English (Core) · Ch 12 — The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse
Summary of the Lesson
Summary of the Lesson
The story is narrated by Aram, who recalls a magical summer from his childhood, "back there in the good old days" when he was nine.
The white horse at the window
One day at four in the morning, Aram's cousin Mourad — thought crazy by everyone except Aram — wakes him by tapping on his window. To Aram's disbelief, Mourad is sitting on a beautiful white horse and invites him to ride. Aram cannot believe it, for two reasons: he has always longed to ride horses, and, more troublingly, his family is desperately poor. The Garoghlanian family, though poverty-stricken, has been "famous for honesty for something like eleven centuries." Aram reasons that Mourad could not have bought the horse and would not have stolen it — yet there the horse is.
'It wasn't stealing'
Aram leaps onto the horse behind Mourad and they ride out into the country. He convinces himself that stealing a horse merely to ride it is not the same as stealing money: "It wouldn't become stealing until we offered to sell the horse," which he knew they never would. When Aram tries to ride alone, the horse throws him and runs off, leaping over vines; it takes Mourad half an hour to recover it. They hide the horse in the barn of a deserted vineyard once owned by a farmer named Fetvajian.
Mourad's 'way' and the crazy streak
Mourad claims he has "a way with a horse" — an understanding that is "simple and honest." He is said to be the natural descendant of the family's crazy streak, embodied by Uncle Khosrove, a huge, hot-tempered man whose answer to every trouble is to roar, "It is no harm; pay no attention to it" — even when told his own house is on fire.
John Byro comes looking
That afternoon, the farmer John Byro, an Assyrian who learned Armenian out of loneliness, visits and mourns that his white horse, stolen a month ago, is still missing — a horse that cost sixty dollars and leaves his surrey useless. Aram now realises Mourad has secretly had the horse for a month. He begs Mourad not to return it until he himself learns to ride, but Mourad is indignant: "Are you inviting a member of the Garoghlanian family to steal? The horse must go back to its true owner" — in six months at the latest.