After making this vow, he didn’t sleep for several nights. He pounded sunflower seeds from the heads, chopped wood, and did all sorts of tasks that could be done on moonlit nights, then in the morning he would go out to the fields. On the fourth night, when he could no longer fight off sleep, he lay down in the bare wooden bed of the cart so as not to sleep soundly, he also tied the dog to the wheel to awaken him with its barking. But Madame General appeared again. The dog sensed her and began barking fiercely at her, but she wasn’t afraid, she was smiling as she stepped toward the cart. The dog jumped at her, biting her dress and tearing it to pieces, but she just stood there smiling until all her clothes had been torn off and she was left in her nightgown. She got into the cart and lay down next to him, while the frenzied dog kept trying to bite her. Nikolin kicked it in its bared teeth and then saw that it wasn’t the dog, but Devetakov, who was holding his injured head and sobbing. No matter how vigilantly he stayed awake, no matter how much he tormented himself for nights at a time, as soon as exhaustion got the better of him and he closed his eyes, Madame General would come to him out of the blue and take him in her affectionate arms. And so it was until one day she appeared to him when he was wide awake. She had heard of Devetakov’s death only the day before and had hurried there to see what Nikolin was doing, how he was managing all alone in that big house.
“Good Lord, how thin you are, as if you haven’t eaten in a month!” she said. “The dead are the dead, the living must go on living. You’re young, you’ve got your life ahead of you, don’t think about the dead.”
She spoke and looked at him as if Devetakov’s death hadn’t made a particularly strong impression on her and she had come to the estate only out of concern for him, to help him if he needed a woman to lend a hand, and to dispel his loneliness. She was not wearing any signs of mourning, while in the expression on her face, in her eyes, in the softness of her sonorous voice, Nikolin sensed a cheerfulness in which he caught a hint of sympathy and a desire to comfort him, as one would comfort a loved one going through hard times. And that wild and shameful passion that pushed him so recklessly toward this woman again overcame him in full force and he forgot the spiritual torments they had caused him in his dreams. He had always assumed and believed that his attraction toward her was as indecent as it was pointless, since a general’s wife would never permit herself intimacy with a person like himself, but now he had a certain premonition that she would allow just such intimacy. From experience he knew that first she would set to cooking, so he suggested that they both go down to the storeroom together for supplies. They went into the barn, he lifted a trapdoor with a metal ring, revealing wooden stairs beneath it. He lit a lantern, climbed down the stairs, then shouted up: “Come on, climb down!”
“Give me your hand, I can’t see anything!” she said. He gave her his free hand, she stepped on the ground and tottered, clutching at him to steady herself and in so doing embraced him such that her chest pushed him back. The embrace lasted only a moment, she gave an affected shriek and let him go. “Oof, I almost lost my footing! But what if someone closes the trapdoor from above and leaves, what will we do down here in this cellar?”
She was talking and giggling flirtatiously like a young girl, just as in his dreams, and Nikolin expected her to reach out and stroke his face, but she was looking at the tins lining the walls and reflecting the light of the lantern.
“What are those?”
“Those two are full of lard, the other two are full of cooking oil.” Nikolin took a step forward and the lantern light revealed what other foodstuffs were there: braids of onions and garlic, potatoes, an earthenware jar of rice, smoked pork legs, a chest full of flour, crates full of all sorts of beverages, while from the ceiling two rows of flat sausages hung from poles. Madame General’s hand shot toward them like an arrow, took down a sausage, and the next moment her cheeks puffed out like fists. Nikolin was aghast by the ravenous glint in her eyes, which also lights up the eyes of starving dogs when they find a scrap of meat and swallow it without chewing, growling with satisfaction. Madame General was also swallowing the sausage without bothering to chew, a voluptuous growl was coming from her throat. Once she had devoured half the sausage, she choked, coughed, and only then seemed to notice that she was not alone.
“Have a bite, Nikolin!” She tried to put the half-eaten sausage in his mouth, convulsed with affected, forced laughter. “It’s really delicious, but so spicy that I choked.”
Nikolin took an empty crate and started putting food into it. He could see that Madame General was ashamed and was trying to cover up her faux pas, but at the same time he could tell that she hated him. He, too, felt ashamed for allowing himself to tempt a starving woman, just as hunters lure hungry game into their traps with bait. As soon as he had invited her down to the storeroom with him, where outsiders had never set foot, his conscience jumped as if stung: “You want to show her how much food you have, to lure her into coming again!” But this inner voice calling from the depths of his conscience was so weak and uncertain that his passion had drowned it out. During lunch Madame General was cheerful and chatty as never before. She was sipping the French wine she had taken from the storeroom and was smiling at him, her face flushed like a peach, asking him what she should do – go home that afternoon or stay till the next morning?
“Do what you like,” Nikolin said. “I’ll leave you the key to lock up the house, because I’ve got to go to the village and I don’t know if I’ll be back by tomorrow. My sister is sick and my brother-in-law came here yesterday to call me to her.”
“You don’t like my company, I can see it,” Madame General said. “Give me your hand and admit it!” She reached across the table and, just as in his dreams, took his hand in hers. “If you’re enjoying my company, you’ll put off going until tomorrow and I’ll stay here tonight. Look what a fine time the two of us are having, because we are both lonely.” Her hand was cold as ice, her face had gone from pink to white, and her smile had turned to a grimace, as if she was desperately trying to suppress some sharp pain. Nikolin could see she wasn’t herself and, not knowing what to do, pulled his hand away from hers and got up, while she put her head down on the table and whispered: “Good God, how far do I have to…No, you don’t like my company, admit it!”
“Of course I like your company!” Nikolin said. “But I’ve got to go. Since they’ve come to call me, that means my sister is really sick. The next time you come, you’ll stay the night and we’ll have a nice chat.”
Madame General lifted her head and looked at him, smiling. “God almighty, the wine has gone to my head. Forgive me, Nikolin!”
“There’s nothing to forgive you for,” Nikolin replied. “The wine went straight to your head, that’s exactly the reason I don’t drink it. Now I’ll go get a little something for you for the road, as we need to get going.”
It pained him to lie about his sister, but it pained him even more to watch her trying with all her might to suppress her dignity and pride so as to steel herself for this most desperate act. And all of that just for a loaf of bread, he thought to himself on the way back home, after he had driven her to the station with a bag full of food, as always. Just a year ago she was a general’s wife, now she’s homeless and penniless, what must she be going through to come here to beg from a servant like me! How much agony must it have cost her to play up to me just for a pound of potatoes or a sack of beans! She hates me and is disgusted with me, and with good reason. This is what Nikolin was thinking, repulsed by his own lustful desire for this wretched woman, who had fallen from life’s highest rung to its lowest, but during the night he once again dreamed of her legs, as he had seen them on the ladder in the storeroom. They had come down rung by rung, rounded and pink in the lantern light, he could not resist the temptation, with a finger he stroked the smooth, warm skin and then he heard her laughter above his head. She was laughing loudly in two voices, one deep and sonorous, the other thin and faltering, and these voices turned into a
n anxious dog’s barking. Frightened, he woke up. The two dogs were barking at someone over near Malayi’s house. He jumped down from the cart where he had been sleeping and headed in that direction. The night was as light as day, he could see the dogs lunging at the fence of the deserted house. Someone yelled at him to stop and Nikolin could see the intruder in the shadow of the house. He stopped by the fence and asked who was setting the dogs off at that hour of the night and what they were doing there.
“I’ll tell you what I’m doing, you kulak’s bootlicker!” the man shouted. “If you take one step closer, I’ll blow you away! Get the hell out of here!”
Nikolin was not frightened and stepped toward the dark side of the house to see the intruder up close and then a shot rang out and the bullet whizzed right over his head. He stepped back, calmed the dogs, went back into the yard, and from there watched two men empty out Malayi’s house and load everything into a cart. They worked calmly and nonchalantly, he could hear them discussing what to fit where, the room inside was lit up by a lamp or lantern. They loaded the cart, turned out the light, and headed off toward the village. They came back the following nights and when there was nothing more to steal from the house, they tore out the windows and doors and carted them away. They soon fell to attacking the outbuildings as well. They carried off the roof tiles, the doors, the wood beneath the awnings, in the end they even carried off the plows. Nikolin watched them from his room and could do nothing to stop them. He didn’t know where they were from and who they were, whether it was one and the same or different people, but he could hear them threatening that if he tried to resist or went to the authorities for help, they would send him to serve Devetakov in the afterworld as well.
At that time his two brothers-in-law turned up like vultures, having caught the whiff of carrion all the way from the village. They said they had heard Devetakov had willed the property to him and that it was being plundered by the villagers, so they’d come to help defend him from thieves. As the late cook Auntie Raina had advised him, starting with his very first salary he had set aside half for his two sisters so that each of them eventually had twenty-four hundred leva. That was a lot of money for that time, when the villagers still bought and sold by barter, and cash money was like solid gold. When they were still young, he gave them each a hundred leva for their dowries and other necessities, then later began buying them land for their dowries as well. Again following Auntie Raina’s advice, this was done for him by the estate overseer Halil Efendi. He was an experienced and honest man, he bought only the best land and when his sisters were of marrying age, they both had nearly fifteen acres. Both of them married the sons of moderately wealthy families, had children, and lived very comfortably. But Nikolin’s in-laws and brothers-in-law, and alongside them his sisters as well, turned out to be greedy, insatiable people. His generosity led them to believe that he had somehow gotten under the skin of his master, whom they knew to be a crackpot who had accumulated much money and land. They visited him a few times a year, he also would go to visit them, and every time they saw each other, they tried to wheedle more money from him – one had started building a house, the other wanted to buy a horse or a cow. The more he gave them, they more they asked him for, because they thought that he, too, like his master, was a bit of a crackpot and didn’t understand the value of money.
It just so happened that the night his brothers-in-law arrived that the thieves tried to steal the sheep from the barn. Nikolin had been expecting them to go after the livestock as well and that night had tied one of the dogs to the sheep pen and the other to the barn by the cows. Since they couldn’t drive away the dog, they killed it with a chain and went about their work as usual without a whit of discretion. One waited with the cart by the door of the sheep pen, while the other two caught the sheep and tied their legs. His brothers-in-law grabbed an axe apiece, cornered them in the pen, and went at it hand to hand. The fellow in the cart managed to get away, but the other two took such a beating that they hardly made it out of the yard of the estate. His brothers-in-law had come to guard the estate, but they turned out to be the worst bandits of all. They stayed at the estate for two days and didn’t leave him in peace until they had made off with one of the horses, the cow, and half the sheep. Since the villagers had turned a greedy eye to the estate, they said, they would rob it blind down to the last brick, because it was a kulak’s estate, and since that’s the way things were, why leave it to be plundered by strangers? He gave them what they wanted and sent them on their way.
This was the miserable state we found Nikolin in when Ilko Kralev and I went to the estate to pick up the books Devetakov had willed him before his death. Nikolin was very glad to see Ilko and even wanted to shake his hand, but Ilko told him to keep his distance.
“Don’t you know I’m sick with tuberculosis?”
“You’ll get better,” Nikolin said, looking at him long and hard. “There’s no sickness in your face.”
He was a handsome young man with expressive, tired, and sad eyes, there was sorrow in the dark hollows beneath his cheekbones, and in the corners of his mouth when he smiled, and in his voice, soft, lilting, and slightly hoarse when he was saying how good it was of us to think to visit him. Ilko first wanted to see Devetakov’s grave, and then we would get down to work. The leaves of the walnut tree with the color of hammered gold had covered the oblong pile of dirt, asters lay at the base of the wooden cross. Their fresh fragrance mixed with the underlying scent of the walnut leaves, filling the warm, still air with that gentle grief that lends a sorrowful charm to the first autumn days. “Why?” Nikolin said, tears springing from his tired eyes. “Why did he take his own life?”
Ilko Kralev and I had asked ourselves the same question many times after we had learned of Devetakov’s death. Rumors abounded about the reasons for his suicide and since at that time the only thing people were writing or talking about were the People’s Courts* and the sentences handed down to political criminals, most people claimed, under the influence of these events, that the reason for his death was political. Like every wealthy landowner, Devetakov had quite naturally been against the new government, he had been mixed up in political schemes and had killed himself out of fear of being discovered and brought to account for these deeds. His building of the school and donation of seventy-five acres of land to the village was explained as an attempt to atone for his guilt in the eyes of the new government, since he had foreseen these events a year in advance – just as everyone had, incidentally.
The only person who could know or even guess the reason for his suicide was Nikolin, but he, too, had not noticed anything strange in his master’s behavior besides “that quiet thing” that came over his soul from time to time. Ilko recalled that over the past few years when he had met and talked with Devetakov, he had noticed “that quiet thing” in him; Alexander Pashov, with whom he often visited the estate, had noticed it too, but the two of them had explained it away as a state of deep internal concentration. Devetakov was “quiet” and calm by nature, but not indifferent. He spoke and argued with great passion, but without any external indications of that passion. They would talk about history, literature, philosophy, politics, and so on, as well as the so-called “accursed questions.” Devetakov did not preach pessimism, yet he also was not an “ecstatic admirer” of the current world order, in the sense that he looked upon this order with condescending irony, and upon life as something foist upon one, which a man in any case had to resign himself to, while this resignation was wisdom itself. Death was not his “pet topic,” unless of course he had purposely avoided it, not wanting to impose it on the others, and Ilko could not reconcile his suicide as an act of superhuman will with a person with such a contemplative, gentle, and inwardly focused nature.
For several days we packed up books, brought them to the village, and piled them on the dirt floor of Ilko’s rented room. Morose from his lonely nightmares and deprived of human contact, Nikolin was desperate to cater to us and to keep us the
re with him as long as possible. He cooked us wonderful lunches and dinners, and in the afternoons he came to help us, and with artless candor he told us all about Devetakov, himself, and everything the reader already knows. He was confused and tormented, he couldn’t see how he would live from then on and asked us for advice. Ilko asked his landlord Anani to rent out the other room, and once he agreed, he suggested that Nikolin rent the room. Nikolin was glad, but now he didn’t know what to do with everything in the house – should he move it somewhere or just leave it? Ilko made a call to the city and a truck arrived with a few workers. And so the rug from the parlor, the piano, the elliptical table, a few leather sofas, and other larger pieces of furniture were taken away to various public institutions.
Wolf Hunt Page 23