*On the opposite mountainside a peasant was ploughing with a yoke of oxen. The oxen slowly traced the little stony patch of land. The peasant heard: “Sevan, Sevan… Come on, Sevan!… Break your shoulder, if you’re Sevan!” “The wheel’s slipping—put a stone under it, put a stone under it!” “Sevan, Sevan!… Pull, Sevan!” “Hold it, hold it… Hold it, lad, it’s tipping into the gorge!” But the peasant was at his plough. Those cries, those desperate efforts, those sounds of the switch and groaning did not concern him. His were the grinding of the stony soil, his plough handle and the slow tread of his oxen. There was even hostility or ill will in his passing glance, looking and not seeing, when a distant voice shrieked, “Put a stone under it!” “Come along,” the peasant said quietly to his oxen, straightening the plough. With another brief sideways glare he saw, on the steep ascent of the ravine’s other slope, an ox cart loaded with a millstone, a man placing a stone behind its wheel, and a horseman who seemed to be looking this way, at the peasant. “Go on,” the peasant said quietly, and then heard:
“Are you so blind you can’t see? Aren’t you an Armenian Christian?”
The peasant stopped, looked, spoke and pointed a finger at himself:
“Do you mean us?”
“No, us,” said the Horseman. “Are you a Christian or a Kurd, that you don’t understand Armenian? Bring your oxen and come help.”
“Come and take them,” said the peasant, pulling the scraper out of the plough.
“What are you taking out that scraper for? What part of me will you scrape, eh?” The Horseman spurred and whipped his horse.
“Don’t bother with the dog,” said the Carter, who had put a stone behind the wheel and was now emerging from beneath the cart.
The Horseman rode down into the ravine, crossed the stony watercourse and galloped over the ploughed field, while the peasant waited with the scraper in his hands. The Horseman reached him and whipped him, circled him and whipped him again.
“If you don’t understand without being told, understand when you’re told!” The Horseman whipped him again. “Now get in front, and harness yourself beside them,” said the Horseman.
The peasant went between his oxen as if to unhitch them from the plough, but bent, slipped beneath the yoke and ran across his field.
“Son of a dog!” The Horseman dismounted, detached the yoked oxen from the plough and whipped them down the field towards the ravine. “Dog, son of a dog!” He went towards his horse, while the oxen ran down the field, swaying heavily.
Later the Horseman sat at the front of the cart, beating and encouraging all four oxen, while the Carter clung to the spokes with his shoulder beneath the wheel, straining as though he would burst.
They brought the cart to the top of the slope. The Carter could not speak for a long time, while the Horseman climbed down from the oxen’s shoulders and, unhitching the oxen taken from the peasant, said:
“May Uncle Ohan put it to good use… Tell him: you have a year or two of life left; have the old stone dressed and make do, good man.”
The Horseman turned the unhitched oxen, which for a moment pleased him, back down the slope towards the ravine, and said to the unseen peasant:
“Come and take them.” And added, “Or have you gone to fetch a gun?”
Frowning for a moment at the little field on the scorched mountainside, the Horseman turned back to his horse, whose reins were looped over a spoke of the cart, and just then the Carter said:
“Uncle Ohan will wear this one out too. He’ll have granite brought from Gandzasar, wear out the granite too and stack it by the mill door, and he’ll wear out you and me as well.” The Carter climbed onto the cart and sat at its front, and then the Horseman, from his horse, said, pointing back towards the stony mountainside with his whip handle:
“There, there, there… Let him come and pull a plough with the oxen on barren soil, and wear himself out. With water doing the work, I could wear anyone out myself.” Then he added, laughing from embarrassment, “I struck that poor fellow’s eye and smashed it.”
“He won’t let it go, don’t worry,” said the Carter. “One day he’ll bring you down from your horse.”
“If only!” said the Horseman. “These are times for men—where is a man? Necks bowed, a breed of sheep. He’s put his hopes in David of Sasun, or else the Russian Tsar Nicholas. Take that! Come on, Sevan, it’s your load to pull, you’ll pull it; what are you twisting about for? He’s afraid of blood himself and hopes the beast is kind. That there is a God. That there is a Russian tsar. Anything, so long as it’s far from him, so long as he isn’t his own saviour. Like a child: ‘The wion is kind, isn’t he?’ If you’re that cowardly, of course there’s a God, of course there’s a Russian tsar, of course the beast dislikes blood and won’t spill any.”
The Carter did not quite agree with the Horseman, and objected with a laugh from the front of his cart:
“The strong are strong!”
“Over men bowed without courage, the strong are certainly strong,” said the Horseman.
“Strength belongs to the strong!” said the Carter from the front of the cart.
“Strength belongs to the strong, and you belong to the strong too, you’re in the strong man’s fist. So be a man and bite that fist so that every time he looks at his hand he remembers how wide your jaws are…”
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* On themes from Av. Isahakyan’s short story “The Pipe of Patience.”
Published in part. You can download the complete version (PDF).