Where All the Stories Dwell

When I was a little kid, my mother always told me that the walls heard everything we said, and they remembered it. I always hoped that someday, someone would invent something to suck out all the memory inside the walls. Because that’s where all the stories are.

On the wall in the stairwell in my grandfather’s old house, there was a huge stain. It was approximately the size of a small dolphin, the color of a pale dolphin, glossy like a waxed dolphin. But it wasn’t a dolphin, it was something else.

I passed by it every morning on my way down to the kitchen on the first floor from my room on the third floor. I stared at it every morning as I flung my book bag on my back. I stared at it as I challenged myself to climbing two unusually high steps at a time. I was obligated to make sure it was there all the time. If I didn’t watch over it, surely it would disappear; surely it would fade or even shrink. Thanks to me, it was always pale grey, sprawled across a white wall like a dolphin, except it wasn’t a dolphin. It was something else.

Perhaps it was a mistake made some fifty years ago by a clumsy painter. Perhaps he had rheumatism and couldn’t hold the paint brush quite right, or had broken his right arm during a construction accident and had to paint with his left hand and accidentally dipped the paintbrush in the wrong paint because his left hand wasn’t used to where all the paint buckets were. Maybe he was thinking about a dolphin while painting and decided to paint one on the wall. A really deformed, overweight dolphin. I couldn’t explain it. Maybe it wasn’t a mistake.

Maybe it was intentional, an artistic message in the shape of a small, deformed, waxed dolphin. Maybe it had a purpose, a meaning, a hidden intention on the artist’s part. Perhaps the artist was a native of the Bandar, the coast, and was homesick. Perhaps he had a really precious dolphin stuffed animal during childhood, a confidant. Perhaps he believed a dolphin-shaped painting on the wall would bring the inhabitants of the house happiness. It could also be that the painter wanted the inhabitants of the house to think that it was a mistaken stain on the wall and the fault of clumsy painters. Maybe by making the homebuyers think that a mistake was made in the painting of the wall, he would discourage them from buying the house and could keep the house for himself. Maybe he really liked the dolphin on the wall and had grown really attached to it. Too bad, because my grandfather bought the house anyway, some fifty years ago.

Or possibly, the stain on the wall was just that, a stain, no intentional dolphin-shaped painting or a carefully-sketched scheme to repel buyers. Maybe it was a mistake so huge that the real estate company couldn’t get rid of it, the same way we couldn’t paint over it. Ever. Maybe the real estate company decided to sell the house for a cheaper price because of the huge mistake made on the wall, and maybe my grandfather bought it because he thought he could easily paint over it. Or maybe the real estate company actually liked the stain. Maybe they decided to attach a story to it, or maybe they stared at it every morning too, like I did. Maybe they decided to raise the price of the house and my grandfather bought the house because he liked the story that the real estate company told him about it…

No. I’m pretty sure my grandfather didn’t buy the house on account of a stain on the wall. He was a physicist. He probably liked the house because he thought it was stiff and stable, sturdy and solid, and soundly structured.

No one would tell me about the stain on the wall. I concluded that the stain probably got there after my grandfather bought the house. There was probably a story that my uncles weren’t proud of talking about, because I had heard they were really mischievous. Maybe they had set fire to the carpet in the stairwell landing and burned the paint on the wall, and before my grandfather could come over and turn red in anger, not say a word because he was too wise to yell and scold, and before he could stare them into putting out the fire, a dolphin had appeared on the wall. Except it wasn’t a dolphin, it was something else. I would someday invent something to listen to all the stories inside that wall. Someday, I would know for sure.

If only that wall hadn’t been knocked down to give way to an apartment building.