Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

Someone with the same case of bad nerves as me has destroyed the master bell, probably figuring that it is not needed for ringing the classes anymore, and people wouldn't miss meals. In that he was mistaken. Many do. They come late, or early. Breakfasts are the hardest hit. In the morning it's almost exclusively Pheasants in the canteen, chomping on their grass, that is, salads. A sorry sight. I've never much cared about that bell—I don't like any indicators of time passing. But while it was working it at least made the atmosphere in the canteen a bit more lively.

I drive up to the table and put on the napkin.

Smoker, across from me, is sipping his tea like it's a cup of hemlock. Lary, next to him, is busy mangling a roll with a dull knife. That's it. Four at the Rats' table, three for the Birds, a solitary Hound shoveling food into a backpack. Only Pheasants are all duly present and accounted for, and the crunch of their morning carrots can be clearly heard across the room.

I make myself a sandwich to demonstrate to Lary how it's done, but he doesn't even look in my direction. Huffing and puffing and torturing the bread.

After my second sandwich Alexander comes running, wheeling Tubby in before him. Tubby's miserable look tells me he's not exactly thrilled with being here. Alexander parks the wheelchair at the table and starts loading food into the poor guy. Tubby's suffering, and Alexander, usually so very attentive, seems not to notice. If the bell were still operational it would have been ringing by now, but it isn’t, so what's the rush? I take a camp pot out of the backpack and roll it over to Alexander.

“Dump it all in there, leave the kid alone.”

Alexander is just in time to catch the pot, but drops the spoon.

“See,” I say. “You're asleep on your feet, you shouldn't be feeding people. And, by the way, he's already helped himself to a roll this morning. I wouldn't put it past him to choke now, what with this treatment. People croak left and right from that, you know.”

Tubby slurps mayo off his chin and hiccups softly, as if in support of my speech. Alexander turns the pot this way and that, apparently amazed at its capaciousness. He clearly wants to drop everything and run back under the shower. He's spent the last three days in there. Hoping to wash the Alexanderness off himself?

“Move it,” I say. “Time's a-wasting.”

Lary grumbles something to the effect that there's too much noise coming from me. That I generally produce too much noise, and in the mornings especially.

“Put that in your notebook,” I tell Smoker. “He was always boisterous, and in the mornings especially.”

I observe Alexander filling up the pot, fold my napkin, and drive off. These boring breakfasts you can keep.

I'm barely out into the hallway when I realize that I do indeed produce too much noise. And the reason for that is the removal of a fairly bulky item, namely the camp pot, from the backpack. Something has shifted inside and clanks insistently now, something that it was safely pressing against. And besides, old Mustang also started creaking, unpleasantly resembling the phantom cart that always passes by the House around dawn, closer to the night that's just ended than to the morning that's about to start.

I'm at my wits' end with that cart. Could be a hobo returning with the nightly haul of empties. Could be a wheeler risen from the grave where his wheelchair had been buried alongside him and is now rusted to hell from being underground for so long. Or maybe it's a runaway wheelchair all by its lonesome, passing by the House like the Flying Dutchman , rattling the decaying bones of its former master.

Establishing which of these theories best describes the reality is impossible. In this narrow slot between night and morning the dreams are too sweet for me to climb out of bed, and even if I were to climb out I still wouldn't see anything, because it drives by when it's still dark. I decided to make a recording of the mysterious squeaking object and then listen to it when I'm awake. But no matter how many times I've left the recorder in the open window, I've never caught that obnoxious noise. The cassettes with the failed attempts I've stashed in a box and secreted in the pile of no one's things.

And now it's me who's squeaking like that elusive object, be it a cart, the ghost of a wheeler, or the wheelchair sans ghost. And this means that Mustang is due for an oil change and a check of the fasteners. A tedious, dreary, wearisome business.

Anything interesting that's happening in the House sooner or later gravitates either to the Crossroads or to the Coffeepot. If you’re not looking for something specific, the best strategy is to sit there and wait until whatever you need finds you. I'm not the only one to set up such ambushes. During the hours of the hunt, the territory of the Coffeepot is strictly divided among the people tracking this and that. We try not to infringe on each other's turf, but stuff happens, so we're mostly aware of what everyone else is collecting. From time to time the Coffeepot suffers from the plague of girls in search of confrontation, and then we have to depart swiftly lest we become the trophies.

We stake out the corner table by the wall, Mermaid and I, and wait. The banner on the Mustang is acid-yellow and smells of decaying sparrows. I have on the T-shirt emblazoned with pirates, as a warning, and I’m wearing sunglasses. They're helping me cope with the sunny weather. Mermaid's hair ensconces her and her chair in a kind of tent, cascading down to within a couple of inches of the floor. It mingles with ribbons, cords, and chains of tiny bells, and in the gaps of her vest I can see question marks. Only question marks, two dozen Whys all in a row. She is waiting too, patiently and silently, her hair drips beads of silver, and the question marks seem to flow like upturned droplets.

I very much wish myself luck now, while Mermaid is here. For her sake, not mine. My own good fortune has abandoned me lately, not surprisingly, since I've already caught a lot of things. It's possible that every lucky day brought me closer to some kind of limit and now I'm bumping against it. This makes me nervous, and to calm myself down I take out the ream of paper and launch into the sixty-fifth variation on the theme of “ A la recherche du Crazy Benefactor.” After the first dozen or so I stopped using the form letter, because I didn't need to anymore, but also because something that's been copied out is always less sincere, even when it's exactly identical to something that's been transcribed from memory.

Mermaid drinks her coffee and watches the door. As I fold my missive, she frowns suspiciously.

“Do you really believe something's going to come out of this?”

“Well, to be completely honest,” I say as I put the file back into the backpack and take out an envelope, “no, not really. Things like that only happen once, if at all. The probability of history repeating itself is vanishingly small. But even the tiniest probability should not be ignored.”

“You mean it already has happened? When?”

I sigh. No one seems to be aware of the history of their own abode. And no one seems to care that they aren’t. It's all moldy rubbish to them, they can't spare a single minute to take a good sniff at it. Truly, not a single one among them has the capacity of becoming an archeologist, of deriving pleasure from digging and of rejoicing at the results.

“Once upon a time there lived a man,” I say. “And he was extremely rich and extremely ugly. Or maybe not exactly ugly, but afflicted with a disfiguring disease. We’ll never know now because he never posed for any pictures, and if somebody took one of him in secret he immediately would drag them into court. He lived holed up in his house, assembled a collection of antique musical instruments, and didn't give a damn about anyone. He did write articles and send them to various magazines, signing them with the pen name ‘Tarantula,’ but they were almost never printed, because in them he mainly vented at the government and all the institutions and organizations he ever had to deal with, or, as he himself put it, ‘spit venom.’ And who'd want to print that, right? I think in ten years he only had one article accepted, and that about the antique musical instruments. All of his relatives couldn't wait for him to croak to finally get their hands on his money. He knew that, of course, and that's why he dug up this orphanage that was about to be shuttered because the building it was occupying was falling apart. He bought that building, financed the repairs, and endowed a trust that was supposed to maintain the orphanage after his death.”