Conspiracy Theory(2)

Don’t dramatize, he told himself. Then he went into his vestibule and got his long good coat out of the closet. There was a time and a place for wearing hair shirts, and Philadelphia on a cold winter night was neither. He started to button the coat from the bottom and then stopped. He put his hand in under the coat and felt around for the inside pocket of his jacket, where the letter was, wadded up so many times that it felt like a stone. He ought to leave it here, where it would be safe. If he got mugged while he was out in the city, the muggers might take it, thinking it was cash. When they found out it wasn’t, they might rip it up. He left it where it was and buttoned his coat the rest of the way to his chin. He got his gloves out of his coat pockets and put them on. He got the Stewart plaid muffler he had been given for Christmas last year and wound it around his neck. The muffler was cashmere. The gloves were leather and lined with cashmere. He wasn’t a rich man, or even close, but he had rich things. Maybe that was part of what was wrong too—but that was worse than stupid, because he was as nearly oblivious to what he ate and what he wore as it was possible to be without going naked and starving. He was just mixed up, tonight, that was all; mixed up and frightened to the bone, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He checked his pockets for change for the bus and then stepped out his door into the courtyard behind the church. He pulled the door shut and looked at the brass knocker, shined so flawlessly it glowed gold in the light from the streetlamp. When he and Anna were first married and he had just been ordained, he had celebrated a liturgy in a cramped little apartment on a side street in Toldevan, a godforsaken mining town in the middle of nowhere, full of people whose names no one else on earth would ever have been able to recognize. It had been a cold night then too, and November, but he hadn’t had a coat that would protect him from much of anything. The apartment had heat only between midnight and six in the morning. It was eight in the evening. The only warmth came from a paper-fueled fire the grandmother of the family had lit in a large can that had once held lard. You had to be careful with the cans. Some of them melted more quickly than you’d expect. Fires broke out that way all the time, and whole apartment blocks went down in flames. At this liturgy there was himself, Anna, the family, and three other families from the same building, carefully chosen, part of the elect. Still, that had made nearly forty people, and the room they were in was very small. There were no lights in the room. Electricity was expensive, and he was expected to know the liturgy by heart. It was dangerous to carry liturgical books, or books of any kind that had not been published by government publishing houses. His hands were cold. His fingers were stiff with the beginning of premature arthritis, brought on by too many nights consorting with the cold. He had given communion   to everyone in the room and felt relieved. He had promised to return to perform a wedding on the third of June. The room smelled of urine, and worse. The only facility was down the hall and not working very well. The people in the apartments used tins, like the one with the fire in it, so that they wouldn’t have to go down the hall in the middle of the night.

“Listen,” the grandmother had said to him, in a sibilant whisper, snaking her thin hand around his wrist as he started to pack up. “Listen. God made evil, just the way He made the good. Never forget that.”

“God didn’t make evil,” he said, a little too loudly. Anna looked up from the other side of the room, alarmed. “God could not make evil. God is all-good.”

“God made evil,” the grandmother said again, and then she smiled, the worst smile he had ever seen, worse even than the smiles of the secret police ten years later when they murdered Anna. The old woman had had a stroke. One of her eyes was half closed and out of control. The “good” one was rheumy and full of water. Her clothes were crusted over with dirt. She stank. Tibor thought she was decomposing in front of his eyes, except that her grip was so strong. He couldn’t get his wrist away from her.

“God made evil,” she said again—and then, suddenly, she let go, and he staggered backward, into something soft, someone not expecting him.

“God made evil,” he said now, coming back to the present, staring still at that brass door knocker. It had his name engraved on it, in script. He unbuttoned his coat again and checked the inside pocket of his jacket again. The letter was still there. That was the worst smile he had ever seen in his life, but that wasn’t the only time he had seen it. He had seen it twice more, and in only the last few weeks. He had seen it just a few hours ago, today.