The Dark Valley (10 page)

There were mossy cliffs in the forest, as well as bear dens and age-old oak trees that had been knocked over by the wind and had mushrooms growing on them. The partly dried branches had become covered in moss, and in the semi-darkness it seemed as if hirsute bears were standing on their hind legs.

Suddenly an explosion was heard from a shotgun opposite the cliffs. The thunder shook the forest, causing the dew on the yellow flowers to drop like pieces of metal on the foliage covering the ground. The night bird flapped its wings in the darkness.

Who could it have been? It was not the sound of a rifle, and there was no other shotgun like that in the village.

“Who could be hunting?” he thought.

Leaves rustled. Uncle Dilan hid himself and kept quiet behind a stone. He saw a pheasant, calmly pecking the ground for food, moving on its blood-colored claws and digging through the soft leaves of the linden tree with its beak.

Uncle Dilan raised his head to find his target, and laid down the barrel of his rifle on the rock. But, suddenly, the pheasant flew away and, behind it, another, then a third, then a fourth…

The pheasant is a cautious creature: it will not allow itself to be shot easily. Sometimes it moves so close and in such perfect position for the hunter, but the slightest rustle, or even a deep breath by the hunter will cause the bird to open its wings and fly away faster than a bullet, crying and circling the dense foliage to softly land somewhere else. The pheasant is a cautious creature. When it pecks food, it cocks its neck, hunches over left and right, and cocks its neck again, looking all around itself.

Uncle Dilan came out of his hiding place and continued on his road. He was already at the heart of the forest—trees had formed impassable barricades here and there. For hundreds of years leaves had fallen one on top of another. They had never been exposed to the sun, nor had they rotten. Tree trunks had become buried under piles of leaves, and their branches, like the wings of a brood hen, had spread for blue mushrooms to grow in their shade.

Uncle Dilan trampled the dried leaves, burying them deeper, like he had done with the hay in the fields. He stumbled a few times on his way and caught himself on branches.

When he reached a spring, he bent over and drank with relish. Next, he descended into the valley of linden trees.

There were many pheasants at the bottom of the valley, on and around rocks… The sun had warmed the mossy rocks, and a golden-feathered pheasant with black dots on its wings was hopping from one rock to another, calling, pecking its neighbor, and circling around a female.

He aimed. The valleys thundered with a dreadful echo as soon as the flint let out a spark and out of the spark exploded gunpowder, pushing fire and smoke out of the barrel of the rifle. The pheasants spread their wings, their soft wings, and flew toward a shade away from the autumn sun’s golden rays.

One of the pheasants was flapping around. It had fallen from the mossy rock onto the bushes.

Uncle Dilan ran to it, and as he ran, he apprehended a white dog leaping toward the bush with its tongue sticking out. Together with the hunting dog, Uncle Dilan’s hands groped for the bloody pheasant.

His fingers touched the yellow feathers, but the wounded pheasant suddenly flapped its wings and flew up. Two feathers circled down like yellowed leaves falling in the autumn.

Uncle Dilan watched the bloody pheasant with regret when all of a sudden he heard the sound of footsteps close to the dog. He turned around and his eyes widened in surprise as he instinctively slid the rifle behind the tree.

It was the forester—with eyes like fiery red coal…

He neared, bawled angrily, and only calmed down after he had whipped Uncle Dilan’s shoulders until a burning sensation, like the sting of a nettle on bare skin, covered Dilan’s shoulder blades.

The forester was angry with Uncle Dilan and whipped him for letting the pheasant that he had shot get away.

The forester’s hunting dog looked back and forth between his master and Uncle Dilan. It snarled, tapped its tail on the ground, and then opened its mouth and yawned, tired from all the agitation that had taken place a little while before with the bleeding pheasant flapping around.

The unexpected meeting perplexed him… Uncle Dilan finally came to his senses after they had left. He looked at their backs and remembered the dog’s red snout…

Uncle Dilan was sitting on a rock. His face twitched in pain. His back felt as if it had been singed with hot pokers, and beneath one of his eyes he felt the heat rise from the beating. Uncle Dilan thought a long time, his eyes fixed on the pheasant’s two feathers. A deep bitterness and sorrow ruined his otherwise wonderful day.

… The sun was playing hide and seek with the evening clouds. There was silence in the forest. The pheasant had flown far away… On the mossy rock, there were two feathers: yellow with black dots. On the dry branches of the bush, there were drops of blood.

Uncle Dilan descended into the valley.

At times the pheasant seemed like a dream to him, but the wounds of the whip burned and he felt pain under his eyes, and his legs shook lightly.

He held the hot barrel of the rifle in the same way that he had groped for the pheasant’s body and felt its soft feathers with the tips of his fingers. The pheasant’s body, with its warm feathers, was just like Sona’s under her sky-blue blouse.

He did not go home. He descended to the garden along the stony path. The small door of the winepress creaked. He entered and lay down on the stone floor.

Uncle Dilan woke up when the morning sunbeams shone through the cracks of the small winepress door. He rubbed his eyes and felt the pain under his eye. The swelling had not gone down yet.

That day he crushed the black grapes in the stone trough more angrily than ever. He did not even feel the sweat roll off his brow and drip into the murky wine…

* * *

It was autumn, a bright autumn…

Uncle Dilan was sitting in the sun in front of the winepress with his head buried in his chest thinking about the past.

In the summer following that autumn Sona died at childbirth. Her mother, husband, and friends cried. Another girl replaced her presence and Uncle Dilan got married. But in his memory Sona would remain forever indelible, and so would the winepress, the sky-blue blouse, and the silver corn leaves.

The cemetery was on the opposite slope of the hillock. Moss had grown on Sona’s gravestone and sand had filled the engravings long ago. The stone had tilted and the ground had swallowed it.

Sona was laid to rest in her sky-blue blouse. By now, the sky-blue has decomposed, and so has her body that was like golden moss…

Countless autumns have passed since that day. He knows that he has grown old. When he walks, he leans on his cane. His eyes are unable to distinguish the autumn colors of the forest and his hearing is no longer sharp enough to hear light footsteps.

The brooklet in front of the winepress murmurs day and night as it talks endlessly and sleeplessly with the moss and the stones…

Uncle Dilan looked toward the brooklet and smiled. That day twinkled in the peaceful abyss of his memory like a lone star in the dark sky—that day when Sona dangled her shins in the brooklet and laughed…

Then his memory slipped along the path to the forest.

There were pheasants in the forest. One of them flew away drenched in blood, leaving two feathers on the soft moss. Sona was like a pheasant with eyes like black grapes—years before, on a sunny autumn day, when his sinewy legs were crushing grapes with the weight of copper ingots, and the pure wine dripped little by little through his toes…

Sona flew away like a pheasant and left behind her grief and sad memories.

… Uncle Dilan got up, pulled back the door of the winepress and fastened the metal lock until the following spring. Then he bent over, picked up the bundle of dried twigs and stalks with difficulty and slowly walked to the garden door with his weary and elderly feet.

There was no one left in the garden.

Only the dried corn stalks rustled in the evening wind and the dried leaves gathered restlessly in corners here and there, fluttering despairingly as they silently fell and laid to rest in the dark hollow.

The prince walked along the bank of the Kasakh River right where it flushes down a steep precipice, crashing its turbid waves against cliffs and scraping them as it buries its course deeper and deeper into the cliffs. The prince climbed up the high cliffs and decided right there to build a most magnificent temple.

Perhaps the story didn’t go exactly like that. Perhaps it was a bishop who had walked past the spot and wished to a see a monastery on the bank of the Kasakh, soaring like a lord on the edge of the cliff with windows looking down on the valley and the waves of the river with its foamy rapids as he contemplated the sight of scholars reading hymns and psalms under the monastery’s vaults, pealing bells, and the abbot, deep in his prayers, forgetting the world and the princes concubine…

The stones of St. John the Baptist Monastery do not tell us what happened.

But on the stones there are inscriptions that tell us that St. John the Baptist Monastery had winepresses, a vineyard, an oil-press, and a watermill, and that lords, “for the salvation of the soul,” had offered the monastery villages replete with bull-calves and forests abundant in herbivorous game, and in those villages they had settled pagan commoners. The stones of St. John the Baptist Monastery remember this.

The prince walked along the edge of the cliff in the seventh century, and when he announced his wish to his adjutants, he did not think that centuries later only the Kasakh would remain together with the cliffs of the valley and the common villagers who had carried the massive stones of St. John the Baptist Monastery on their shoulders.

Centuries went by and the villagers multiplied. And there, where there had been forests with herbivorous game, only rocks and soft ground remain, because lavash is indispensable for the villagers.

The land dried like the womb of a barren woman. Of the brooks, only memories remained, and of the small dales, only legends from the old days that there was a time when foamy brooklets flowed through the dales and deer stooped to drink from their waters.

The villagers grew in number, the trees of the majestic forest became beams in haylofts, the haylofts burned down, the inhabitants found shelter in caves, and when the sun shone once again on the peaceful vaults, the villagers came out of the caves, wheat sprouted out of the soft ground, and the villagers once more began to multiply during the cold winter nights in their underground houses.

When the brooks began to dry up, the last vines were hewed, the mounds were leveled, and the winepresses became abandoned. Rain, snow, and wind came. The rain beat against the walls of the winepresses, and the winepresses got knocked to the ground and were leveled just like the mounds in the vineyards.

The winepresses, too, became only a memory, just like the seventh-century prince.

On the roof of St. John the Baptist Monastery, thorns began to grow, cracking the age-old cement and displacing the stones. And, during an earthquake, the dome collapsed and its stones fell into the Kasakh, foaming the river and filling it with the same stones that the villagers had lifted and carried on their backs centuries ago.

At the crack of dawn, old ladies kissed the charred stones in the monastery more passionately than before, while goats bleated and nimbly bounded over the fallen stones onto the roof of the monastery to chew on the shrubs that had grown through the cracks of the roof.

Years went by. The villagers held on to their native pasture very tightly. They curled up when they were beaten and retracted into their shells like snails do when their slimy tentacles touch something repulsive: the Khans soldiers, the synod’s taxes, the constable’s whip.

The villagers lived huddled together within the walls of St. John the Baptist Monastery, sowing wheat into the arid ground, eating pancakes made from the wheat, producing fertilizer from fodder and the waste of hidebound oxen, coating the stones on the Urartian walls with the fertilizer, and keeping jars of pickles in their pagan ancestors’ graves.

* * *

Last spring, when the snow was melting on the skirts of Mount Ara and its slopes were becoming exposed, and when the turbid snow water was flowing down in narrow streams toward the valley of the Kasakh, a villager from St. John the Baptist Monastery, whose ancestors had carried stones for the monastery in the seventh century, set his eye on a strip of ground inside the walls of the monastery.

The villager walked around the collapsed stones of the monastery, looked at the sacredly carved stones, and contemplated building a threshing floor and hayloft with the stones of the monastery and using the patch of land for a vegetable garden. And when he leaned over to see whether there was a road to fetch water from the valley with jugs for the thresher in the summer heat, it did not cross his mind that his seventh-century ancestor had stood on that same cliff wishing to see a vaulted monastery, and that the abbot had looked down on the turbid waves of the Kasakh from the same precipice and had missed the prince’s concubine, had missed her and had read psalms.

It was cool on the edge of the cliff—the cool breeze pleased the villager. The wind could easily blow away the threshed husks. And how wonderful it was that walls had been built around the monastery in the old days! The surrounding goats would not be able to enter and graze the herbs in the vegetable garden. Behind the walls, next to the threshing floor and hayloft, he would build a house on top of the precipice and live out of the sight of a neighbor’s gaze.

At home in the evening he fell to thinking once more. He weighed the wish he had had in the afternoon and found it good. He thought it imperative to start planting trees immediately on the next day, to dig the vegetable garden, and to hang a door where the wall had collapsed so that goats would not be able to graze the herbs in the vegetable garden.