The Dark Valley (14 page)

If a sick person wants some honey or a sour apple in the winter, he will knock on Osep’s painted gate.

“I don’t have any,” he’ll respond, and “What did you want? A few apples,” or “The bee didn’t do its job this year.” But if you offer a good price, he will say: “Hold on, let me see,” and run down the cellar.

The spacious courtyard is at the front of the house, which has four lighted rooms with hinged windows. In the rooms there are carpets on the floors and walls, two fine beds, a white copper samovar, and cups and plates.

Osep was a shopkeeper once and did business in the village.

It is from those days and from the war years that he kept his carpets and filled his trunks, which he hides in a corner of the cellar.

With the coming of peace, his house has filled with things every year. He takes out what he has already hoarded and continually adds new things to the pile.

He is called “blind wolf” in the village. If conversation ever turns to Osep, a youth will have to say:

“And the things he keeps in his shed…”

* * *

If you look at him, if you slap him, he’ll bore into the ground like a tick. He looks as emaciated as a horse that has been fed on fodder only. He has protruding cheekbones, he is short in size, and he has a hump on his back that bulges out a little. His face looks like a worm-eaten potato, his eyes are beady, as if they were poked at with a stick, his eyebrows and beard are conjoined, and it is impossible to tell the difference between the hair on his face and the wool on his hat.

Yet, he is a miser. He has four horses and his own plow, which he bought first hand. If he wanted, he could have oxen to yoke for plowing… But he doesn’t only plow; he also mows, and for that, he has two oxen in his barn.

He doesn’t keep what he earns. He gives change and gets interest in return. Or he distributes seed in the spring and gets double in return from the thresher. If someone in the village ever thinks of butchering a sheep in order to sell its meat but doesn’t have enough strength to do it himself, Osep always befriends him. Sometimes he buys the sheep at a cheap price and then slaughters it himself.

If he hears that someone has beams or stones for sale in the village because he has no strength left to build a new construction, Osep will be on top of it with smacking eyes negotiating the price. And how well he knows his neighbors’ weak spots! If he sees a willow, he’ll stop and look at it out of the corner of his eye, and mentally calculate how much timber it will produce. And when he sees the owner of the tree, he will say:

“My hayloft is missing a beam. Sell your tree so that I can buy it.”

Even though the tree is still rooted, it is already his, and he will keep it rooted for a year, or maybe two—it doesn’t matter, since it only grows thicker as time goes by.

He also sells leather. He collects fox fur in the winter and sells it in the city.

A miser does not clutch traditions. Osep, too, does not attend church.

If the village Komsomol allowed it, he would work one of his sons into their ranks.

“It’s only the tax that’s oppressive. We can’t take it.”

It is tax, and the row of problems related to tax, that the miser does not understand, no matter how much he racks his brains. And in his mind he has convinced himself that it is the average man who is the troublemaker.

Whenever a census is taken by people from the city and an inventory is made of all the goods, possessions, and grounds, Osep feigns poverty, and with a downcast head he says:

“I have… there is… why… long live this government.”

And if the statistician asks him one by one about the horses, oxen, and cows, Osep stutters at first and then makes him write down less than what he has: one horse, two donkeys.

But then he sees that instead of writing what he has said on the tax form, the statistician has written what he owns. That is why he says that the average man is a troublemaker.

If a youth complains during a meeting and says:

“Osep, brother, if you have, give,” Osep becomes furious. He raises his voice to the sky and starts telling that which he has already told a thousand times and the listener has already heard a thousand times: that he is lying.

What does he say?

He says that the poor man is lazy, that he himself works all day, that the shop he owned did him no good, that they are mistaken to think that he is well-off, and in the end he says:

“I give tax the size of the village to the government! What more do you want?”

If he doesn’t say that, then he says that he supports a couple of poor households and that they are living under his wing.

Neighboring Osep’s house are a few poor households whose women wash wool at his house, bake bread, or do some other chores. Osep’s herd boy is always at their house; he steers the plow and looks after the cattle.

If there is an urgent job to be done, Osep calls one or the other from the courtyard.

These households are poor. Each one of them has either an ox or a cow, two bits of land to till a day, and a house full of eaters.

After finishing their work for Osep, they do odd jobs here and there for different people in order to survive.

That is why Osep claims they are living under his wing, but the listener knows that that is not true. It is Osep who has attached himself to them like a leech and makes them work for a slice of bread.

“But why do you shake when we say sign a contract with the hired hand?”

If they say that, Osep really does begin to shake. He will get up and leave the village crowd.

* * *

The messenger walks over the rooftops calling for a meeting.

One by one the villagers gather in the schoolyard and seat themselves under the wall on the ground or on stones.

The meeting is about tax.

A friend from the city talks about this year’s tax and explains why it is insufficient.

The people listen carefully and then ask questions. They ask whether they have to collect like before: a lot from the rich and a little from the average man.

Osep is also at the meeting.

He does not miss a single meeting—he is the first to speak, working on avoiding the main point with parables in order to dig out what he wants to know. If he decides not to ask a question himself, he asks someone else to do it for him.

And at each meeting, when the subject turns to tax, he always says the same thing:

“Collect tax from the poor too, if only a twenty-cent coin, as long as you collect it.”

Collect it, he says, because by not paying taxes, the poor get accustomed to being lazy and having their problems accepted everywhere.

That is a peculiar view for one whose honesty Osep has never doubted.

The poor take their problems to court to avoid paying taxes. That is why the poor go to court so often and put pressure on those who are well-off.

Either that or the poor villager is convinced that the government will collect from the rich to give to him, and that is why he does not want to work on becoming rich, on becoming the owner of the wealth that he built for himself.

In short: an entire point of view with only one practical solution, which he would lay on the table at every meeting when the subject turned to taxes.

“Collect money, if only a twenty-cent coin, from the poor.”

And one time Osep proposed to the chairman of the council to appeal to the government to ask for permission to distribute the tax collected from the village among the villagers themselves.

“They don’t want a hundred coins from the village? Let them want two hundred coins, as long as they tell us: share those two hundred coins among yourselves.”

The chairman of the council laughed.

“Don’t say that somewhere else, brother Osep, or you’ll get arrested.”

Until now he has not mentioned it anywhere else, but he has also not forgotten it.

* * *

The arrival of the herd dispersed the crowd at the meeting. Everyone hurried out to make room for the cattle.

The chairman’s cry made no difference:

“The meeting is not adjourned yet! Are there any questions?”

The cattle were a “question in itself” for the villagers.

“Oh, man! Is this a way of conducting a meeting?” the chairman grumbled, as he walked toward his own cows, because the call from the rooftops had already begun.

There is a saying in the village that if you want to know who owns what in the village, you have to ask the cattle herd. He knows best what everyone has.

The cattle herd came to the meeting after dispersing the cattle in the village to attend what was left of it. But everyone had already gone, except for me, and I was sitting on a stone.

“Is Osep a miser?” I asked the cattle herd.

“But of course. It’s a well-known fact that he is a miser. Whose cattle do you think that is?” he answered and sat down next to me, tying the laces of his moccasins.

“His greed is boundless. He walks around with his mouth wide open to gulp down any sandwich of the poor that he sees. But in the end, he’ll be left with nothing.”

When I asked him what he meant by Osep being left with nothing, he shrugged, took out a pouch of tobacco, tapped a bit of it into the clay bowl of his pipe, struck a flint against steel, put the stem in his mouth, and sucked on it, smacking his lips.

“We all know how he will die… He won’t stop until his last breath…”

Then he told me a parable about an avaricious villager who was told that however far he managed to walk on foot from sunrise to sunset, that was how much land he would be given. The man began to walk and walk. And as sunset neared, he began to walk faster.

Right before sundown, out of avarice, he stretched himself as far as he could to conquer the piece of land on which he would lie down as well.

The cattle herd ended his story and reached for his crook to leave.

Then, abruptly, he looked at me and said:

“Only that spot that he’s lying on will be his. Osep-the-Miser’s, that is…”

Each spring in the dale of Orangia, rosehip bushes grow and wild roses bloom: yellow and white. The cliffs of Orangia heat in the spring sun and lizards with yellow belly skins lie on warm rocks flicking out their tongues.

In the days when Manas’s home was inhabited, there were no rosehip bushes in the dale of Orangia and shy lizards did not fleet about on the walls. Instead of wild roses, there were cucumbers in the vegetable garden.

Only one narrow path joined the dale of Orangia with the village. That path no longer exists today.

“Manas, why did you build your house in Orangia? Didn’t you know that Davoys’ Arakel also had his eye on the dale where snow melts faster and the grass under it grows quicker?”

Davoys’ Arakel, wearing his ox leather moccasins, looked out of the corner of his eye one morning at the dale of Orangia, where two calves that had straggled from the herd were grazing, and decided to build a palace for himself there.

However, two weeks later, it was Manas who was pouring cement in Orangia with his trousers rolled up, standing in mud up to his knees while a carpenter stacked cut stones.

Arakel was not in the village at that time. When he returned he caught a glimpse of the constructed wall and got angry, but kept his indignation to himself to face Manas with it in the morning and start a fight over Orangia.

“As soon as you know that there’s no judge or court around, you start to grunt,” said Manas. “I must build this house in Orangia, Arakel…”

“Manas, know who is standing before you. I’m Davoys’ Arakel. And whose whelp are you?”

And right there and then he hit Manas on the head with a club. A brawl ensued; there was rumpus and ruckus. Manas was carried home soaked in blood.

And Arakel looked at those who were leaving and those who were sitting on a log against the wall, threatened them, and went home.

They heard, they saw, but not one of them uttered a sound. They were afraid of Arakel: they whispered that Arakel had ties with the “gendarme,” that he was spying on the village, and that he was the right hand of important functionaries.

“Arakel is an informer, just like his father. He takes after his father.”

The feud between the two houses had existed for a long time.

For Arakel, the house that was being built in the dale became a thorn in his side. Sometimes he would look through the gaps of his fence at the walls of the house or at Manas passing cement to the carpenter with a cloth around his head.

Arakel looked from behind the fence and regretted that the club had missed Manas’s temple. The walls of the house were rising and with it the anger in Arakel’s heart reared like an unruly horse. Under his woolen hat his thoughts crawled like worms, sickening worms swarming dead flesh.

He decided to visit his acquaintance the constable. He brought oil and honey for him and an Easter lamb with a painted forehead for his son.

“Manas, hide, Arakel has gone to see the constable.”

But Manas’s water mill continued to grind last year’s grain.

“But you know, don’t you, that there is a person above the constable? If necessary I’ll knock on his supervisor’s door…”

Arakel came and went. He walked past the dale of Orangia with his head cast down, frowning. Vengeance was in his heart and his eyes refused to see anything else.

Manas built a house. He covered the roof with wood and hay and moved his wife and child from his old paternal home by way of the path and adjusted them and himself in his new home.

It is said that it was on one of those days that the constable called a few influential villagers to his house and said to them, wagging his finger:

“You won’t get away with not choosing Arakel as the landlord.”

Many claim that the constable never said those words, but that it was a rumor spread in the village by Arakel’s supporters.

Manas was in the middle of digging out a vegetable garden when the news reached his ears. His eye caught the ground and he froze for a moment with a stone in his hand. When he put the stone down, he realized that Arakel would have to revenge himself somewhere.