Dear Tornik, I am going to crown you again, a second time. Do not imagine that the crowning of the church and the priest is all you need. In the spirit, and by God's law, it is enough and more than enough, yes. But if Papik does not lay his own crown on top of that one, you will die hungry. Look, the day has broken. Give the order to the laborers. Have them harness the gutan, our great ox-plow, and take it out to the stubble-field just outside the village. We have to plow that field now, and dung it, and in the spring make a vegetable garden of it.
Yoke the gutan. And now watch, Tornik, and see how I am going to crown you. First go and kiss the foreheads of the buffaloes and the oxen. Then come over here to the gutan's plow-handle, bow down to the ground, and kiss the mother soil. My hand is on the handle. Kiss Papik's hand, and then the handle. Here is Papik, forty years a plowman, handing over to you today the highest office there is, the plowman's office, which the Lord God gave to Adam, our great Papik, when He told him to work the earth and keep it.1
Let me plait you a fine, handsome, round crown of wheat stalks with my own hands. Bring your head here, Tornik, and let me set this crown of mine on it. This crown is your crown from Papik, and his memorial, and you must never lift it from your head until the day you die. And when you have grown old like Papik, set that crown on the head of your eldest son, and let it go on that way from son to son. Now let me tell you what the crown means, so that you understand it properly and keep the memory of this day unspoiled in your mind.
Listen, my honest Tornik. Here is what my crown means. The priest crowned you with Shushan, and you are hers until death. You cannot leave her. In just the same way Papik, by crowning you, binds you to the mother soil, to the gutan and to the tillage of the field, and you must never give it up as long as you live, because it is our own possession, from our fathers and our Papiks. Adam said it, and men still say it. A wife is a man's life. And is the soil not a man's life too? People live on this earth by bread. Shushan will bear you children, and the soil will give you bread. The cow and the sheep grazing out in the field will give you milk, plenty of it, and from the milk you will make butter and cheese. And don't all these good things come to you from the soil?
Now, Tornik, tell the laborers to take up the gutan and the animals, and let us go back to the house. I have to explain the meaning of the field crowning to your mayrik and to Shushan.
Listen while I talk to you, good mistress of the house, and you too, Shushan. Today I took Tornik, the new bridegroom, out to the field. I had the gutan yoked, I put the plow-handle into Tornik's hand, I laid my hand on his head and read the patriarchal blessing over him, and I crowned him a second time, with the tillage of the soil, and bound him to the soil and to the gutan. And I want you both to know that Papik's crowning cannot be undone. Tornik has two wives now. Be clear about that. One wife is Shushan, whom he was crowned with in holy marriage. The other wife is the soil he has inherited from his fathers, and I bound him to her with the blessing of Father Abraham. Shushan will bear Tornik children, and the soil will give bread to the whole family. I pray God keeps Shushan and gives her long life. But Shushan is mortal, and if she dies, Tornik will find another lily. But if the soil dies, then the whole family of Papik's house dies with it. And how can the soil die, when it has stood there from Adam to this day and stands there still, deathless? Let me tell you how the soil dies. It dies on that unlucky day when Tornik takes his hand off the plow-handle and gives up farming. Or when he grows rich, and grows proud with it, and comes to think it beneath him to live in the village and keep the company of village people, and so leaves the village and the soil behind and goes off to be a townsman. Or else the bad days come down on him, and, trusting that he has land enough and to spare, he piles debt on debt, and the creditor seizes the fields. And oh, Tornik is left without a care in the world.
That is the day the soil dies for Tornik and stays alive for the man who took it. On that day, yes, the lamp of Papik's house goes out, and Tornik the householder becomes a hired laborer. What a loss that will be. Papik's bride, our graceful Shushan, will go out to be a baker-woman in the village, and in the evening she will lay a few loaves in her apron and carry them home to her little ones. Mother of Tornik, good mistress of this house, die soon after Papik, so that you never see that day.
Won't you say it, Tornik? Ah, Papik, what evil fortune-telling is this over your Tornik? Speak good things with your mouth. No, Tornik. God forbid the prophecy should ever come true for you. I pray you never see that black day, and that is exactly why I have painted the sorrowful picture of that black day's life in front of your eyes. It is so that you will see it, and remember your Papik's far-sighted prophecy, and work with all your strength never to let the soil out of your hands. You need the soil not only because it gives you bread and you live on this earth by it, and may God give you long years of sun for it. You need it because when you die you will need two cubits of earth for your grave. Don't you know that men fight even over the earth of a grave? God help the man who dies with no place to be buried, because even the earth of a grave is a man's own right. What I mean, Tornik, is that a man lives by the soil from the day he is born, and when he dies he needs the soil once more, to be buried under it.
So the soil is what you need on the day of life and on the day of death, Tornik. That is why Papik has bound you to the soil and crowned you with it, so that you hold it fast, and let no one else snatch it out of your hands, and are not left landless, turned into a slave, driven to other men's doors to work for hire. Because then Papik's uncanny prophecy will come true for you, and you will come to your senses and remember. How sad, I was a householder once, and I paid no attention to my patriarch Papik's advice. Now, like the prodigal son,2 I work for wages. I have left my own flock of sheep, I graze other men's herds, and once a week at least I go around the doors and collect the herdsman's bread.
Yes, Tornik. When the wheel of a village householder's fortune turns, and he sinks so low that he becomes the herdsman of that same village, do not think that lot is the bitterest thing there is. The village herdsman is a laborer on a wage. He carries bread home by the backload, he has a milking cow, a few sheep at least, and a goat, and his family lives in plenty.
But when even the herdsman's place does not fall to that ruined householder, then he thinks back over what he used to be, and says to himself, I was a householder. How can I work as a hired hand in the village? Better to leave the village and go to the cities, and there, as an unknown pauper, mix in with the beggars of the street and be a beggar myself. And if, as a man fallen from wealth, a devletten dushkun, fortune's castaway, I can manage to get a certificate from the Prelate of the diocese, that will be a great stroke of luck for me. I will go from country to country and apply to the churches and the rich men, and when I have made my collection I will come back, pay my debt, and keep my family.
There, Tornik, the harshest and bitterest lot of all is this one, when a householder turns to begging and believes that by that base, dishonorable begging he can scrape together enough money to set his ruined house on its feet again. Do you believe a farmer's ruined house can be raised up by begging? In my whole long life I never saw it happen. The firm foundation of a village householder's house is the working of the soil. Once the householder gives up the soil and the soil's earnings, he is ruined already, and he will never stand up again. He will live in destitution until he dies.
Well, dear Tornik, that is enough. Let us finish the field crowning and my field lessons. But I still have to tell the village priest and the villagers about it. Let the world know what a strange thing the Papik of Archak has done. He took his Tornik, the new bridegroom, out to the field, and crowned him on the soil and on the gutan. Nobody knows what sort of crowning that is, performed out in the open field with no priest, no cross and no Gospel, and no people to witness it.
Let our villagers judge it however they like, Tornik. It is enough that you have understood the meaning of this crown. I will die and you will stay alive, and you will see. In time the villager will understand it too, and he will say a God-have-mercy for Papik's soul.