The Dark Valley

by Aksel Bakunts

And then one day news came to the village that there was freedom, that the army was going to come home, that there was no longer a Czar, and that the war had ended.

  A variety of people came to the village, said a thousand things, and held meetings. But the only thing that the villagers understood from all that commotion was that the situation was going to get worse and that new misfortunes were waiting for them in the days to come.

  Soldiers were returning at night, with arms, but without guns. They hid in haylofts during the day and fled to the nearby mountains whenever they heard that someone was coming to the village to hold a meeting to form a new army.

  It was autumn when news arrived that Armenians and Turks had turned against each other in neighboring provinces, that villages were under fire, that both sides had become fierce instigators, and that blood was flowing through the villages.

  Arms outnumbered clubs in the village. There were machine guns and people spoke of cannons. Children talked of arms, and odd and even shots became part of everyday life.

  Together with arms, pillaging was also on the rise. The village was no longer safe. People locked their doors more tightly before going to bed. There was theft in the courtyards—the village was clearing out old grievances by setting fire to the fields of neighbors and avenging troubles that had been kept hidden in peoples hearts for decades.

  Almost every night guards roamed the village. New people had come to the village: chief and commander. They stayed in good rooms, demanded oil and chicken, and left the village for a few days to return with looted goods.

  The village was huddled in fear. But food and drink was abundant in the rich homes, where the commander would get drunk and shoot about ten times out of the window into the cold winter air, causing the hot bullet to fizz. The village was terrified of the bullets and was on the watch, half-asleep, half-awake, listening carefully for the alarm until daybreak.

  Only the cattle continued to puff and ruminate in the barns, just like babies who were rocked to a soft sleep under their covers without worries or knowledge of what was going on.

  Peti did not get involved in the happenings in the village. He did not attend meetings and nobody asked for him. He was not considered one of the village men. No different than before, he slept in barns with the cattle or on the fodder in the loft.

  A census was taken; lists were created and distributed in the dozens. And each time the villagers were asked who still needed to be added to the list, one of them would jokingly say:

  “Well, Peti!”

  The rest would laugh and the youth would crack jokes that Peti could serve as a good cannon gadfly. In the midst of this merriment, someone or other would have to step in and say:

  “Joking aside, Peti is a very unusual man.”

  Peti had changed. He had pulled himself back from the crowd, turned into himself, spoke very little, and rarely appeared among people. It was as though he had become an old man: his eyes had sunk in and the wrinkles on this forehead had multiplied. When he walked, his head drooped, as if he were looking for something on the ground.

  Whenever Peti came up in conversations, some people suggested giving him a woolen overcoat or a rug.

  “Look at his state. A refugee is better off than him.”

  But the village had its own troubles, and there was no time to care for Peti.

  Winter passed, the snow melted, Mount Ayu’s slopes became visible again, and Peti came to life.

  Fresh herbs were starting to grow under the dry grass and the soil evaporated the dampness of the winter clouds. The water on the rooftops was dripping down and there was mud on the streets. The temperature of the spring sun was pleasant.

  Peti drove the cattle to the pasture. This time, however, together with his crook, he also carried a rifle.

  In all his life, he had never fired a gun. He had never even touched one. Peti truly did not want to carry a rifle, but he was coerced into it. The commander had gotten angry and had stamped his foot on the ground. Peti had broken into a sweat and agreed. The village was afraid that the cattle might be stolen from the mountain.

  People laughed when a few young boys taught Peti how to work the rifle. Peti touched the rifle with fear and instantly drew his hand back, as if it were fire and he had burned his hand. And so he drove the cattle to the mountain every day with a rifle in his hand like a crook.

  According to him, carrying a rifle was unnecessary. Everyone on the mountain knew him. There were other shepherds on the mountain and they ate together by the stream. Peti was convinced that his acquaintances would neither shoot nor approach his cattle.

  On many occasions, when the heavy weight of the rifle bothered him, he would hide it under a rock as soon as he left the village and pick it up again on his way back.

  The children of the village laughed at him:

  “Peti, how many people did you kill?”

  “Peti, where’s your rifle?”

  Sometimes it seemed to Peti as if the commander had given him a rifle on purpose to be made fun of—to be laughed at. The thought bothered him and broke his heart so much that he pulled back into a corner of a barn in order not to have to see anyone.

  One morning, as Peti was washing his face in the nearby stream, and the cows had gathered around him, he was told that he had to dig trenches on the mountain slope. The cattle were to stay in the village that day.

  Peti was so dumbfounded that he forgot to wipe his face with his hat. The water dripped from his face. He considered refusing the order for a moment, but then he remembered that the commander would stamp his foot again.

  So he went with the others to dig trenches on the slopes of Mount Ayu.

  It was a cloudy day in spring. It was drizzling softly. There were spring flowers and the sweet fragrance of green grass in the dampness.

  Peti put his food under a rock and started to dig where the commander had told him to. Someone else was digging a trench quite far from him. Next to him, there was another person digging a trench. And, as such, on a cloudy day in spring, belts of trenches appeared on the flowery slopes of Mount Ayu.

  Peti dug with inexperienced movements as sweat rolled down his pockmarked brow like droplets of mercury.

  Suddenly the clouds drifted apart and made way for the spring sun to appear between the clouds, and the fragrance intensified. Peti leaned against a rock and sat down to rest.

  In the distance, the hidden village in the gardens seemed like an oasis in the middle of the field.

  The lowing of a cow, coming from the direction of the village, reached Peti’s ears. He looked and heard the low again.

  “My dear stag, you’ve been kept hungry,” he said to himself and decided to drive the cattle early in the morning to that side of Mount Ayu where the grass was tasty and abundant.

  He was leaning against the rock and looking at the opposite hills. The sunbeams illuminated some sort of greatness in Peti’s long-suffering, copper-colored face, and his sunken eyes were filled with infinite compassion and innocent love for the grass, the cows, and the flowery mountains.

  … A few sporadic shots were heard from the opposite hill. Peti craned his neck and pricked up his ears.

  And suddenly he fell into the trench, face-first onto the wet ground. He fell like half-dry grass falls when mowed from the bottom with a sharp scythe.

  Was it a stray bullet or a crazy wish lying in wait that had flown from a distance with a hot bullet that spilled the contents of Peti’s skull onto the green grass?

  When the commander came to look at the trench, he saw Peti lying face down. The newly dug soil had sucked in the red blood.

  He was buried in a corner of one of the trenches.

  The village had too many worries of its own to cry over Peti. Only the cattle in the barns lowed in the mornings, missing the grass on the mountain.

  And the night rain washed away the drops of blood Peti had left on the grass…

  * * *

  Now there is a patch of land on one of the slopes of M
ount Ayu where the grass is lusher and darker than the rest. Under this lush grass lie Peti’s wasting bones.

  The Apricot Field

  Even though it is called the Apricot Field, there is not a single apricot tree there. Thorny shrubs like spiky brooms protrude on the riverbanks and in the cracks of the rocky cliffs. The two main advantages of the Apricot Field are that it serves as a shelter against the wind and that it has a river running through it. At the beginning of each spring, when there are snowstorms and winds with rainfalls in the mountains, shepherds drive their sheep to the valley and give them shelter behind the bare rocky cliffs of the Apricot Field. The goats chew on the thorny shrubs and the sheep graze with their heads in each other’s rears. Neither the fragrance nor the snowstorm compels the sheep to raise their heads.

  The Apricot Field would have nothing of value to be remembered by had it not been stuck between the endless fights of the two villages Mir and Mrots, had it not been a topic of contention, and had the two neighboring villages, Mir and Mrots, not fought each other countless times with clubs and crooks over the course of years.

  Both villages were on the left bank of the river. Mrots was above, Mir below.

  Both Mrots and Mir had the same number of households and, in the old days, when they fought with clubs over the Apricot Field, it happened that one year Mrots won, and the next Mir, or that both returned to their villages defeated, because more or less the same amount of blows had been delivered with clubs on both sides in the name of the Apricot Field.

  Both Mrots and Mir kept sheep. There was a church in the above village and a church in the one below. Very often the bag of insults opened around the same time. In the above village, some of the elderly would sit against walls, toss cornel branches toward Mir, and curse.

  “Who on earth would want to live in Mir? If you burned it down, you wouldn’t even smell it. They knead their dough in our wastewater…”

  It was perfectly plausible that around the same time the elderly of Mir were cursing the village above and keeping the vengeance of their ancestors alive in their young. But they could not say that if you burned down Mrots you wouldn’t even smell it or that they knead their dough in wastewater, because even a child in Mir knew that the river flows from above, passing through Mrots, where garbage was disposed, ashtrays were emptied, and cows, oxen, and the hooves of horses were washed. The brides and girls of Mir knew this very well too, which is why they ran to the river at the break of dawn to fetch water before it got sludgy.

  Mir’s children also knew that the river flowed from above, but it would take a while before they grew up and understood what the elderly in the above village meant when they said that if you burned down Mir, you wouldn’t even smell it.

  Mrots had goats and sheep, and so did Mir. But in Mrots there were people who had as many sheep as the size of Mir. It was possible to drink fresh water from the river early in the morning when it was as clean and cold as the water that the village above drank, but Mir did not have as many cows as the above village. Whereas Mir’s emaciated cows tugged at the hay that had grown in the cracks of rocks, Mrots’s cows buried themselves in the fresh grass as their full udders rubbed against flower petals and carried back pollen to the above village.

  It was the latter that the children of Mir had to know about. When they had grown up they understood that the oil reserve that was kept in clay jugs was connected to the grass on the mountain. After they had understood what the disagreement over the Apricot Field was about, they pricked up their ears, clutched the handles of their clubs more tightly, and ran to the Apricot Field with the others as soon as they heard a cry for help that the shepherds of Mrots had driven their sheep and cattle to the valley.

  And even in the summer heat, when the grass had dried and the soil had cracked, the restless cattle could find a shade to stand in and cold water in the river to cool down with. And after the sun had set, the cattle could find a little grass in the Apricot Field to graze, and the goats could find leaves on the thorny shrubs to chew.

  * * *

  Nobody in neither Mrots nor Mir knew when the hostility between the two villages started over the Apricot Field.

  If the villagers in Mrots were asked, they would come up with a thousand and one arguments as to why the Apricot Field belonged to them, how they had blueprints drawn by hand and documents to prove the fact.

  “Here it is. I have drawn the border over there on the hill with my own hands…”

  “I remember that my father’s sheep used to stay the night in the Apricot Field.”

  “Mir’s border is much farther from the Apricot Field than ours… the field is our native land.”

  Naturally, the people of Mrots said much more, and more than three villagers spoke when asked about the Apricot Field. The villagers jostled each other as everyone worked to make their way to the government official and tell him what was on their minds, to confirm that what he had heard about the Apricot Field belonging to them was true. Some villagers would even go so far in their stories, would invent such scenarios, that even their closest neighbors would not believe a word they said, but would keep quiet anyway, and laugh inwardly while nodding outwardly so that the government official would believe them. After all, wasn’t the argument over the Apricot Field? Over the thorny shrubs that grew on the riverbanks and over the further expansion of the village borders?

  But the disagreement could not be settled by merely talking a lot and raising voices. When the government official was ready to leave, the people of Mrots would secretly collect a sum of money between them that the government official, who had come from the city, alluded to during dinner the night before.

  “It’s for your own benefit that I’m saying this, you know. It’s not for me.”

  The government official also went to Mir. The village below worked to welcome him even more grandly. They collected possessions from here and there: a clean pillow from one house, the best carpet in the village from another. They decorated houses and warned brides not to leave a single speck of dust when cleaning the rooms. They humbly bowed to their visitor and ushered him into their houses.

  They tied up the visitor’s horses, gave them fodder, and obediently smiled with common wretchedness at the government official’s guards, hoping that if they treat the guards well too, they could benefit from the endless feud over the Apricot Field.

  In Mir, too, people raised their voices. They knew what the above village had said and they refuted the story about the “blueprint.” One of the villagers would approach, show a gash in his head and tell how the villagers of Mrots had hit him with clubs. Another villager would push his child through the grieving throng, pull up the child’s pants and show a dog bite on his leg.

  The child would look at the government official in awe and fear as the father tightly held the child’s leg and lifted him so that the government official would have a better view of the wound. But the government official would shift his eyes from the wound on the child’s leg to the colorful carpet on the ground and put a price on it in his mind, comparing it to the bribe that Mrots had promised.

  And it was not unusual for the people in Mir to roll up the thick carpet and take it to the city to the government official’s house the next day to keep Mrots in a bad light. In Mir, too, the villagers secretly taxed themselves, giving the price of the carpet to its owner so that brides and daughters could make a new colorful carpet in the winter nights and tell of age-old mischief.

  If it so happened that the visitor agreed to see the Apricot Field in person the following day, practically all of Mir would go with him, some on foot, others on horse. The intellectual and influential people of the village would hold the bridle of the government official’s horse and tell him again about the Apricot Field and, with the same drive as the intellectual and influential villagers, the village messenger would tell the same to the government official’s guards.

  It was unheard of that someone would not tell the government official an old tale in
broken Russian on the way to the Apricot Field about a rich man who had a hideous wife and a beautiful maid who both went to the mountain to milk the sheep and were confused for one another by the Khan’s servant, who thought that the beautiful one was the Khan’s wife, and when the Khan arrived, the servant pointed to the hideous woman and asked the Khan astonished: “Long live the Khan, has she been brought to be married off as well?”

  And in telling that story, the story-teller would have to ask whether the grounds of Mrots were comparable to the grounds of the Apricot Field, but the government official would only laugh loudly, and a few simple-minded villagers from Mir, who knew the tale by heart, would take the government official’s laughter as being favorable for Mir.

  In this fashion many years came and went. Hundreds of government officials took oil, cheese, and carpets, and allocated the Apricot Field according to what they received. Sometimes Mir would get the Apricot Field, and at other times Mrots, which created a well of arguments and fights, causing the two villages to reopen the can of worms over the Apricot Field every year as leaves began to sprout on the thorny shrubs…

  The Soviet days came.

  After the enemy’s panic-stricken troops retreated from the provincial capital, the exhausted Red Army soldiers lay down on national Soviet divans and the army headquarters deemed the city conquered together with remote valleys, including the one in which Mrots and Mir lay.

  It was neither necessary to send troops there, nor cannons. A local agitator traveled through the valleys and told of that which the villages in the valley had heard.

  As soon as news arrived that among those who had fled from the provincial capital were those who felt the same as the former government officials about how to solve the dispute over the Apricot Field, both villages kept their ears to the ground for news in those new days with the Apricot Field in mind.

  When the preaching agitator arrived in Mir and gave a lecture for the people who had gathered in the spacious threshing floor, swinging his hands in the air and angrily repeating the words “bloodsuckers, beasts of prey” a few times, many villagers in Mir took that as referring to the above village. After the lecture was over, the villagers stood around the visitor and asked about the fate of the Apricot Field. The visitors answer, “the land belongs to the worker,” left the villagers in doubt. After the agitator left, some villagers interpreted his answer as being in favor of Mrots.