Rather than join the priests in the teachers' lounge at the end of the day, Batya Pinter retreats to the gray silences of her office on the sixth floor where she stands at a window overlooking the city's disfigured industrial valley. There she smokes cigarettes, drinks tea, and watches the ghostly blue flames dance atop the tall vent stacks, singing the sky, turning the clouds back with ash.
Ever since taking the position at the Jesuit school, Batya has generally shunned the company of her colleagues. There are invitations, of course, to parties, to gallery openings, to the symphony, but she has no real desire to socialize with her fellow teachers at the quaint coffeehouse crowded with eccentric characters from the neighborhood. Orchestral music, especially the unceasing bombast of Wagner, makes her nauseous, and Impressionist seascapes with tiny gray men in wooden dinghies bobbing along on rough brushstrokes of thick vermillion paint bore her to death, as do those ancient Greek serving bowls with unexpurgated depictions of pederasty between sinewy boys glistening with oil and their erect wrestling coaches wearing only lecherous coyote grins.
Most conversation she finds tedious, especially since the small talk these days centers around which aging faculty members have been whisked away to the clinic because Death has dropped by for an unexpected visit, perhaps not with glimmering scythe and hooded robe, no, but with a sly "Boo!", just enough to put the fear of god into them, make them sink to the floor with only a minor stroke, leaving them with a noticeable slump to their shoulders, an angry downward scowl to their lips. To everyone's relief, the clinic employs a battalion of overpaid and self-important quacks who know their trade just well enough to keep Death temporarily at bay, oblivious to the fact that Death will wait good-naturedly for the inevitable, silently paring his talons and stoking the fires of hell in preparation for the multitudes who have failed to seek redemption before the final hour.
Perhaps by harping on the ubiquitous nature of suffering and loss, the Jesuits hope to alleviate the anguish she has experienced these past two years, but if they fail to cheer her up, it's because beneath their gentle words of consolation, they secretly despise her and feel that some form of cosmic punishment has been meted out. But how can she begrudge them for having these feelings? Batya is an alien among them, an outsider, an exotic creature from an ancient bloodline immune to their scholasticism. They are forever talking of the mysterious workings of god, but to these men, god isn't a mystery at all. God they can explain with the greatest confidence, and they often wax poetic about what happens to a person after death. It's life that perplexes them; it's life that they cannot explain. "Only through divine revelation," they say, "can humanity hope to comprehend this vale of tears."
The irony doesn't escape Batya. All religious experience is, she believes, a matter of concealment, not revelation. Faith is a metaphysical game of repression, self-deception, a way to disguise deep-rooted fears and weaknesses.
