“Well,” Yoramin started to say but an alarm clock suddenly rang loud and long inside another room.

“I am sorry, but it is my bedtime,” Father Don Rickles explained. “We will talk more in the morning. I can tell we have much to discuss and many things to share.”

Yoramin nodded vigorously. “Good night, then, Mr. Jones, until tomorrow.”

The priest left, and Yoramin paced the room, confused that the priest hadn’t offered him any food and that here it was, only eight o’clock, and all the lights were turned off and the priest was already snoring in the next room. Yoramin got under the covers of his bed and felt himself becoming droopy-eyed. He laughed to himself. I almost believed some of the things I was saying before, he thought to himself. In any case, it’s working…. Wait, what’s working! he thought suddenly and sat up, terrified, not knowing who he was. At last he remembered that he was a spy and settled down to rest. Before he slept, though, he snapped his fingers and cursed to himself in a low voice. “Forgot to ask him about God. Must remember to in the morning.”

***

Yoramin slept until noon the next day, more weary of traveling than he had let himself believe. When he finally roused himself, he realized that the priest wasn’t anywhere inside, so he walked around the building. As he went along the garden he heard someone singing a God-awful rendition of “But Not for Me.” He followed the voice to the other side of the building and spotted Father Don Rickles near some hedges with a disheveled man with a hangdog look and awful posture booming out the end of the song, holding the final “me” for more than twenty excruciating seconds. The priest, spotting Yoramin at last, smiled and waved Yoramin over.

“Did you have a nice sleep?” asked the priest. “This is Frank. Frank, this is Sam.”

Frank belched, barely acknowledging Yoramin, and started to wander away before turning. “I’ll fix your gutters today, Father.”

“Thank you, son.”

Yoramin glared after Frank as he slouched away. “What a drunk. He’s not going to fix any gutters.”

“He is one of God’s children. I think I can help him. He fixed a crack in my sidewalk a year ago and has been staying here ever since. We’re both Mets fans, you see—”

“The Mets are very important,” said Yoramin with conviction.

“Er—yes, yes, of course they’re important,” the priest conceded. “But the scriptures above all, you know.” He trailed off.

“It seems as though you have your doubts,” observed Yoramin as they began to walk.

“What do you mean? I have no doubts. Doubts about what?”

“It’s just that it seemed to me just now that you were trying to convince yourself that the scriptures were more important than the Mets—or to baseball in general, let us say.”

“That’s absurd, Sam,” scoffed the priest, picking frantically at freckle on his hand.

“Well, let us say that the Mets were in the World Series—which is laughable with the state their pitching is in at the moment—but let us say this is true... are you going to say that someone coming to your church is going to think more about the scriptures than he will about the pitching matchups?”

“He can think about both,” the priest asserted wisely.

“Yes, but what I’m saying is that people don’t really care about God the way they used to. Well, I don’t mean ʻcare about.’ I’m sure people don’t worry about God catching a cold, for instance.”

“They should.”

“Yes, but I mean that people aren’t as afraid of God as they used to be.”

Father Don Rickles stopped walking suddenly and clenched his fist. “That is certainly not so! They’d better be afraid, or God will come down on them with all the fury He can muster and—” The priest bit down on his lower lip, clenching both fists now and falling to his knees. Frank, walking with a ladder near the side of the church, looked over and put the ladder down.

“Or else He’ll get them; He’ll get them for sure!” the priest spat out, pounding the walkway with his bare fists. Frank began to walk over to them but the priest looked up suddenly and waved Frank away. “I’m all right, Frank,” he said, and Frank stepped uncertainly back to his ladder.

Yoramin was completely taken aback and gently took the priest by the elbow, helping him up. He could not believe that he’d seen such fury in this gentle man’s face and decided not to provoke him any further. “I would just like to hear more of what you have to say about God,” Yoramin whispered in a very gentle voice. Frank put the ladder down and started walking over again, but this time Yoramin waved him away violently with two hands and Frank went back to the ladder.

***

The two men sat in the kitchen over tea. The priest seemed to have calmed himself. “Never mind about that outburst before,” he said. “I would really rather hear you tell me about your life. What do you believe is important in this life?”

“I don’t believe anything is important,” Yoramin replied. “I have gone through twenty-five years of life, not very long to most people, but to me it is enough to realize that nothing has meaning. Love is an empty word. To love a woman is impossible. They are terrible. Men are terrible. We are all terrible, filled with such ugliness and nameless fears. Yes, love is impossible.”

“What about love between brothers?” the priest asked.

“Big deal, brothers!” Yoramin’s emotions now began to get the best of him. He’d forgotten that he was a spy on a mission and began to spill out all that was in his heart. “It all means nothing! We will all die whether we love or don’t love, and loving causes pain, even if we love but mere brothers. Life is meaningless, I tell you!”

“Why is it meaningless? Why is love impossible? Is it that woman again? This Katerina woman.”

“Don’t even say her name!”

“There’re plenty of fish in—”

“I don’t want to hear that fish talk! How do you know anything at all, priest? Have you ever loved a woman only to have her change her mind like the wind changes.”

“Well, no, but—”

“I have. It was nothing but a joke to her. Taking advantage of my sensitivity, she did. Playing games with me, like I was a worm.” Yoramin buried his head in his hands and began to cry loudly. Father Don Rickles took him gently by the elbow and led him to his room where Yoramin collapsed, weeping on his bed. Frank had put the ladder down and was walking toward the building, and the priest waved him back. “It’s all right, Frank. It’s him this time.”

***

Yoramin cried for four days and four nights and hardly slept at all. When the priest walked into the room on the fourth morning his shoes squished in Yoramin’s tears which covered the floor. He came to Yoramin’s bed and addressed him in a soft voice.

“Why are you crying so much over one woman?”

“She wasn’t just one woman.”

“Well now, how is that possib—?”

“It isn’t just her. It is all of life. It bleeds suffering all around. The very air is filled with sweetness, and it is this which makes life painful. All of this sweetness is within us, the beauty, the music, Time’s passing on and the changing of the seasons. The snow. A fly. But it is all outside, and nothing enters. The beauty is there and I am here and nothing enters. So I am full of hatred for life…. I am really a spy, you know. I may as well tell you. I came to find out about God for the Russian government, but I have already failed in my mission. They can shoot me if they want. I can’t tell them about God because even you don’t know anything about Him except (mimicking) ʻthe scriptures, the scriptures.’ I’d say to them that God lets us suffer and for what? Heaven? We will go to Heaven if we believe and won’t go if we don’t believe? Is that some kind of game? Tell me!”

The priest shook his head and sighed, looking out the window.

“Father, you know it, don’t you? There’s no point to life. Tell God to strike me dead, please, Father, tell him. Go to a quiet place and ask him to please strike me dead. He’ll listen to you.”

“I am totally at a loss for words, Sam,” said Father Don Rickles slowly. “You are a very bitter man. You are more pathetic than even poor Frank. He lives in a world where life is all about fixing a gutter and singing a standard. But it’s better than your world. You’re all clouded up with anger and I am getting very bad vibes right now, man.”

At this moment Yoramin burst out furiously in a fit of tears and Father Don Rickles drifted away from him, shaking his head.

***

The next morning Yoramin woke to find Frank sitting on his bed trying to feed him a muffin. Instinctively Yoramin knocked the muffin out of Frank’s hands and bolted to his feet. The priest entered and picked up the muffin as Frank shuffled out.

“I’ll fix your gutters today, Father.”

“Thank you, Frank.” The priest sighed and went into the kitchen, biting into the muffin. Yoramin followed. “However badly you feel, you should not have treated Frank that way, Sam”

“Because God says I should love my brothers, I suppose,” said Yoramin. “And don’t call me Sam. My name is Yoramin Rhezvinski. And don’t ask me any questions about why I’m here.”

“You already told me.”

“Huh?”

“You told me while you were crying that you are a spy.”

“Oh. Right. Well, then don’t ask me any more questions, man of the cloth. I’m staying right here, and if there are any arguments I’ll knock your block off. I may have been crying for four days and four nights, but I can be tough.”

At this the priest whirled and socked Yoramin across the jaw, sending him sprawling onto the floor and causing three of this teeth to fly out of his mouth and cascade ahead of him along the ceramic tile.

“I can be tough, too,” said the priest.

***

Yoramin healed his sore jaw and damaged gums by talking only sparingly and eating apple sauce. His mood, however, became increasingly more cheerful, his melancholy melting along with his black and blue jaw. He and the priest rarely spoke, but if either seemed to be angry at all it was the priest, who was not so much angry with Yoramin as he was silently brooding about some other matter. Yoramin’s words to him had indeed hit home somehow. He wondered what he was doing being a representative of God when he wasn’t even sure of what God really was. He knew that God was Something. It was the What that had him stumped. During a confession one day, a man muttered his sins through the curtain which separated him from “God’s ears,” meaning the priest.

“I thought of committing adultery fifteen times this week, Father. Only once did I follow through, though. Also, I haven’t given back the hoe I borrowed from Sam Blake, even though he never gives stuff back to me when he borrows it. I slapped my wife around one time this week because she didn’t have the ketchup on the table. And—”

“Are you finished?” the priest asked.

“No, what do you mean?”

“I mean, just go. You can say some prayers if you like, but they’re useless. They’re nice strong words and it might make you feel better but it won’t alleviate what you’ve done no matter how many times you say them and no matter in what devout voice you whisper them in. Go read a sports section.”

“Now just a second. I came here to be forgiven, not—”

“You wait a minute, buddy boy—”

“You’re no priest. I’m leaving.” He burst out of the confessional and stormed past the other sinners who were waiting on line. The priest cracked his confessional door open and screamed. “Go on then! Go! Adulterer! Wife beater! Go on! And I’m going to tell Sam Blake about that ho!”

***

One might say that the priest was fed up, but he wasn’t completely fed up. He had his doubts about God, but more doubts about man himself. He felt that as long as he doubted he could not go on talking about Him to those who had more faith the he did. He didn’t know why he’d ever become a priest in the first place. His brother was a bank robber and his sister a hooker, and though that makes for a good start in the forgiveness department, he wondered why he was different. His family was Catholic, so Catholic that they trimmed their bushes into the shape of the Virgin Mary each spring, so much so that they said a full rosary every night before eating dinner while their food grew cold and Don’s stomach rumbled. And after an entire childhood of cold and sometimes spoiled food, his sister became anorexic and his brother became a glutton, stealing for money and then buying and eating large quantities of chocolate layer and cheese cakes, so that he was exactly three hundred pounds by his fifteenth birthday. His poor family said even more rosaries for him, but his weight and his thievery only increased. Soon he became too heavy to run from the police any more, even in sneakers, and he was caught sometimes before even getting out of the door of the store he was robbing even though the police station was a full three miles away.

Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3