Wolf Hunt Read online

  Copyright © Ivailo Petrov, 1986

  English translation copyright © Angela Rodel, 2017

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published as Hayka za valtsi by Profizdat, 1987

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wolf hunt / Ivailo Petrov; translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel.

  Other titles: Hayka za valtsi. English

  LCCN 2016051928 | ISBN 9780914671701 (paperback)

  BISAC: FICTION / Literary.

  LCC PG1038.26.E8 K43313 2017 | DDC 891.8/133–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016051928

  Ebook ISBN 9780914671718

  Cover art: Marta Rayhel

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Archipelago Books gratefully acknowledges the generous support from the National Book Centre program of the Bulgarian National Palace of Culture, Sofia Municipality Culture Programme, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Part One: Kalcho Statev, Aka Salty Kalcho or Trotsky

  Part Two: Zhendo “The Bandit” Ivanov

  Part Three: Nikolin “Little Horn” Miyalkov and Ivan “Painkiller” Shibilev

  Part Four: Stoyan “Man of Steel” Kralev

  Part Five: Kiro “Up Yours” Dzhelebov

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  AT THAT TIME, the so-called process of industrial migration had successfully come to an end, and in my village only aging and elderly people were left to live out their lives. The youngest were past fifty, so the process of giving birth had successfully come to an end as well. In seven years, only one child had been born in the village, to the tractor driver, and he was a transplant. In the fall the child had gone to school in the main village on the local cooperative farm’s bus, which would come by in the morning to pick up kids from the neighboring two villages as well. But since the big cold snap had taken hold, the bus hadn’t stopped to get the boy, as there was still no paved road to the main village, and no vehicle could get down the dirt road, piled as it was with snow and iced over. Incidentally, for this same reason I, too, wasn’t able to slip away from the village for ten whole days.

  The case of the tractor driver’s boy had become a village-wide topic of conversation, so when I went down to the horemag (you likely recall that years ago, all our villages had one of these highly propitious, righteous establishments – a combination of a hotel, restaurant, and store – which eventually reverted to your average, ordinary tavern), the men were discussing it yet again. They had told me about the child Lord knows how many times, yet I still had to listen to the whole story from beginning to end and, of course, weigh in on the question. I said what everyone had been saying for months already, namely that, on the one hand, the school authorities in the main village were to blame for not sending the bus to pick the boy up, while on the other, they weren’t to blame at all, since the bus couldn’t get through the icebound road.

  “I understand that it’s a complex business,” the tractor driver shouted heatedly, “but that’s cold comfort for me! I want my kid to study, I want to make a decent man out of him, no ifs, ands, or buts about it!”

  Meanwhile, the Holy Communion I had been invited to partake in had begun. In late December, the homemade wine started clearing up, so the locals here had established the ritual of taking a bottle down to the tavern to hear opinions on their “domestic production.” Bay* Trendo Two-Bits set out glasses on the table quick as a flash and with a professional flick of the wrist divvied up the first bottle. He had run a tavern for as long as I could remember and would keep running one despite the vicissitudes of the times. When the co-op was founded, some teetotaling wave to close down the pubs had gathered steam, so they tried to stick him with some other job, but he gave them the slip and disappeared for a few years. He went to a different village, and from there to the city, where he opened up a tavern right across from the city slaughterhouse. His best and most loyal clients were the butchers – swaggering, dyed-in-the-wool boozers, every one of them. There were seven of them and they would arrive early in the morning, before dawn. Bellied up to the bar, they would toss back a shot or two and roar: “Mmmm-hmm, that devil’s piss set my soul on fire!” In the evening, Two-Bits would leave the shot glasses out, filled with water to freshen them up a bit, then in the morning he’d fill them with brandy and line them up on the bar to save the butchers time. One morning he was held up a bit in the storeroom, and when he got back, what did he see? – there they were, lined up at the bar, raising the shot glasses full of pure water, shaking their heads and praising the brandy: “This time you gave us your strongest stuff!” After that, Two-Bits never once served them brandy again, and never once, over the course of a whole year, did they realize that they were drinking pure water.

  While recounting this incident from his life and times as a tavern keeper, Bay Trendo Two-Bits took the first sip and declared: “Bravo, Kalcho, your wine is très magnifique!”

  The others accepted this judgment stoically, because they knew that due to long years of alcohol consumption, the tavern keeper had lost any sense of taste for drink, just like the butchers he had just told them about. Everyone turned to Stoyan “Man of Steel” Kralev, who passed as the best taster among them. He raised his glass to his lips, took a large swig and stared at the slogan – likely thought up by the tavern keeper, but written out in a calligraphic hand by Ivan “Painkiller” Shibilev:

  Socialism and alcohol are like cats and dogs, yet they live under the same roof.

  The other men were staring at him, watching silently as he squinted his eyes slightly and froze up, as if sunk in the magic of some mystery. His gray moustache, cut short and placed like a square rug between his nose and mouth, flinched and puckered, his windpipe shuddered as well, showing that he had let the sip wash over his palate. He opened his eyes, smacked his lips, and finally offered his weighty pronouncement: “Here’s to your health – may you drink it with pleasure on television! Three flavors stand out: our local vine, Muscat, and a hint of Pamid. Intertwined like the three strands of a rope…”

  “You hit the nail on the head!” Zhendo “the Bandit” said, impressed. “He even picked up on the hint of Pamid.”

  They all took sips of the wine – some more impatiently, others with the dignity that the situation demanded – and unanimously confirmed Stoyan Kralev’s authoritative opinion. Next they tried wines made by Nikolin “Little Horn” Miyalkov and Kiro “Up Yours” Dzhelebov, which both received the same high praise. Incidentally, you have probably noticed that everyone has nicknames, and rather disconcerting ones at that, but let us not get ahead of ourselves – it will later become clear why, how, and under what circumstances each man got his nickname. For the time being, I will merely note that there were a few wiseacres in our village whose vocation for thinking up nicknames was passed on from father to son, such that no one was left without a nickname, while others had even two or three, for everyday use and for special occasions, as it were. Even domestic animals bore the nicknames of their owners, so if some dog was barking or some cow was mooing, everybody’d say: �
�Petko the Kibitzer’s barking” or “Dobri the Spaz is mooing again.” The local wiseacres not only lacked a sense of collegial solidarity – indeed, on the contrary, driven by artistic envy, it seems, they were so merciless toward one another that some of their very own nicknames were used only by a tight circle, while those meant for general usage were uttered by all without the slightest hint of embarrassment: Yanko the Motherkiller, Green Apple Gancho, Pissant Georgi, Snotnosed Ivan, and so on.

  In any case, only twenty or so people in the village had vineyards, so it was no secret which sorts each man grew, how many liters he’d made, and what his bouquet entailed, yet this Holy Communion had the irresistible charm of mutual magnanimity. Everyone enjoyed running a swig of another man’s wine over his palate, giving his blessing and receiving one in return. After the solemn tasting ritual concluded, each man would drink his wine at home “on television,” as Stoyan Kralev put it – that is, not in front of a television set, but from a bowl or a shallow cup. At that time, there was already one television set in the village, the local folks had filed past it to take a look, and by-the-by had noticed that their images were reflected in bowls of wine just like on television when they raised them up to take a drink.

  From time to time, there was a pounding on the door, somebody would come in, wrapped in a fur cloak or an overcoat, and along with him a whole cloud of fine, hard snow would bluster inside, showering a good half of the tavern like sand. The newcomer would stamp his feet one last time behind the door, and if he was carrying wine, would leave it on the table and sit down wherever he could find a seat. The enormous oval barrel stove, dark as a buffalo’s belly, crackled and strained to redness, while the air around it shimmered like summer haze, and the room swayed in the sweet daze brought on by the scent of new wine and wet furs. The fantastical designs on the nearby windowpane turned to murky moisture, now and again someone would wipe the lowest pane with his sleeve, and you could see the branches of a tree twisting nearby, black as coal, forlorn and cheerless; you could also see the ghostly outlines of the closest houses, veiled in the impressionistic white of the snowflakes, behind which the head of the old well jutted up into the sky like a cabalistic sign, while everything else around it, swathed in grayish-white invisibility, hinted at mysteriousness and enchantment. Inside the tavern as well reigned a mood unusual for the occasion. The men had been sipping wine for a whole hour already and a slight flush filled their cheeks, but strangely, they did not raise their voices, but rather with a ritualistic solemnity spoke quietly and courteously about the finer points of the art of viniculture. Even the youngest, the tractor driver, who had been on the lookout the whole time for a suitable moment to once again raise the unsettled question of his child’s education, carefully set his emptied glass down on the table and said, as if uttering an incantation: “I came here over hill and dale to earn a buck or two and get my child an education. And what of it? They tell me to rent the kid an apartment in town – but how can I put up a seven-year-old in an apartment? My wife and I would have to go with him. And that’s damn well what I intend to do. Once the weather breaks, I’m going to find a new job in a village that has a school. The only thing I care about is making a decent man out of him…”

  “Yeah, well, we all made decent folks out of our kids, and we haven’t seen hide or hair of them since,” said Grandpa Radi, also known as Grandpa Saggy Pants. “If you shook a stick around this whole village, you wouldn’t hit a single young person. Last summer my oldest boy came to visit with his wife. We hadn’t seen them or the grandkids in three years. Now, my son might think to drop a line every now and then, but her, the wife, she never gives us the time of day. She slurps up brandy and puffs on cigarettes like a regular floozy, while spewing out such hogwash that it makes your ears burn to hear it! So Grandma and I said to ourselves, well, they finally thought to come see us, while those two, by-the-by, started wheedling me to sell half the yard and give them the money. Said they wanted to buy themselves a place to build a villa. A while back I’d given them three grand to buy a car, and now they’re nagging at me for a villa. The jig is up, I said. I’m not going to give your brother a red cent either, as long as I live, since he hasn’t bothered to show his face here for years. You get married without us, I said, you have children without us, you baptize them without us, you can build your villa without us as well. And they whined: You’re not thinking about us at all, you’re getting on in years already, while we’ve still got our whole lives in front of us. Damn right, I tell ’em, since I’m getting on in years, that’s exactly why I need a house and a yard and some money tucked away for rainy days, so when I fall, there’ll be someone to look after me. Then I sent them packing with a sack of potatoes and nothing more.”

  “The Pangarovs didn’t even come to bury their father,” someone from the same table chimed in. “Two sons and two daughters, and not a single one of them came to toss a handful of dirt on his grave. One didn’t get the telegram in time, the other was on a business trip…But when it came time to split up the house and the land, all four of them showed up lightning-fast. They fought like cats and dogs, splitting up everything down to the last brick…”

  The blizzard pounded at the windows, showering them with snow, the stovepipes howled ominously like sirens, while the buffalo-belly of a stove choked, coughed, spit fire from its mouth, and seemed to rise toward the ceiling a bit. It had come time to try Zhendo “the Bandit” Ivanov’s wine. The tavern keeper pulled the corncob out of the neck of the bottle and was just about to pour a round when the door opened, hitting the wall with a bang. Amidst the white surge of the blizzard, a dog yellow as a flame appeared, standing in the middle of the tavern on three legs. Everyone stared at it, as if some evil spirit had come inside, incarnated as that lame yellow dog. It began turning its head, looking over all the men first with its left, then with its right eye, as if looking for someone to deliver a message to or to hex with an evil omen. No one dared to flinch, so as not to attract its attention.

  “Noseless Anani!” the tavern keeper cried. He was Anani’s neighbor and saw the dog in his yard every day. “He keeps it hungry, so that’s why the no-good mutt roams around the whole village! Now, git, Anani, shoo, shoo!”

  The tavern keeper waved to chase the dog off and knocked one of the glasses from the table onto the floor. The dog, seeming to sense that the men in the pub were nonplussed by its visit, turned around and disappeared into the blizzard. The superstitious old men saw this as a bad omen. Dogs presage earthquakes, bad weather, and impending death. Anani was a night owl, if, God forbid, he had gotten into trouble, nobody’d be the wiser. However, Stoyan Kralev said that only an hour earlier he had seen Anani coming back from the well with his shoulder pole, others seconded this, and the Holy Communion continued. It had come time to taste Zhendo “the Bandit” Ivanov’s wine as well. He took off his cap and tucked it under his arm. He had only recently gotten his vineyard, this was his first time making homemade wine, so while he was awaiting the other men’s blessings, he stood at attention as if at an exam. It turned out that the tavern keeper had knocked Salty Kalcho’s glass off the table. He looked for another glass but couldn’t find one, so he poured wine into a soda bottle. It was now Kalcho’s turn to take a sip of wine and give his blessing, so he grabbed the bottle but didn’t lift it to his lips. His fingers pulled away from the bottle and like five little dwarves from a fairy tale, they put their heads together conspiratorially, as if plotting something and cooking up a plan of action. The men at the table fell silent and stared at these little dwarves, as if trying to overhear their whispers and puzzle out their plans. I can’t say how long it went on, but it must have been too long, because it felt awkward and painful. But I, like all the others, didn’t dare move, so as not to disturb what I thought might be some ritual of theirs. I merely allowed myself to look them over and noticed that Zhendo’s balding forehead was very white, while Salty Kalcho’s eyes were moist. Overexcited by the Holy Communion, it seemed, he couldn’t stand
the tension, which was growing ever more agonizing, he covered his eyes with his hands and some wild, heart-wrenching groan tore from his lips: “Mmaaah!”

  The tavern fell silent, the men from the neighboring tables set down their glasses and turned toward Salty Kalcho’s table. Several seconds passed in heavy silence. Zhendo’s face turned from white to beet-red, he wiped his sweaty forehead with a cap and again tucked it under his arm. His hands were shaking, and he started rubbing them together. And then Ivan Shibilev leapt to his feet, as if he had just remembered something very important, cheerfully took a sip from his glass, and said with a smile: “Hey, people! Well now, I came here to tell you about the wolves, but wouldn’t you know it, this wine has addled my brain. Did you know that three wolves showed up in our common pasture? This morning Keran the shepherd came to my place to borrow my rifle. They felled a dozen sheep just like that, he says, but since we don’t have any guns, we can’t get rid of them. We chase them out of one pen, they rush into the other one. With all the hunters we’ve got in this village, he says, you’ll blow them away in no time. Their tracks lead all the way to the quarry, they prowl around there by day. I didn’t give him my gun, because I said to myself, if we leave now, we’ll have knocked them off by evening. Who’s in? We’ll have a wolf hunt.”

  As we shall see, Ivan Shibilev, also known as the “Painkiller” for his ability to remedy all ills, has since time out of mind showed all sorts of eccentricities, so his suggestion to go out into the woods in this blizzard to hunt wolves did not stun, but rather amused the men in the tavern who were not hunters. And he had started talking about this wolf hunt with the cheerful enthusiasm of a person who’s suddenly gotten an idea that was unexpected even to himself, which was absolutely in keeping with his character. The strangest part was that the other five members of the village hunting club happened to be at that same table and all of them – as if they had planned it in advance – got up and went to get their rifles. Once they were outside, Ivan Shibilev tried to backpedal, saying the blizzard had gotten worse so they had better leave the hunt for the next day, but the other five replied that putting it off was unthinkable and even reproached him for stringing them along. They agreed to meet half an hour later in front of his gate and went to get their rifles.