Toward evening, on clear days, Almon the Fisherman usually sits in his chair on the riverbank, puts on the old glasses that slide down his nose toward his thick gray mustache, and reads books. Or he writes and rubs out line after line in his notebook as he mutters to himself all sorts of arguments, opinions, reasons. And with the passing years, he has learned, by the light of his night lamp, to carve bits of wood into a great many beautifully shaped animals and birds and also unknown creatures that he saw in his imagination or in his dreams. Almon gives those carved wood creatures to the village children as gifts: Matti got a pinecone cat and kittens carved from the bark of a walnut tree. For Little Nimi, he carved a squirrel, and for Maya, Almon made two long-necked cranes with wings spread and stretched out in flight.
It was only from those small carvings and the pictures their teacher Emanuella drew on the blackboard that the children knew what shape a dog was and what a cat looked like, or a butterfly, a fish, a chick, a kid, or a calf. And Emanuella taught some of the children how to imitate the sounds of the animals, sounds that the people of the village surely remembered from their childhood, before the animals disappeared, but that the children had never heard in their lives. Maya and Matti almost knew something they were forbidden to know. And they were careful not to let anyone suspect that they knew or almost knew. Sometimes they met secretly behind the abandoned hayloft, where they would sit and whisper for about fifteen minutes, and when they left, they each took a different path. Of all the grownups in the village, there was perhaps only one they could trust. Or not: several times Matti and Maya had almost decided to tell their secret to Danir the Roofer, who in the evening would sometimes joke loudly with his young friends in the village square about things that children were forbidden to hear. And when he drank wine with his friends, he was known to joke about a horse, a goat, a dog he was thinking of bringing from one of the villages farther up the valley.
What would happen if they told Danir the Roofer their secret? Or maybe they should tell old Almon instead? And what if, one day, they dared to go a little way into the darkness of the forest to try to find out if their secret was real or only an illusion, a passing dream that Nimi the Owl might have, but certainly not them?
And meanwhile, they waited without knowing what they were actually waiting for. Once, toward evening, Matti bravely asked his father why the creatures had vanished from the village. His father was in no hurry to answer that question. He stood up from the kitchen chair, paced the room for a few moments, then stopped and grasped Matti's shoulders. But instead of looking at his son, the father's eyes wandered to a bare spot on the wall above the door, where the plaster had crumbled because of the seeping dampness beneath it, and said, Listen, Matti. It's like this. Once, things happened here in the village, things we're not proud of. But not everyone is to blame. Certainly not to the same degree. Besides, who are you to judge us? You're still a child. Don't judge. You have no right to judge the grownups. And anyway, who told you that there were animals here once? Maybe there were. And maybe there weren't. After all, so much time has passed. We forgot, Matti. We forgot and that's it. Leave it alone. Who wants to remember? Now go down and bring some potatoes from the cellar, and stop asking questions all the time.
As he got up suddenly to leave the room, Matti's father said one more thing: Listen, let's agree on one thing, you and I — that this conversation never happened. That we never even talked about it.
Almost all the other parents chose to deny it. Or to avoid the whole subject by keeping silent. Not to talk about it at all. Especially not in front of the children.
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.