The Dark Valley (7 page)

The entire village had gathered inside the threshing floor where the cattle had been tied up.

After the watchmen returned with the remaining cows they had fetched from the barns, the veterinarian said something or other to the villagers as he looked at them from behind his glasses with anger burning in his eyes and wagged his finger.

“He’s angry with those who have hidden livestock,” one of the villagers said.

And then the inspection, for which the villagers had been waiting impatiently, started. There was a feeling of doubt in the hearts of each one of them. Would their cow turn out to be sick? Time seemed to pass very slowly under those circumstances.

The veterinarian started at the end of the row. He approached each cow, looked at its tongue, its eyes, under its tail, then signaled the watchmen to separate the healthy from the diseased.

Peti was also present. He was standing at a distance, watching the veterinarian, the cows, and the villagers. No one paid attention to him in the bustle and it crossed no one’s mind that Peti’s heart pounded every time the veterinarian approached a cow and spent more time inspecting it than the others.

The inspection ended near the end of the evening. Twelve cows were declared sick. The only way to prevent the disease from spreading further was to cremate the plagued cows.

The villagers dug large holes in the ground and the watchmen urged them to hurry.

Many people were crying. Calves were lowing in courtyards, and so were cows. Those who were hastily digging deep holes with spades and picks felt the same amount of pain in their hearts.

Only the veterinarian was calm: this was routine business for him.

When the holes were dug, the sick cows were driven toward them. The watchman with the ten-inch long mouth used the blunt side of an axe to beat the brows of the animals. The animals winced in indescribable pain, lowed, and rolled into the hole.

Next, black petrol was poured onto the cows and trusses of hay were thrown into the hole. Finally, both petrol and hay were ignited. Together with the dark smoke of the fire the smell of fat rose into the air, and the wind blew the smell of petrol and scorched meat far away toward the mountains where the night dew settled on grass.

The calves in the courtyards lowed all through the night, and the village fell into mourning.

Peti, speechless and heartbroken, was standing in front of the fire, remembering the black cow whose udders were always hanging and whose fat milk dripped on its way home from the pasture.

When the fire died down, Peti returned to the village depressed. He wrapped himself up in his rug and lay on the old dry hay.

The orphaned calves continued to low, and Peti, with the old hay under his head, lay in his worn-out rug and cried like a helpless child.

* * *

The next morning Peti could not bring himself to look at the threshing floor, so he kept his eyes fixed on the ground as he passed it while driving the cattle. Zar’s sister was waiting by the source with a cow to be added to the herd. Peti did not reprove her as he normally would have:

“Poor cow, it doesn’t have any milk left.”

But Zar’s sister did moan:

“A misfortune is going to befall the village.”

The first few days were hard for Peti. He could not get the cremated cattle out of his head. His heart was broken and he was angry with himself for hitting the sick cow once with his crook at the foot of the mountain.

Time passed, and with time, the village forgot about what they had lost. And then winter came. As before, Peti was in the barns looking after the cows that had become fat. He was restless with boredom and couldn’t wait for the winter to end when the slopes of Mount Ayu would become visible again.

Winter was passing, and with it the melting snow allowed the grass to turn green. Whenever Peti saw the green, he grew younger and his blood boiled. But he had stopped thinking about the crippled old girl with the withered hand.

Zar’s sister had died and there was no one anymore to tell him:

“Get yourself a wife, good-for-nothing, and rebuild your father’s palace.”

Peti had settled with his cattle and had become used to their company. He had no other work to do besides the cattle, and his thoughts neither drifted from his cattle, nor from the mountains.

Only sometimes, at the break of a summer’s dawn, when the air was crisp and as transparent as glass, when the tops of distant mountains were clear in the blue horizon, and when the cattle were grazing at the foot of one of Mount Ayu’s slopes, did Peti sit on a high rock and look into the distance ahead of him at the vast field in the middle of which a remote village was enclosed in green gardens.

He had been there once, but he only remembered the remote village as a dream, as if he had never even seen it, had only heard of it through a tale during the long winter nights.

One evening, as he was driving the cattle home, he witnessed commotion in the village. It was a summer evening and the villagers were gathered in groups talking with each other as they made their way home after harvesting and mowing all day.

When he got to the streets of the village Peti heard someone say:

“Oh, heartless man, he won’t even become a soldier.”

A war had been declared and the village had been ordered to draft soldiers.

On any other peaceful working day no one in the city would have thought twice about the village that lay behind the mountains. But on this day, it was as though the village was tied to invisible ropes and a fist, an armed fist, was ready to strike the village.

Soldiers were taken from the village.

The first few months were full of joy and happiness. The first group of soldiers were led out of the village with drums and bells, but then, just as a swallow that appears in the spring, armless boys and boys with wooden legs started coming home. At the same time letters began to arrive with foreign and unknown words from soldiers in captivity in distant cities, and the village began to change its attitude toward the war. Soldiers were no longer sent off with drums and bells; many people cried, and the number of widows multiplied in the village.

Everything in the village had been turned upside down. Days had become years, poverty was on the increase, the price of bread was rising, and sugar had become medicine for the sick.

It seemed as though there was no end to it.

Peti tended his work with his head cast down. It would not be unfair to say that the village hardly paid any attention to him. The jokes from the old days were no longer told. The calf that had been born on the mountain no longer brought joy to the owner.

“Peti, bring some news, some good news, from the Germans’ prisoners.”

Peti shrugged his shoulders and left without saying a word. The wages had also decreased. People did not give as much bread as they used to. Instead of bread, many gave money—paper money—whose value Peti did not know.

Nobody gave away old clothes anymore. In fact, many were wearing worn-out clothes themselves. Peti himself sat under a lamp in the barn and passed a woolen thread through a needle in order to sew the old patches on his woolen overcoat. His rug had become close to useless, but nobody thought of giving him a new one. More often than not the supplier only had stale bread. The villagers sold oil and cheese at the price of gold. The rich and abundant days of yore had vanished.

And whenever Peti drove the cattle to the foot of Mount Ayu, he recalled Zar’s sister’s words:

“A misfortune is going to befall the village, Peti…”

He recalled her words and looked toward the city, but his slow mind could not put the pieces of the puzzle together and arrive at a conclusion.

Winter came. The cattle were in the barns, but it was not the way it used to be. It so happened that he remained hungry for days, working in the barns, but never being called for dinner by the owners. And he was too ashamed to ask for food.

Peti sat in the barn and listened to the cows ruminate, and felt the necessity to eat as well.

And then an old thought, as from his childhood memories, rose in his head and crawled like a green caterpillar. It was a secret thought from the old days about having a house of his own—the suppressed wish of building a home, which surfaced when he had eaten well—and the blood in his veins warmed up.

He smiled to himself. And, for a moment, the smile radiated from his pockmarked face, but then faded and died out. His head dropped, his eyes fixed on one spot, and his thoughts whirled in his head for a long time until sleep finally defeated him.

* * *

And then one day news came to the village that there was freedom, that the army was going to come home, that there was no longer a Czar, and that the war had ended.

A variety of people came to the village, said a thousand things, and held meetings. But the only thing that the villagers understood from all that commotion was that the situation was going to get worse and that new misfortunes were waiting for them in the days to come.

Soldiers were returning at night, with arms, but without guns. They hid in haylofts during the day and fled to the nearby mountains whenever they heard that someone was coming to the village to hold a meeting to form a new army.

It was autumn when news arrived that Armenians and Turks had turned against each other in neighboring provinces, that villages were under fire, that both sides had become fierce instigators, and that blood was flowing through the villages.

Arms outnumbered clubs in the village. There were machine guns and people spoke of cannons. Children talked of arms, and odd and even shots became part of everyday life.

Together with arms, pillaging was also on the rise. The village was no longer safe. People locked their doors more tightly before going to bed. There was theft in the courtyards—the village was clearing out old grievances by setting fire to the fields of neighbors and avenging troubles that had been kept hidden in peoples hearts for decades.

Almost every night guards roamed the village. New people had come to the village: chief and commander. They stayed in good rooms, demanded oil and chicken, and left the village for a few days to return with looted goods.

The village was huddled in fear. But food and drink was abundant in the rich homes, where the commander would get drunk and shoot about ten times out of the window into the cold winter air, causing the hot bullet to fizz. The village was terrified of the bullets and was on the watch, half-asleep, half-awake, listening carefully for the alarm until daybreak.

Only the cattle continued to puff and ruminate in the barns, just like babies who were rocked to a soft sleep under their covers without worries or knowledge of what was going on.

Peti did not get involved in the happenings in the village. He did not attend meetings and nobody asked for him. He was not considered one of the village men. No different than before, he slept in barns with the cattle or on the fodder in the loft.

A census was taken; lists were created and distributed in the dozens. And each time the villagers were asked who still needed to be added to the list, one of them would jokingly say:

“Well, Peti!”

The rest would laugh and the youth would crack jokes that Peti could serve as a good cannon gadfly. In the midst of this merriment, someone or other would have to step in and say:

“Joking aside, Peti is a very unusual man.”

Peti had changed. He had pulled himself back from the crowd, turned into himself, spoke very little, and rarely appeared among people. It was as though he had become an old man: his eyes had sunk in and the wrinkles on this forehead had multiplied. When he walked, his head drooped, as if he were looking for something on the ground.

Whenever Peti came up in conversations, some people suggested giving him a woolen overcoat or a rug.

“Look at his state. A refugee is better off than him.”

But the village had its own troubles, and there was no time to care for Peti.

Winter passed, the snow melted, Mount Ayu’s slopes became visible again, and Peti came to life.

Fresh herbs were starting to grow under the dry grass and the soil evaporated the dampness of the winter clouds. The water on the rooftops was dripping down and there was mud on the streets. The temperature of the spring sun was pleasant.

Peti drove the cattle to the pasture. This time, however, together with his crook, he also carried a rifle.

In all his life, he had never fired a gun. He had never even touched one. Peti truly did not want to carry a rifle, but he was coerced into it. The commander had gotten angry and had stamped his foot on the ground. Peti had broken into a sweat and agreed. The village was afraid that the cattle might be stolen from the mountain.

People laughed when a few young boys taught Peti how to work the rifle. Peti touched the rifle with fear and instantly drew his hand back, as if it were fire and he had burned his hand. And so he drove the cattle to the mountain every day with a rifle in his hand like a crook.

According to him, carrying a rifle was unnecessary. Everyone on the mountain knew him. There were other shepherds on the mountain and they ate together by the stream. Peti was convinced that his acquaintances would neither shoot nor approach his cattle.

On many occasions, when the heavy weight of the rifle bothered him, he would hide it under a rock as soon as he left the village and pick it up again on his way back.

The children of the village laughed at him:

“Peti, how many people did you kill?”

“Peti, where’s your rifle?”

Sometimes it seemed to Peti as if the commander had given him a rifle on purpose to be made fun of—to be laughed at. The thought bothered him and broke his heart so much that he pulled back into a corner of a barn in order not to have to see anyone.

One morning, as Peti was washing his face in the nearby stream, and the cows had gathered around him, he was told that he had to dig trenches on the mountain slope. The cattle were to stay in the village that day.

Peti was so dumbfounded that he forgot to wipe his face with his hat. The water dripped from his face. He considered refusing the order for a moment, but then he remembered that the commander would stamp his foot again.