Lemon Tsupryk Q3 #4: The House in Which...
On the outside, the walls are a washed-out grey.
Angel-hair strands of ivy roots sneak up them, cautious, even though anyone who would’ve bothered scraping them off has long stopped looking. There’s an old oak tree in the yard, and a firepit, and an endless forest which only some can find. No, not quite find, rather—have the patience to wait for it to come to them, sniff their hand and curl up by their side. The kind of patience only a child, set aside out of sight and out of mind, could learn.
The children in Mariam Petrosyan’s Дом в Котором1 are nothing if not that: disabled, disregarded, locked away from the structure of regular society; off in their own world with its own rules contained within a half-boarding school, half-orphanage on the outskirts of the city. Each child, left largely to their own devices, becomes half-adult: smoking, drinking, getting into fights, all the while telling stories and making up superstitions the likes of which could only come from a child’s imagination. Everything in their home is tinted with fantasy, and the key to joining the fantasy is this:
A name.
Every new member of the flock gets a кличка2: Sphinx, Blind, Smoker, Wolf…the vast majority are far from human names, with only some—for inexplicable reasons—relatively ordinary, like Larry, Ralph, or Gabby. Those with derogatory names don’t seem to mind, though—Hunchback and Blind don’t huff at being reduced to basic traits, and Rat doesn’t care about being associated with a pest. It’s an odd ritual: even if the others may want to kill you, if you have a name, you are still one of them. Cut off from the outside world. Made to play the elaborate game where nothing is pretend; the game which all the kids in the house are playing, and the teachers are too.
With stories of demons and fae, Rumpelstiltskin and Odysseus, it is easy to come to the conclusion that a “true” or “real” name carries inherent power. But no, that is not why the children shed their “real” names like lizard skins and don aliases given to them by the older residents of the house. It’s a tradition every child of the house abides by: the older children, those closer to graduation, give the younger ones nicknames and so too do they hand down the unsaid rules of the game, keeping the wheels turning in perpetuity. Who was the first kid to say to another, “your name is Leopard now!” or call their teacher “Shark”? Who was the first to dirty the clean key-lime walls with drawings of bulls and white dragons and poetry? It doesn’t matter anymore. Words, like herd animals, have strength in number. Without the person, the name will melt away, leaving nothing behind—no last name, no surname, just who they were when they lived in the grey house.
Because is there really a world outside the toy box for broken dolls?
The house has a name, too, almost like the children. Unlike English, which has separate words for house and home, Russian only has one. When in English you’d say “the house down the street is getting renovated” and “let’s go home,” in Russian you’d use the same word for both: дом3. The children use this name lovingly, and their teachers with resentment. Neither is fully correct, nor fully wrong. Grey can be the warm grey of a tabby cat’s fur, or the cold grey of cement; the house is likewise, and so is the game. None of it is real but, at the same time, everything is. Angels (there’s one in group 4), tapestries which capture your nightmares, прыгуны3 who can visit the outside world in their dreams. There are dragons, witches, keepers of time. Through their game, the children take the reigns of their abandoned lives into their own hands. Each has a name, and each belongs to the one house that raised them.
1 dom v kotorom; translated literally as the cut-off phrase The House in Which (English translation of the book: The Gray House).
2 klitchka; nickname, informal moniker
3 dom; pronounced like a mix of dom and dome
4 priguni; “jumpers”
There’s power in a name. A name is the first thing someone receives upon entering the world, and it follows for years afterward. Each name has its own meaning, often reflecting a parent’s aspirations for their child. The name Jason is derived from ancient Greek mythology: he was a hero who retrieved the golden fleece. Everyone’s name is their own, unique (mostly).
ReplyDeleteIn this case, the children shed their names, perhaps to leave their unsavory past behind. They embrace a new life, a new name, a new persona where they are unburdened and free to pursue their own hopes. A name is just a few words, a collection of syllables, but words have meaning, and names are not an exception. It’s the one thing that anyone can truly own, in a sense.
Hi Lemon! I absolutely love your writing style in this blog, and I genuinely had to stop for a second after reading a couple of specific phrases, namely “without the person, the name will melt away,” and the “toy box for broken dolls.”
ReplyDeleteI will admit that I have never read or even heard of the book you describe, and even though I am not typically much of a fantasy fan outside of things like Harry Potter, this book sounds incredibly compelling and like something I would be interested in given how layered it seems. I found it particularly interesting how the children in this book choose to give themselves control and meaning through the house they live in, as well as through the power of their names. Even if those names reduce them into physical traits like “Blind” or “Hunchback,” they still signify being “chosen” and being part of some kind of community.
Also, out of your entire well-written blog, the intro was definitely my favorite, and the descriptions of the children who were able to develop patience among other traits due to being excluded and neglected instantly reminded me of Everything I Never Told You. Hannah, in particular, is constantly overlooked to the point where her family was barely aware of the fact that she existed. As a result, she is extremely perceptive and notices many details about the family members that no one else is able to see. This reminded me a lot of the children in the house from your blog, who despite being ignored by the outside world, develop their own ways of surviving and navigating life. Thank you for sharing!