Not a Creature Was Stirring(9)

The line reached his pew. If he was going to receive, he would have to go now. Lida slipped out of the pew in front of him and turned, nodding her head vigorously. Gregor hesitated and then shook a negative.

The last Armenian liturgy he had attended had been Elizabeth’s funeral. It had been the last he’d intended to attend. He’d only come here today out of some kind of whim, the way he’d come back to Cavanaugh Street.

The people who had received Communion   were leaving by the center aisle. They were moving quickly, in a hurry to get to the church steps and the permissible zone of conversation. One or two of them looked him over as they passed. Many more looked back at him when they thought they were safely beyond his field of vision. His scalp was beginning to tingle. God only knew what kind of stories had been floating around this neighborhood since he’d come back.

He spied a gap in the stream of people and felt a little better. At least he was going to be able to get out. He wedged himself between a tiny grandmother in archaic black and a boy in Ralph Lauren Polo and headed for the vestibule.

Going toward the door, he began to wonder what would happen if he did something “really radical,” as his favorite niece would say—if he started singing Bob Dylan songs in his deep baritone voice, or talking in Armenian.

Madness.





2


Actually, Gregor thought a little later, climbing the stairs to the second floor and Father Tibor’s office, what was really madness was his state of mind. For the two years of Elizabeth’s last crisis and the two more that followed her death, he had had absolutely no interest in the work that had taken up most of his life. That had begun to change. Maybe it was because he was settled, with a real apartment and a real address. Maybe it was just a matter of time, and he was getting bored. Whatever the reason, he was feeling distinctly itchy—and in his itchiness, he was beginning to do some very strange things.

Now he did something that wasn’t strange at all. He poked his head through the door of the big room where he had once attended Sunday school. It had been divided up by slick new baseboard partitions, each hung with a green chalkboard and decorated with construction paper cutouts of the dove of peace. Gregor backed into the hall again. The older he got, the more depressed the world made him. The big things didn’t bother him so much. Crime and drugs, war and brutality—he’d read enough history to know all that had happened before and would probably happen again to whatever civilization replaced this one. It was the little things that made him crazy. When he’d been at Sunday school here, the room had been decorated with icons and the words on the blackboard had been in Armenian. What was in there now could just as easily have been part of a Methodist Church in Pederucah, Tennessee.

Gregor heard a sound on the stairs and looked into the well. The little priest was there, hurrying, the tattered hem of his day robe catching on the stair runner every few feet. Gregor made a mental note. He’d known from the sound of the voice on the phone that Father Tibor was an immigrant. The day robes told him Father Tibor was an immigrant from a Communist country. It was only in places where the Church was suppressed that the clergy still felt the need for religious dress.

Gregor leaned over the railing. “Father Tibor?” he called down.

“Yes, yes,” Father Tibor said, still hurrying. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m very sorry. I was coming right up, but Mrs. Krekorian was there at the bottom of the stairs—”

“I know Hannah Krekorian,” Gregor said.

Father Tibor looked up quickly and smiled. “Everybody knows Mrs. Krekorian,” he said. Then he raced the rest of the way up and emerged, puffing and red faced, on the landing. “There. I should have told you to go into the office and sit down. The door is open. It sticks a little.”

“That’s all right,” Gregor said. It was, too. He was beginning to feel as if he spent his entire life sitting down. “I was looking at all the renovations. You’ve done a lot of work around here.”

“Work,” Father Tibor said, as if there was something particularly nasty about that word. He brushed past Gregor and walked to the far end of the hall, to an old-fashioned door that had been newly painted black. Then he twisted the knob and pushed, hard.

“Mr. Kashinian had the office remodeled,” he said. “It was a very fine remodeling. It’s my own fault I can never get this door open.”

“Howard Kashinian?” Gregor said.

“That’s right.” Father Tibor nodded. The nod was vigorous, almost frantic—but everything Father Tibor did was almost frantic. “I keep forgetting. You grew up here. You would know these people.”