Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

“Why did you refuse to go there with me just now? Were you afraid I'd drag you somewhere you can't crawl out of? Leave you there and run away?”

Sphinx nods. “Something like that. You got it. Do you mean to say you wouldn’t?”

Blind raises his head.

“I don't know,” he says fiercely. “I might have. Except it's not that easy. You are stronger than you think. You'd get out. There are no doors there that wouldn't open before you. But you are choosing to stay here and live out the rest of your stupid life as an armless cripple.”

The last sentence convinces Sphinx that Blind is teetering on the edge. He's never used those words before. Never said them out loud. Blind is having a harder and harder time holding himself together. Sphinx is having a harder and harder time observing him in this state.

“People live with this,” he says.

“Of course they do,” Blind says. “Go ahead, live with it. I hope you don't have an occasion to regret the choice you've made. I could have brought you over completely. You know that. Even Noble could have done it. Think about it.”

“Noble has others to take care of.”

Sphinx stands up.

The House is looking at him through Blind's empty, translucent eyes. The House does not want to let go of him. For a fleeting moment Sphinx imagines that there's no Blind in the room. Only someone, something, that would stop at nothing to keep him in. He feels a cold knot in his stomach. It passes as quickly as it came, and he again sees Blind, who'd never do anything to hurt him.

“Go away,” Blind says. “I don't want to hear you again.”

If Sphinx had arms he would have pounded his fist into the table now. Maybe it would've helped a little. But there are no arms. The only thing he can do is leave. Everything that needed to be said, was.

He walks out into the hallway and stops as he hears a crashing noise from behind the closed door. Blind has done what he himself couldn’t, smashed his hand against the table. Sphinx closes his eyes and stands quietly for a while, listening intently, but there are no more sounds coming from inside the Coffeepot.

Tabaqui told me to write in the diary that “Fairy Tale Night is coming.” We've just returned from the canteen, having spent more than four hours there, all told. I've never felt more drained in my life.

It's not that the dorm looked especially ransacked. If anything, it was even cleaner than usual. But the probing hands had obviously rifled wherever they could, so everyone dashed to check on their secret places. I didn't have any, which is why I unloaded myself on the bed and lay there while they ran around counting the losses. The biggest of the losses was the hotplate. That definitely got taken away. But most of the things that were then said to also have been lost were found afterward. And even though Lary kept whining that some incredibly valuable object had been stolen from him, no one believed him, because as soon as he checked his bed he perked up markedly and even spat out the metal thing he'd been sucking on all that time.

I was so tired that I thought I was going to switch off as soon as I touched the bed. But after lying there for a while I realized that I wasn't sleepy at all. My tiredness was of the canteen, not of anything that was inside me, and our room cured me of it. Still, I couldn't imagine that they would insist on arranging a Fairy Tale Night after a day as hard as this one. I was sure everyone could appreciate some rest.

“Go on, write,” Tabaqui said. “You’ll get to rest during the breaks.”

“What do you mean, breaks?” I said.

“This Night is going to have breaks in it. Everyone knows it's the last one, so most probably it’ll go on till morning. Besides, we are expecting guests, so make an effort and behave yourself.”

I didn't understand what that was about. When was the last time I didn't behave myself with guests present?

It was an exceedingly bizarre evening. Very much resembling those evenings after which happened the nights I didn't like to recall. When Pompey was killed, and the other one, when they cut Red and Crab was found dead.

Everyone was so bubbly, everywhere you looked there were bright eyes and broad smiles, but as soon as they started speaking you noticed that their voices were shaking and their hands were trembling. Like they were all slightly drunk.

Humpback said he was going to perform an Irish jig for us.

“Just you wait. I’ll do it,” he said in a kind of voice people use to threaten suicide.

Then he tore apart the notebook with his poems, fashioned paper airplanes out of the pages, and tossed them out the window. Dropping one on the way. I picked it up, turned this way and that attempting to figure out what was written on it, and then rushed down to the yard to try and salvage the rest, but in the time it took me to drive down, half of them had been snatched up, and the other half landed in the muck and got dirty and soggy, rendering the letters completely illegible.

Tabaqui was singing nonstop. He must have done four dozen songs in a row, each one more depressing than the one before it. All funerals and broken hearts, all the time. Noble, the only one of us who had at least some success in the past in getting him to shut up, inexplicably decided to practice patience and just smiled.

Blind appeared about an hour and a half after our return from the canteen. He had one of his hands swaddled in a towel, and his complexion was so gray that Tabaqui took one look at him and fell silent. Blind looked like all the protagonists of his songs at once. Those about the funerals, and broken hearts, and abandoned wreaths. He said that he wasn't feeling too good, climbed up to Lary's bed, and lay there without a sound.

Tabaqui darkened. Wheeled around the room a couple of times and then also clambered up to join Blind. A little while later he peeked out, called to Alexander, requested to be taken down, examined one of his top-secret hiding places, and disappeared back into Lary's bed with a bottle of brandy at the ready. Tabaqui had exactly one way of treating any ailments. The only variation came in the brand and alcohol content.

I don't remember when exactly it was that I started to suspect that the graduation was happening earlier than the next week, and quite probably even tomorrow. I guess it was shortly before Blind's arrival. It was definitely clear as soon as he appeared. When Ginger came in wearing the same cheerful expression as Blind and began hugging people left and right, my suspicion grew into certainty. She even hugged me. Like it wasn't even a thing, like we hugged each other anytime we felt like it. That was the moment when I understood everything about tomorrow. And about today. Why the search, why Noble was willing to sit through the interminable funeral laments, why Blind looked like a corpse, and why Humpback was threatening to dance. And about the smiles, I understood them too. I mean, why everyone around was smiling like an idiot. I had this lump in my throat that stood in the way of words, so I too could only smile now, just smile and nothing else.

“Please look after my bear for a while,” Ginger said. “I’ll be right back.”

I took the bear from her.

“Oh, look, one more paranoid grin,” Sphinx said, entering the dorm. “Another one joins the fun.”

He looked at me intently, then at Ginger's bear, which I was clutching tightly, because I did promise to take care of it even if I hadn't quite put it in words, and then turned away.

“There's all this bread in the Coffeepot,” he said. “From the canteen. No one's turned up for dinner at all. Shark ordered everything to be brought into the Coffeepot. If we want to claim our share we should hurry. Hounds already started sneaking it away.”