Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

Softer. Softer still. The slender fingers flitting across the holes, the wind throwing the leaves right in the face, the coins in the back pocket cutting into the skin, the bare ankles freezing, covered in goose bumps. Comfort is a piece of sibilant wood. Calming, lulling, if you allow it to be.

A leaf fetched against his foot and was stuck. Then another one. If you sat without moving for hours, Nature would include you in its cycle just like another tree. Leaves would cling to your roots, birds would alight on your branches and crap down your shirt, rain would wash down your furrows, and wind would bury you in sand. He imagined himself such a treeman and laughed. He laughed with only half of his face. His red sweater, patched on the elbows, let in the wind through the threadbare wool, and it prickled. He didn't have a shirt under it. This was a punishment he set for himself. For all transgressions, both real and imagined, he always punished himself. And almost never commuted his own sentences. He was unforgiving toward his skin, his arms and legs, his fears and fantasies. The itchy sweater was penance for his fears in the night. Those that made him wrap his head in the blanket, making sure that there was no gap left for He Who Comes In The Dark to creep in. Those that forbade him from drinking water before bed, to save himself from the torment of needing to go to the bathroom. The fears that no one knew about, because their owner occupied the top bunk and no one from below could see what was going on up there.

Still, he was ashamed of them. He fought them every night, lost every time, and punished himself for the loss. This had been his way for as long as he remembered. It was the game he always played with himself, gaining the next level of maturity through mortifications imposed on his body. All of his victories smelled of defeat. By winning he only conquered a part of himself, while remaining unchanged at the core.

He fought his shyness with vulgar jokes, his aversion to fights by being the first to jump in, his dread of death with thoughts about it. But all of that, repressed and suppressed, still lived inside and breathed the same air he did. He was both shy and rude, quiet and loud; he bottled up his virtues and exposed his vices, pulled the blanket over his head, praying “O God, don't let me die,” and attacked those much stronger than himself.

He had his poems, written in code on the wallpaper next to his pillow, and he scraped off those he got tired of. He had his flute, a kind gift, and he hid it in the space between the wall and his mattress. He had his crow, and he stole morsels of food for her from the kitchen. He had his skeins of wool, and he knitted beautiful sweaters.

He was born hunchbacked and six-fingered, ugly, apelike. At ten he had been moody, his lips always bruised, his awkward paws destroying everything they touched. At seventeen he became more delicate, taciturn and quiet. His face was the face of an adult, his eyebrows met above the bridge of his nose, his wild unkempt hair the color of raven feathers spread out like a gorse bush. He ate indifferently and dressed slovenly, wore black under his fingernails and rarely changed his socks. He was ashamed of his hump and the pimples on his nose. He was ashamed that he didn't need to shave yet, and smoked a pipe to look older. His secret vice was soppy romance novels, and the heroes of his poems died slow, horrible deaths. He kept books by Dickens under his pillow.

He loved the House. He'd never had any other home and had never known his parents. Here he grew up as one of many, and he was used to tuning the world out when he needed to be alone. His best flute playing happened when no one was listening. Then everything came out right, every song sounded as if the wind itself whistled into the instrument. He thought sometimes that he wanted someone else to hear it, but he also knew that if someone were listening it wouldn't have come out this well. In the House it was customary to call those with humps “angels,” in reference to the folded wings on their backs. This was one of the very few tender names that the House allowed itself to give to its children.

Humpback played, keeping time on the wet leaves with his splayed feet. He inhaled the peace and the kindness, and placed himself in the circle of clarity that never would allow the pale hands of those who confuse the soul to worm their way through. Other people sometimes drifted past, behind the fence, but they did not disturb him. In his mind, the Outsides did not exist. There was only him, the wind, his songs, and those he loved. All of that was inside the House, and outside of it was nothing and no one, only the empty and hostile city that lived its own life.

The wind was burying the yard in leaves. Two poplars, the oak, and four nameless bushes. The bushes grew under the windows, clinging to the walls; poplars occupied the two outer corners of the fence, and some of their roots left the domain of the House. With its massive arms the oak pushed at the shed that it neighbored and overshadowed its corner of the yard completely. It had sprung up here long before the House came to be, and it remembered the time when all of this was orchards and storks made their nests in the trees. How far did its own roots extend?

The empty ball court with old crates for seats. The empty kennel, its roof leaking, the rusty water bowls in front of it full of rain. The bench under the oak, plastered with beer labels. Trash cans. White steam issuing out of the kitchen. Multicolored music out of the windows on the second floor.

Mangy cats stole along the boundaries of the yard. Crows marched across the bare lawns, pushing wet leaves. An aquiline-faced boy in a red sweater sat on an overturned crate and played his flute, locked in a circle of empty loneliness. The House breathed on him through its windows.

The dorm was rocking. Humpback and I were sitting on the bed. Noble, Tabaqui, and Blind were on the floor passing around bottles and jars, sniffing, sampling, and pouring the mysterious contents of some of them into others. Tubby, in pink pajamas, watched them from behind the bars of his portable playpen.

I was watching through the bars of the headboard.

Humpback was whittling something from a blackened knobby root with his pocket knife. He had on his outside coat, decorated with Nanette's droppings, and his shaggy hair was full of shavings.

“The pine needles are past their prime, is all I'm saying,” Tabaqui was droning halfway inside a jar of something murky and brownish. “The bouquet is completely off.”

“Take the other one, then,” Noble said. He took the jar himself, sniffed, and put it aside. “This is last year's vintage. And quit jolting it, you are disturbing the sediment.”

Blind licked the drops he'd shaken onto his hand from another bottle, scowled, and said, “What's oil doing here? Is this salad dressing or something?”

“Hey!” Tabaqui yelped. “Where did you get that from? That's a scorpion drowned in sunflower oil! It's medicine! I always store it separately!”

Noble brought the bottle closer and peered at it.

“Could be. Yep, there it is, floating there. You dummy, why did you have to do it in an opaque bottle? You can hardly see the bugger.”

“I used what was available at close proximity,” Tabaqui said sulkily. “Your choices are somewhat limited when you are holding a live scorpion in your hand, you know. And I distinctly remember putting a warning label on it. Must have dropped off at some point.”

“What use would your label be to Blind? What if he drops off right here? We'd be leaderless on the eve of a military coup.”

At this, Noble broke into a smile. It was tender and wistful.