The Gray House

by Mariam Petrosyan

  “Why would I want to change something there?” I said. “If it wouldn’t mean a change here.”

  The damned tie was biting into my neck. All I wanted to do at that point was to go away from this place. I guess Sphinx noticed the state I was in.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “You’re turning red.”

  And we left. Eric wasn’t at the show that day. Or I would have asked him a couple of things.

  Horse

  When we saw him we didn’t put two and two together at first. I mean, sure, we realized that the boy was the spitting image of Blind. But we couldn’t imagine it was really him. I mean, think about it. Would you if you were in our place? Would anyone?

  Hybrid

  So this one time Sphinx shows up, and he’s not alone. Climbs out of the car, cracks open the rear door, and pulls out this scarecrow. Thin as a rail, and all covered in some kind of nasty rash. All of ours already had the chickenpox and all that, so we don’t sweat it, make it look like we don’t notice even. And it’s clear as day who he looks like. Makes you feel uneasy, like you saw someone carrying a photograph of his late wife with him everywhere. You don’t exactly come out and say it, right? So we don’t. But the kids get to him right away, because he looks such a city slicker in his white sneakers and his stickered shirt, they can’t help themselves. So they gather around and start discussing his clothes, his rash, how he can’t even move he’s so scared. Teasing him.

  But not that hard, you know. I decide to knock some sense into them, because he’s a guest and that’s not the way to treat guests, and I take a step toward them, and then someone, I guess it was Red’s youngest, pulls at his sleeve. And that’s when it hit the fan.

  Horse

  He lost his dark glasses in the melee, and then it was obvious. To anyone. I mean, anyone who’d ever seen Blind. At least that’s what I thought. I was wrong. Termite, for example, did not get it.

  “Oh, look!” he said. “Blind’s little boy! Would you look at that, a perfect likeness!”

  I wasn’t going to argue with him. Heredity is now one of his favorite topics. How nurture’s got nothing on nature.

  The kids were so upset when they saw they were picking on an unsighted that we didn’t even need to tell them off.

  But Sphinx took his boy behind the barn and gave him a good scolding. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t help it and peeked a bit, to see what was up. And I wasn’t alone. Red got there first. So we see Sphinx blabbing his head off, and the kid just stands there, calm as could be. Maybe listening, maybe not, no way to tell.

  “Poor Sphinx,” I whisper to Red.

  “Depends on the point of view,” Red shoots back. “Didn’t you get lectured about the proper way to behave when you were a kid? Didn’t that make you want to throw up?”

  “What would you have done in Sphinx’s place?”

  “Told him that it was a brave thing to do,” Red says without pausing even for a second. “And to keep standing up for himself.”

  “What? You mean, him?” I say, aghast. “Tell him to keep it up? This guy here?”

  Red stares at me strange like. And asks if I am really as stupid as I look.

  What do you say when someone insults you to your face? I turned around and left.

  Red

  After we packed the goons off to bed, Horse got off the phone and I stopped fretting about the size of the long-distance bill that was bound to arrive after his intimate chat with Lary, that is, after things calmed down a bit and Sphinx and I were the only ones left out on the deck, I asked him where he’d dug up that boy.

  “Where he no longer is,” he said, in the best tradition of the Fourth.

  “Thank you for that informative answer,” I said. “What are you trying to prove by this, and to whom? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  We were drinking hard cider, legs up on the railing. We didn’t turn the lights on, so that the nightlife wouldn’t get any ideas.

  “All I want is to undo some mistakes made by one good man,” he said.

  It sounded . . . normal. Like something that happens. Something that we all should be doing from time to time. Then he said that I would’ve done the same thing. If I’d had that chance.

  When he said that, I had to work hard to bring my imagination to heel. Because why not? I’ve got four daughters, three of them gingers, and I know which one I love just a little bit more, and why. Even though the resemblance is mostly in my head.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But this is different.”

  He shrugged. I couldn’t say for certain in the dark, but I think he was smiling.

  “To each his own,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But to each not the same acquaintances.”

  He flinched and spilled his cider.

  “Shhh,” I said. “I didn’t say I blamed you. That was just envy, pure and simple. A very common phenomenon.”

  We sat there silently for a while, finished what was left in the bottles, and I felt a sinister prophecy coming up.

  “You’re going to catch a lot of grief with this guy.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know that. It’s just that I wanted him to learn to love this world. Even a little. As much as I could teach him to.”

  I guess it was cruel of me, because now he couldn’t have changed anything even if he wanted to.

  “He will learn to love you,” I said. “And for him you are going to be the whole damn world.”

  He didn’t say anything for so long that I realized he was afraid of the same thing. But he’s a stubborn guy, and it was clear he wasn’t going to back down. He’ll prove his point, to someone who would never know about it, or die trying. Funny, isn’t it.

  I didn’t even ask about the rash on the boy. I got it. The House put its mark on him. In advance, in anticipation of losing him and before he could end up there. I didn’t tell Sphinx that.

  “Right. Well, good luck,” I said instead. “If you ever change your mind, you’re welcome to stay. We’ve got loads of kids, all of them crazy. A little changeling would blend right in.”

  In the morning they left. I watched them walk to the car, and I swear I couldn’t decide which one I pitied more. Sphinx, I guess. He has a history of attempting the impossible. And it doesn’t always work out in the end for him, not by a long shot.

  Black

  That’s all bullshit, and I’m sick of hearing it. I’m a grown man, not a baby who daydreams about hopping into a time machine and bringing back a small dinosaur for a pet. And if someone’s half-cocked brain is coupled with a sick sense of humor, I don’t see why the rest of us should sing along. I have no clue where Sphinx got that boy, and I don’t give a damn. Like there’s a shortage of undernourished blind orphans in the world, even if they also have black hair and white eyes. Yes, he could even be Blind’s, so? No one knows where he is or what he’s been up to. He could have rattled off a dozen mole rats like that. What he could never do is become a decent father.

  As for Sphinx, he’s just the kind of man to turn any little thing into a planetary event. Into something mysterious and idiotic. He’s always been like that, since he was little. Drag in some piece of slime and go, “Ooh, look, the aliens left this!” I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out he stole that kid. That’s his style. He even managed to steal someone else’s father, and that’s got to be harder to pull off.

  Smoker’s Father

  Of course I’ve heard the talk. And of course it’s all made up. They are rather mystically oriented, those guys from the commune. Sphinx starting those rumors himself? He never did. The kid’s parents put the boy in his care for the summer, and then either the boy got used to him, or the parents decided it would be more useful to not take him back right away. It’s always advisable for children like that to have as much access to a specialist as possible. Adoption? Nonsense, have you any idea how much of an effort it is now to adopt? Especially for someone like Sphinx. And I am sorry, I’m not even going to discuss kidnapping.
>
  Eric says the boy doesn’t really look like who everyone says he does. “Nothing in common.” Those were his exact words. And I believe him.

  Smoker

  I’m seeing very few people. I have many questions, but I’m not asking them. Never. There are times when I think Black knows the answers, but just as I’m about to ask he gives me this miserable look and changes the subject so abruptly that I can’t bring up the courage to say it. He’s so vulnerable then, it’s scary. I don’t want to blow holes in the protective shell he’s spent so much time and effort to build and maintain.

  I have even less desire to go asking Sphinx. In his case it’s the very real possibility of receiving the answers that’s frightening. It’s too iffy between us as it is. I like him, but I can’t get over the fact that he has been given a choice. A choice I have been denied. And no matter how friendly he tries to be, his world will always be different. Not the same as Black’s and mine. We can never forgive him for that.

  THE HAPPY BOY

  In the room they call Stuffage, a seven-year-old boy woke up one early morning. At first he thought that it was a bad dream that made him wake up. He lay there with his eyes shut tight, trying to remember what was so disturbing that he saw, but the dream kept slipping away, not letting him catch it, until the boy got tired of chasing it.

  When he opened his eyes he was astonished at the sudden change in his mood. He was usually gloomy and irritable in the mornings. But not today. This morning felt wonderful. He looked around the room with an unexpected and unfamiliar delight. Looked at the roommates, their heads buried in the pillows, at the clumsy drawings on the walls, at the pink blot of the sky in the windows thrown wide open, and finally, with a strange longing in the pit of his stomach—at the head of his brother on the other edge of the pillow. The head that was an almost exact copy of his own. The boy knew that this wondrous feeling was going to disappear soon, and in the hopes of making it linger just a while longer he shook his brother awake.

  The brother opened his eyes. Round and bugging, they didn’t close completely even in his sleep. That glinting sliver between the lashes, making it look as if he wasn’t really asleep but just faking it, annoyed everyone. Except his twin, who had the exact same peculiarity.

  “What?” the brother who just woke up whispered.

  “I’m not sure,” the boy said, also in a whisper. “I’m feeling kinda strange. Kinda liking everything, very much, so much I want to cry. Do you have it too?”

  The brother searched inside himself.

  “No,” he said, yawning. “Not yet. Could be because I’m still sleeping.”

  And he closed his eyes hurriedly.

  The boy lowered his head onto his end of the pillow and tried to go back to sleep. The joy that had been overflowing inside him was not going away. He pressed his palm against his heart, as if probing it through the skin. Cradling it.

  He did not know yet that this feeling would stay with him for a very long time. It would become less sharp, almost mundane, but at times would strike him again with the same unexpected force, like a soft blow, making him gasp in wonderment, filling his eyes with tears and his soul with delight. He also didn’t know that he and his twin were now and forever different from each other. That he would always look older. “More corrupt,” Black Ralph would say. When the boy overheard that, he wouldn’t be offended. That would be another new feature of his character—nothing much would be able to offend him anymore.

  THE ENCOUNTER

  Room number twenty-four is under a reign of terror since early morning. It is not the cheeriest of rooms even under normal circumstances. All the wheelers who did not leave for the summer have been living in it, the seniors and the juniors together. There aren’t that many of them, only six, but the two nurses who remained in the House have been running ragged taking care of this bunch.

  The seniors are beset with the ailments that prevented them from going, racked with envy of those who did go, and tormented by their own petty needs, by the fact that they have been deprived of the familiar dorms and sent to the room that was considered cursed because its windows were looking out into the street instead of the yard, the way they were supposed to in decent dorms. And also by the necessity to share this room, unpleasant as it is by itself, with the juniors. The presence of juniors is what irks them the worst. Especially one of the juniors.

  The juniors suffer from all of that too, but unlike the seniors they don’t have anyone at whom they can vent their frustration.

  All six of them are terror professionals in their own right, but none can compare to Stinker, can’t even come close. Stinker is in a category of one. His aptitude for terror is otherworldly. He is a peerless prodigy, capable of dealing death for a mere sideways glance, in lieu of a smack upside the head. Moreover, the death would leave him above any suspicion, and be visited upon the victim by means of cutting-edge technology, utilizing the latest inventions, including his own, implemented meticulously and lovingly, by weapons such as the world has never seen, based on his unique research in the fields of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, with side trips into history and biology. Stinker is an expert in all these fields, but his grades are still poor, because he has no time to parade his knowledge before the teachers. There are things infinitely more important that demand his attention. The seniors never pick on Stinker. They never say anything bad about him at all, even in private. Listening devices are Stinker’s specialty, and he is constantly at work refining and perfecting them.

  Scolding and punishing him is something that’s reserved exclusively for the nurses. “There is something motherly about it,” Stinker likes to say. “Something warm, fuzzy, and creepily nostalgic.” It’s been noticed that the older and homelier the nurse, the more he is prone to using this phrase.

  Such is Stinker, a living horror all of nine years old.

  Which is why, when one unfortunate morning he shakes everyone awake before dawn and proceeds to tear apart the room, preparing for the Event, no one dares to say a word.

  Stinker does not deign to explain himself. He constructs a watchtower. The table, pushed against the window, serves as its base. On the table he mounts several pillows and the tripod for the spyglass, then installs himself, surrounded by cookies, binoculars, party poppers, and tissues. The two juniors dutifully paint letters on the white canvas stitched together from a cut-up sheet. Stinker leans down from his post at regular intervals, evaluates their progress, and exhorts them to work faster. The seniors flee the room in an attempt to get some rest.

  Breakfast is served to Stinker directly at his post. The nurses, spooked by his increasing nervousness, attach the finished Welcome! sign to the window and wheel the juniors away to scrub the paint off them.

  Stinker frets, more and more as the time passes. By midday he becomes dangerously sullen. The nurses bring out the smelling salts and disappear in the bowels of the House with the terrified juniors in tow. Seniors return and watch Stinker with increasing curiosity. He distributes the party poppers and orders them to be shot out of the window at his command. The seniors prepare. Judging by Stinker’s defeated look the Event has not happened, and is increasingly unlikely to happen, so when they suddenly hear his hysterical “Fire!” two of them simply drop the poppers, and only one reflexively pulls on the string.

  Stinker, waving the spyglass, performs the triple “Hooray!” wiping off the tears streaming down his face, and snarls at the seniors, “What are you staring at? Never seen happiness before?” Then he detonates the reserve cracker, showering the senior who climbed up on the window in confetti.

  They walk slowly. The boy shuffling a little behind, the woman bent under the weight of the suitcase. They are both wearing white, both are fair-haired, tinting almost to red, both seem slightly taller than one would expect: the boy, incongruous with his age, the woman, with her femininity. The boy drags his feet, catching the sneakers against each other, and keeps his eyes half-closed so that he can see only the gray pavement bubb
ling in the heat and the marks being left on it by his mother’s heels.

  He also sees the scattered confetti. Bright, shiny dots on the gray background. He walks around, taking care not to step on them, not to dull their luster. In doing so he bumps into his mother and stops.

  “This must be the place.”

  The woman lowers the suitcase to the ground. The squat gray bulk of the House looms in front of them, a breach, a rotted tooth in the dazzling row of the snow-white houses on both sides of it. The woman takes off the sunglasses and studies the sign on the door.

  “Yes, this is it. You see? We got here in no time at all. No need to take a taxi for such a trifle, right?”

  The boy nods indifferently. The building looks grim to him.

  “Look, Mom . . . ,” he begins, but then there is a muffled explosion and a snow of confetti. The boy takes a step back, looking in surprise at the fresh portion of the rainbow-colored dots on the asphalt. They are also on his clothes and in his hair. He runs back so he can peek into the windows of the House, and imagines that he can hear someone inside it, someone whom he cannot see from below, hoarsely shout “Hooray!”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Artashes Stamboltsyan

  Mariam Petrosyan was born in 1969 in Yerevan, Armenia. In 1989 she graduated with a degree in applied arts and worked in the animation department of Armenfilm movie studio. In 1992 she moved to Moscow to work at Soyuzmultfilm studio, then returned to Yerevan in 1995.

  The Gray House is Petrosyan’s debut novel. After working on it for eighteen years, she published it in Russia in 2009, and it became an instant bestseller, winning several of the year’s top literary awards, including the Russian Prize for the best book in Russian by an author living abroad. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Lithuanian.