The Dark Valley (15 page)

In the evening, Manas looked at the metal lock on the door and said to his wife:

“Wife, dear, we need a dog. We are at the edge of the village at the mouth of the path.” …Who was it that called out and said that Arakel should be the landlord? Someone called out at the meeting, and then another group joined, and finally they decided to divide the crowd into two camps.

“Those who want Arakel to be the landlord, go to the wall,” someone called out. A group of people moved to the wall. Soon after they were joined by a few more people, and when the “leaders” of the village pushed and shoved each other toward Arakel’s wall, the rest of the crowd followed them like sheep attracted to salt lick.

Manas’s legs trembled, and he shuffled his way toward the rest of the crowd like a limping sheep that had strayed from the flock.

“Let Arakel-the-Leader dwell in that house!” people called out left and right. Others threw their hats to the ground.

To this day people in the village talk about Arakel.

“He was a dangerous landlord. He was like fire to the touch. Who knows how many people were destroyed at his hands… In one hand he held the handle of a dagger and in the other a whip.”

They tell about how Arakel would go to the pasture at night and if he ever saw a sheep that had strayed into his or his neighbor’s field, he would slaughter it right there and then in the field. Shepherds in the mountain would drive their sheep a few yards farther back out of fear if they heard that Arakel was rambling the site.

And as the villagers recounted the story of Arakel, one of the elderly added:

“Poor Manas, too, could not escape from his hands. His house was left to ruin…”

* * *

Manas sometimes thought that Arakel became the landlord to revenge himself. He thought, but whatever he thought he did not share with anyone else.

And when his family and friends warned him again, “Manas, hide, the time for the sharp sword has arrived…” Manas did not want to give in to it and repeated what he had said before.

But Arakel did not show that he had a problem with Manas. From the day the landlord put a chain around his neck and dropped the copper lock in his pocket, Arakel pretended that he could no longer see Manas.

“Manas, keep your eyes open, Arakel will corner you unexpectedly.”

…When news spread that there were strikes in the cities and that a revolution had started, Arakel pricked up his ears. That same night sparks flew off his horse’s hooves. The constable reassured him.

“Stick to your regular work, people. It’s a messy year. And don’t let me hear or know that gallivanting people are coming here and holding secret meetings at night.”

He was afraid of his own shadow as if there really was genuine danger in the village and, a week later, Arakel went back to the constable’s house.

“Long live the constable, agitators are starting to appear in the village. Let me take about ten Cossacks with me to the village. They will only need to appear in the village once to terrify the people.”

The constable twirled his moustache around his finger and stretched the tip until it was under his eye, as if he wanted to poke his eye with it. As he twirled his moustache, his cheeks puffed out like that of a zurna player.

Arakel had not reached the village with his Cossacks yet, but everybody knew that they were coming. That evening, many did not light their lamps at home. Many also did not close their eyes until sunrise.

…Oh, splendid Cossack, why did you drink so much at Arakel’s house, letting the blood rush to your head and warm you up? Manas, if only your wife was not doing laundry that day and hanging it on the wall, because Arakel was pointing out your wife, who was hanging laundry, to the Cossack through the gaps of his fence. Cossack, have you forgotten that there are no dales in Dunyashayid country the way that there are in Orangia? And that behind the fence was the last time you licked your lips?

To this day, when anyone talks about Orangia, they always add an eyewitness:

“It was all planned. Arakel had the craft of Satan…”

“When it got dark, we locked our doors and went inside our homes. The Cossacks drank a lot and then went out into the streets. They sliced so many chicken necks with their blades…”

“They stole my heifer that year. What more can I say? It’s as if they ripped my eyes out…”

The villagers tell many things from that year when the topic of Orangia comes up.

Manas had gone to the forest that day. He had finished harvesting and it was time to thresh.

“And you wouldn’t believe how much crop there was that year! On rooftops, under walls; there were mounds…”

Darkness had fallen outside when suddenly a shriek was heard from Orangia: the sound of someone crying for help.

“My ear was on the shriek when I heard another shot. The sound made the valleys rumble. The dale of Orangia was burning. Flames billowed high into the sky.”

That night the entire village rushed to the dale, but it was already too late. The house, on whose rooftop and under whose walls there were mounds of crops, had burned down like a cloth dipped in petrol. When the fire died down, Manas’s wife and child were found lying charred alongside the Cossack.

“Oh, the evil that the village did not suffer! How many people did they not beat? What did they not do? They took Manas away. They did everything imaginable, but he refused to give in. He kept saying that he was innocent, that he had not killed a Cossack. And the Cossacks were convinced that they had seen Manas kill one of theirs. Ah, things like that…”

When Manas was put into a carriage headed for distant tundras, it was in vain that he looked for an acquaintance in the bustle of the station.

“He left. As to what happened to him after that, no one knows…”

… But the wind brought seeds, and on the ruins of Manas’s house a rosehip bush began to grow. And each spring lots of roses bloom in Orangia: yellow and white.

Mrots is a unique world, and when you walk along the edge of its valley and ascend one more mountain and descend into the next valley, it is as if the last mountain served as the border of a familiar world, whereas opposite the mountain, downwards, lies a desolate land with forests in which bears gather wild pears and roll to the thick-trunked oak trees in the moonlit night pawing each other on semi-dry leaves.

To someone visiting the valley for the first time, it all seems peculiar. But keep following the path and don’t hold the horses reins too tightly. Instead, let the horse guide you to Mrots as it sniffs the path.

And when you pass by the rapid of a rivulet and see gardens on its banks, then you should also hear the bark of a dog, especially if it is daytime. The dogs of Mrots are vigilant—their fangs have often pierced the hide of wolves.

When the horse hears the bark of the dogs, it pricks up its ears, clatters its hooves against the stones of the path, and instinctively thinks of its stall full of barley.

No matter whom you ask, no one will tell you why the village is called Mrots. The priest might concoct a story of how in the “lawless” warring days, many centuries ago, their ancestors fled from another country and found shelter in this distant valley. The priest might also tell about the escape, but it is doubtful it ever happened, and he will not be able to show any evidence except for the oral accounts from conversations by long gone dead old men.

The only thing known for certain is that Mrots has been in one place for a very long time, and when you examine the thick walls of the houses and the uncut stones, you are left with the impression that, since time immemorial, the mountains of Mrots were formed, creating concave plains in turn so that the snow on their peaks could melt and flow down into the valleys. When the mountains were formed, a piece of cliff was put aside for the inhabitants of Mrots to be born onto—inhabitants who sowed wheat in the fields, domesticated wild chamois that bounded from rock to rock, and learned, through generations of trial and error, how to make butter from yoghurt. That will be your impression, because Mrots is far and forgotten, and its path is hard and overgrown with green grass.

You do not need to climb up the church’s roof to see how many valleys there are beyond Mrots. If giants lived here at some point, those valleys would naturally have been nothing more than streamlets to them.

Perhaps there were never any giants and it was the streams from the mountains that gradually scraped the skirts of the mountains over the centuries, rolled down boulders, fretted rocks with their frothy waves, and dug deep precipices where there are virgin forests. And in those forests there are as many virgin bears as there are forests; that is, if virgin means unseen by mankind.

In these valleys there are also superstitions and the sources of demons and evil. And even now, there are many common people in Mrots who hold their breaths frightened as they walk past the mossy caves in the forests and carefully press down the dry leaves with their moccasins. If they hear even the slightest creak, their knees begin to shake, even if the slightest creak came from the dry firewood under their moccasins.

And in the winter, when many branches break under the weight of snow, people in Mrots sit around a fireplace where an old man, who has carried firewood on his shoulders a thousand times, begins to tell how at night, as he passed through the forest, a sound caught his ear, possibly a woman’s, a very familiar woman’s, who called him with a light voice that resembled the voice he uses to spur his horse with…

He tells the story and dangles his feet above the fireplace. Why should he care that his granddaughter has curled up in her grandmother’s lap with half-closed eyes in fear, not sure whether she should listen to what her grandpa is saying or go to sleep in front of the warm fireplace? And even if she repeats by heart the words of the village Komsomol (and there are not many Komsomols in Mrots yet), “We are free, we are free,” her one ear is still tuned to her grandpa’s story, even if she heard at a meeting that the demon of the forest is non-existent, an invention, a superstition.

* * *

Mrots naturally has a village council and the council has a chairman. But in no speech whatsoever will he say what you will see if you live in Mrots and leaf through its ancient history book.

Above the village there are old caves in whose shade lie calves that have strayed from the herd. There are uncut stones arranged in a circle in the middle of which there is one big flat stone that is sprinkled with salt for the sheep. The people who extracted those stones from the cliffs and rolled them all the way above the village had perhaps never even seen any sheep. Mrots does not know anything about the history of those stones, except that since long ago the circle of stones has been known as a “place of worship.”

Mrots has narrow streets and small streams that flow through those streets. The cattle that return from the pasture wash their mucky hooves in the street waters and every morning and evening the waters turn sludgy, as if it were wastewater flowing from the streams.

In the middle of the village there is an ancient church and on the church threshold there are century-old droppings. Sheep gather to rest in the shade of the church and drop their waste before going up the mountain. Over the years the waste has accumulated, heaped up, and many women have kicked the waste aside with their bare feet, opening a path to the church door to kiss the cross stone on it.

Not far from the church, in the middle of the village, there is a reading hall—an ordinary shed, which could have had a hayloft, with planks laid out on stones inside and several posters on the walls.

It may seem a little odd to the human eye that the houses in the “place of worship” have remained intact until the coming of the reading hall, even though there are only a few newspapers in the hall, on account of the village having only a few literate people. It is as though the pagan fireplace, the cross-bearing church, and the new reading hall know the history of thousands of centuries from the day that man, hard as a rock, appeared for the first time in the valleys of Mrots, drove the hairy bear out of its cave, and sought shelter there for himself instead.

If you ask about it even to the scholar of Mrots, he will look at you stumped, unable to give an answer. And then he will boast that “in the course of Czar Nicholas’s three-hundred-year rule,” Mrots did not provide a single soldier. Birth certificates were falsified so that no one from the village would have to “go to Siberia, become Russian.” You will be told that every year, during military conscription, a blind and a bald man appear at the military office under this or that false name in order to free Mrots’s shepherd, or someone sells everything he owns to bribe his son free from military service.

The people of Mrots will tell other surprising stories, and you will be amazed to know that to this day many households in Mrots celebrate a different New Year. They call it “Navasard,” and they will tell you about how they get up on the eve of the pagan Navasard, burn their lamps, and eat by the light.

* * *

It was a big event for Mrots when one day a machine was brought pulled by horses.

The chairman of the council recited by heart the letter that had been sent along with the machine: “We are sending a trier: we request, under the immediate responsibility of the chairman, for the machine to be guarded until further notice.” And because the paper was sealed with an official stamp and written in a respectable manner, the chairman took out the manual from the opening and wrote in it: “Take from here the machine that has come to my village until further notice.”

If an elephant suddenly leap out of the woods of Mrots and stood in front of the church, the villagers would hardly be surprised. The old person would try to make everyone think that the elephant was in fact a large bear, and the villagers would believe it.

But neither in the forest, nor in the valleys, had a single old person ever seen a machine. And when the chairman saw a gluttonous crowd around the machine, extending their hands toward it and pulling them back in fear, he considered it his duty to disperse the crowd.