The Gray House

Stinker, waving the spyglass, performs the triple “Hooray!” wiping off the tears streaming down his face, and snarls at the seniors, “What are you staring at? Never seen happiness before?” Then he detonates the reserve cracker, showering the senior who climbed up on the window in confetti.

They walk slowly. The boy shuffling a little behind, the woman bent under the weight of the suitcase. They are both wearing white, both are fair-haired, tinting almost to red, both seem slightly taller than one would expect: the boy, incongruous with his age, the woman, with her femininity. The boy drags his feet, catching the sneakers against each other, and keeps his eyes half-closed so that he can see only the gray pavement bubbling in the heat and the marks being left on it by his mother’s heels.

He also sees the scattered confetti. Bright, shiny dots on the gray background. He walks around, taking care not to step on them, not to dull their luster. In doing so he bumps into his mother and stops.

“This must be the place.”

The woman lowers the suitcase to the ground. The squat gray bulk of the House looms in front of them, a breach, a rotted tooth in the dazzling row of the snow-white houses on both sides of it. The woman takes off the sunglasses and studies the sign on the door.

“Yes, this is it. You see? We got here in no time at all. No need to take a taxi for such a trifle, right?”

The boy nods indifferently. The building looks grim to him.

“Look, Mom . . . ,” he begins, but then there is a muffled explosion and a snow of confetti. The boy takes a step back, looking in surprise at the fresh portion of the rainbow-colored dots on the asphalt. They are also on his clothes and in his hair. He runs back so he can peek into the windows of the House, and imagines that he can hear someone inside it, someone whom he cannot see from below, hoarsely shout “Hooray!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Artashes Stamboltsyan

Mariam Petrosyan was born in 1969 in Yerevan, Armenia. In 1989 she graduated with a degree in applied arts and worked in the animation department of Armenfilm movie studio. In 1992 she moved to Moscow to work at Soyuzmultfilm studio, then returned to Yerevan in 1995.

The Gray House is Petrosyan’s debut novel. After working on it for eighteen years, she published it in Russia in 2009, and it became an instant bestseller, winning several of the year’s top literary awards, including the Russian Prize for the best book in Russian by an author living abroad. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Lithuanian.

In interviews Petrosyan frequently says that readers should not expect another book from her, since, for her, The Gray House is not merely a book but a world she knew and could visit, and she doesn’t know another one.

Petrosyan is married to Armenian artist Artashes Stamboltsyan. They have two children.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Born in Moscow, Yuri Machkasov studied for a career as a theoretical physicist before moving to the United States in 1991. He lives in the Boston area and works as a software developer. Yuri has translated several books into Russian for Livebook Publishing, among them the Carnegie Medal winner Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner. He has also translated poetry from Russian into English, including the work of the Moscow poet Vera Polozkova.