ‘Pull!’

  ‘We can’t!’ they answers from up top. ‘It’s too heavy!’

  A couple of inches further and they stopped again. Then they gave one more almighty heave, got us six inches or so above the water and stopped again. I looked up to see what was wrong and suddenly noticed the rope: where it rubbed against the edge of the cliff it was almost worn through. I was hanging, so to speak, by a single thread !

  ‘Now what, Liyu?’ I asks myself. ‘If you let go of the barrel they’ll be able to pull you up and you’ll be safe. But what if the rope still snaps, and you fall into the water without the barrel …? Yet if you do keep hold of the barrel, the rope will snap for sure, and you’re certain to end up in the water.’

  ‘With the barrel or without? Come on, quick! Make up your mind! The rope won’t last for ever!’ I decided to keep hold of the barrel and shouted to the men on the cliff:

  ‘Get another rope! This one’s almost had it! And hurry, or I’ll be drowned!’

  There was some kind of commotion up top and one of the men went off to the village for a rope. He didn’t exactly strain himself – he went ever so slowly, like a tortoise – and just above my head the strands of the rope were snapping one by one…. Before I had time to cry out I was in the river. I went right under and the foam frothed in my face, but I didn’t let go of the barrel.

  ‘He’s drowning! He’s drowning!’ voices shouted from the cliff.

  But then they saw the barrel come to the surface and me still hanging on :

  ‘He’s all right! He’s alive!’ they cried. ‘Get the rope! Quick!’

  What I went through in that whirlpool while they was fetching the rope I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy! That slippery, the barrel was, swirling round in the water like a mad thing, it was all I could do to keep a grip on it. First it crashed into the rocks on one side, then back it raced again, and it didn’t seem to care one little bit whether my hands were
in the way or not! If it had got me on the fingers, the whirlpool would’ve swallowed me up in a single gulp. I could feel the water twisting me round and trying to suck me under. Then I had an idea: ‘Why not try sitting astride the barrel, so you can control it better?’ I summoned up what strength I had left, somehow managed to get a leg over, and there I was riding round on the bloody thing without my breeches!

  Above my head a hundred voices rang out: ‘Well done! Aferim! Ask olsun ! Bravo!’ And when I looked up I saw a fair old crowd gathered on both sides of the river. The only thing that worried me, as I struggled to grip the barrel between my legs, was whether the hoops would hold. If they snapped now, I’d really be in the soup! ‘My dear, darling hoops!’ I prayed. ‘Please don’t break. Please, just a bit longer! Save me, please!’

  While I prayed, my legs were hard at work too, holding on tight and keeping the barrel away from the rocks. Every time it went near the bank I stuck out a leg, so my foot hit the side instead of the barrel, and the barrel went floating back into the river again. In the end they brought some ropes and let them down over the side. I tied one round the barrel and the other round my waist – how I did it I’ll never know! – and then I shouted up :

  ‘Heave away!’

  First they hauled up the barrel, then me. The soles of my feet were bleeding and all the skin had been stripped off my knees. Someone gave me a pair of trousers, I jumped on a mule and into Hambardere I rode like a Hadji: one man walking in front holding the halter, and a whole procession of young and old strung out behind for as far as the eye could see! And they brought the barrel too! The Agas stood it in the courtyard of the mosque and announced for all to hear:

  ‘The barrel is going to be presented to the village, and this is where it will stand!’

  Then they asked me if I agreed.

  ‘Of course! But on one condition : Kara Soulyu must get up on the barrel and before everyone gathered here he must say three times that wooden hoops are better than iron ones.’

  Kara Soulyu got up on the barrel, but he didn’t just say what I’d told him – he added a bit of his own as well: