The Chosen (19 page)

‘Well, that’s wonderful!’ he said. ‘I’m happy to hear that.

That’s really wonderful!’

‘So we’ll be going to the same college,’ I said. ‘Will you be going for a B. A.?’

‘Sure. You have to. They don’t let you study just Talmud in that college. I’ll be majoring in psychology.’

We had come to the corner of the synagogue in which my father and I prayed. Danny stopped.

‘I have to go back: he said. ‘I’ve got schoolwork to do.’

‘I’ll call you at your house tomorrow afternoon.’

‘I’ll probably be in the library tomorrow afternoon, doing some reading in psychology. Why don’t you come over there?’

‘I won’t be able to read anything.’

‘That’s right.’ Danny smiled. ‘I forgot. You didn’t duck.’

‘I’ll come over anyway. I’ll sit and think while you read.’

‘Wonderful. I’d like to watch you sit and think.’

‘Mitnagdim can think too, you know.’ I said.

Danny laughed. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.

‘Right,’ I said, and watched him walk away, tall and lean in his black caftan and black hat.

I hurried home and came into the apartment just as my father was beginning to dial the phone. He put the phone down and looked at me.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ he asked.

‘Is it very late?’ I glanced at my watch. It was almost ten thirty. ‘I’m sorry, abba. I couldn’t just walk out.’

‘You were at Reb Saunders’ synagogue all this time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Next time you are out so late you will call, yes? I was ready to telephone Reb Saunders to find out what happened. Come into the kitchen and sit down. What are you looking so excited about? Sit down. I’ll make some tea. Did you eat? What happened that you were away so long?’

I sat at the kitchen table and slowly told my father everything that had taken place in Reb Saunders’ synagogue. He sipped his tea and listened quietly. I saw him grimace when I began to go over the gematriyot. My father did not particularly care for gematriya. He had once referred to it as nonsense numerology and had said that anything could be proved that way, all that had to be done was to shift letters around adroitly so as to make the values come out any way you wanted. So he sat there, sipping his tea and grimacing, as I reviewed Reb Saunders’ gematriyot. When I started to tell him what had happened afterward, the grimace left his face, and he listened intently, nodding his head from time to time and sipping his tea. And when I got to the part where Reb Saunders had asked me about the wrong gematriya, his face took on a look of astonishment, and he put the glass down on the table. Then I told him what Reb Saunders had said to me after Havdalah and what Danny and I had talked about on the way home, and he smiled proudly and nodded to indicate his happiness.

‘Well,’ my father said, sipping his tea again, ‘you had some day, Reuven.’

‘It was an experience, abba. The way Danny had to answer his father’s questions like that in front of everybody. I thought that was terrible.’

My father shook his head. ‘It is not terrible, Reuven. Not for Danny, not for his father, and not for the people who listened. It is an old tradition, this kind of Talmudic discussion. I have seen it many times, between great rabbis. But it does not only take place between rabbis. When Kant became a professor, he had to follow an old tradition and argue in public on a philosophical subject. One day when you are a professor in a university and read a paper before your colleagues, you will also have to answer questions. It is part of Danny’s training.’

‘But in public like that, abba!’

‘Yes, Reuven. In public like that. How else would Reb Saunders’ people know that Danny has a head for Talmud?’

‘It just seemed so cruel to me.’

My father nodded. ‘It is a little cruel, Reuven. But that is the way the world is. If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste. But the business about the mistakes I never heard before. That is something new. That is Reb Saunders’ innovation. It is clever, but I am not sure I like it very much. No, I do not think I like it at all.’

‘Danny said the mistakes are always easy to find.’

‘Perhaps,’ my’ father said. ‘A man can do whatever he wishes to test his son’s knowledge. But there are other ways than the way of Reb Saunders. At any rate, Reuven, it is good training for Danny. He will be involved in such things all his life.’

‘Reb Saunders is a very complicated man, abba. I can’t make him out. One minute he’s hard and angry, the next minute he’s soft and gentle. I don’t understand him.’

‘Reb Saunders is a great man, Reuven. Great men are always difficult to understand. He carries the burden of many people on his shoulders. I do not care for his Hasidism very much, but it is not a simple task to be a leader of people. Reb Saunders is not a fraud. ‘He would be a great man even if he had not inherited his post from his father. It is a pity he occupies his mind only with Talmud. If he were not a tzaddik he could make a great contribution to the world. But he lives only in his own world. It is a great pity. Danny will be the same way when he takes his father’s place. It is a shame that a mind such as Danny’s will be shut off from the world.’

My father sipped his tea again, and we sat quietly for a while.

‘I am very proud of the way you handled yourself today,’ my father said, looking at me over the rim of the glass. ‘I am glad Reb Saunders will let you be Danny’s friend. I was worried about Reb Saunders.’

‘I’m awfully sorry I came back so late, abba.’ My father nodded. ‘I am not angry,’ he said. ‘But next time you will be so late, you will call, yes?’

‘Yes, abba.’

My father glanced at the clock on the shelf over the refrigerator. ‘Reuven, it is late, and tomorrow you are going to school. You should go to sleep now.’

‘Yes, abba.’

‘Remember, you must not read. I will read to you in the evenings and we will see if we can study that way. But you must not read by yourself.’

‘Yes, abba. Good night.’

‘Good night, Reuven.’

I left him sitting at the kitchen table over his glass of tea and went to bed. I lay awake a long time before I was able to sleep.

When I got back to school the next morning, I found I had become a hero, and during the fifteen-minute morning recess my friends, and even some boys I did not know, all crowded around me, wanting to know how I was and telling me what a great game I had played. Near the end of the recess, I went over to the pitcher’s position and stood on the exact spot where I had been hit by the ball. I looked—tried to look; the yard was crowded with students—at home plate and imagined Danny standing there, grinning at me. I remembered his grinning that way again yesterday, and I closed my eyes for a moment, then went over and stood near the wire fence behind the plate. The bench on which the young rabbi had sat was still there, and I stared at it for a moment. It seemed impossible to me that the ball game had taken place only a week ago. So many things had happened, and everything looked so different.

Sidney Goldberg came over to me and started talking about the game, and then Davey Cantor joined us and added his opinion about ‘those murderers.’ I nodded at what they were saying without really listening. It seemed silly to me, the way they kept talking about the game, they both sounded so childish, and I got a little angry when Davey Cantor started talking about ‘that snooty Danny Saunders,’ but I didn’t say anything.

I got out of school at two o’clock and took a trolley car over to the public library where I was supposed to meet Danny. The library was a huge, three-story, graystone building, with thick Ionic columns, and with the words BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY, THAT IS ALL YE KNOW ON EARTH, AND ALL YE NEED TO KNOW—JOHN KEATS engraved in the stone over its four glass entrance doors. It stood on a wide boulevard and there were tall trees in front of it and a grassy lawn bordered by flowers. On the right-hand wall of the vestibule, just inside the doors, there was a mural of the history of great ideas, beginning with a drawing of Moses holding the Ten Commandments, going on to Jesus, Mohammed, Galileo, Luther, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and ending with Einstein gazing at the formula E=mc2.

On the other wall there was a mural showing Homer, Dante, Tolstoi, Balzac, and Shakespeare engaged in conversation. They were beautiful murals, done in bright colors, and the great men in them looked alive. Probably because I had become so sensitive about eyes in the past week, I noticed for the first time that Homer’s eyes seemed glazed, almost without pupils, as if the artist had been trying to show that he had been blind. I had never noticed that before, and it frightened me a little to see it now.

I went quickly through the first floor, with its marble floors, its marble pillars, its tall bookcases, its long reference tables, its huge windows through which the sun streamed, and its glass topped desks at which the librarians sat. I found Danny on the third floor against the far wall, partly hidden by a bookcase, wearing a black suit, a tieless shirt, and a skullcap. He was sitting at a small table, bent over a book, his long earlocks dangling down the sides of his face and almost reaching to the top of the table.

There were not many people on this floor; its stacks were filled mostly with bound volumes of scholarly journals and pamphlets. It was a large floor, and the closely set stacks gave it a mazelike appearance. They went from floor to ceiling, and. they seemed to me to contain everything of importance that had ever been written on any subject in the world. There were journals in English, French, German, Russian, Italian, and even one collection in Chinese. Some of the English journals had names I couldn’t pronounce. This was the one floor of the three-floored library I did not know well. I had been up here once to find an article in the Journal of Symbolic Logic which had been recommended to me by my mathematics teacher, an article which I had only dimly understood, and once to meet my father. Now was the third time in all the years I had belonged to this library that I was on its third floor.

I stood near a bookcase a few feet away from the table at which Danny was sitting, and I watched him read. His elbows were on the table, and he held his head in the palms of his hands, the fingers covering his ears completely, his eyes staring down at the book. Occasionally, the fingers of his right hand would play with his earlock, and once they stroked the tufts of sand-colored hair on his chin for a few seconds, then went back to the side of his face. His mouth was slightly open, and I could not see his eyes; they were hidden by the lids. He seemed impatient each time he came to the foot of a page, and he flipped the page with a quick gesture of his right hand, wetting the forefinger with his tongue and turning the page by pushing upward with the finger against the lower right-hand comer, the way one does a page of Talmud except that with a Talmud the left forefinger usually pushes against the lower left-hand comer because it is read from right to left. He was reading with phenomenal speed. I could see him read. He would start at the head of a page, his head tilted slightly upward, and then his head would move downward in a straight line until he got to the foot of the page. Then it would tilt upward again and either move sideways to the right page or remain fixed in its upward position until the page was turned, and then start downward again. He did not seem to be reading from side to side but up and down, and, watching him, I had the distinct impression that he was reading the middle of the page only and was somehow able to ignore, or absorb without actually reading, what was written on the sides.

I decided not to disturb him, and I sat down at another table a few feet away and continued to watch him read. It was frustrating to be sitting there surrounded by all those journals and not be able to read a thing myself, and I decided after a while to review by heart some of the symbolic logic I had been studying. I closed my eyes and went over the propositional calculus, trying to visualize the truth tables for conjunction, disjunction, equivalence, and material implication. They were fairly simple, and I had no difficulty. I tried to do some problems, but after a while it became complicated, I couldn’t remember all the deductive steps, and I stopped. I was about to begin going over the steps of indirect proof when I heard Danny say, ‘You’re always sleeping! What a sleepyhead you are!’ and I opened my eyes. Danny was sitting up in his chair and looking at me.

‘I was reviewing my logic,’ I told him. ‘I wasn’t sleeping.’

‘Of course,’ he said, smiling. But his voice sounded sad.

‘I was just going into the indirect proof. Do you want to hear it?’

‘No. I can’t stand that stuff. Why didn’t you tell me you were here?’

‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’

‘You’re nice. For a Mimaged.’ He gave the Hebrew letter ‘tof’ its Ashkenazic pronunciation. ‘Come over here. I want you to see something.’

I went over to his table and sat down next to him. ‘I’m not allowed to read, you know.’

‘I want you to hear this. I’ll read it to you.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s from Graetz’s History of the Jews.’ He sounded unhappy, and there was a somber look on his face. ‘It’s about Hasidim. Listen. Graetz is talking about Dov Baer, who was the follower of the Besht. He just finished saying that Dov Baer invented the idea of the tzaddik.’ He looked down at the book on the table and began to read aloud. ‘

‘Baer’s idea, however, was not meant to remain idle and unfruitful, but to bring him honor and revenue. While the tzaddik cared for the conduct of the world, for the obtaining of heavenly grace, and especially for Israel’s preservation and glorification, his adherents had to cultivate three kinds of virtues. It was their duty to draw nigh to him, to enjoy the sight of him, and from time to time to make pilgrimages to him. Further, they were to confess their sins to him. By these means alone could they hope for pardon from their iniquities.” That means sins,’ he told me.

‘I know what it means,’ I said.

He went on. ‘

‘Finally, they had to bring him presents, rich gifts, which he knew how to employ to the best advantage. It was also incumbent upon them to attend to his personal wants. It seems like a return to the days of the priests of Baal, so vulgar and disgusting do these perversities appear.”