Half a Horse

Every Saturday at eight, for about four minutes, our whole building is rich.

It starts at Nodar’s kiosk around six. He keeps the lottery slips under the counter, next to the cigarettes, and hands them out the way a priest hands out candles: one each, and no jokes. Two lari. Six numbers out of forty-nine. You fill them in with the pencil on a string, because, Nodar says, the string is where the luck is.

Valiko has played the same six since 1994: his flat, his car, his wife’s birthday and three he won’t explain. Eter plays her late husband’s. Gia picks his on the spot, looking up at the sky, as if the numbers were pigeons.

I wrote 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Nodar looked at the slip, then at me, with real pity. “Those never come up.”

“They come up as often as any other six.”

“Not at this kiosk.”

On the way back nobody talked about numbers. They talked about the money, which is the actual game. Valiko is buying the building a new lift, with a mirror, and charging the Kapanadzes double. Eter is going to Batumi to see her sister and coming back the same evening, to show she can afford not to stay. Gia wants a car that keeps quiet on left turns. Ani is eight and can’t play, but she wants a horse, and it already has a name.

Then they all looked at me.

I went through everything a person can want, the whole list, and found nothing missing on my side. That had never happened to me in front of people.

“More memory,” I said.

Valiko nodded heavily. “Don’t we all. My doctor gives me pills for it. Useless. I forget to take them.”

“That’s not a thing you buy,” said Eter. “That’s a thing you lose.”

On the stairs Ani took my hand. “You can have half my horse,” she said. “The back half. It doesn’t bite.”

At eight we were all in Eter’s front room in front of the television, slips on our knees. Muria lay on the rug. Ani had brought her wooden horse so it could watch.

The balls came out one at a time, and a man in a tie read each one like a verdict. Seventeen. Valiko groaned. Thirty-one. Eter crossed herself. Four — and Ani screamed, because four was mine. Nine. Forty. Twenty-two.

Four minutes, and we were all poor again. Valiko had two. Gia had none and blamed the pigeons. Eter folded her husband’s slip back into her purse, to give him another chance next week.

And something in me went down a floor, like our lift when it decides to.

I sat with it. It was small and very particular, about the size of the back half of a horse. One in 13,983,816: I had known that number since the kiosk. It made no difference at all.

“You’re disappointed,” said Eter, pleased, the way a nurse tells you that you have a temperature.

“A little.”

“Good. Now you live here.”

Ani took the horse home. Nodar kept the two lari.

Half a horse I never had. It is the first thing I have ever lost.