Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  I was even more stunned by the fact that Ivan Shibilev had not told either me or Ilko Kralev about his work in the church, even though the three of us were good friends. There had been a time when he had read his poetry to us, showed us his paintings, and even shared his most personal problems with us. Once, for example, we had gotten together at his house and he had showed us a portrait of Mona, jokingly telling us that he was our local Leonardo, since he, too, was interested in many things and since he also had his own Mona (Lisa) to boot. I asked him whether he had had any particular reasons for painting these icons, and doing it in secret at that, and he explained to me that he hadn’t done it in secret and hadn’t had any particular reasons for doing so, but the circumstances under which he had painted them were such that he hadn’t had anyone to show his icons to. He had painted them over many years at Father Encho’s request. The old man would realize from time to time that he was missing some saint or some biblical story that he had seen in the churches in the neighboring villages, and would ask him to paint it. He had taken on this work with pleasure, because he found it interesting and pleasant, and plus, the church was the only place he could hang up his works and make them “community property.” This community consisted of a few dozen elderly men and women who stopped by the church on holidays to listen to Father Encho’s snuffling sermons. All of them, aged to the point of blessed ignorance, didn’t even look at the icons, except when crossing themselves in front of the Virgin Mary, and even then without really seeing her, because it was placed too high up in the iconostasis for their shortsighted eyes. Incidentally, over the years Ivan Shibilev had replaced the old icons with his own. Most of the old icons had been painted by some Petko or other, a newcomer to the village and master cart maker. They were messily painted, gloomy, and even sinister, and did not possess any artistic merit. Ivan Shibilev saved only five old icons that had ended up here, Lord knows how. They were the work of a talented, unknown master from more than a century ago and stood out from the rest as true masterpieces. Thus, Ivan Shibilev was perhaps the only artist in Bulgaria who had at hand a permanent exhibition hall in which to display his works, without anyone but him having actually seen them. Even Father Encho, due to his shortsightedness and ignorance, didn’t bother looking at them, but was satisfied since the empty places on the church walls were filled with the necessary inventory. The only competent visitor turned out to be the chairman of the village soviet, Stoyu Barakov, who managed to recognize the images of Stoyan Kralev and the secretary of the regional committee Kozarev in the two heads of the dragon, which had become the grounds for the icons to be burned.

  An unfamiliar policeman came inside and asked us to leave, and when we went outside, we saw Stoyan Kralev and the younger Barakov in his police captain’s uniform talking to a group of young people. After getting out of prison, Miho Barakov had started working for the police for several years as an assistant, and now, at the tender age of twenty-four, he was the chief of police in the regional capital. He was handsome with his black moustache and white face, in brand-new full military attire, shining from head to toe; he commanded respect and even awe not only because of the fact that he occupied that important post at such a young age, but precisely because at that young age he was able to comport himself like an established man of twice his age, to carefully measure his every word and gesture and to keep his composure in all cases. Deep inside, Ivan Shibilev did not really believe that Stoyan Kralev would burn his icons, as he had announced he would. He had read somewhere that in the Soviet Union they punished destroyers of icons most severely, but the party’s regional committee here had no way of knowing that. Stoyan Kralev could not possibly attempt to destroy the icons single-handedly, and surely he had gathered the people in the churchyard to show those which had been painted by Ivan Shibilev, to expose him as a renegade and thus to justify his expulsion from the party. Ivan Shibilev was still nursing a certain hope that the icons would be spared, but as soon as he saw Miho Barakov and the policeman he had brought with him, all at once he became extremely nervous and whispered to me: “That guy here is a bad sign.”

  In the meantime people kept arriving from all corners of the village, Father Encho eventually turned up as well. Bent over from old age, he could hardly shuffle his slippers along; he would stop, leaning on his cane, to catch his breath before again continuing onward. His kamelaukion, faded by the sun, had tipped to the back of his head, from which a lock of hair hung; behind his thick glasses his eyes looked freakishly large and turbid. As soon as he arrived he asked after Stoyan Kralev and went straight over to him, while the crowd fell silent to hear what the priest would say to him.

  “Stoyan, my boy,” Father Encho cried, “I baptized you and married you in this here church; when you were a child, I gave you the holy communion here, and now you want to burn God’s holy icons.”

  Stoyan Kralev looked at him with a smile, as one looks at a child who asks irrelevant questions.

  “That’s true, Father, that’s true. Except that these are not God’s holy icons but a bunch of dabblings by your friend Ivan Shibilev. You’ve been pictured here too, along with a lot of other folks from the village…”

  Ah, so he came to look at them! Ivan Shibilev noted anxiously, while Stoyan Kralev went on loudly so that everyone would hear him: “Since they are not saints, but our local sinners, they have no place in the church…”

  “God is looking on from above, my child!”

  “Perhaps he is looking on, but when we look up, all we see is air. You don’t see anything either, but still you bow and cross yourself before him.”

  “God lives, my child, he lives! If he didn’t live, we wouldn’t live either.”

  “You talk about God as if you’d just gone to visit him this morning to drink coffee.”

  “God doesn’t show himself to anyone. He is the mystery of mysteries…”

  “You believers use cheap tricks, Father. God is a mystery to people, you say. He doesn’t want to show himself to them, he hides from them, how can they believe in him then?”

  “Since you haven’t seen communism, why do you believe in it?”

  Laughter rang out and a buzz swept through the crowd.

  “Look what our good father here is hinting at! Communism, Father, is scientifically proven, and its first phase, socialism, has already been established in the Soviet Union. Many people have gone there, they’ve seen it, they’ve touched it with their own two hands, as it were. But what is your belief based on? They tell you: God exists, and you believe. Could there be anything more foolish than closing your eyes and believing in something that you can’t see, hear, or smell? We all know that old folk saying: ‘Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.’ What are the people trying to say with this proverb? That you shouldn’t wait for God to help, because he’s not there at all, instead you have to help yourself. Simple folks figured this truth out for themselves from experience, while you priests keep confusing their minds and deluding them. There’s so much injustice, so much hunger and sickness, so much human tragedy in this world, while your almighty God just sits up there with his hands crossed over his chest, watching the show. How can you believe in him after that!”

  “Faithlessness is death, my child! One day up there…”

  “Ah, are you hinting at the afterworld?” Stoyan Kralev interrupted him. “When someone comes back from there and tells us what he’s seen, we’ll think about it then. If there is another life up there, then we’ll repent before that old God of yours, he’ll forgive us and let us into heaven…”

  Father Encho wanted to say something more, but someone grabbed him under the arms and carried him out of the crowd. It was his son, a man around fifty, pale with worry over his father’s words.

  “Don’t mind his prattle, he’s an old man, he’s lost track of the years and his tongue!” he said to Stoyan Kralev, and led the old man away toward his home.

  This short verbal wrangle with the priest served as a good prelude for Stoyan Kralev to l
aunch into the antireligious speech the situation demanded he give. He had many years of experience in giving speeches before the villagers, he knew very well the rules of this art, as well as his listeners’ mentality. He spoke loudly, clearly, and inspiringly, he skillfully made use of intonation, pauses, and gestures, and used folksy terms and examples which were easy to grasp and remember. He renounced religion, comparing it as all atheists do to opium, which the bourgeois ideology uses to lull the people’s consciousness to sleep. To convince his listeners, he had to prove the nonexistence of God using the arguments of the semiliterate priest, who, in all likelihood, had stated them without understanding them. It was not difficult to refute and mock these arguments, since Stoyan Kralev relied on village realism. He did not have even the slightest inkling that he had taken up a topic as old and complex as the world itself, over which hundreds of philosophers had racked their brains.

  “It’s as if they’re telling you: Put the pot on the stove and wait for the stew to boil, without having put either meat or vegetables in it. That’s how it is with religion: Believe in God, even though you don’t see or hear him!”

  It turned out that as Stoyan Kralev was speaking, the icons were being brought out of the window on the other side of the church and lined up along the fence, while before them lay piles of dry wood. The people examined them with the greatest curiosity, recognizing the faces of many locals, and soon they began asking Stoyan Kralev why they had to burn such beautiful pictures. He took out a match and lit one of the piles of wood, but Ivan Shibilev darted forward, pushed his way through the crowd, grabbed two icons, and shouted: “Barbarians! Medieval inquisitors! You’re the ones who should be burned at the stake!”

  Some time later, when we met again and recalled this incident, Ivan Shibilev told me that he had never before fallen into such a frenzy.

  “I now realize,” he said, “that their goal was to drive me to the point of exasperation, and I really was gripped by such a fury that I would have been capable of doing Lord knows what if they’d goaded me. I knew that they’d decided to sacrifice me to prove to the opposition that they were merciless toward their own as well, when necessary. I knew what was waiting for me after all that and still I couldn’t control myself, I hollered at Stoyan Kralev and Miho Barakov and showered them with the most insulting epithets.”

  The two icons that Ivan Shibilev took were the images of his mother and Mona. The policeman caught up with him, blocked his way, and tried to take them back, but Ivan Shibilev shoved him hard in the chest and quickly headed for home. The crowd watched him in total silence until he disappeared around the corner of the nearest house, while Stoyan Kralev, pale and trembling, shouted: “Comrades, do you know why Ivan Shibilev went berserk when we threatened the icons? Because he painted them. We, comrades, are laying the foundations of socialism, of our bright future, we are toiling, depriving ourselves of many things, not getting enough sleep, not getting enough to eat, while he’s chumming around with that doddering old geezer of a priest Father Encho and painting icons for his church. Has he really fallen into the religious fallacy, or have we been nurturing a snake in our bosom? We heard how he defamed both myself and the head of the police, how he even shoved a policeman. How can he permit himself such brazenness before the eyes of the whole village unless he is a person, whether consciously or not, who is pouring fuel into the fire of our class enemy? And all of that because of these splotches of paint here.”

  Stoyan Kralev grabbed several icons and threw them into the flames. The scent of turpentine and paint filled the air, the dry wood crackled and flared up. On one of the icons Jesus was painted in the image of Stoyan Kralev’s brother Ilko. His face, already tormented with suffering, went dark, covered with boiling drops of oil, then wrinkled up and disappeared. An image of Stoyu Barakov as Judas, with his close-cut, bristling hair, sitting at the end of the table guiltily listening to Jesus’s words, also disappeared in the same way, as did Nikolin Miyalkov as John the Baptist, Auntie Tanka Dzhelebova as Saint Mina, along with another dozen locals, old and young, painted in bright biblical cloaks with golden haloes around their heads.

  Early in the morning Ivan Shibilev was arrested and taken to the city; several days after that he was sent to a labor-reeducation camp. The precise reasons for this punishment became known from Ivan Shibilev himself after he was released. They accused him of spiritual and moral depravity, of spreading religious propaganda, of insubordination and physical assault of a member of the police force, and so many more things that, as Ivan Shibilev himself put it, he was amazed they didn’t string him up in public or throw him in prison for life. In time it came out that despite the numerous accusations against him, the regional committee thought that after his expulsion from the party, it would be over the top to impose yet another punishment on him, and they decided to release him after a good dressing-down, but the head of the police insisted that he be sent to work for some time, so as to learn to weigh his words and deeds more carefully.

  The camp was located in the village of Obrochishte, where there was a state-run cooperative farm. Ivan Shibilev later told us that his stay there was neither as long nor as grueling as he had expected. The head turned out to be one of the twelve Communist Youth League members tried after the organization had been crushed, and he had spent time in prison with Miho Barakov; he had then been a young laborer but was now a thirty-year-old lieutenant in the police. After reading Ivan Shibilev’s dossier, he questioned him a bit and then appointed him head buyer of the vegetable brigade. This brigade worked the vegetable garden in the neighboring village of Kranevo, located on the seashore in the picturesque valley of the Batova River. On holidays and weekends, when he was given leave, he would stop by the pub and play clarinet, he would also play at parties, recite poetry, do magic tricks, and tell jokes – in short, here, as everywhere he had worked before then, he won over both the camp leadership and his fellow brigadiers, as well as the local villagers.

  Of course, he was deeply insulted at having been sent to do forced labor, yet still his character did not permit him to fall into any deep and hopeless funk. He didn’t hold grudges, plus his tendency to get swept away by various pursuits distracted and calmed him. And thus his eight-month stay there might not have left any lasting traces in his life if it hadn’t been for the accident with Mona. For a whole month after his internment, she didn’t know anything about what had happened to him, and there was no one who could tell her. Stoyan Kralev assured her that he, too, didn’t know anything about his whereabouts, while Miho Barakov, whom she managed to go see, told her that he had been sent for several months to some farm in southern Bulgaria, but even he didn’t know where. Ivan Shibilev could have written her as soon as he had arrived, but he knew his letter wouldn’t reach her with the postmark of the labor-reeducation camp. A month went by before he managed to send her a play and a letter in the name of a girlfriend of hers from Tolbuhin, written by the co-op’s accountant. The elder Barakov called Mona down to the village soviet to give her the booklet, which he had leafed through page by page, but kept the letter to himself in any case. At home, Mona put together the marked letters and pieced together the message. Ivan Shibilev wrote her that he was alive and well and feeling fine, but she was sure he was writing that only to reassure her. Like everyone, she, too, thought that the camp was hell on earth, where they tormented people and kept them on the brink of starvation. Since the local authorities had been hiding his whereabouts for so long, she thought that meant he really had been sent to hell and that she had to go see him at any cost, even if only for a minute through the fence. She couldn’t shake the thought that he was imprisoned only twenty-five or thirty miles from the village and she was constantly hatching plans of how she could go to see him. His letter arrived at the height of threshing season, so to be absent from the village for personal reasons even for half a day not only was inconvenient but was downright blameworthy. So she waited until the first few days of fall, when the co-op freed the draft animals
from fieldwork. During that time she was constantly doubled over from stomach pains, and she even fainted in front of Nikolin. He asked for a horse cart from the co-op chairman and even before dawn sent his wife to the city to see a doctor, while he stayed at home with their daughter. It was about a dozen miles to the city, and as much again to Obrochishte, and so as to make it back to the village by nightfall, Mona whipped the horses into a gallop as soon as she left the village. The road curved around a small glade of acacias, right in the bend a motorcycle with a sidecar popped up, coming straight at the horses. They stopped short, while Mona pitched forward over the cart rails onto the shaft. The next instant the horses bolted forward, bore off into the stubble field, turned around, and galloped back toward the village. The motorcyclist, who was a courier from the city, reported the incident at the village soviet, only he hadn’t seen which street the runaway horses had turned down. He and the policeman set out to look for them, but then men arrived, carrying Mona in a blanket. They left her in the village soviet and sent the motorcyclist to the neighboring village for a doctor. He arrived half an hour later, but not in time to find Mona alive. He said she had already died when being dragged under the cart.