What he was saying was true, of course, but nonetheless I felt great relief in regards to my theatrical activities when he married Kichka. She was one of those girls the village called “brash” or “mouthy,” but in my brother’s opinion she was “forward-thinking.” She was barely eighteen, petite, and still delicate in a childlike way, but she was energetic, handy, inventive, and practical in a womanly way. She turned out to be quite the housekeeper and in only a few months she had turned the old Tatar dump into a cozy home. Stoyan had already managed to take upon himself all the educational and political activity in the village, he gave lectures about the cooperative movement, about the Soviet kolkhoz system, about the exploitative nature of the capitalist economy, no worse than any modern lecturer could do, he enjoyed a reputation as a learned man not only in our village, but in the neighboring villages as well. He could have married a wealthier or more beautiful girl, but even back then he looked upon marriage from a class point of view, and as he confessed to me later, out of all the girls, only Kichka possessed the true qualities needed for a wife and comrade in life. Just as he was the first among the young men to don a suit coat and trousers, so she was the first of the girls to wear city clothing; just as the young men went to him to sew their new clothes, so the girls went to her for patterns for skirts and blouses. Kichka wasn’t beautiful, but she dressed with taste, wore her hair in a bob like the schoolteachers, and like them said “please,” “merci,” and “pardon me” – polite words that had yet to enter the village youngsters’ vocabulary. She had only finished one year of middle school, but like my brother she was inquisitive, following his example she would read a book now and then, she liked to be “in style,” she taught herself good manners, and among the girls in the village at that time, she stood out as an intelligent, flirtatious, and graceful young lady, whom outsiders took for a schoolteacher or guest from the city. All of this lent her some charm and softened the sharpness of her small, bird-like face, which in moments of excitement became sweet, expressive, and even pretty, it also exonerated her from her conscious superiority over the other girls in the village, whom she treated with affectionate condescension, while laughing at them behind their backs. Stoyan was not annoyed by her self-confidence, since he thought it was unconscious and that it expressed the positive sides of her character – forthrightness, decisiveness, and a willingness to help others however she could. He was happy that he had bound himself to a woman whose outlook on life coincided completely with his own, even before they were married. Kichka eloped with him, not like the other girls who snuck away in the dead of night, but in broad daylight. She gathered up her dowry in a bundle and told her parents that she was going to Stoyan Kralev’s to become his wife. They didn’t believe her, because they didn’t believe that without matchmakers, without maidenly bashfulness and dignity, she would go and throw herself into the arms of some man during the Lenten fast, and all this before her older sister had been married off. But Kichka did it, bravely ignoring the religious and worldly conventions of the times, and in doing so showed she was worthy of her future husband. A few days later they wanted to get married officially, but Father Encho advised them to wait until after Lent. Stoyan and Kichka knew weddings were not allowed during Lent; they took advantage of the opportunity to declare church weddings as religious prejudice and started living together unmarried. No one had permitted themselves such boldness as long as the village had existed, and not only Kichka’s family but everyone was against them. With their illegal cohabitation, they profaned matrimony as blessed by God and tradition and set an example of flagrant debauchery; the priest threatened to expel them from the church. The three of us thought it over carefully and decided that at the moment, the conditions were not conducive to free civil marriage and we had best not scandalize public opinion because of a formality that might undermine the authority Stoyan had already won among the young and old.
Kichka very soon was heading the women’s movement in the village, which initially expressed itself through imposing the new fashion, new dances at parties, and the recruitment of women for theatrical activities. Boryana was the first play in which the female roles were played by women, it enjoyed great success and was performed three times. In this play, Kichka debuted and established herself as the number one actress in the village. Ivan Shibilev’s directing helped with this too. It turned out that during his frequent and mysterious disappearances from the village, he had joined various theater troupes in the nearby cities and from him for the first time we heard words and concepts such as “directing,” “makeup,” “mise-en-scène,” “interpretation,” “set,” “prompter,” and “intermission.” During his brief experience with these troupes, Ivan Shibilev had managed to make off with some props and costumes, such as makeup, wigs, moustaches, and beards, which transformed our actors such that people could no longer recognize them. In our earlier plays, we had disguised ourselves with white and black wool, we stuck it to our beards, moustaches, and eyebrows with watermelon treacle, but the treacle would soften in the warmth of the salon, our beards and moustaches would fall off, or as soon as they started to come unstuck, the actors would take them off and put them in their pockets. There were some slow-witted actors who froze up, picked their beards up off the floor, and tried to stick them on again in the little room backstage, stopping the performance for several minutes. The actors were semiliterate young men and couldn’t learn their roles from a written text. At rehearsals, my brother and I read aloud all the parts to each person individually, until they learned them by heart, and if they forgot some word during the performances, they fell silent like mutes and looked at our lips.
For this reason, Ivan Shibilev, after outfitting us with props, introduced a new personage to our performances – the prompter. The job of the prompter had to be filled by a literate person, so we turned to the schoolteacher, Pesho. Who knows why, but he despised the teatro and thought that all these parties, new dances, and fashions were corrupting the youth. Like most teachers at that time, he was as strict and demanding as a field marshal and never let a single violation go unpunished. When at last after much pleading he agreed to become the prompter, his first and only condition was that “we listen to him.” For him, the whole village was a school, and all the people his students, thus for him the job of prompter was also part of his teacherly duties. Even when the roles were first being handed out, he would announce to the actors that by the third rehearsal they had to know their lines by heart, or…“they would be punished.” Because he was a longtime teacher and mentor, and the most authoritative individual in the village, no one would ever dare talk back to him, we didn’t dare talk back to him either. We had all been his students and remembered his supple dogwood switch that with a single blow turned your palms into puffy donuts. In any case, the troupe of actors had undergone a complete change. Like many other things in the village, studying had also become fashionable. We had one girl and four boys in high school who replaced the semiliterate young men onstage. And then our theater went full steam ahead. The number of high school students increased every year, as did the number of intelligent actors. Very often during one vacation we would stage three plays, we began touring to the neighboring villages as well.
No matter how often I go to the theater or watch a play on television, I always remember our performances in the mud-brick hall of the community center. It was not theater, of course, but “enlightenment activity,” as naïve and ridiculous as a children’s game, but perhaps precisely because of this it was truly the people’s theater. The audience, not jaded like today’s by its knowledge of theater and of all possible dramaturgical schools, never for an instant distanced itself from what it was watching, but became one with the life onstage and took part in it. One woman who got thirsty during a performance jumped up onstage, dipped a mug in the cauldron, and when she didn’t find water in it, went over to Boryana and said: “For shame, Boryana, what time is it girl, and you still haven’t gone to fetch the water?”
Another woman, who was sitting close to the stage, peeked at the wealthy Lord Marko’s feast table and turned to the public: “Take a look at that, people, he calls himself a lord, but his table’s full of nothing but empty plates and dry crusts of bread!”
There were also cases of direct interference in the performance on the part of the audience. In one play a murder was to take place. The plans had been laid in the first act, and in the second, Stoyan, who was playing the killer, was supposed to stick his knife in his opponent’s back. He was waiting for him by the window, and when footsteps and his enemy’s voice could be heard from outside, he hid behind the door and took his knife out of his belt. The door opened, and on the doorstep stood Neycho, who was to be killed. At that same moment, his father, Bay Ivan Geshev, leapt onstage, shouted at his son to run, grabbed the knife out of Stoyan’s hand, and turned it against him: “Start marching to town hall or I’ll stick it to you!”
Stoyan was taken aback and didn’t know what to do, while Bay Ivan Geshev was holding the knife to his chest and hollering: “You low-down dirty scoundrel! I’ll take you to court for trying to kill my son! You say he stole your money! My son doesn’t touch another man’s property. That floozy you’re foolin’ around with, she’s the one who stole it, go after her!”
Pesho the schoolteacher was also dumbfounded by this incursion onto the stage. He was sitting in his prompter’s seat in the corner, wrapped up in the curtain as if in a cocoon, so the audience couldn’t see him, but he didn’t do anything, as if he thought that the play contained such a scene that he had not noticed before and which hadn’t been rehearsed. Relieved that the murder had been headed off, the audience was now impatiently waiting to see how Bay Ivan Geshev would deal with the culprit, without suspecting that his appearance onstage had been self-initiated. All of this went on for only two or three minutes, but for theatrical time a pause of this sort is catastrophic. In the end, Pesho the schoolteacher saved the day. We signaled to him to patch things up, he promised Bay Ivan Geshev that he would testify in court in his favor, took the knife out of his hands, and hustled him into the dressing room.
We, of course, used the magical power that theater had over the villagers as a means of raising their class consciousness. We boldly reworked every play, cutting or changing the lines so as to load it full of socialist content, exaggerating the class strife. Onstage, the rich or wealthier characters in every play were called bloodsuckers, exploiters, and class enemies of the poor people, we propagandized for cooperatives and the Soviet kolkhozes, for equality between the sexes, we mocked religion and bourgeois morality, we rejected all the customs of that time. Actually, Stoyan was doing all the work, I helped him out with the literary material, which comrades from the city supplied me with. He would read or retell these materials to the villagers, explaining international politics to them, arguing with them, exposing his ideological enemies. I knew all this because he wrote me every week, informing me of village news in the greatest detail. I remember with what joy and enthusiasm he would tell me which lectures he had given before the young and the old in the community center, what questions had been asked, how most of them had accepted the idea of the Soviet kolkhozes and a couple of dozen people had already joined the party. By then I knew that my brother’s true calling wasn’t the tailor’s trade but public service. For every injustice perpetrated by the local authorities – the giving of land to landless villagers, the imposition of fines or collection of various taxes – he always stood on the side of the injured party, and since he was better read and informed than the authorities themselves, in most cases he succeeded in imposing his opinion. Not a single public event took place or was called off without his opinion being taken into account, whether it was the building of a fountain, a school, or a highway, such that even though he was young and not authorized by any authorities whatsoever, he became the center of all events in the village. He was ready at all times to drop his personal business and not to sleep for nights on end so as to write lectures, learn parts for plays, look for lodgings for teachers, organize parties and raffles, sew uniforms for free for poor students, and even act as an adviser to families dividing up land.
Nevertheless, my brother’s public activity in those years was peaceful, educational activity in comparison to the strenuous work that awaited him after the declaration of the German-Soviet war. The day the war was declared coincided with a great event in the life of our family – Kichka gave birth to a baby girl. In the morning an old woman had gone into her room to midwife for her, while my brother and I hung around in the yard waiting for the child to be born. From time to time, the old woman would appear on the doorstep and make us bring her warm water from the cauldron, which was simmering over the hearth in the other room, or she would ask for some clothing or a handful of wool and then we would hear Kichka’s groaning. Stoyan was shocked and frightened, he was pacing back and forth around the yard, not taking his eyes off the door to the room. And so hours passed, it was noon, but still the old woman hadn’t come out to tell us whether Kichka had given birth. At one point she opened the window of the room and once again disappeared back inside. Master Stamo came out of the tailor shop, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, and started crawling around the yard like a turtle. His humps were more pronounced than ever and they pressed on his throat, suffocating him. The heat was intolerable, the chickens were dozing in the shade of the apricot tree with open beaks and spread wings, the pig was panting in the pen. Master Stamo sat down under the awning of the barn, leaned his back hump against the post, and closed his eyes. After a short while we heard whispering, we turned to him and realized that he was telling us not to bake in the sun but to come into the shade. From the open window we heard Kichka give a single sharp cry that was not repeated. A sinister silence fell, the three of us stood as if petrified, oppressed by the majesty of a mystery that was taking place in the room, but what was that mystery – birth or death? The rooster, which had been lying among the hens, his beak hanging open from the heat, got up, shook off the dust, flapped his wings, and crowed. His clear, polyphonic voice resounded in the silence as loud as a shot and so absurdly that we jumped and turned toward him. The rooster cocked his head, fixed us with one eye, and stretched his neck, with his flaming red coxcomb on his head and steely spurs on his feet. He stood still and kept watching us with his cold eye, and we shuddered from superstitious fear, as if some unclean force stood before us, incarnated as a rooster.
“War with Russia!” someone said in a breathless voice.
“It’s a girl!” the old woman cried at the same time from the doorstep. “May she live a long life, Stoyan, she’s your spitting image!”
My brother ran toward the house, but when he reached the threshold, he stopped and turned toward Acho (the attendant from the community center) and asked: “What war?”
“Germany and Russia are going to fight,” Acho said. “I heard it just now on the radio. Them Deutschers invaded and have already gotten a heck of a ways into Russia.”
The midwife showed us the baby from the doorstep, but wouldn’t let us in to see Kichka. She called out from the bed, saying she was all right, and immediately fell asleep. Acho was still standing in the yard, as if awaiting some orders from Stoyan. We sent him away and went into the garden, sat down amidst the lush alfalfa, and Stoyan said: “Now how’s that for a coincidence! On one and the same day, my child is born and fascist Germany attacks the Soviet Union.”
This declaration of war came as no surprise to me, because I had quite extensive information about Germany’s intentions. I had already lived in Sofia as a student for one full year, and I had even known from unofficial sources that toward the middle of April Churchill had sent Stalin a message informing him that German forces were gathering on the border of the Soviet Union. Stoyan and I had spoken many times about the inevitability of such a war, yet still he was surprised, taken aback, and bewildered. He also didn’t want to believe the radio report that the German Army in the very first da
ys of the campaign had gotten a couple of hundred miles into Soviet territory. After the evening news we went back to the community center and listened to Soviet radio stations in the dark. They confirmed the report we had heard on our radio and talked about the Soviet troops’ strategic retreat. I translated literally, but Stoyan questioned my knowledge of Russian, thinking I had translated incorrectly.
“It can’t be!” he kept saying over and over like an incantation.
In my absence he might have fallen into despair like many others, but when we were together I never noticed in him even the slightest doubt regarding the outcome of the war. During the first days he was restless and anxious, he slept very little and worked a lot, and with great internal tension he managed to keep calm in front of other people. It was agonizing to listen to reports of German successes together with the whole village, and I sometimes stayed home, I couldn’t bear the rebukes and taunts of the villagers to whom we had spoken so enthusiastically about the might, grandeur, and invincibility of the Soviet Union. Stoyan never missed a day in front of the radio, smiling calmly and even condescendingly like a person listening to some pompous palaver.
Wolf Hunt Page 40