The Dark Valley

by Aksel Bakunts

  “There aren’t even any stones here. Where have they brought us, man?” the old woman moaned. She didn’t speak again after that.

  If right at that instant someone called from the gardens saying “Tall Margar, the water is running out,” Tall Margar would leap up from his place, pick up the shovel and walk toward the barrier of the stream. And no one knew that as he fixed the stream’s barrier, he was somewhere else in his thoughts, somewhere a thousand miles away from the village in the south.

  Margar was crushing road metal with the old woman on his mind. How good it would be if he could steal a few stones from the road at night to put on his wife’s grave. Otherwise the sand would sweep open and allow wolf-dogs to tear up the old woman. A stone needed to be placed, a heavy stone, on the sandy mound.

  Only twice in his life did Margar receive a beating: once when he was a boy for tying a broom to the tail of a dog, and once for placing a stone on the old woman’s grave.

  He was once again crushing road metal in the sun when two men approached him.

  “This old one?” one of them asked, and when the other nodded with a military bearing, he kicked Margar’s chest with the heel of his hobnailed jackboots, making his chest cavity thud like an empty pitcher. Blood ran down his nose, and when his side was kicked the second time with the jackboot, the road metal cut Margar’s thumb.

  Even now, as he clears the stream, if the scar on his thumb catches his eye, his fingers grip the shovel tighter, but his anger soon fades when he remembers that there is a stone on the mound.

  “Will it stay put? Has the wind not chafed it? Has it not been stolen?” He would give very much to get answers to his questions.

  After the tents were taken down and the people continued on the road to other lands, Margar pick up the remaining parcels and took Torosik’s hand.

  On Margar’s back there were apricot stones wrapped in his wife’s kerchief. In the village apricot grove there was one apricot tree with big, tasty fruit. The old woman had kept the stones of those apricots to plant in front of their house the following year. The apricot stones too had spent weeks of sleepless nights with the old woman on the creaking oxcart to the remote desert.

  When they packed up the tents and left, Margar had two thoughts: look after Torosik and deposit the apricot stones on safe ground.

  3

  Years went by. Margar could not find anywhere to rest. The mouth of the flood rose and fell like thatching ants, but the flood washed down the thatch along with the ants.

  Margar worked, depriving himself of food to save it for Torosik, who was growing up under Margar’s wings. Then one day Torosik went up the deck of the steamboat.

  Grandpa, too, and other neighbors, too, who had lived in tents near Kavala, told of bygone days, of working during the day on farms, at the dock, in the city. Margar was happy—he had grown younger. And when Torosik asked:

  “Grandpa, where is the boat taking us?”

  Margar looked in his grandchild’s lively eyes and saw the image of his own child who had been lost without a trace. Containing himself, he said:

  “Our country, my boy…”

  Margar had nothing other than Torosik and apricot stones to bring to that country as tribute.

  The rocking boat slashed the water with its sharp nose, splitting it momentarily into two repellent waves that moved toward each other again, splashing against the boat and crumbling into little ripples.

  Margar looked at the mountain range on the coast on whose sharp summit a cloud sat gracefully. He looked and quietly took out his house keys from his pocket, stroked them in his fist, and threw them in the sea. Ringlets formed where the keys had been thrown. The ringlets grew larger, dissolved, and a big wave covered the place where the keys had been dropped. By now the keys have slipped into the abyss.

  Tall Margar did not tell anyone why tears came to his eyes when he saw Ararat’s snowy summit for the first time from the train window. It was in this country that the apricot stones should grow.

  …And if someone stole water behind his back, Tall Margar would get angry and say:

  “Your tree won’t grow any fruit, my boy…”

  If someone doubted his words, he would say:

  “At my age, you expect me to lie?”

  Of course only few in the village knew with what tribulations Tall Margar had reached that age.

  And if he wanted to do something nice for someone, Tall Margar would smile and say:

  “Wait until my apricots grow. I’ll give you one. You’ll see how tasty they are. There’s no apricot like mine around here.”

  Tall Margar’s small, teary eyes would sparkle with great joy especially in the spring when he was changing the stream’s course and had to pass by the school. He would look through the crack of the mud wall at how the children ran about in the schoolyard, playing, screaming. And playing with those children was Torosik.

  And a little farther away from the school, in front of their house, the apricot shoot was stretching in the sun…

  Sabu

  They live in the forest, and because the village has been in the dense forest since time immemorial, the child of the village of Sabu thinks that the world is one endless forest in whose clearings man sows millet and bears gather fallen acorns, break tree branches, and lie down satisfied in the millet field.

  The forest has put its stamp on Sabu. Not only are plates, plows, and ladles made from the wood of the forest, but a great chunk of their food also comes from the forest: wild pears and plums, various vegetables and staple food that are as tasty to them as they are to the wild boars that live in the depths of the forest.

  Nowhere is man more acquainted with bears than in the village of Sabu. Even the children will recognize the fresh prints on the path as being that of a bear or of a wolf passing by, or of a wild goat descending to the valley for water. The greatest part of their stories revolves around savage beasts.

  And there is a legendary hero there, called Geush, whose sharp gravestone is a sanctuary to this day in the village of Sabu. The elderly teach the young hunters about Geush’s steel sword with which he cut a bear’s neck in half with one stroke. Another hero who was attacked by three bears wrestled his way out, killed one of them, and then climbed up a tree, leaving the beast’s hind paw in its own jaws.

  Bearskins hang on walls in many households. Above doors, the head of a wild goat with branched antlers is nailed and in the hollow cavity of its skulls, in its eye sockets, there are pieces of cloth. Bits of hay are apparent in its open mouth, making it seem as if the wild goat is eating hay day and night. Who knows, perhaps the moss between its teeth was already there when a hunter from Sabu fired at the wild goat from behind a tree with his rifle.

  There is an old sect in the village of Sabu. This sect remained in that gloomy world of age-old legends. In the same way that the beast in the forest has remained untouched, so too this ancient faith has remained in the village of Sabu like the virgin copse in the forest.

  There is a parchment that tells of ancient sun worshippers who inhabited the highlands on the left bank of the Arax River. That land was called Beautiful Sun. There were tall planes in the land of the sun worshippers and every morning at dawn, the people would kneel before the sun under the planes. Perhaps this side of the bank of the Arax caught a spark from Zoroastrian Iran and became a sect of its own.

  Sabu is in that land. In Sabu, too, there are tall planes, except the people do not kneel before the sun and perhaps that is why sunny days are rare in this dark valley. Even now planes are considered to be sacred and, in order to protect themselves against the evil eye, pieces of colorful cloth are tied around their trunks.

  The people in the village of Sabu are Turks. Because they were heretics, they were chased away in the old days and subjected to ridicule. Sabu drew back even further into its den and gripped its old faith tightly. For years the copse has remained green, but the sun has not been able to cast its rays onto the shade beneath, so the fallen boughs have ro
tten, and the boughs and leaves have mildewed with the ground.

  Sabu does not shave hair: the people believe that cutting moustaches and beards is deadly. That is why the men are long-bearded and hairy. Hair covers their cheekbones and even their auricles are hairy. The hair across their foreheads hangs to their eyebrows, hiding their foreheads. Their beards are as black as the wings of a swallow.

  Sabu is somber. It is the forest that taught the people to walk quietly with their heads bowed down and to clutch the handle of an axe tightly under the trees. One could not only cut a bough with an axe, but also crack a bear’s skull like the legendary Geush.

  Sabu avoids desiring girls from other villages. Only very rarely do others agree to give a girl to Sabu, because the sect has a secret ritual about which the neighboring villages have concocted a thousand stories. And since they only perform the ritual when there are no outsiders in the village, only very few actually know what that ritual entails, even if there are some who assert having witnessed it.

  In the beginning it was customary for a woman to live with several men, but one day the leader of the sect came from Iran and announced that the oracle no longer accepted that custom. This happened a long time ago, but even today many claim that in the village of Sabu that custom still smokes under the ashes like smolder.

  There is a night when neither moon nor stars are visible. A cloud descends on the forest and drifts across the dales to the village, enveloping home and hay barn like smoke. On that night, together with the cloud, beasts roam the village streets. Bears dig their paws in clay jugs and lick the honey inside, wolves lap up the warm blood of lambs, and dogs howl in vain as they hide behind haystacks.

  That night the children of the village of Sabu bury their heads under pillows. Some of them start crying. If it had been light out, one could have seen the village girls and women huddled on the rooftop of the house of prayer like a frightened flock of sheep before a wolf.

  Inside, in the dark, a few people weep plaintively like lamenting women and say words of prayer in Arabic. After every song, hundreds of hairy hands stretch upwards in the dark, and from the skylight the women drop their colorful belts in turn. Someone in the crowd of the house of prayer catches one of the belts. And after the last girl has timidly untied her thin belt, the praying crowd charges into the forest, dragging along the women and girls whom they hold captive with those same belts.

  On that night there is neither moon, nor the twinkle of stars…

  In the old house of prayer, the elderly weep and pray until dawn.

  * * *

  A sayyid appeared one night on the other side of the Arax wearing a green mantle from head to toe. He was the ancient sect’s prophet who would sometimes cross the border in disguise from remote Iran and travel all the way to Sabu.

  As the sayyid crossed the border, the water of the Arax spattered turbid drops on the silk tail of his mantle whenever his horse gashed the river.

  That night a young girl in the village of Sabu was weaving a carpet on a loom. The girl had thin tresses, and at the tip of her tresses hung little metal bells. The girl turned her head left and right, picking the colorful yarn with her yellowed fingers, placing one thread over another and then packing the weft with a heavy comb. The rows of knots grew one on top of the other and designs were born: pomegranate branches, leaves, and two wings in the leaves that looked like songbirds to the girl. Each time the girl packed the weft with the comb, the colorful knots moved, and the bells in her tresses tinkled.

  When the horsemen passed that street, the dogs barked at the green aba. The girl turned her head and the sayyid saw both the carpet in the lamp light and the girl sitting in front of the loom. To him it seemed as if the girl herself was a colorful design on the carpet.

  That year, too, had a dark night. When the first song ended in the dark house of prayer, the two arms of the green aba-wearing man stretched upwards, toward the skylight. The women on the rooftop pushed the young girl forward, and several women’s hands untied the girl’s innocent belt in the dark, which she then tied with her slender fingers to the skylight. The bells in her tresses tinkled timidly. That night a wolf would lick the blood of an immaculate lamb. And when the girl shrieked in fear in the forest, a pheasant that was asleep in its nest awoke and moved to another nest.

  In the morning, the sayyid read out new decrees. His every word was taken as sacred law in Sabu. And that which he announced to the girl’s parents was received like the word of a prophet.

  It was necessary for the carpet to be finished, because it was to hang on the wall of the sayyid’s house and the girl was to sweeten his bitter senescence. The incomplete designs came out tangled. In some places the colors were bright, as if they were on fire, and in other places they were dull, ruined. The girl’s fingers trembled whenever she held the colorful yarns.

  The dogs barked one more time when the horses turned their heads toward the south. The carpet was spread on a horse and on it sat the girl. The girl looked once more at her abandoned loom and at her mother. She saw her native forest and a tear dropped on the designs of the carpet.

  * * *

  The Arax now no longer spatters drops on green aba mantles. The forest of Sabu is still where it was. Black-bearded men continue to axe boughs and pluck wild pears.

  On the other side of the river there are Iran’s bare cliffs and sun-scorched plains. The villages are like green oases with hanging gardens through which narrow streams flow and mix soil with the muddy waters of the Arax.

  In the village on the other side of the river there is an old lady who puts a hand to her forehead whenever she washes a worn-out carpet in the stream and looks in the distance where the forests keep her native Sabu.

  The faded designs on the carpet sometimes suddenly light up in the water and, for a moment, it seems to the old woman as if she can hear the tinkling of those melancholy bells that had once hung from the tips of her youthful tresses.

  Alpine Violet

  To the memory of Arpenik Charents{8}

  All year round a cloud perches on Kakavaberd{9}—the toothlike battlement disappears in the white cloud, leaving only the tall towers to catch rays of sun. The ruins are not visible from a distance and it looks as if there is a guard above the towers. The iron doors of the castle are closed and it seems as though someone at the top of the tower is ready to call whoever ascends the cliff.

  And when the wind disperses the cloud, and the scraps of cloud dissolve above the valleys, the thorny shrubs on the walls become visible along with the tower’s inclined head and the battlement that is sunken halfway into the ground.

  There is silence around the ruins of Kakavaberd. The only sound there comes from the Basuta River in the valley, which scrapes its banks and polishes the blue quartz on its riverbed. The Basuta writhes on its riverbed as if a thousand hounds were howling under its white foam and biting the rocky chains.

  At the top of the battlement, kites and griffons have built their nests. As soon as footsteps are heard below the battlement, they squawk, fly out of their nests, and dreadfully circle above the fortress. Then the eagle with a beak like a crooked saber, talons like sharp spears, and feathers like steel armor soars.

  The only flower that grows at the height of Kakavaberd is the Alpine violet. Its dew is as red as the claw of a partridge and its flower is the color of apricot. The Alpine violet grows by the stones under the battlement. The stones warm up in the sun and when the clouds cover both rocks and battlement, the Alpine violet turns and leans its head against the stones. To the iridescent beetle that has plunged into the pollen, the flower is a cradle, and the world, one big apricot-colored flower garden.

  On the other side of the Basuta, on the cliffs in the valley below, there are several houses. Smoke rises out of skylights in the morning, twirling like blue ribbons and dissolving in the clouds. The cock crows in the warm afternoon, and with that crow the old inhabitants of the village yawn in the shades of their houses and draw patterns on the sand with t
heir canes, and with those patterns they excavate past memories in their minds.

  And both in the village and at the top of the fortress time goes by slowly. The same leaves grow on the same trees from year to year. That is also why the old men’s memories get mixed up. The river roars the same as always, the stones are the same, and so is the eagle.

  So many generations have lived by the Basuta, have laid thick patched-up felt on firewood, have enclosed tents with reeds, and every spring when the Alpine violet blooms below Kakavaberd, have driven goats and sheep to the slopes of the fortress, filled their bags with cheese and bit on millet bread and goat cheese in the winter.

  * * *

  One sunny afternoon three horsemen climbed up the cliff of Kakavaberd. Not only their clothes, but also their manner of straddling the horses gave away that the first two horsemen were from the city and had neither seen Kakavaberd, nor its cliff.

  The third horseman was their escort, and while the ones ahead tightly held onto their horses’ manes, practically bending over to keep their balance, the last horseman softly crooned a song, melancholy and doleful, like the desolate valley, the wretched cliff, and the remote village.

  The cloud perched on top of the fortress sometimes opened like a curtain, making the battlement visible, and sometimes closed, covering the top. The first horseman could not take his eyes off the battlement. In his mind raced the history of the fortress and the words written in manuscripts about the days of reign when armored horses clattered their hooves in front of the iron entrance and the adjutants returning from war and destruction waved their spears. Through his glasses his learned eyes saw the iron-clad soldiers and the parchment, whose reed pen concocted their glorification, and he listened to the ancient clatter of horses. How harsh the cliff seemed to him, the cliff over which the previous owners had clambered like chamois!

  When they reached the tents, the first horseman continued up the road. He was looking for the old path and neither saw the half-naked children playing in the ashes in front of the tents, nor the puzzled goats bobbing their heads.