I was in love then and wanted to think that in the whole village only I understood my Younger Uncle. He had come back after five years of army service in Tiflis, had been in the village three months already and would not take up a scythe. He sat on the office railings and smoked, stood at his doorway with hands in pockets, kicked a fallen apple aside in the orchard and bent to wipe the toe of his boot. He changed his collar lining often, adjusted his belt and came back to the village square with his hands in his pockets. Abgar, the collective farm chairman, thought my Younger Uncle was showing off his badge as an outstanding machine-gunner and a couple of other badges, so Abgar pinned his Order of the Red Banner to his shirt, walked back and forth before my Younger Uncle, then stood opposite him, puffed out his chest and rose on his toes. He tossed and caught the round seal. My Younger Uncle was much taller than Abgar, with bulging eyelids; he looked down at Abgar through narrow eyes and shrugged.
“I’m a man with one arm out of action,” Abgar said, moving his hand with its thin, straight fingers.
“So what?” said my Younger Uncle.
“And if need be,” Abgar said, looking round and gathering encouragement from those about him, “if need be, I’ll let the other arm wither too.”
“Well, let it,” my Younger Uncle said, quite unruffled.
“And it will!” Abgar said loudly. “To spite all the citizens, it will!” Then, turning quickly, he flung at my Younger Uncle’s feet: “Citizen!”
That pleased everyone. Nobody had clean boots or clothes of stout army cloth. Besides, they all had scythes and pitchforks on their shoulders, waited for bread from the store, hoped for meat, honey and butter too, and thought the chairman would now turn away from this soft Tiflis fellow and authorise a ram for them, the scythe-bearers. They mowed; if they did not mow for a day, the city would starve. That was how important they were, and how much of a freeloader this lance corporal was, who thought himself a general.
“We’ve seen that army too,” Abgar mocked from above, from the second-floor balcony, and picking up the telephone ringing in the office, boasted through the open window, “And plenty of Russian matushkas too. Hello... Columbus has discovered America and come to amaze Abgar.”
All the men laughed, because they had all been in the army, had boasted after coming back and still remembered with enthusiasm the women of those days, women they had known or heard of. And all the women mowers, their faces creasing with smiles, pinched the men, because the women were certain pleasant shameless things happened in the army.
Then my Younger Uncle lit a cigarette and said in his deep voice:
“Don’t pester me.”
“Wha-at?..”
“You’re a grown man. Don’t pester me,” my Younger Uncle said calmly.
It was collective-farm business; people were always rude to the chairman. But now he acted as though he had never heard such an answer before and stood feebly beside the telephone.
“Meaning it’s your affair, you know best,” he muttered.
Upstairs Lusik stood embracing the balcony post and looking into the distance. She thought she and my Younger Uncle would marry, because he was the only one just back from the army and she was the village’s only grown girl. She wanted to fall in love with my Younger Uncle because books said that before marrying a girl and a boy fall in love, and she could not. She had firm muscles and blue eyes empty as water, which she wanted to fill with fire and tears, but could not. That girl had a hard time growing up: full-breasted and broad-shouldered, she seemed a woman, but the fool would suddenly leap onto a donkey and laugh tastelessly. At evening gatherings she pushed ahead of the schoolgirls and, tossing her head, stood motionless on the stage:
“Hovhannes Tumanyan. Maro! There is our village, proudly...”
Everyone applauded, everyone said she recited excellently, never stumbled, was a good, hard-working girl. But no one thought of making her his wife, his brother’s wife or a daughter-in-law.
That Lusik now stood embracing the post, looking at my Younger Uncle, almost falling in love, but suddenly recited in a ringing voice:
You did no work all summer,
Tell me, what was the reason?
In those fragrant grasses
You sang along with ours.
You sang—very well,
Now take up the dance,
Let the wind applaud—dance!
You could have gone deaf from the laughter. Then everyone fell silent and waited to see what would happen next. When everyone was quiet, my Younger Uncle’s deep muttering was heard:
“Stupid brute...” And a long, incomprehensible phrase containing the word made.
“Aha, he swore in German, swore in German!” said Hamo, who had taken Berlin, his lively eyes moving from one to another.
But Lusik took no notice at all of my Younger Uncle’s German, held out her hand and rang out again:
“Nothing human is alien to our souls!”
Now my Younger Uncle was going down towards the school, hands in pockets, broad-backed. We were sitting in geography class, Rima stammered at the map and wanted to give up and sit down, but I prompted her next sentence. Our young teacher, a kinsman of ours, read the newspaper and kept smiling with his lips closed, suppressing a snort at every moment. You might have thought the paper was telling a very funny, long story column by column, but the newspaper had nothing to do with it: our young kinsman the teacher was thinking how I was in love with that Rima.
“Shall I tell your father to marry you off? Perhaps you’re shy,” he once said to me in secret.
Everyone felt obliged to tell me they knew about something very, very secret. The boys of army age asked me quite seriously:
“Are you playing house, or is there something to it?”
I was going away, but they surrounded me:
“Son of a dog, answer when you’re asked something.”
Then I think they said there were no decent girls in the village, and the one there was had been claimed by... There was a Seno among them, an athlete and a snake, with a snake’s wide-open eyes. He took a handkerchief, gripped my nose in it and shook it: “Blow!” I was afraid of him, but struck him. They did not strike me. One pushed me to another, he to another, he to this one, this one somewhere I do not know... One held me so I would not fall... No, held my arms from behind, they undid my belt, lowered my trousers and spat. And laughed sharply: ee-hee-hee-hee... Afterwards I lay whimpering, while they said:
“Shame on you, you’re a man in love. Get up and fasten your trousers.”
...Ah, that damned smell of chalk, the smell of the worn map, the teacher’s smile behind the newspaper and that Rima’s sulky lips. And behind the desk that child, huddled with his hands between his knees, prompting: along the Ural Mountains... along the Ural River... down... along the Caspian Sea... right... Kuma–Manych... left...
My Younger Uncle stood beside the horizontal bar, hands in pockets, broad-backed. Rima was giving her lesson, wanted to give up; I prompted the next sentence, while the teacher pretended to read the paper.
Suddenly we saw my Younger Uncle standing upside down on the bar, motionless.
“Attention!” said the teacher.
Suddenly we saw my Younger Uncle swing, release the bar and catch it again, release and catch it again. Release and catch it again. And Rima was speaking very fast.
“Pay attention to the speaker!”
Suddenly we saw Seno standing still on his hands on the bar. Then Seno arched backwards, swung away and back, released the bar and caught it. Away and back, released and caught it. Then he somersaulted and stood beside my Younger Uncle.
My Younger Uncle gave his belt to Seno, hung from the bar straight as a stick, stayed a moment and lowered the bar towards his thighs... No, suddenly raised himself, still straight like that. Then slowly moved his body, stood upside down, carefully took away one hand and held himself on the other so long... Yes, the bell rang for break.
Seno gave his belt to one of us pupils, hung from the bar and, bending a little, repeated what my Younger Uncle had done: stood on his hands, then on one hand, then on his head alone. And like that winked at the group of girls. At Rima.
“You mustn’t, your head will hurt,” said my Younger Uncle.
“Has he one to hurt?” came the voice of Ruben the headmaster, and we pupils moved away from the bar and watched from a distance.
My Younger Uncle took off his shirt, swung at once and began doing circles; we counted ten. Seno did the same and a little more, shrieking as he turned, his shirt full of wind, spilling a knife, a photograph of the actress Makarova, a cigarette case and tobacco from his pockets.
Makarova’s photograph passed from Seno’s hand into Ruben the headmaster’s. In our pupils’ minds the headmaster was now going to tug Seno’s ears with a smile: Seno was yesterday’s pupil, and in our minds the headmaster had the right to tug everyone’s ears in the village. But the headmaster said to my Younger Uncle, out of nowhere:
“What else did they teach you in the army?”
“To be vigilant,” my Younger Uncle said, fastening his belt.
“And?”
“To be vigilant.”
“You said that. Something else.”
“Something else?..”
We took this for a serious conversation, but now I see that my Younger Uncle wanted to hit that headmaster in the face, the man who had made himself a decent city life in the village. He drew a salary, then a pension for no one knew what; as a villager he kept a cow and sheep, as a teacher he paid no tax on them; his wife too drew a school salary and a pension for a weak heart. He had made himself a life of soft, clean days flowing harmoniously along, and now and then from his house’s second floor asked after the villagers and gave pennyworth advice: “Why are you wet?—I got wet crossing the river.—You must cross a river by a bridge.”
“Something else?” said my Younger Uncle. “If necessary, to hit the Yankees in the face.”
“What are you saying!” the headmaster marvelled. “Are the Yankees the hypothetical enemy now?”
“That is correct,” my Younger Uncle answered.
“And,” the headmaster asked unexpectedly, “is your girl in Tiflis like Makarova?”
“Let me see,” my Younger Uncle said, coming closer.
“That wasn’t what I was asking,” the headmaster said. “They say you want to go to Tiflis. A good city, isn’t it? Rustaveli Street, the old city hall, the funicular, ice cream, the zoo, pavement... Yes, the Kura,” the headmaster suddenly remembered.
My Younger Uncle looked over his shoulder at the actress Makarova’s photograph and spoke alongside the headmaster’s words:
“Like her, yes, exactly her. Only the eyes a little smaller, the ears a little bigger, the mouth a little larger, the nose a little flatter—a monkey; herself fat, with three chins—a pig. A little weak in the heart too. I think she even draws a pension.”
“Well, that’s good,” the headmaster said. “You’ll receive it and eat. There’ll be bread and tea. White bread.”
But my Younger Uncle continued:
“No, why? It’s better here than Tiflis. Find someone who knows how to organise things and the Tiflis man can only envy him. House, home, gramophone, record player... Eggs, sugar, liquor, sheep. Pension, salary. A head of cheese per sheep, the upbringing of children.”
“Of course!” said the headmaster. “Cabbage, potatoes, beans, butter, pickles, to spite the envious, twenty sheep apiece...”
“The upbringing of children.” My Younger Uncle suddenly struck Seno hard on the neck and swore audibly beside the headmaster’s ear: “The upbringing you give...”
That fool Seno stood near them, proud that he had already left school and had the right to stand beside the headmaster, hide his cigarette while displaying it, smoke with a smile, and especially proud that his photograph was in the hands of such serious men. Seno ran away, then suddenly remembered he was grown up.
“Why are you hitting me?”
Facing the headmaster and continuing to speak, my Younger Uncle struck again.
“Why are you hitting me?” With sparks flying from his eyes, Seno came right under my Younger Uncle’s nose. At that moment my Younger Uncle was saying to the headmaster:
“The auditing commission is a good thing, but one can’t be both the headmaster and the commission...” With one hand on the headmaster’s shoulder, my Younger Uncle pushed Seno back with the other and struck him with his boot heel. As he threw his leg back, he must have squeezed the headmaster’s shoulder hard: the headmaster bent to one side. Seno searched for a stone, weeping, moved away as he searched, found a stone in the distance embedded in the earth and tried to pull it out, but could not. Seno sat on the stone and wept, swearing.
“Don’t swear,” said my Younger Uncle. Seno fell silent, and there we all understood that my uncle had a heavy hand. Seno looked at my Younger Uncle with wide, red eyes, then asked a remarkable question:
“What, I’m to be beaten and have no right even to swear?”
“You have. But if I come over, I’ll really beat you.”
“I’ll run away,” Seno said.
“That’s another matter,” my Younger Uncle smiled.
“What, can’t I?”
“You can.” My Younger Uncle moved a foot and Seno sprang up. Sprang up, swore and ran. Then stopped, swore again and ran. Then ran without stopping and swore without stopping, and all of us pupils laughed. The headmaster laughed too, then called:
“Hey, lad, come and take your Makarova.”
Seno stopped on top of the rise and said very loudly towards the school and headmaster, as though answering at an examination:
“...Makarova!”
He swore, that fool truly swore, and it really was something to boast of: one foot still in school, we, others like him, gathered there, almost unaware of what Makarova meant, and he had already reached the point of rejecting her. Something to boast of. I was dying of envy, but now my Younger Uncle shuffled on the spot, then suddenly sprang towards Seno.
“What have I done, what have I done, what have I done?” Seno crouched like a rabbit, paws raised, but understood that was no salvation. Seno ran.
“Hovik!.. Hovhannes!..” the headmaster called.
My Younger Uncle went swinging through the potato field, while Seno was already jumping the fence below. Seno was on the other side of the ravine; my Younger Uncle struck a foot against the fence and jumped. Long after he had passed, when my Younger Uncle was beyond the ravine and Seno on the hilltop, the fence collapsed.
“Ho-vik, I’ll call the district police, on my word as a Party member!”
Someone rang the lesson bell, and it was extremely hard for us to sit through chemistry. It was hard for that weak-hearted teacher to sit through chemistry too, adding with every lesson to her reputation for ignorance and absurdity. If only her headmaster husband could manage to draw the salary without those formal lessons! She hated us and we hated her, because we felt that each hour she was spoiling something in our future. Halfway through the lesson, in the silence indoors and out, women’s cries and dogs’ barking rose. Hovik and Seno. We poured out, ran through the potato field, hopped across the collapsed fence, descended into the ravine and climbed the hill. In the ravine on the hill’s other side the women shrieked round Seno, while my Younger Uncle walked slowly towards the forest. Between the bushes he appeared and disappeared, and his broad back was indifferent to the women’s unalarmed clamour.
“Look at our Tiflis man: in Tiflis he learned to kill people,” all the women said in turn. And rightly so. With his nose in the air, my Younger Uncle saw no women in the village, but women were there. They lit fires, put out fires, kneaded dough, bore children, washed clothes, cooked meals. He had discovered Tiflis!..
In my thoughts I was the one beating Seno, I was the Tiflis man, I was in the village by chance, and had nothing to do with my unshaven father, my rough Elder Uncle, the chairman who thought he represented the great world in that little village, the headmaster who knew the great world’s difficulties and found it convenient to build a life worthy of that world far away from it. I had written a play in those days, and my play was a more worthy claim upon the great world than their medal and blue railings. But the chairman called the play a “piesa.” The headmaster laughed at him, but said “piesa” too.
In the direction my Younger Uncle had gone, a ravine and a hill away, the reserve began. It had been the hunting ground of the viceroy of the Caucasus. Viceroy Vorontsov-Dashkov had come here from Tbilisi to hunt. So they said. Someone had said it and they repeated it because they did not want to be excluded from the gilded halls. And I would come here one day to rest and hunt. With the same indifference I would ask after the school headmaster: “How are you?” With boredom and laziness I would ask the chairman: “What’s new?” I would ask my father: “Do you need any help?” And restrain my city hunting dog, pulling at its lead: “Quiet, Rex!”
“Ho-vik!.. Hovhannes!..”
It was a transparent September day. If there were no one, nothing to disturb you, you could lie down and die. The sun melted overhead, and beneath it everything seemed meaningful and melancholy. Who invented this struggle for bread? Why should a man not be able to relax his nerves? We stand apart like trees, each for himself, each taking his share of sunlight and casting his shadow. How does a world standing quietly like a forest turn into a kennel? He is going to Tiflis; let him go. He curses his Makarova; let him curse.
“What a world!” I said to my Younger Uncle.
“Are your lessons over?” he said. He lay on his belly in the thicket; the village calls did not reach us, and our being there seemed our ancestor’s being there. I lay beside him, like him; my height was probably equal to his, my back rising and falling calmly was probably as broad as his. And I said to him in a metallic voice:
“Those lessons...”
The earth smelled beneath my nose, there was silence, and in the silence or my memory the telegraph poles hummed softly. And truthfully the ground was cold; I wanted to be lying on a mattress. I wished I had not sworn and did not feel my Younger Uncle’s heavy gaze beneath my ear.
“I’ve sent my play to Avangard,” I said quickly.
Beneath my ear it slowly grew lighter, and now again two bodily shapes, equal in height and breadth of back, lay pressed to the ground, breathing the earth.
“They replied that they’ll print it,” I said calmly.
“They replied that they’ll print it?”
“I think so.”
“Who thinks so?”
“I do.”
“Are you ten years old?”
“I’m fourteen, in my fifteenth year.”
“Go and learn your lessons.”
“I’ve always learnt my own lessons.”
“Who took your trousers off you?”
“That’s what Seno got it for!”
“Are you pleased?” my Younger Uncle smirked.
“Who is prettier, Karine, Makarova or Rima?”
“Don’t put your hand in my pocket again,” my Younger Uncle said, lowering his head.
“Other people’s pockets are no business of mine.”
“And who is Karine?”
“Whoever she likes. I don’t care who she is.”
“Then why do you listen in on other people’s conversations?”
“They’re my ears. I can listen.”
“You’re a boastful little brat.”
“I haven’t harmed anybody.”
“You’ve written a play. They’ve replied that they’ll print it. They’ve already sent the money; go and collect it. A hundred thousand roubles. A playwright. Go and buy houses in Kirovakan.”
As I walked away I muttered, “No, in Tiflis,” and at that very instant my Younger Uncle’s shout sent a shiver down my spine:
“Wha-at?!..”
“He’s doing nothing,” I told my Elder Uncle. “Lying there in the forest. I say, let’s go home, and he doesn’t even lift his head. So I left him and came.”
“How did he come to beat him?”
“Seno swore at Makarova, and Hovik beat him.”
“What Makarova?”
“An actress.”
“Has a theatre company come?”
“Seno had a photograph of Makarova. It fell out when he was swinging on the horizontal bar, and the headmaster said, pick up your Makarova, and he said... He swore at Makarova, and Hovik beat him.”
“So no theatre company has come.”
“Nope.”
“Then how did the fight come about?”
“Just then our bell rang.”
“A letter’s come for you from the newspaper. They’ve praised you.”
They had not praised me. They had said as plainly as could be that drama was a difficult genre and for now I should study hard at school. But my name in typewritten, almost printed letters, the words “drama” and “genre” in a letter addressed to me—my Elder Uncle took that as praise, and so did I. It made me kind.
“He’s going to Tiflis; let him go. Why won’t you let him, Uncle?”
He was hewing a cart shaft for the collective farm. Whether the axe did not cut well, or the wood was hard, or the workday credit was meagre and worthless, it was hard work. Make it badly and the carter swore; often he himself was the carter and swore at his own shoddy work. Make it well and it took ten days. And the forester quarrelled with him too, as though he himself were the collective farm.
“You’ve begun with a play,” my Elder Uncle said. “You’ve done right. Anyone can hew a cart. Scorch it and smooth it too. You stick to your lessons. It isn’t for you to support the old women, or me, or your father. They’ve waited five years for Hovik, and Hovik wants Tiflis. So do I.”
It had grown dark. They sat down to supper. There was quiet talk about the world, the weather, things heard and seen, and you could hardly believe that the chairman of the village council and the Party secretary had come to arrest Hovik. Their village clothes, and indeed the fact that they were people like us, mingling with us, made their purpose in coming to our house seem absurd. That day the village council chairman had cut his hand with his scythe while mowing; he said it stung and feared blood poisoning, while the Party secretary said drowsily that there was much work to do tomorrow.
My Younger Uncle was sitting on the far side of the cowshed.
“What’s he doing?” my father asked.
My mother had already lost patience and answered with an outright shout:
“May your whole line die out!”
“That I know. I’m asking what he’s doing.”
My mother spoke like my Younger Uncle, as though her jaw were heavy:
“I’m cry-ing. ‘I’m in love.’ I want to go to Tiflis. Runs in the bree-ed!” my mother shrieked. “Others can feed your brats while you fall in love in your Makhachkalas!”
Love was the city, a city commodity. My mother was a girl from a village near town, almost a town girl; love belonged to her, she and love suited each other. But here were these fellows, these heavy-jawed idlers, falling in love—one in Tiflis, another in Poland, and my father during the war in Makhachkala.
“Your brother’s calling you.”
In the moonlight his bent back breathed quietly, and the outline of his face grew dim with the sheen of dark bronze. A lone cricket sang from its cold crevice about the cooling world. In the forest the wide-mouthed lover, the geography teacher, sang softly; beneath his thick voice the girl’s low, full singing sometimes slipped out. If you strained your ears you could catch their steps together on the path, and if you strained your eyes you could distinguish their outlines among the shadows.
“Your brother’s calling you.”
My father’s shadow swayed in the moonlight too.
“Hovik? Hovo-o! Hovhanne-es!..”
Brother embraced brother, and with their heads together they swayed slowly.
“Hovo-o, Hovhanne-es, tynty-yl, woof, woof...” That was the language of their old home. They did not speak that language with us—with my mother, me and the others who had come later. It was the language of their old, close-knit family. Then my father called towards the song in the forest: “Hey, lad, shall we marry you two off tomorrow so you’ll leave us in peace?”
“Marry off your own so-on!”
There was silence, then the girl’s laughter rang out beneath the moon. My father was about to say something else but did not: he stared at the forest, dumbstruck. Hovik sobbed audibly, and all at once I fell in love and began to yearn. You could weep, and it was worth weeping.
The brother’s hand rested on his brother’s back. They both looked at one point, that point was inside them, and like that, shoulder to shoulder, they looked very much like an old family photograph. At that moment I did not exist for my father; I was becoming a stranger to him, he was with their old family. My mother, my Elder Uncle’s wife, I and all the grandchildren had not yet existed—twenty or thirty nervous, incomprehensible people wanting to change heaven knows what in this world. There had been one family, with its jokes, loves and friendship, respect for the elder and care for the younger, and then care had torn apart the lace of its love and its delicate friendship.
“Once there was, once there wasn’t a... what, Hovo?.. Once there was, once there wasn’t... Hey, green brother, Hey, familiar brother, Come, bring with you Rays of sunshine, A babbling brook, A blue sky, Bring sweet-scented Shoots, flowers and grass, The bleating of lambs, Play and joy, Hey, green brother, Hey, familiar brother...”
“What do you care if they recite poetry?” I said to my mother. “They’re right to recite it. If you knew any, you would recite it too.”
“I was bringing you up. I had no time.”
“You needn’t have.”
“You’re right.”
Then outside one of the brothers coughed as though he had a cold, and that gave the woman a sound reason to go and interrupt them and have her say. The three came inside. My Younger Uncle stood at the door like a stranger; my father examined a photograph close to the lamp, and my mother wanted to take it from his hands. In that village house, by the red light of kerosene, the girl’s slightly dreamy eyes in the photograph looked at each of us as though inattentively, as though attentively and wishing to please; they were loved but loved no one in that hut. When that Karine had her photograph taken she must have known about our rough walls and my father’s large hands. From far away that Karine had told us: “I am lovely, but you are not so lovely.” We did not take offence: we would have sold all our cows and carpets for her without expecting even a faint smile. Her scent still trembled in my Younger Uncle’s nostrils, her hair still tickled his chin. And those firm calves and those high heels and that slight sway in the tight dress... And beyond the barracks railings, beyond the lamplight, her fading footsteps.
“Let’s go and bring her here,” my father said in our red-lit room.
“Bring her; she can milk the cows,” my mother said, turning at the door.
World, oh world! My mother wanted somehow, by whatever means—bribery, pleading, secretly or through quarrels—to keep four cows instead of the two allowed. She had lost her hopes of the city for good and, having become a peasant, wanted to be a proper peasant. Yet precious memories of the city made her spare that girl with the dark brown eyebrows. She was my mother’s own girlhood. They wanted to deceive her, plead with her, drag her into this remote, dark forest, hang brats from her skirts and cease loving her—to think of Makhachkala!
“And you’ll have cows too. Bring her to shovel out the collective farm’s dung. Put a rake in her hands, a child on her back. A child on her back and a forty-pound bucket in her hand.”
“You’re barking like a dog,” my father snapped.
“And shut her mouth so she won’t bark. ‘Let’s go and bring her.’”
“Quiet!”
My mother turned to my uncle:
“Don’t listen to them, though you’re one of them yourself. Give them a job and they’ll do it, then wait for you to give them another. They’ve no minds of their own, and you’re one of them. When those army clothes wear out, what will you wear? Here’s what I say: pack your bag tomorrow and off you go, back to your Tiflis. If you don’t go tomorrow, put a cross through your Tiflis and your girl.”
“She’s right. We’ll look after the old women,” my father said.
My mother went out to fetch tea, closed the door behind her, and suddenly realised she had taken a burden upon herself, while her husband—a packhorse through and through—instead of correcting his wife’s mistake was actually confirming it. She burst back into the room without the tea and said from the doorway:
“Wha-at? I’ll look after the old women? The rake, the dung, the washing, you, the children, the cow, the pig, you—and the old women as well? Where’s your conscience, man of God? Don’t you pity me?” My mother aged in a minute, feature by feature, and bags hung beneath her eyes. “Pigs and hens, cooking and washing, raking and the collective farm—let her come. Curse her, the collective farm’s the collective farm, the state’s the state, but who does the Tiflis girl think she is?”
That autumn or the next, when I was in love and thought I alone understood him, my Younger Uncle chose a four-year-old horse from the herd. Mingled with fifty-three other four-year-olds like himself, he galloped, drank, grazed, shied, pricked up his ears—you could not pick him out among them. During the catching and afterwards he proved a glowing coal. They threw him down, twisted his neck this way and that, seared his belly with a braided whip, drew blood from his nostrils, pummelled him, sweated him, turned him into a dead coal. He was so cowed that my Younger Uncle begged him to get up; we had no hope he would ever rise, and my Younger Uncle kissed him. But lying there he was gathering strength not to submit. My Younger Uncle pulled him home, talking, promising to be a brother to him, holding sugar to his mouth, while the fool tugged towards the mountains and came looking back. My Younger Uncle said he would not let children torment him, would not lend him to others to fetch wheat from distant hot villages, would water him often, feed him from his palm, would not work him with a shoe missing, and his saddle would be the finest in the village. But the uncomprehending creature pulled back, pulled back, reared, hung in the air and, rearing, turned towards the herd. He mustn’t have, mustn’t have... His bones were young, not hardened; he mustn’t have. He fell, the bone of his lower leg splintered beneath the skin, and the hoof was no longer his.
“Fool, fool’s head...”
He shrieked and, still hot, did not feel it, wanted to stand. He stood and his leg buckled, slipped from under him, and he fell with a dull thud into the grass. The herd played along the shoulders of the mountains, calling him to race, and he circled on the spot, wearing himself and the ground away. And he swam in sweat.
“Useless fool...”
My Younger Uncle sat beside him, turned with his dragging circles and saw the distances sway, saw distances turn over distances in the mist. My Younger Uncle smoked and left. For a day or two he kept thinking, wanted to tell my Elder Uncle something and sat with his young back bent. His voice had grown hoarse. With his eyes my Elder Uncle demanded that he not smoke in his presence, but he had forgotten that he did not smoke in his presence. His mind was somewhere else entirely. Waving smoke from his eyes, he stammered: “He was sweating, swimming in sweat. He was bluish white, wasn’t he? He’d darkened, turned almost black, from the sweat.”
My Elder Uncle was hewing a cart shaft. He put down his axe, stepped heavily in his half-boots, came over and took the cigarette from him. Crushing it, he said:
“You paid five hundred roubles for the colt. What’s five hundred roubles? Find it and you wouldn’t be pleased. You were bringing the colt home and his leg broke. Isn’t that what happened?”
And Levon, the manager, called from the hilltop:
“Tell that child the ravens are circling. When it dies they’ll spoil the hide, when it dies the ravens will spoil the hide!.. Understood?”
“Did you hear?” my Elder Uncle asked the Younger. And Levon, so we would hear clearly, called once more from the hilltop:
“When it dies they’ll spoil the hide!”
“What do I do now?” my Younger Uncle asked my Elder Uncle. Before the Elder could answer, Levon’s voice was heard. Levon had finished what he had to say to us and turned on the hilltop to say something else to someone else, but apparently my Younger Uncle’s behaviour was so extraordinary to him that one shout could not settle it, and Levon was still thinking about it. And since Levon thought aloud, the wind brought his opinion of our family:
“Bare-arsed sons of bitches, Mantashev’s trouserless grandsons! Poet, crackpot, fool...”
“Did you hear?” my Elder Uncle asked the Younger.
“I heard. What do I do?”
“Go and skin him.”
“How?” my Younger Uncle asked, bewildered.
“How what?”
“He isn’t dead.”
“Ah,” the Elder realised. “Well, take the axe with you.”
“Take the axe and do what?”
“Oh dear...” my Elder Uncle said. He was a man of few words: he had spent four years in captivity, been taken from the camp and exiled to the Altai, where he remained three years, and all he said about those seven years of life was: “The Germans are a very thrifty people.”
“Take the axe and do oh dear?” my Younger Uncle asked.
“Oh de-ear...” the Elder said angrily.
“You say, take the axe.”
The Elder did not speak, only looked at the Younger, so the Younger continued: “You say, skin him. I say, he isn’t dead. You say, take the axe.”
Then my Elder Uncle made a long speech: “Don’t make me explain every little thing.”
“But man, you say, take the axe. Take the axe and do what?” For those two days and many other days my Younger Uncle had been starved of laughter. Now the Elder’s slow blinking and his taciturn anger, warming and cooling, seemed as worthy of laughter as what had happened in the mountains was worthy of sorrow. “Take the axe and cut down a tree? Take the axe and hew a yoke? Chop wood? Split my own head? Do what?..”
“A-ah...” my Elder Uncle understood. “Take it, kill him and skin him.”
My Younger Uncle stared, his thick-lipped mouth hanging slack, then flung his hands about and finally stammered:
“Are... are you joking?..”
The Elder took the cigarette packet from his pocket, crushed it in his palm, found and took out the matches, put them in his own pocket, thrust the axe into his belt, though the belt was tight, and pushed him. And lavished one more word:
“Go!”
The masses of muscle moving in his tight army breeches, he climbed the steep slope and went into the mountains. Deafening himself, not hearing the larks’ song, blinding himself, not seeing the larks’ flight, numbing himself, not feeling the breeze ring in the clear mountain air, my Younger Uncle went towards the horse. And his brain rustled, squeezed beneath his temples. And he struck the horse’s head with the back of the axe. And struck a second time. And cutting the sod with the axe, roasting in the heat, he threw earth out of the hole with his hands, feet, nose and mouth. And having buried him, he went down to the village, his broad jaw taut.
“You haven’t brought the hide, you’ve ruined the axe’s edge. The hide—well, all right, I won’t make you,” my Elder Uncle said, “but you’ll take the axe to the smith.”
“I won’t.” And the Younger bent to pick up some of the broken cigarettes. My Elder Uncle put his heavy half-boot on the crumpled packet and, chin to chest, took five roubles from his shirt pocket, pushed them into his palm and hooked the axe over his arm, bending it at the elbow.
“The smith’s home. Go and fetch him, go and forge the edge. Careful, don’t lose the temper. And don’t make it brittle.”
The Younger seemed to want to stamp on the ground like a beaten child, but in fact he was running towards the smith’s house. Somehow he was both stamping like a child and running like a real soldier charging. He had returned a year earlier from army service in Tiflis. He had become a fair, well-filled-out, handsome lad, with a faint shadow nestling over his eyes. He had a girl he loved there who did not want to come to the village. “She’s not for the village,” my Younger Uncle said. He wanted to go to Tiflis himself, but my Elder Uncle said, “Take them.” He meant, take your parents with you. The old man and woman would not go, and my Younger Uncle bowed his head before his brothers: “Let them stay with you, please...” “You’re the youngest,” the Elder said, and looked for a girl for him. He listed names on his fingers, but the Younger shook his head silently. Then the Elder bowed his head and truly pleaded, and at that moment he truly was pitiable: “Come on, don’t you pity me? Whoever you want will have you. Why torment me...” But the Younger shook his head and stood up.
“I’m going to Tiflis.”
My Elder Uncle held out his little finger and said, “Karine,” and then the Younger closed his eyes and swayed, and tears squeezed slowly between his rounded eyelids. My Elder Uncle hesitated, then shouted:
“Bra-at!”
But he did not open his eyes and swayed. My Elder Uncle came over to hit him but could not; standing beside him, he shouted again:
“Bra-at!” And waiting for that word to sink in, he said another: “Chi-ild!..” He searched his mind for words for him and could not find them, so he spoke with pauses. “Ra-ag!..” He went on like that until my Younger Uncle’s thick lips twisted like softening metal and, with a tearful curse, lost their shape altogether.
“Pah, you brat...” My Elder Uncle went inside and suddenly found he was quarrelling with his wife, and matching wits with a woman’s tongue was beyond his tongue. Driven out by her hail of words and the hoarse crying of the baby in the cradle, he came outside and saw his Younger Brother from the veranda. At that moment my Elder Uncle loved his Younger Brother very much for not being a woman and not having a woman’s nimble tongue. Standing on the veranda, as though in peaceful conversation, he said towards my Younger Uncle: “Vardan’s Lusik had eight hundred and thirty workday credits last year; I, a full-grown man, had five hundred and seventy-five. And with all those workday credits she recites Hovhannes Tumanyan’s Maro from the rostrum. What doesn’t she recite? Tumanyan’s Maro, Sako of Lori, One Winter Night, ‘One winter night there was a wedding...’ Abu-Lala Mahari...” My uncle counted, folding his fingers, reached the little finger and smiled: “Karine.”
To me he was a boor. I often thought that when he was in captivity the Germans ought to have loaded him with hundred-kilogram stones. There had been frost and an open field, and they had only shirts on, and the shirts were ragged, and in the open field they had come upon a pigsty and driven out the sleepy pigs and piled themselves upon one another in the place the pigs had warmed. And all the lice of the pigsty had moved onto them. You just had to scratch.
When he took the cigarette from my Younger Uncle’s hand, I thought the pigsty was precisely the place for him and his kind. I asked my Younger Uncle:
“Karine’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?”
He did not answer, but I waited so eagerly for his words that he said, “Are you fourteen or fifteen?”
“When you were fifteen,” I said, “Vardan’s Lusik was your sweetheart. You lied that you were going to the club, she lied that she was going to the club, but neither of you was ever there.”
“We weren’t, then we weren’t.”
“Karine’s pretty.”
“You’ve been in my pocket,” he said.
“No, I imagine her.”
“What do you imagine?”
“She’s tall and slender,” I said, and wanted her to have fair hair, white teeth, dimples full of smiles, and when you saw her you would say Beethoven, ice hockey, Cheops, palm tree, Pechorin, Maupassant, speak to her of the finest things you knew, say that yes, you were a villager, but worthy of the city and only a villager by accident, and that this boorish uncle and this unshaven father had nothing to do with you.
“She comes to my shoulder,” my Younger Uncle said. “Her head’s a little, just a little above my shoulder when she wears high heels...” And my Younger Uncle closed his eyes and forgot to speak. As tangibly as though she were there he felt her cheek against his arm, her hair tickling his chin, and her scent remained in his nostrils, trembled in his nostrils. “She’s dark,” my uncle said. “A little dark-haired girl.”
“What a world!” I said, pressing against my uncle. I wanted him to like me.
My Younger Uncle forged the axe with the smith, making sure he neither softened nor overhardened its steel, and from the smithy went into the mountains. For him there was no ringing breeze, no flight of larks, no song of larks. And, scraping the earth aside like a scavenging hyena, he skinned the horse. With the rolled hide under his arm he came with firm strides and—he had brought Russian words back from the army—said one of them:
“Khvatit? Khvatit? Khvatit?”
...My Younger Uncle is one of the village’s good workers. A good mower, a good irrigator, whatever work they give him he can do. And there is a certain cruelty in him: he mocks others as much as he likes but goes pale when a mocking word leaps anywhere near him. He works with his head down as much as you want, but if he suspects they have shorted him by so much as a kopeck, he hisses softly: “I’ll hit you so your head goes into your crotch, donkey’s foal!” His wife Lusik became the farm’s second chairperson and manages so well you almost want to put your family’s reins in her hands too, and conducts meetings so well there is talk of transferring her to the district centre. “Don’t get involved,” my Elder Uncle tells her. “They raise you up, raise you up, then fling you down. Plant your feet here and hold firm.”
Recently, fifteen years later, I asked my Younger Uncle:
“Do you remember the blue-grey colt?”
“Which one?”
Chin resting on his staff, he stood among the cattle and watched a four-year-old bull roaring at the top of his voice, tearing up anthills and challenging the hill-sized bull on the upper hill. “Don’t be foolish, you good-for-nothing,” my Younger Uncle muttered.
“The blue-grey colt? Ah...” my Younger Uncle smiled. “You were a colt then too. So was I. Seno-o-o, keep your bull to yourself or I’ll pull his horns off!”
“If you can pull them off, pull off your own wife’s ho-orns!”
“Do you see that ill-mannered fellow?” my Younger Uncle smiled. “And if I come ove-er?” my Younger Uncle called, sitting down.
“I’ll run awa-ay!”