Wolf Hunt

by Ivailo Pretov

  After dinner I asked to sleep outdoors under the awning of the barn, but Stoyan and Kichka refused. Strange characters wandered the village at night, they said, keeping the house under surveillance, and they might suspect that I was sleeping outside to keep in contact with illegal fighters. I didn’t dare tell them I was sick, so as not to spoil their mood on the very first day, and spent a long time convincing them that after exhausting myself studying for exams in a small, stuffy apartment, I needed to sleep out in the open so as to refresh myself and rest up. Stoyan and I carried the wooden bed under the awning of the barn, and Kichka made it up. Early in the morning she heard me coughing and as soon as I came inside the house, she began scolding me for not listening to them. I could no longer hide my illness, particularly since it was dangerous for them and especially for the child. The two of them were stunned but tried to comfort me.

  “You’re fine,” Kichka said, but I noticed how she unwittingly pulled away from me and glanced toward the girl, who was still sleeping. “So that’s why you didn’t hug Lenka, but only watched her from a distance…”

  During vacations, Lenka was constantly in my arms. Even when she was a baby, I had felt some atavistic pleasure in cuddling and coddling her, breathing in the scent of her delicate flesh, watching in her and through her how a person gradually changed from “a hunk of meat” with animal instincts to a conscious being who was aware of the world. Now she was four years old, the age at which a child is innocently tempted by curiosity about everything around it, sweet, illogical, and amusing in its endless questions and answers, when it draws a person as a cross with two support beams below instead of legs and a dot instead of a head, and when the child is exactly such a little stick figure itself. The thought that from now I would no longer be able to hold the girl in my arms, to stroll around the yard and fields with her, to visually transform myself into everything she wanted to see, to joke around with her, to make her laugh and to comfort her, it was this and not the thought of my illness that pierced me with the sinister insight that the remainder of my life would be spent in exile from the lives of others.

  “If you really are sick, you need to go get treatment starting tomorrow!” Stoyan said. “You know where and how, and as for the rest, don’t worry about it. We’ll gladly pay whatever it costs, but we’ll cure you.”

  Stoyan was shaken to the very bottom of his soul, but he talked about my illness as if it was something passing and did all he could to seem calm, which is precisely what the loved ones of the terminally ill do. Several people in the village had died of consumption. Their faces took on a deceptive freshness from the hearty food and rest, but over time they grew as yellow as overripe cantaloupe, and right before death itself – as snow-white and translucent as death masks. In the winter they slept with the windows open, while in the summer they strolled through the gardens and fields, or sat somewhere in the shade, lonely and doomed to waiting for death. Kichka furtively peered at my face when she passed by me, in her thoughts she saw me as one of those living dead and could not hide it.

  “Good God, why just now?” she said once, while we were discussing where and when I would take treatment.

  Why just now! This was the most fitting exclamation that could come from the lips of a young and happy wife and mother. Did I have to come down with tuberculosis and die just now, when I had graduated from the university with such effort and privation, when our aspirations, nursed for years amidst destitution and dangers, doubts and worries, were now almost a reality, when the doors of the future were opening before us unto a new life, full of joy and happiness? The doctors in Sofia had recommended mountain air, hearty food, and peace and quiet as the only chance for a cure, and I needed to leave for a sanatorium for lung diseases. I was torn and put off that departure for a whole week. “Just now” the great events were unfolding, I wanted to meet them and experience them with my family, and not in a sanatorium for the living dead. I had dedicated my whole conscious life up until that point to these events, as immodest as that declaration might sound to some. Yet I could no longer stay in the village. I couldn’t sleep under the awning of the barn any longer, eating separately and keeping the whole family in fear of infection. We decided that I would go to Varna on Saturday to see a famous doctor, and from there I would go to the sanatorium he recommended. Kichka got everything ready for my trip, while Stoyan found a man who would drive me to the bus in Zhitnitsa.

  We decided that at noon on Friday, but late in the afternoon Nusha came to our place. Stoyan and Kichka were working, I was sitting by the door, reading a book aloud. Nusha’s appearance surprised and disconcerted me so greatly that I froze for several seconds. Then I got up, shook her hand, and led her into the tailor’s shop. Stoyan and Kichka seemed to take her as some vision, they looked at her without returning her greeting and without budging from their places, so unearthly and delicate did she seem in that stuffy, messy, wretched room. My heart started beating fast and painfully, I felt pathetic in my overexcitement, yet I could not get ahold of myself and acted completely flustered. First I offered Nusha a chair to sit in, then I introduced her, then I invited her to go outside into the fresh air. In short, I was not in my right mind. When we went out onto the street, Nusha told me that she had gone to the town hall to take care of some business for her father, and after that she had wanted to see whether I had gotten over my cold from the train. The cart she had arrived in was pacing in front of the town hall and the cart driver was waiting for her. Nusha told him to go on ahead, and we started out on foot. We soon reached the edge of the fields and set off across them.

  Now here’s the strange thing: I don’t remember what Nusha and I talked about over the course of an hour as we walked through the fields. No matter how I rack my memory, this hour of my life remains a blank. I don’t even recall the expression on her face, nor what she was wearing, nor whether we made plans to meet again. I seem to have fallen into an incorporeal, oblivious state, somewhere beyond myself and the world. As far as the length of time I spent with her, I found that out from my brother and sister-in-law.

  “Well, you certainly hurried to get away from the girl! It’s hardly been an hour since you left. Who was she?”

  At that moment it was as if I had awakened from a dream, I remember how the two of them set aside their work and were all ears. It was more than obvious that until now they had been talking about the girl and not only had they liked her, they were even proud on my behalf. What’s more, they were so enchanted by her beauty that they hadn’t heard or remembered her last name. Never before had they showed any curiosity about my personal life. My brother lived and breathed the events of the war and often said that now wasn’t the time for personal life and that we needed to devote everything we could to the struggle. But now the struggle was nearing its end and how nice it would be for the victory and my personal happiness to arrive at our home hand in hand. I could more or less guess such thoughts from their faces and I had no doubt they were sincere. At another moment perhaps I would have considered the circumstances and tried to prepare them better, but now I was not capable of that, I told them who the girl was. In just an instant my brother’s face changed color and expression several times in ascending degrees of intensity, if I can put it like that. It went dark, then pale, and finally beet red. Judging from these changes, he had quickly felt disappointment, alarm, and finally rage, one after the other.

  “Petar Pashov’s daughter! Are you crazy? How…how…how!” He started choking. “How dare she set foot in our house? Did you invite her, or…No, she wouldn’t decide to come here on her own.”

  “She came on her own,” I said. “I didn’t invite her.”

  “That can’t be! She didn’t come here on her own, just like that, only to say how-do-you-do. Someone sent her or called her here. You were struck dumb as soon as you saw her, that means she must’ve had a reason for coming. But then again, maybe she did come of her own accord.” Now his face radiated a spiteful irony. “Those types come running
after men on their own, especially now. She’ll slip not only into your house, but right into your bed uninvited.”

  I must have looked so immune and deaf to his rebukes that Kichka, too, was offended on his account.

  “He can’t see or hear a thing,” she said. “He’s head over heels in love like a schoolboy, that beauty has scrambled his brain.”

  “That’s why I’m talking to him, to get his brains back in his head before it’s too late.” Stoyan signaled to Kichka to leave, and when we were alone, he put his hand on my shoulder. “Tell me as your brother and as a man, how far have you gotten with that girl? You need to realize in time that this question doesn’t concern just you personally, but all of us, so we’ve got to decide it together. I can see you can trip up, that you’ve tripped up already, by letting Pashov’s daughter come here to our place. What are your relations with her?”

  “Ethereal.”

  “What do you mean, ‘ethereal’? Are you mocking me? How long have you been seeing her?”

  “Since an hour ago.”

  I told him the whole truth. My meeting with Nusha on the bus had been a chance crossing of paths. Our true meeting had happened an hour earlier. For several days I had been yearning for her, I was sure that she had been yearning for me, the two of us had been striving toward each other and now we had met. Stoyan knew I was telling him the truth, and precisely because he knew this, he grew even more alarmed. He was not lacking in insight – since I had known the girl only so recently, yet was so head over heels, it meant that this was no laughing matter, what we were dealing with was blind passion, which would not end without consequences if it was not nipped in the bud. But Stoyan loved me and was afraid that if he “cut short” my passion for the girl with one slice of the knife, he would be committing an assault of sorts not only on my very heart, but also on our brotherly love, and perhaps upon our whole life up until that point. He had likely also taken into account that my impending departure would play the role of the knife between Nusha and me, so after his fiery and unrestrained rebukes, he quieted down and even tried to justify my passion.

  “We’ve all been blinded by women. You just need to get healthy, the rest will work itself out.”

  Two customers came into the tailor shop, Stoyan lit the lamp and started chatting with them, while I went outside, passed through the garden, and from there headed toward the fields. I wanted to get some fresh air and to think about how to resolve the question of my relations with Nusha. I was brimming with the feeling that my life had been transformed down to its foundations, I was illuminated by the happy insight that she had come to me, led by a pure outpouring of love, and that she would never leave. And now I would have to drive her away from me, once and for all, at that. That’s what it had come to, my happiness depended on or would depend on outside circumstances. Nusha’s father had been accused of betraying our comrades. We had discussed this treachery many times with the few communists in the village, a person had even come from the regional committee to lay out the case to us. Like the author of a detective novel, he presented us with a mystery, which we would have to solve ourselves. There had been a crime, but who was the criminal? Unlike the author of a detective novel, however, the messenger from the regional committee did not know who had done it, as became clear. What he knew was what we also knew. In early February of 1943, the canvas cover of Petar Pashov’s threshing machine had been stolen. My brother had been asked to find, if possible, enough canvas cloth to make a dozen windbreakers. Such cloth in such a quantity could not be found even on the market. The only way we could get ahold of it was to steal the canvas cover of the Barakovs’ threshing machine. Stoyu Barakov was the wealthiest man in the village, he had a hundred acres of land, he also had a threshing machine. One of his three sons, the youngest, was a member of our youth communist league, and we assigned him the task of expropriating his father. It turned out that their threshing machine didn’t have a cover, and Miho, that was the boy’s name, pointed us toward Petar Pashov from the neighboring village of Zhitnitsa. Pashov and Barakov were in-laws, they had married the daughters of two sisters, but due to old grudges they didn’t keep up family ties. Their children didn’t even have anything to do with one another, only Miho hadn’t given in to old prejudices and would go to the Pashovs to see his cousin Nusha. He was courting one of her schoolmates, he had visited her at her apartment in town, and whenever he would come and go to the city by bus, he would always stop by their place. In any case, Miho knew the Pashovs’ house best and offered to steal the cover of their threshing machine himself if we gave him two helpers. We sent them by horse cart around midnight and by dawn the canvas cover was already at our place. As luck would have it, it started snowing just then, so the tracks on the road were covered up. But Miho Barakov got us good and worried. Once the two helpers had left, he stayed to give a report on the mission and warned us that we were in danger of the police coming to search for us very soon, since Petar Pashov had seen and recognized them. Or more precisely, he had seen and recognized Miho. While the other two were lugging the canvas toward the street, he had been standing by the side of the house watching, Petar Pashov had appeared right in front of him like a ghost, he needed only to reach out his hand and he could have grabbed him. He had tossed on a fur coat and was bareheaded, he said only “Aha!” and left. It crossed Miho’s mind to tell him about the whole business, but the other man instantly disappeared back toward the house. From there several dogs were let loose, they descended on him from all sides, they set all the other dogs in the neighborhood barking too. Miho didn’t tell the other two about his run-in with Petar Pashov so they wouldn’t panic, but mainly so they wouldn’t go to the police if the whole business somehow came to an investigation. If Petar Pashov reports to the authorities, Miho said, I’ll deny that he saw me in his yard, and he can’t prove it. Everyone knows that his son is a communist, and the suspicion will fall on him. Communists can’t swipe something from the family of a communist without him knowing about it. Petar Pashov will have to think good and hard about which is more precious to him: a canvas cover or his son. Besides, we ought to go easy on him. He’s a wealthy man and we might need him again…

  We were familiar with Miho Barakov’s cold-bloodedness, which he had displayed more than once in similar situations, and now we were convinced that he wasn’t lacking in quick wits, either. But nevertheless we were on guard around the clock. We cut the canvas into pieces and hid them in various places around the yard and garden, while at night we took up our posts. Stoyan worked until midnight in the tailor shop, where every night men would stop by to chat, after midnight I sat there and read until morning. The police could come looking for us at any time, but we imagined that they would surprise us at night, so we tied the dog to the gate to warn us in time if outsiders came into the yard. Petar Pashov’s exclamation turned into a psychological puzzle for us. What did he mean to say with that “aha”? An expression of fright or astonishment that he had seen a stranger in his yard in the middle of the night, or had he wanted to wash his hands of the whole business, figuring that it was being done with the knowledge of his son: “Let’s just pretend I didn’t see you!” But no matter how we interpreted it, one thing was clear – we had made a mistake, one that could turn out to be fatal. Rather than trembling in uncertainty, we needed to inform him right away to what end we had taken the canvas and thus to head off any eventual desire on his part to report the theft to the authorities. Precisely because everyone knew that his son was a communist, he could report the theft of the canvas to the police to protect his son from any suspicion, no father would turn in his own son for theft, and theft for political ends, at that. However, we didn’t think to warn him in time and thus left everything to his own conscience.

  A week passed, and no one came looking for us, so we began taking the canvas out of its hiding places piece by piece. Over ten nights, Stoyan sewed ten windbreakers. It was a slow and difficult job, since the canvas was as hard as plywood, Stoyan didn’
t have the right needles and thread, so he had to look for them among his colleagues in the city. I was forced to extend my vacation as well, so I could keep watch around the house and help him. We waited for all outsiders to leave, covered up the window, and opened up the inside door that connected the tailor shop to the barn. We gathered up all the scraps in a bag so that we could, if need be, quickly carry them out through the barn and into the room, and from there – outside. Stoyan had filled these kinds of orders before and had experience in such matters. A few days before I left for Sofia, a man came to the house and carried off the windbreakers.