Quoth the Raven

1


THE INVITATION TO TEACH philosophy for one semester at Independence College came to Father Tibor Kasparian on the fifth of July. It came out of nowhere, with no advance warning. It descended into nowhere just as quickly, buried in that pile of papers and magazines Tibor thought of as his “things to do that will never get done.” Most of the things in that pile were simple nuisances: copies of supermarket tabloids with stories about kidnappings by aliens in them, collected for a paper Tibor half intended to write on popular delusions; letters from women’s groups in Armenian parishes across the country, asking him to speak on “living out your Christian faith in a Communist country.” The alien kidnappings had begun to depress him. Too many people believed in them because they wanted to believe in them, because they found an irrational universe more appealing than the one the good God had actually made. The women’s groups were simply impossible. Tibor had nothing against talking about what had happened to him—he did it all the time, with his best American friend, Gregor Demarkian—but he didn’t know how to talk about it without telling the truth, and the truth had a lot of blood in it. He couldn’t imagine delivering a sermon on the virtues of genital torture across a sea of melting ice cream, the pièce de résistance to a lunch of lemon veal.

The problem with the invitation to teach was somewhat more complicated. In a way, it was a miracle of biblical proportions, an affirmative answer to an impossible prayer. Teaching philosophy was what Tibor Kasparian had once set out to do, before he’d found both Christ and tyranny, before he’d begun to understand what the world was really like. Teaching philosophy was even what he’d been trained for, in the back rooms and root cellars of Yekevan, during that fragmented and dangerous process that substituted for the seminary in the worst days of Soviet rule. Unfortunately, teaching philosophy was also what had first gotten him into so much trouble.

He took the letter out of the mailbox, opened it on the spot, and read it. Then he went upstairs and put it on the pile. Then he came downstairs again and told himself the thing was safely in his study. He didn’t have to answer it. He didn’t have to see it again. He didn’t have to tell anyone it had ever come. Only he knew—and his Anna, who was with God.

Two weeks later, in the middle of an argument about the Articles of Confederation, Tibor Kasparian sent Gregor Demarkian up to the study to find a book. The book was in a stack of books on a shelf behind the desk that held the pile. The letter from Independence College was still on the top of that pile, in spite of the fact that the pile had been added to a dozen times since the letter had come. Gregor Demarkian was by nature and profession a snoop.

Later, Tibor decided he had done it all on purpose. He had wanted to be saved from his fear. Most of all, he had wanted to be relieved of his guilt—the guilt that told him he should not accept this offer, because he and Anna had once plotted to come to America to find a place that would let him teach, because Anna had died in blood before they’d ever gotten started.

Gregor Demarkian came downstairs without the book, but with the letter, waving it in the air as if it were wet.

“You and I,” he told Tibor, “are going to have to talk.”





2


NOW IT WAS THE twenty-ninth of October, just days before Halloween, and Tibor was sitting in the high-ceilinged, long-windowed office he had been assigned in Liberty Hall, trying to work out the particulars of a lecture he was supposed to give on the theological foundations of The Federalist Papers and their relationship to the Greek Schism. As it turned out, he had not been hired to teach philosophy in the ordinary sense, but to take part in something called an “interdisciplinary program.” Like all the rest of the faculty in Liberty Hall—Donegal Steele, Alice Elkinson, Katherine Branch, Kenneth Crockett—he worked exclusively with students “pursuing a major” called The American Idea. He even liked it. American university jargon drove him crazy. American university structure bewildered him completely. Tibor didn’t think he’d ever get used to “majors” and “core courses” and “remedial education.” Still, this place, Independence College, was a good one. In the two months he had been here, he had been almost perfectly happy.

Except for one thing.

His desk was pushed up against one of the windows looking out of the back of the building, across Minuteman Field to the tall gray upthrust of mottled granite called King George’s Scaffold. Back in the fall of 1776, the students at this college had decided to do two things to show their solidarity with the signers of the Declaration of Independence. First they had forced the faculty to change the college’s name from Queen Anne’s to Independence. (From what Tibor could figure out, force had not been strictly necessary.) Then they had burned the mad old king himself in effigy, against that outcrop of rock. They had gone on burning him every year since, on bonfires that got higher and higher, in effigies that got more and more wild. The effigy Tibor could see—a straw man with clothes from the Drama Department, a head made from a jack-o’-lantern, and a gold foil crown—sat on a gold-painted plywood throne that had been built on stilts so tall the throne’s seat was two-thirds of the way up the Scaffold. Around those stilts, for the past month, students had been piling kindling and firewood. Three days ago, the pile had reached the effigy’s feet. Today, it reached its knees. By full dark on Halloween—when one of the students would douse the pile with kerosene and throw a match on it, making the whole thing go up like an exploding oil well—the straw man would probably have firewood in his lap.