“It was all planned. Arakel had the craft of Satan…”
“When it got dark, we locked our doors and went inside our homes. The Cossacks drank a lot and then went out into the streets. They sliced so many chicken necks with their blades…”
“They stole my heifer that year. What more can I say? It’s as if they ripped my eyes out…”
The villagers tell many things from that year when the topic of Orangia comes up.
Manas had gone to the forest that day. He had finished harvesting and it was time to thresh.
“And you wouldn’t believe how much crop there was that year! On rooftops, under walls; there were mounds…”
Darkness had fallen outside when suddenly a shriek was heard from Orangia: the sound of someone crying for help.
“My ear was on the shriek when I heard another shot. The sound made the valleys rumble. The dale of Orangia was burning. Flames billowed high into the sky.”
That night the entire village rushed to the dale, but it was already too late. The house, on whose rooftop and under whose walls there were mounds of crops, had burned down like a cloth dipped in petrol. When the fire died down, Manas’s wife and child were found lying charred alongside the Cossack.
“Oh, the evil that the village did not suffer! How many people did they not beat? What did they not do? They took Manas away. They did everything imaginable, but he refused to give in. He kept saying that he was innocent, that he had not killed a Cossack. And the Cossacks were convinced that they had seen Manas kill one of theirs. Ah, things like that…”
When Manas was put into a carriage headed for distant tundras, it was in vain that he looked for an acquaintance in the bustle of the station.
“He left. As to what happened to him after that, no one knows…”
… But the wind brought seeds, and on the ruins of Manas’s house a rosehip bush began to grow. And each spring lots of roses bloom in Orangia: yellow and white.
Mrots
Mrots is a unique world, and when you walk along the edge of its valley and ascend one more mountain and descend into the next valley, it is as if the last mountain served as the border of a familiar world, whereas opposite the mountain, downwards, lies a desolate land with forests in which bears gather wild pears and roll to the thick-trunked oak trees in the moonlit night pawing each other on semi-dry leaves.
To someone visiting the valley for the first time, it all seems peculiar. But keep following the path and don’t hold the horses reins too tightly. Instead, let the horse guide you to Mrots as it sniffs the path.
And when you pass by the rapid of a rivulet and see gardens on its banks, then you should also hear the bark of a dog, especially if it is daytime. The dogs of Mrots are vigilant—their fangs have often pierced the hide of wolves.
When the horse hears the bark of the dogs, it pricks up its ears, clatters its hooves against the stones of the path, and instinctively thinks of its stall full of barley.
No matter whom you ask, no one will tell you why the village is called Mrots. The priest might concoct a story of how in the “lawless” warring days, many centuries ago, their ancestors fled from another country and found shelter in this distant valley. The priest might also tell about the escape, but it is doubtful it ever happened, and he will not be able to show any evidence except for the oral accounts from conversations by long gone dead old men.
The only thing known for certain is that Mrots has been in one place for a very long time, and when you examine the thick walls of the houses and the uncut stones, you are left with the impression that, since time immemorial, the mountains of Mrots were formed, creating concave plains in turn so that the snow on their peaks could melt and flow down into the valleys. When the mountains were formed, a piece of cliff was put aside for the inhabitants of Mrots to be born onto—inhabitants who sowed wheat in the fields, domesticated wild chamois that bounded from rock to rock, and learned, through generations of trial and error, how to make butter from yoghurt. That will be your impression, because Mrots is far and forgotten, and its path is hard and overgrown with green grass.
You do not need to climb up the church’s roof to see how many valleys there are beyond Mrots. If giants lived here at some point, those valleys would naturally have been nothing more than streamlets to them.
Perhaps there were never any giants and it was the streams from the mountains that gradually scraped the skirts of the mountains over the centuries, rolled down boulders, fretted rocks with their frothy waves, and dug deep precipices where there are virgin forests. And in those forests there are as many virgin bears as there are forests; that is, if virgin means unseen by mankind.
In these valleys there are also superstitions and the sources of demons and evil. And even now, there are many common people in Mrots who hold their breaths frightened as they walk past the mossy caves in the forests and carefully press down the dry leaves with their moccasins. If they hear even the slightest creak, their knees begin to shake, even if the slightest creak came from the dry firewood under their moccasins.
And in the winter, when many branches break under the weight of snow, people in Mrots sit around a fireplace where an old man, who has carried firewood on his shoulders a thousand times, begins to tell how at night, as he passed through the forest, a sound caught his ear, possibly a woman’s, a very familiar woman’s, who called him with a light voice that resembled the voice he uses to spur his horse with…
He tells the story and dangles his feet above the fireplace. Why should he care that his granddaughter has curled up in her grandmother’s lap with half-closed eyes in fear, not sure whether she should listen to what her grandpa is saying or go to sleep in front of the warm fireplace? And even if she repeats by heart the words of the village Komsomol (and there are not many Komsomols in Mrots yet), “We are free, we are free,” her one ear is still tuned to her grandpa’s story, even if she heard at a meeting that the demon of the forest is non-existent, an invention, a superstition.
* * *
Mrots naturally has a village council and the council has a chairman. But in no speech whatsoever will he say what you will see if you live in Mrots and leaf through its ancient history book.
Above the village there are old caves in whose shade lie calves that have strayed from the herd. There are uncut stones arranged in a circle in the middle of which there is one big flat stone that is sprinkled with salt for the sheep. The people who extracted those stones from the cliffs and rolled them all the way above the village had perhaps never even seen any sheep. Mrots does not know anything about the history of those stones, except that since long ago the circle of stones has been known as a “place of worship.”
Mrots has narrow streets and small streams that flow through those streets. The cattle that return from the pasture wash their mucky hooves in the street waters and every morning and evening the waters turn sludgy, as if it were wastewater flowing from the streams.
In the middle of the village there is an ancient church and on the church threshold there are century-old droppings. Sheep gather to rest in the shade of the church and drop their waste before going up the mountain. Over the years the waste has accumulated, heaped up, and many women have kicked the waste aside with their bare feet, opening a path to the church door to kiss the cross stone on it.
Not far from the church, in the middle of the village, there is a reading hall—an ordinary shed, which could have had a hayloft, with planks laid out on stones inside and several posters on the walls.
It may seem a little odd to the human eye that the houses in the “place of worship” have remained intact until the coming of the reading hall, even though there are only a few newspapers in the hall, on account of the village having only a few literate people. It is as though the pagan fireplace, the cross-bearing church, and the new reading hall know the history of thousands of centuries from the day that man, hard as a rock, appeared for the first time in the valleys of Mrots, drove the hairy bear out of its cave, and soug
ht shelter there for himself instead.
If you ask about it even to the scholar of Mrots, he will look at you stumped, unable to give an answer. And then he will boast that “in the course of Czar Nicholas’s three-hundred-year rule,” Mrots did not provide a single soldier. Birth certificates were falsified so that no one from the village would have to “go to Siberia, become Russian.” You will be told that every year, during military conscription, a blind and a bald man appear at the military office under this or that false name in order to free Mrots’s shepherd, or someone sells everything he owns to bribe his son free from military service.
The people of Mrots will tell other surprising stories, and you will be amazed to know that to this day many households in Mrots celebrate a different New Year. They call it “Navasard,” and they will tell you about how they get up on the eve of the pagan Navasard, burn their lamps, and eat by the light.
* * *
It was a big event for Mrots when one day a machine was brought pulled by horses.
The chairman of the council recited by heart the letter that had been sent along with the machine: “We are sending a trier: we request, under the immediate responsibility of the chairman, for the machine to be guarded until further notice.” And because the paper was sealed with an official stamp and written in a respectable manner, the chairman took out the manual from the opening and wrote in it: “Take from here the machine that has come to my village until further notice.”
If an elephant suddenly leap out of the woods of Mrots and stood in front of the church, the villagers would hardly be surprised. The old person would try to make everyone think that the elephant was in fact a large bear, and the villagers would believe it.
But neither in the forest, nor in the valleys, had a single old person ever seen a machine. And when the chairman saw a gluttonous crowd around the machine, extending their hands toward it and pulling them back in fear, he considered it his duty to disperse the crowd.
“You’re unbelievable! It’s as if you’d never seen a machine!” he said. When someone asked what the machine was for, he too didn’t know, but he made up an explanation on the spot that the machine carried letters from one city to another and brought back news from family and friends with the “wings of a bird.” When the gluttonous crowd believed him, the chairman too began to believe his own concoction, and he was glad that only he knew what that machine in Mrots was for. But he was not alone. In the morning, on the way to the water well, the chairman’s wife too found an opportunity to boast in front of the other women.
The machine was left in the same place during the night. A few times the messenger had to disperse those who continued to look at it dumbfounded, contemplating how that machine was to take letters to friends in distant cities.
Before allowing themselves to be dispersed, the people spoke out hundreds of speculations and asked the messenger about them, but the messenger merely shrugged and left.
Naturally it never crossed the mind of the worker on the other side of the Atlantic who wrote “Made in U.S.A.” on the machine that that machine would travel by sea, train, and land all the way to such a distant place as Mrots.
…A week passed, and the messenger had become tired of keeping people away from the machine and forbidding them to touch it. Mrots was still talking about the machine.
As the agronomist ascended the last mountain, he could see Mrots from the top of the mountain, and he thought about what he should say to the villagers. Will they offer wheat or barley to test the trier? And how surprised will the women be when they see that the trier separates grain much more effectively than they do?
His arrival in Mrots surprised the people especially when they found out that the machine was going to be put to work. The chairman hesitated for a moment, and then presumed that “until further notice” must be that young man.
After the messenger managed to create a path to the machine by pushing people aside, the agronomist approached the trier. To make it work, he turned the handle a few times but was puzzled when the machine stopped working after the first trial. His surprise was even greater when he dug his hand inside the machine and took out an enveloped bundle, with the envelope glued together with dough and the address composed of letters dried under a lamp…
The “Demon” of the Dark Valley
An old man was sitting on a rooftop scraping off the hair of an oxhide and telling a story to the villagers sitting on stones before him. When he stood up to tap the hair off his apron, his eye fell on the opposite road. He put his hand to his forehead so that the sun would not irritate his watering eyes and to have a better view of the travelers on the road.
“You’d say the other one was a woman…”
The others looked too. For a moment they forgot the old man’s story.
“What pitiless people! How can you sit on a descending horse?”
“If the horse had been theirs, they would not be sitting on it…”
The old man resumed scraping the hide with a piece of glass, and when the travelers disappeared in the opposite forest, the people on the rooftop assumed their previous positions to listen to the old man’s story.
“Sakan, do you think something happened between those travelers who have come alone across desolate valleys and mountains?” the old man asked Sakan and laughed.
“Well, they’re young. We can’t discount that…”
“Yes, in those days too,” the old man resumed his story, “there was lots of fear in the valley. Dear boy, I came out at the top of the Dark Valley, and a shadow caught my eye. It was a moonlit night too… And at that moment neither the shadow went away, nor was I able to move. I told myself that it was a bear that hadn’t seen me yet. And then, all of a sudden…”
But right then they heard the hooves of a horse from the rooftop and looked down. A woman wearing a man’s hat was standing in the middle of the road. The woman was holding the horse’s reins very tightly, but she could not stop the horse from kicking the cow dung on the street.
“Hello,” the woman said. The people on the rooftop lightly bowed their heads.
“Is the chairman of the council at home?” the woman asked.
Sakan, who had gone down and was holding the reins, said:
“No, he has not returned from the meadows yet.”
The woman asked about another house. Sakan pointed it out with his finger.
“It’s over there, under the big pear tree.”
And when the woman kicked the horse’s flank with the heel of her shoe, Sakan saw the top part of the woman’s thin stockings—a ribbon the width of a finger, and above the ribbon, pink flesh that looked like an extension of the ribbon, which was light red.
Sakan returned to the rooftop and sat on the stone he was sitting on before. He was asked what the woman had wanted.
“She has come for the women’s meeting,” Sakan replied.
The old man resumed his story about the Dark Valley so slowly that it not only seemed as if he was having difficulty remembering it, but that he was concocting it, decorating it with hundreds of surprising and intervening incidents.
“And when I ran, it ran after me. And when I stopped, it also stopped. You wouldn’t believe what a devil it was! What a creation! I bent over to pick up a stone…”
“Sakan! Sakan!” his mother called from the rooftop. “Come down! The cow is giving birth!”
Sakan jumped up, grabbed his crook, and ran from rooftop to rooftop.
“Don’t let her trample her calf! The beast has never given birth before!” the old man called after Sakan and then started to tell what the “demon” did when he bent over to pick up a stone.
When he got to their rooftop, Sakan could hear lowing from the barn’s skylight.
“Sakan, I hope nothing happens,” his mother said, as she beat her chest every time the cow lowed, and said:
“Dear Maral…”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen today,” Sakan said and opened the barn door. The cow turned at t
he sound of the creaking door and the light of the evening gloom fell on her face. If Sakan had looked into the cow’s eyes, he would have seen the first difficult labor pains. But Sakan placed his hand on her belly and examined her hanging udders, her milk-filled bosom.
“Get some hay, nana.” While his mother went to get hay to cover the barn stones, Sakan pulled up his sleeves and examined the cow’s hanging belly once more.
Maral’s pains intensified. The cow regularly moved about, back and forth, banging her head against the wood of the stall and sniffing the barn stones with her snout. And when the little calf in her womb moved again, Maral became afraid of herself and hit herself with her tail, as if the culprit was on her back and would get off, go away if she whipped it with her tail.
Sakan’s little son appeared by the barn door, scratching his belly button. He wanted to enter, but his grandmother took him by the arm and brought him back home.
“Bring the light. Where is your wife?”
“I don’t know. There’s a women’s meeting at the Srans’ house. A woman has come from the city.”
Sakan remembered the woman sitting on the horse wearing a man’s hat, under which she had gathered her locks and knotted her hair, and stockings fringed with a red ribbon.
The cow’s contractions intensified. Her swollen belly was moving up and down. The pain was weakening Maral; she was barely able to stand on her feet.
Sakan was unable to express his annoyance at his wife’s absence. But his mother understood him and said:
“It wasn’t supposed to happen today…”
Not long after, Maral was lying on the hay licking her slimy calf that now opened its eyes and now closed them.
“Oh, oh, nana! She looks happy,” Sakan’s son called out. He had entered the barn during the delivery without the knowledge of his father or grandmother and had hidden himself in a corner of the barn.
Sakan washed his hands and went to the hayloft to get a large basket of hay for the cow.
The Dark Valley Page 12