The Dark Valley (16 page)

“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…

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 the 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.

“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.