Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

The next morning, Wolf started working on the room. He dashed off to Elk and to seniors, then went down to the yard, returning each time with heaps of this and that and laying it out along the walls. Grasshopper never went out. He and Blind were guarding the room. Wolf procured paints, both liquid and spray, an old easel, a stepladder, and some fraying brushes. He also arranged empty paint cans and stacked old, yellowing newspapers on the floor. Grasshopper was getting tired of the commotion and of Wolf running around holding all these items, but then Wolf declared everything ready for the work to begin.

Grasshopper helped him spread out the newspapers. Wolf mounted the stepladder and started painting the wall white. The old portable radio was belting out slow blues, coughing and making unfunny jokes between the songs. Grasshopper walked over the newspapers, anticipating the multiple colors of the Gardens of Paradise and singing along softly whenever the tune turned out to be familiar. Blind was scrubbing the windowsill, grayish water flying everywhere.

The lunch bell came unexpectedly for all of them. Wolf stayed back while Grasshopper and Blind went to the canteen. Sportsman's eyes were shooting daggers, Muffin made faces, blue-eyed Magician looked at them plaintively and forlornly. This was the first time Grasshopper was using his prosthetics in full view of others, and the embarrassment was making him eat very slowly.

“Sportsman is looking at us weird,” he whispered to Blind.

“He'd do better to look after his own.”

“Why?”

“Wolf has more cunning than he,” Blind replied cryptically.

He squeezed a piece of meat loaf between two slices of bread and shoved the resulting sandwich in Grasshopper's pocket. Another sandwich just like that one weighed down the other pocket. On the way back they bestowed two greasy stains on Grasshopper's jacket.

In addition to Wolf sitting on the stepladder, they also found Humpback and Beauty in the room. Humpback's hamster was running around in the tub installed on one of the beds. Its glass bowl, spotlessly clean, was drying out on the windowsill. Beauty, his tongue hanging out from the effort, was diligently, if inexpertly, rubbing a wet rag on the lampshade. Humpback, hunched over, was drawing an unidentified animal on the wall. Its legs rose up like columns. When Grasshopper and Blind entered, he nervously straightened up and hid the pencil. All that was near the floor. Higher up, the white wall exploded in green and blue triangles, red spirals, and orange splashes. Blind can't see this, Grasshopper thought with disappointment.

“What do you think?” Wolf asked from up on the stepladder.

“Yes!” Grasshopper said. “This is exactly it!”

“And these”—Wolf pointed with the brush at Beauty and Humpback—“are fresh Poxy Sissies. Now we are five. And the hamster.”

That's why Sportsman was so mad, Grasshopper thought.

“Can I finish this now?” Humpback asked no one in particular.

He turned back to his monster and started putting stripes on it. His head was covered in orange drips too, making him seem a continuation of the wall.

“We brought food,” Grasshopper said. “Runny meat loaf.”

They all skipped dinner. By evening they'd painted the entire wall. The upper part bristled with the flying spirals and triangles, while the bottom was taken over by bizarre animals. Humpback's striped creation was there, as was a slender-legged wolf with teeth like a buzz saw—Wolf's contribution. Also a smiling hamster. Beauty painted a red blob, then smeared it and started crying. They all pitched in and teased it into an owl.

Grasshopper couldn't hold a brush. Wolf wrapped a rag around one of the fingers on his prosthetic hand and dipped it into the can, and a giant porcupine with slightly crooked quills joined the parade of animals. Blind drew a giraffe. It was empty inside and resembled a tower crane, so Humpback colored it in. When they stopped, paint was everywhere. On the newspapers, the clothes, their hands, faces, hair, even the hamster—everything. Elk came by to ask why they didn't show up for dinner and froze as he opened the door.

“Oh,” he said. “This is something else.”

“Beautiful, isn't it,” Beauty whispered. “We did everything ourselves.”

“I can see that,” Elk said. “But you are spending the night in my room.”

“No,” Grasshopper said, agitated. “We can’t! If we leave here, Sportsman and all the rest of them are going to come and ruin this. We can open the windows, to air it out. There's hardly any smell at all! Please?”

Elk gingerly stepped inside and immediately got stuck to the newspapers.

“A rebellion?” he asked Wolf.

Wolf nodded. “They threw us out themselves.”

Elk studied their stained faces, the floor and the cans of paint, then the wall.

“I think I see a vacant space right there,” he said.

A green dinosaur shaped like a kangaroo came to live in the vacant space, and Elk's suit acquired beautiful emerald spots.

“Yes, well,” Elk declared, getting up from his knees. “It is indeed contagious. And now we go and wash up.” He shoved the brush into the paint can. “Are the other walls destined for the same fate?”

“We’ll think of something,” Wolf promised.

“No doubt,” Elk said. “Go open the windows.”

They opened the windows and threw away the newspapers. Elk took Grasshopper and Beauty to the bathroom. He washed them by turns. As soon as the scrubber left Grasshopper to attack Beauty, Grasshopper would fall asleep. Surrounded by the white tiles, under the thundering hot waterfall, swaying and grabbing the bars of the drain with his toes to stop himself from falling down. Beauty's squeals, muffled by the noise of the shower, faded into the distance, then Elk's hands came back and jostled him, the soapy brush reappearing, and Grasshopper woke up again. Then he was being carried, swaddled in a towel, and he still kept his eyes shut even though he wasn't asleep anymore, because he didn't feel like walking. He only peeked out of his fluffy cocoon once deposited in the room.

Humpback, Blind, and Wolf were sitting side by side on a bed. The wall stretched before them in its drying splendor, and Grasshopper again became sad that Blind could not see it. Elk covered him with the blanket, and Grasshopper snuggled in the warm burrow. The voices rolled over him, bubbling indistinctly, but he couldn't make out the words. He was sinking into sleep but managed to call out.

“Blind ...”

Someone smelling of paint appeared silently by his side.

“You know what,” Grasshopper whispered. “The dinosaur... It's raised off the wall a bit. You could see it when it dries up... If you touch it ...”

The paint-smelling apparition answered something, but Grasshopper did not hear it. He was asleep.

The next morning, Wolf changed the lightbulbs for brighter ones. They made shades for two of them out of colored craft paper, and Wolf covered them with Chinese characters. The third one occupied the shade Beauty had been washing. After Beauty left, Humpback washed it all over again, but Beauty didn't know that and so every time he walked under it his face was illuminated by a smile, itself like a lightbulb under the dark bangs.

They guarded the room in shifts all day. The wall was almost completely dry now. The Stuffage Pack was suspiciously quiet. From time to time one of them would sneak out and shuffle outside the door, trying to peek through the lock. Or they would knock and run away before someone could open. Wolf and Grasshopper were on guard during lunchtime. Wolf sat on the windowsill looking out into the yard. Grasshopper lay on his bed. The hamster scratched in its bowl. The room on the other side of the wall was silent. Then someone knocked. Wolf had been jumping up and down all morning, opening the door only to find emptiness behind it and hear the sound of running feet, so he didn't even move.