The Devil’s Valley
Something creepy was about Grandma’s village. I know it was because I felt it. And I spent all my vacations there. And it was like a magnet, barely waiting for vacation time.
People in the settlement did not see it that way because most did not know how life was elsewhere. All their activities were in the community and the surrounding lands. They mixed their Christian beliefs with stories about devils or creatures they named devils. But what if something happened that fits no pattern?
The village’s position, surrounded by high hills, added to the isolation of the settlement. It had no paved roads leading to the surrounding towns. I remember the highest elevation to the south, called Trascau Mountain; on the other side, it was a chasm of maybe 300 meters with a valley on the bottom and settlements strung along - but it was not possible to climb down from the mountain to reach them, only the alpinists could do it. To the north were the forests where you could easily get lost. To the east, you must cross a few hills to reach the next village. The easiest way in and out was toward the northwest, leading to the town where I was born, but you had to go along the Devil’s Valley for a few kilometers before reaching the paved road and safety.
Everyday life was mainly peaceful, the most enjoyable place on Earth. Then, something happened right under my nose, or I heard about something taking place only a few streets away. The most common thing was friends talking and laughing together, then out of nothing, a quarrel started, groups formed on the spot, knives pulled out, and fierce fights left some with nasty wounds. Those without knives rushed into the neighborhood yards looking for spades or hayforks. It was brutal.
Those nasty things happened when groups of youngsters visited neighboring villages, too. Once, I saw a group of young men coming down the hill where one could not walk on his feet, and the others brought him home wrapped in a rug.
Many men had a hamp bag on their belts with only one thing inside - a knife. It was helpful when they were in the forest for everyday necessities; it would have been silly not to have one, but they had it all the time; it was part of their costume.
It was like the Devil stuck his tail out occasionally and messed up people’s will, minds, and perceptions. Maybe the stories I heard about the Devil encounters are substantiated somehow.
And it was not only in recent years. People from other villages were scared to walk into Grandma’s. An aunt told me a story from when she was young. The mayors from Grandma’s village and a neighboring one decided to organize a party on the hill separating the two settlements so the youngsters could get to know each other. Who knows? – build families. The mayors invited musicians. The dance started. At first, all the couples were boys and girls from the same village - they had not mixed yet.
Do you think the Devil was not around? Wrong. He was.
A knife popped up from a youngster’s hemp bag when he jumped, heated by the dance, and fell to the ground. My aunt saw it and shouted, “Ioan, the knife!”
The youngsters from the other village thought that was a signal for a fight, and without waiting for a second more, they ran downhill toward their homes. The Devil had some fun again. The party was over.
And I remember how all kinds of superstitions flourished. My cousins told me not to whistle after sunset because the Devil would hear and come by. Or, if you hear a whisper, do the cross sign and do three steps in the opposite direction. And, of course, a black cat crossing the street in front of you is a signal you should return and let someone else cross that line and deal with the lousy omen spelled by the Devil.
From what I read in the Bible, the Devil was a wretched creature in all cases; that’s why I think around the village might have been something else because, in most cases, the creatures had their own business, and the interactions with the humans were not that bad. Since I mentioned the fights, I have to say that I have never heard of anyone dying or wounded for life.
But something unusual marched the hills around the settlement.
*
Grandma had eleven kids –my aunties and uncles. Three died in childhood and one at a young age. The others married and left the parental home – all except Anuta. Grandma considered keeping her at home as a support for old age.
Grandma decided in her will that all her properties would go to Anuta. There wasn’t much. After the communist regime appropriated the farmers’ lands, all she had was the house and two gardens, one across the street from home and one over the little river flowing at the end of the backyard. She also had a goat.
Anuta lived all her life in Grandma’s home. She never married.
As time passed, Grandma regretted her decision. What she took for herself, she stole from her last daughter. Anuta would have no one to care for her in old age as children are supposed to do. The cause of Grandma’s death was the sorrow of knowing what fate awaits her faithful daughter.
When we went to Grandma’s village for the summer months, Anuta was our best friend - my brother and I. She treated us like brothers rather than nephews, even if she was thirty years our senior.
We spent all our summer vacations in Grandma’s village. Three months. We wandered the hills and forests with Anuta, an expert in finding mushrooms, wild berries, hazelnuts, and wild cherries (the small black ones were super delicious).
One day, we decided to go and look for hazelnuts in the Devil’s Valley, about three to four kilometers northwest of the village. On our way, we passed over the Hill of the Cross. I could not help but look at that cross each time I passed it. Its shape is well crafted and very ornamental, but the cross no longer stands straight; it tilts like a man ready to fall. It leans toward the valley, the Devil’s Valley. There is something strange about its position. Standing next to it, if you look down toward the north, you see the Devil’s Valley. If you turn toward the south, you should notice the village but can’t. The road drops several meters, then rises before descending toward the community. It is a weird feeling; you think you’re standing with the cross on the highest ground and should be able to see the village, but you can see only the Devil’s Valley. The message is clear: you are in the Devil’s territory once you pass the cross.
The stone cross on the top of the hill was at least 100 years old. The dates of the person buried under it were as visible as if someone carved them the day before. I do not remember the exact dates. I promised myself I would remember every time we walked by the cross, but that never happened. I recall the dates from the nineteenth century, but the cross looked new. It was the same story with the tombstones in the village’s cemetery. The elements couldn’t erode them.
The hill southeast of the village provided all those unique stones. The cubes are soft and easy to craft when machinery cut big chunks from that hill. However, as time goes by, exposed to the elements, the stone becomes harder and harder to the point that it becomes impervious to wind, snow, and rain. In the nineteenth century, when Transylvania belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire, Budapest’s parliament façade was built with stones from that hill. A century later, the Romanian communist regime built the People’s House façade in Bucharest with stones cut from the same hill.
That day, we were already down in the valley when Anuta wanted to tell us the story again.
“You see that big oak tree?”
We looked where Anuta pointed, even if we knew the tree and the story. Still, she continued. “Luca Raspopitul (the fallen priest) claimed he saw the Devil crossing the river right there. One hundred years ago.”
The tree was across the road from the valley where two hills met, and in between was some water flowing, searching its way to the Devil’s Valley. I was wondering why people mention the tree instead of that tiny river because, most probably, that river existed 100 years ago, but I am not sure about the oak tree. In those days, people looked at the oak tree as a reference.
“Do you believe it?” asked my brother. “By the way, who told you that?”
“Everybody in the village knows.”
“Maybe just a legend,” I shrugged.
“He is not the only one who saw the Devil around,” answered Anuta.
“The first one to tell the story was enough. The others thought they saw something because they believed the first guy telling the story.” I always tended to be a little bit skeptical.
My brother and I played the heroes here, but the truth was that we had a strange feeling that something unusual could happen every time we were in the valley. It never did; we were there many times, but that feeling never left us. The few stories I heard about the Devil in the valley’s vicinity puzzled me; none said that the Devil wanted to hurt or scare the villagers. It seemed more like he had a hideout somewhere in the hills, and the encounters were accidental. How did the people know it was the Devil they saw? Was it someone too hideous to live in the village without danger of being mocked or stoned? Was it a creature unknown, too ugly to be a person but not beast-like enough to be an animal? I never found the answer to these questions since I had never met someone claiming they saw the Devil. And I am not sure I would have believed them. The only description I heard, probably from Luca’s story, was that the creature (the Devil) was immense, but no explanation of what “immense” meant.
By the way, the Western Romanian Carpathians Mountains - the Transylvania mountains, have interconnected caves, at least 60 of which are known. They would make a perfect hideout for a scary creature. When I was a university student and brought some friends to hike those mountains, I learned a lesson: always have water with you. Higher than a certain altitude, there are no springs. All the water flows inside the mountain. There are places where the rivers inside are impressive, and only the professionals (trained speleologists) dare cross them, and the water is freezing, even in the summertime.
What confused me was the way people approached the stories. People talked about the Devil quickly, but at the same time, they said that only by mentioning his name would he show up, seen or unseen. How dare you talk about a wretched creature, knowing he would show up? Maybe the Devil liked the villagers because they spoke of him more often than God. And honestly, every time I heard someone talking about God, it was about how hard He would punish me if I did this or that. The priest in the church mentioned examples of how God punished whole communities for mistakes made by some members. And that scared me even more. What if some bad guys do something to trigger God’s fury, and all of us would pay? I did not know who scared me more, God or the Devil, back then.
Adding to my bewilderment was this expression, Lucrul Dracului (The Devil’s Work), referring to technological achievements. Everybody enjoyed the radio, TV, and used phones; all were Lucrul Dracului. And as I learned in the church, God opposed progress. He punished Adam when he had a bite from the apple of knowledge because “he became like one of us,” said God. God mixed the people’s languages when they wanted to build a tower as high as to reach the sky (Babel Tower), so they could not communicate to work on it.
I was deep in those thoughts when I heard Anuta saying, “There.”
I was startled, watching quickly in that direction.
I breathed relief when I saw that Anuta pointed to a hazelnut bush. We hit the jackpot. I could see the tree loaded with hazelnuts.
We were always in a foraging competition, although I have to admit that my bag was the smallest every time. Anuta and my brother did not bother to compare their bags anymore with mine; it was the same story, always for the hazelnuts and all the goodies we found on the hills when collecting forest treats. Gathering fruits was not my best skill.
After we collected everything from that bush, we needed water. We were all thirsty, and we knew where to look for it.
We reached a significant spring, only 10 meters away from the river. It had so much water coming out of it that the authorities wanted to consolidate it, and they built a concrete cylinder around that spot, about one meter in diameter, sometime in the mid-1930s. Many villagers preferred the long walk to that spring for drinking water because they said it had curative properties. And the spring is impressive, like an underground river surging from the Earth. When I was a kid, only half the concrete cylinder existed. Anuta told us that some Russian soldiers wanted to see how that cylinder resisted their dynamite during World War II, and they blew it up. The village authorities never rebuilt it – not to this day.
We drank water directly from the spring and looked for some shade. We found a fallen trunk, and we sat on it.
Anuta stretched her hand toward the hill that separated the village and the valley. “We had land on the Hill of the Cross, but on the other side, toward the village,” said Anuta.
We knew that - the Communist regime had expropriated all that land.
Anuta waited much longer than usual to continue. We felt she would say something important. Her mood changed. She seemed to be looking into a void, one without us there.
She looked up, then let her hand fall. “I was only a few years older than you two.”
I calculated rapidly in my head. That should have been the late 1930s.
Anuta stretched her hand again toward the Hill of the Cross. “Mother and I had some farm work on that land.”
She was debating with herself whether to tell us the story or not.
She stopped and breathed deeply. “I don’t want to tell you because you might not believe me.”
“Come on, Anuta,” said the two of us simultaneously.
She scratched her nose. Very unusual.
She shook her head. “All right. I was working when I heard mother say, ‘Look.’”
She stopped, and we waited. She continued after an eternity. “I looked where Mother pointed.”
She stopped again.
After a while, I said, “Whatever you saw, tell us.”
“Tell us, Anuta,” said my brother.
She looked in turn at both of us. I expected she would say that she saw the Devil. My brother told me later that he thought the same thing. She looked up at the sky and then turned to look at us.
“Well,” she finally said, “a wardrobe fell from the sky.”
She did not laugh but waited for our reaction. I expected her to laugh like it was some joke, but she did not; she was still looking at us. Something in her attitude told me that she was serious.
I asked, “Where did the wardrobe fall?”
“About 100 meters away from us,” she said, watching us closely.
“Did it crash?” asked my brother.
“No, it jumped a few times, rolling over, then, then, it flew back to the sky.”
My brother and I didn’t know what to say.
“A wardrobe?” I asked again.
“Yes,” confirmed Anuta.
“What color?”
“Greyish or brownish, something in between. I thought it was greyish, and Mother said brownish.”
“What did you do?” asked my brother.
“Nothing,” came the answer quickly.
“Was it noisy?”
“No.”
I knew Anuta too well to be misguided. She tried jokes sometimes, but she could never finish them. She burst into a laugh before the end. But for that story, she was very serious, even scared.
“Do you think it was somebody in that wardrobe?”
I bet she wanted to say the Devil, but instead, she mumbled, “How should I know?”
After we reached home, I measured Grandma’s wardrobe. It was about 179 centimeters high, 145 centimeters wide, and 68 centimeters deep.
The next day, I searched for Grandma. That story could not let me sleep.
“Grandma, Anuta told us that you and she saw something falling from the sky many years ago.”
Grandma was on mute for a whole minute, then she said, her mind far away, “Yes, a wardrobe.”
“What do you think it was?”
After another long silence, she repeated, “A wardrobe.”
Her mouth said “a wardrobe,” but her eyes said much more. Anuta did not know more than she had already said, but Grandma did. That day, when the two ladies saw the object falling from the sky, she looked to the sky instead of looking at the seeds she planted or the dirt turned by the shovel. I wrote other stories about Grandma and her special premonitions and interpretations of events, such as when having messages from the sky. Or, the messages were not from Heaven since she was sometimes at odds with teachings from the holy scripts.
At times, when she thought no one was watching, Grandma searched the sky. She was looking for something. Many years later, when I was a granddad, I found her reason for looking up (I am ahead of myself here). But those days, when I saw her focused in the void as a kid, I thought she liked the stars or the clouds. Oh, I knew so little about Grandma those days.
What Grandma thought about the sky I found two years after Anuta’s story when the Americans landed on the moon. Everybody in the village said it was a fake movie since the Bible says that the moon is a light God created to help us in the dark of the night. Period. A light.
“Did the Americans land on the moon?” I asked Grandma.
She laughed. It was a way to avoid the answer.
I asked once more, but all I heard was her laugh again.
“I’ll ask you as many times as needed until you say yes or no.”
She took the portable radio in her hand. “This devilish thingie is not linked to anything. And Benone (her preferred folk singer) sings in Bucharest, and I hear him here.”
“And?”
“The Bible says nothing about Benone singing, and the people at 400 km away hear him.”
It was my turn to laugh.
“It’s coming through the sky,” I said, “radio waves.”
“You learn about things like that in school,” she said, putting the radio back on the table. “But what I know is that there are things around us, and in the sky, that we cannot see, hear, or smell and our lives are controlled by what is out there.”
“Like what?”
She ignored my question. We were on her veranda, and she sat on the stairs.
“You cannot avoid what’s coming from the sky.”
I sat near her. “Good or bad?”
She threw me that look, meaning, I hope you understand. She said, “If you are a good kid, Elly, what’s coming from the sky is good.”
“Like what?”
She nodded, looking through me. “And remember one thing. Don’t fear whatever happens when the sky acts upon you.”
“I don’t understand you, Grandma.”
“Oh, you will someday.” And she smiled broadly. She was back in this world. “Just saying. You are smart.”
I hated it when I did not understand the meaning of someone’s words. And this time was critical. “What could happen, Grandma?”
Grandma raised on her feet. “He will protect you.”
I reacted quickly. “Who?”
“The man from the sky,” said Grandma, then rose and left.
