The Gray House Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2009 Mariam Petrosyan

  Translation copyright © 2017 Yuri Machkasov

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Дом, в котором . . . by Гаятри/Livebook in Russia in 2009. Translated from Russian by Yuri Machkasov. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503942813

  ISBN-10: 1503942813

  Cover design by David Drummond

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE SMOKER

  THE HOUSE MALE STUDENTS

  AS OF BOOK ONE

  The House sits . . .

  SMOKER ON CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OF TRAINING FOOTWEAR

  THE HOUSE INTERLUDE

  THE HOUSE

  SMOKER OF CONCRETE AND THE INEFFABLE PROPERTIES OF MIRRORS

  THE HOUSE INTERLUDE

  THE BACKYARD INTERLUDE

  SMOKER OF BATS, DRAGONS, AND BASILISK EGGSHELLS

  THE HOUSE INTERLUDE

  THE FOREST

  SMOKER VISITING THE CAGE

  THE HOUSE INTERLUDE

  SPHINX VISITING THE SEPULCHER

  THE HOUSE INTERLUDE

  SMOKER ON MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN BLACK SHEEP

  THE HOUSE INTERLUDE

  SMOKER POMPEY’S LAST STAND

  BOOK TWO EIGHT DAYS IN THE LIFE OF JACKAL

  THE HOUSE MALE STUDENTS

  AS OF BOOK TWO

  RALPH A SIDEWAYS GLANCE AT GRAFFITI

  TABAQUI DAY THE FIRST

  SMOKER ON APHIDS AND UNTAMED BULL TERRIERS

  THE HOUSE INTERLUDE

  TABAQUI DAY THE SECOND

  THE CONFESSION OF THE SCARLET DRAGON

  TABAQUI DAY THE THIRD

  TABAQUI DAY THE FOURTH

  THE SOOT OF THE STREETS SHARDS

  THE HOUSE INTERLUDE

  TABAQUI DAY THE FIFTH

  TABAQUI DAY THE SIXTH

  THE HOUSE INTERLUDE

  A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CORRIDOR

  WALKING WITH THE BIRD

  TABAQUI DAY THE SEVENTH

  SORCERY

  BASILISKS

  GHOST

  TABAQUI DAY THE EIGHTH

  THE LONGEST NIGHT

  SPHINX THE LONGEST NIGHT

  BOOK THREE THE ABANDONED NESTS

  THE HOUSE MALE STUDENTS

  AS OF THE END OF BOOK THREE

  SPHINX

  SPHINX

  RED

  RALPH

  SMOKER

  BLIND

  TABAQUI

  SPHINX

  SMOKER

  NOBLE’S TALE

  GINGER’S TALE

  SMOKER (CONTINUED)

  RED’S TALE

  TABAQUI’S TALE

  SMOKER (CONTINUED)

  EPILOGUE TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE

  BETWEEN THE WORLDS

  VOICES FROM THE OUTSIDES

  THE HAPPY BOY

  THE ENCOUNTER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  BOOK ONE

  SMOKER

  THE HOUSE MALE STUDENTS

  FOURTH

  —

  BLIND

  SPHINX

  (TABAQUI)

  BLACK

  HUMPBACK

  (NOBLE)

  LARY*

  ALEXANDER

  (TUBBY)

  (SMOKER)

  THIRD

  BIRDS

  —

  VULTURE

  (LIZARD)

  (ANGEL)

  DODO

  HORSE*

  (BUTTERFLY)

  (DEAREST)

  GUPPY

  BUBBLE*

  BEAUTY

  ELEPHANT

  (FICUS)

  (SHRUB)

  SECOND

  RATS

  —

  RED

  SOLOMON

  SQUIB

  DON

  VIKING

  CORPSE

  ZEBRA

  HYBRID*

  MONKEY*

  MICROBE*

  TERMITE*

  PORCUPINE

  SUMAC

  CARRION

  RINGER*

  TINY

  WHITEBELLY

  GREENERY

  DAWDLER

  AS OF BOOK ONE

  SIXTH

  HOUNDS

  —

  POMPEY

  CROOK

  (OWL)

  GNOME

  SHUFFLE

  LAURUS

  WOOLLY

  RABBIT

  ZIT*

  TRITON

  (SLEEPY)

  GENEPOOL*

  DEALWITHIT*

  SPLUTTER*

  (HEADLIGHT)

  (HASTEWASTE)

  EARS

  NUTTER

  RICKSHAW

  BAGMAN

  CRAB

  (FLIPPER)

  FIRST

  PHEASANTS

  —

  (GIN)

  (PROFESSOR)

  (BITER)

  (GHOUL)

  (STRAW)

  (STICKS)

  (BRICKS)

  (CRYBABY)

  (GYPS)

  (HAMSTER)

  KIT

  (BOOGER)

  (CUPCAKE)

  (SNIFFLE)

  (PIDDLER)

  LEGEND

  —

  (PARENTHESES):

  WHEELERS

  UNDERLINED:

  INSENSIBLE

  BOLD:

  UNDER 17

  STARRED*:

  BANDAR-LOGS

  PHEASANT CRYBABY IS NOT THE SAME PERSON AS CRYBABY OF THE “PAST” EPISODES, WHO BECAME HORSE

  The House sits on the outskirts of town. The neighborhood is called the Comb. The long buildings of the projects here are arranged in jagged rows, with empty cement squares between them—the intended playgrounds for the young Combers. The teeth of the comb are white. They stare with many eyes and they all look just the same. In places where they haven’t sprouted yet, there are the fenced vacant lots. The piles of debris from the houses already knocked down, nesting grounds for rats and stray dogs, are much more appealing to the young Combers than the empty spaces between the teeth.

  In the no-man’s-land between the two worlds—that of the teeth and that of the dumps—is the House. They call it Gray House. It is old, closer in age to the dumps, the graveyards of its contemporaries. It stands alone, as the other houses shun it, and it doesn’t look like a tooth, since it is not struggling upward. Three stories high, facing the highway, it too has a backyard—a narrow rectangle cordoned off by chicken wire. It was white when built. It has since become gray, and yellowish from the other side, toward the back. It is bristling with aerials; it is strewn with cables; it is raining down plaster and weeping from the cracks. Additions and sheds cling to it, along with doghouses and garbage bins, all in the back. The facade is bare and somber, just the way it is supposed to be.

  Nobody likes Gray House. No one would admit it openly, but the inhabitants of the Comb would rather not have it in their neighborhood. They would rather i
t didn’t exist at all.

  SMOKER

  ON CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OF TRAINING FOOTWEAR

  It all started with the red sneakers. I found them at the bottom of my bag. The personal-possessions bag, that’s what it was called. Only there was never anything in it with any touch of personality. Two standard-issue towels, a bunch of handkerchiefs, and dirty laundry. Same as everyone else. All bags, all towels, socks, briefs—all identical, so that nobody would feel slighted.

  It was an accident that I found them. I’d lost sight of them long ago. An old present from someone forgotten, from the previous life. Bright red, wrapped in shiny plastic, the soles striped like a candy cane. I tore open the package, ran my fingers over the flaming laces, and quickly put on the shoes. My legs looked funny. I forgot they could look like that. They acquired this unfamiliar walking feel.

  That same day, after classes, Gin took me aside and said that he didn’t approve of my behavior. He pointed at the sneakers and told me to take them off. I shouldn’t have asked why, but I did.

  “They attract attention,” he said.

  This was normal for Gin in terms of explanation.

  “So?” I said. “So let them.”

  He didn’t say anything. He adjusted the cord on his glasses and wheeled off. That night I received a note. Only two words: Footwear discussion. I was in trouble, and I knew it.

  Scraping the fuzz off my cheeks I cut myself, and then broke the toothbrush glass. My reflection in the mirror looked completely terrified, but I wasn’t really afraid. Well, I was, but at the same time I didn’t care. I even left the sneakers on.

  The assembly was held in the classroom. Someone had written Footwear discussion on the blackboard. Three-ring circus with clowns, except I wasn’t laughing, because I was tired of these games and the oh-so-clever people who played them, and of the place itself. So tired that I almost forgot how to laugh.

  My place was at the board, so that everyone could see the subject of the discussion. Gin sat at the desk to my left sucking on his pen. To my right, Kit loudly knocked a steel ball bearing around a plastic maze until he got the reproachful looks.

  “Who would like to contribute?” Gin said.

  Many would. Almost all of them. To start it off, they called Gyps. The quicker to get rid of him, I guess.

  We learned that everyone who tried to attract attention to himself was an egotist, a bad person, capable of anything and full of himself while at the same time completely empty inside. A jay in peacock’s plumes. Gyps recited the fable of the jay. Then he recited the poem about the donkey that wound up in the lake and drowned because of its own stupidity. He also tried to sing something to the same effect, but no one was listening anymore. Gyps puffed his cheeks, started to cry, and stopped speaking. He was thanked, given a handkerchief, and shunted behind a textbook, and the floor was given to Ghoul.

  Ghoul was barely audible. He never lifted his gaze, as if reading something off the surface of the table, even though there wasn’t anything there except the scratched veneer. His white bangs were falling over his eyes, and he was sticking it back up with his saliva-moistened finger, but as soon as he fixed the pale strand to his forehead, it crept back over his eyes. You needed nerves of steel to look at Ghoul for long. So I didn’t look at him. My nerves were in tatters already. There was no need to fray them further.

  “What is it to which the person in question is trying to draw attention? It would seem that it is just his footwear. However, this is not so. By means of his footwear he is drawing attention to his legs. Therefore he is advertising his handicap, putting it in everyone’s face. Therefore he is accentuating our common unfortunate condition without consulting us or soliciting our opinions. In a sense he is mocking us all . . .”

  He chewed on this for quite a while. The finger traveled up and down the bridge of his nose, his eyes were getting bloodshot. Everything he could say I knew by heart—everything that was fit to be trotted out for the occasion. Every word emanating from Ghoul was just as colorless and desiccated as he was, as were his finger and the nail on that finger.

  Then it was Top’s turn. Basically the same speech, and about as engaging. Then Straw, Sticks, and Bricks, the triplets. The Little Pigs. They would talk all at once, cutting each other off, and this I actually watched with great interest because I had not expected them to take part in the discussion. I guess they didn’t like the way I was watching them, or they got self-conscious and that only made it worse, but they ripped into me the hardest of all. They dragged out my habit of folding page corners (even though I was not the only one reading books), the fact that I had not contributed my handkerchiefs to the communal pool (even though I was not the only one with a nose), that I occupied the shower for longer than was allowed (twenty-eight minutes on average, when the norm was twenty), bumped my wheels while driving (and wheels need care!), and, finally, arrived at their main point—that I was a smoker. If you could call someone smoking one cigarette every three days a smoker.

  They asked me if I knew the extent of damage caused by nicotine to the well-being of others. Of course I knew. I not only knew, I could easily give a talk on the subject, because over the last six months they’d stuffed me with enough booklets, articles, and pithy quotations on the dangers of smoking to comfortably feed a multitude. I was lectured on lung cancer. Then, separately, on cancer in general. Then on cardiovascular diseases. Then on some additional horrible ailments, which was when I stopped listening. On topics like these they could go on for hours. They would shudder, horrified, eyes lit up with excitement—like decrepit gossips discussing the latest murder or accident, drooling happily. Neat little boys in neat little shirts, so earnest and wholesome, but hidden underneath their faces were old hags, skin pitted with acid. This was not the first time I saw through to those wrinkled old crones, so it was not a surprise. They got to me so badly that I started dreaming of poisoning them with nicotine, all together and each one separately. Pity I couldn’t do that. To smoke my paltry once-every-three-days cigarette I went to hide in the teachers’ bathroom. Not even our own bathroom, god forbid! If I poisoned anyone or anything it could only be the cockroaches, because only the cockroaches ever ventured there.

  The stoning had been going on for half an hour when Gin rapped his pen on the table and declared the footwear discussion closed. They’d just about forgotten the topic by that time, so the reminder turned out to be quite appropriate. They stared at the damned sneakers. They loathed them in silence, with dignity and with contempt for my childishness and tastelessness. Fifteen pairs of soft brown loafers against one fire-red pair of sneakers. The longer the stares continued, the brighter the shoes burned. Soon everything except them became gray and washed out.

  I was just admiring them when I was told it was my turn to speak.

  I don’t know quite how it happened, but, for the first time in my life, I said to the Pheasants what I thought of them. I told them that this classroom and everything in it were not worth one pair of gorgeous sneakers like these. That’s what I said to the Pheasants. Even to poor, cowed Top. Even to the Little Pigs. And I really felt it at that moment, because I can’t stand cowards and traitors, and that’s exactly who they were—cowards and traitors.

  They must have thought they’d scared me so much that I’d gone crazy. Only Gin didn’t look surprised.

  “So now we know what you actually think,” he said. He wiped his glasses and pointed his finger at the sneakers. “This was not at all about those. This was about you.”

  Kit was still waiting at the board, chalk in hand. But the discussion was over. I just sat there with my eyes closed until they all wheeled out. And I continued sitting like that long after they did. My tiredness was flowing out of me. I had done something out of the ordinary. I’d behaved like a normal person. I’d stopped conforming to others. And, however it all ended up, I knew I would never regret that.

  I looked up at the board. It was supposed to say: Footwear discussion. 1. Self-importance. 2. Drawing
attention to collective disability. 3. Thumbing nose at collective. 4. Smoking. Kit had managed to make at least two mistakes in every word. He could not write for sour apples, but he was the only one who could stand, so he ended up at the board for every meeting.

  For the next two days no one spoke to me. They all behaved like I did not exist. I had become a ghost. On the third day of this silent treatment, Homer told me that the principal wanted to see me.

  The First’s counselor looked more or less like the whole group would look were they not masquerading as teenagers for some reason. Like the hag sitting inside every one of them, waiting for the next funeral. Decay, gold teeth, and failing eyes. At least he wore it all out in the open.

  “The administration has been made aware already,” he said, looking like a doctor giving a patient the news of an incurable disease.

  He continued to sigh and nod and look at me pityingly until I started feeling like a corpse, and not a very fresh one. Once assured of the proper effect, Homer left, snuffling and groaning as he went.

  I’d visited the principal’s office twice before. Once when I had just come in and once when I was submitting a painting for the exposition with the idiotic theme of “I Love the World.” It was the result of three days’ work and I titled it The Tree of Life. Only when you stepped back a couple of feet from the painting could you discern that the Tree was teeming with skulls and hordes of maggots. Up close, they looked kind of like pears in among the crooked boughs. Just as I’d expected, no one inside the House noticed anything wrong. My dark sense of humor was apparently only discovered at the exposition itself, but I’ve never found out how it was received. Actually, it was not even a joke. My love for the world at the time looked more or less the way it did in the painting.

  During my first visit to the principal’s office, the worms had already started wriggling inside the worldly love, though we weren’t quite ready for the skulls yet. The office was clean but still somehow untidy. It was obviously not the hub of the House, the place everything flows in or out of. More like a guards’ shack at the gates. A rag doll in a festooned dress had been sitting on the sofa in the corner. It was the size of a three-year-old. Memos and notes, stuck with pushpins—on the walls, the blinds, the sofa, everywhere. But most of all I was struck by the enormous fire extinguisher over the principal’s desk. It was so mesmerizing that I could not quite pay attention to the principal himself. Anyone who chose to sit under that antique fiery zeppelin must be somewhat counting on that. The only thing you could think about was that monstrosity crashing down and flattening him right there in front of your eyes. There was no space left in your head for anything else. Not a bad way of becoming invisible.