Maral’s plump bottom and nipples peeking out of her bra had the eyeballs of men pop out of their sockets and glue them to the neighboring reaches of her body.
Like a gun for hire pursuing a victim vanishing from one corner of a wall to another, Maral, inconspicuous to everyone else, would get angry, but, all the same, she knew her job very well, which is why some sort of silly defeat or some other such sloppiness would never cross her mind. Whenever there was a brief moment of rest, her hands would itch, her body would tingle, her skin would break out in red bumps, and the air, the water, the land, and the sun, with one voice, would remind her to always be in the best shape, but most surprising was the friendly support:
“As long as we’re here, keep up your spirits, no one can hurt you, bless that, that, that…”
This time, however, Maral had taken a meaningless break. The gastric juice in her stomach had become so irritated by this that her mouth was filling up with a bitter taste.
One wonders: what business does such a big yarn of nerves have in the stomach to get irritated on top of everything and cause unnecessary headache? What you call the body: what sort of pointless and defective creation is it? And then they say, “In His image.” Well, in this world of perfection, why is it that this one thing is so imperfect? The ugly pain of the “ego” probably also frightened Him, and, for this reason, forgetting what was and wasn’t already there, He molded whatever and gave it to the world, and, like that, unshackled Himself.
“Man, forget the body. Look at the whirring soul instead, how nauseating that is, as if the claw of a rat were stuck in your teeth—a rat that was earlier splashing around serene sewage waters,” Professor Vagho, who was sitting under the wall, thoroughly shook the backgammon dice in his hand, threw them in the air, and his eyes followed them with a yelp, as if he were watching Maral’s swaying hips.
“Eh, Professor Vagho, what a big pessimist you’ve been! Who would’ve thought? So, what do you want? To darken even this little so much, for it to spread like tar and, passing from mouth to mouth, for your perfect words to pour out onto the face of this earth?” Saro picked up the dice from the corner of the board in his hand and warmly blew on them—and if, by accident, they fell, both you and me, Maral too, and also this damned backgammon, he would curse and bury in blame. “The sun that is a sun: if you hold a knife against it when it’s red-hot, blood will gush out of it, but you say that man’s soul is dirty, and should it not be? How can you pierce someone in a thousand places and not wound them?”
“Man, you’re doing a pretty good job philosophizing right now—I feel disgraced—so why don’t you offer your gift to Maral? Can’t you see that the poor thing is withering on her feet? Whoever looks drools at the need to make a move, but you shake your dice and rejoice so much at getting a “shesh besh” that an entire life’s worth of rejoicing is spent.”
“Yeah, right!” Saro, like someone abruptly waking up, suddenly started, and the backgammon, with the clatter of the black and white checkers, smashed to the ground and, from the midst of all that, a white checker rolling all by itself fell on its face in friendly Drzo’s fenced courtyard.
“Eh, this isn’t your best day, brother Saro, now see how you’re going to get that piece out of Drzo’s courtyard: you’re better off being food for wolves and dogs than extending your hand and trying to slide it through those rails… You know, the wires on the Armenian-Turkish border don’t even carry this much electricity.” Saro was dumbstruck. The world was spinning around him. He turned his gaze instinctively to Maral’s balcony and from a distance caught a glimpse of her “swaying body’s silhouette,” as Professor Vagho would say. In the blink of an eye, the silhouette disappeared from head to toe, and it seemed to Saro as if it were an optical illusion, and when he took a step to convince himself that Drzo’s courtyard had not entered his sleepless nocturnal dream as a symbol, he put his foot directly onto one of the black checkers and bang, with his entire length, he sprawled on the ground as a living addition to the une nature morte creation of scattered checkers and a half-closed backgammon board. And as if mocked by fate, this black checker, too, rolled and joined its colleague’s luck: a black and a white playing piece fell face to face in Drzo’s fenced courtyard, and now neither the roller knew what was to befall, nor the owner of the courtyard. Seeing the danger of faltering once again as Saro groped the ground to get up, Professor Vagho crossed himself and tremblingly whispered: “I confess—you, I confess—this is a bad sign. Who is skilled enough to take one joist out of Drzo’s courtyard? Whoever tries will have so much mincemeat made out of them that they’ll remember their father’s wedding.”
“Brother Drzo,” stretching himself slightly, Saro somehow watched Drzo’s white-striped black suit, red tie, and raft-like salamander shoes, which had right at that moment adorned the owner with a radiance and taken him out into the street—with the deliberate intent of blinding a few undesiring eyes—may your good evening be good, your safe trip safe…, how the ground under your feet crackles.
“Yeah,” Drzo cut off and, pushing a button from a distance, opened the door of the BMW, pulled out the tie between his legs, sat down, and, closing the door disappeared behind tinted windows. When the car turned toward Maral’s house, her swaying body’s silhouette appeared once more on the balcony and she, leaning her bosom against the banister, dangled her hand and waved with an open palm.
Saro and Vagho looked at each other dumbfounded.
“Eh, dear Professor, you miscalculated. Maral hooked him from a good place, while you, taking a 180-degree turn, are on a desolate street,” Saro stung his playmate and getting down on his knees started to pick up the black and white checkers one by one, and when he reached the checkers in the courtyard, a brilliant thought crossed his mind, “I can go knock on Drzo’s door and say that my checkers accidently fell in your courtyard, give them back, it’ll lift my misfortune, and I’ll go.” “So?” Saro looked upside down at the Professor who was standing over him, still dumbstruck.
“Whatever,” Vagho echoed vaguely and, shrugging, he fastened his head onto his body more tightly, as if he were afraid that it would detach itself and fall off.
* * *
The woman standing at the threshold was holding an ashtray in one hand and, in the other, a cigarette, from which the rising smoke lavishly curled up and dropped on her Barbie-like face.
“Come in… okay?” said the Barbie very faintly, apparently expecting something big and new.
“I…, my black and white checkers…, totally by accident…”
“Come, come! Come in! Do you smoke? Do you want cold ‘Coke’ or will you have a ‘Whiskey’?”
Saro instantly stood behind the closed door and before him a Hermitage-like view opened up: a rich collection of sculptures, paintings, engraved cupboards, magnificent leather drapes, and shiny wooden tiles laid out like carpets. While Saro had lost his ability to speak and was turning his head to the left and to the right, the Barbie arranged a platter of “Whiskey,” “Coke,” and tall glasses with ice cubes on a low table and, crossing her legs, called out:
“Come here!”
Later, no matter how hard Saro tried to remember—did they first drink “Whiskey” and then, or did they first… and then wash their tongues and mouths with “Whiskey”?—he couldn’t. He constantly saw the same images: the weak, soft strokes of body parts spinning like a top on a milky-white marble table, violating the divine rules that govern magnetic fields, somehow panting, inconceivable exertions to get out of the vortex, and two foreign shadows flapping like fish without gills on the polished floors of the Hermitage.
No one remembered the black and white checkers that had accidently found their way into Drzo’s courtyard anymore, and if there was someone who remembered, it was only Vagho the Philosopher, who regretfully shook his head and walked on when his gaze turned toward the checkers that had by now been buried in the lush grass.
Every time Maral’s silhouette appeared on the balcony, Saro would prepare to visit the latest Hermitage exhibition halls, which enriched his body, his imagination, and his pockets as fast as spinning dizziness.
After enriching his pockets, Saro’s mind would turn to Maral’s silhouette, whose hand, which dangled from the balcony, no longer waved at the BMW, but in an indefinite direction. And then one day, when the Barbie, with her arm locked into Drzo’s, walked up to the BMW, Saro understood that not only had the visits to the museum ended, but also Maral’s silhouette games, and, therefore, either to console himself or to win over Maral’s heart, he leaped, with noble intentions, with one knightly jump onto her balcony, and then with an honest aim to hide the killing light that was emanating from his mistress, he sedately pulled down the curtain that had been rolled up to the ceiling. And each time the BMW took the Barbie mistress of his heart to unknown prairies, Saro would take on concealed humanitarian work.
Maral swore, pleaded that Drzo wasn’t even worth one of Saro’s little fingers, that her swaying body, her adulterous mind, and the suspended balcony were only sacrificed for Saro’s sake, but Saro remained implacable: his wandering mind was still traipsing the Barbie’s Hermitage, was still craving newer and newer unknown exhibitions that were unreachably far from Maral’s swooning classes. Maral’s heart burst with grief, when, suddenly, she realized how she could tame Saro’s unfettered mind.
She decided to become a Barbie. First, she ordered a wig that looked like Barbie’s hair, and then she had her body massaged with so many creams that she resembled Barbie’s swirling shadow, she even bought “Whiskey” and “Coke” and put the same amount of ice cubes in tall glasses, but this false display was a complete failure.
It was impossible to win over Saro’s heart: he wanted the Hermitage and he continuously rode his own jackass saying that he had already been to Jerusalem forty times, but had still not turned into a horse. If only, just once, he could feel like a horse, leave the reins in the Barbie’s delicate hands, he would no longer be sad, and even Drzo’s attractive BMW wouldn’t seem such an impossible dream, as much as that fixed idea that he was merely the Barbie’s jackass, and if only he could be a horse. “Well, man has to be lucky, eh, I was born a jackass, and I’ll die a jackass. How I can stand on an equal footing with Drzo, I don’t know, and if one day I get caught, he’ll skin me alive, ow, but, well, it’s worth it, it’s worth it…” Saro muttered to himself and turned his despairing feet to Maral’s swaying body.
Maral was loving as usual, even more so, as if she were vindictively more submissive and primped, but, well, the dream, and in this case the sacred dream of the jackass that had been to Jerusalem, had been rewarded beyond all bodily pleasures, and, therefore, Saro had left Maral’s naked body lying there idly on the bed, while he soared in the seventh heaven, when unexpectedly he heard a knock on the door. Saro’s heart skipped a beat: an unbearably ill omen sank into his soul and blurred the limpid dream. Maral got out of bed with languid indifference and, hiding her curves under her palms like a peasant, she approached the door as if bashful, pressed her eye against the peephole and with a witchy smile instantly opened the door. Terrified, she drew back and hit the wall. Drzo jumped on her like a beast and tore apart Maral’s white curves. Saro, with his eyes peeled, watched and could not connect the refined taste of the Hermitage with that beastly rapacity. But, then, who doesn’t know that money can join together the least unifiable elements? Eh, what did you lose? What are you looking for, oh, Saro? If this is a boon to the Barbie, what is it to you? It’s better this way: you go after your dream, and who knows, maybe one day you’ll turn into a horse, too… Without fully realizing in what sort of Sodom and Gomorrah his innermost dream had landed, Saro unconsciously and noiselessly put on his clothes, wanting to get out of this cursed trap unnoticed, when Drzo suddenly disrupted his animal gratification with a growl and attacked Saro in a wild rage. Poor Saro, the blows struck him as regularly and ruthlessly as a peasant woman whipping wool. After Drzo exhausted himself from working so hard and his body was covered in foam and sweat, Saro lay on the floor like a dead lump of flesh at Maral’s whitish feet. Like a woman fully satisfied with a favor, Maral whispered her compassion: “Your wish didn’t come true, poor boy…”
That same night, in the opposite garden, hirelings hit a thirty-seven-year-old man wearing a sports shirt, while his shoes were size forty-five salamander rafts, which had most of all surprised the investigator of the murder, considering that the real shoe size of the victim was thirty-nine. They said that the most mysterious phenomenon in this dark story was the appearance of a black and a white checker in the pocket of the victim’s pants after the investigator had already recorded the evidence that his pockets were empty.
And the idea that divine powers participate in all the events of our life, which Professor Vagho knew not only from ancient philosophical treatises, the old man had also been shaken in life by the many things he had seen and heard. When Saro’s funeral procession passed by Maral’s house, a black and a white checker rolled from the body’s crossed hands and fell into the open mouth of the nearby sewer.
Professor Vagho, paralyzed and trembling, whispered to himself: “Stupid jackass, you who are a donkey, what is it to you to play a horse?”
Translation by Nairi Hakhverdi
