The Dark Valley (20 page)

“It’s my mood,” he would say and order that they water in turn until he came.

He would walk along the stream to the closest dale where there were apricot trees. He would lie under an apricot tree or sleep in the shade of a cliff, or lie on his back and stretch his legs like a giant pair of scissors. It was as if someone had marked a cross under the apricot tree.

Tall Margar would look up at the bright blue sky through the branches of the tree. A white cloud, transparent and unique, would softly drift across the sky. To Tall Margar it was as if the sky was one large laundry basin with blue water, and the cloud an item of forgotten laundry in the basin’s water. Tall Margar would look at the puff of cloud: how softly it drifts, changes its shape, pouts its lips and then draws them back again.

If he could climb up the cloud, Tall Margar would be able to see his village hidden behind the distant mountains. He would be able to see the rooftops covered with reed, the poplars near the village, his apricot grove, and the low door of his house next to which there was a pitcher with water for the chickens.

Early each morning Tall Margar’s wife would open the small door of the henhouse and the chickens would run about cackling to the pitcher where the old woman would give them feed.

One of the chickens flew up and circled the air. When Tall Margar looked up through the gaps of the branches of the apricot tree it seemed to his aging eyes as if the chicken was in the sky playing with the solitary puff of drifting cloud.

…The flax had blossomed blue flowers and the apricot had yellowed. He was plowing, and the plow was forming furrows on the arable land. When he turned around, his eyes fell on the track. The old woman was standing by the rosehip bush beckoning with her hand.

“There’s been an upheaval in the village, man,” the old woman was calling out.

He untied the oxen and left the plow in the ground. In the evening, the oxen, exhausted from plowing, were pulling a cart loaded with household belongings to unknown places.

These were the days of eviction. The oxcart creaked day and night. There was dust on the road and puzzled faces. The villages had been thrown upside down. New groups joined the caravan along the way. The newcomers asked about relatives that were left behind and about the road they were on, but no one said anything definite. People felt even more puzzled by the uncertainty.

“I forgot to put out the fireplace, man,” the old woman said from the top of the oxcart.

Tall Margar thought about the present each time he saw his wife on the oxcart holding their grandchild.

“Sit tight, keep your eyes open, don’t let Torosik catch cold…”

Sometimes Torosik slept in his grandmother’s lap, and at other times he woke up asking confused:

“Grandpa, we’re still moving? What country are we going to, grandpa?”

And when he did not receive a reply from his grandfather, Torosik sulked, drooped his lip, and looked at the chickens dangling from the oxcart with their heads down.

The oxcart creaked for weeks. The dust on the road was endless day and night. The waters were different and so were the countries. No matter how much Margar drank, his thirst could not be quenched.

When they stopped to catch their breaths in a desolate desert, there was neither oxcart, nor twin oxen. Only small parcels remained. The sun had burned Torosik’s face and his skin was peeling.

The dust on the road had settled on the old woman’s hair, turning it yellow and dun. Margar noticed that the disaster had plowed new furrows on her face.

…Whenever Tall Margar said “It’s my mood” and lay under the apricot tree during the day looking through the gaps of the branches at the blue sky, at the white puff of cloud that submerged like a white cloth and pouted its lips, and at the birds visible only as tiny black dots circling the heights, he would remember the southern desert, the rows of tents, and the colorful shreds of cloth on the tents that the exiles had brought with them from remote villages. To Tall Margar, the few scattered trees in the desert looked like big brooms stuck in the sand.

“There are not even any stones here. Where have they brought us?” Margar’s wife moaned and regretted leaving behind the chickens and household belongings when she looked at the house keys every evening.

“If I had known, I would have taken them with me,” she would say.

One time Margar tried to talk about their child, but the old woman burst into tears, swallowed her sobs, wiped her tears firmly with her apron, and hugged Torosik very tightly. Margar did not say another word about their child.

Winter passed, but no one noticed the coming of spring. Stiff, dusty plants blossomed and then dried out. And with them the short-lived southern spring passed. The desert became bare again in the hot, fiery sun.

The people were gathered in groups and the hands that had pitched up the tents were taken away to build a new road. Margar, too, had to go. They worked all day, carrying back rocks and sand from long distances. Thousands of spades and pickaxes dug the ground every day to build the road. Margar worked alongside the others. There were familiar people from the village. They were preparing road metal, and when the sun slinked behind the mounds and the trees extended their long shadows, they returned to their tents to be back at the break of dawn.

Then one evening the old woman didn’t feel well and complained about something pricking in her heart. Margar got up to look for stones in front of the tent to warm them up and put them on the old woman’s chest. That is how they did it in their village. He looked and looked, but came back empty-handed.

“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…

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 rotten, 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.