In nineteen forty-five our village received seven thoroughbred mares and one furious stallion to replenish the herd thinned out during the war. I do not remember what happened to them—I was ten then—one remained, an orange one, with the stallion, who was orange too. They supposed the stallion was the mare’s son, and the fact that she did not foal seemed to confirm it.
In nineteen forty-six Mesrop returned from exile.
“What is exile?” I asked my Elder Uncle.
“Forests, deserted snow, one bear and vodka.”
I thought and thought, and since I had already asked others and knew what exile was, I said:
“I think it must be prison.”
“Yes, something like prison.”
“And what is prison like?”
“Prison?.. Prison is like your uncle’s wife. Go home.”
“Oh de-ear,” I said, hurt.
He was hewing a cart shaft. “Don’t interrupt,” he said. “When you grow up, you’ll find out everything.”
In nineteen forty-seven they took Mesrop away again.
“If they were going to take him away, why did they let him out?” I said to my Elder Uncle.
“You’re wearing me out. Hey, woman!” he called to my mother. “Call your brat.”
That night they took my Elder Uncle too. The division, with my uncle in it, had not yet been armed when the Germans surrounded it. “You were taken prisoner without firing a single shot,” they told my Elder Uncle at the district centre before exiling him. He is a slow speaker: by the time he said, “I had no rifle,” the train had reached Makhachkala. Three years later he returned. He had been exiled by mistake. At the district centre they said, sorry; by the time he said, “Never mind, anything can happen,” he was already in the village, hewing a cart shaft, scorching it, smoothing it.
“But aren’t there rifles in the army?” I said.
“When you grow up, you’ll find out.”
“Then why don’t they apologise to Mesrop?”
“How should I know, Hranto-o?” my Elder Uncle said irritably.
I am thirty now. In nineteen hundred and eight Mesrop’s father killed a man. That place is called Where the Turk Was Killed. In nineteen eighteen three men came and killed Mesrop’s father. That place is now called Where the Armenian Was Killed. Later, twenty-five-year-old Mesrop wanted revenge, and Levon, the Party secretary, had him imprisoned. In nineteen fifty-six Mesrop returned from exile. He came into the office, grabbed Levon’s collar and shook him:
“You brought the Cheka to my house for nothing, eh, at three in the morning, eh!..”
Levon did not cower. He too grabbed the other’s collar and began to shake him:
“You practised nationalism under Soviet rule, eh!.. If the Party has taken pity and let you out, don’t think it let you out because you were in the right. Siberia is deep, eh, the Party won’t pity the ill-mannered...”
“Look at him, just look at him,” Mesrop sneered. “I’m the one coming from Russia, and he speaks in the Party’s name.”
“The Party will not pity you!” Levon shouted.
“So you’re the Party?” Mesrop looked him up and down.
Levon’s rawhide shoe had a hole, and the sock beneath had a hole; through the joint hole in shoe and sock his big toe stuck out its large head. Levon was blind in one eye, bald and had a hernia. “I’m not the Party,” Levon said meekly. “What sort of Party am I?”
“Then why do you speak in its name?”
“And why were you reading Leo?”
Then Sanasar, the wide-mouthed collective farm chairman, grew angry:
“Enough idle talk,” Sanasar said. “You, Levon, are going to the farm. If you don’t put the farm right, don’t enter the village: pack up your mountain camp and go wherever you please. Mesrop, you,” Sanasar said, “welcome home. We’ve missed you very much. Go and tend the horses, Mesrop.”
Only an hour or two after becoming the horse herder he was insisting that the stallion was the mare’s son and that until there was another stallion this mare would not foal. Many believed him and many did not, while Levon, standing in another group of talkers, asked, “What, has he already started straining his brain?”
As long as that orange stallion was in the herd, no other male horse, no, would dare appear anywhere near it. He was vicious. If from one mountain he saw a male horse on another, he flew to tear him apart. That blazing orange creature flew, aflame beneath the huge sun of that green world, towards the wretched packhorse, as though the wind were driving a fire; his copper tail all but tore away, barely kept up with him. And the white foreleg appeared and vanished, appeared and vanished in the crossings that broke apart and formed again. And the flame of his mane tossed about him. From one mountain to another you heard the powerful lungs beating against his ribs. From that distance his rush was fearsomely beautiful. But if you owned the packhorse, you wanted to drive hot lead into his looming chest. You wanted him to stumble, collapse upon himself and have his spine shatter beneath the skin.
And Mesrop shrieked after him:
“Oh, if a man could be such a horse!..”
A year later the dark red herd was flecked with fiery, restless foals that sprang from the far end of the plateau and scattered little orange flames all over the green plain. Their lazy mothers whinnied dully, calling from afar, from the other end, but the foals, the very image of the stallion, paid their mothers no heed, startled at the breeze and off they went, now to the mountain’s shoulder.
“Fly, of course, fly,” my uncle said. “Here I am having Alkho’s pack saddle patched for you.”
Alkho was our horse. They reckoned his age at twenty to twenty-three. Before reaching us he had had some four owners and as many names: each new owner named him after the previous one. One eye was ruined, half his teeth gone, a thousand old wounds on his back, his flanks worn by stirrups. But he was a strong horse. That day we had brought thirteen loads of wood out of the ravine’s forests on him. His back was rubbed raw again, and my Elder Uncle freed him of saddle and bridle, slapped his rump: go, mingle, whinny, gallop with the herd.
“Let him fill out for a month or two and I’ll sell him as a five-year-old.”
But he paid the herd no heed. Gave it a slight glance, a slight whinny and began to graze. He grazed in circles, with a rope’s length for a radius, as when tethered. Then, full and rested, he pricked up his ears and moved slowly towards the mares. That was all that was needed. The stallion broke from the herd and came thundering like a demon.
“Andre-e!” Mesrop called to my Elder Uncle. “I’m not responsible!”
Poor Alkho, he had neither legs to flee nor teeth and hooves left to stand his ground. He trembled like a willow. Pitchfork in hand, my uncle stood in the stallion’s path. And called to Mesrop:
“Mesro-op, I’m not responsible, Mesro-op!..”
“Don’t be foolish, let him through, Andre-e!” Mesrop called.
Then Levon came out, pushing aside the tent’s felt coverings.
“There, there, look what they’re doing, what’s happening,” he repeated in confusion, then, recovering himself, set all forty dogs of the camp on the stallion. Amid the mingled yelping and running the stallion lost Alkho and returned to the herd.
“What shall I do with him?” my Elder Uncle asked anxiously.
“Let’s take him to the village.”
“But I want him to fatten up so I can sell him.”
We tethered him near the camp, away from the herd’s territory. But the uncomprehending creature broke his tether and went towards the mares. The stallion battered him, made carrion of him.
The shepherds stood beside him, talking and waiting for him to die so they could feed him to the farm dogs. They praised him: he had been a good horse, carrying eight or ten poods; they knew nothing of Gikor’s twelve.
He truly was a good horse. They loaded him and drove him to the hot villages of Kazakh. Horseflies tore at him, the switch made knots on his bones. From the hot villages of Kazakh, oh, a hundred kilometres away, they loaded him with fourteen poods and deceived my Elder Uncle, saying they had loaded a little over eight. “It’s barley, light as cotton,” they laughed at my Elder Uncle. They unloaded him and beat him to the station; they missed the train and beat him again.
“Doesn’t foal, gives no milk, carries no load,” my uncle said. “I’d pile Alkho’s load on her, his hide too, damn her maker...”
“On the stallion? A little quieter.”
“On your mare,” my uncle said to Mesrop. “Your orange mare. A stallion is a stallion, we understand, but why do you keep the mare? She neither foals nor carries a load.”
Then the farm received three lorries and two tractors. One was hitched to the threshing machine; the other finished the autumn ploughing in a week and, for want of anything to do, began hauling fuel from the forest. The oxen and horses grew so fat they were bursting. The draught animals were driven off for meat procurement. Then they sent the aged mares to the procurement depot, mares that stumbled a little, were a little short, a little tall, a little sluggish or nervous. Yet a large herd remained, which would eat so many tons of barley over the winter, an article on cost accounting in the district newspaper said. The price of a horse became the price of a sheep. They began selling them to anyone and everyone.
The dentist bought the orange mare. That summer he had come up from his city of Yerevan into our mountains, fitting crowns on the shepherds’ and milkers’ teeth for butter, cheese and money, and they smiled crooked smiles. In a month he had collected thousands by cheating and swindling, and now he was enjoying himself. He would ride the orange mare from his house to the medical station, from Yerevan to Echmiadzin, from the theatre to the restaurant. He paid twelve hundred roubles for the mare.
“Plus,” he told Mesrop, “if you have any bad teeth, come and I’ll crown them.”
Mesrop told him not to bother, the mare was not his, he was only the horse herder, then turned and quarrelled with Levon.
“You brought the Cheka to my house at night, eh!..”
That was in the office. The accountant raised his eyebrows:
“Wha-at, you’re selling Narinj? You’re smashing your heads against a rock!” the accountant fumed. “We deliver two to two and a half million roubles’ worth of wool alone every year. Who cares if one mare doesn’t foal? Who’s giving birth here that the mare should? The world is full of the barren; the slaughterhouses would be swamped, couldn’t keep up...”
“Calm down, calm down,” said Abgar, the former chairman, pretending to read a newspaper when in fact he was merely smoking behind it.
The cashier counted the money with difficulty, could not open the safe. “Call the smith to break it open... what sort of box is this, what sort of lock and key...”
The orange mare would not let herself be caught: she had known a saddle and knew the price of freedom. About twenty of us went, and she sensed that so many would not go for some ordinary colt. And our constantly driving her into the herd made her smell trouble and tremble. She would not let herself be wedged among the horses; she pulled outwards. We pressed her against the wall of thick rumps, and she became a ball of trembling nerves. She circled the herd, not yet knowing whom she would trample in her escape. Sideways, her steel neck arched, she circled brushing the walls of rumps and rasped low. Her copper tail fell in an arc, and her mane beat against her neck with a fine rustle. The ears swivelling on her head caught all our intentions. Her forelegs slipped sideways beneath her, and the eternal green covering peeled away underfoot. She had made a ring around the herd, and with her circling it grew black, a path worn over years. This lasted ten minutes, twenty, thirty; then we approached and she gathered into herself, we approached and she contracted. She tensed, tensed and sprang open! Broke from the herd and went. Her flight hardened our desire to catch her. In all our minds we were the catchers and she the fugitive. And all the world’s shortcomings were because she was not caught.
The herd followed her, and somehow she found herself wedged among heavy rumps. The herd was her enemy: the lifeless wall of rumps crushed her. Biting, she broke out of them and went at a pacing gait. The herd flowed behind her, while she fled the herd, and the legs beneath her began to multiply. Her legs grew more numerous, more numerous, more numerous, until no legs could be seen, no motion could be seen; whatever it was, that flight was not by means of legs: a yellow flame slid over the earth. Only it was a pity it could not leave the earth: it dipped with the hollows, rose with the hills and turned with the road. And with the curving plain it vanished from our sight.
Mesrop bet she would not be caught. “I’ll cut my throat,” he said, mocking the dentist: “That was a wild twelve hundred, Doctor; it flew out of your hands.”
“Wait, wait, leave your throat alone,” the dentist said. He took a wallet from his breast pocket.
“Well, here’s the thing.” He counted out money. “Hold this money. Hold it, hold it.” He pretended he could not fold and close the wallet with one hand and needed to free the other. “Hold it, I’ll tell you now... So, man to man, it’s agreed, the money is yours, put it in your pocket. You must catch Narinj.”
“All right,” Mesrop said, “but without money.” He crumpled the money in his hand and, whether embarrassed or reluctant to part with it, held his hand out to him.
Two days later they sent me to the city for school. The dentist had payments to collect, stayed to gather them and came to the city in mid-September. Then the mountain dwellers moved down to the village’s warm ravines. Mesrop stayed in the mountains with the herd another twenty days or so. The orange mare kept close, and Mesrop’s heart fluttered. The mountains were green with their last green beneath the cold-warm autumn sun. Smoke rose from no camp in the mountains, and it was sad. The sun rolled in absolute silence. Mesrop missed the summer voices, missed going down to the neighbouring camp swearing and their field guard’s staff whirling over his head.
“Come, orange mare, come,” he called to the horse standing far away. “I’m alone; everyone’s gone. The Yerevan man too. Everyone’s gone, just you and I are left...”
Mesrop very much wanted the dark thing in the distance to be a rider coming towards him.
“You’re a rider,” Mesrop said. “You’re tightening your horse’s load; shall I come and help?..” But minutes passed and it still only showed dark. Evening came, and now it swayed in the dusk. “You’re a stone, a stone,” Mesrop said. “What do I care? I’ll go down home too, but you’ll stay where you are. Poor rider. Girl, I’m talking to you!” Mesrop turned to the orange mare, standing motionless at the plateau’s edge, head high, ears pricked, very like a horse in a schoolbook at that moment. “Come, my dear, believe me, I won’t catch you. The dentist’s gone! He’s not here, not here.” Mesrop slapped his palms together from above. “Finished, gone!..”
“Summer’s gone,” Mesrop grew sad at once. “You’re a horse, you won’t understand...” Over all the mountains’ bareness there were only him and the horses, and Mesrop corrected himself: “You won’t understand so well. Of all the animals you understand the most, that’s true, but a human is different...”
The mare did not leave the herd, circled it. In early October she came down beside the herd to the village: the mountains had grown cold. In the village ravines she grazed at the herd’s edges. In December snow fell, they drove the herd into the stable. Gave them hay, gave them barley. In short... But she circled the village and gnawed bushes. On December seventeenth wolves ate Levon’s cow at the water; on the night of the nineteenth they entered Artem’s cowshed. Shots were fired after them; on the twentieth they did not enter the village. But they threshed around it, circling and howling all night. Mesrop woke and saw Narinj pressed against the house wall, trembling. He approached; she fled. Four days later, around midnight or one, Mesrop came out of the office and the orange mare appeared for a moment in the light. Hid herself. That night Mesrop’s dog struck the door; by the time he came out there was neither dog nor wolves, only a faint rustling far away. On the night of the twenty-ninth Mesrop was in the stable when a whinny came from outside. He went out: Narinj. She did not even wait to be invited in: with her chest she pushed Mesrop aside and, her tall body making the floor clatter, went into her place. Bit and drove off the colt occupying her place and stood over her barley. The stable warm, the barley plentiful, the horses crunching in the stable. As for how many wolves were howling together outside, no one with a full manger and a warm place cared.
A year ago I was at the circus with my child and suddenly saw Narinj. They had given her a full ten minutes of the programme. They had clipped her mane, clipped her tail, polished Narinj up. True, she was a little too fat, but no sinewy village horse could have matched the delicacy of her movements. She danced a waltz, and every part of her plump body obeyed her: legs, ears, head, back, everything obeyed her. All that time I wondered whether her leg might suddenly become a hoof, whether she might suddenly lash out with kicks. No. She waltzed; they applauded and she danced again, then stood at the exact centre of the ring and thanked the audience on every side. They applauded for more, but she would not indulge them: paying them no further attention, she bowed to the orchestra and the orchestra bowed to her, and the ringmaster bowed her out of the ring. That ringmaster was made of Turkish delight and a book of etiquette, and suddenly I wanted Narinj to land a good kick in his belly.
I left the auditorium and went backstage. The crowd’s hot laughter came from behind the curtains. It was somehow slippery and heavy, like the hippopotamus they could not drive out of the ring: it had opened its mouth there, the ringmaster had put his pomaded head inside and taken it out, and now it was supposed to close its mouth but would not. There was heat, rustling, sweat, make-up, colours and hundred-candlepower lamps. Everything seemed to smell and give off steam. I opened doors and suddenly saw our horse.
“Narinj?”
She did not even look my way. The line of her back had been bronzed, the white on her leg painted her own colour, and her groomed mane was green.
“Narinj!” I said, holding chocolate to her muzzle. She did not eat it, did not even sniff it. For a moment I thought she would not eat the sweet because only its coating was chocolate, while inside was some sweet mixture of dough. I drew my palm back and hid the sweet I do not know where so she would not see it. And felt that I too was becoming a stranger to that horse. Seeing her fat rump, brushed, washed and oiled every day, I felt I hated her, and that firm within me stood the packhorse—the packhorse torn by horseflies, beaten by children, scorned by the stallion, the stallion’s terror in his sinews and straw before him.
“Ass!” I kicked her swollen belly. “You never foaled, never carried loads, never groaned under them, and you live. A fox farm was the place for you, ass.”
They had taken the hippopotamus out, and in its place the clown was now turning somersaults: pretending to take off his hat, he pulled off his beard; trying to put the beard on his chin, he put it on his backside.