There were always schoolteachers living at the Dzhelebovs’. They came from various parts of the country, coming to our godforsaken village for a few years to get their start in life. Whoever arrived first in the fall, the mayor would send her to the Dzhelebovs, just as he sent official guests from the city to sleep there. One of these schoolteachers became the reason for which Kiro Dzhelebov became stuck with his new nickname. Like all our local folks, he, too, would curse more or less every other word, with or without cause, cussing out everything he laid eyes or hands on. And our curses, to put it modestly, are exquisite bits of literature and are so strikingly realistic that, as one joker who came to the village put it, when you hear them for the first time, you unwittingly scratch certain parts of your body.
The first schoolteacher to be boarded at the Dzhelebovs’ was named Hortensia. For a long time we could not remember that strange name, which inspired in us such awe that even when we remembered it, we didn’t dare to utter it, so as not to make it sound coarse and unharmonious from our lips. The schoolteachers were like exotic flowers among us and the village, which in the summer was sunk knee-deep in dust, and in the fall and winter, in mud and snow. Almost all of them were from cities and at first had such a hard time adjusting and coming to terms with our way of life that the villagers themselves, with their inborn feeling of superiority and hostility toward “city ladies with their dainty white hands,” at once reproached and pitied them: “The poor things, why did they come here to get barked at by dogs and bitten up by fleas like us!” They didn’t know that these girls were penniless and came to our village from far-flung regions to make a bit of money, to be able to have a home and family of their own, or to further their education. Hortensia, for example, spent three years with us, without going home during vacations, so as to save travel expenses, and in the fourth year wrote to us from Switzerland, where she had gone to study medicine. She was from Kyustendil and often told us about that big city that was so wondrous in our imaginations, as we had not seen mountains or crystal-clear rivers or mineral baths. Even now, when I happen to see the town of Kyustendil on the map, I always think of “Miz Hortensia,” my first teacher, I see her cautiously wading through the deep, sticky mud, her overshoes completely sinking in it, how she skipped lightly and gracefully across the fields with us in a white blouse and a black skirt, petite and slender, with her hair cut boyishly à la garçonne, I can hear her calling our names in her gentle, flute-like voice, I can smell the scent of her clothes and hands, the aroma of flowers amid our fur caps and leather sandals stinking of manure and dust.
As Auntie Tanka later told us, the first morning the new teacher came running to her in tears, saying: “My dear landlady, I’m leaving! I beg your pardon, but I can’t stay here with you any longer!”
“But why not, Miss Teacher? You just got here last night, and now you’re wanting to leave. You didn’t see a snake in our house, now did you?”
The teacher told her how she had finally fallen asleep around dawn, and that the landlord’s voice had awakened her just a short while ago. She sat up in bed and saw him standing in front of the window of her room, and spoke such words to her that she could not possibly repeat them. Auntie Tanka couldn’t imagine what the explanation for this could possibly be, and she was burning with shame in front of the girl. A grown man with three children going and saying such shameful things to a young girl, she couldn’t get her mind around it. She found her husband in the cattle shed and hauled off and gave him a piece of her mind. When he heard what his wife was accusing him of, Kiro in his turn burned with shame and swore that he hadn’t seen the teacher, much less talked to her. And he hadn’t been peeping through her window, but had seen a mouse on her window ledge, one of those that infest the foundations of the house all summer and can be killed off neither by water nor by poison. It was just standing on the window ledge looking him in the eye, as if thumbing his nose at him.
Auntie Tanka immediately guessed what he had said to the mouse, warned him next time to keep his “dirty mouth” shut, and ran back to the girl to calm her down.
“So that’s what it was, eh, Miss Teacher? Well, that’s what our men around here say instead of ‘good morning.’ Your uncle Kiro saw a mouse and he was threatening it, and here you are all in tears…”
Knowing the indelibly artistic impression made by our curses, which my grandfather began teaching me even before I went to school, I can only imagine how unambiguous his threat must have sounded, addressed in the early morning to the schoolteacher’s window: “Ooh, you dirty little tramp, just wait till I get my hands on you, I’ll skewer you alive!”
From that day forward, Kiro Dzhelebov fell ill, as hardcore smokers or drug addicts fall ill when deprived of tobacco or drugs. This new girl, “as pretty as a picture,” inspired such respect in him that he suddenly recognized the obscenity of his habit, felt deeply ashamed, and decided to root it out once and for all. But habit, as we know, is man’s second nature, and it is stronger and truer than man’s first nature. This second nature had been sprouting in his soul since the cradle and had set down such strong roots that only a sworn saint could have cured himself of it, at the price of a lifelong vow of silence. For Kiro Dzhelebov, this meant being reborn, and under the condition no less that the teacher would live with them in order to raise him from infancy. His abstention turned into true sickness, making him agitated, petty, and quarrelsome. He had to take the teacher into consideration even when she was at school, because it seemed to him that she would hear him and burst into tears from the shame and insult of it. Only in his sleep could he fully relish freedom of speech, and for whole nights he would spew such masterpieces of cursing that Auntie Tanka would listen in delight. But wouldn’t you know, the situation became unbearable and Kiro Dzhelebov tried to fool his habit, just like a smoker tries to outwit his urge with an unlit cigarette, candies, or sunflower seeds. He started replacing real swears with more innocent cusses, for example, “son of a biscuit” and “why don’t you you-know-what your whatchamacallit,” but all this abstract you-know-whatting could not satisfy his urgent needs. Finally, after extended artistic setbacks, he found an expression that he felt was fully synonymous with one of our classic curses. This expression, similar to modern art, was filled from end to end with subtext, in other words, with it you could say what you wanted to say in an Aesopian way, but on the other hand, no one could reproach you for vulgarity or old-fashioned realism: “Up yours!”
The local wiseacres had been watching his literary efforts at close range and as soon as they heard this expression come out of his mouth twice, they immediately appended it to his name.
Nikolin Miyalkov and Salty Kalcho flashed by like ghosts and went on their way farther into the woods, while he stood near the dry stump and cleared away the snow around it. For years he had manned this blind and he had always hit something. A narrow clearing headed downhill and the game always ran along it as it was being pursued. He stood there well hidden by the dry stump, such that even the wild boar couldn’t sense him and came within a dozen feet of him. Two years earlier he had killed a boar with enormous tusks (golden tusks, as he was later to find out) in this spot and had given them to Stoyan Kralev. The forest was small, but held a lot of game. Besides rabbits, in recent years deer had been breeding there, pheasants had been introduced, and with them came foxes. Two herds of wild boar had turned up from somewhere, after plundering the corn they stayed to winter in the Inferno near the pools made by the spring. In late autumn, the snipes swooped in, attracted by the humidity, huge flocks of wild doves flew in as well, and the forest became a small but rich reserve. For fowl, they hunted “in situ,” but for larger game, they split into beaters and hunters. Their hunting party was small, six men all told, four of them would go through the woods, making noise, hollering and shooting, while the other four would wait in the blinds. Each time they would do only two battues, but they never came back empty-handed. They would gut the game under the old oak tree, divide the meat
into equal parts, after that one of them would gather in his hat one object from each of them – a pocketknife, matches, a button, or some other thing -hand the hat to another who would place the objects on the pieces of meat. During this ceremony all the others would stand with their backs turned, and afterward everyone would take the piece of meat marked with his object. In this fair way they divided even the small game. If there was an extra pheasant, partridge, or wood pigeon left, they would draw lots for it as well, and only then would they sit down beneath the old oak to rest. They would take whatever they had, brandy or wine, out of their backpacks, drink a few rounds, and give themselves over to the pleasure of hunterly talk.
Sometimes, exalted by drink, they would shoot at targets. They would throw empty bottles up and try to hit them, they would fire at newspapers and hats, but most often they took the raven’s nest as their target. As is well known, ravens are centenarian birds, and it seems that they build their houses for a century to come. The nest was firmly jammed between several branches at the very top of the oak and had been there for years. The hunters only shot at it in the fall, when it was empty, and never managed to destroy it either with buckshot or slugs, as if it were woven from armored steel. All of them had some pleasant or unpleasant memory from the hours spent under the old oak. For example, when Kiro Dzhelebov killed the large boar, he made a mistake that could have cost Stoyan Kralev his life. They had just sat down to their first round when Kiro Dzhelebov bumped his rifle, which he had leaned against the oak, with his foot. It fell, and as it fell it fired right at Stoyan Kralev. It missed him by a hair and tore a strip out of the sleeve of his padded jacket. He touched his left arm, while Kiro Dzhelebov turned white as a sheet. They all jumped up alarmed, only Stoyan Kralev remained sitting and tried to cover his fear with a joke: “Death tugged at my sleeve and passed right on by. For now, it said, I’m pushing back your deadline.”
Kiro Dzhelebov got ahold of himself, grabbed his rifle, and slammed it into the oak so hard that he was left holding the butt in his hands.
“Christ, I just about killed a man for nothing!” he cried, pounding his head with his fists.
While he was getting a new rifle butt made in the city, he still went hunting. He said that on hunting days he couldn’t sit still at home, so he became a permanent beater for the hunting party, but, in fact, he was only serving Stoyan Kralev. He would head straight for his blind, shouting, yapping like a hunting dog, and driving game to him. After the hunt he would quickly skin and gut Stoyan Kralev’s portion, and only then would he sit down to rest. And so it was for two whole hunting seasons. He also helped him with his vineyard, fashioned all sorts of chicken coops and birdcages for him, and finally began inviting him to his house, all under the pretense that it was a “sacrificial offering” to make up for the incident beneath the old oak. He didn’t feel any guilt over that unpleasant incident, which really could have cost Stoyan Kralev his life, yet nevertheless he constantly tried to show that he was indebted to him due to his carelessness and that there had been no intended malice in that carelessness. The more repugnant this toadyism was to his own nature, the more he tormented himself with his efforts to play the role of Stoyan Kralev’s friend, and the more he tried to prove this to him. Stoyan Kralev repaid him for his generosity only with a bare and simple “thanks.” This bootlicking was not particularly pleasant to him, but he allowed it, since with this bootlicking Kiro Dzhelebov showed the village, albeit with a great delay, that he was to blame for the serious conflicts that had played out between the two of them. He had been waiting for more than fifteen years for that proud man to bow his head and drop from his shoulders his great burden of guilt, which the elderly people still remembered and which they could not forgive him for. Kiro Dzhelebov even now was thinking about the sad and insurmountable consequences of that guilt. Down in the Inferno, a thick whiteness had settled, while up above in the blind the blizzard was raging at fever pitch. And it seemed to him that this cold and impenetrable white nothingness was rocking and making his head spin. If I didn’t know what a state he was in, I wouldn’t have been able to explain why he had agreed to head to the woods at that time, especially since he was the only one of the group who didn’t understand the meaning of the episode with the bottle, which Salty Kalcho refused to drink from and which made him burst out crying. For the others, this was no mystery, since they had all been at the wedding of Salty Kalcho’s daughter. And as we shall see a bit later, all of them had some fateful connection to that event. But even if Kiro Dzhelebov had been at that terrible wedding, the incident at the tavern would hardly have reminded him of anything. He headed for the woods, not to hunt some wolves, not out of solidarity with the others, but, as he himself was aware, to chase away his own anguish.
A few days after I had arrived in the village, he met me on the street and very insistently invited me to his home. He looked truly happy to run in to me, because he told me that many times he had thought of me, just like that, just as sometimes you remember things from the past. He led me upstairs to the east room, where the schoolteachers had once lived. The room was clean and cozy, and, of course, was arranged completely differently than it had been years ago when I had been a regular visitor at their house. Where there had once been a wall rug, sewn from pieces of woolen cloth and embroidery with colorful thread, now stood a two-winged wardrobe, the wooden bed had been replaced by an iron one, on the wall in a single frame were numerous pictures of his two sons with their wives and children, in the corner between the two windows stood a large radio, on its chain next to the bed hung the silver watch with Arabic numerals that Marko and I had used throughout our school years. Back then he had told us that his grandfather had gotten it from his own father when he was young, thus the watch had worked flawlessly for more than a century. There, too, an icon of the Virgin Mary had been placed, drawn by Ivan Shibilev’s skillful hand. Unlike all the icons I had seen in city churches, the young woman was painted in profile, with one large Egyptian eye, in a dark-blue robe and with a green halo around her head. With one arm she held Jesus in her lap, while with the other she offered him a bright-red bunch of grapes. Jesus was reaching out his little hand toward the grapes with the impatience of a hungry child, and it was clear that after that bunch he would want to eat yet another. The only sign of his divine providence was the equally green halo around his head, otherwise he looked like any local child – with rosy cheeks and a white shirt, since at that age they did not yet dress them in pants. Ivan Shibilev had likely painted the icon in the summertime in the shade of the outdoor kitchen, because the background was golden yellow like ripe wheat, and around the two figures he had painted all sorts of domestic birds and animals.
“Sit down, I’ll be right back,” my host said, and a minute later brought a bottle of wine, two glasses, and a plate of blood sausage from the other room. “Your auntie Tanka went to the store, she’ll be back soon, but in the meantime we can raise our glasses. Try some of the sausage, I just slaughtered my pig the other day, it’s fresh. Welcome and cheers!”
“This is fine wine, Uncle Kiro!” I said. “I haven’t had any like this in quite some time.”
“Where would you get any? All that store-bought stuff is sour as vinegar. This is my old wine, I haven’t opened up this year’s yet. Sure, I’ve got wine, but who is there to drink it? My sons have gone and scattered off to the cities, they never seem to find time to drop by here. Your auntie Tanka and I are left alone, we look after ourselves somehow or another. Some nights we may drink a glass apiece, and that’s the end of it.”
While he was saying this, he got up, looked out through the window to the street, and tears filled his eyes. He filled up the glasses and said: “May he rest in peace!”
“May he rest in peace? Who?”
“My heart is aching with grief, my boy! I haven’t breathed a word to anyone, but I’ll bare my soul to you now. I’ve considered you one of our own since way back when, because you and Marko went to school together and hung ar
ound together. Marko is no longer with us!”
Marko had emigrated to West Germany in ’52. He was the first defector abroad from our region and his defection at that time made a staggering impression on all of us, while his family fell into serious disgrace. Kiro Dzhelebov and I had never talked about this. I could see that at every one of our meetings he wanted to share something about his son, but didn’t dare to, while I, for my part, could never decide whether to ask about Marko, I didn’t want to be rubbing salt in the wound. Only now was he giving me the opportunity to comfort him, and I told him that Marko might come back someday. As far as I knew, he hadn’t given up his Bulgarian citizenship, he had not declared himself a “nonreturner,” so if he wanted to, he could come back. He shook his head.
“Marko passed away.”
He took a crumpled piece of paper out of his wallet and handed it to me. It was a telegram, written in Bulgarian in Latin letters and for the recipient’s benefit the contents had been written between the lines in Bulgarian letters:
Marko died wait two days funeral Juta Annie Kiril.
I studied the telegram for a long time, pretending that I didn’t understand the text very well in Latin letters and was trying to translate it letter for letter, to make sure there hadn’t been some mistake. But Kiro Dzhelebov knew why I was sounding out the text and saved me the trouble of sharing the banal condolences offered in such situations.
Wolf Hunt Page 50