Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

Tabaqui got ready in a flash and wheeled away to get the bread, taking Lary with him. Before he left, he felt it his duty to smack me on the back. Cheering me up, I guess.

“Did you figure it out yourself?” Sphinx said.

I nodded. Then wheezed that it wasn't that hard. We both looked up at Lary's bunk. I noticed there was a paper airplane peeking out of Sphinx's shirt pocket. The burns on his cheeks were still fairly bright, making him seem ruddily healthy.

Then came Black, who asked if we were in need of brute force. He was dressed like he was going out into the wilderness. Heavy boots coming up almost to the knee, cargo pants with a dozen pockets, a shirt on top of another shirt. All of it on the greenish-brown side of the spectrum. And a hat on a string behind the shoulders.

Sphinx said that the brute force would be needed in about half an hour. Black said in that case, he would return in about half an hour, and walked out, leaving behind a jar of olives.

Alexander hauled out the box of cups, all of them different sizes, and started arranging them on the table. Tabaqui and Lary came back laden with packages. In addition to bread, they turned out to contain two jars of sandwich spread, a wheel of cheese, a stick of salami, and a bunch of scallions.

“I shall call this dinner ‘The Last Flight of the Flyer,’” Tabaqui explained and added Black's olives to the loot on the table.

Ginger returned and took the bear off me.

Then all was incredible hustle and bustle. They dumped the clothes out of the wardrobe and piled unfamiliar bags in the anteroom. There was a line to use the showers. I looked at this for a while and then decided to take a stroll. I didn't have anything to change into anyway, and sitting there idly in the middle of it was quickly getting old. So I wheeled out.

The hallway was empty. Not a soul, not even at the Crossroads. Doors slammed, from time to time someone would sprint from one room to another, but mostly the commotion was confined to the dorms. I went to sit by the Crossroads window. The rain had stopped a while back. Sun even made an appearance, albeit a short one. It was setting now, and the puddles in the yard glowed gold. I decided that I had to do a painting like that. Later sometime. An evening, in the bluest of blue, and the yellow puddles, and a thin line of yellow in the sky. I didn't have my notepad with me to sketch it, so I did a quick one right in the diary, to make sure I didn't forget, even though I knew I wouldn't forget anyway. I saw this painting in my mind so vividly it got me doubting that it was going to happen. Everything that I imagined in such detail before I started drawing ended up worthless, or looked nothing like what I was imagining.

I took another couple of laps around the hallway and returned to the dorm.

They were in the process of moving furniture, trying to free up the space for the guests. The master bed had been disassembled into regular, narrow ones. They pushed one against the wall, the other against the wardrobe, and the third got squeezed somehow between the bunk and the table. It was now impossible to reach the window or to open the wardrobe, but there was this big empty space in the middle of the room. Covered with dust and debris. Lary attacked it with a broom, Alexander went over it with a mop, and then they let Tubby, in his festive red overalls, crawl around it to his heart's content.

Tubby was crawling, Tabaqui was slicing bread on the table, Sphinx and Black were discussing something, sitting on Black's bed, Noble was offloading the medicine bottles from the wobbly nightstand that invariably got knocked over anytime we had guests. I noticed that he was throwing them into a garbage bag, and then I noticed the backpacks, in neat rows under the bed, all closed and ready. And more backpacks in the anteroom. Also coats folded on top of some of them. It dawned on me that everyone had already packed. Except me. I had this creepy feeling that they were all going to vanish any moment now, and I'd be left here alone in the empty dorm to wait for the morning. It passed, but left such a bad aftertaste that I hurriedly stuffed my things into the bag. I didn't have much. Sketchpads, notepads, paints. The sweater that Humpback knitted for me and the cup, Jackal's present.

Tabaqui shouted to me to climb up on the table and help him with the sandwiches.

The next hour I was very busy. Busy putting spread on all the bread he'd sliced, and since he'd sliced a sizable mound of it, the work promised to never end. The buttered pieces Tabaqui ingeniously decorated with this and that, and as a result managed to create enough sandwiches out of the limited amount of ingredients to feed an army. Looking at them, I even started to doubt if we'd be able to eat them all in one night. The finished sandwiches we arranged in layers on serving plates, but not before sticking a toothpick in each.

“There!” Tabaqui said. “I'm done with working for today. It's party time!”

With this, he and Noble holed up in the corner with bottles of homemade hooch, tasting and mixing. I wasn't going to be of any help in that.

While I was contemplating what else useful I could be doing, two Bird-Logs came in carrying mattresses, plopped them in the middle of the room, and went away again.

Then came Lary, in Noble's white shirt. It was the kind of shirt the lead singer in Tosca usually wears for his big number. I keep forgetting what his name is. Anyway, it was a very operatic shirt. Lace on the collar, billowing sleeves, that sort of thing. Lary looked stunning in it. It went especially well with high boots. Actually, they had all spiffed themselves up, it's just that on Lary it seemed especially jarring.

I was still sitting on the table. Shooing Nanette from the sandwiches quietly going stale, and drawing anything and everything around me right in the diary. Bits and pieces of them.

Bird-Logs came back. Dragging in Vulture's stepladder. Mermaid and Needle came with a round tray. There was a pie on it. They put it next to me and set to cutting it up. I grabbed the knife and joined in. The aroma of the pie made me realize how beastly hungry I was. It was a meat pie, still warm. I had no idea how they'd made it and with what, but they certainly weren't using a hotplate. We arranged the slices on the same tray.

“I think we should try it,” Mermaid said. “If it came out all right, I mean. It's getting cold.”

So the three of us took a piece each, and we gave one to Tubby as well. He was slurping it with such gusto that everyone immediately gravitated to us, eager to participate in the tasting. We only managed enough willpower to get the pie away, on top of the wardrobe, when there was about half of it left. Humpback climbed on the table to place the tin pan over it, to keep it from Nanette, and when he stepped down again he was in a kind of a swoon. He said that he'd marry the one who made this pie. Mermaid and Needle exchanged glances and giggled.

“It was a joint project,” Mermaid said. “You'd have to become a polygamist.”

Humpback confirmed that he would gladly do that. He was absolutely serious when he said it. Deadly serious. Like this thought just hit him, that the one thing that had been missing from his life up to this point was polygamy. I couldn't believe it was really him saying that. Always so reticent, so quiet, and suddenly—promises of dancing, paper airplanes, joking with the girls... It sure was strange, the effect that the upcoming graduation was having on him.

“Oh! I have to go get changed!” Needle said and ran off.

“What about you?” I said to Mermaid. “Are you getting changed?”

“I did,” she said, reddening. “Changed, I mean.”

“Ah. Of course. Right. How stupid of me not to notice! You look great.”