Aksel Bakunts (1899-1937)

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Dear readers,

I would like to use this thread to share some of my translations of Aksel Bakunts's short stories with you. Bakunts was an Armenian author who wrote at the turn of the Soviet revolution in the 1920s and 30s. Sadly, he was executed by firing squad in 1937 by the Stalinist regime. I will post a slightly longer biography below.

I hope you enjoy reading these works as much as I enjoyed translating them. If you have any critical insights or objections with any of my translations or parts thereof, I encourage you to leave a note. I am always open to corrections and emendations.

I will strive to post a translation about once a month.

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Copyright notice:

All of Aksel Bakunts's works are in the public domain.

To be clear, I am not the author. I am, however, the translator. Therefore, whatever text you see below has my copyright. If you wish to share these translations on other websites, please refer to my name or link it back to this thread. I work very hard on each of these translations and it would be nice to be credited for that work.

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Biography:

Aksel Bakunts (Alexander Stepani Tevosyan) was born in Goris, in Russian Armenia, on June 13, 1899.

After secondary school, Bakunts studied agriculture in the Ukraine and became an agronomist traveling through the provinces of Armenia and providing help and knowledge to farmers and villagers. Around the same time, he also worked as a free-lance journalist, reporting events in cities and villages, and as a teacher in village schools.

Bakunts started writing short stories in his teens, but it was only in his twenties that he began to take his craft more seriously. His first bundle of short stories appeared in 1927 under the title Mtnadzor (Dark Valley). In these stories, Bakunts chronicled life in rural Armenia just before and right after the Communist revolution. One of the greater themes running through most of the stories is that of the hapless villager caught between powers beyond his or her control. In these stories, Bakunts is critical not only of old traditions that make unnecessary victims, but also of politics, Czarist and Soviet, for brutally altering the lives of people who had, until then, a very naïve and protected experience of life and the world around them.

Bakunts wrote prolifically between 1926 and 1937, mostly essays, short stories, and novellas. In 1937 he was arrested by the Stalinist regime on charges including nationalism and estrangement of socialist values. He was executed by firing squad after a twenty-five-minute trial. His works were banned in Soviet Armenia until the 1960s. In 1976, the first of four volumes of Bakunts’ body of work was published in Soviet Armenia. The other three rapidly followed suit. Besides Mtnadzor, they contain the following collections: Sev Tseleri Sermnatsane [The Sower of Black Plowed Land], Andzreve [The Rain], and Patmvatskner yev Patkerner [Stories and Images]. Bakunts is now considered a canonical writer in Armenian literature.

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Aksel Bakunts: "Dark Valley"

The only path leading to Dark Valley closes off with the first snowfall--until spring, no one sets foot in its forests. However, even now there are dense forests in Dark Valley where no one has ever been. Trees fall, decay, and in their fallen places new ones grow. Bears dance and whistle like shepherds; wolves howl, pointing their snouts to the moon; boars dig the black earth with their tusks, gathering autumn’s rotten acorns.

Dark Valley is a very peculiar place: virginal and wild, to say the very least. It seems like one of those forgotten places from an era when mankind did not exist and the fossilized dinosaur felt as free as the bear does in our days. Perhaps the world was like that in those days, when immense layers of coal came into existence, and the imprints of plants and reptiles long since become extinct remained on those layers.

Now, in Dark Valley, there are lizards with dark green skins that have never seen a human face and are not afraid of mankind. They lie on rocks in the sun; for hours on end, you can watch how the skin of their belly beats and, like a weak vein, you can catch them. The lizards of Dark Valley do not flee from human beings.

The mountains of Dark Valley are high, and it is because of them that even during the long summer months the sun provides a few hours of light to the forests of Dark Valley. And when the sun begins to turn toward the west on the distant horizon, the shadows of Dark Valley rise and impenetrable darkness sets in under the foliage. The bears come out to hunt, the boars descend to drink water, the eager wolf howls from its lair with its yowl echoing a thousandfold through Dark Valley.

When night falls, the natives of Dark Valley come out to hunt. The bears eat pears, paw each other, roll about on dry leaves, and take cover when they hear the wild boars approach. The bear knows the strength of the wild boar's tusks, so it will not attack at once. If a weak boar straggles behind the rest, the bear will slice its soft throat with one blow of the paw, devour a few bites, cover the carcass with wood and dry leaves, place a rock on the pile, and turn away grunting, until the carcass begins to decompose.

If, by chance, the boars hear the squeals of the strayed boar, their tusks will shine like sharp swords, and all the bear can do is awkwardly clamber up the oak tree. Like raging horses, the boars will neigh, plow beneath the oak tree with their tusks, and bash the tree trunk. The elderly forest ranger of Dark Valley saw the skeleton of a boar one spring, its tusk driven to its root into the trunk of the tree, and in the hollow of a branch, a dead bear cub.

The forest ranger, Panin, resembled a wild boar. He was a monster dressed in the garb of a forest ranger with a cockscomb hat. He would appear in the forest without warning, stand near the lumberjack, and watch how fast he axes the tree. Suddenly he would come out of his hiding place and roar so loudly that even the bears would wake from their sleep and grumble in their dens. All the terrified lumberjack could do was either flee or contort like a snake under the blows of Panin’s whip.

Panin was a hunter. He had six dogs, one fiercer than the other. He would go hunting with them in the depths of Dark Valley. On moonlit winter nights, when no one would come near Dark Valley out of fear, Panin’s dogs would wrestle with the bears in the forest clearing or chase startled wild goats. Panin would run after the dogs, shrieking with delight. The nighttime hunt was a familiar pursuit for him.

Come daybreak, spurts of blood would appear on the snow; here and there jumbled traces, the carcass of a strangled wolf, skin in shreds. Panin would sit by the hollow of a tree until the dogs finished eating their quarry.

He would not touch any killed animal, and after the dogs had had their fill, he would return home. On his way home, if he caught someone carrying stolen firewood, Panin’s dogs would attack him and make him run until the sweaty, bloody man found cover.

This is how Panin was. His terror had spread far and wide, and stories were told about him by word of mouth. No one knew either his nationality, or his religion and ancestry. They said that he had been an officer, that he had killed people, done time, and then gone to the forests. In one of the northern forests, he had supposedly killed his wife on a night out hunting or, more precisely, he had ordered his dogs to maul his wife.

Such were the stories that were told about the forest ranger Panin.

* * *

Avi had a good reputation as a hunter in the village. He would gather part of the food for his household table from the depths of Dark Valley. He hunted pheasant in the forest clearings, and partridge and quail near the fields. He set up traps for foxes, and sometimes he went into the depths of Dark Valley and sat on the butt of a rock for hours until the boars approached the
water.

Avi would aim accurately, and the bullet of his rifle would gash the boar’s fat flank. The boar would tumble, dig its tusks into the ground in pain, tear up roots, and fall to the ground, grunting.

And when he was not afraid of Panin, or when he knew that Panin was not in Dark Valley, he would lift a bundle of firewood on his back and hide it somewhere, to take home in the evening.

On this particular day also, Avi had gone hunting. There were fresh tracks in the snow. Avi followed one of the tracks, and just as he ascended the top of a hillock, he saw two foxes. However, by the time he was ready to shoot, they fled. That was a bad sign for Avi: it meant that the hunt was not going to be successful. He walked a little more, saw the tracks of a wild goat, looked around, but could not find it. And because on that day Panin was not meant to come to the forest (he had heard that the forest ranger was ill), Avi judged it a good time to take home a bundle of firewood.

Evening was closing in when Avi laid the firewood on a rock and sat on a stump to catch his breath.

A hunting dog appeared, sniffed Avi, and moved on. Avi’s breath was cut short. A second dog appeared, then a third, and behind the dogs, Panin, as if he had grown out of the ground.

The snout of one of the dogs was as coarse as canvas. The snout of another was as red as a beet. Panin sputtered like one of the bears in Dark Valley, and when he raised his whip, Avi hunched over and covered his head with his hands. It seemed to Avi as if Panin’s hand had turned to stone and the whip had frozen in the winter evening’s cold air. Panin pulled back his whip, and when Avi raised his head, it seemed to him as if a demon were cackling in Dark Valley.

Avi was dumbstruck by the choice. He was either to pay a twenty-ruble fine for stealing wood from the forest or kill one of the bears of Dark Valley. After Panin repeated his proposal one more time, he pulled back his lips and let loose with a deafening laugh. Avi jumped up, left behind the bundle of firewood, and retraced the road by which he had come to Dark Valley. Not a single bear in the forest matched the fee of Panin’s fine.

Avi looked for cartridges in his rifle, tucked the woolen flaps of his overcoat under his belt, and tightly drew his shepherd’s hat onto his head. He walked as lightly on the snow as a bear does on dry leaves.

Avi looked back once; neither Panin was in sight, nor his dogs. The moon looked like a big snowball and its light was reflected in the snow crystals. Avi could clearly see the tree trunks, the road he was on, and the big fallen boughs.

He went down the valley and heard water gurgling under a sheet of ice. The sound of the water reminded him of a boiling cauldron, of home, and of a lit fireplace. His family was probably already waiting for him.

He heard the sound of a twig breaking behind him. It sounded as if it had snapped under the heavy weight of the snow. On his way up, Avi felt as if someone were following him. He turned around and saw a bear the size of a man standing a little farther back with a branch resembling a shepherd’s crook on its shoulders.

Avi aimed his rifle, and when the bear, foaming at the mouth, flung aside the branch it had been carrying and fell on all fours, the rifle thundered, the valleys echoed the sound of the shot, and snow fell from the tree branches. The bear bellowed. Through the smoke of his rifle, Avi saw the bear bound as it extended its paws toward the barrel of the rifle.

An unequal fight between man and beast began in Dark Valley. The bear punched with its paws, trying to push the man to the ground. Avi was trying to protect himself with one hand from the bear’s blows, and with the other to push the barrel into the bear’s jaw to fire one more time.

The bear leaped to its hind legs, kicked the snow, fell down, and got up again. Suddenly it put the barrel in its mouth and began to chew it. Avi’s hand glided along the rifle and pulled the trigger blindly, making it thunder one more time. The bear bellowed louder than before as it fell on its back and rolled down like a snapped bough. When it reached the ice sheet, it got to its feet and tried to climb back up.

Avi fired a third time. The bullet hit the snow and fizzed like glowing red tongs on a cold anvil. The third time was also the last time the rifle thundered. Avi could not understand why the fourth bullet would not fire.

The bear bellowed and leaped to its feet once more. Avi felt the warm breath of the injured beast very close to him. He bent over, and when the bear sank into the snow, Avi ran back, staggering in the thick snow and climbing up. The bear was after him. Avi was running and jumping over thick boughs. Twigs scratched his face like sharp talons, and he slipped and scrambled up again. To Avi it seemed as if all of the beasts of Dark Valley were after him.

At one point, his shepherd’s hat got torn off by the thorns on one of the branches. At that same instant he also felt a heavy blow to his back as a hirsute paw dug its claws into the skin of his nape. Someone fired a gun, but Avi felt nothing.

Panin was laughing demonically as he stood with one foot on the bear’s carcass.

* * *

Avi lives to this day.

Cringing back, you can see him sitting in a corner, making leather shoes for different people, hidden from the rush of the street.

Avi wears a woolen overcoat and leather shoes. He has an average body with healthy hands that dexterously punch holes in leather and make knots from its strands. But on his average body, instead of a head, he has a skull, wholly peeled, without hair, without skin.

With one blow of the paw, the bear had dug its sharp claws into the soft skin of the nape and, with all the wrath of an injured bear, it had pulled off the skin of the skull, and with that the skin, the hair on the head, the brows, the eyes, and the nose.

Avi does not have lips. You can see his teeth through the cracks in his bones. His nasal cavities are bare, and when Avi speaks like a mute, his breath also comes out of the cavities. In his eye sockets there are bits of dried flesh that look like withered apricots hanging from a tree.

His ears are all that have remained intact on his skull. You can look, but you won’t be able to tell whether Avi is young or old, where his voice comes from, whether he is even human and not a scarecrow, and whether there is perhaps nothing other than a skeleton, without flesh and body, underneath his woolen overcoat.

Only his hands have flesh and skin. His fingers move skillfully, and if you mention Dark Valley, you'll see him stick out his teeth even more and utter crackling sounds from his throat.

And you will never know whether the old hunter is getting angry or whether he is smiling.

1926

[Proofread and edited by Aris Sevag from Ararat Magazine]

© Translated by Nairi Hakhverdi

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Aksel Bakunts: "Vandunts Badi"

Everybody in the village knew Vandunts Badi.* They knew that his house was on the road to the pasture, not quite near the water mills yet, but by the Atanants’ great walnut tree.

Badi was the village cowherd. He was the first one up in the morning and it was his voice that resounded through the village streets.

“I’m taking the cattle! Hey! Oh, people, don’t be late…”

The villagers had become as accustomed to his call as they had to the rooster’s crow. To know the time, they would often say, “Badi did not take the cattle while I was on the pasture, did he?” or “As soon as Badi called, I jumped out of bed.”

Badi himself could not remember for how many years he had been a cowherd. He only knew that during the year of cholera he had been conscripted into the army as a soldier but had stayed in the village instead. In those days there was no water mill yet by the Atanants’ great walnut tree.

No one knew the pasture and mountains as well as Badi did. He had walked the mountains and valleys countless times with his cattle . He knew his herd very well too: he knew who owned each cow, whether one of the cows had grown a new spot, how many calves there were, and why the Karaments ox had a broken horn.

When he drove his cattle from the village to the pasture, he only needed to look back once to tell instantly which cow was missing from the herd.

When he returned the cattle to the village in the evenings, Badi would stop at the spring where young brides and girls gathered, and tell them:

“The sorrel is ripe on Mount Pear-Rock and the dewberry has blossomed by Sand Spring…”

In the evenings, after distributing the cattle in the village, Badi would lean on his crook and return to his home by the Atanants’ great walnut tree.

His wife and only child, who was growing as fast as a sapling, would be at home.

Badi’s wife, as wizened as him, knew when to cook dinner. Over the course of years everything, every day had become so repetitive that her movements had become mechanical.

As soon as the door creaked like a wheel and Badi entered and put his crook by the threshold, he would ask his wife:

“Hatam’s daughter, have you given water to the calves?”

Hatam’s daughter was his wife. It was an old habit of his to call his wife that way and this habit had become as rooted as the thick-trunked neighboring walnut tree.

Hatam’s daughter’s reply was also always the same:

“Didn’t I?”

Badi would then grunt wearily, take off his leather shoes, empty them across the threshold, and place them on the floor for the following day. Meanwhile, his wife would keep an eye on the kitchen stove or fix the lamp’s wick, and spread the worn carpet on the swept floor.

Then, a modest meal—bread and cheese, and, whenever available, warm food, herbs from the pasture, and sometimes even dear food sent by a neighbor that would be cooked once a year on Badi’s stove.

Badi’s child, Habud, had already grown so big that he could help his father, but Badi did not want Habud to learn his trade.

“May he be literate, so he does not curse my grave later.”

“When he’s grown, I’ll marry him off. He’ll have a hearth and home, learn a craft, and bring home food. As for me, when I’ve reached my senior years, I’ll reap the harvest and put to rest my weary feet that will have scrambled mountains and valleys.”

* * *

Badi had a patriarchal demeanor and temper, but he was honest and righteous. He wanted for his child to follow the same path, to be hospitable, to love tradition, to respect his elders, and to be a well-mannered man in the village.

And then one day in the pasture, after a conversation, Habud asked his father a question:

“Dad, why is it that in our herd the Isanants have nine cows, but we only have one?”

Badi snorted.

“Are you comparing yourself to them? Your father is a cowherd, while Isanants blessed soul, grandpa Zaki, was a man of honor and dignity. Whenever an administrator came to the village, he would stay at their house. Grandpa Zaki was even awarded a medal in the days of the governor. And his sons were smart: they split the one thing he left into two.”

Grandpa Badi looked after the Isanants’ nine cows all year long, and in return he received one sack of wheat, a pound of sugar, which was never enough, and a little money.

Habud did not like the fact that his father had to go around houses every month to collect his share for looking after the cows or for threshing, with a sack on his shoulders, walking around threshing floors to get his share of wheat. It touched Habud’s pride when he had to go from door to door to collect food or money in place of his father.

Every time Habud entered the Isanants shop, the middle brother would mock Habud one way or another and say: “When did the month go by for you to come?” or “How many weeks does your month have?”

Habud was never able to receive what he legally deserved. Either they would say that they had nothing to give or, if Habud persisted too much, the Isanants brother would get angry with him and say: “Who the hell are you? Have your father come here and we’ll make a deal with him!”

Habud knew that his father was a timid and humble man. He would agree to whatever they said, if only to keep good relations with the well-to-do villagers.

“They are rich, and we live in their shadow.”

This is what Vandunts Badi would say as he gave his collected coins to Hatam’s daughter for saving. One day it would be needed: there was Habud’s wedding, there was the need for a home, a place, in the future.

“He’s growing. There’s not much time left,” Badi would sometimes say to his wife, and both would look at Habud and miss him already.

“If I’m still alive, I’ll plan a wedding for next autumn.”

Hatam’s daughter said that there were no suitable girls in the village, that she should get a girl from a neighboring village, and she lamented the fact that she could never free herself from work and duties to go and see whose daughter was eligible.

“This autumn, when the flock of sheep crosses the mountain, buy some wool, if you can, for me to spin and make a load of bedding out of its waste.”

The old couple put their heads together and considered the future when there will be noise in the house, comers and goers, the happy shrieks of a young child resounding in their ramshackle hut.

And sometimes they would discuss what trade Habud should learn. His mother wanted him to become a village clerk or serve the village constable, while Badi wanted him to learn a trade.

“Let there be no dirty bread on my plate,” he would say. Vandunts Badi knew that the penman took bribes and that they were very unhappy with him in the village. Badi did not want for him to be cursed after his death.

Habud agreed with his father. He also disliked Avan-the-Penman, who sniffed like a hunting dog, looking wherever he could to rip someone off, to scribble a couple of words in exchange for a chicken.

Avan-the-Penman was very close to the Isanants. He was always in touch with them and often arranged to do much of his work in their shop.

Habud, however, secretly had other ideas: to go to Baku and learn a trade. He was often on the verge of entreating his father, but he didn’t dare open his mouth.

He wanted to see the world, as his friend said, who had worked in Baku and had only returned because he had fallen ill. The two of them would sit on the rooftop for hours, and his friend would talk about how powerful machines are, how there is this thing that if you push turns on light without fire, how oil is extracted from a well, and thousands of other things like that.

Habud would listen intently and feel an irresistible urge to see it all. But as soon as he would return home, the warm fire that was in his heart would extinguish, and he would come to terms with learning a trade in the village.

Then one day, Habud went to Davit-the-Carpenter with his father to be left there well and good. The craftsman declined a little at first, but in the end promised to teach his craft in two years’ time.

That evening the craftsman came around to Vandunts Badi’s house. They ate, drank, put aside their grievances and worries, and became dear acquaintances from then on.

…It was past midnight, but neither Badi, nor Hatam’s daughter was sleeping. They were thinking about the following day, satisfied and lucky. Next to them, Habud slept quietly. He was their only hope in hard times.

* * *

And then one morning an unusual event took place in the village. The village messenger was shouting from rooftop to rooftop with a shrill voice.

“Hey, people! It’s the Czar’s decree that whoever has been a soldier must gather in the city! There’s war against Germany...”

Those coming from the city said that there were large posters hung on walls everywhere, that people talked about the war when they saw each other in the streets, that many soldiers had to be gathered, that the war was among many countries, that the world was going to get all mixed-up.

The villagers gathered in groups in front of the shop: a literate person began to read the paper aloud. The village listened to unknown names and places, cities, and countries, and felt instinctively that things were going to get expensive and that there was going to be massacre and hardship.

Isanants’ house-owning brother argued that the war had its benefits for the people, that the Russian Czar’s bed was secure, that the population was big, and that the German king would be defeated.

“This is Russia we’re talking about—she has one foot in Siberia and another in India. How can anyone defeat her?”

Some of the elderly villagers said that according to the “Ephemeris” seven nations were to go to war, bread was to become expensive, and the Czar’s taxes were to increase.

Of all of them, the penman was the happiest. A small group of deserters was forming around him made up of sons of the village misers. They bribed, falsified birth certificates, sent others in their place so that they could stay in the village and do whatever they wanted. A large field of recovering small sums and old vengeances had opened up in the village.

The posters on the city’s walls had affected the once peaceful village where everything had settled and where it seemed as if the lamb were living with the wolf.

* * *

Habud was already noticing the changes that had taken place in the village. In the Isanants shop, paint had become more expensive, there was a lack of brushes and cloth, and the price of sugar had gone through the roof.

The Isanants sons kept the brushes in their house to sell later.

“The roads are blocked. These paints are German made. When will you find this quality of product again?”

For Habud, the worst spirit in the village was that of the penman. One time the penman had said something dirty to the Khachuments bride, who had gone to have a letter written for her husband. He had touched her, and the bride had run away crying.

The news had quickly spread in the village. A few people had been determined to make him pay, but the house-owner had threatened them:

“I will drive anyone to Siberia who dares start a fight in the village. Have you any idea what times we’re living in?”

Habud’s dislike for the penman had grown even more. He had become the bad man of the village, the bloodsucker of the village. As for the Isanants shop: Habud no longer went there. At home, they no longer drank tea with sugar.

The elder of the Isanants brothers said that everything would return to normal if the son of the village cowherd would also join the army.

Vandunts Badi talked about the pasture, that the grass was fresh in the valley of the church, that the young cow had to give birth, that the bridge in the above pasture had fallen. And sometimes he would ask Habud about the war.

“Habud, aren’t those Germans Christian?”

“They’re Christian.”

“Then how did they join the Turks? God doesn’t allow that.”

Habud would smile at his father’s concerns. He would recall the Isanants boys, the penman, and those who were fighting in remote places, losing arms and legs, freezing in the cold, and receiving crosses from the Czar for their courage.

Why did it come to that? Why was it that not a single soldier had come out of the Isanants house, but three of Khachuments Bakhsh’s boys were fighting? Why was sugar getting more and more expensive, why were there meetings in the cities to collect money, how was it that Minas-the-Teacher had formed a group and gone to Van, but refugees were dying of cold and hunger?

Habud thought and his crude mind painfully pushed to give answers, to conquer the forbidden, to open the doors to all those secrets.

* * *

Then one day Zaki-the-Messenger came to Vandunts Badi’s house under the Atanants’ great walnut tree...

“Good day, Hatam’s daughter...”

“Ah, Zaki, I hope you have brought good tidings.”

“They’re good. Why wouldn’t they be? When your son comes home, tell him to go to the city tomorrow. He’s been drafted.”

It was as if Hatam’s daughter had been hit on the head with a large rock. Her knees shook, her eyes were blinded, and she fell right onto the threshold.

That evening the cowherd’s home was like a house of mourning. There was neither food, nor the regular conversations. Badi was sitting by the fireplace, drying his wet shoes and thinking.

“What’s going to happen?”

Badi could have expected anything, but never this. Hatam’s daughter was delirious. She was sitting next to Habud looking at him, looking at him voraciously like a tongueless beast, and thinking. Habud was lying on the mat, thinking about how his old mother and father would cope if he left.

That night it seemed as if all the misery of the entire village had fallen onto Vandunts Badi’s roof. Thoughts--heavy, unanswered--which all three were ruminating on in the darkness of the hut, tossing and turning in bed. Someone was moaning, another was groaning and crying, softly, holding back sobs.

* * *

The next day, Habud went to the city early in the morning. That day Hatam’s daughter forgot to wrap food in Badi’s handkerchief, and Badi did not watch where his cattle were going or whether they were hungry or not. He could only think about his child.

“We’ll see whether he has the right build or not…”

For a moment Badi wished that they would think his son crippled or armless, so that he could stay home. But then he himself got horrified at the thought and turned his hopeful eyes to the sky instead.

“God, I am your created pauper. Please don’t do any evil.”

Vandunts Badi promised to offer a sacrifice if his child were freed from the conscription. But it was not to be. Habud had the right build, and he was to be sent to the rookie regiment.

Habud came home with his friends to return to the city the following day and from there to wherever he would be sent. Habud was happy that he would get to see many cities and learn different languages, but as soon as he saw his elderly parents, his happiness dispersed like a light fog.

During the military examination, the elder of the Isanants brothers and the penman had whispered to each other. They weren’t playing with him, were they? And the bitter hatred he felt toward the penman, who had touched Ohan’s wife and wanted chicks and chickens for writing a letter, and toward the Isanants and all the others like them, rose like a wave.

The bad news had reached home quickly. Hatam’s daughter was dazed. She had her hand in her lap and refused to move away from her child. She could not touch anything. Everything around her seemed empty, as if a flood had washed away everything…

But what of Habud’s wedding?

“Habud, is the war far from our province?” the mother barely managed to ask.

The child smiled. What was he to say? What did his mother know and how was she to understand that the world had turned upside down and that her child would have to travel over a thousand miles, past cities, to reach the place where people were deafened by the sound of bombs?

Badi returned home in the evening. He instantly understood the situation and all he could say was:

“Habud, bless you, but what about us?”

It was already past midnight, but no one was sleeping. Hatam’s daughter was preparing her child’s baggage, packing socks and handkerchiefs, fruits and sweet cake. She did not know the destination of anything she held in her hands. Her tears flowed like torrents of water.

Badi was trying to comfort himself.

“It’s all in the service of the Czar. There’s nothing anyone can do. Where can you flee from the Czar’s territories?”

“Habud, take good care of yourself. Don’t do too many adolescent things. It’s a foreign country, it’s a war, who knows what can happen? Keep your thoughts home and send letters. Surely a light will reach us somehow.”

And, like that, Badi mumbled to himself downcast, by the stove, his wet shoes in his hands. A thousand thoughts crossed his mind, a moan rose deep in his heart, and his tearless eyes flickered like an extinguishing lamp.

Habud left the next day.

His parents accompanied him to the edge of the village. They talked, cried, and kissed a thousand goodbyes, and then returned home alone to their ramshackle hut by the Atanants’ great walnut tree.

On that day, for the first time, the village cattle were taken to the pasture late. Even the cattle were confused as they lowed their way past Vandunts Badi’s house.

* * *

Months passed.

Habud sent letters. He had been sent to the front, had been wounded in the leg, had lain in the military hospital, had healed, and had been sent to the battlefield again.

Habud complained in his letters. He wrote that the army was hungry, that they had no clothes, that they sent him from one battlefield to another every week, and that there were no prospects for peace. And one time he wrote that he was getting a leave soon and would be coming home.

His parents were infinitely happy. The day after receiving that letter, Hatam’s daughter ran to harvest crops in Isanants’ field. The Isanants received the letters, and they were the ones who read them and wrote replies.

In return, Hatam’s daughter harvested crops in Isanants’ field for two days, from dawn to dusk, without pay.

Habud wrote that things were expensive, that the army had looted shops in a few places. He wrote many other things as well. His father could not understand why things were the way they were. The penman and Isanants’ eldest brother got angry. In another letter, Habud wrote, “Dad, why do we have to fight the Germans? What good is it to us?”

“You brute! You’ve been made a soldier and you bother your head about these things?” Isanants’ son exclaimed as he read the letter.

And then one day news came from the city that a telegram had been received saying that the army had started a rebellion and dethroned the Czar. The villagers did not believe it at first. The house-owner, the penman, and even Zaki-the-Messenger told everyone in the middle of the village that the news was false. Father Gevorg, who knew psalms and hymns by heart, was trying to convince the people that without a shepherd there could be no sheep, that the people needed a leader, and that those who were spreading the news were meddlers or German agents.

A day or two later two men arrived from the city with a piece of red cloth tied around their arms. One of them was Minas-the-Teacher and the other a young man. The villagers knew Minas-the-Teacher.

The teacher began to give a speech, saying that there is no Czar anymore, that there is freedom now, that the land has to be given to the villager, that the people are hungry, and that this is the reason why they must kill the Germans and fight until the end. The young man also spoke, and then they held an election.

Isanants’ eldest son, Khachuments Ohan, and the house-owner became a committee. Someone in the crowd said that he did not want the house-owner, because he was a bloodsucker, but Zaki-the-Messenger glared at him in such a way that the poor man lost heart. Father Gevorg averred that the house-owner was a conscientious man, compassionate and thoughtful.

After the meeting, the new committee, the priest, Minas-the-Teacher, the young man, the penman, Zaki-the-Messenger, and a few others, went to Isanants’ house and had a meal. They ate and drank and by evening the teacher and the young man returned to the city quite tipsy.

Hatam’s daughter told her husband all of this. Vandunts Badi did not believe it at first and considered the news to be nothing more than thin air, but then he started to get his hopes up.

“Could it be possible that the war will end and Habud will come home?”

Hatam’s daughter did not understand any of it. Her ears caught haphazard news and she listened to incomprehensible words. The city’s leader had been arrested and put to jail, and now they had to gather soldiers again—death or freedom. There was no Czar, but there was war.

The village committee had begun its work. The Isanants began to raise the price of products in their shop, they exacted gold, collected wheat and cheese for loans, and sent it all to the city.

Minas-the-Teacher came to the village once more. He organized a meeting, spoke about the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, cursed the Mensheviks, and said that whoever was not a member of the Federation was not an Armenian. The villagers gasped and the literate people signed a piece of paper that the penman and the teacher had prepared.

Minas-the-Teacher said that soon people will come to measure the lands, steal from the rich and give to the poor. They will also give cloth and fabric to the needy and open a cooperative in every village. Every village should also have two doctors and three teachers. To have all this, it was necessary to vote for the Federation, so that it could go and defend our pains in the largest assembly of all, where all of Russia’s nations will gather.

The villagers did as Minas-the-Teacher said. They took Isanants’ eldest brother more seriously, looking attentively into his eyes. Who could speak against him or win an argument? Some owed him grain, and others had to buy a few feet of cloth from his shop or a pound of sugar. Who was crazy enough to disagree with him?

Habud continuously sent letters. He was glad that there was no longer a Czar, but he wrote that that was not enough, that something needed to be done so that every man would be able to eat from the honest sweat of his brow. Habud wrote many more things in his letters, but Isanants’ son would not read it to his father.

“Your son has turned foolish, grandpa Badi. He has lost his senses.”

Vandunts Badi refused to believe that his son could lose his senses. He knew that his son had an open mind. Who knew what Isanants son’s problem was with Habud? He had disliked Habud from the beginning.

Habud wrote that he had become a regiment’s committee and that their regiment did not want war anymore. He would come home in the evenings, talk with Hatam’s daughter, and ask her what had been said in the village. One evening Badi said:

“Hatam’s daughter, have you heard what they are saying, that our Habud has become a Bolshevik?”

“A what?”

“A Bolshevik. Isanants’ son was saying it. He’s a Bolshevik who wants to mix the rich and the poor and make them equals.”

* * *

Another month passed.

And then one day Habud came home without warning.

In the evening, when it was already dark outside, he entered with a bag on his shoulders—a sturdy young man with a beard and moustache.

There had not been as much joy in Vandunts Badi’s hut since the day it was built. There were questions, tearful hugs, and boundless happiness. Habud announced to his parents that he was no longer going to serve, that he no longer wanted to fight.

“Let Isanants’ boys fight for a while.”

After two years of absence, and exhausted from roaming countless cities, Habud quietly lay next to his mother on the mat in his native hut.

* * *

The next day, everybody in the village found out that Vandunts Habud had come home.

Many were happy and ran over to Hatam’s daughter to give her their blessings. But Isanants’ son and the penman, and even Zaki-the-Messenger were not happy.

Isanants’ son was saying to them that Habud had become a Bolshevik, that he will cause chaos in the village, and that the waters will turn murky. And Zaki-the-Messenger promptly commissioned himself to find out who Habud was with, where he was going, and what he was doing.

An opportunity soon arose.

At a meeting in the village, where Minas-the-Teacher -- the city’s committee -- was also present, Habud said a few words about Isanants’ son.

The meeting was about collecting taxes for the city’s committee. Minas-the-Teacher was saying that the revolution was in danger, that the Germans had bribed the Bolsheviks to crush the Russian troops. It was necessary to reinforce the army and lay down one’s life for the homeland.

“I, for one, am ready, if I am called, to leave my hearth and home, my work and duties, and volunteer!” Minas-the-Teacher boomed as he thumped his chest and turned his hands in the air like the sails of a windmill.

Isanants’ eldest son also spoke, saying that the national taxes must be paid, that they are holy debts, adding that any troublemaker in the village should be chased away. There are a few deserters in the village who should be caught and sent to the city to fight the enemy.

“And when are you going?” Habud called out. He had been listening with his head bowed down, biting his lip in anger.

“Be quiet, you son of a *****!” the penman bawled out from the other side and signed the messenger to jump him. A few young men—the penman’s men—jumped at Habud to beat him, but Habud had not come away from the front without any experience. After several blows had been delivered on both sides, the villagers stepped in to separate the two camps.

Habud left the meeting, went home, calmed his mother, and at night he and two of his trusted friends left the house for the city, ordering his mother not to say anything to anyone and telling her that he would be back the next day.

The incident at the meeting had a negative effect on Vandunts Badi. He was outraged at those who had dared raise their hand against his son in broad daylight in a crowd. From that day on, Isanants’ son became an eyesore for Vandunts Badi.

On the following day, as he was driving the cattle to the pasture, Badi was tempted to separate the cows of his son’s enemies from the rest of the herd, but his conscience would not let him. How could a tongueless beast be guilty of sin?

On his way to the pasture Badi silently thought about why Habud had gone to the city, what the papers were that he had brought with him from distant places, why he was dissatisfied with the way things were in the village, and why he opposed Minas-the-Teacher.

The following day, Habud came home, had a bite to eat, and began to write.

“Habud, you have written enough. Your eyes will be ruined,” his mother said to him in the middle of the night. But Habud continued to write and erase. Dawn was close when he folded the papers, put them in his breast pocket, and was on his way out.

“Where to, my child?”

“I’ll be back soon. I’m going to the city. I have some work to do. I’ll be back in the evening.”

Badi pleaded with him that it was dark outside, that it was an evil hour, that there were thousands of enemies: “Wait and go when it’s light out.” Habud would not listen.

“It’s all right. I’m not a virgin to these roads, am I?” he said and closed the door.

On the next day, close to evening, news spread in the village that the city had experienced upheavals. The Bolsheviks, together with their troops, had attacked the city, smashed the committee’s building, and the people had started to loot shops. And then the Bolsheviks had been surrounded and the boys of the group had attacked the Bolshevik committee and arrested everyone.

Vandunts Badi and Hatam’s daughter impatiently waited for Habud’s return. There was deafening silence in their hut and hearts, and neither dared ask the other whether a misfortune had befallen.

Habud did not come back. Early the next morning, they learned that he had also been arrested.

“Can you believe that cretin? No one in our entire province is smarter than Minas-the-Teacher, but Vandunts Habud, the son of a cowherd, is not satisfied!” Isanants’ son, gloating and conceited, told the crowd that had gathered in front of his shop that morning.

“Now look who’s playing around with high prices: me or him? He never liked us, dear people, you be the judge,” he implored the villagers, feigning innocence.

That day the price of cotton went up from one to two coins.

* * *

Vandunts Badi did not drive the cattle to the pasture that day. Instead he went to the middle of the village and sadly announced that he was going to the city to find out what happened to his son.

“There he is, locked up in the fort. What are you mourning for, old man?” Zaki-the-Messenger said.

Some of the villagers felt for him and drove the village cattle themselves.

It had been many years since Badi had been to the city. He remembered Master Khachi’s caravansary on the way to the city. He would go there, ask around, and find out what happened.
But no sooner had Badi set foot outside the village than he found out that the caravansary had also been burned down, because the Bolsheviks had tied up their horses there.

To whom was he to go? Why not straight to Minas-the-Teacher? He was an important man with a committee in the city and all. He would tell him, kiss his hands and feet, and maybe they would free Habud.

The closer Badi came to the city, the more he felt his knees shake, and the more he shuffled his feet. He stopped once or twice, wiped the sweat off his brow with his hat, caught his breath, and continued on the road.

He finally reached the caravansary. The beams were still smoking. Only the charred walls were left standing. As he entered the city, Badi saw someone in the street with a red cloth tied around his arm. He gathered up his strength, shuffled toward him, and bowed deeply to him.

“Where is Minas-the-Teacher’s office?” he asked.

“What are you doing?”

“I have a problem, you see, a misfortune has befallen…”

And with teary eyes, Badi started to tell him what he had heard about his son.

“Hm…” the man muttered and pointed at a white building that was not that far.

Badi walked to the building, but was denied entry. He was told to come back the following day.

“But I’m an old man. My cattle are left unattended. Can’t you tell me anything about my son?” Badi pleaded and sat by the threshold on the paved sidewalk.

He stared ahead of him at passers-by and listened to the bustle of the street. He was thinking about Hatam’s daughter, her teary eyes, his unattended cattle, and Habud, who had become a piece of burning coal scorching his heart and causing him indescribable pain.

A man came out of the building and looked down at Badi.

“Why are you lying here like a dog?”

“Master, I’m Vandunts Badi, a cowherd…”

“Vandunts?” the man asked, surprised.

Badi mustered up his courage and started to tell him his troubles. The man listened, frowned, then cut Badi’s speech short. He turned to the doorkeeper, called him over to a corner, whispered something or other in his ear, then left quickly, turning the corner onto another street.

Badi felt that a heavy blow should hit his head. He promptly stood up and approached the doorkeeper.

“Bless you, what did the master say to you?”

The doorkeeper looked around him, pursed his lips, then suddenly bent over and quickly whispered in Badi’s ear:

“Last night your son was executed by firing squad in the fort…”

The doorkeeper walked away. Badi stood frozen for a moment. Then he grumbled in pain like a wounded beast, and two large teardrops rolled down his wrinkled cheeks.

Badi ran to the fort, but got lost in the streets of the city, and in the end did not find it…

He was told that it was already too late, that there was no point anymore. He returned home dejected by the way he had come, alone and empty-handed.

There was nothing left. Everything was lost.

Badi barely managed to make it to the caravansary where he fainted in the middle of the road by a stone. The villagers found out where he was. They came and took him to the village.

* * *

Many changes took place in the village.

The Bolsheviks returned and Minas-the-Teacher took the road to Tabriz, but died on the opposite bank of the Arax River.

The Bolsheviks came to the village and the roads were opened. The Isanants shop became a reading-hall. The elder of the Isanants brothers fled to Persia with the penman. To this day nobody knows anything about them.

And Zaki-the-Messenger fled to a nearby forest and never returned. The villagers didn’t know what had happened to him until last year, when a group of young children gathering firewood found the skeleton of a man under a cabin. Many claimed that those were Zaki-the-Messenger’s bones.

On the road that leads up to the pasture, not quite near the water mills yet, under the Atanants’ great walnut tree, is Vandunts Badi’s home. Badi is no longer a cowherd. He has no one to come home to. Hatam’s daughter did not live long after her son’s death. Vandunts Badi has remained alone in his old hut.

His eyes don’t see well anymore, having become drenched in tears. Every day he carries some firewood from the forest for different people for a bite to eat. He is living the last days of his life.

And sometimes, while gathering wood in the forest, when it gets a little too heavy for his back, Badi grumbles to himself:

“What am I supposed to say to you, God, you who saw me and took him away?”

In the evenings he returns home alone, throws one or two pieces of dung in the fireplace, and lies on the mat…

Outside, like the old days, the Atanants’ great walnut tree softly rocks its branches over Vandunts Badi’s ramshackle hut…

1925

* Historically, it was common in Armenian villages to refer to men by the family that they belonged to. Badi and his son Habud, for instance, belong to the Vands, or Vandunts in Armenian. In Armenian, the suffixes -unts, -ents, and -ants (which are quite common in the southern part of Armenia where Bakunts was from) indicate belonging to a certain family tree.

© Translated by Nairi Hakhverdi

[parap]

Aksel Bakunts: "In Akar"

1

The village of Akar is picturesque, surrounded by forests. In the forests there are ancient oak trees and age-old ruins of monasteries. A clear stream flows under the trees and passes through the village streets where it turns muddier and muddier until it reaches the pastures where it becomes a bog. In the morning a fresh breeze from the forests descends on the village and brings with it a healthy waft redolent of cedar and linden. But when the sun begins to warm up and the garbage heaps in the streets begin to flow, the fragrance that came down from the forests is replaced by the smell that comes out of opened barns.

In the garbage heaps, the heads of worms heat up—worms that harmoniously turn their eyeless heads to the left and to the right, as if they were weaving silk.

In Akar there is scabies, which is aggravated by the sun, and causes those who are infected to scratch their backs against walls or thresholds, and itch themselves with their hands until they bleed. In Akar there is also pink eye, and children walk around blinded by the sun with bloodshed eyes and a dirty cloth over their foreheads. The cows get infected with foot-and-mouth disease and limp as tiny white maggots suck on the blood vessels between their hooves, and the milk in the cows’ udders dries, and the cows lick their hooves in pain, spitting out the maggots with their tongues.

Akar is old, from time immemorial. And from that time it has been a habit to sow wheat in sandy soil, to dig plots of lentils with picks and hunch over them from morning to evening plucking the short pods with bare hands, and then to beat the lentils to have enough to make lentil meals twice a day in the winter or to turn the wheat into buckwheat and eat it with yoghurt.

Akar is poor. And if no one tilled the soil for two years, the forests would swallow up Akar, the winds would scatter the linden’s fruits, the birds would carry acorns to the roofs, and the acorns would dig their roots in extinguished tonirs.1 And if there weren’t forests, a flood from the mountains would wipe out Akar in one night, destroy churns and jugs with stones, and throw an entire house, with hayloft and all, upside down. On the surface of the flood, together with the diseased cows, white maggots would swim like thin slivers.

But there are neither floods in Akar, nor are the forests in the process of engulfing it. As soon as a sprout appears on the plots of lentils, the inhabitants of Akar dig it up with their picks to keep the soil as parched as an emaciated and dehydrated cow.

Of the forty households in Akar, one of them is that of Hanes’s daughter, Shahan. Even though Shahan is aging and has been a widow for eight years, people in the village still call her Hanes’s daughter. This is probably why Shahan’s husband, who was a coal miner, lived in the depths of the forest all year round and only came home at night once in a while, washed the soot off his face, shared a pillow with Shahan until sunrise, and left a few silver coins with Shahan in the morning until his next return. And from that relationship, three girls were born in four years. Their blondness reminded Shahan of her husband and his youth when he was not yet a coal miner and had hair on his head that felt like lamb’s wool.

And then one week her husband did not return, and when Shahan went to the forest to find him, she saw her husband’s thunderstruck corpse lying by the coalmine, scorched and charred like a large sheet of coal. He was buried on the same spot. Shahan carried home his clothes, cried over them, and after her tears subsided, she found three twenty-cent coins in her husband’s trousers.

There was neither love nor hate between them. They had lived under the same roof for eight years and in those years they had become as inured to each other as a horse does to a stable. A winter passed, the leaves of oaks turned green, and when Shahan was planting seeds for someone else, she saw smoke rise out of the depths of the forest from the top of a hillock and, of course, it reminded her of her husband, but she neither missed him, nor had sweet memories.

At night, she locked the doors, put the girls to sleep, and pressed her suckling to her breast and warmed her up. She turned into a brood hen, spread her wings, and under the warmth of her wings, Shahan’s three blond daughters grew up. They had to grow and wait for a winged young man to take the eldest first, then the middle one, and finally the little one, because no bird should bring a sprout under Shahan’s roof.

2

Eight years passed. Hanes’s daughter was a baker and a weeder and a carrier of firewood. For eight years, the hot tonir had scorched her face. That is why her face glowed like a brass plowshare. She would walk away from the tonir carrying a few sheets of lavash2 under her arm, which she would divide among the girls. The starling feeds her chicks worms from her beak and her feathers also glow even though she has never seen a tonir.

For eight years, Shahan’s threshing floor did not see any chaff. The rain had perforated small holes in the roof of the hayloft causing water to drip on the beams. A spider had spun its web there, and one winter two of the hayloft’s beams collapsed under the weight of the snow and fell to the floor.

Sometimes Shahan would look attentively at her oldest daughter, Sandukht. She wanted to know whether her daughter was growing, or rising like kneaded dough. She wanted to know why her body was developing late, her movements were still childish, and her questions innocent and naïve. Shahan would fish for news in different bakeries, and whenever there was talk of giving and taking girls, she would bring Sandukht to mind. If only she could find a place for her, get her to settle there, so that her load would lighten and she could think about the other two. What if no one wanted her daughters and they turned yellow like seedy cucumbers and remain seedless. But Sandukht had manners, didn’t she? Modest and obedient, with eyes like pale-blue flowers.

And then one day, on the street, when Ghazakh’s Ohan wanted Sandukht from Shahan for his son, without saying anything of her eyes being the color of pale-blue flowers, he asked if Hanes’s daughter would also give him her threshing floor and collapsed hayloft together with Sandukht.

Shahan thought about it that evening and went to ask her brother for advice. Her brother thought it a good idea.

“What do you need the loft for?”

She returned from her father’s house and thought about it again. Sandukht did not understand why her mother stroked her hair, then bent over and kissed her forehead. The scent of fresh lavash emanated from her mother’s bosom, and when Sandukht half-opened her eyes and saw her mother, she was surprised at how much money she had. The moon’s milky ray shone through the skylight and flickered on the silver coins in Shahan’s hand. There was enough to buy cloth for a dress for Sandukht and something more.

The next day, Ghazakh’s Ohan sent his wife to examine the girl. Shahan bathed Sandukht and carefully braided her blond hair. Ohan’s wife approved of Sandukht. Before coming into the house, she had taken a look at the threshing floor and hayloft.

It was Saturday when Ghazakh’s Ohan, his son, Shahan, and Sandukht went to the civil registration office to register. The documents for selling the threshing floor and hayloft had been prepared the day before.

Sandukht was wearing a new dress. Whenever the wind fluttered the flaps of her dress, her heart grew wider. But as soon as she saw Ohan’s son, her joy would instantly subside; she would pull back and draw into her coat like a snail’s tentacles. There was a dark and uncertain doubt in her heart, but with that doubt there was also happiness at having come all this way holding on to her mother’s dress, leaving Akar behind the forest. How big the world seemed to her, and how close the mountains in front of her!

Then the unexpected happened. A doctor called Shahan and Sandukht into his office. The young girl timidly removed her dress. Through his spectacles, the doctor saw the girl’s emaciated shoulders, her flat chest, and her snow-white body. Shahan attempted to lie by telling the doctor that her daughter was full-grown, that the priest had gotten it all wrong, that Sandukht had been ill, and that that was the reason why her body was not developed yet, but the doctor was speaking in the name of the law and tried to persuade her that it would be bad for the girl.

Sandukht understood, and when she buttoned up her dress, put on her sandals, and walked out holding on to her mother’s dress, she saw how the doctor shook his head. At the door, Shahan got angry with her daughter for clinging on to her dress like a suckling.

Ghazakh’s Ohan learned about the law, raised his eyebrows, then suddenly squinted. And, in that same second, he decided to break the law, to jump over it as if it were a narrow stream, and to put a lock on Hanes’s daughter’s hayloft.

On the road, Sandukht was walking ahead, Shahan and Ohan were walking together, and Ohan’s son was trailing behind them all. Ohan’s son was sluggish and dull and had heavy bones. When he spoke, his lip drooped, forming a gutter in one corner of his mouth from which drool dripped down. Whenever he looked at Sandukht, at her striped dress, the drool dripped faster from the lip’s gutter.

On the road, Shahan told Ohan what the doctor had said about waiting. But Ohan curtly announced that he did not want to wait. Poor girls and ruined threshing floors and lofts were a dime a dozen in Akar.

“Have them live together, and when she’s grown, we’ll register them. How’s the law to find out? You sign the agreement…”

And that’s exactly what they did. Sandukht was deceptively brought to Ohan’s house with tears in her eyes. Her mother stayed with her until morning, promised to visit her every day and threatened to beat her, and then the mother cried, too. At dawn, Sandukht broke her promise and looked with fear at Ohan’s son, who was lying by the wheat sack, snoring.

Sandukht cried again on the following night, but bowed her head to Ohan’s son on the same pillow. In the morning, pale and teary-eyed, she ran to her mother’s and wrapped herself around her, but her mother took her back to Ohan’s and tried to persuade her once again.

Meanwhile, Ghazakh’s Ohan fixed the broken beams of the hayloft and poured stones near Hanes’s daughter’s threshing floor.

3

Four months passed, but for Akar’s history the four months felt like four seconds. The villagers still ate lentils and the renovated hayloft had not altered the overall sight of the village one bit.

Sandukht had come to terms with her situation. She remained silent. When someone asked her a question, she replied by nodding or shaking her head. It seemed as if she neither had thoughts, nor desires. She was like a squeezed-out lemon—an object without life. She had retreated into herself and no longer went to her parental home.

And then one day, she felt something move under her bosom. She got scared, pressed her hand against her heart, and calmed down. The feeling under her breast disappeared like a ripple. A few days later, however, it moved again, and this time she suspected something.

Sandukht was to become a mother. Her body contracted all her muscles and collected all her water to adapt itself to her new condition. She resembled a small apple hanging from the branch of an apple tree which the sun had given a red color, but the thin branch had not been able to provide with any water for it to grow and ripen.

On her way to the well one day Sandukht met another young bride who taught her how to have a miscarriage. Sandukht was afraid at first, but later, when she bent over to put the pitcher on the ground and felt the movement under her bosom again, a resoluteness came over her.

She did as the young bride had explained. She did not eat for two days and on the third day she drank the juice of a yellow flower. When she started feeling unbearable pains in her belly, she pressed her lips together, clenched her tiny fists, ran to the barn without being seen, and closed the door. She now had to hit her belly with a stone to make the pain go away…

The cattle were driven back to the barn in the evening. When Ghazakh’s Ohan opened the barn door, he saw blood by the door and an unconscious daughter-in-law.

He carried Sandukht home. At dawn, however, Sandukht’s final drop of blood flowed out her body with her last breath.

Shahan cried at her grave and at home.

That night, one of her hair-locks turned gray.

1926

1. A tonir is an underground oven used, among other things, to bake lavash, a type of flat bread.
2. Lavash is a type of thin, flat bread baked in a tonir.

© Translated by Nairi Hakhverdi

[parap]

Aksel Bakunts: "On Mount Ayu's Slope..."

Peti would wake with the first rooster’s crow, put on his moccasins, cup his hands once or twice in the narrow stream in front of his house, wash his face, wipe it with his hat, and stand at the edge of the village ready to let out the cows and drive them to the mountain to graze.

“Auntie Zar, you have milked her too much! The poor thing has no body left,” Peti would say to the old woman who had a house full of children and only one cow.

“I have no choice, Peti,” Auntie Zar would moan, pushing the cow in front of her.

Peti looked after the herd with care. He only needed to look back once to tell instantly which of the cows had been restless the night before and which one was starving.

And when the last of the cows were brought to him, he would swing his crook in the air and shriek:

“Hey, stag!”

Peti had been a cowherd for a long time. He had opened his eyes among cows. As a child he had looked after calves and later he was given the village cattle.

He had no one. He was still a calfherd when his mother died and he became a complete orphan. The village took care of him: one day he stayed at one person’s house, the next day he slept in someone else’s barn or hayloft, until dawn, when he got up and herded the cattle again.

His old fatherly home was completely ruined. The roof had sunk in, the charred beams above the fireplace hung down, and the sand and stone on the roof had fallen in. Wild hemp had grown all around the ruins of the house and the neighbor’s chickens lay in the shade of the hemp after pecking the ground for food.

“Peti! Oh, heirless man, when will you rebuild your father’s palace?” people would ask him.

Peti’s pockmarked face would smile and he would roll his sunken eyes, open his mouth, and shrug.

“The entire village is my home,” he would say and swing his crook in the air.

Whenever his woolen overcoat would tear, the laces of his moccasins would break, or the old patches on his woolen trousers would wear out and expose his hairy legs, it was always Auntie Zar who scolded him, asking him why he wouldn’t get himself a wife and light up his father’s extinguished fireplace.

“Peti, you good-for-nothing, who will take advantage of your abilities?”

Auntie Zar would scold him and, like a dried-up source, she would squint, take a woolen thread with her bony and shaky fingers, pass it through the eye of a needle, and sew Peti’s woolen trousers.

The village brides also laughed at Peti, but it did not bother him. He would smile, and the row of white teeth in his mouth would glisten through his thick lips.

There was one old crippled girl in the village with a withered hand who looked after wheat that had been laid out or buttermilk that had been put out on rooftops to dry. The girls called her “Peti’s bride” and laughed, and the old girl, who was crippled and had a withered hand, would frown, get angry, curse, and then smile timidly.

Sometimes a thought, like a puff of white cloud in a light-blue summer sky, a wishful thought, would drift across the old girl’s quiet mind:

“If only it were true and Peti wanted me…”

At nights, when he lay on the fodder in the hayloft, Peti would suddenly recall the girls’ laughter and what Auntie Zar had said:

“Get yourself a wife, you good-for-nothing.”

He would then wander past the village households in his mind, trying to remember all the girls. For a moment he thought it a good idea to have a wife so that when he came home in the evenings there would be someone there to cook a warm meal and make his bed. But he couldn’t find a suitable girl. No one would ever give him a girl. There were many more men in the village who were much wealthier and better off than him.

His body was boiling hot and felt itchy. Sleepily, he would scratch his body with his sharp nails like an ox does when it rubs its neck against a large rock or trunk. He would remember the crippled old girl and then, like a honeybee, his thoughts would fly to another flower and breathe a new fragrance.

And that’s how he stayed.

Years passed, and with the years, his youth passed, too, and, like autumn grass, his secret thoughts of finding a wife and building a home dried out.

* * *

Spring was on the way. The snow was beginning to melt and its water was slowly dripping into narrow brooklets. The spring sun softly warmed up the ground, and the villagers, tired of the long winter nights, basked in the sun, sat under walls on pieces of dry log, and talked with each other.

Spring was on the way, and the cattle in the barns were becoming increasingly more irritated by the heat and showed signs of restlessness, looking impatiently at the door and lowing at the top of their lungs. The two-year-old female calves were mad and the three-year-old male calves capered in the snow and locked horns with each other as they were driven along the fresh water. The bulls were fat with meaty legs. They hunted for pleasant fragrances in the warm air with their wet nostrils, lowing and digging their hooves in the half-melted, hard ground.

Peti, too, was restless.

The heat was also bothering him. His body itched more and he looked toward Mount Ayu more frequently. The mountain was his sign. The spring sun caused the snow on Mount Ayu to melt and, as a result, to bare its rocky slopes.

Sometimes he would go to the pasture by the village shoveling snow aside with his feet to observe how the green grass was starting to grow under the snow like a newly sprouting moustache.

Peti felt a sort of vibrant bliss at the beginning of spring. Like the brooklets that were formed from the melting snow, the blood in his veins seethed quicker, and he laughed, gurgling at the same time. He was no different than a horse neighing in delight when its stable is replenished with golden barley.

Peti was preparing for the spring. He sewed his moccasins, tightened the straps of his bag, and carried his worn-out rug on his shoulders to lay in the sun.

“Peti has laid his rug in the sun,” the villagers would say. That was a sign that the cattle were going to be driven to the pasture a few days later.

Like a caring mother, Peti walked from barn to barn admonishing the owners to give their cows more to eat or to keep the barn warm. If someone wanted to know when a calf was to be born, they would ask Peti when the cow had last been seen with a bull.

Peti knew which bull was the father of which calf and which cow gives difficult births. Whenever a cow was giving birth, Peti had to be there to help the cow’s owner.

And when the slimy calf would barely be able to open its wet eyes, it was Peti who massaged its nose and lips or caressed the cow.

“The cow was in much pain… But, look here! It’s that red bull’s calf.”

After the cow had given birth, it was usual for the owner to give Peti something in return for his services, such as an old coat, a dish of pudding, or a promise for a bushel of wheat for the threshing floor. Occasionally, a cow would give birth on the pasture. Peti would carry the calf home on his shoulders as he drove the cattle back to the village. On days like these, the smile on Peti’s face was infinite. He knew that he was carrying a blessing on his shoulders and joy for the owner.

A few days before driving the cattle to the pasture, Peti would warn the owners to be prepared. And how much news he would share in the first few days after returning to the village! The snow had melted, revealing a skeleton under the snow. Peti approached it, looked at it, and concluded that it was a sheep that a wolf had taken from the village in the winter.

The days were getting even warmer, the grass was growing, and flowers were blooming: blue, yellow, red. A thousand beetles and butterflies circled the air, birds built nests in the sweetbrier bush, and the cattle grazed the tasty grass with puffs and pants.

Spring always made Peti happy. Having looked after the cattle on the same pasture and mountain for so many years, Peti had become so familiar with the herbs and flowers that he could flawlessly point out which flower blooms early and which herb serves as a remedy against pain.

Sometimes, when he caught sight of a beautiful beetle or a colorful butterfly, or when he watched how ants worked on rebuilding their last year’s nest, Peti would shake his head and say to himself:

“Bless you, good Lord, for creating such wonderful things…”

* * *

And then one summer a plague spread among the cattle. One of the young cows started to straggle on her morning drive to the pasture. She stopped in the middle of the road and lowed at the top of her lungs. Peti got angry and hit her once with his crook, but the cow did not make it to the foot of the mountain.

Peti watched how her legs shook and how she collapsed lowing loudly and did not get up again. Bloody pus ran out of her nostrils, her belly was bloated, and the sick cow looked sorrowfully at Peti.

Peti was taken aback.

“What has happened to her? She wasn’t given any medicago, was she?”

He took out his knife to draw blood and cut a bit of the cow’s earlobe. The cow writhed her head in pain, attempted to get up, but her legs shook. Her warm blood flowed onto the grass and then coagulated, but it did not make the cow feel any better.

Peti went to drink some water from a nearby spring and to gather the spread-out cattle by the valley. But when he returned, the cow had already died. The bloody pus had run out of her nose, her tongue had turned blue, her gums were cold, and her belly was bloated like a stretched-out drum.

Only then did Peti realize that this was “cattle plague.” That evening no one in the village talked about anything else but that. There was sadness on everyone’s face—people asked each other where the plague had come from, and instantly they grabbed their oil lamps and went into the barns to examine their livestock.

Peti felt as though someone had poured cold water on his head. He had lost himself and was confused. A thousand thoughts ran through his head about why the plague had come.

Auntie Zar added fuel to the fire by saying:

“Peti, the plague was sent from above. A misfortune is going to befall the village.”

And Peti worried about the “misfortune,” but he was actually more afraid of the veterinarian who had come to the village once years before during the last cattle plague.

Two more cows died the next day. News arrived that cows had also died in a neighboring village. In the evening, the messenger announced from the rooftops that the cattle doctor was to come to the village on the following day.

Peti was standing with his back against a barn, leaning on his crook, and listening to the messenger. He remembered Auntie Zar’s words:

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

That evening Peti did not even put a small bite to eat in his mouth. He wrapped himself in his rug and lay down on the dry hay. The next morning Peti was like a lost soul. His daily routine had been disrupted by the sudden outbreak of the plague. He had only very rarely been in the village at that hour and he was feeling out of place. He walked from barn to barn, examining the livestock. Meanwhile, the tied-up cattle were lowing in front of the barn for fresh grass. And each time the cattle lowed, Peti felt a pang in his heart.

It was noon when the veterinarian arrived in the village with two watchmen. Peti saw him sitting on a horse wearing glistening spectacles and a bright cockade on his white hat.

Peti saw him and recognized him.

The cattle were driven higher up in the village to a spacious threshing floor and tied to stakes that had been hammered into the floor in advance. The cattle were bothered by the heat and lowed for the fresh grass on the mountain, while their owners stood by their cows with lowered heads and hands on their hearts.

The veterinarian also came up and ordered the watchmen to search the barns for hidden livestock. And the watchmen attacked the barns sniffing like hunting dogs.

One of the watchmen, who had a ten-inch long mouth, saw a fat rooster pecking the garbage as he opened the door of one of the barns. The watchman drooled from his ten-inch long mouth when he saw the rooster and ripped off one of its wings with a sword. He grabbed the bleeding rooster and shoved it into his woolen sack.

The owner of the house screamed and pleaded with him, but the watchman threatened to tell the veterinarian that the owner had hidden livestock in another village--he threatened and shook his terrifying fist under the house owner’s nose.

In another barn a cow was found hidden behind large baskets of fodder. It was the only cow the poor household owned and it had been hidden in the dark corner of the barn for fear of the veterinarian.

The entire village had gathered around the cattle at the top of the village.

When the watchmen came with the cow taken from the barn, the veterinarian looked at the villagers angrily from behind his glasses, said something or other, and wagged his finger.

“He’s angry because they hid livestock,” someone said.

And then the inspection, for which the villagers had been waiting impatiently, started. There was a feeling of doubt and fear in the hearts of all of them. Would their cow turn out to be sick? And if it did, there would be nothing they could do about it.

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 there. 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 at the beginning of the evening. Twelve cows were sick. Cremation was the only way to prevent the disease from spreading.

And the watchmen hurried the villagers who were digging holes to burn the cows.

Many 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 who winced in indescribable pain, lowed, and rolled into the hole.

Then they poured black petrol and threw trusses of hay in the hole. They burned both petrol and hay. The fires burned in the dark, the smell of fat rose, 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 until late into the night, and the village fell into mourning.

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

When the fires 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, while driving the cattle to the pasture, Peti could not bring himself to look at the threshing floor, so he passed it with his head cast down. Auntie Zar, who had brought a cow to be added to the herd, was waiting by the source. Peti did not say to her like before:

“Poor cow, don’t milk her so much.”

But Auntie Zar did moan:

“A misfortune is going to befall the village.”

The first few days were hard for Peti. He could not get the cremating cattle out of his head. His heart was broken and he was angry with himself whenever he recalled hitting the sick cow 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 was looking forward to the end of winter when the slopes of Mount Ayu would become visible again.

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

Auntie Zar 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 the 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 Mount Ayu, 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 city was buried in green orchards.

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

And then one evening, as he was driving the cattle home, he witnessed an unusual commotion in the village. It was a summer evening and the villagers who had returned home from harvesting and mowing were gathered in groups talking with each other.

As he passed the streets, Peti heard someone say:

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

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

On any other peaceful working day it seemed as if no one in the city knew about that village that lay behind the mountains. But on this day, the village felt 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 groups 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 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. No one in the village even noticed him. The jokes from the old days were no longer told. The calf that had been born on the mountain no longer brought the same joy to the owner.

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

Peti shrugged 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 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 frayed, but nobody thought about 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 Auntie Zar’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 would sit in a warm corner of the barn and listen to the cows ruminate, and feel the need 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 the 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 boiled.

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.

All sorts of people came to the village, said a thousand things, and held meetings. But the only thing the villagers understood from all that 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 and without guns. They hid in haylofts during the day and fled to the nearby mountain whenever they heard that someone was coming to the village to gather 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 talking of cannons. Children talked of arms, and odd shots became part of everyday life.

Together with arms, pillaging was also on the rise. It was no longer safe in the village. People locked their doors more tightly before going to bed. There was theft in the orchards—the village was clearing out old grievances by setting fire to the fields of neighbors and avenging troubles that had been kept hidden in people’s 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, left the village for a few days, and returned with looted goods.

The village was huddled in fear. But there was food and drink in the rich homes, where the commander would get drunk and shoot about ten times out of the window into the sky. The village was terrified of the bullets--hot lead that fizzed in the cold winter air. Half-asleep, half-awake, the village was on the watch, its ear on 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 events of the village. He did not attend meetings and nobody asked for him or took him seriously. Just like 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 asked who still needed to be added to the list, one of them would have to jokingly say:

“Well, Peti!”

The rest would have to laugh and the youth would crack jokes that Peti could be good at hurling cannons or making a commander. And, suddenly, in the middle of all this, someone or other would have to 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. He had become older: his eyes had sunk in and the wrinkles on this forehead had multiplied. When he walked, he cast his head down like someone looking for something.

Whenever Peti came up in conversations, some people suggested giving him a woolen overcoat or 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, and with the melting snow, 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 melted snow on the rooftops was dripping down and there was mud in 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.

He had never in his life fired a gun. He had never even touched one. Peti really wanted not to carry a rifle, but they forced him. The commander got angry, stamped his foot on the ground, Peti broke 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 in fear and drew his hand back as if it were fire that had burned his hand. And, with the rifle in his hand like a crook, he drove the cattle to the mountain every day.

In his mind, he thought carrying a rifle unnecessary. Everyone on the mountain knew him. Whatever other shepherd had come to that mountain, they had eaten together by the stream. Peti was deeply convinced that his acquaintances would never shoot or approach his cattle.

And very often, 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, devastated him, and he would pull back into a corner of a barn not to see anyone.

One morning, as Peti was washing his face in the nearby spring and the cows were being brought to the spring, 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.

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

It was a cloudy spring day. It was drizzling softly. In the dampness, there was the sweet fragrance of spring flowers and green grass.

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, the spring sun appeared between the clouds, and the fragrance intensified. Peti leaned against a rock and sat down to rest.

In the distance, the buried city in the gardens looked 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 had dropped on the rock and was looking at the opposite hills. The sunbeams illuminated some sort of brilliance 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 hills. Peti craned his neck and pricked up his ears.

And suddenly he fell into the trench, face-first onto the wet ground. That is how half-dry grass falls when it is 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.

1927

© Translated by Nairi Hakhverdi

[parap]

Aksel Bakunts: "Apricot Field"

Even though the name is Apricot Field, there is not a single apricot tree there. Thorny shrubs like spiky brooms protrude from the riverbanks and from the cracks of the rocky cliffs. The advantages of Apricot Field are that it is protected from the winds and that it has water close to it. At the beginning of spring, when there are snowstorms and windy rainfalls in the mountains, shepherds drive their sheep to the valley and give them shelter behind the bare rocky cliffs of Apricot Field. The goats chew on the thorny shrubs and the sheep graze with their heads in each other's rears. And there isn’t a single sheep in the flock that will raise its head on snowstormy days.

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 discussion and contention, and had the two neighboring villages, Mir and Mrots, not fought each other countless times with clubs over the course of years.

Both villages are on the left bank of the river. Mrots is higher up and Mir lower down.

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

Mrots had goats and sheep and so did Mir. There was a church in the above village and a church in the one below. Very often the bag of insults opened at the same time. In the above village, some of the elderly sitting against walls tossed red cornel sticks toward Mir and cursed.

"Who on earth would want to live in Mir? If you burned it down, you wouldn't even smell the burn. 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 the burn or that they knead their dough in wastewater, because even a child in Mir knew that the river flows from above and passes by Mrots, sweeping up garbage and ash pans emptied next to it, and washes up hooves of cows, oxen, and horses passing through it. The brides and girls of Mir knew this even better, which is why they ran to the river at the break of dawn to fetch water before it got murky.

Mir’s children also knew that the river flowed from above, but they would have to grow up a little more to understand why their elderly did not say about the above village:

"If you burned it down, you wouldn't even smell the burn..."

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 the same clean, cold water from the river early in the morning as the above village drank, but Mir did not have as many cows as the above village. Whereas Mir's emaciated cows tugged at the dry grass that had grown in the cracks of rocks, the full udders of Mrots's cows buried themselves in green grass, their teats rubbed against flower petals, and pollen settled on the udders of the cows of the above village.

The children of Mir had to know about this so that when they grew up, they would understand that the oil supply that was kept in clay jugs was connected to the grass on the mountain. From the moment they understood this, if Apricot Field was talked about or discussed in the village, they pricked up their ears, clutched the handles of their clubs more tightly, and ran to 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 though the grass gets scorched in the summer heat and the soil cracks, the irritated cattle still rest in the shade of the rock, the cold of the river cools their skin, and after the sun has moved, the cattle still find a bit of grass to eat and the goats leaves on the thorny shrubs in Apricot Field.

* * *

Nobody remembered, neither in Mrots nor Mir, when the first hostilities started between the two villages over Apricot Field.

If Mrots was asked, they would come up with a thousand and one arguments about how Apricot Field belonged to them, that they had a map drawn by hand by an "engineer," and that there were papers.

"Here it is. With my hands I have drawn the border with rocks from the hill..."

"I remember that even my father's sheep used to stay the night in Apricot Field."

"Mir's border is very far from Apricot Field… The field is our native land..."

Naturally, Mrots not only said that, and not only three villagers spoke when someone asked them about Apricot Field. They would storm, jostle each other, each of them working to make their way and tell the government official what was on their mind, to confirm what they had heard about Apricot Field belonging to Mrots. Many of them went so far, invented stories in such a way that even neighbors standing close to them did not believe what they said, but they would keep quiet, laugh inwardly and nod so that the official would believe them. After all, wasn’t the argument over Apricot Field? Over the thorny shrubs that grew on the riverbanks and over the further expansion of the village borders?

But the argument was not settled by talking a lot and shouting loudly. After the official had left, the people of Mrots, with whispers and very secretly, would collect that sum of money that the "chief," who had come from the city, had alluded to during dinner the night before, adding:

"It's for your own benefit that I'm saying this. It's up to you. I don't want it only for myself."

The government official also went to Mir. The village below worked to welcome him even more grandly. They collected belongings from here and there: a clean pillow from one house, the only good carpet in the village from another. They decorated houses and warned brides not to leave a single speck of dust, and then, after cleaning the rooms, to bow their heads humbly to their visitor and usher him into their house.

A few tied up the visitors' horses, gave them fodder, and obediently smiled with the wretchedness of commoners at the government official’s guard, treating him well too, in the hope that that, too, could help the endless fight over Apricot Field.

In Mir, too, people raised their voices and made noise. They knew what the above village had said and they refuted the story about the "map." One of the villagers would come up, show a gash in his head and tell how the villagers of Mrots had hit him with clubs. Another would elbow aside his neighbors and push his child ahead in order to pull up the child’s pants and show dog bites on his leg.

The child would look in awe and fear at the government official's shiny buttons as the father tightly held the child's leg and lifted him up so that the "chief" could have a better view. But the government official's eyes would glide from the scars on the child's leg to the colorful carpet on the ground and put a price on it in his head, comparing it to the bribe that Mrots had promised.

And it was no surprise that on the next day, to keep Mrots in a bad light, a few people from Mir rolled up the thick carpet from the night before into a saddle blanket and took it to the city to the government official’s house. 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 evils.

If it so happened that the visitor agreed to see Apricot Field in person on 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 "chief's" horse and tell him again about Apricot Field and, with the same drive as the influential villagers told the government official, the village messenger would tell the same to his guard.

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

And in telling that story, the story-teller would have to ask whether the grounds of Apricot Field fell into the same ranks as the grounds of Mrots, but the "chief" would only laugh boisterously, and a few naive villagers from Mir, who could tell the tale by heart, would take the government official's laughter as being favorable to Mir.

In this fashion many years came and went. A lot of oil and cheese, carpets and rugs were taken from the two villages by a thousand and one government officials, and Apricot Field was allocated now to Mir, now to Mrots, according to how much was taken, creating a source of fights, and intensifying the anger over Apricot Field in both villages every year with the sprouting of green leaves on the thorny shrubs...

* * *

The Soviet days came.

When the enemy’s panic-stricken troops retreated from the provincial capital, and the exhausted Red Army soldiers lay down on National Soviet divans, the army headquarters deemed not only the city conquered, but also all of its remote valleys, including the one in which Mrots and Mir lay.

And it was neither necessary to send troops there, nor cannons. A local agitator traveled through the valleys and told that of 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 Apricot Field, the two villages kept their ears to the ground for news in those new days with Apricot Field in their minds.

And as soon as 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, the villagers crowded around the visitor and the first question they asked was about Apricot Field. The visitor’s answer, "the land to the worker," left the villagers of Mir in even more 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 listened to him, and at that moment there was not a single brain in Mrots in whose folds the history of Apricot Field did not move like a shadow. After listening, many talked about Apricot Field.

In the middle of the night, a few people in Mrots talked on the rooftop underneath which the agitator was sleeping on a kursi.1

"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, when the comrade who had come from the city mounted his horse to visit another village, they wished him a pleasant trip, approached 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 also approached him and wanted to extend his right hand and put that which he was clutching in his fist into the visitor's palm as he greeted him, his eye caught the horseman's eye as he extended his right hand, and his half-extended hand fell back into his hat from fear, exposing money in his hand. After seeing off the horseman, he took off his hat. The same day, the crowd on the rooftop reproached him, but he merely shrugged and said:

"Was I able to do it? No. His eyes were full of rage..."

Another spring came, and that spring a land surveyor came from the city to determine the borders of the two villages. The land surveyor had not set foot in the villages yet, but in both village they already knew so much about him that it was as if the man had lived with them for years. Until his arrival, both villages talked about him.

"They say he's got a good conscience."

"He wouldn't say no to a drink..."

"When he gets angry, there's no escape. He'll destroy everything..."

"And one of his eyes wanders a little..."

After the land surveyor came, there was even more talk and discussion. No sooner had he made his way to Mir than horsemen from the above village came to take him to their village. And because he did not "mind a drink," he went to the above village of which he had heard in the city. He gave Mrots the first victory as he poured water on Mir’s head. The villagers considered half of the fate of Apricot Field determined.

The land surveyor stayed more than a week. In both villages, he ate eggs and honey, slept in clean beds, and listened many times to the tale of the Khan and the bride and to the influential people in Mrots who said that they had the map of Apricot Field.

The land surveyor returned to the city. On his way, they held on to the bridle of his horse. If the holder was from Mrots, he pleaded with the land surveyor for Apricot Field to be theirs. And if the holder was from Mir, he did the same for Mir.

And both villages gave more or less the same amount of blessings to the land surveyor's children, to his house, to his dead and alive relatives, as they worked to find out something, to dig out a ray from what he had said that would illuminate the darkness of their doubts until news arrived from the city.

But the land surveyor merely said:

"It's going to be all right. I have drawn such a border that..."

And that "all right" turned out to be in favor of Mir...

An announcement was sent from the city to both Mir and Mrots, written in the same way, on the same paper: "To give Apricot Field in its entirety to the village of Mir, being a poor and land-deprived village." Even though that sheet of paper was very small and simple, it produced more noise in Mrots than the biggest bomb would have. They came to look at the paper, to touch it. Even though many were illiterate, they passed on the paper to the next person after touching it as if it were a piece of hot tin that had burned the fingers of the one who had touched it.

That same evening, the villagers of Mir talked and expressed doubt. True, the paper did not burn, but it also did not give them confidence. What pen could end the story of Apricot Field on that small piece of paper?

"So, is there something here?"

"No, it couldn't happen this fast..."

The next day, three people from Mir went to the city and approached a youth who was in charge of land matters. They put Mir’s final verdict on his table. There was something surprising in the verdict: the youth read it, cracked a smile, and looked at the villagers.

"Give us half of Apricot Field," they said.

1926

1. A kursi is a type of thick blanket spread over a low table placed over a shallow pit of smoldering coals. In the winter, people would often sit around the low table or cover themselves with the blanket to keep warm.

© Translated by Nairi Hakhverdi

[parap]

Aksel Bakunts: "Pheasant"

It was autumn, a bright autumn…

The air was crisp and clear like a teardrop. The bluish mountains were so close and looked so distinct that, from a distance, one could discern all the streams and reddish rosebushes on their clean slopes.

It was autumn with falling leaves, with the sun’s low temperature, and with bitter winds that plucked yellowed leaves from tree branches, drove them in groups, and carried them to distant valleys. Even the thick-trunked oak tree on the steep precipice bowed to the wind.

A marked sadness had descended on the reddish-yellow forest and the harvested fields in the deserted valleys. The first breath of snow was palpable in the chilly coldness of the air.

In the orchards the young cherries were cold and rustled in the wind. The tall corn leaves rubbed against each other, whishing like sabers. It was as if knights were jousting and the corn leaves served as crashing swords, falling before the wind.

The last sunflower smiled and swayed its yellow head in the sun.

Uncle Dilan was sitting on the dry bough of a walnut tree under the wall of the winepress. He had a habit of entering the orchard for the last time in late autumn, lock the door and fence, and close the winepress so that wolves and other beasts would not find shelter there in the cold winter.

He had bundled a bunch of dry twigs and stalks and put them next to him. He was resting with his eye fixed on the distant mountains. He was sitting and thinking, with his ear on the rustle of the corn leaves.

The autumn sun warmed him up. The peace in the valley was pleasant. The vines that twisted around the trees rocked in the wind, and Uncle Dilan’s mind swayed back and forth like the dry leaves that the wind had devoured. The small worn door of the winepress softly creaked in the wind and timidly sang an old song.

If the sun did not set, he could sit in that position forever without getting tired and without ever feeling satiated with the fruits he would pluck or with the rustle of the yellowing trees. Soon winter would come and who knew whether his hand would be the one to open the door of the orchard again in the spring or whether it would be someone else's.

In the peaceful autumn days he found pleasure in the rustling of the corn leaves, the rocking of the vine, and the song of the little winepress door.

Many years ago, the orchard door had creaked like that once. It had also been a sunny day. In the shade of the winepress, black grapes in a wicker basket had been glistening.

Inside, in a stone trough, Uncle Dilan was crushing grapes with his legs bare up to his knees as blood-colored must flowed from the stone trough into a clay jug.

It was hot in the winepress. He crushed the grapes and hummed a cheerful song to himself as drops of sweat rolled down and fell into the must. He was young in those days and the blood in his veins fermented like strong wine.

Dilan looked out at the sound of the door. There was no one in the orchard. But suddenly, when a bluish brocade on a head appeared in the cornfield, he hid behind the door.

It was as though a bird had hidden itself in the darkness in the middle of a forest. Then it cocked its neck like a partridge does when it hears rustling in a dry field and a young woman came out of the dense cornfield. She came out, shook her thin body and, like a reed, glided toward the winepress with the light steps of a partridge.

It was Sona: a new bride with a brocade for a kerchief—she was that girl with bright teeth whose laughter rang when she dangled her white shins in the narrow brooklet while the neighbor's son, Dilan, sprayed his curly hair, which looked like a bunch of grapes, with water.

The bride walked to the winepress with steps as light as those of a roe on snow. The silver coins on Sona’s woolen blouse tinkled by the door and she entered like a naïve bird through the open door of a cage.

Suddenly she saw him. She started and jumped back, but a passionately hot hand closed the little door of the winepress.

"Someone will come to the orchard, Dilan," she implored, trembling.

And he didn't know whether it was the wine or the heat in the winepress. Uncle Dilan simply didn't know. He whispered in Sona's ear:

"Wait, heartless..."

He whispered and put his arms tightly around her. The starch and the scent of her sky-blue clothes were so pleasant and the winepress so hot.

Sona writhed like a snake, trying to free herself from the arms around her. She pleaded and made promises. Her young body rocked like a reed and her back bowed down... Tired of the useless struggle, the bride, with pounding heart, offered her body to him as a chaste victim. And he greedily kissed the bride’s tight red lips and was infinitely delighted with her golden tresses that waved and glistened on the bright slope.

And then, like a bird with a broken wing, Sona bashfully flew out of the winepress. She shone once more in the dewy grass of the orchard and left the scent of her sky-blue blouse inside.

And the tinkling coins clanked like crashing waves.

* * *

They had been childhood friends and their love had grown as unnoticeably as a dark violet that blooms in the dark of the night. On the banks of the brooks, in the orchards, in the fields while stacking hay, by the haystack in the moonlit summer nights—everywhere that love chirped like a swallow until they both grew up and one day Sona walked into her wealthy neighbor's house, a bride’s veil over her face and, under the veil, bloodshed eyes, bright as a lake in the mountains, from crying.

Four months after the wedding they ran into each other on the path to the orchards. Dilan stopped her and asked her how she was. Sona shrugged sadly and walked away hastily.

The encounter had irked him, but the desire to be close to her like before, like a graceful soaring bird high in the sky, never descended on his threshold.

Then, suddenly, that bird perched right on his shoulder...

Why did she come to the orchard? Had Sona missed the water of the brooklet from her childhood? Or did she approach the little door of the winepress by chance, thinking that it was deserted inside, just like it was in the orchard? Dilan never figured it out.

He approached her a few times, wanting to talk to her, but Sona gave him the cold shoulder.

"Leave it, Dilan. Go your own way..."

And they never saw each other again.

* * *

Uncle Dilan only went home later that night. He roamed the valley all day, walked around the neighbor's orchard, went to the brooklet, stood on the corner of the street, but did not see Sona anywhere.

It was a moonlit night and the sky was cloudless. The night breeze was blowing. Uncle Dilan lay down on top of a haystack, on newly mowed grass, but couldn't sleep.

Thousands of dry flowers gave off their fragrance through the hay and, in the moonlit night, it seemed to him as if Sona were lying on the same haystack, having left the scent of her sky-blue blouse in the hay.

The stars melted with the rising of the sun and the dark blue of the night turned pale. When the flowers woke from their nightly slumber and the dew left glistening droplets on the orange rocks, the partridge awoke with the first rays of sun in the dry fields opposite the village.

"Kerrr-ick, kerrr-ick..."

One could hear the partridge singing its deep song. Higher up, from the depths of the forest, the pheasant was calling.

Uncle Dilan got up, threw his rifle over his shoulder, and turned his face toward the forest on the slopes of the mountain from which the pheasant was calling.

He felt sick at the thought of going to the orchard and seeing the winepress.

Uncle Dilan walked through the dewy grass, trampling harvested fields and golden wheat as he walked to the forest with his head cast down over tortuous paths and through shrubs.

There was an old rosehip bush at the edge of the road with a flat stone next to it that shepherds sprinkle salt on for sheep to this day... They used to carry bunches together—he and Sona. The sun scorched the girl's face and the tips of her golden tresses. There were strands of yellow wheat stuck in her hair.

They would take the horses out of the stables, get to that flat stone and stop the horses. He would lift Sona onto one of the horses, then straddle his own horse, and they would go to the fields to pick bunches.

And then one time Sona asked for them to sit together. So they pulled one horse behind them. Sona had sat at the front of the horse, and he at the back. He had held the reins with one hand and, with the other, he had held her thin body. The girl’s tresses had brushed against his face.

The next morning, however, when they arrived to that stone and he proposed for them to ride the same horse again, Sona said that her mother had scolded her and had strictly ordered her to sit on her own horse...

"Why?"

"It's shameful," the girl had said with a fair smile.

Uncle Dilan walked over to a bale of hay, dug his hand in it, and felt its warmth. The hay had warmed up and the grains had softened in the night's humidity.

When he reached the familiar field, he leaned on his rifle and thought. One summer Sona was weeding right there, bending over the wheat as splinters found their way into her fingers. Sona brought food for the harvesters, and she sweated in the sun, and the sweat made her shirt cling on the mountain slope.

If only... if only he could be a harvester mowing the field so that Sona would bring him the food, the shirt would be sweaty, and she would sit next to him sweating.

Uncle Dilan looked back at the road he had come from. There was no one. The autumn meadows were bare. Only the rosehip bush and its red fruit glistened between the yellowing leaves.

Suddenly he heard the call of a partridge from behind a bush.

"Kerrr-ick, kerrr-ick..."

With light, careful steps, Uncle Dilan crouched toward the bush. Partridges were roaming the mowed fields looking for fallen grains and pecking at chaffs. It wasn't just one partridge; there were many. They hopped around, rocking their fat bodies. In the spring two birds would often lock beaks over one grain.

Uncle Dilan kneeled and took aim. One fat partridge cocked its white neck and looked all around itself. The rest quieted down and hid in the bush.

The wind rustled the bushes, just like Sona had done with the tall corn leaves... And as soon as the rustle reached the partridges, they instantly circled into the air and descended on the sunny fields farther away.

He moved on. The farther he walked, the more abundant the bushes became. In the fields one could see sporadic oak trees bent, bowed, and charred by lightning. It was as if sentinels were guarding the borders of the forest and fields.

The path was narrowing. He was trampling the last fields. A breeze blew in his face from the forest and his nostrils greedily sucked in the forest's humid and fresh air.

* * *

The forest was familiar to him. He knew where the pheasant likes to build a nest and call from--that golden-feathered bird from the depths of the forest.

In the forest, there were mossy cliffs, bear dens, and age-old oak trees that had been knocked over by the wind and were strewn with mushrooms. The half-dry branches had become covered in moss and in the semi-darkness it seemed as if hirsute bears were standing on their hind legs.

The thunder of a shotgun was heard not far from the cliffs.

The noise 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 be? 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 behind a rock. It was 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 from his hiding place to take aim at his target and lay 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 cautious: it won't let itself get shot so easily. Sometimes it moves so close, and you're just about to shoot it, 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 quietly land somewhere else. The pheasant is cautious: 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 over blue mushrooms that had grown in their shade.

Uncle Dilan trampled the dry leaves, burying himself like he had done in the hay fields. He stumbled a few times and continued on his road holding onto tree branches.

He reached a spring, bent over, and drank with relish. Soon after, he descended into the valley of linden trees.

Below, on rocks, there were so many pheasants... The sun had warmed the mossy rocks and a golden-feathered pheasant with black dots on its wings was hopping from rock to rock, calling, pecking its neighbor, and circling around a female.

He aimed. When the flint sparked and the gunpowder exploded, fire and smoke rose out of the barrel of the rifle, the valleys thundered with a dreadful echo, and the pheasants flew out of the valley, their wings wide with soft feathers and spread out in the golden rays of the autumn sun.

Only one of them fluttered and fell from the mossy rocks into the bushes.

Uncle Dilan ran to it and, as he ran, he noticed a white dog with its tongue out leap at the bush. The muzzle of the hunting dog and Uncle Dilan's hands extended toward the bloody pheasant together.

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

Uncle Dilan was regretfully watching the bloody pheasant when all of a sudden very close to him, he heard the sound of footsteps. He turned around, his eyes widened with surprise, and his rifle instinctively slid behind the tree.

It was the forest ranger—his eyes like smoldering red coal...

He walked up and bawled out, and only calmed down when his whip had ripped the air and landed on Uncle Dilan’s shoulders so many times that his shoulder blades burned like the sting of a nettle on bare skin.

The forest ranger whipped him and was angry, because Uncle Dilan had scared away the pheasant he had shot.

The forest ranger's hunting dog looked back and forth at his owner and Uncle Dilan and snarled, tapping its tail against the ground, now opening its mouth and yawning from the agitation, now restlessly sniffling the shrubs where the bloody pheasant had flapped around before.

The unexpected meeting had perplexed him... They had already left when Uncle Dilan came to his senses and looked behind them, remembering the dog’s red snout...

Uncle Dilan sat on a rock. His face twitched in pain. It was as if his back had been singed with hot pokers and he felt heat under his eyes from the beating. Uncle Dilan thought for a long time with his eyes riveted on the pheasant’s two feathers. A deep bitterness and sorrow ruined his otherwise wonderful day.

...The sun was playing with the evening clouds. There was silence in the forest. The pheasant had flown far away... Two feathers lay on the mossy rock, yellow with black dots, and, on the dry branches of the bush, drops of blood.

Uncle Dilan descended through the valley.

Sometimes 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 trembled lightly.

He tightly held the hot barrel of the rifle like the body of the pheasant, which he had stroked for only one second and felt with his fingers that its feathers were soft. The pheasant's body, with its warm feathers, was just like Sona's body under her sky-blue blouse.

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

When the rays of the morning sun shone inside through the crack of the small winepress door, Uncle Dilan woke up, rubbed his eyes, and felt pain under his eyes. The swelling had not gone down.

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

* * *

It was autumn, a bright autumn...

Uncle Dilan was sitting in front of the winepress, his head cast down to his chest, thinking in the sun about the days that had come and gone.

The summer following that autumn Sona died at childbirth, and her mother, husband, and relatives cried. Another girl replaced her and Uncle Dilan also got married, but in his memory Sona remained forever indelible, and so did the winepress, the sky-blue blouse, and the silver corn leaves.

The cemetery was on the opposite slope of the hillock. There was moss on Sona’s gravestone, the engravings had long been covered in soil, and the stone had tilted to one side and buried itself in the ground.

Sona was buried in her sky-blue blouse. The sky-blue had decomposed long ago and so had her body that was like golden moss...

How many autumns passed since that day--who knows? He knows that he has already 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 not sharp enough to hear light footsteps.

In front of the winepress, the brooklet flows by murmuring, day and night the water makes noise--that's the water's endless and sleepless conversations with the moss and the stones...

Uncle Dilan looked to the brooklet and smiled. In the dark abyss of his memory that day twinkled like a lone star in the dark sky--that day when Sona dangled her shins in the brooklet and laughed...

Then his memory slipped and passed to the forest along the path.

There was a pheasant in the forest. It 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 sadness and bitter 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 dry twigs and stalks with difficulty and slowly walked to the orchard door with his weary and elderly feet.

There was no one left in the orchard.

Only the hardened corn stalks rustled in the evening breeze; the dry leaves gathered restlessly in corners here and there, fluttering despairingly and laying silently to rest in the dark hollow.

1926

© Translated by Nairi Hakhverdi

[parap]

Aksel Bakunts: St. John the Baptist Monastery

The nakharar* walked along the bank of the Kasakh River, and where the river flushes into a deep abyss, crashing its turbid waves against cliffs, scraping the cliffs, burying its course even deeper into the cliffs, the nakharar walked along the top of the high cliffs and decided to build a magnificent temple.

Perhaps that is not how it happened. Perhaps it was a bishop who passed by and wished to a see a monastery on the bank of the Kasakh that would soar like a lord on top of the cliff with windows looking down on the valley, on the waves of the river, on the foamy rapids, and with scholars reading hymns and psalms under its vaults, with bells pealing, and with the abbot forgetting in his prayers the world and the nakharar's concubine...

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

But there are inscriptions on the stones that tell us that St. John the Baptist Monastery had winepresses, vineyards, oil-presses, and watermills, and that princes, "for the salvation of the soul," offered the monastery villages replete with bull-calves, forests abundant in herbivorous game, and more villages and, in those villages, pagan commoners. All of this is recorded on the stones of St. John the Baptist Monastery.

The nakharar walked along the top 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, the cliffs of the valley, and the common villagers who carried the massive stones of St. John the Baptist Monastery on their shoulders would remain.

Centuries went by, the villagers multiplied, and where there had been forests and, in those forests, herbivorous game, only rocks and soft ground remained, because for the villager, lavash was necessary.

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

When the water level of the brooks began to drop, the last vines were axed, the mounds were leveled, and the winepresses were abandoned. It rained and snowed, and was windy. The rain beat against the walls of the winepresses and the winepresses were leveled to the ground like the mounds in the vineyards.

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

Thorns began to grow on the roof of St. John the Baptist Monastery and the thorns cracked the age-old cement and displaced the stones. And then one night, during an earthquake, the dome collapsed and its stones fell into the Kasakh. The river foamed and covered 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 of the monastery more passionately than before and goats bleated, nimbly bounding over the fallen stones onto the roof of the monastery to chew on the shrubs that had sprouted on the roof.

Years passed. The villagers latched onto their native pastures like ticks. They curled up when they were beaten and they retracted into their shells like snails do when their slimy tentacles touch something repulsive: the Khan’s 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 wheat pancakes, producing straw-filled dung from the waste of hidebound oxen, smacking the dung on the stones of Urartian walls, and preserving pickles in their pagan ancestors’ burial jars.

* * *

Last spring, when snow was melting off the skirts of Mount Ara exposing its slopes, and snow water was flowing down in turbid narrow streams to 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 upon a strip of land within the walls of the monastery.

The villager walked around the collapsed stones of the monastery, looked at the sacredly carved stones, and put it in his head to build a threshing floor and hayloft with the stones of the monastery and use 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--when he looked at the valley, he did not realize that the seventh-century nakharar had stood on that same cliff wishing to see a vaulted monastery and that the abbot had looked down from that same cliff on the turbid waves of the Kasakh and had missed the nakharar's concubine, had missed her and had read psalms.

It was cool at the top 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 neighbor's goats won't come and and chew on the herbs in the vegetable garden. Behind the walls, next to the threshing floor and hayloft, he will build a house on top of the cliff and live away from his neighbor’s gaze.

At home in the evening he fell to thinking once more. He carefully considered the wish he had had in the afternoon and found it good. He thought it imperative to plant 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 chew on the herbs in the vegetable garden.

The first thing the villager did was to fortify the vegetable garden. Many stones: ornamented stones with pomegranates and bunches of grapes—stones with inscriptions that the sun and wind had faded in places. Whatever fell into his hands he used to build the wall—a Urartian type of wall—piling them up as tall as a human being. He got a shovel and began to dig. Pieces of tile, broken jugs, and stones came up from under the ground. He chucked aside the broken jugs with his shovel, cleaned the stones he needed for his vegetable garden, and rolled the rest of the stones down the valley.

When evening fell he sat down on a rock and smoked. A breath of fresh air rose from the valley and stroked his sweaty brow. He smoked and looked at the semi-ruined walls and cross stones of the monastery. The old St. John the Baptist Monastery seemed redundant to the villager. What a nice vegetable garden it would become, with melons and watermelons! For how many centuries had the grounds of St. John the Baptist Monastery been completely useless!

If only an earthquake would hit again, just like before, so that all of it would fall into the valley and the site of the monastery would be forgotten. He would come out of his vegetable garden, expand the walls, clean the site of the monastery, and incorporate within its borders the old graves with their headstones now half-buried into the ground and their inscriptions now almost completely faded.

He would take all that into his borders and, on the royal graves, he would plant onions and garlic, and also an apricot tree, whose roots would descend deep into the ground, burying inside the royal bones, which in turn would yield tasty fruits.

The monastery would not cast a shade on his vegetable garden...

People in the village talked about the villager. They talked about St. John the Baptist Monastery and that he should not be allowed to build a vegetable garden, that the site was historical—a sanctuary. But people in the village also talked about the fact there were no vegetable gardens anywhere in the village. The villager had been fortunate enough to have found suitable land. They talked, and then they fell silent.

The villager's wife did not approve of what her husband was doing, but she did not complain. Early in the morning she went to the monastery, kissed the cross stones, lit two yellow candles as thin as her fingers, and kneeled to pray, but as soon as she heard footsteps she left.

It was the bell-ringer. He had come to take a bale of stacked hay from a corner of the monastery. The bell-ringer had not seen a lit candle by the door of the monastery in a long time. He blew out the candles and put them in his pocket. He would need them in the evening when he fed the cattle hay in the barn.

* * *

In the winter, the stuffed sweet peppers were tastier to the villager. He ate, gulping down large chunks, and extended his plate to his wife.

"If there's any left, put some more on my plate..."

The sweet pepper burned his tongue, warmed his stomach, and he very much enjoyed the sweet pepper from the vegetable garden on the site of the monastery. And not a single abbot in centuries past had received as much peaceful pleasure on winter days as the villager did from his planted sweet peppers in his mouth.

Sometimes he would go and look at the trees he planted. In a few years the threshing floor and hayloft would also be finished and, in the summer heat, tired from threshing, he would lie down at the foot of one of the trees. The breeze from the valley would bring the coolness of the waves of the Kasakh and fruits would grow in the summer sun.

But that's not what happened. Fruits never ripened.

A piece of paper arrived that said that St. John the Baptist Monastery was historical and that it was prohibited to cultivate the land, plant trees, and use its stones to build a house.

In the spring, when the snow melted off the skirts of Mount Ara like the year before, the land was parceled. Piles of stones were placed on the ancient grounds and on the borders of the village. The trees in the vegetable garden were uprooted.

And that which he had thought about the spring before while standing on top of the cliff and looking down on the Kasakh--a threshing floor, a hayloft, and a home behind the walls--all of that seemed like melting snow to the villager.

He took down the hanging door.

The goats once again climbed up the rickety walls to chew on the shrubs. They bounded from stone to stone. And when a piece of cement fell, an echo rang under the vaults, causing doves to fly up, circle the air, and descend again.

When the villager took down the door, he looked at St. John the Baptist Monastery. To him the monastery on top of the cliff seemed useless, and the sweet pepper from the vegetable garden tasty...

1926

*In feudal Armenia, a nakharar held the position of a prince or lord who oversaw a state, province, or estate.

© Translated by Nairi Hakhverdi