The Dark Valley

by Aksel Bakunts

  Badi felt as if he had been hit on the head with a brick. He promptly stood up and approached the doorkeeper.

  “Bless you, what did the master say to you?”

  The doorkeeper looked around him, pursed his lips, then suddenly bent over and quickly whispered in Badi’s ear:

  “Last night your son was executed by firing squad in the fort…”

  The doorkeeper pulled back. Badi stood frozen for a moment. Then he grumbled in pain like a wounded beast, and two large teardrops rolled down his wrinkled cheeks.

  Badi ran to the fort, but got lost in the streets of the city, and in the end did not find it…

  He was told that it was already too late, that there was no point in trying to find his son anymore. He returned home by the way he had come, dejected, alone, and empty-handed.

  There was nothing left. Everything was lost.

  Badi barely managed to make it to the caravansary where he fainted in the middle of the road by a stone. The villagers found out where he was. They came and carried him home.

  * * *

  Many changes took place in the village.

  The Bolsheviks returned and Minas-the-Teacher tried to flee to Tabriz, but died on the opposite bank of the Arax River.

  The Bolsheviks came to the village and opened the roads. The Isans’ shop became a reading-hall. The elder of the Isans’ brothers fled to Persia with the penman. To this day nobody knows what happened to them.

  Zaki-the-Messenger fled to a nearby forest and never returned. The villagers didn’t know what had happened to him until last year, when a group of young children gathering firewood found the skeleton of a man under a cabin. Many claimed that those were Zaki-the-Messenger’s bones.

  On the road that leads up to the pasture, not quite near the water mills yet, but by the Atans’ great walnut tree, is Vands’ Badi’s home. Badi is no longer a cowherd. He has no one to come home to. Hatam’s daughter did not live long after her son’s death. Vands’ Badi has remained alone in his old hut.

  His eyes don’t see well anymore, having become drenched in tears. Every day he carries some firewood from the forest for different people for a bite to eat. He is living the last days of his life.

  Sometimes, when the wood he is carrying gets too heavy, he grumbles:

  “What am I supposed to say to you, God, who has seen me and has taken him away?”

  In the evenings he returns home alone, throws one or two pieces of dung in the fireplace, and lies on the mat…

  Outside, like the old days, the Atans’ great walnut tree softly rocks its branches over Vands’ Badi’s ramshackle hut…

  In Akar

  1

  The village of Akar is picturesque, enclosed in forests with ancient oak trees and age-old ruins of monasteries. A cold stream flows under the trees and passes through village streets where it turns sludgier and sludgier until it reaches the pastures where it becomes a bog. In the morning a fresh breeze from the forests descends on the village and brings with it the healthy fragrance of cedar and linden. But when the sun begins to warm up and the garbage heap in the streets begins to flow, the fresh breeze that came from the forest is replaced by the smell that comes out of opened barns.

  In the garbage heap, the heads of worms heat up—worms that harmoniously turn their heads to the left and to the right, as if they were weaving silk.

  In Akar there are people with scabies, which is aggravated by the sun, and causes them to scratch their backs against walls or itch themselves with their hands until they bleed. In Akar there is also pink eye among the children who suffer from itchiness in the sun and walk with bloodshed eyes and a dirty cloth over their foreheads. The cows are infected with foot-and-mouth disease and limp as tiny white maggots suck on the blood vessels between their hooves. The milk in the cows’ udders has dried, and the cows lick their hooves in pain and spit out the maggots with their tongues.

  Akar is as old as time immemorial, and since that time it has been a tradition to sow lentil seeds in sandy-soiled furrows dug with plows. And when the seeds grow into plants, the villagers hunch over all day plucking the short pods with their bare hands. After they pluck them, they either crush them to have enough to make lentil soup twice a day in the winter, or they break up the pods and eat the seeds with yoghurt.

  Akar is poor. If the soil is not tilled for two years, the forest will swallow up Akar, the winds will scatter the linden’s fruits, and birds will carry acorns to the roofs. And if one of the acorns should fall into an extinguished tonir,{1} it will root itself there and grow into a tree. And even if there wasn’t a forest nearby, a flood from the mountains would wipe out Akar in one night, carrying stones with it that would destroy churns and jugs and throw an entire house, with hayloft and all, upside down. And on the surface of the flood, together with the diseased cows, white maggots would swim like thin slivers.

  There are neither floods in Akar, nor is the forest in the process of engulfing it. As soon as a sprout appears in the furrows, the inhabitants of Akar pull it out with their plows to keep the soil as parched as an emaciated and dehydrated cow.

  Of the forty households in Akar one of them is that of Hanes’s daughter, Shahan. Even though Shahan is aging and has been a widow for eight years, people in the village still call her Hanes’s daughter. This might explain why Shahan’s husband, who was a collier, lived in the depths of the forest all year round and only came home at night once in a while, washed the soot off his face, and shared a pillow with Shahan until sunrise. In the morning he would leave a few silver coins with Shahan until his next return. And from that relationship, three girls were born in four years. Their beauty reminded Shahan of her husband and his youth when he was not yet a collier and had hair on his head that felt like lamb’s wool.

  And then one week her husband did not return. Shahan went to the forest and found her husband’s thunderstruck corpse lying by the coalmine, scorched and charred like a large sheet of coal. He was buried in the same spot. Shahan carried home his clothes, cried over them, and after she calmed down, she found three twenty-cent coins in her husband’s trousers.

  There was neither love nor hate between the two. They had lived under the same roof for eight years and had become as inured to each other as a horse does to a stable. The following winter, when she was planting seeds for someone else, she saw smoke coming out of the depths of the forest from the top of a hillock and, of course, it reminded her of her husband, but she neither missed him, nor had sweet memories.

  At night, she locked the doors, put the girls to sleep, and pressed her suckling to her breast and warmed her up. She was like a brood hen spreading her wings. Under the warmth of her wings, Shahan’s three blonde daughters grew up. They would have to grow a little more, however, before three young men with wings would take away the eldest first, then the middle one, and finally the youngest, because no bird was to build a nest under Shahan’s roof.

  2

  Eight years passed. Hanes’s daughter had become a baker, a tiller of the land, and a distributor of firewood. For eight years, the heat of the tonir had scorched her face. That is why her face glowed like a brass plowshare. She would draw back from the tonir with a few sheets of lavash,{2} which she would hang on a hook and divide among the girls. The starling feeds her chicks worms from her beak and her wings also glow, even if she has never seen a tonir.

  For eight years, Shahan’s threshing floor had not seen any chaff. In the roof of the hayloft, the rain had perforated small holes, causing water to drip on the beams. A spider had spun its web there, and one winter two of the hayloft’s beams collapsed under the weight of the snow and fell to the floor.

  Sometimes Shahan would look attentively at her oldest daughter, Sandukht. She wanted to know whether her daughter was developing. Sandukht’s body was changing very slowly, her movements remained childish, and she still asked innocent and naïve questions. Shahan would fish for news in the different bakeries, and whenever the discussion would turn to giving and
taking girls, she would bring to mind Sandukht. If only she could find a place for her, get her to settle there, so that she could lighten the burden on her shoulders and take care of the other two children. What if no one wanted her daughters? Her daughters would rot like seedless cucumbers and remain seedless themselves. But Sandukht was mannered, wasn’t she? Modest and obedient, with eyes like pale-blue flowers.

  Then one day Ghazakh’s Ohan approached Shahan on the street and asked her for Sandukht for his son. Nothing was said of her eyes being the color of pale-blue flowers. He also asked whether Hanes’s daughter would give him her threshing floor and collapsed hayloft together with Sandukht.

  Shahan thought about it that evening and went to ask her brother for advice. Her brother thought it a good idea.

  “What do you need the loft for?”

  When she got home from her father’s house, she continued to mull it over. Sandukht did not understand why her mother stroked her hair, then bent over to kiss her forehead. The scent of fresh bread emanated from her mother’s bosom, and when Sandukht slowly opened her eyes, she was surprised to see how much money her mother had. The moon’s milky-colored rays shone through the skylight onto the silver coins that Shahan was holding in her hand. It was enough to buy cloth for a dress and something more.

  The next day, Ghazakh’s Ohan sent his wife to examine the girl. Shahan bathed Sandukht and carefully braided her blond hair. Ohan’s wife approved of Sandukht. Before examining the girl, she had already taken a look at the threshing floor and hayloft.

  On Saturday, Ghazakh’s Ohan, his son, Shahan, and Sandukht went to the notary to sign a binding contract. The documents for the threshing floor and hayloft had been prepared the day before.

  Sandukht was wearing a new dress. Whenever the wind fluttered the flaps of her dress, her heart fluttered too. But as soon as she would see Ohan’s son, her joy would instantly subside; she would pull back and hide her face in her coat, like a snail that retracts into its shell. A dark and uncertain doubt hung in her heart as she held on to her mother’s dress, leaving the forest of Akar behind her. How big the world seemed to her, and how close the mountains in front of her!

  Then the unexpected happened. A doctor called Shahan and Sandukht into his office. Timidly the young girl removed her dress. Through his spectacles, the doctor saw the girl’s emaciated shoulders, her flat chest, and her snow-white skin. Shahan attempted to lie by telling the doctor that her daughter was full-grown, that the priest had written down the facts wrong, that Sandukht had been ill, and that that was the reason why it seemed as if her body was not developed yet. But the doctor was speaking in the name of the law and tried to persuade her that it would be bad for the girl to marry.

  Sandukht understood what the doctor was saying, and when she buttoned up her dress, put on her sandals, and held on to her mother’s dress on her way out, she saw the doctor scratching his head. At the door, Shahan got angry with her daughter for clinging onto her dress like a baby.

  When Ghazakh’s Ohan heard of the law, he raised his eyebrows, then squinted. And within a second, he decided to break the law, to jump over it as if it were a narrow stream, and to put a lock on Hanes’s daughter’s hayloft.

  On their way back, Sandukht was walking ahead, Shahan and Ohan were walking together, and Ohan’s son was trailing behind them all. Ohan’s son was sluggish and dull and had heavy bones. When he spoke, his bottom lip drooped, and from one side of his mouth he had a drool that dripped down like rain from a gutter. Whenever he looked at Sandukht’s striped dress, the drool dripped faster.

  Shahan was telling Ohan what the doctor had said about waiting. But Ohan firmly announced that he did not want to wait. There were many poor girls, threshing floors, and lofts in Akar.

  “Have them live together, and when she is developed, we’ll register them. How is the law to find out? If you agree to it…”

  And that’s how they solved the problem. Sandukht was deceptively brought to Ohan’s house with tears in her eyes. Her mother stayed with her until morning, promising to visit her every day and threatening to beat her if she cried. At that, her own mother started crying. At dawn, Sandukht broke her promise and got scared when she saw Ohan’s son lying by the wheat sack, snoring.

  Sandukht cried the following night again, but agreed to share her pillow with Ohan’s son. In the morning, she ran to her mother’s, pale and teary-eyed. Sandukht embraced Shahan, but Shahan took her back to Ohan’s and tried to comfort her.

  Meanwhile, Ghazakh’s Ohan fixed the broken beams of the hayloft and laid stones near Hanes’s daughter’s threshing floor.

  3

  Four months passed. In Akar’s history, however, four months equaled four seconds. The villagers still ate lentils, and the renovated hayloft had not altered the sight of the village one bit.

  Sandukht had come to terms with her situation, though she remained silent. When someone asked her a question, she replied by nodding or shaking her head. It was as if she neither had any thoughts, nor any desires. She was like a squeezed-out lemon—an object without life. She had retracted herself inside her shell and no longer went to her parental home.

  Then, one day, she felt something move under her bosom. She became afraid, pressed her hand against her heart, and calmed down. The feeling under her breast disappeared like a ripple in water. A few days later, however, she felt the movement again, and this time she suspected something.

  Sandukht was to become a mother. Her body contracted all her muscles and collected all her water to adapt itself to her new condition. She resembled a small apple hanging from the branch of an apple tree which the sun had given a red color, but the thin branch had not been able to provide with any water for it to grow and ripen.

  On her way to the well one day Sandukht met another young bride who taught her how to have a miscarriage. Sandukht was afraid at first, but later, when she bent over to put the pitcher on the ground and felt the movement under her bosom once again, a resoluteness came over her.

  She did as the young bride had explained. She did not eat for two days and on the third day she drank the juice of a yellow flower. When she started feeling unbearable pains in her belly, she bit her lip, clenched her fist, ran to the barn without being seen, and closed the door. She now had to hit her belly with a stone to make the pain go away…

  The cattle were driven back to the barn in the evening. When Ghazakh’s Ohan opened the barn door he saw blood by the door and an unconscious bride.

  He carried Sandukht home. At dawn, however, Sandukht s final drop of blood flowed out her body with her last breath.

  Shahan cried at her grave and at home.

  That night, one of her hair-locks turned gray.

  On Mount Ayu’s Slope

  Peti would wake with the first cock’s crow, put on his moccasins, cup his hands once or twice in the narrow stream in front of his house, wash his face, wipe it with his hat, and stand at the edge of the village ready to let out the cows from the sheds and drive them to the mountain to graze.

  “Zar’s sister, you have milked her too much! The poor thing has no body left,” Peti would say to the old wife, who had many children at home and owned one cow.

  “I have no choice, Peti,” Zar’s sister would moan and hand over the cow.

  Peti looked after the herd with care. He only needed to look back once to tell which of the cows had been restless and which one was starving.

  And when the last of the cows were brought to him, he would swing his crook in the air and shriek:

  “Hey, stag!”

  Peti had been a cowherd for a long time. He had opened his eyes among cows. As a child he had looked after calves, and when he grew up, he was allowed to look after the village cattle.

  He had no one. His mother died when he was barely a calf herd. Since her death, Peti had become a real orphan. The village took care of him: one day he stayed at one person’s house, the next day he slept in someone else’s barn or hayloft, until dawn, when he would get
up and drive the cattle to the mountain again.

  His old fatherly home was completely ruined. The roof had sunk in, the hanging beams were charred from smoke, and the sand and stone on the roof had fallen inside. Wild hemp had grown all around the ruins of the house, and the neighboring chickens lay in their shade after pecking the ground for food.

  “Peti! Oh, childless man, when will you rebuild your father’s palace?” people would ask him.

  Peti’s pockmarked face would smile and he would roll his sunken eyes, open his mouth, and shrug.

  “The entire village is my home,” he would say, swinging his crook in the air.

  Whenever his woolen overcoat would tear, the laces of his moccasins would break, or the old patches on his woolen trousers would wear out and expose his hairy legs, it was always Zar’s sister who scolded him and asked him why he wouldn’t get himself a wife and revive his father’s house.

  “Peti, you good-for-nothing, who will take advantage of your abilities?”

  Zar’s sister would scold him and, like a dried-up source, she would squint, take the woolen thread with her bony and shaky fingers, pass it through the eye of a needle, and sew Peti’s woolen trousers.

  The village brides laughed at Peti, but it did not bother him. He would smile, and the row of white teeth in his mouth would glow through his thick lips.

  There was one old girl in the village who was crippled and had a withered hand. She looked after the wheat and buttermilk that had been laid out on rooftops by the villagers to dry. The girls called her “Peti’s bride” and laughed, and the old girl, who was crippled and had a withered hand, would frown, get angry, curse, and then smile timidly.

  Sometimes a thought, a wishful thought, drifted across the old girl’s quiet mind like a puff of white cloud in the light-blue summer sky: