The Dark Valley

by Aksel Bakunts

  “Don’t let her lick too much.”

  As he passed by the Srans’ house, Sakan stooped and looked through the window, which was covered with paper. The women were sitting on the floor. The newly arrived traveler was talking, moving her hands, and sometimes looking at a book she was holding in her hands. The woman was not wearing a hat. It seemed to Sakan as if she had also changed the rest of her clothes. When he saw her on the horse, she was not wearing white and her arms were not bare to her elbows.

  Among the women sitting on the floor, Sakan also saw his wife with a kerchief over her head. She looked wretched.

  Sakan heard footsteps coming to the door. He quickly turned onto the street and disappeared into the darkness. As Sakan filled the basket with hay in the hayloft, he couldn’t get the image of the woman in a white dress with a book in her hands out of his head.

  If someone were to run into Sakan that night, they would notice that he was carrying the basket askew. When he passed by the Srans’ house, he wanted to approach it, but he did not see a light through the window, so he walked on. The cow was sitting on hay and ruminating when Sakan put the hay-filled basket in the corner of the barn.

  “There’s a guest in the house,” his mother said. She picked up the little calf and brought it to the calf shed. The cow softly mooed after the calf.

  Sakan did not ask who the guest was. He tapped the hay from the flaps of his woolen overcoat and entered the house where he tapped his overcoat once more across the threshold. When he looked up he saw the guest and his hand froze in midair.

  “Friend Asya will stay with us tonight,” Sakan’s wife said to him.

  Asya smiled.

  “Was it you who showed me the way under the rooftop?”

  “Yes, that was me,” Sakan said and moved closer to greet her. As Sakan shook the guest’s hand, it seemed to him as if her hand was as soft as a newly born calf.

  “What a sweet calf,” Asya said.

  “Possibly it is sweet,” Sakan replied, moving a little away from her.

  “And that is our lesson, dear Asya. We’ll learn it by heart,” Sakan’s wife announced from the corner as she took out cups from the trunk and added them to the rest.

  “She went to kiss the calf…”

  For a moment all three were silent. Asya was looking at the little one sleeping on the rug with his clothes on. He had taken a bite of food, waited for his mother, and fallen asleep right where he had been sitting. Sakan sneaked a look at Asya, her white dress, and her arms as he wiped the floor with his finger, even though there was nothing to wipe.

  “I gave it a place,” nana said, as she put out the petrol lamp that she was holding in her hand. What a good thing nana did: coming in and breaking the silence!

  Sakan coughed lightly, swallowed his saliva, and looking over Asya’s head at the opposite wall, he asked:

  “I’m ashamed to ask, but where is the friend you came with?”

  “We separated by the valley. He went to a nearby village…” Asya answered and straightened herself. She wasn’t used to sitting on the floor. Sakan’s wife noticed and took a pillow from a pile and placed it next to her.

  “Lean against it,” she said.

  Asya adjusted herself to lean against it. She moved her legs a little to the side and gathered her dress with her hands. Sakan cast his eye on the patterns of the carpet to avoid seeing that which he had seen when she was on the horse. He recalled the old man’s question:

  “Sakan, do you know if something happened between the two that were traveling through the mountains?”

  How was Sakan to know? Maybe it never even happened. Maybe the friend who traveled to the next village was Asya’s brother or cousin. Asya was playing with the tassels of the rug with her fingers. When Sakan looked at her, it was as if he wanted to check with whom she was on the mountain road. Maybe something had happened.

  “So you always circle the villages, organize meetings, and give lectures?” Sakan asked. Asya laughingly said “yes” and nodded. Sakan noticed how clean her teeth were and how a lock of hair loosened from the knot and dropped on her brow when she nodded—he saw that and he didn’t like Asya’s laugh.

  If the old man sitting on the roof scraping oxhide had asked Sakan at that instant whether something had happened between them, Sakan would not only reply:

  “They’re young. We can’t discount that,” but he would concoct a story on top of it and tell it to the people sitting on the rooftop in the same way the old man told about the forgotten “demon” of the Dark Valley.

  Sakan’s wife laid a cloth on the floor and placed bread, cheese, and yoghurt on it. Sakan approached the cloth, tore the good parts of the bread and put them in front of Asya. He wanted to put the yoghurt bowl in front of her as well, but pulled back, and put the bowl down.

  During the meal Sakan peeked at Asya’s small bites. He was fascinated by how she ate. Asya rolled the thin slices of lavash, nibbled a few times, chewed, and then swallowed unnoticeably. Sakan, on the other hand, ripped the lavash in half, crushed the cheese with his fingers on his bread, and rolled it all up like a bale of hay.

  After Sakan’s wife had put the child to bed, she sat in front of the cloth and began to eat. To Sakan it seemed as if his wife chewed like an old cow. She sniffed the bread before putting it in her mouth, and when she swallowed she extended her neck a little.

  While Sakan’s wife was clearing the cloth and making the bed, his mother asked Asya questions. When she asked whether she had a child, Asya laughingly answered:

  “Nana, I’m not even married!”

  Nana only thought to herself, “How is that possible?” and was stunned to hear that a grown woman was unmarried and childless.

  “I’m a party member, nana. I’m not my own boss,” Asya said. Asya appeared to have understood that nana was puzzled and perhaps questioned her behavior. But nana did not understand the meaning of her words, even when the wife rushed to ask what a party was.

  When Sakan’s wife inclined her head a little and timidly explained what she had learned that day to her mother-in-law, she peeked at Asya from her bowed head to see whether she had repeated the lesson correctly. Asya was looking at her with genuine delight. The mother-in-law was also looking at the wife: she was both happy that her son’s wife was not a member of the party and worried that she might learn things at the meetings and change.

  Sakan was playing with the tassels of the carpet by the fireplace with his ear turned to what is wife was saying. And when his wife finished, Sakan got up from his place, asked where the barn lamp was, scratched his shoulder, and went to the barn.

  The fuzzy calf was lying on the hay and licking its lips with its tongue. The cow sometimes ate fresh grass and sometimes turned her head toward the calf and moaned. Sakan filled the stall with hay and stood next to the cow a little longer with the lamp in his hand.

  Asya was already in bed when he came home. Next to the bed were her clothes, among which her white dress that looked like a mound of snow. When he moved past her bed to go to the other side of the room where his bed and the child’s crib were, a pleasant fragrance reached his nose, as if someone had plucked flowers from the mountain, squeezed them, extracted the fluid, and sprinkled it like water on the sheets, the floor, the charred ceiling. But when he sat on his bed, took off his moccasins, the pungent stench of the barn, the dirt stuck on his moccasins, and the blades of hay hit his nose. In this corner of the room hung the smell of an unclean bedspread, a sweat-drenched shirt, a sunburned overcoat, and an unwashed body.

  When his wife raised one end of the bedspread and turned toward Sakan, Sakan squinted his eyes and saw that the light had already been turned off. He quietly asked his wife why there was a rug under her head instead of a pillow.

  “I gave our pillow to her,” his wife said and moved closer to him. Sakan’s nose was struck by the strong smell that came out of his wife’s mouth, as if her teeth had corroded and rotted. He turned to his other side and faced the wall, amaze
d that until then he had never noticed the smell of his wife’s breath.

  * * *

  The morning sunbeam dropped through the skylight and produced a milky circle on the rug. Sakan put on his moccasins as soon as he woke up.

  When he walked past Asya he saw her white dress, her neck, her shoulder, and on her shoulder a thin strap of white cloth. He quickly moved to the door, picked up his sickle, and went out.

  He washed his face in the stream in front of the house and wiped it with the fringe of his overcoat. After that he descended to the valley to pluck grass from the garden. On his way there Sakan wondered about something. Did Asya sleep naked or was she wearing a blouse? If she was wearing a blouse, then why was her shoulder bare? Or perhaps the white dress next to her was her blouse…

  The cow looked at the barn door frequently as she licked her calf and rubbed her neck against the wooden planks of the stall, scratching herself. Meanwhile, everyone at home had already woken up. When Sakan returned to the barn carrying two bales of fresh grass on his back, the beds had been tidied at home and his wife had turned on the fire to make tea.

  Asya was standing next to Sakan when he dropped the grass in front of the cow. She laughed when the calf turned its face to the green grass, sniffed it, staggered to its feet, and hid, burying its head in its mother’s bosom.

  Asya discerned a few flowers in the grass, picked them up, and brought them closer to the calf. The cow saw that, swished her tail, and briskly turned her head. If she hadn’t been tied to the stall, she might have butted her. Asya recoiled and the flowers fell from her hand.

  After she had made the tea, Sakan’s wife brought a basin of water to wash Asya’s face. Even when Asya refused and took the basin to pour water on her own hands, his wife rejected the idea.

  Sakan was standing by the barn door. He saw how Asya washed herself. She put water in her mouth a few times, puffed up her cheeks, rubbed her finger against her teeth, gargled, and spat the water out. Sakan recalled how bad his wife’s breath smelled.

  “Well, everything comes out of habit, from what we see our mothers do…”

  Asya once again ate very little at breakfast. On the one hand it was his mother who was urging her on and, on the other, it was his wife.

  “Eat, you’re going on the road, you’ll be hungry…”

  Asya laughed and said:

  “What I ate will last me three days.”

  Nana was puzzled and concluded in her mind that Asya was not healthy, that she was hollow inside, that she must have some sort of disease that is preventing her from eating much.

  And then Sakan got up to get Asya’s horse from the neighbor’s barn. A few women had gathered on the rooftop. Asya was saying something or other to them and Sakan was saddling the horse when he overheard Asya promising to visit the village again.

  The horse was saddled when the women came down from the rooftop. Asya shook nana’s hand, stooped to kiss the child’s cheek, and walked to the horse to mount it. Sakan was holding the reins. Asya extended her hand toward the saddle and tried to mount the horse, but her foot almost slipped out of the stirrup. Sakan held her foot and helped her get on the horse.

  Asya said goodbye to Sakan, shook his hand, and departed. The women accompanied her to the border of the village and separated, spreading out in the village streets to find their homes. Asya clutched the reins tightly and kicked the horse’s flanks with her heels to speed up the horse’s pace.

  Sakan stood frozen for a moment and then walked over to the barn door, but remembered that he was meant to go to the garden. He turned around and went down to the valley.

  When he helped Asya mount the horse by holding her foot, it was as if his fingers had sunk into something soft. When he bent over to put her foot in the stirrup, the tail of Asya’s coat rose and Sakan saw her white dress.

  Sakan watered the garden all day.

  The stream of water slowed down under the trees and, until it reached where he was, Sakan lay on his back and partly closed his eyes.

  The trees knocked the branches together and the leaves rubbed against each other. Whenever the branches separated a little and Sakan could see the blue sky through the gap, it was as if the cloud he was looking at took the shape of the white dress that had been in his house by the bed the night before.

  It was already dark when he returned to the village. He threw his shovel aside and went to look at the cow. He went home to his wife who grumbled that he had left the cow thirsty. His wife wanted to tell him that she had weeded the vegetable garden, that she had been out, but she kept it to herself, laid out the cloth, and placed bread, cheese, and yoghurt on it.

  Sakan ate until he was full. He didn’t make a sound and kept his head lowered. After he swallowed his last bite, he muttered under his breath:

  “Make my bed and put this whetstone by the door so that I don’t forget to take it with me in the morning.”

  He said that and loosened his belt.

  When he laid his head on the pillow, Sakan once again smelled the fragrance that had emanated from Asya’s clothes. That same pillow had been under her head the night before.

  Sakan buried his face in the pillow, flared his nostrils, and started to breathe deeply. He saw before him swaying shoulders, a white dress, and soft feet.

  His wife turned off the light and quietly wrapped herself under the sheets. Sakan felt his back warming up and he turned to face his wife. There was a pleasant scent under the sheets, and when Sakan held his wife, it was as if his wife’s shoulder was also bare and that she too was wearing a snow-white dress. His wife did not understand why Sakan was so aroused that night, but in her mind she forgave him for what he had done the night before when he turned to the wall.

  His wife had softly fallen asleep and, in another corner of the house, nana was sleeping. In the dead of the night, Sakan was listening to the cows chewing in the barn through a crack in the wall.

  He recalled how the cow had wanted to butt Asya when she brought a flower close to the calf’s face. Sakan also remembered the first day when he was sitting on the rooftop. The old man was telling a story of how on a moonlit night the “demon” had appeared in the Dark Valley and followed him.

  “I was running, and he was running after me. When I stopped, he also stopped…”

  It was right when he had said that that Asya had appeared.

  All night Sakan was half asleep and half awake. The moon had cast a shade from the skylight and was playing on the rug. Sakan fell asleep close to dawn.

  In his dream he saw the Dark Valley. A woman wearing a white dress was running after him in the valley. He moved closer to catch her. The woman stopped for a moment, and then ran off laughing in the valley again.

  The Modest Girl

  The spring morning promised a bright and sunny day. Our well-fed horses trotted up the stony path and puffed out air with every step. The horses’ dark-blue necks had become damp with sweat.

  The path was tortuous. The farther we traveled from the village, the denser the forest became. We met with thick-trunked trees whose branches had wound around each other and hung above the path. We often had to bend forward and embrace the horses’ necks to protect our faces from being scratched by the overhanging branches or pricked by their thorns.

  We were silent. I was striking the leaves on the trees with the tip of my horsewhip, pulling them off or shaking the overhanging branches, causing the night dew to sprinkle on the horse and on me like rain.

  My friend was softly whistling a song and rocking in his saddle to the pace of the horse’s steps.

  “Twelve years ago I went to Dzoragyugh{6} on this path,” my friend said. It was as if he were speaking to himself.

  I looked at him. He was smiling as if a fortunate event had entered his memory to which the path and the old forest had been witnesses.

  I asked him which wind had hurled him to the village that lay in the remote valleys.

  “It was on the same day that I got out of prison. I was a y
outh of around seventeen or eighteen. I was full of energy to work and had so much vigor… If only that youth had lasted.”

  The path ended and merged into a broader and softer path that came from the valley rivers in the depth of the forest. The horses stopped, took a deep breath, and resumed their trot.

  “You know, sometimes a face fixes itself in a person’s memory in such a way that decades later you remember it just as distinctly as if you had seen it the day before. We forget the name, the location, the year, or when we saw that face, those eyes: we forget the details, but we remember the face and the eyes, as if that first impression must remain indelible to the grave.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to ask him about the event and his indelible impression, which was illuminating light on his memory at that moment in the same way the sun shines its golden rays on shady trees.

  “I remember those days when I decided to go to Dzoragyugh very clearly. It was necessary for me to leave the city and not show my face there for a while. I kindly accepted my acquaintance’s suggestion: to be a teacher in that remote village. Two thoughts stimulated me: first, that no one would follow me or look for my traces and, second, that I would get to work in a village.

  “When the head of schools told me about Dzoragyugh and the fact that the place was inaccessible, that the air was clean, and that there were dense forests nearby with abundant game, I instantly agreed. I think I went on the road the same day.

  “…It was the beginning of winter. Snow had just fallen. We got to this exact same path at night and separated from the forest’s main track. The snow glowed under the moon, resembling white marble on which black tree trunks were reflected. The Dzoragyugh coachman pointed out the beginning of the path that led to the valley below.

  “‘There it is. Our village.’

  “I saw tiny black specks strewn all over the white carpet of snow. These were village dwellings, bales of hay, and stacks of dung. In one of the windows I discerned the white light of a lamp, which looked like a little star that had gone astray in the dark heights of the universe. We descended a little along the slope and heard the distinct bark of a dog, which echoed in the forest like the strikes of an axe.