Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

4

Silently and sadly, the village lived its simple life.

Day after day, the men and women went out to work in the fields, in the vineyards and orchards, and in the evening, they would return wearily to their small homes. Every morning, the village children went to school. In the afternoon, they would play in the empty yards, wander through the abandoned cow barns and deserted chicken coops, climb to the empty dovecotes or the branches of trees where no bird had a nest.

Day after day, in the evening — only if it hadn't rained — Solina the Seamstress would take her invalid husband for a walk through the village streets. The invalid, Ginome, had shrunk so much over the years that Solina could easily lay him in an old pram and wheel him to the riverbank and back.

All the way there and back, Ginome, in diapers, would bleat in a thin, whiny voice because his amnesia made him think he was a baby goat. Solina would lean over and hum to him in her dark, warm voice: Hush, hush, hushabye, hush, hush, my little Ginome, all alone, hush, hush, hushabye.

Sometimes Little Nimi, his hair tangled and filthy, his clothes torn and his nose runny, would dash past them, one eye watering. Panting, he'd wave at them from a distance and give them two or three long, wild whoops. The invalid would immediately stop bleating, smile with baby-like pleasure, and turn his head to listen.

With one hand, Solina would gently stroke the sparse gray hair that still grew on her husband's head, and with the other, she kept pushing his pram, its ancient wheels squeaking along the sloping path.

In the long summer evenings, at the end of their workday, Danir the Roofer and his two helpers would sometimes sit down to rest on the low stone wall in the village square and drink beer from thick glasses, and sometimes the three of them would begin to sing. Other young men and women came from the far ends of the village to gather in the stone square and join in the singing or play games of skill or argue and whisper to each other. Occasionally, they burst out laughing. The children of the village would sneak into the square to listen or watch them from behind the fences, because sometimes the young men and women would talk and joke about things that children weren't allowed to hear, for instance about other villages located in the valley far below, or about the love lives of rabbits or what the howls of cats in heat sound like. Danir the Roofer sometimes roared with deep, hoarse laughter that sounded like a cascade of rocks, and swore that soon now, in another week, another month, he'd take his helpers down to the far-off valleys and they'd come back not on foot, but in a convoy of wagons harnessed to horses and loaded with a hundred different kinds of birds, animals, fish, and insects. They'd go from house to house and scatter the animals in every yard and release the fish into the waters of our river. So the village would be just the way it had been before that cursed night. The young men and women were stunned into silence by those words: instead of making them laugh, Danir's words suddenly cast a shadow over the square.

Those evening get-togethers of Danir the Roofer and his gang of friends in the square paved with ancient stone tiles were actually the only happy moments in the life of the village. Because soon after sunset, the group would disperse quickly, each to his own home. The square emptied in an instant, leaving only the shadow.

Later, when night fell, all the houses were locked up with iron bolts and the windows covered over with iron shutters. No one went out after nightfall. At ten o'clock, the lights were turned off, one by one, in the windows of the small houses. The only light filtering out came from the table lamp in Almon the Fisherman's shack at the edge of the village. But at midnight, his window too was dark.

Darkness and silence crept from the depths of the forest and lay heavily on the sealed houses and deserted gardens. Massed shadows quivered on the village paths. Cold winds sometimes blew in from the mountain, rustling treetops and bushes. The river seethed all night and rushed down the slope, foaming and bubbling through the darkness.