When he reached a spring, he bent over and drank with relish. Next, he descended into the valley of linden trees.
There were many pheasants at the bottom of the valley, on and around rocks… The sun had warmed the mossy rocks, and a golden-feathered pheasant with black dots on its wings was hopping from one rock to another, calling, pecking its neighbor, and circling around a female.
He aimed. The valleys thundered with a dreadful echo as soon as the flint let out a spark and out of the spark exploded gunpowder, pushing fire and smoke out of the barrel of the rifle. The pheasants spread their wings, their soft wings, and flew toward a shade away from the autumn sun’s golden rays.
One of the pheasants was flapping around. It had fallen from the mossy rock onto the bushes.
Uncle Dilan ran to it, and as he ran, he apprehended a white dog leaping toward the bush with its tongue sticking out. Together with the hunting dog, Uncle Dilan’s hands groped for the bloody pheasant.
His fingers touched the yellow feathers, but the wounded pheasant suddenly flapped its wings and flew up. Two feathers circled down like yellowed leaves falling in the autumn.
Uncle Dilan watched the bloody pheasant with regret when all of a sudden he heard the sound of footsteps close to the dog. He turned around and his eyes widened in surprise as he instinctively slid the rifle behind the tree.
It was the forester—with eyes like fiery red coal…
He neared, bawled angrily, and only calmed down after he had whipped Uncle Dilan’s shoulders until a burning sensation, like the sting of a nettle on bare skin, covered Dilan’s shoulder blades.
The forester was angry with Uncle Dilan and whipped him for letting the pheasant that he had shot get away.
The forester’s hunting dog looked back and forth between his master and Uncle Dilan. It snarled, tapped its tail on the ground, and then opened its mouth and yawned, tired from all the agitation that had taken place a little while before with the bleeding pheasant flapping around.
The unexpected meeting perplexed him… Uncle Dilan finally came to his senses after they had left. He looked at their backs and remembered the dog’s red snout…
Uncle Dilan was sitting on a rock. His face twitched in pain. His back felt as if it had been singed with hot pokers, and beneath one of his eyes he felt the heat rise from the beating. Uncle Dilan thought a long time, his eyes fixed on the pheasant’s two feathers. A deep bitterness and sorrow ruined his otherwise wonderful day.
… The sun was playing hide and seek with the evening clouds. There was silence in the forest. The pheasant had flown far away… On the mossy rock, there were two feathers: yellow with black dots. On the dry branches of the bush, there were drops of blood.
Uncle Dilan descended into the valley.
At times the pheasant seemed like a dream to him, but the wounds of the whip burned and he felt pain under his eyes, and his legs shook lightly.
He held the hot barrel of the rifle in the same way that he had groped for the pheasant’s body and felt its soft feathers with the tips of his fingers. The pheasant’s body, with its warm feathers, was just like Sona’s under her sky-blue blouse.
He did not go home. He descended to the garden along the stony path. The small door of the winepress creaked. He entered and lay down on the stone floor.
Uncle Dilan woke up when the morning sunbeams shone through the cracks of the small winepress door. He rubbed his eyes and felt the pain under his eye. The swelling had not gone down yet.
That day he crushed the black grapes in the stone trough more angrily than ever. He did not even feel the sweat roll off his brow and drip into the murky wine…
* * *
It was autumn, a bright autumn…
Uncle Dilan was sitting in the sun in front of the winepress with his head buried in his chest thinking about the past.
In the summer following that autumn Sona died at childbirth. Her mother, husband, and friends cried. Another girl replaced her presence and Uncle Dilan got married. But in his memory Sona would remain forever indelible, and so would the winepress, the sky-blue blouse, and the silver corn leaves.
The cemetery was on the opposite slope of the hillock. Moss had grown on Sona’s gravestone and sand had filled the engravings long ago. The stone had tilted and the ground had swallowed it.
Sona was laid to rest in her sky-blue blouse. By now, the sky-blue has decomposed, and so has her body that was like golden moss…
Countless autumns have passed since that day. He knows that he has grown old. When he walks, he leans on his cane. His eyes are unable to distinguish the autumn colors of the forest and his hearing is no longer sharp enough to hear light footsteps.
The brooklet in front of the winepress murmurs day and night as it talks endlessly and sleeplessly with the moss and the stones…
Uncle Dilan looked toward the brooklet and smiled. That day twinkled in the peaceful abyss of his memory like a lone star in the dark sky—that day when Sona dangled her shins in the brooklet and laughed…
Then his memory slipped along the path to the forest.
There were pheasants in the forest. One of them flew away drenched in blood, leaving two feathers on the soft moss. Sona was like a pheasant with eyes like black grapes—years before, on a sunny autumn day, when his sinewy legs were crushing grapes with the weight of copper ingots, and the pure wine dripped little by little through his toes…
Sona flew away like a pheasant and left behind her grief and sad memories.
… Uncle Dilan got up, pulled back the door of the winepress and fastened the metal lock until the following spring. Then he bent over, picked up the bundle of dried twigs and stalks with difficulty and slowly walked to the garden door with his weary and elderly feet.
There was no one left in the garden.
Only the dried corn stalks rustled in the evening wind and the dried leaves gathered restlessly in corners here and there, fluttering despairingly as they silently fell and laid to rest in the dark hollow.
St. John the Baptist Monastery
The prince walked along the bank of the Kasakh River right where it flushes down a steep precipice, crashing its turbid waves against cliffs and scraping them as it buries its course deeper and deeper into the cliffs. The prince climbed up the high cliffs and decided right there to build a most magnificent temple.
Perhaps the story didn’t go exactly like that. Perhaps it was a bishop who had walked past the spot and wished to a see a monastery on the bank of the Kasakh, soaring like a lord on the edge of the cliff with windows looking down on the valley and the waves of the river with its foamy rapids as he contemplated the sight of scholars reading hymns and psalms under the monastery’s vaults, pealing bells, and the abbot, deep in his prayers, forgetting the world and the princes concubine…
The stones of St. John the Baptist Monastery do not tell us what happened.
But on the stones there are inscriptions that tell us that St. John the Baptist Monastery had winepresses, a vineyard, an oil-press, and a watermill, and that lords, “for the salvation of the soul,” had offered the monastery villages replete with bull-calves and forests abundant in herbivorous game, and in those villages they had settled pagan commoners. The stones of St. John the Baptist Monastery remember this.
The prince walked along the edge of the cliff in the seventh century, and when he announced his wish to his adjutants, he did not think that centuries later only the Kasakh would remain together with the cliffs of the valley and the common villagers who had carried the massive stones of St. John the Baptist Monastery on their shoulders.
Centuries went by and the villagers multiplied. And there, where there had been forests with herbivorous game, only rocks and soft ground remain, because lavash is indispensable for the villagers.
The land dried like the womb of a barren woman. Of the brooks, only memories remained, and of the small dales, only legends from the old days that there was a time when foamy brooklets flowed through the dales and deer s
tooped to drink from their waters.
The villagers grew in number, the trees of the majestic forest became beams in haylofts, the haylofts burned down, the inhabitants found shelter in caves, and when the sun shone once again on the peaceful vaults, the villagers came out of the caves, wheat sprouted out of the soft ground, and the villagers once more began to multiply during the cold winter nights in their underground houses.
When the brooks began to dry up, the last vines were hewed, the mounds were leveled, and the winepresses became abandoned. Rain, snow, and wind came. The rain beat against the walls of the winepresses, and the winepresses got knocked to the ground and were leveled just like the mounds in the vineyards.
The winepresses, too, became only a memory, just like the seventh-century prince.
On the roof of St. John the Baptist Monastery, thorns began to grow, cracking the age-old cement and displacing the stones. And, during an earthquake, the dome collapsed and its stones fell into the Kasakh, foaming the river and filling it with the same stones that the villagers had lifted and carried on their backs centuries ago.
At the crack of dawn, old ladies kissed the charred stones in the monastery more passionately than before, while goats bleated and nimbly bounded over the fallen stones onto the roof of the monastery to chew on the shrubs that had grown through the cracks of the roof.
Years went by. The villagers held on to their native pasture very tightly. They curled up when they were beaten and retracted into their shells like snails do when their slimy tentacles touch something repulsive: the Khans soldiers, the synod’s taxes, the constable’s whip.
The villagers lived huddled together within the walls of St. John the Baptist Monastery, sowing wheat into the arid ground, eating pancakes made from the wheat, producing fertilizer from fodder and the waste of hidebound oxen, coating the stones on the Urartian walls with the fertilizer, and keeping jars of pickles in their pagan ancestors’ graves.
* * *
Last spring, when the snow was melting on the skirts of Mount Ara and its slopes were becoming exposed, and when the turbid snow water was flowing down in narrow streams toward the valley of the Kasakh, a villager from St. John the Baptist Monastery, whose ancestors had carried stones for the monastery in the seventh century, set his eye on a strip of ground inside the walls of the monastery.
The villager walked around the collapsed stones of the monastery, looked at the sacredly carved stones, and contemplated building a threshing floor and hayloft with the stones of the monastery and using the patch of land for a vegetable garden. And when he leaned over to see whether there was a road to fetch water from the valley with jugs for the thresher in the summer heat, it did not cross his mind that his seventh-century ancestor had stood on that same cliff wishing to see a vaulted monastery, and that the abbot had looked down on the turbid waves of the Kasakh from the same precipice and had missed the prince’s concubine, had missed her and had read psalms.
It was cool on the edge of the cliff—the cool breeze pleased the villager. The wind could easily blow away the threshed husks. And how wonderful it was that walls had been built around the monastery in the old days! The surrounding goats would not be able to enter and graze the herbs in the vegetable garden. Behind the walls, next to the threshing floor and hayloft, he would build a house on top of the precipice and live out of the sight of a neighbor’s gaze.
At home in the evening he fell to thinking once more. He weighed the wish he had had in the afternoon and found it good. He thought it imperative to start planting trees immediately on the next day, to dig the vegetable garden, and to hang a door where the wall had collapsed so that goats would not be able to graze the herbs in the vegetable garden.
The first thing the villager did was to fortify the vegetable garden. Many stones: ornamented stones with pomegranates and bunches of grapes—stones, whose inscriptions had faded in places because of the sun and the wind. Whatever fell into his hands he used to build the wall—a Urartian type of wall—piling them up as tall as a human being. Then he took hold of a shovel and began to dig. Pieces of tile, broken jugs, and stones came up from under the ground. He chucked aside the broken jug with his shovel, cleaned the stones he needed for his vegetable garden, and rolled the rest of the stones down the valley.
When evening fell he sat down on a rock and smoked. A breath of fresh air rose from the valley and stroked his sweaty brow. He smoked and looked at the semi-erected walls of the monastery and at the cross stones. The old St. John the Baptist Monastery seemed redundant to the villager. What a nice vegetable garden it would become, with melons and watermelons! For how many years had the ground of St. John the Baptist Monastery been completely useless?
If only an earthquake would hit again, just like before, so that all of it would fall into the valley and the site of the monastery would be forgotten. He would come out of his vegetable garden, expand its walls, clean out all traces of the monastery, and incorporate the old graves with their headstones half-buried into the ground and their inscriptions now almost completely faded.
He would take the royal graves within his boundaries and plant onions and garlic on them. He would also plant an apricot tree, whose roots would descend deep into the ground, digging inside the royal bones, which in turn would yield tasty fruits.
The monastery would not cast a shade on his vegetable garden…
People in the village talked about him behind his back. They talked about St. John the Baptist Monastery and that he should not be allowed to build a vegetable garden, that the site was historical—a sanctuary. But people in the village also talked about the fact there is no vegetable garden anywhere in the village and that the villager was fortunate enough to have found suitable land. They talked, and then they fell silent.
The villager’s wife did not approve of what her husband was doing, but she did not complain. Early in the morning she went to the monastery, kissed the cross stones, lit two yellow candles as thin as her fingers, kneeled to pray, but left when she heard footsteps.
It was the bell-ringer. He had come to take a bale of stacked hay from a nook of the monastery. The bell-ringer had not seen a lit candle by the door of the monastery for a long time. He blew out the candles and put them in his pocket. They would come in handy in the evening when he would be feeding the cattle hay in the barn.
* * *
To the villager, stuffed sweet peppers were tastier in the winter. He ate, gulping down large chunks, and extended his plate to his wife.
“If there’s any left, put some more on my plate…”
The sweet pepper burned his tongue and warmed his stomach. He liked the sweet pepper that had grown out of the vegetable garden where the monastery had once stood. And not a single abbot in centuries past had received as much peaceful pleasure during the winter days as the villager did from the planted sweet peppers in his mouth.
Sometimes he would go and look at the trees he planted. The threshing floor and hayloft would be finished in a few years and, in the summer heat, tired from threshing, he would be able to lie down at the foot of one of the trees. The breeze from the valley would bring the coolness of the waves of the Kasakh, and fruits would grow in the summer sun.
But that’s not what happened. Fruits never grew.
A piece of paper arrived which said that St. John the Baptist Monastery is historical and that it is prohibited to cultivate the land, to plant trees, and use its stones to build a house.
In the spring, when the snow melted from the skirts of Mount Ara like the year before, the land was parceled. Piles of stones were placed on the ancient grounds to demarcate the borders of the villages. The trees in the vegetable garden were uprooted.
And everything that he had thought about the spring before while standing on the edge of the cliff and looking down on the Kasakh, about having a threshing floor, a hayloft, and a home behind the walls, melted away like snow.
He took down the hanging door.
The goats once again climbed up the r
ickety walls to chew on the shrubs that had grown out of cracks. They bounded from one stone to another. And when a piece of cement fell, an echo rang under the vaults, causing the pigeons to fly up, circle the air, and descend again.
When the villager took down the door, he looked at St. John the Baptist Monastery. To him the monastery on the edge of the cliff seemed useless, and the sweet pepper from the vegetable garden tasty…
For Gyulbahar
There is a village with twenty hearths that carries the name of Drmbon. Every morning smoke billows out of twenty chimneys and rises toward the sky as yoghurt soup is heated on fires.
Drmbon has picturesque valleys and steep precipices as sharp as skewers. The picturesque valleys are filled with echoes of shrill donkey brays—thump, thump, thumping. And when the echoes reverberate from one valley to the next, goats stop chewing on the fresh green leaves of shrubs that grow in the cracks of rocks. Instead they prick up their ears and look down into the abyss of the valley and bleat.
There is a village—Drmbon—far from any road. It has no schools, but it does have one priest: Father Maruk from Khnus. When the Pasha’s turbid migration wave crashed against Drmbon’s valleys years ago, it left a mark in the picturesque valleys after it receded; namely, Father Maruk from Khnus.
It all happened in exactly the same way as it is told in children’s tales: “The sky ripped apart and a piece of it fell on my tail.” And the piece that fell on Drmbon’s tail was Father Maruk.
For one or two months Father Maruk was ill. Then he expanded his lodgings and became Drmbon’s parish priest. “We shall be your flock, and you our shepherd,” the people of Drmbon said. Father Maruk was living in the good days, relishing like a caterpillar does on tasty cabbage and filling his emaciated body with fat from blessing the fields and performing the liturgy.
In Drmbon there is a woman, Gyulbahar-the-Widow, who is the caretaker of two orphans. Her house, which is located at the edge of the village, is one of the twenty hearths and one of Father Maruk’s twenty parishioners. Gyulbahar, a divorcée; Gyulbahar, a name that means “spring flower.” If the inhabitants of Tlkuran lived in Drmbon, they would probably say this about Gyulbahar:
The Dark Valley Page 8