The Dark Valley (11 page)

The first thing the villager did was to fortify the vegetable garden. Many stones: ornamented stones with pomegranates and bunches of grapes—stones, whose inscriptions had faded in places because of the sun and the wind. Whatever fell into his hands he used to build the wall—a Urartian type of wall—piling them up as tall as a human being. Then he took hold of a shovel and began to dig. Pieces of tile, broken jugs, and stones came up from under the ground. He chucked aside the broken jug with his shovel, cleaned the stones he needed for his vegetable garden, and rolled the rest of the stones down the valley.

When evening fell he sat down on a rock and smoked. A breath of fresh air rose from the valley and stroked his sweaty brow. He smoked and looked at the semi-erected walls of the monastery and at the cross stones. The old St. John the Baptist Monastery seemed redundant to the villager. What a nice vegetable garden it would become, with melons and watermelons! For how many years had the ground of St. John the Baptist Monastery been completely useless?

If only an earthquake would hit again, just like before, so that all of it would fall into the valley and the site of the monastery would be forgotten. He would come out of his vegetable garden, expand its walls, clean out all traces of the monastery, and incorporate the old graves with their headstones half-buried into the ground and their inscriptions now almost completely faded.

He would take the royal graves within his boundaries and plant onions and garlic on them. He would also plant an apricot tree, whose roots would descend deep into the ground, digging inside the royal bones, which in turn would yield tasty fruits.

The monastery would not cast a shade on his vegetable garden…

People in the village talked about him behind his back. They talked about St. John the Baptist Monastery and that he should not be allowed to build a vegetable garden, that the site was historical—a sanctuary. But people in the village also talked about the fact there is no vegetable garden anywhere in the village and that the villager was fortunate enough to have found suitable land. They talked, and then they fell silent.

The villager’s wife did not approve of what her husband was doing, but she did not complain. Early in the morning she went to the monastery, kissed the cross stones, lit two yellow candles as thin as her fingers, kneeled to pray, but left when she heard footsteps.

It was the bell-ringer. He had come to take a bale of stacked hay from a nook of the monastery. The bell-ringer had not seen a lit candle by the door of the monastery for a long time. He blew out the candles and put them in his pocket. They would come in handy in the evening when he would be feeding the cattle hay in the barn.

* * *

To the villager, stuffed sweet peppers were tastier in the winter. He ate, gulping down large chunks, and extended his plate to his wife.

“If there’s any left, put some more on my plate…”

The sweet pepper burned his tongue and warmed his stomach. He liked the sweet pepper that had grown out of the vegetable garden where the monastery had once stood. And not a single abbot in centuries past had received as much peaceful pleasure during the winter days as the villager did from the planted sweet peppers in his mouth.

Sometimes he would go and look at the trees he planted. The threshing floor and hayloft would be finished in a few years and, in the summer heat, tired from threshing, he would be able to lie down at the foot of one of the trees. The breeze from the valley would bring the coolness of the waves of the Kasakh, and fruits would grow in the summer sun.

But that’s not what happened. Fruits never grew.

A piece of paper arrived which said that St. John the Baptist Monastery is historical and that it is prohibited to cultivate the land, to plant trees, and use its stones to build a house.

In the spring, when the snow melted from the skirts of Mount Ara like the year before, the land was parceled. Piles of stones were placed on the ancient grounds to demarcate the borders of the villages. The trees in the vegetable garden were uprooted.

And everything that he had thought about the spring before while standing on the edge of the cliff and looking down on the Kasakh, about having a threshing floor, a hayloft, and a home behind the walls, melted away like snow.

He took down the hanging door.

The goats once again climbed up the rickety walls to chew on the shrubs that had grown out of cracks. They bounded from one stone to another. And when a piece of cement fell, an echo rang under the vaults, causing the pigeons to fly up, circle the air, and descend again.

When the villager took down the door, he looked at St. John the Baptist Monastery. To him the monastery on the edge of the cliff seemed useless, and the sweet pepper from the vegetable garden tasty…

There is a village with twenty hearths that carries the name of Drmbon. Every morning smoke billows out of twenty chimneys and rises toward the sky as yoghurt soup is heated on fires.

Drmbon has picturesque valleys and steep precipices as sharp as skewers. The picturesque valleys are filled with echoes of shrill donkey brays—thump, thump, thumping. And when the echoes reverberate from one valley to the next, goats stop chewing on the fresh green leaves of shrubs that grow in the cracks of rocks. Instead they prick up their ears and look down into the abyss of the valley and bleat.

There is a village—Drmbon—far from any road. It has no schools, but it does have one priest: Father Maruk from Khnus. When the Pasha’s turbid migration wave crashed against Drmbon’s valleys years ago, it left a mark in the picturesque valleys after it receded; namely, Father Maruk from Khnus.

It all happened in exactly the same way as it is told in children’s tales: “The sky ripped apart and a piece of it fell on my tail.” And the piece that fell on Drmbon’s tail was Father Maruk.

For one or two months Father Maruk was ill. Then he expanded his lodgings and became Drmbon’s parish priest. “We shall be your flock, and you our shepherd,” the people of Drmbon said. Father Maruk was living in the good days, relishing like a caterpillar does on tasty cabbage and filling his emaciated body with fat from blessing the fields and performing the liturgy.

In Drmbon there is a woman, Gyulbahar-the-Widow, who is the caretaker of two orphans. Her house, which is located at the edge of the village, is one of the twenty hearths and one of Father Maruk’s twenty parishioners. Gyulbahar, a divorcée; Gyulbahar, a name that means “spring flower.” If the inhabitants of Tlkuran lived in Drmbon, they would probably say this about Gyulbahar:

“It’s spring again, it’s spring again,

And again there is news of love”

Instead of the inhabitants of Tlkuran, however, it was Father Maruk who thought about what a soft skin Gyulbahar had. The priest grew fatter, the blood in his veins began to boil, and at Easter, he gave her a relic and discreetly stroked her cheek.

One year passed. Two years passed. It was Gyulbahar who washed the priest’s undergarments and sewed patches on his cassock. The priest would wait until it was dark—until the night was moonless—to go to Gyulbahar’s carrying his undergarments under his arm.

One, two: the mental urge becomes physical and every time on his way home from Gyulbahar’s Father Maruk would stroke his beard, which was specked with white streaks, with more delight as he smacked his lips. Flies calm down in a similar way after they have licked a forgotten grain of sugar on a table.

* * *

One day a member of the Komsomol
{3}
came to Drmbon. He spoke, said a few words, and a group of youth in Drmbon saw him off. The following day a chapter of the Komsomol was established in Drmbon.

The village had been unhappy with Father Maruk’s visits to Gyulbahar for quite some time. The unhappiness had reached considerable heights. Drmbon could not believe that a priest, aside from knowing the taste of the fields he had blessed, knew the taste of Gyulbahar.

Drmbon—without having seen the face of the patriarchal carriage. Drmbon—without holding an iron plow. And the chapter of the Komsomol—with old traditions and ancestral honor. One problem, like a pillar, stood in front of the youth.

“Shall we let the immigrant priest crush the honor of our village in this way? Shame on him!”

The Komsomol roared, and the Illuminated elderly echoed back. Yakhshi, the head of Drmbon, set to work to arrange the capture of Father Maruk.

Father Maruk was careful and discreet, but in the darkness of his room his pleasant desires “awoke, rose, and descended, became a field…”

It was not working. He could not take it. And then one night, “in the heat of the moment,” he sent his neighbor’s child to call for Gyulbahar to fire cup his back in order to cure his cold. The child called on Gyulbahar and stole away to inform Yakhshi.

The clay lamp was burning in the priest’s house and Gyulbahar hung the rug out of the window with her own hands. And when she blew out the clay lamp, Yakhshi put a lock on the door.

It was as if a bear had stuck its paw in a beehive in the hollow of a tree. That’s how loud the noise was that Drmbon made in the middle of the night. Women stood on rooftops pointing their fingers at Gyulbahar, and a hundred eyes glimmered under leather hats as clubs were swung in the dark.

Father Maruk growled like a trapped bear and crossed himself in the dark of his room. Outside, Drmbon flushed like wild spring floods, causing the valleys to roar at the sound…

“Oh people, respect his rank as a priest…” Mukhsi, one of the respectful, honorable village elderly, called out.

Yakhshi pushed back the noisy throng and guarded the priest’s door until morning. And until morning, the youth talked near the house, making plans as to what to do with Father Maruk.

In the morning, in the village square, under the shade of the oak tree where calves rest after returning with the cattle from the fields in the summer heat, a decision was made in a village meeting to remove Father Maruk from the village.

For three days what had happened that night was spread by word of mouth like an echo in the valleys. Close and distant neighbors spoke with each other:

“I went to cover the skylight and I saw that the priest’s lights were out. I leaned out of the skylight and heard whispers. I knew that the priest was prostituting Gyulbahar. At that instant, Yakhshi put a lock on his door.”

Another embellished the story even more:

“I ran over to the priest’s house and saw from a distance that she was knocking on the priest’s door. Then I saw a shadow move up from the right side of the house…”

* * *

And then one day a note arrived addressed to Yakhshi calling him to court. Who had been taught the possibility of taking Father Maruk’s case to court?

Again there were meetings and again there was noise, like that coming from a kite’s nest on the edge of a cliff, in Drmbon.

“The entire village is a witness. Let’s remove Father Maruk from our village!”

And the caravan moved forth to the court, clamoring arm in arm and swinging clubs the whole way.

Drmbon was not yet familiar with the status of the court. And after the caravan had entered the court, Mukhsi, who had called out that night to respect the rank of a priest, saw Father Maruk hunched over on a bench in one of the corners of the court. And Mukhsi asked: “Is this your seat, Father?” and began to look at the pictures on the walls. An assortment of pictures hung on the walls of the lighted courtroom. There was a poster announcing the distribution of dairy products and one with a winged camel flying in the air with the caption “Vanish Imperialist War.” That is how it had been printed, but the court’s messenger had glued the word “court” on the word “war” so that it now read “Vanish Imperialist Court.”

The inhabitants of Drmbon looked at the decorations on the walls. Mukhsi poked Yakhshi: “Look at what a pretty cow it is…”

The judge read out the indictment, and when Yakhshi complained that they did not understand what was meant by it, the judge explained that the council was accused of self-willed and illegal imprisonment. It was as if a jug of cold water had been poured on Mukhsi’s head and he stared dumbstruck at the walls and then at the judge. He clutched his hat with his dry fingers and asked himself:

“How is it that Father Maruk breached the honor of the entire village, but now Yakhshi is found guilty?”

When the judge asked Yakhshi whether he considered himself guilty, Mukhsi stepped forward:

“The guilty one is the priest…”

Yakhshi, Mukhsi, and the inhabitants of Drmbon all spoke. One of them said that it was the women of the village who had persuaded the rest to do something about Gyulbahar, because otherwise:

“We, too, will learn from her…”

That is how the women of Drmbon had said it.

“What sort of a woman is Gyulbahar? Is she clean aside from her behavior, or not?” the judge asked.

An inhabitant from Drmbon with an aquiline nose and a nasal voice called out from his place:

“Can we even keep Gyulbahar from that path, let alone turn her away from it?”

Another one, a true inhabitant of Drmbon, who crossed his chest as he spoke and meekly bowed his head, answered the judge’s question as to whether he had seen Gyulbahar with the priest before:

“I saw her one time.”

“What was she doing?”

“I can’t say. My tongue won’t let me speak.”

“You haven’t told anyone else about it, have you?” “Well, I have a soul to give. I told three people in secret. If they spread it to the rest of the village, then let the guilt be on their heads.”

Then the village shepherd was asked—an ignorant, foolish man with his hat in his hands; basically nothing more than a rock with two legs.

“What’s your name?” the judge asked.

“Me?” he answered, drawing out the vowel and stretching time.

“How many children do you have?”

“Me?” he said, gathering his thoughts, as if he were counting his children for the first time.

“What do you know?”

“Me?” he replied, and said that Father Maruk had entreated the people, “Oh people, let it be, I’m an old clergyman, spare my white beard,” after he had been caught.