Festival of Deaths(42)

Gregor heard a click in his ear. Ira had hung up. He hung up himself and went back to his coffee. Why was it, he wondered, that everything in his life that started out simple ended up complicated?

Through the kitchen doorway, he could see the menorah Donna had left him, perched in the window, plugged in and glowing. Sometimes he got so tired of symbolic gestures, he could scream.





2


TIBOR CAME TO PICK him up for the walk to Sofie Oumoudian’s apartment at quarter to eleven, and by then Gregor had managed to give himself what was nearly a nervous breakdown about his tie. He had also started to resent the hell out of Tibor and his cautions. If Tibor hadn’t insisted, over and over again, on just how pious, devout, old-fashioned, European, and traditionally Armenian these two women were, Gregor would never have gotten so nervous. He had also begun to wonder just how accurate Tibor’s description really was. After all, Sofie Oumoudian had managed to attract Joey Ohanian, and Joey was hardly a pious, traditionally Armenian young man. In fact, he was something of a rip. Gregor thought Joey would put up with a certain amount of shyness and sexual standoffishness for the sake of romanticism, but there would be a limit. The limit would probably have something to do with the backseat of Joey’s brand-new, shiny black Chevrolet sports car, his parents’ gift to him on his sixteenth birthday, when they still thought he would finish out at Deerfield without giving them any problems.

Tibor arrived in impeccably correct dress, his cassock cleaned and pressed. That was one of the virtues of a religious uniform. It was appropriate everywhere. Tibor looked Gregor up and down once or twice and apparently didn’t find anything wrong with him. Either that, or he decided it wasn’t worth saying anything.

“I’ve brought pastries,” he said, holding up a white box that had obviously come from Ohanian’s. “It is customary to bring something. Do you know what you are going to say?”

“In a way,” Gregor said.

“The aunt’s name is Helena,” Tibor told him. “She is in the church often and long. She lights candles and leaves offerings. I think there is family back in Armenia.”

“You think?”

“She doesn’t talk to me much.”

One of the difficulties yet to be untangled in the wake of the fall of the Soviet union   was the position of the churches and their clergy. The Russian Orthodox Church had been thoroughly infiltrated by the Communist government, and it was generally assumed that the hierarchies of the smaller eastern churches had been infiltrated as well. In occupied Armenia there had actually been two churches, the official one and the one operating underground. Tibor had been part of the church operating underground. Of course, Helena Oumoudian would assume that any priest operating out in the open the way Tibor was now would be suspect. She hadn’t been in the United States very long.

To get to the Oumoudians’ apartment, Gregor and Tibor had to leave Cavanaugh Street and walk two blocks north, into territory into which Gregor had never before ventured. Tibor, whose motto was “if Christian behaved like Christians, we wouldn’t need a welfare state,” had a wider acquaintance with the blocks that surrounded their Armenian-American enclave. When the first immigrants had come in the wake of Armenian independence, Tibor and Lida and all the others had done their best to find places on Cavanaugh Street itself, just as they had founded the Holy Trinity Armenian Christian School to teach children who knew no English and had to learn in a hurry. After a while, though, there got to be too many immigrants. Cavanaugh Street was a small place. That was when Lida and Hannah and Sheila and Bennis had started buying up real estate on the fringes, hoping to export what Cavanaugh Street was to any other part of Philadelphia they touched.

That they hadn’t quite succeeded was obvious as soon as Gregor and Tibor got more than half a block north. There were some signs of Cavanaugh Street on these blocks—Donna Moradanyan had been out, scattering bright foil paper and Christmas ribbons and glowing menorahs in her wake—but the brownstones looked mean and dispirited and the streets were full of litter. Children sat on stoops in the cold, dressed in thin sweaters, without coats, their feet shoved into unraveling sneakers and innocent of socks.

The Oumoudians’ apartment was in a looming building with grime on most of the windows that faced front and a coating of something like sand on the steps that led to the tall front door. Once upon a time, this brownstone had been a single-family house. Now it was cut up into apartments for people who had no time or energy or money to maintain it. Gregor and Tibor went into the vestibule and rang the buzzer under “Oumoudian.” The vestibule made Gregor even more depressed than the street had. There was a bright silver bow on the Oumoudians’ mailbox—Donna Moradanyan again?—but no other decoration of any kind. The floor was dirty and the walls were cracked.