Hardscrabble Road (12 page)

Tibor came to the door and opened up, and right there, running around his legs, there was indeed a dog. It was a very small
dog—Gregor didn’t know anything about dogs, but he knew what a puppy was when he saw
one—and it was completely, happily berserk, bouncing around on the vestibule carpet as if it had pogo sticks for legs, chasing
first up Tibor’s legs and then up Gregor’s, wagging its tail so hard Gregor thought the thing was going to fly off. He came
all the way into the apartment and closed the door behind him. The cold was getting in. The dog took off for the living room
on a run, barked happily a little longer, and then came running back.

“When did you get a dog? Gregor asked. “You didn’t say anything about a dog.”

“It’s Grace who got the dog, Krekor,” Tibor said. “She’s a chocolate Labrador retriever named Godiva. Grace got the dog and
then she had to go play in New York, so I’m keeping the dog for the week. She’s a very nice dog.”

“A chocolate Lab named Godiva.” “Yes, well, Krekor, what can I say? I didn’t name the dog. She really is a very nice dog,
very intelligent and very affectionate. And small, so she isn’t hard to keep. I rigged up a kind of Kitty Litter box in the
back air lock—”

“Kitty Litter for a dog?”

“Sand, Krekor, sand. You can’t ask a small animal like this to go out in the cold to do its business. I keep it in the air
lock and it doesn’t bother me. Come into the living room. If you sit on the couch, she’ll sit on your lap.”

Gregor decided to sit on the chair, because although Godiva really was a very nice dog, he didn’t want dog hair all over his
trousers. He even had an excuse for that, since Chickie was coming. He looked at the books on Tibor’s coffee table, which
as usual was so covered that nobody could put a cup of coffee on it without threatening either Aristotle or Jackie Collins.
Today there were a few new arrivals: a novel called
Baudolino
by Umberto Eco; another novel called
Blindness
by José Saramago;
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
. Tibor must be having a fiction week.

“The thing is,” Tibor said, coming back to the living room from the kitchen, “I can’t take the dog into the Ararat. The Melajians
don’t mind, but apparently the city of Philadelphia does, and you can’t take dogs into restaurants unless they’re Seeing Eye
dogs. I’d try to pass Godiva off as a Seeing Eye dog, but she’s too small and she’s, uh—”

“—A little too active?”

“Something like that, yes, Krekor. It’s really too bad, because Linda Melajian is very fond of her. But I think she would
end up running all over the place and overturning tables and things if she got out of hand.”

“You can leave her here, can’t you? She can stay in the apartment for an hour.”

“She can stay, yes, Krekor, but she’s a Labrador retriever. She’s a very affectionate dog. She needs company. That’s why Grace
didn’t leave her in her apartment and have me just come by and walk her and feed her a few times
a day. They get depressed if they don’t have company, this kind of dog. So she’s staying here with me, and we sit together
to watch television, and then at night she comes in and sleeps on the bed.”

“Don’t Labs get to be really big dogs? I mean, how is Grace going to feel about that sleeping on the bed stuff when the dog
is fully grown and weighs a hundred pounds?”

“By then she will have gone to obedience school, Krekor. It will be all right. Give me a minute. I’ve forgotten where I put
my wallet.”

“Look in the medicine cabinet,” Gregor said. “That’s where you usually leave it.”

“You’re perhaps not as respectful as you could be, Krekor, where a priest is concerned.”

Gregor liked to think he was unfailingly polite to everyone, which might or might not be true.

T
here had been a
small problem with the dog, who had wanted to come with them until she dashed into the courtyard and realized how cold it
was. Then she’d dashed back inside and begun crying pitifully to get them to come back in with her. Gregor thought she probably
thought they were insane to be going out in this weather, and she was probably right. Tibor had compensated by spending a
few minutes kneeling on the ground at the door and speaking to her in a cooing voice Gregor thought was usually reserved for
babies in distress. He couldn’t believe Tibor hadn’t frozen his kneecaps to the slate tiles in the process. Then they had
gone out through the courtyard and around the side of the church to Cavanaugh Street itself, and Tibor had had to stop and
look inside.

“They really did a very wonderful job,” Tibor said. “And we don’t have the iconostasis anymore, which was only there because
we took this over from a Greek Orthodox congregation, and isn’t really the Armenian way. And we have held off Hannah Krekorian
and Sheila Kashinian, and there is no stained glass in the windows with pictures of St. George slaying the dragon on them.
Sheila has no sense of place or time, do you understand that? And Hannah just goes along with her. I know that it’s too much
to ask that American schools should teach the history of the Armenian Church, but the Armenian Church should teach it. What
did you all learn in religion lessons when you were growing up?”

“Not much,” Gregor said. “The priest taught them himself and he only spoke Armenian, and most of us barely did. Also, he smelled,
and he was a nasty man.”

“I think Sheila Kashinian secretly wants to be a Roman Catholic. I don’t mean as a matter of what they believe. I don’t think
she knows what they believe. I don’t think she knows what we believe, or why there’s a difference. I think she wants to be
Roman Catholic so she can sit in a Gothic church with stained glass windows and imagine herself becoming a nun.”

“Only if there’s an order that gets its habits through Nieman Marcus,” Gregor said.

“We need to be nicer, Krekor. Howard gave us ten thousand dollars for the new church.”

“Bennis gave more, and she doesn’t even believe in God.”

“I know, Krekor, but Bennis has more. Howard gave the ten thousand dollars and between that and the money Bennis gave, and
all the smaller things, we have a new church that looks like it belongs to the Middle Ages, when people really gave money
to churches. Of course, we have the kneelers, which is not traditional, but I think it was the right decision. People aren’t
what they were. You can’t get them to kneel on the floor anymore. Even the pews are an innovation, really. In the early days,
people didn’t sit in church. They either stood or kneeled and the floors they kneeled on were made of stone.”

“I’m surprised anybody ever came to liturgy.”

“If they didn’t, they were fined. Yes, I know, Krekor, don’t say it. Things have changed and they’ve changed for the better.
I wish the elections were all over. Since I came to this country, since I first received citizenship, I’ve been the most conscientious
voter on the entire continent. But I’m tired of them already, this year.”

“The conventions haven’t even happened yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. It will all be anger and craziness. When I first came to America, people weren’t angry like this all the
time, Krekor. People were passionate about politics and, yes, there were some, idiots in the New Left, what they were thinking
I don’t know, but most people were not angry like this. It is not one side or the other now. It is both of them. And it doesn’t
matter what the issue is. If you don’t like the tax cuts, you are a traitor who wants to sell out the country to Islamic fundamentalists.
If you don’t like abortion, you are a fascist murderer who wants to enslave women as breeding machines with no right to a
life of their own. It’s not that there isn’t any center anymore. It’s that there isn’t any sense. First the Republicans accuse
President Clinton of paying for a hit man to murder his friend. Then the Democrats accuse the Republicans of allowing the
9/11 attacks to happen on purpose, if not causing them themselves. It doesn’t matter who gets elected in November, it will
be the same thing all over again, and do you know why? It’s because it’s not about politics. It’s not about are we going to
have a welfare state or a laissez-faire one. It’s not about should there be public schools or private schools that get vouchers.
It’s not about politics. It’s about religion.”

“It is? Are the Democrats pushing religion?”

“Tcha,” Tibor said. “You’re too limited in your scholarship. There is real religion, which is about our relationship to God,
which is important. But there is another kind of religion, and that is the religion that is about identity. It is about banding
together in a group and defending ourselves against what we fear, when what we fear is each other. It is about not wanting
to live in a world where we are in a minority, because it is uncomfortable to be a minority. That kind of religion talks about
God sometimes, but it doesn’t have to. It can call itself Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Communist or Libertarian or Green.
I like real religion, Krekor. It’s been of enormous importance and value in my life. This other stuff, I look at it and I
fear for the survival of civilization.”

“That’s quite a lecture for five minutes to seven on a Monday morning.”

“Don’t be flippant, Krekor, it matters. I’m more American than most Americans. From the day of my naturalization, I’ve kept
a flag in my house; now I keep it in my kitchen. I have little lapel pins with the flag on them. I have a red, white, and
blue baseball cap. I embarrass the people who were born here with my enthusiasm. I think this is the greatest experiment in
the history of the world, the story of the Tower of Babel falsified. But lately I am not so sure it is going to survive. Not
in any form in which I recognize it.”

“I think it will survive,” Gregor said. “I think it’s just one of those times, like during the Civil War—”

“—This you think is a comforting analogy, Krekor?”

“I didn’t mean I think we’re going to have a civil war. I mean it’s one of those times that we go through where we reinvent
ourselves. The Civil War was the worst of it, but there have been other times. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Depression,
for instance.”

“Tcha. I like Roosevelt. I like both Roosevelts, though the first one was perhaps a little overenergetic.”

“I’m just saying that we get angry and we get upset and some of us even get nuts, but we don’t fall apart. We didn’t even
fall apart when we fell apart, so to speak. And now I’m talking like a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, instead of the son
of two immigrants from Armenia. Would you go back to Armenia, if you could? It’s free of the Soviet Union now.”

“No, Krekor, I would not go back, not even with the craziness here. And it’s more than just a matter of central heating, although
that’s certainly a factor. It’s odd to think, isn’t it, that people can be born out of place and out of time? You’d think
that the force of culture alone, of upbringing, would suit
you more for the place you were raised than some other place, but it doesn’t always work like that. It didn’t work like that
for me.”

They had arrived at the Ararat, and Linda Melajian was just unlocking the plate glass front door. “Come on in,” she said.
“I know it’s five minutes early, but I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be and you can’t stay outside in that cold. I keep
thinking about that phrase everybody uses. When Hell freezes over. I think it did.”

“That would be interesting in a story,” Tibor said. “A science fiction story, a kind of disaster movie. What happens to the
world when Hell freezes over.”

Gregor gave a little shove to the back of Tibor’s coat and propelled him inside to the warm. Along with having apocalyptic
thoughts about politics, Tibor seemed to be having a problem getting through doors this morning. Gregor went to the window
booth with its long low cushions and slipped inside.

“I’ll get you coffee in a minute,” Linda said. “I’ve got to put out a few more sugar racks before I can say I’m ready.”

Through the big windows that made up the outside wall of the booth, Gregor could see people beginning to appear on the street,
wrapped up in coats with the collars pulled high and their faces out of sight under scarves. Most of them had had the sense
to wear hats and gloves. All of them were heading for the Ararat, although a few of them stopped to buy the papers at Ohanian’s
first. Gregor tried to count up how many mornings he had spent having breakfast in this same booth in the Ararat, but it wasn’t
the kind of calculation he was good at. It suddenly occurred to him what was making him so nervous at home: the building was
deserted. Grace was away in New York giving concerts with the group she played harpsichord for. Bennis was away on her book
tour. Old George Tekemanian was out on the Main Line staying with Martin and Angela, who thought he’d do better if they could
be sure he wasn’t going out in this cold at his age, which he would be if he stayed here, because he’d come to breakfast.
The building was deserted, and he was surrounded by silence.

“Krekor?” Tibor said. “Are you all right? Linda brought the coffee and you didn’t even say thank you.”

“I’m fine,” Gregor said. Linda had certainly brought the coffee. It was sitting right there in front of him. “I was just thinking.
I got a phone call this morning.”

“From Bennis?”

“No, not from Bennis. And don’t nag. She doesn’t call much. And I have no idea if that’s normal or not. This is the first
time she’s been away for any significant amount of time since, ah, you know.”

“Yes, Krekor, I know. What was the phone call?”

Gregor took an enormous sip of coffee and looked out the window one more time, just as Lida Arkmanian came out of the front
door of her town house to meet Sheila and Hannah on the street. Lida and Sheila had fur coats. Hannah had a cloth coat in
red so bright it almost seemed to be pulsing like the bubble on top of a police car. A few doors closer, the Very Old Ladies
came out of their building in a tight little knot. They were older than Old George, but they weren’t about to miss their morning
at Neighborhood Gossip Central.