Ivan Shibilev went to the cinema almost every night, without paying any mind to the “students’ curfew” and without any pangs of conscience for breaking school rules. During the middle of his second term, however, his luck betrayed him and he was caught coming out of Splendid after curfew and his grade for behavior was lowered. His class teacher called him in to remind him that just as in any institution, at the high school, too, there were rules and a code of conduct which had been established over the years and which had to be followed down to the letter. The class teacher was especially fond of Ivan Shibilev, just as, incidentally, all the other teachers were, and made it known to him that if he promised to follow the school rules strictly from now on, he could ask the principal to rescind his order lowering his behavior grade. Ivan Shibilev replied that he couldn’t fathom why they were accusing him of violating the school rules when he was merely satisfying an intellectual need after he had prepared his lessons for the following day. To the class teacher it became clear that he would have to punish one of his best students, to “shake him up” a bit, so as not to have to repeat this unpleasant exercise in the future.
Ivan Shibilev was not “shaken up” by the punishment. For him it was perfectly natural, for example, to rework the school monogram engraved on his belt buckle to suit his own taste. He came up with his own design of the monogram and gave it to a smelter in the neighborhood to cast it, not in gold, but rather silver bronze, since he felt this color better matched his suit jacket. For the same reasons, he refashioned both his hat and his jacket. He removed the spring from the hat, roughed up the edges a bit, and bent down the right side of the brim so it looked “more chic,” while he added light-blue velvet to the collar of his jacket. His hands instinctively itched to take hold of not just his clothes and other objects at his disposal, but of many other things as well, to change them so as to be better or more comfortable to his mind. He also couldn’t stand the large student number on his left sleeve. He hated it not out of vanity or because it made it riskier for him to break the school rules (as we have seen, he did not pay mind to them anyway, as he couldn’t see their point), but as a mockery of his individuality. He thought of himself as Ivan Shibilev, student in group 4a, and not as the number two nineteen written on a round piece of cardboard, covered with cloth, and sewn to his sleeve. “Hey you, number two nineteen, get in step, you’re throwing off the whole company!” the gymnastics teacher hollered at him while marching the classes around during some celebration. “Number two nineteen, I’m talking to you!” The teacher ran over, out of breath, and shook him by the shoulder, and only then did Ivan Shibilev realize that the order had been meant for him. This happened during his very first term of study and since then he had taken the number off his sleeve. He carried it in his pocket and only in the morning, before going into class, would he fasten it to his sleeve with a safety pin.
His infatuation with cinema continued the whole year with such an intensity that he didn’t even want to go home to the village during vacations, so as not to miss a film. As soon as the first shots appeared on the screen, he would fall into a trance and be transported to a magical world which he had never seen before, not even in his dreams. He would leave the cinema hall enchanted and would carry that world around with him for a long time, seeing the characters from the film, sensing them around him, hearing them speak and breathe. Thus he himself started living another, unfamiliar life, taken aback and touched by his own actions: He was a shipwrecked sailor, a roulette player who lost his fortune, a judge, a criminal, a soldier…
At the beginning of his second year, he met the artist Asen Momov. He had gone into the Astra Photo Studio on the main street to have his picture taken, and there amidst the advertising photos hanging on the wall of the reception room, he also spotted seascapes. Apparently no other client had ever studied his pictures with such interest, so the artist noticed this immediately. He also noticed the awe with which the schoolboy listened to him when he started telling him about his pictures and that’s how he found out that the boy also “painted a few pictures now and then.” He invited the boy to his home to see his other paintings and Ivan Shibilev turned up at his place at the appointed day and hour. Momov ran the photo studio with his father, and in his free time painted the seaside cliffs with wild foaming waves crashing against them, or sometimes the calm sea with fishing boats as well. Very rarely, and only on commission, would he paint still lifes of woven baskets full of fruit or bouquets of autumnal flowers against a colorful tablecloth. He painted in oils, but most often in gouache on small squares of cardboard, and he would go around to all the larger institutions and stores, selling his art. Very rarely, perhaps two or three times a year, he managed to sell a picture to some merchant, and in exchange for goods, no less – cloth for a suit, shoes, or a shirt.
There were several other artists in the city, and they expressed their rivalry through complete scorn for one another. Since Momov had discovered in the boy his own ecstatic disciple, he looked over his pictures, approved of them, and declared himself the boy’s patron. Ivan Shibilev was overcome with the same passion for painting as he felt for cinema and poetry, and in the fall he returned from the village with an entire stack of drawings and paintings. The whole summer he had been painting with fierce abandon anything that fell before his eyes: people, houses, animals, scenes of harvesting and threshing. A new drawing teacher had arrived at the school, a young man with new outlooks on art and a talented artist himself. He was delighted by the boy’s landscapes and especially his portraits, saying that he had seen his subjects “not with his physical eyes, but with his spiritual eyes.” Near the end of the year the class teacher, who taught literature, and the drawing teacher declared Ivan Shibilev a wonder child with multifaceted talents. Besides the straight As he had received in all subjects, Ivan Shibilev had drawn portraits of his classmates and teachers. The portraits were done in oil, gouache, or in pencil, depending on the time and place he had observed his models. At the same time, a cycle of his poems came out in the magazine Bulgarian Speech. The two teachers arranged for him to have an art show in the foyer of the high school, which was visited by many students and citizens of the town.
Very soon after these days of universal rapture over his talents as a poet and artist, Ivan Shibilev was fated to be swept away by the irresistible force of theater as well. His landlord’s younger brother was a stagehand at the theater. Like most stagehands, he suffered obsessively from being a failed actor and had “dedicated his life” to the stage with a devotion that perhaps even the actors themselves were not capable of. His brothers, one a retired teacher of history (and Ivan Shibilev’s landlord), and the other a clerk for the tax authorities, were ashamed of his theater mania, which had caused him to miss out on a normal career, and considered him mentally ill. Everyone from both families and especially the children loved him and gladly welcomed him. He created a jubilant mood wherever he went, he could make faces and do magic tricks, he could imitate people and animals so well that everyone would be shouting with laughter. His name was Georgi, but everyone called him Uncle Zhorko, and in his absence they called him Uncle Bunny as well, as he had a harelip. The very first time they met, Ivan Shibilev recognized in him a kindred spirit; for his part, Uncle Zhorko also appreciated the boy’s talents and started taking him to the theater for free. He introduced him to the ushers, they set up a chair for him on the edge of the first balcony, and from there, undisturbed and all eyes and ears, he watched the theater’s entire repertoire.
Once Uncle Zhorko asked him to help for a few hours, since one of his co-workers hadn’t shown up to work. Ivan Shibilev stayed with him the whole afternoon and from that point on was his unpaid assistant, first only on weekends, then during weekdays after he got out of school. Actually, there was nothing really for him to help with, since Uncle Zhorko and his fellow stagehands did all the work, but he would nevertheless stay on until the end of the performance. He would explore every corner of the stage, watch them installing
the sets, sometimes he even managed to peek into the dressing rooms where the actors were getting ready for the performance. Rehearsals were most interesting for him. Outsiders were strictly forbidden from attending them, but Uncle Zhorko managed to hide him in some dark corner behind the set, or if need be introduced him as his nephew. And so Ivan Shibilev got the chance to see and hear what was happening on stage. At first the actors read through their parts and Uncle Zhorko explained that this was table work. During the following rehearsals, the actors recited their lines by heart and started working on the mise-en-scène (as Uncle Zhorko explained), they interrupted the action many times, the stagehands brought more and more set pieces to the stage, the actors put on the necessary costumes, the director followed the play from down in the auditorium, speaking to the actors from there and sometimes running over to them and showing them something before going back to his place. From one rehearsal to the next, from individual words and gestures, the play transformed into a living human story, happy or sad, but always moving to the point of oblivion. Opening night would come as the icing on the cake. A few days before the opening, everyone at the theater, from the doormen to the stagehands to the director, would be overcome by panic and anxiety, they would rehearse twice a day, going over some parts of the play even a third time, the director would dash from the auditorium to the stage and back, shifting set pieces, changing costumes, commanding everyone to keep quiet. Ivan Shibilev, like everyone else, experienced preopening jitters, because he knew all the roles by heart and felt himself a part of the production.
Finally, opening night. The ground floor and the balconies would gradually fill up with people, and Ivan Shibilev would watch through a crack in the curtain and see that there, in the theater, the audience looked completely different, as if they had left their everyday concerns outside; not only in their Sunday-best suits and dresses, but also in the expressions on their faces, there was a solemnity and nobility, a softness and a civility, which outside was not noticeable in them. Transformed by the gilded Baroque atmosphere of the hall and the lights, they sat respectfully in the soft velvet seats, whispering among themselves and impatiently waiting for the curtain to rise. Ivan Shibilev knew firsthand that for them, everything behind the curtain was a mystery which they could never catch a glimpse of, and that they would always have to strain their imaginations, just as he had strained his own imagination until recently. None of the hundreds of spectators could guess, for example, that behind the mysterious curtain reigned not complete calm, as it seemed from the auditorium, but on the contrary, backstage was seething with the utmost tension, carelessly done details were being fixed, the stagehands were scurrying about on tiptoe, the director was giving his last bits of advice, the actors were waiting for the curtain to rise, inwardly steeled and concentrated, as if about to face a life-threatening ordeal.
And now the lights go out one by one, the noise gradually dies down, the upper part of the curtain tears into two halves and they sail toward the two sides of the stage. Beyond the footlights a bluish darkness descends and into it, reflecting the glimmer of the stage, peer the luminous stains that are hundreds of human faces. Soon these faces hold their breath, while shortly they start to laugh or to sob, as if what is happening onstage is happening within their very selves. Act after act, and the end of the play comes imperceptibly. The hall quakes with applause and admiring shouts, the actors come out onstage hand in hand, smiling and still worked up from the play, they bow to the audience, hide behind the curtains, and called by the crowd again and again, they come out to take bows. After these minutes of ecstatic applause for the actors and the minutes of glory, which the audience bestowed upon them, Ivan Shibilev thought to himself that cinema, drawing, poetry, and studying were fleeting passions on his path toward the stage, and he made a vow to devote his life to theater. And while his teachers, fellow students, and acquaintances kept telling him that nature had been recklessly generous with him and while they praised him as a famous future poet or artist, he was already striving in his thoughts and feelings toward the theater. The openings of The Misanthrope, Stoyanov’s The Master Craftsmen, and Nušić’s The Minister’s Wife were all coming up one after the other, which would star Krustyo Sarafov, Elena Snezhina, Vladimir Trandafilov, and other touring “luminaries of the stage.” In the city’s artistic circles, there hardly could have been two people awaiting these premieres more impatiently than Uncle Zhorko and Ivan Shibilev. Uncle Zhorko refused to leave the theater for days on end, sleeping a few hours a night on a dilapidated couch, working furiously the rest of the time so that the performances would want for nothing. Ivan Shibilev went to the theater every night and very often during the day as well to watch rehearsals along with his brother-in-arms. Uncle Zhorko had already managed to show off the boy’s poetry printed in Bulgarian Speech and the local paper Literary News, a few people had even seen his exhibit at the high school, thus almost all the actors knew him and were kindly toward him.
And so the end of his third year of high school came about. He could have finished with straight As, since all his subjects came easily to him, if these subjects had not ceased to interest him. Everything his teachers said filled him with boredom, while exams were especially unpleasant. They turned into a cross-examination, terrorizing his soul and making him feel like a marionette. More and more often he began getting bad grades and his teachers did not hide their regret that day by day his standing at the school was plummeting and he was not making the effort to repeat his initial successes. He thought to himself, so many people have no idea how high Kom Peak is, or what the chemical makeup of water is, or they don’t know how to use a logarithmic table, but still, they’re not fools or degenerates, useless to themselves and to society, as they preach to us in class? I wonder whether Sarafov or Snezhina can calculate the volume of a cylinder, and if they can’t, how did they become such wizards on the stage?
Thus he tried to use such sophistic reasoning as a shield against his academic capitulation and as an excuse for his latest obsession. One day perhaps the muses would turn into Furies to take revenge on him for his artistic polygamy and to change his talent into a terrible curse, but for the time being he was filled with such pure aspirations that the thought of such a danger didn’t even cross his mind and he believed that he could serve his muses to the end of his life with the same devotion and love. He felt pangs of conscience only where his mother was concerned, the poor illiterate woman who had married a second time just so she could save their property and give him an education. Just as every summer, she moved back to the old house to spend a few months with him, but he stayed with her only two days and went back to the city on the third. He told her that the school required him to stay in the city for a while longer, so she gave him money and her blessings and sent him on his way.
In early July one of the directors, Yanakiev, gathered together a dozen actors and undertook a tour in the region with the Bulgarian classics Under the Yoke and Boryana. Here and there they were still harvesting barley, but people in the villages had never been to the theater and in the evenings they filled the “hall.” In most villages they fed them gratis, and the eternally hungry actors’ guild ate and drank their fill and earned a lev or two for summer vacation. Yanakiev had a friend, a colonel from the local garrison and a passionate lover of theater, who lent him a four-ton, canvas-covered truck; hence transporting people and props was quick and easy. Ivan Shibilev and Uncle Zhorko, who also took on the duty of quartermaster, would go to the next village a day or two in advance to secure lodging for the troupe and to prepare the stage in some cultural club, school, or even in a barn.
In one such abandoned communal barn, Ivan Shibilev made his first theatrical appearance onstage. The actor who had been playing the role of Pavel in Boryana broke his leg on just the second day of the tour after an unedifying bender and had to be taken back to the city. Yanakiev assigned the role to Ivan Shibilev without any hesitation, because he knew he would do well in it. He already knew of the boy
’s passion for theater, thanks to which he had come along with the troupe to work for free, but now he discovered that the young man had other talents as well. He had an exceptional memory and knew almost the whole of the theater’s repertoire by heart, he was a skillful imitator, he wrote poetry and recited it well, he drew portraits of people from the troupe, played violin and all the folk instruments, and besides that, he possessed that which is most invaluable for an actor – charm and a strong stage presence. He was slightly taller than average, with brown eyes, a warm voice, and a very pleasant, expressive face, which reflected a cheerful, restless character and emotional purity. After the performance of Boryana, the actors congratulated him on a successful debut and wished him further successes. Everyone was delighted by the freshness and earnestness with which he embodied the young village lad Pavel, especially in the moment when he took a stand before the all-powerful king of Alfatar to defend his love to the death: “I won’t let Boryana go, she leaves this place only over my dead body!” After a monthlong tour, the troupe returned to the city. Before they went their separate ways, the director asked him to come to the theater around September 1 to play the same role, in case the other actor was not recovered by then, and even if he was, to try him in some other role fit for a young man.
Wolf Hunt Page 17