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great walnut tree softly rocks its branches over Vands’ Badi’s ramshackle hut…

In Akar
    1
    The village of Akar is picturesque, enclosed in forests with ancient oak trees and age-old ruins of monasteries. A cold stream flows under the trees and passes through village streets where it turns sludgier and sludgier 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 the healthy fragrance of cedar and linden. But when the sun begins to warm up and the garbage heap in the streets begins to flow, the fresh breeze that came from the forest is replaced by the smell that comes out of opened barns.
    In the garbage heap, the heads of worms heat up—worms that harmoniously turn their heads to the left and to the right, as if they were weaving silk.
    In Akar there are people with scabies, which is aggravated by the sun, and causes them to scratch their backs against walls or itch themselves with their hands until they bleed. In Akar there is also pink eye among the children who suffer from itchiness in the sun and walk with bloodshed eyes and a dirty cloth over their foreheads. The cows are infected with foot-and-mouth disease and limp as tiny white maggots suck on the blood vessels between their hooves. The milk in the cows’ udders has dried, and the cows lick their hooves in pain and spit out the maggots with their tongues.
    Akar is as old as time immemorial, and since that time it has been a tradition to sow lentil seeds in sandy-soiled furrows dug with plows. And when the seeds grow into plants, the villagers hunch over all day plucking the short pods with their bare hands. After they pluck them, they either crush them to have enough to make lentil soup twice a day in the winter, or they break up the pods and eat the seeds with yoghurt.
    Akar is poor. If the soil is not tilled for two years, the forest will swallow up Akar, the winds will scatter the linden’s fruits, and birds will carry acorns to the roofs. And if one of the acorns should fall into an extinguished tonir, {1} it will root itself there and grow into a tree. And even if there wasn’t a forest nearby, a flood from the mountains would wipe out Akar in one night, carrying stones with it that would destroy churns and jugs and throw an entire house, with hayloft and all, upside down. And on the surface of the flood, together with the diseased cows, white maggots would swim like thin slivers.
    There are neither floods in Akar, nor is the forest in the process of engulfing it. As soon as a sprout appears in the furrows, the inhabitants of Akar pull it out with their plows 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 might explain why Shahan’s husband, who was a collier, 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, and shared a pillow with Shahan until sunrise. In the morning he would leave a few silver coins with Shahan until his next return. And from that relationship, three girls were born in four years. Their beauty reminded Shahan of her husband and his youth when he was not yet a collier and had hair on his head that felt like lamb’s wool.
    And then one week her husband did not return. Shahan went to the forest and found her husband’s thunderstruck corpse lying by the coalmine, scorched and charred like a large sheet of coal. He was buried in the same spot. Shahan carried home his clothes, cried over them, and after she calmed down, she found three twenty-cent coins in her husband’s trousers.
    There was neither love nor hate between the two. They had lived under the same roof for eight years and had become as inured to each other as a horse does to a stable.