The Dark Valley

by Aksel Bakunts

  As they worked together, churning butter or spinning wool, Aunt Mina would open the thousand-year-old book of the village in front of Elia’s eyes. And on each page there was the martyrology of a hapless victim, or the description of a bride who lived under the terror of her mother-in-law, or a wife who had been tortured under the feet of her tyrannical husband, or the story of children who had been murdered in secret by strangulation. One by one Aunt Mina told of these incidents and lightly shook her head.

  Elia was horrified by these stories and it seemed to her as if these century-old miseries and evil spirits still hovered over the gloomy nooks of the houses in the village.

  Anzhik sometimes spent time with her grandfather and sometimes with the neighborhood children. Children of the same age would gather around her and curiously look at her beautifully combed hair, the tiny clip in her hair, and her shoes with eyelets. The children of the village looked at her and in each one of their little hearts a very big wish was born: to have that which Anzhik had, to wear a black leather belt like hers. All of the children worked on becoming Anzhik’s friend and be closest to her.

  Almost every night, before going to bed, Aunt Mina would ask Anzhik to sleep in the same bed with her. The old woman wanted to cuddle her grandchild and warm up her young body with the weak temperature of her wizened body, as she reassured herself that this young girl was not the last offspring, that the kernel of a rotten root still grows many shoots.

  But Anzhik always refused:

  “It’s not nice with you. I don’t want to leave my bed.”

  Anzhik wanted to say more. She wanted to tell her grandmother that a heavy scent emanates from her shirt and that she walks with bare feet all day and goes to bed at night without washing them.

  Before falling asleep, as she lay under a blue blanket that she had brought with her from the city, Anzhik would think about the city, her school, the rows of pioneers, the movie theater, the tram, and a thousand other things like that. Under her blue blanket Anzhik felt as though she were in the city again, and that pleased her.

  The spring sun made its presence felt again. The vibrancy in the village was gradually rising.

  The village was like a deep rumble in the distance that begins to move at the beginning of spring. The spring sun decomposed the garbage that had been thrown in the gardens faster, and the smell of putrefaction seemed heavier and more irritating to the mucous membranes in the nose, which caused the eyes to water.

  The cattle in the barns were restless and the villagers talked in the open air about the mountain where fresh grass was already begin to grow.

  Like the others, Aunt Mina too was preparing to go to the mountain. Before going to the mountain, however, she set her mind on taking Anzhik to the chapel first. Like a weak light, she had a wish in her mind to teach Anzhik to pray.

  Why had that wish been born inside of her? She did not know either. The old woman wanted to tie them to the village and turn Anzhik into a modest girl, undoing everything the city had given her all those years.

  How wonderful it would be if they stayed in the village! But Tigran was always saying that they have to return to the city soon, that the holiday will soon be over. But will they ever come to the village again? And will she be alive when they do?

  * * *

  It was on one of those lovely spring mornings when everything seemed lively and pleasant, when one thought the least about everyday problems and felt closest to nature that Anzhik and Aunt Mina went to the brooklet. Aunt Mina had not said that they were going to the chapel at home. She was afraid that Tigran would not let Anzhik go.

  When they left the village, Aunt Mina began to tell Anzhik that she was old and might die soon. The grandmother’s strange confession, which was meant to instill fear in the grandchild’s heart, had an adverse effect and touched the child deeply. She did not know what to say and instead turned her wavering gaze toward the dark green raspberry bushes on both sides of the path.

  They arrived at the chapel. It was a dilapidated structure and looked more like a pile of stones. Near the chapel, not far from the path, there was a cross stone, blackened from smoke and sunk into the ground. Village dogs would often come up the path, raise their hind leg, and urinate on the cross stone.

  Aunt Mina approached it, kneeled, and anxiously kissed the cross stone once. Anzhik was astonished and could not understand why her grandmother would kiss that charred stone. Aunt Mina got up, walked over to Anzhik and asked her to kiss it too.

  “I don’t want to. It’s dirty… I won’t kiss the stone. What is that over there anyway?”

  Aunt Mina stood frozen. She did not expect Anzhik’s reply. And for a moment she stood frozen next to the cross stone, as if she were another cross stone.

  Then she came to herself and walked firmly toward the chapel. She stooped and entered, because the door of the chapel was low. Anzhik followed her grandmother. She was curious to know what was in the chapel and what Aunt Mina was going to do there. As she entered, Anzhik’s head hit the stone doorframe.

  “Pah! Who built this door?”

  “Don’t ‘pah,’ my dear, God will hear you,” the grandmother said nervously, as if she were announcing a sacred secret.

  “There is no God, grandma!” Anzhik replied loud and clear.

  To Aunt Mina it was as if the walls of the chapel collapsed and a stone from the wall fell on her head. She looked at Anzhik with a shudder, and in the old chapel her granddaughter’s lively eyes seemed completely unrelated to her own.

  She remembered her son and recalled that they would be leaving soon, and she bowed her helpless head toward the damp floor of the chapel. The chapel’s mossy walls heard Aunt Mina’s quiet sobs.

  And Anzhik extended her hand toward the green leaves of the raspberry bush, which had magnificently crept up the roof of the chapel.

  “Dancing Pain”

  The shrill squeal of the zurna{4} and the broken din of the dhol{5} on a sunny autumn morning on the sunny side of the village, which lay on the slope of a hill, seemed peculiar.

  It was neither a wedding, nor a banquet, nor a baptism. This was not the regular sound of a zurna blown with puffed-out cheeks, but the sound of one blown with one perpetually half-closed eye as dancing intensified and feet thumped louder.

  It was difficult to determine right away from which underground house the sound was coming. When I asked a familiar villager, he did not want to tell me at first, but later he pointed to a house across the street and said: “It’s been ten days that they’ve been playing like this, day and night…” The house across the street: slightly tilted, with an inclined rooftop, on which there was a stack of dried cow dung resembling a shepherd’s hat, and a row of yellow gourds. The only window that gave onto the street was covered with a sheet. A zurna was playing inside and a dhol was beating. Several people were stamping their feet on the room’s stone floor. The door of the house was locked, and no one inside could be seen, not even from the garden. And if someone on the street passed by the house, he would not stop in front of the covered window and he would not listen to the music of the zurna. Instead, he would quicken his pace and walk away hurriedly.

  The familiar villager, whom I had asked about the sound earlier, moved away a little and sat on a bough that had been tossed in the middle of the street. He rubbed his brow and said:

  “This dancing—the dancing pain—is common in cow’s urine…”

  He did not know what pain or disease it is that takes over so suddenly and hits after an unexpected loss or sudden exultation, as they say after having thought about it long and hard. The bones of the ailing person hurt.

  “The pain crawls through the entire body like a worm… It pricks the knees and then hides behind the heart. The worm needs to be killed.”

  And they kill it with the “dancing pain.” Hired weeping ladies sit in the half-lit room and the patient sits next to them. The hired ladies weep, wail, and whimper until the heart of the patient weakens, as if it were dying out,
and then the patient suddenly leaps up and begins to dance, bounding like a lunatic, throwing himself to the floor, writhing his body, and dancing, dancing for hours. He sweats and he raves, but the dancing thuds on. The zurna player, who sits in a corner of the room, plays louder and the dhol player beats faster, and it seems as if the music is penetrating the bones, and the body, with each beat of the dhol, bounces up and down like a football.

  This is how it starts and lasts for two days. They play day and night. Another zurna player replaces the tired one and turns up the volume again. The dhol continues to be pounded on, and the patient dances until he faints. When that happens, they lay the patient on his bed, let him calm down a little, and then the dancing starts all over again.

  If the patient does not heal within two days, if he is still complaining about the pricking of the “worm,” they resume the dancing, this time more aggressively, more senselessly, more savagely.

  They put the bell flare of the zurna against the ear of the patient, alternating between the left and the right ear, and they blow as long as the lungs are capable of holding in air. They put the dhol on the patient’s head and hit it as hard as they can with wooden sticks on the tightly drawn skin. They blow into the zurna with all their might and the sticks fall onto the dhol like hail falling from the sky.

  The patient shakes in pain, but turned voracious from the sounds, he gets up on his feet and starts dancing again. It is at this point that two strong men walk into the house and start the dreaded “dancing pain.”

  They throw the patient to the floor, trample him, pull at his soft skin, grab his arms and pull them apart, push him from one wall to another, kick him, take him by the veins, tug at him, break his fingers…

  “A living person would not be able to endure even one second of that torture,” the familiar villager was saying to me. He was called on once too, and he too went to break a body once.

  “When I was tugging at the fat of the patient’s back, I said to myself, ‘If you pull hard enough, the flesh will come off…’ But the patient doesn’t feel any pain…”

  And he twisted his thumb and index finger in such a way that it resembled a kite’s beak.

  * * *

  I have asked many people about the “dancing pain.” They all say the same. The patient is crushed and kicked, his arms are broken, his body is bruised and he bleeds, but in spite of that, the patient does not let out a single peep. “It pleases the patient.”

  The men get tired with exhausted arms. They sweat in the half-lit room where there is no more fresh air to breathe, because the door and the windows are covered heavily. Whoever is exhausted is substituted. The zurna squeals loudly again, the hired ladies continue to whimper in the dark corner, weeping and scratching their faces, while the patient dances or the men roll him over, drag him across the floor, and always work at “catching the worm.”

  Days go by like this. Day and night, non-stop, until the patient either heals or dies. When he is exhausted from dancing, he lies down with his crushed body on the bed. The zurna dies down, the ladies stop weeping, and when the resting period seems to take too long, one of the ladies approaches the bed to see if he is still breathing…

  * * *

  “Last year, in our village, three brides suffered from the ‘dancing pain’… One of them was even pregnant,” the familiar villager was telling me, as he sat on the bough in the middle of the street, while a zurna was being played monotonously, tediously inside the room with the covered window.

  “Two of them healed. The other’s child was crushed and she is no longer alive…”

  Usually they start curing in the autumn, because the “worm” begins to crawl when it starts getting cold and sores become visible. There are old women in the village who know how to recognize the sores as “dancing pain.” That’s when the village begins to prepare itself, calling zurna and dhol players from neighboring villages in pairs so they can substitute each other.

  I was not able to verify how much the zurna and dhol players receive. The chairman of the council said that they had agreed on eight rubles a day. Many zurna players cannot bear the sight of it, so they do not agree to play, even for a lot of money. Newly trained zurna players always happily consent. It is an opportunity for them to learn, because they are not required to have modest manners, but merely need lungs with the capacity of a blacksmith’s bellows.

  “This woman, who’s in pain, has come from abroad. They couldn’t help her in the cities… All the reputable doctors she went to said that it was ‘tuberculosis’ and that it cannot be cured. She was advised to return to her native land… Now she is being treated here.”

  When I glanced at my interlocutor’s hairy face and his ear, in which he had lodged a cotton ball, I could not tell whether he was joking, or whether he genuinely believed that “she is being treated here.”

  Usually it is women who catch the “dancing pain.” Men do so less frequently. The patient of that day had made her two children victims of an unfortunate accident. She had become so preoccupied with the pain that looking after her children had become too much and “the worm had nestled in her heart.”

  “She is young, but if you see her, she looks like a dried-up branch: washed out and yellowed like the peel of a quince.”

  I asked him how the patient is able to endure such indescribable torture, how it is that she does not breathe her last.

  “It goes without saying that some of them die… The melody of the zurna is pleasant, its pitch penetrates the bones, and just like water that comes to a boil, the pain makes her jump up.”

  Apparently the patient can be recognized on the first day. If the sound of zurna pleases the person, if the three weeping ladies can make her eyes water with their wailing, if she begins to flail her arms to the music, then she has the “dancing pain” and the elderly will have diagnosed it correctly. The only treatments left are the zurna player and the limb-tugging men to cure her.

  The patient is given very little to eat: just a piece of stale bread and a cup of water.

  “She has to stay hungry for the ‘worm’ to come out.”

  In the old days, the “dancing pain” was treated much more drastically. The zurna, the endless pushing and pulling, and the weeping ladies were all there, but there was also the smoking dung, with the dried excrements of a dog piled on the smoking dung.

  The unconscious patient would lie in bed under the sheets. The patient’s head would then be covered with a blanket and the smoking dung—like a censer with excrement as incense—would be put under the patient’s nose under the blanket until she suffocated. Then the poisoned patient would jolt angrily, throw aside the blanket, and leap up in order to dance to the zurna’s much too cursed “jazz band ”…

  Nowadays the smoking dung has long been forgotten about, but the dancing has remained, day and night, with zurna and dhol, in a half-lit room, and an exhausted patient’s lunatic bounds. The “dancing pain” remains one of our bizarre and hidden “savage traditions.”

  “They have been playing for twelve days now… They have called on three zurna players and still the ‘worm’ moves…”

  We got up, and together with my familiar villager, we walked up to the covered window. The monotonous, tedious sound of the zurna could be heard from the room. The dhol was beating, and jumbled sounds could be heard, sometimes weak, sometimes heavy footsteps, as if the stones of the floor were being beaten with clubs…

  His house is by the side of the road at the edge of the village. You can walk through the entire village, but you will not find another painted gate. Only his hard and heavy gate is coated with blue paint.

  If the gate is open, you can see the courtyard and parlor.

  There is an outdoor workshop in the courtyard with big and small hammers, saws, tools for making horseshoes, rims, axles, a stack of newly-planed wood, and smoothed beams drying in the sun.

  A couple of people work there every day. One of them is building a mud wall and laying out the frame of a
new barn. Another is cutting stone. And he, he too works alongside his children from sunrise to sunset.

  It is not for nothing that the people say this about a hard worker in the village:

  “If he fell under the claws of Osep-the-Miser, he wouldn’t stand a week.”

  He too works and frequently calls over to the artisan:

  “God bless you! The day is almost up! Come on, hurry up! Put up a wall here too and I’ll give you brandy in the evening!”

  He pays the thresher with wheat, but before it gets to that point, he will have already taken his share out of it. If he is not happy about an arched beam, he will give it to the artisan to replace with a new beam on the roof. And he will take the price of the new beam out of the thresher’s wage.

  In one of the corners of the courtyard there is a sort of makeshift military kitchen with a rusty pan and a crooked pipe.

  In the year of the locust plague he bought a pood of millet. He toyed with the idea of accommodating a pan for distilling brandy and selling the rest of the metalware.

  Lying on the ground by the kitchen is a two-wheeled cart dating from the war. He fixed it, painted it, and uses it, and sometimes he also rents it out.

  Adjoining the house is a garden—the best garden in the village—with rows of trees, assorted species of trees, and grafted trees. Only in his garden will you find grafted trees.

  Next to the garden there is a vegetable garden in whose corner there are twelve beehives arranged in a row.

  The garden and the vegetable garden are fenced off by a high mud wall. Only the top branches are visible from the street.

  If a sick person wants some honey or a sour apple in the winter, he will knock on Osep’s painted gate.