The Dark Valley

by Aksel Bakunts

  “‘That is the sound of our Boghar,’ the coachman said. The horse, too, seemed to know that the village was near and that it was Boghar that was barking, and so it stepped up its pace.

  “To me it was like going to a very distant land of which the geography teacher had told about like a fairy tale. Children are often fascinated by distant lands where red-skinned people live and colorful birds perch on trees. And when they leave their homes, the land they imagined suddenly seems very close.

  “I, too, thought like that, even though I was already a young man. Perhaps it was the forest that affected my thoughts—the grandeur of the winter night, the unmatched presence of the cliffs, and those mysterious sounds coming from the valleys and forests. Perhaps it was fatigue that had fogged my consciousness. I don’t remember. I only know that the first time I came to Dzoragyugh became one of the best nights of my life.

  “The coachman brought me to his house. How sweetly I slumbered next to the fireplace under the blanket! It was quite a bit later that I opened my eyes a little and looked up at the skylight. There was still a bit of winter night left. I wrapped myself in my blanket and moved my feet closer to the warm ashes as the imaginary world of the night swayed on the threshold between sleep and dream.

  “I felt ashamed when I opened my eyes. It had been some time since the others had woken up and were waiting for me to light the fireplace.

  “I went outside. From the garden I could see the village and the road we had been on the night before. Boghar barked at me near the henhouse. His bark no longer had a terrifying echo and the steep cliffs no longer appeared shapeless. The orange winter sun shone on the snow and on the jugs on the rooftops as smoke rose out of chimneys.

  “On the same day I was taken to the house where I was to live. The landlord, brother Ohan, was a man with a patriarchal demeanor. People like him no longer exist in our villages. In the winter, he would sit by the fireplace and stack wood next to him. One by one he would throw the wood in the fire and tell stories from the time of the Shah, from long ago, and about hunting game in the forest. And if no one listened to him, either out of boredom or loneliness, he would open his Book of Psalms in front of the fireplace.

  “There were four of us in the house. Me, brother Ohan, his old wife, and ten-year-old Ashot, who was my loyal friend. When we went to school together, the dogs barked from the rooftops and kicked snow at me with their hind legs, because they were not accustomed to me yet.

  “The school was at the edge of the village on a hillock. The old cemetery was now the schoolyard. The school had a large room with two rows of ordinary wooden benches and a blackboard on the opposite wall. There was no other decoration on the unplastered walls. In the window frames, instead of glass, oily paper had been stuck with dough.

  “I was the only one who had a watch. And, one day, as I was climbing up the hillock, my foot slipped, I fell on the ice, and the watch in my pocket smashed into pieces, and until the end of the year, I was left without a watch. On sunny days we determined the time by shadows; on cloudy days, until we got tired.

  “After about two weeks I was able to call my forty or so students by name. I knew the homes of many and the parents of some. They were lively children, with bright eyes, and we very quickly became acquainted.

  “I would come down the stairs of the house when the first morning school bell rang and before I had reached the hillock, I would see the children gathered in front of the school and we would go inside together.

  “After class, I was almost always at home. Brother Ohan would go to the barn to feed the cattle hay. Ashot carried the hay from the hay barn in a large basket while the old wife lit the fire or washed cracked wheat for dinner. I would stack brother Ohan’s dry firewood in the fireplace and lie down in front of the fire, watching the pieces of wood turn to ash and the tongues of flame shoot sparks up the chimney.

  “When darkness fell, Ashot and brother Ohan would take off their moccasins and sit by the fire. And while the old wife cooked the wheat meal, brother Ohan would start to tell an old story. If Ashot and I wanted to hear the ending, we would sometimes have to disrupt brother Ohan’s sleep.

  ‘“Where was I?’ he would wake up and grumble before we could remind him.

  “‘I’ve grown old. I get tired very easily,’ and he would pick up the story where he dozed off.”

  * * *

  I was listening intently to what my friend was saying, and even though tree branches were still overhanging the road, for a moment I stopped plucking the leaves with my whip. The sun had risen substantially and the dew drops had evaporated.

  “There’s a hunter in Dzoragyugh called Crooked Neck Anton. He’s still alive, though quite old. His eyes don’t see well anymore, and that’s why he no longer hunts.

  “Brother Ohan talked a lot about him. One time Anton wrestled with a bear in the forest. The bear smashed his rifle, then bent over to pick up a bough to beat Anton with, but Anton killed the bear in time. Brother Ohan also told how Anton caught a fox in its lair.

  ‘“If you saw him, you’d be surprised. Scrawny, short, and a crooked neck. You’d say: if you hit him on the head, he’d be glued to the ground,’ brother Ohan would say about him.

  “I decided to go hunting with him, even though I had only very little experience in hunting. The old man promised to ask his neighbor for a rifle.

  “No later than the following Sunday, early in the morning, when smoke had just started to rise out of chimneys, Anton and I took the road to the forest. I fired four times that day. The shots caused snow to fall from tree branches, but my gunpowder did not singe the fur of a single fox.

  “Anton tried to comfort me by telling me that what I had done so far was a lot for a first-time effort. But I could see the smirk on his pockmarked face. He killed an old fox and two starlings. The old fox tormented us a lot.

  “Anton fired and I saw the fox tumble through the smoke. We ran toward it, but the fox grinded its teeth, tucked its tail between its hind legs, and fled. We could only see its prints and drops of blood on the snow. On several spots it had dropped down exhausted, the blood had flowed more heavily, and the hair of its fur had fallen out onto the snow.

  “While looking for the fox, Anton killed another starling. Together we ran to where the bird had been killed, and in a shallow pit we saw the old fox, curled up, with its snout against the wound. Its hanging tongue was stained with blood. It was obvious that it had been licking the blood of its wound. Anton slung the fox over his shoulder, I picked up the starlings, and we returned home.

  “We were on our way back to the village when we heard the sound of breaking dry branches in the forest clearing. It sounded as if a deer was pushing aside branches with its horns in order to pluck the dry leaves from under the branches. We turned around.

  “An eight to ten-year-old boy was stacking firewood on a rope laid out on the snow. A little further, a girl stood holding a branch as thin as the rope in her hand. They saw us before we saw them and were standing there looking at us.

  “It is that face that has fixed itself in my memory, even though twelve years have passed since that day, and what years!”

  My friend stopped talking. I could see the same happy smile on his face that I saw the first time when we were still ascending the path. It was as if he was seeing the girl in front of his eyes, in the snowy forest, with a dry piece of firewood in her hand.

  “I saw her and I froze,” he slowly continued, “and even though Anton asked her whose daughter she was and she said that they had come to gather firewood, I wasn’t listening to her. I remember when we passed by the clearing and descended toward the village threshing-floors, I looked back one more time. I don’t know if the girl was smiling or not, but it seemed to me as if she was. She lowered her head and broke the thin branch in her hand.

  “From the porch of our house I saw the girl carrying firewood on her back. They followed our footprints to the threshing-floors. She was wearing a gray outer garment and, on her he
ad, a home-knit shawl. I was looking in her direction while brother Ohan was asking me about the starlings and Ashot was plucking their feathers. I was giving disconnected answers as I followed the girl with the firewood out of the tail of my eye to see what house she was going to enter.

  “How happy I was the next day when I found out that her younger sister attended the school.

  “From that day on, the girl with the red shawl, who, until then, had merely been one of my forty students, stood out from the rest and in my eyes became the dot around which my inner world revolved.

  “I wanted to know the girl’s name. I made up some lesson in which students had to tell about their family members. And because they were two sisters, it was not difficult to guess that the girl I had seen in the forest was called Khonarh.{7} The other students also raised their hands to tell about their homes and were puzzled when I wrote a new mathematical problem on the blackboard.

  “Khonarh, Khonarh… I was looking at the numbers on the blackboard, but all I could see before me was the face of the woolen-shawled girl, her feet in the snow, and a snake-like rope on the carpet of snow.

  “That face would sometimes submerge in an abyss, and that began to happen regularly. I would remember that we had killed an old fox and two starlings in the forest. Then, suddenly, the face would appear and be right before my eyes. I tried very hard to find out whether the girl had smiled when I looked back or whether it had only seemed that way to me.

  “I went hunting with Anton once more. When we reached the clearing, I went to the bough next to which the girl had stood. The hunter called after me asking whether the road turned to the right. The snow around the bough had covered the girl’s footprints. Nothing was visible but a dry branch under the tree. I picked it up.

  “On our way back we came to the winding streets of the village that would lead us to pass by her house. The dogs in that neighborhood barked at me and jumped on me. And then I saw her in her courtyard through a half-open door with a bunch of hay in her lap. She saw me and instantly turned her head to the other side and went inside the house. I caught her blushing.

  “I was so happy that day. Brother Ohan, too, noticed my happiness. He laughed and said that we must have had quite some fun in the forest. After dinner, when he dozed off by the fireplace, I quickly leafed through his Book of Psalms and bookmarked another page with the book’s woolen string so that brother Ohan would be confused in the morning and wonder when he had got halfway the thick Book of Psalms. He would read it and suspiciously look at Ashot and me.

  “I saw Khonarh twice over the course of the winter. She was sick for one month and recovered before the Carnival festivities. I very often asked her sister about her and had to come up with another pretext each time, sometimes going quite far and sometimes seemingly by chance, to change the subject and talk about her.

  “Finding an excuse was not always easy. I remember once not having any news for three days and refraining from asking. What if the little girl went home and told? On the fourth day I went to school earlier than usual. Her sister had not arrived yet. I was standing by the entrance. My eye was on the hillock. Suddenly her sister appeared, saw me, and thought I would reprove her for being late. The girl quickened her pace and when she reached me, she said with short breaths:

  “‘Khonarh has gotten up…’

  “And then I found out that she stayed in bed for another four days. The girl had lied.

  “I saw Khonarh on one day during the Carnival festivities. Girls on the rooftop opposite our house were playing, throwing snow at each other, and singing songs. Many were holding apples in their hands. They were wearing new clothes: red, blue, green. Khonarh was among them. She was wearing a long striped red dress. She held her hands under her apron and stood on the edge of the rooftop looking at the younger girls laughingly nudge each other and run about on the rooftops.

  “She seemed pale and a little gaunt from the porch. Her new clothes made her look older and her back leaner. She had tied the strings of her blue apron behind her back. Inadvertently she looked toward the porch, saw me, retreated from the edge, and mixed with the group of girls.

  “I saw Khonarh’s white face and tiny eyes once more. The girl in the red garment seemed to me a mature child. She wore the same woolen shawl as before on her head. I went inside the house not to intrude on her, because the other girls whispered, and some of the younger ones who went to school covered their faces with their aprons and turned away from me.”

  * * *

  We came to the end of the forest and the beginning of lush mountain meadows whose scattered shrubs attested to the fact that once upon a time oak trees had grown in the black earth.

  A stream, whose sources were springs in the heart of the valley forest, flowed through the grassland. This is why the surface of the stream was covered not only with grass, but also with floating dry leaves.

  The horses had become tired. The grass of the mountains was attractive both to the tired horses and us.

  “Let’s go down and let the horses rest,” my friend said. The horses pushed out the metal bits with their tongues and plucked the grass with relish. We lay down on the grass by the stream.

  “Brother Ohan had many books, old books. One Sunday I sat on the porch and read one of his old books, I think about Emperor Justinian. The snow had not melted yet, but the heat of the sun could already be felt and that meant that spring was right around the corner. On days like these even the cat would leave the heat of the fireplace and sprawl in the sun with its eyes closed.

  “Someone was coming up the steps. I raised my head. The book in my hand trembled. Next to me stood Khonarh playing with the fringes of her apron with her fingers. She had never stood that close to me. That’s why the letters on the page became jumbled and the book trembled.

  ‘“My father would like you to come to our house for dinner.’

  “I didn’t understand either why I used the book as an excuse and said that I couldn’t go. Khonarh briskly closed the book in my hands. I barely had time to compose myself when she repeated her father’s wish from the garden.

  “I didn’t go and I also didn’t reopen the book. I didn’t know what to do.

  “I tried to correct my students’ notebooks, but I couldn’t. Brother Ohan came home and we were together until evening. That day I went to the barn with him and gave the cows straw and hay.

  “I don’t know if spring is as nice every year in Dzoragyugh as it was that year. Even the rocks inhaled the spring fragrance. The scent of a thousand lindens in the forest hung over the village day and night. When I lay down in the forest under the lindens after class, my head would spin.

  “Even now there are gardens in the dales. In the spring, the buds on the apple trees grow and blossom. Only one week of warm weather is needed for the red flower petals of the apple tree to bloom and diffuse their fragrance through the dales. The white blossom on tree branches makes it seem as if the trees are covered with snow, as if the spring has sprinkled snowflakes on the trees: colorful, scented snowflakes.

  “The sun evaporated the waste water in the streets. The cows that went down to the water were blinded by the sunlight and the bull-calves moaned, sniffed, ran around, and dug their hooves in the open ground. And how reluctant they were to enter the barn through the low door!

  “The sunny spring days reminded me that soon it would be May and that the last day of school was coming close. I would have to go back on the same road that brought me there and never ever again see Dzoragyugh.

  “I regretted not going to their house. Her mother reproached me once for not accepting the invitation. I wanted her to invite me again, or at least give me a slight hint.

  “In those days it was usual to organize a party for the end of the school year. The students were learning songs and poems, and I was preparing for the party as well. The older students brought planks and carpets from their homes and built a stage. The students had been instructed to invite as many people as they could. And all
that time, my eyes were fixed on her sister.

  “Sunday came. It is conceivable that in no other year as many people gathered in that school as in that year. Spring carried the fragrance from the trees in the gardens through the open windows. Starlings chirped keenly and flew from one nest to another under the roof of the school. They, too, had dressed up—in shiny black feathers.

  “I could see only one face in the crowd, this time without a shawl, her hair split in the middle and brushed with care. And how thin her lips were!

  “Following the intermission, the second half of the program was to start with a poem that her sister would recite. The carpet moved, and behind the stage Khonarh appeared. She smoothed her sister’s hair with a brush.

  “With the high-pitched voice of a child, the little girl was bravely saying something or other. The crowd was listening quietly. I wasn’t listening. Next to me was Khonarh. In her eyes was a smile of happiness. Her eyes shone like the starling’s black feathers. I took hold of her hand.

  “‘Khonarh…’ My voice quavered.

  “‘Let go!’ she said and swung her hand toward her sister who had finished her recitation and whose face was unusually red with joy. People clapped in the room, some of them adding other sounds, even stamping their canes on the ground, to express their satisfaction.

  “The party ended soon after that. To me it felt as if the party proceeded in sadness and the spring day became overcast. Her words ‘Let go!’ rung in my ears and I looked at my hand to make certain that I had indeed held her hand. Why had her fingers been so warm?

  “I saw Khonarh a few times after the party. By chance I discovered the way to their garden. After class I would go to the dale and lie down on the blue rock in brother Ohan’s garden, above which she would have to pass by the fence to return home from her garden. I wasn’t able to say a word to her, even when I saw her a few times on the other side of the fence. Her father would walk in front of her with a bundle of firewood on his back, and she would follow him with a pail of water and sheets of lavash draped over her arm. I would take a book with me, but not leaf a single page, because at every footstep I would look at the road.