The Dark Valley (8 page)

So he went with the others to dig trenches on the slopes of Mount Ayu.

It was a cloudy day in spring. It was drizzling softly. There were spring flowers and the sweet fragrance of green grass in the dampness.

Peti put his food under a rock and started to dig where the commander had told him to. Someone else was digging a trench quite far from him. Next to him, there was another person digging a trench. And, as such, on a cloudy day in spring, belts of trenches appeared on the flowery slopes of Mount Ayu.

Peti dug with inexperienced movements as sweat rolled down his pockmarked brow like droplets of mercury.

Suddenly the clouds drifted apart and made way for the spring sun to appear between the clouds, and the fragrance intensified. Peti leaned against a rock and sat down to rest.

In the distance, the hidden village in the gardens seemed like an oasis in the middle of the field.

The lowing of a cow, coming from the direction of the village, reached Peti’s ears. He looked and heard the low again.

“My dear stag, you’ve been kept hungry,” he said to himself and decided to drive the cattle early in the morning to that side of Mount Ayu where the grass was tasty and abundant.

He was leaning against the rock and looking at the opposite hills. The sunbeams illuminated some sort of greatness in Peti’s long-suffering, copper-colored face, and his sunken eyes were filled with infinite compassion and innocent love for the grass, the cows, and the flowery mountains.

… A few sporadic shots were heard from the opposite hill. Peti craned his neck and pricked up his ears.

And suddenly he fell into the trench, face-first onto the wet ground. He fell like half-dry grass falls when mowed from the bottom with a sharp scythe.

Was it a stray bullet or a crazy wish lying in wait that had flown from a distance with a hot bullet that spilled the contents of Peti’s skull onto the green grass?

When the commander came to look at the trench, he saw Peti lying face down. The newly dug soil had sucked in the red blood.

He was buried in a corner of one of the trenches.

The village had too many worries of its own to cry over Peti. Only the cattle in the barns lowed in the mornings, missing the grass on the mountain.

And the night rain washed away the drops of blood Peti had left on the grass…

* * *

Now there is a patch of land on one of the slopes of Mount Ayu where the grass is lusher and darker than the rest. Under this lush grass lie Peti’s wasting bones.

Even though it is called the Apricot Field, there is not a single apricot tree there. Thorny shrubs like spiky brooms protrude on the riverbanks and in the cracks of the rocky cliffs. The two main advantages of the Apricot Field are that it serves as a shelter against the wind and that it has a river running through it. At the beginning of each spring, when there are snowstorms and winds with rainfalls in the mountains, shepherds drive their sheep to the valley and give them shelter behind the bare rocky cliffs of the Apricot Field. The goats chew on the thorny shrubs and the sheep graze with their heads in each other’s rears. Neither the fragrance nor the snowstorm compels the sheep to raise their heads.

The Apricot Field would have nothing of value to be remembered by had it not been stuck between the endless fights of the two villages Mir and Mrots, had it not been a topic of contention, and had the two neighboring villages, Mir and Mrots, not fought each other countless times with clubs and crooks over the course of years.

Both villages were on the left bank of the river. Mrots was above, Mir below.

Both Mrots and Mir had the same number of households and, in the old days, when they fought with clubs over the Apricot Field, it happened that one year Mrots won, and the next Mir, or that both returned to their villages defeated, because more or less the same amount of blows had been delivered with clubs on both sides in the name of the Apricot Field.

Both Mrots and Mir kept sheep. There was a church in the above village and a church in the one below. Very often the bag of insults opened around the same time. In the above village, some of the elderly would sit against walls, toss cornel branches toward Mir, and curse.

“Who on earth would want to live in Mir? If you burned it down, you wouldn’t even smell it. They knead their dough in our wastewater…”

It was perfectly plausible that around the same time the elderly of Mir were cursing the village above and keeping the vengeance of their ancestors alive in their young. But they could not say that if you burned down Mrots you wouldn’t even smell it or that they knead their dough in wastewater, because even a child in Mir knew that the river flows from above, passing through Mrots, where garbage was disposed, ashtrays were emptied, and cows, oxen, and the hooves of horses were washed. The brides and girls of Mir knew this very well too, which is why they ran to the river at the break of dawn to fetch water before it got sludgy.

Mir’s children also knew that the river flowed from above, but it would take a while before they grew up and understood what the elderly in the above village meant when they said that if you burned down Mir, you wouldn’t even smell it.

Mrots had goats and sheep, and so did Mir. But in Mrots there were people who had as many sheep as the size of Mir. It was possible to drink fresh water from the river early in the morning when it was as clean and cold as the water that the village above drank, but Mir did not have as many cows as the above village. Whereas Mir’s emaciated cows tugged at the hay that had grown in the cracks of rocks, Mrots’s cows buried themselves in the fresh grass as their full udders rubbed against flower petals and carried back pollen to the above village.

It was the latter that the children of Mir had to know about. When they had grown up they understood that the oil reserve that was kept in clay jugs was connected to the grass on the mountain. After they had understood what the disagreement over the Apricot Field was about, they pricked up their ears, clutched the handles of their clubs more tightly, and ran to the Apricot Field with the others as soon as they heard a cry for help that the shepherds of Mrots had driven their sheep and cattle to the valley.

And even in the summer heat, when the grass had dried and the soil had cracked, the restless cattle could find a shade to stand in and cold water in the river to cool down with. And after the sun had set, the cattle could find a little grass in the Apricot Field to graze, and the goats could find leaves on the thorny shrubs to chew.

* * *

Nobody in neither Mrots nor Mir knew when the hostility between the two villages started over the Apricot Field.

If the villagers in Mrots were asked, they would come up with a thousand and one arguments as to why the Apricot Field belonged to them, how they had blueprints drawn by hand and documents to prove the fact.

“Here it is. I have drawn the border over there on the hill with my own hands…”

“I remember that my father’s sheep used to stay the night in the Apricot Field.”

“Mir’s border is much farther from the Apricot Field than ours… the field is our native land.”

Naturally, the people of Mrots said much more, and more than three villagers spoke when asked about the Apricot Field. The villagers jostled each other as everyone worked to make their way to the government official and tell him what was on their minds, to confirm that what he had heard about the Apricot Field belonging to them was true. Some villagers would even go so far in their stories, would invent such scenarios, that even their closest neighbors would not believe a word they said, but would keep quiet anyway, and laugh inwardly while nodding outwardly so that the government official would believe them. After all, wasn’t the argument over the Apricot Field? Over the thorny shrubs that grew on the riverbanks and over the further expansion of the village borders?

But the disagreement could not be settled by merely talking a lot and raising voices. When the government official was ready to leave, the people of Mrots would secretly collect a sum of money between them that the government official, who had come from the city, alluded to during dinner the night before.

“It’s for your own benefit that I’m saying this, you know. It’s not for me.”

The government official also went to Mir. The village below worked to welcome him even more grandly. They collected possessions from here and there: a clean pillow from one house, the best carpet in the village from another. They decorated houses and warned brides not to leave a single speck of dust when cleaning the rooms. They humbly bowed to their visitor and ushered him into their houses.

They tied up the visitor’s horses, gave them fodder, and obediently smiled with common wretchedness at the government official’s guards, hoping that if they treat the guards well too, they could benefit from the endless feud over the Apricot Field.

In Mir, too, people raised their voices. They knew what the above village had said and they refuted the story about the “blueprint.” One of the villagers would approach, show a gash in his head and tell how the villagers of Mrots had hit him with clubs. Another villager would push his child through the grieving throng, pull up the child’s pants and show a dog bite on his leg.

The child would look at the government official in awe and fear as the father tightly held the child’s leg and lifted him so that the government official would have a better view of the wound. But the government official would shift his eyes from the wound on the child’s leg to the colorful carpet on the ground and put a price on it in his mind, comparing it to the bribe that Mrots had promised.

And it was not unusual for the people in Mir to roll up the thick carpet and take it to the city to the government official’s house the next day to keep Mrots in a bad light. In Mir, too, the villagers secretly taxed themselves, giving the price of the carpet to its owner so that brides and daughters could make a new colorful carpet in the winter nights and tell of age-old mischief.

If it so happened that the visitor agreed to see the Apricot Field in person the following day, practically all of Mir would go with him, some on foot, others on horse. The intellectual and influential people of the village would hold the bridle of the government official’s horse and tell him again about the Apricot Field and, with the same drive as the intellectual and influential villagers, the village messenger would tell the same to the government official’s guards.

It was unheard of that someone would not tell the government official an old tale in broken Russian on the way to the Apricot Field about a rich man who had a hideous wife and a beautiful maid who both went to the mountain to milk the sheep and were confused for one another by the Khan’s servant, who thought that the beautiful one was the Khan’s wife, and when the Khan arrived, the servant pointed to the hideous woman and asked the Khan astonished: “Long live the Khan, has she been brought to be married off as well?”

And in telling that story, the story-teller would have to ask whether the grounds of Mrots were comparable to the grounds of the Apricot Field, but the government official would only laugh loudly, and a few simple-minded villagers from Mir, who knew the tale by heart, would take the government official’s laughter as being favorable for Mir.

In this fashion many years came and went. Hundreds of government officials took oil, cheese, and carpets, and allocated the Apricot Field according to what they received. Sometimes Mir would get the Apricot Field, and at other times Mrots, which created a well of arguments and fights, causing the two villages to reopen the can of worms over the Apricot Field every year as leaves began to sprout on the thorny shrubs…

The Soviet days came.

After the enemy’s panic-stricken troops retreated from the provincial capital, the exhausted Red Army soldiers lay down on national Soviet divans and the army headquarters deemed the city conquered together with remote valleys, including the one in which Mrots and Mir lay.

It was neither necessary to send troops there, nor cannons. A local agitator traveled through the valleys and told of that which the villages in the valley had heard.

As soon as news arrived that among those who had fled from the provincial capital were those who felt the same as the former government officials about how to solve the dispute over the Apricot Field, both villages kept their ears to the ground for news in those new days with the Apricot Field in mind.

When the preaching agitator arrived in Mir and gave a lecture for the people who had gathered in the spacious threshing floor, swinging his hands in the air and angrily repeating the words “bloodsuckers, beasts of prey” a few times, many villagers in Mir took that as referring to the above village. After the lecture was over, the villagers stood around the visitor and asked about the fate of the Apricot Field. The visitors answer, “the land belongs to the worker,” left the villagers in doubt. After the agitator left, some villagers interpreted his answer as being in favor of Mrots.

The same lecture was delivered in Mrots. There, too, the villagers listened to him with perked ears, and when the agitator spoke of equalizing the land, the multitude moved. Even those whose thoughts were elsewhere started and approached the speaker. Many people were listening to him, but at that moment there was not a single brain in Mrots in whose folds the history of the Apricot Field did not come to the forefront. After the speaker had finished, many talked about the Apricot Field.

A few people in Mrots talked through the night on the rooftop underneath which the agitator was sleeping under a warm blanket.

“So, what do we do?”

“He won’t take anything. He’s angry…”

“So we let him leave just like that? But that won’t do any good…”

In the morning, the villagers wished the friend, who had come from the city and straddled his horse to visit the next village, a nice trip. They walked over to him and shook his hand.

When the villager who had said “it won’t do any good to let him leave just like that” the night before on the rooftop wanted to move to the right side of the horseman and put that which he was clutching in his hand into the visitor’s hand as he wished him goodbye, he caught the horseman’s eyes and his half-extended hand fell into his hat from fear and so did the money that was in his hand. After the horseman left, he took off his hat. The same day, the crowd on the rooftop chided him, but he merely shrugged his shoulders and said: