PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
There was something about cities in the Untied States at night that Vladimir liked. Perhaps it was just that he didn’t know enough about the places he visited and his stay was too short to recognize the underbelly that came with darkness. In Bucharest, he knew there were adults as well as children who scavenged and stole, committed all manner of crime. He knew that happened here as well. But he didn’t know Pittsburgh as intimately, as personally as he knew Bucharest. Further, he could do nothing about anything that happened here. He often could not do much more in Bucharest, but he did not have the same sense of failure or feel the same responsibility for it here as he did there.
Again Vladimir walked with Josef and Nicolae.
“Ce mai facet?” Nicolae asked.
“I am fine,” Vladimir answered. “All is well.”
The streets were well lit, just as in Toronto, and this was also the business district. But, here the streets were littered and the poor and the homeless, the drug addicts and alcoholics, did not scurry into the alleys and out of the way places. They loitered in plain sight along the sidewalk and in doorways.
Nicolae was fearful in these streets and kept close. Josef, like Vladimir, felt that God protected and God permitted and would do both now, just as He did every other moment of their lives. Vladimir thought they must look like foreigners to the vagrant population, for nobody approached them. They made their way without being accosted to the street where the bridges began.
Three of them, all crossing one of the rivers that surrounded Pittsburgh on three sides.
“There is something about this country, these cities, that I like,” Vladimir admitted. He could not identify what it was. The open face of poverty perhaps. The lack of perfection, perceived or real. “There is something normal about this place. Not right, but normal.”
“Perhaps this is the human condition that we speak of so often,” Josef mused. “Perhaps it does not put on faces, pretending to be what it is not. It seems certain that those who want to help these chosen poor of God know their limitations and do not rail against what they cannot do, but persist in doing the good that they can.”
“And equally certain that those who chose blindness remain blind,” Vladimir said.
“Those you have spoken to at the churches so far have not given us promises, Vladimir. They have given us specific pledge amounts. They have given us checks.”
“Because they can feel the hunger, Josef. The cold. Because these people are here on the street day and night where they can see them. The poor we have with us always. Here, you can see the poor all around you, and smell them and even avoid them, but there is no way you cannot see them if you come into the city. If you work for the corporation or the bank or the restaurant or clean at the hotels, you see them always. And, there are those who know that they could become like those they see.”
“They try to keep us from seeing this side of the city, Vladimir. But there is no way to do that, is there? They take us to the homes surrounded by grass and sheltered by trees, where all is clean and well kept. And still we come here and we see. Is poverty worse here than it is in Romania? We are a poor country. We think of the United States as a rich country. Yet we see this. Is that why the people we visit, who do not live near this, call the places where they live gated communities?”
“If so, Josef, that is good in its way. But only if there is someone who calls their attention to what the gates close off. I think there are many who live in these gated places, yet must come into the city and see these people who live on the street. I believe there are those who see and care and do what they can.”
“And woe to those who do not,” Josef said. “Although we would be stoned and cast out if we told them that.”
“I trust more in the pledges and promises of those who can see poverty than those who look away,” Vladimir admitted. “The sharing will be greater here than in those places where there is no want.”
“Strange, isn’t it,” Josef replied, “that we expect a greater harvest from those who are poor themselves than from those who have much.”
They walked halfway across the bridge. Vladimir looked back where they had come from, Pittsburgh, a city he had a walking acquaintance with, then to the city at the far side of the bridge. A city whose name he did not know. A city he had not and might not ever visit. A city whose streets he most likely would never walk at night. Unlike Bucharest, it was also a city that did not need his reminders of poverty or charity. For a moment he felt that weariness that comes not with physical effort but with this thing he prayed about daily, but could share with few.
He was glad that it was Josef who weighed and made such decisions as to where they must go. There was little good he could do in the world save by his presence and his encouragement and supplication—begging, as Josef often rightly called it. Even that responsibility often seemed more like a burden than a gift. It would be worse if he had to decide where to beg.
Vladimir put his arm around Josef’s shoulders, then around Nicolae’s. “Do not be afraid,” he said to Nicolae. “Despite our best intentions and worst efforts, time goes on, life goes on, the world suffers and rejoices and goes on.”
Smiling, he turned toward Pittsburgh. The land of the free, he thought. Then what is freedom?