Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

He interrupted. “My God? I beg your pardon, Mrs. Hoffman. What about yours?”

“Is He still here? I thought he was long gone. I no longer believe. I suppose I used to, must have outgrown it. Two days ago, I met with a couple of decrepit rabbis in Prague and felt nothing. Isn’t that sad? All those years of being something and I come back here to what — the old country? — and I can’t muster any kinship. They just looked like poor, tattered souls, not family.”

“There are so few Jews left, of course.”

“All the more reason I should have been moved, no?”

“What moves us is a complicated question.”

“I’m not making you uncomfortable, Reverend, am I?”

He’d waved her away with a doorlike swing of his small, hairless hand. A short, gregarious woman in white heels. She sat across this very desk and watched herself through his eyes. She saw a bold woman willing to reach across the great chasm to provide aid and comfort to a poor Lutheran pastor in poor, oppressed Czechoslovakia. So he told her stories, some of them even true, detailing the hardships of running a church in such times. The limitations on what services he could offer, the constantly changing and arbitrary laws, the threat of spies, the disastrous plumbing in the rectory. To get a decent plumber to come to a church you have to know someone in the Politburo! And she’d listened to his boastful anecdotes about the whispering, nudging, and yes, I’ve had to do a bit of bribing here and there . He’d spread his arms wide, not exactly knowing why, but trying in his way to say, I embrace not only the misery of myself and my people but of mankind! “Of course,” he’d said quietly, “I’m insignificant.”

A good woman, perhaps not yet fifty, trolling around for something good to do in this world, and she’d landed, of all places, in this office. She was going to ship him a new mimeograph machine, paper, books, office supplies. Even a boxload of Bibles in Czech. At one point in the last hour of the second day, there was a lull in their conversation. Barbara Hoffman didn’t like lulls. But this particular moment she didn’t fill it; instead, she waited. Then she blurted out so harshly it was as though she’d stomped on his foot:

“I was married for two weeks.”

“Two weeks?”

“Felt like a hell of a long time. At the end of the second week — we were still on our honeymoon in Ireland — he turned to me and said, ‘Well?’ And I said, ‘Well, what?’ For the life of the man he couldn’t think of anything else to say.”

Reverend Hrncirik couldn’t either. He gaped at her.

“And it didn’t rain in Ireland. The entire time I kept waiting. You never married?”

12/14/63

My dear Reverend Hrncirik ,

Don’t think I have forgotten the happy days I spent in Brno. I’m sending along to you Alan Paton’s second novel. I wouldn’t say that it is as groundbreaking as the first; nonetheless, Paton continues to expose. This one is about a delicious creature called the Immorality Act, which prohibits contact of a carnal nature between the races. Contact of a carnal nature! Can you imagine the bureaucrat that came up with that particular phraseology?

The book is a paperback. On the front it says, “For the considerable audience that hailed Cry, the Beloved Country as a literary and popular masterpiece, Alan Paton has produced another novel of similar beauty, equal power, and even greater readability— The Denver Post .” Denver! Americans! Even their books are advertisements. To be barked at like that while you are trying to read. This one is called Too Late the Phalarope . He looks up phalarope in his English dictionary: Kinds of small, wading and swimming birds known for their timidity . He lays the book aside and straightens some papers on his desk. He’d planned to write some letters and to finish a report before Barbara Hoffman returned. And make no mistake, a letter is a return. Three sentences of one letter and the salutation of another — he crumples both. He picks up hers again and rubs the tissue-thin paper between his fingers. He raises it to his nose as if it might carry her scent. It smells faintly of dust. They’d gotten to talking about books. She’d loaned him one she’d just finished, a book with such a beautiful title, Barbara Hoffman had said, it made her want to plant it in a garden. He’d read Cry, the Beloved Country in one sleepless night, in a fever. In a bleary — and theatrical — moment at 4 a.m., he’d knelt and kissed the book. How else to honor such a man, such a pastor, as this black Father Kumalo? Reverend Hrncirik had been so shamed that the next day he’d jibbered at Barbara Hoffman… “Unless all the churches, mine, the Episcopalians, my Lord, even the Catholics, everybody, regain consciousness” —He’d stopped himself and slapped the book on the table. “Ah, but what’s the incentive for this? Churches sleep now, as we slept before. Ask your rabbis in Prague. For every Bonhoeffer there’s a thousand men like me.” He gazed around his tiny office, but he was really looking beyond it, at the crumbling altar of his church, at the weary streets of his city, at his people walking, bundled.

He talked on, ignoring her protests. “And this Father Kumalo? He’s enough to make you abandon forgiveness as any sort of answer. When you see it only twisted, increasing paralysis. They heap tribulation. He forgives. They heap. He forgives. It isn’t supposed to work like this.”

“An old story,” Barbara Hoffman said.

Reverend Hrncirik laughed. “But remember, even Christ chased away the moneychangers. That old man? He’s almost monstrous in his patience. No anger, only love, as his son hangs.”

“What are you suggesting, Reverend?”

“I don’t know.”

“That forgiveness doesn’t always work?”

“Keep it between us.”

Barbara Hoffman laughed with her eyes. “In this sense, I agree with you. Perhaps the only answer in a place like South Africa is brute force.” She paused. “But — the West, with our obsession with Communism. We only have the capacity to understand one evil at a time. Besides, the South Africans are such good capitalists.”

Ah, Communism! He smiled and wrapped his throat with both hands, mock strangling.

Now Barbara Hoffman didn’t laugh. She only looked at him, Why haven’t you touched me, Reverend Hrncirik? Why haven’t you reached across your desk and touched me?

They both listened to the rain.

I heard Paton speak in Belgium in November. He said he had little hope for a peaceful solution in South Africa. Perhaps he is coming around to facing the inevitable. You may have heard that after his last trip abroad, his passport was seized by his government and he is no longer permitted to leave the country. A quiet man, but a powerful one. Please tell me all your news and if you received the promised shipments…

On the evening of her last day she’d asked him to her hotel room for some chocolate. “Swiss.” She laughed. “I smuggled it over the border.” And he declined with a bow, making it clear there was nothing wrong with the invitation in an academic sense — it wasn’t as though he was celibate, he’d had other women over the years — but he wouldn’t accept her offer, anyway. What was it he wanted to punish her for? For being as lonely as he was? He remembers feeling simply tired, or rather, he remembers that he had an expectation of being tired later. I’m exhaustible, he thought. I am a man whom things exhaust before they’ve even happened.

Now, this afternoon, he thinks, I could have listened to her voice. I could have just watched her lips move. He was a man who nursed all the proper notions, beginning with his bedrock belief that to restrict belief is to oppress God and that such blasphemy is fathomless. But his actions, his actions , amounted to begging help from plumbers and electricians. He thinks of Father Kumalo hiking up the mountain, that old man feeling his way in the dark with a stick. There are no small heroes. He looks around his office at the stacks of requisition forms, at the old bronze clock, at one of his gloves lying on the floor. He exists. This church exists. Will it ever be enough? He drums his fingers on the book. Who’s the timid bird? He thinks of the uselessness of being a man people don’t want to even silence, much less kill. He laughs at how beyond him it all is. A man without the courage to love, where would he find the courage to stand up. Against what? A shadow darkens the cloudy glass of his door window. Slowly, like a much older man than he is, he rises. His parishioners always lurk like that. Always, they hover in the corridor. Why won’t they knock? He sits back down. He won’t open it. Wait, whoever you are, wait. Let you wait. Let the old widows wait. Let the man from Pardubice with the sick daughter wait. Let Jesus himself wait. Reverend Hrncirik slumps in his chair, allows her image to tunnel into his stomach, sink down his legs. He’d gone back to his room that night and masturbated slowly, with the light on. He fingers the soiled handkerchief in his pocket and wants to do it again now, even almost gently, like he did that night. But not with that impatience at the door, not with this book on the desk, not with her letter silently — what? Asking? Goading? Forgiving?