A Stillness in Bethlehem(27)

They had come to a stop at this corner because Tibor wanted to look at the set-up for the Nativity play. There was a lot to look at, too. A middle-sized octagonal gazebo had been artfully camouflaged with driftwood and reeds to look like a stable. The manger inside it was rough and gray and seemed to be a thousand years old. The ground around it was bare of snow, in spite of the fact that the rest of the town was buried under at least six inches of white. Gregor decided that that was because this ground had to be cleaned up regularly when the animals did what animals will do no matter how strenuously you try to talk them out of it. Gregor could see some of those animals on the other side of the park, penned up in a circle behind a makeshift picket fence. Three sheep, a cow and a camel—according to the brochure they had gotten from the travel agency, there were supposed to be three camels, but Gregor didn’t want to ask where the other two were. This camel was munching on something, as were the cow and all three of the sheep. Since the ground was barren, Gregor assumed someone had put food in there with the beasts to keep them quiet. Maybe that was what had happened to the camels. Maybe they had decided the food wasn’t good enough and gone off in search of more interesting stuff. There were two small stands of tall evergreen bushes in the park, one at Gregor’s end and one at the other side, but camels might not have wanted them. Camels were Middle Eastern beasts.

The rope fence came up to the middle of Gregor’s thighs. It came close to both Tibor’s and Bennis’s waists, and they were both leaning forward over it, balancing on the balls of their feet but looking as if they were letting the rope support them. Their posture made Gregor uncomfortable, and so did the wind. In spite of the incessant whine of complaints he had heard since they first drove across the state line this morning, the weather in Bethlehem did not seem to him “warm.” It felt downright cold and getting colder. The wind was frigid. The sidewalk under his feet felt frozen solid. The thin leather soles of his shoes provided so little protection, his toes felt iced into a block. Gregor leaned forward and tapped Bennis on the shoulder.

“Let’s go and eat something,” he told her. “At least let’s go somewhere inside. I’m getting frostbite.”

“You’re wearing silly shoes,” Bennis said. “Just a minute, Gregor. They’re having some kind of animal rehearsal or something, can’t you see? Tibor is interested in what they’re going to do, and so am I.”

Now that Bennis had pointed it out, Gregor could indeed see. The other two camels hadn’t absconded. They had been in another part of the small park in the charge of a short, muscular man in a bright red ski parka. He was leading them around in a wide circle, pulling them along on leashes that ended in three feet of wooden stick that he held onto. The camels did not look pleased.

Gregor tapped Bennis on the shoulder again. “It’s not an animal rehearsal,” he said. “The man’s just making sure the camels get some exercise. You see those sticks? That’s so they can’t get close enough to bite him. Camels bite.”

“I know camels bite,” Bennis said.

“I have read about it in my pamphlet,” Tibor put in, waving the long booklet in the air. “This year they have fourteen different kinds of animals for the Nativity play and later for the living crêche. Camels. Cows. Sheep. Horses. Donkeys. Pigs. A black bear. A family of deer. A moose.”

“A moose?”

“They got it from a zoo in Oregon, Krekor. They also have three lion cubs and a tiger cub and a panther cub that they got from a firm that supplies animals for television commercials. It is going to be most symbolic.”

“It is going to be an unholy mess,” Gregor said. “I wonder how they get them all here. This isn’t a major intersection. Do you figure they block off Main Street?”

“If you read your brochure you’d know,” Bennis said. “Main Street is closed to all but pedestrian traffic from six o’clock every night until two o’clock the next morning. So are the two blocks closest to Main Street on something called Carrow. That’s so people can mill around and not get run over, and there isn’t any traffic noise to make it hard to hear the play.”

Gregor shook his head. “That doesn’t answer my question. That just means Main Street is going to be full of people instead of cars. How are they going to get a moose and a black bear and a family of deer through all that?”

“Maybe they get them here before, Krekor,” Tibor said. “Like these sheep and this cow they have here now.”