He went out to the foyer, got his coat, and went downstairs. He knocked on old George’s apartment just in case, but he wasn’t expecting to have much luck. It was nearly seven-thirty. Old George and everybody else would be at the Ararat already. He went out into the street and looked up and down. Howard Kashinian’s youngest daughter, having been expelled from her fourth college in three years, was standing with a boy next to the Ararat’s front windows. If she didn’t watch it, the neighborhood would have her married, pregnant, and well on her way to grandmotherhood before lunch.
The first order of business was to look at Holy Trinity Church, in daylight, the way it was now. He went down the street, across the intersection, to the middle of the next block. From here, with the width of the street and the far sidewalk between him and it, it looked strangely hopeful. In spite of the pictures he had seen of it in the papers, and once on the news, he had somehow expected to find it completely a pile of rubble. He crossed the street and went up the stone steps to what had once been the door. The door was gone, and so was most of the vestibule beyond it, although he could tell where it had been from the variations in the floor. He stepped through into the sacristy. This close to the street, there was no roof. Farther down, there was, but he thought it might be dangerous. Roofs were not meant to hang in free suspension over floors. He sat down in the last pew at the back in the set just next to the center aisle. The pews were beautifully carved wood, given by Howard and Sheila Kashinian when the church had been renovated in 1985. They were covered with dust and debris and they had been rained on more than once. They were not going to survive. He got up and went down the center aisle toward the altar. It was still standing, although the wall of icons that had once stood in front of it mostly was not. That didn’t bother him so much. That was one of the things that should have been changed decades ago, because it was in the Greek churches that the altar was shielded by an iconostasis. In Armenian ones, there was supposed to be a curtain. Tibor suspected that the priests who had come before him had felt as he did. The iconostasis was a beautiful thing. They hadn’t wanted to destroy it.
When we rebuild the church, we’ll rebuild it to Armenian specifications, he told himself. He couldn’t reach the altar. There was just too much in the way. He wondered what had happened to the icons. It was too much to hope for that somebody had taken them down and preserved them. Even if they weren’t proper to shield the altar in an Armenian church, they could be given away, to a Greek church or a museum. They could be reframed to hang in the reception area of the new church when it was built.
He went back down the center aisle to where the vestibule had been. Nothing he was doing felt entirely real. He might have been an actor, so caught up in his role he’d ceased to notice the audience just beyond the lights. He went down the front steps to the sidewalk. Then he went around to the side. He didn’t have to go very far into the narrow side alley to get the eerie feeling that he’d been transported back in time. Nothing here looked changed, or damaged, or in danger of falling over at the first rude jolt. He had to remind himself to be careful. The blast had done “structural damage” to the entire building, and the wall that lined this alleyway and his own small apartment at the back were part of the building. Still, when he got into the courtyard and looked around, everything looked exactly as it had. The little carriage light next to his front door was still burning, just the way he’d left it when he’d gone to Adelphos House on that night. He got his keys out of his pants pocket and went up to the front door. He unlocked and stuck his head inside. Everything was normal here too, and there was another light burning. That was the table lamp next to the big couch in his living room. He left that one lit day and night because he didn’t like to be entirely in the dark.
He propped the door open, just in case the building started to collapse and he had to run for it. He went in through the little foyer and the living room to the kitchen. The chief change was in the books, which were mostly gone. Usually, this apartment had books stacked everywhere, floor to ceiling against all the walls, on all the furniture, even in the bathroom. He wondered where Bennis and Donna and the others had put the boxes they’d packed the books away in. He left the kitchen and went down the little hall on the left to his bedroom. The hallway was twice as wide without books stacked against the walls on either side. It was easier to navigate, but he didn’t like the effect.
He was in the bedroom, making a small pile of pictures and letters, when Bennis came in. He knew it was Bennis because he could hear her muttering under her breath as she walked. He sat back on his heels and waited. Next to him on the floor, with nothing stacked on top of it, because he would never stack anything on top of it, was the largest and clearest photograph he had left of his wife.