Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

“Was this your idea?”

“Black, come on,” Sphinx sighs. “Of course not. You seem to have a very strange impression of me.”

“Whose, then? You were mentioning her just now!”

“Now that was a joke. Besides, what's your problem? The new Law is in effect, everyone is free to invite whomever they want.”

“That's right,” Gaby pipes in, lighting up. “Chill, man. Who knows, maybe someday it's going to be your lucky day too.”

“Who?” Black screams, ripping off his glasses. “Who invited you?”

“Blind.” Gaby winks. “Like the boss of your boss, unless I am mistaken.”

Black sits back down. At first he seems paralyzed. Then he pulls the book back and buries himself in it. Looking right through it. Gaby puffs. I resume teasing the nuts out of the shells. Looks like a very promising development.

Sphinx's polite comments regarding the weather and the teachers result only in Long snorting merrily and recrossing her legs, which are impossible not to look at. So I don't fight the urge and gawk freely. Sphinx does as well. Humpback and Alexander seem to prefer studying the ceiling. Finally Gaby becomes bored just sitting there, gets up, and starts pacing about the room.

“What's this you have here? And this? Ni-ice ...” Boobs on the table, butt sticking out in our direction, oohing over the record stacks. “Oh, wow. Cool stuff. I think I heard this one. And the one on the B-side here is, like, the shit! I didn't know you guys were into this.”

Humpback goes pale and cranes his neck. I become uneasy too, especially when she proceeds to shake the records out of the sleeves and turn them around, leaving dozens of paw prints on both sides.

“Look at all that dust,” Long says. “Do you wipe them, like, ever? Shame.”

She extracts a handkerchief and spits on it.

“Halt!” Sphinx screams, shooting up. “Freeze, bitch!”

Humpback, who jumped at the same time, falls back on the bed and wipes the sweat off his face.

“Would you like some nuts?” I inquire.

Long dutifully stands frozen exactly where Sphinx's yelp caught her, and probably cogitates whether she should take offense or not.

“Bad for the teeth,” she grumbles, taking a step away from the table. “You guys are, like, jumpy. Yelling and stuff. What if I’m gonna stutter now?”

“It's the day of the physical, you see,” I explain. “Everyone's on edge. You might even say it's traditional.”

Long leans against the headboard and tilts toward me. “Yeah, they tried poking me too. So? I don't give a shit. Like I never been poked before, right? Now this one time when I got raped ...”

I choke on the nut and cough it out on the blanket. Gaby kindly whacks me on the back with a fist. In search of a more convenient angle, she basically drapes herself over the headboard, and my perspective into the neck of her blouse becomes infinitely more fascinating. This has a terrible effect on my coughing. I almost suffocate.

“You poor thing,” Long sighs. “It's no fun being sick, right? It's OK. It happens. Now this one time when I got sick ...”

“Enough,” Black says and gets up. “I'm just going for a walk. There's got to be a limit!”

He walks out, slamming the door so hard everyone startles.

“What was that about?” Gaby says.

“Nothing, never mind,” Sphinx says hoarsely. “Busy, I guess.”

“Yeah, right. Went to sit in the john with a book, I’ll bet,” Long snorts. “Those four-eyes are all the same. What's with the voice? Are you, like, sick too?”

“Something with the vocal cords.”

“No way,” Long marvels. “That was some shout, you know what I mean?”

“Exactly,” Sphinx agrees. “Not bad at all.”

Gaby peels herself off the headboard. The bed groans gratefully.

I blink my eyes back into focus. She shuffles to the door.

“I'm off, then. The world awaits. My regards to Blind. And to your bookworm too. You get well.”

“I’ll make sure we tell them,” I say. “You're welcome anytime, don't be a stranger.”

“Stranger, that's not me,” she says. “But I guess you figured that already, am I right?”

A farewell grin framed by purple lip gloss, and she disappears. The heavily perfumed air is stifling. I thoughtfully swallow the last nut and sweep the shells together.

“What was that you just said? Welcome anytime?” Humpback says. “I'm going to remember that, Tabaqui.”

“That's called being polite,” I explain. “It's what you say when guests are leaving. Especially when it's a lady.”

“I see,” Humpback says.

He goes to check on the records. On their overall condition and especially on the absence of traces of saliva polishing. I drink my coffee and flip the cards of my solitaire. This new Law looks like fun. Whatever else, it certainly brings variety.

When Black returns, Smoker starts pestering us with questions. Who was Mother Ann? It's all Sphinx's fault. He let it slip to Black that he, Sphinx that is, is not Mother Ann to be chasing Blind's girlfriends out of the dorm. Honestly, that was a fib. He was never going to do the chasing himself. But Long is unlikely to come back here anytime soon if I know anything about Sphinx, and I do, believe me. Black does as well, but he's too thick to see things that are right under his nose. Which is why we all waste so much nervous energy.

“So who was she?” Smoker asks.

Asks me, imagine that. It's not an easy question. I can see Sphinx grinning. Easy for him. He's not the one being questioned, so he's not the one who has to answer.

“Well, you see,” I begin reluctantly, “she was this woman who lived here ages ago ...”

A lousy way to start. But what else do I have? Should I have started with us inventing distractions for ourselves? With songs? Maybe Wolf's jokes, like that snowman that we put Lary's T-shirt on, even though we had to disassemble and rebuild it to do that? Fairy Tale Nights? It's impossible to recall everything that has been tried at one time or another just to prevent ourselves from dying of boredom.

“About a million years back she ruled this place,” I said.

She did. As a principal.

Sepia photographs, fraying at the edges: a plump woman in a nun's habit, hands folded over her stomach. Cheeks most likely red, palms calloused. When it got cold she'd wear fingerless mittens. Those hands had to do a lot. Tin buckets full of icy water. Shovelfuls of coal. Each dorm—or dortoir , as they were called—had either a fireplace or a stove, smoky and sooty, and every day fuel for them had to be brought up from the sheds in the yard to provide heat for everyone.

Kids in heavy hobnailed boots. Meager coats with large round buttons. Winters meant constantly chapped cheeks. “Almshouse for Deprived Children.” The House bore this unctuous Dickensian sobriquet with pride. That's what it said on the plaque attached to the squat cast-iron gates. Every Saturday they polished it with sand, as they did everything that was supposed to shine. It was a huge plaque, for in addition to that name it also had to fit the names of the twenty-eight trustees. Each one of them had a postcard prepared and sent out every holiday, in clumsy kids' handwriting, plus a letter from M. A. herself. With the renewed expression of true gratitude... Praying daily that you remain in God's good graces. Maybe they really did give those daily prayers, who knows? Each trustee meant a small measure of joy for the inhabitants of the House, and joy was in short supply back then.

We were down in the basement, Sphinx and I, diving into the strata of crusted papers held together with wire. Some had almost disintegrated, others survived intact, but all of them, every little scrap, reeked of damp—as if they had absorbed miles and miles of swamps. It was a pleasure to dig. There was only one other person who shared this passion for clawing the House's past out of its most secret nooks, and that was Sphinx. For the rest of them even the most precious finds from the basement were disgusting junk. But Sphinx ...