Dear Tornik, if we had been born thousands upon thousands of years ago, we would have seen this earth we live on covered all over with forest. And who had planted it? God the Creator, who spoke and it was. Not the trees alone, plants of every kind came up of themselves out of the earth's lap. Look at those dark mountains, and at these wide plains and valleys and gorges. Once, perhaps, they were all thick with forest.
It seems that the people of the first ages, who lived by nothing but wild hunting, had forgotten the craft of our First Father, whom the Lord God told to work the earth and to keep it.1 The wild men of that time did not know how to provide for tomorrow, and they began to cut and burn the forests without any restraint. But God, who provides in advance, turned this earth of ours upside down in many places with earthquakes and hid forests beyond counting deep under the ground, like an inexhaustible treasure, for the generations of men to come. The clever generation of today, ransacking the globe and opening up the earth's deep places, found the treasure. And do you know what the treasure is, Tornik? Not gold and not silver, but black coal, which is more precious and more useful than gold, because the engines that drive the world's progress run on the power of steam, and steam is made from water by the blazing fire of burning coal.
So when men saw that the ancient forests God planted were being used up little by little, they set to work with every effort to raise forests by hand, and today the world of western Europe is full of cultivated forest, which supplies all the timber it needs, for buildings, for the countless wooden ships, and for laying out the roads of the steam-carriages.
But our eastern world is very poor in the wealth of forests. A few natural forests still stand, but they too are being cut without rule or restraint, and they are nearly gone. So alongside our field work we have to work at raising forests of planted trees. And do you know how much land the village people have for growing woodland, both on the flat and on the crumbling soil of the hills? Timber is as necessary to the farmer as bread is to keeping him alive. If he wants to build even a plain hut to shelter his family, he needs wood. And think what a great patriarchal family, running to forty or fifty souls, needs in the way of roomy buildings. Set aside the building of our houses, which takes poplar, aspen and willow. Our farm work needs hard timber of other kinds as well. Ash for the gutan's curved beam (the esh, "the donkey," as we call it) and for the share-head, elm for framing the body of a cart and for the axle-tree, and there is no counting the smaller tools, which are generally made of the hard woods. And as I wrote earlier, think how much idle time the village farmer spends getting hold of timber like this. He has to travel a long way to find it, bring it home, work it, and only then can he start on the job.
But enough of that, Tornik. You can see for yourself how beautiful and how cheerful the villages with planted trees are, and how much the trees add to the look of a village. Have you been to Artamet,2 to that rich orchard and fruit-garden country? Never mind the forest trees that bear no fruit. Think how many kinds of fruit trees there are, apple, pear, and all the other sweet fruits, and the finest of them all is that red apple, unmatched in taste, in scent and in color, and so plentiful that it supplies the whole land of Vaspurakan.
For the village, planted trees have other uses too, and other pleasures. In summer they spread shade against the burning sun. In winter they shelter the village from the fierce north wind. And how pleasant it is for the village families, who sit under the trees in their free hours with their little ones, doing their handwork and enjoying themselves. The nightingale and the starling sing from the orchard, the children chatter at their play below, and when the lambs skip and bleat as well, vash! how many sweet voices come together in the harmony of plain village life.
Orchards are not only for people, for their pleasure and their profit and the needs of their life. They matter greatly for the animals too. Fresh green shoots come up under the trees, and that is the only place where the calves of newly calved cows and the young foals of the mares should graze. And in the heat of a summer noon those tender young creatures rest on the green under the cool trees.
But it is not enough, Tornik, that orchards should decorate the edges of the village. If only our fields and croplands were planted with trees too, wherever the water-courses run and the springs come up. How much easier, how much more restful it would be, both for the laborers at work and for the tired yoke-animals. The moment they are unyoked in the heat of midday they begin grazing under those shady trees, and afterward they lie down and chew the cud. The water-loving buffalo calves, which cannot stand much heat, make a rush for the water as soon as they are out of the yoke, and if there is water enough they sit right down in it. The plow-boy gives them a good wash and then takes them to the pasture. And in that hour the tired laborers sit at the spring in the shade of a tree and start asking one another, what do you think the mistress has cooked for us today? You know how our laborers love a buttered dish and pilaf, and madzun strained through the bag.
Then they see the girl who brings the bread coming along, a sturdy girl with the load on her back. She sets it down, they open it, and the food is exactly what they wanted. The laborer's table is the green ground. They spread the mezar-cloth on it and lay out the thin baked loaves. They open the madzun-bag and beat the madzun with cold spring water in a kot, an earthenware or wooden bowl. Then they pick up their spoons, a spoonful of pilaf, a spoonful of madzun-buttermilk. Okh, Tornik! You have eaten it. You know the appetite those hungry laborers eat with. They eat, and they bless the mistress of the house.
After the midday meal they put their heads down under the cool tree and sleep sweetly, so sweetly that a prince in his palace, on his feather bed, cannot sleep as restfully or as quietly. You do not know the reasons for that yet, Tornik, but you will find them out later, when you grow up and start taking an interest in the world.
So, my thoughtful Tornik, you have taken good note of how useful and how profitable planted trees are for the village people. Then get to work. Plant and tend, year after year, and increase the trees that belong to our house. Long ago I fenced in a field by our door and brought on a fine orchard. But you should not take pride in the trees I planted. It is far sweeter to plant new ones with your own hands, tend them, and take pride in those. And you should know that trees have cares of their own as well, planting, pruning, cutting back, and the rest. You do not need long lessons on the tending of trees. You have seen how your Papik takes a saw and a curved knife and stays out in the orchard, always cutting away the dead and unnecessary branches so that the branches that are left will grow better. The ground under the fruit trees should be dug over once every two or three years, and that work pays as well. First, when the soil is loosened, the roots of the trees grow stronger. Second, if you sow barley or some other grain there, you get a yield from the tree and from the ground under it at the same time.
Do you remember, Tornik, how some years ago the Vanetsis took up the growing of mulberry, and at first carried it forward with great success? A sudden piece of luck came their way. For a few years the Vanetsis made great profits simply by selling silkworm seed. The price of Van seed rose so high that they weighed it out against gold, because the seed of every other country had been ruined by a sickness of the silkworms.3
It pains me to tell you, Tornik, how the Vanetsis let that profitable business drop altogether. They convinced themselves at the start that selling silkworm seed was the only way they were going to profit. They could not see that it had been a stroke of luck and that the luck had passed, and they could not grasp that silk-growing does not rest on the seed alone but far more on the cocoons, because the real yield of mulberry-growing is the cocoon. Either you sell the cocoons in season, or you draw the thread from them and sell silk. And since silk is a light thing in itself but heavy in price, it suited the Vanetsis' trade perfectly, far as they are from the seaports.
It seems to me, Tornik, that the Vanetsis have no love for work that is fine and tedious and needs patience, work like turning the soil a cubit deep and planting the mulberry, digging around the plantings every year, building the silkworm-house, setting up the proper trays for the worms to work on, bringing mulberry leaves every day to feed them, going over the worms with a doctor's sharp eye and separating the sick from the healthy, and, when the worms start spinning their cocoons, preparing the little, little twigs for them, and so on and so on. And then, once the cocoons are formed, taking the seed you need and either selling the rest of the cocoons to the merchant as they are, or drawing the thread and winding it skein by skein into clean silk and tying it up. Okh, what a tedious, endless job! And so the lazy, ease-loving Vanetsi starts grumbling.
Look, Tornik. The Vanetsi calls silkworm-rearing a tedious, drawn-out job, when the whole of it barely lasts three months and then he has his yield, while he will plant a vineyard and wait seven years before he gets the first fruit from it. And in any case, all these many old vineyards of Van, did the present generation plant them? No. They were planted by the true vine-loving sons of the patriarch Noah, by our forefathers, our Papiks, and we enjoy them today.4 In the same way I have planted a vineyard, and I will die, and you will inherit it and enjoy it, and later on, perhaps, you will boast and say, I planted this vineyard.
Here and now, Tornik, I am giving you a charge. Along with your other trees, do not forget the mulberry. The soils around our village suit it very well, because the mulberry does very well in sandy ground. But you must understand, Tornik, that the ordinary work of our farming keeps a man very busy. So when you want to push the growing of trees forward, it is best to hold back on the field crops themselves (the sowing of wheat, barley and the rest), so that you can get more out of the trees.
I have talked about the growing of orchards at some length, Tornik. You know how much your Papik loves a tree and a spring. Sometimes, tired from work, I go and sit in the shade of a tree. I set my back against the trunk and rest. I have grown old, Tornik. I need a staff now, a support for my old age. The patriarch Jacob called one beloved son of his the staff of his old age.5 I say the same to you. You are the staff of my old age, until I reach my last resting-place.
Notes
- Genesis 2:15. ↩
- Artamet, a small town on the southeastern shore of Lake Van, famed through the whole Van country for its orchards and its red apples. ↩
- The pebrine blight that ravaged the silkworm stocks of Europe and the Levant in the 1850s-60s left Van's untainted silkworm eggs ("seed") briefly worth their weight in gold to buyers. ↩
- Genesis 9:20. Noah was the first tiller of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. ↩
- Of Benjamin, the child of Jacob's old age (cf. Genesis 44:20). ↩