The Chosen (21 page)

I stood at the foot of the inside stairway and called up, ‘Hello! Anybody home?’ After a moment, Danny appeared at the head of the stairs, wearing his black caftan, black pants, and a black skullcap, and told me to come on up.

He introduced me to his mother and sister. His sister was almost as tall as I, with dark, vivacious eyes and a face almost exactly like Danny’s, except that the sculptured lines were a good deal softer. She wore a longsleeved dress, and her dark hair was combed back severely and dangled in a thick braid behind her. She smiled at me and said, ‘I know all about you, Reuven Malter. Danny never stops talking about you.’ His mother was short, with blue eyes and a roundish body. Her head was covered with a kerchief, and there were faint tufts of sand-colored hair on her upper lip. They were both sitting in the living room and had apparently been reading or studying what looked to me to be a Yiddish book when we had interrupted them. I told them politely that it was nice to meet them and was rewarded with another smile from Danny’s sister.

We left them and started up the stairway to the third floor.

Danny explained that the third floor contained his room, his father’s study, and a conference room. The second and third floors were completely separated, just as they were in any three-story brownstone. They had thought once of moving the family to the third Floor, Danny said, so as to avoid the noise made by the people who were constantly climbing the stairs to see his father. But his mother wasn’t well, and a three-Floor climb would be too much for her.

I asked him how his brother was feeling.

‘All right, I guess,’ he told me. ‘He’s asleep now.’

Danny took me through the third-floor rooms. They were identical with the ones in which my father and I lived. Danny’s bedroom was located exactly where my father’s bedroom was, the kitchen had been left intact—to serve the visiting dignitaries tea, Danny said with a grin—the bathroom was next to the kitchen, the study was where my father’s study was—except that one of its walls had been knocked out so that it also included what in our apartment was my room—and the living room contained a long glass-topped conference table and leather chairs. Danny took me into the conference room first—we went through the outside hallway door—then into his room, which had a narrow bed, a bookcase full of old Hebrew and Yiddish books, and a desk cluttered with papers. A Talmud lay open on top of the papers. The walls were white and bare. All the walls were white and bare. I saw no photographs or paintings anywhere, neither on the floor where his family lived, nor here on the floor where he lived and his father worked.

We stood outside his father’s study, and Danny knocked softly on the door. ‘He doesn’t like me to barge in on him when he’s in there,’ he whispered with a grin. His father said to come in, and we went in.

Reb Saunders sat behind a massive, black wood, glass-topped desk, wearing a black caftan and a tall, round, black skullcap. He was sitting in a straightbacked red leather chair with intricately carved wooden arms. A single light bulb glowed white beneath its ceiling fixture. The study, with its additional room, seemed enormous. A thick red carpet covered its floor, and its walls were lined with glass-enclosed wooden bookcases jammed tight with books. There were books everywhere—on the two wooden chairs near the desk, on the desk itself, on the wooden file cabinet that stood near the door, on cardboard boxes piled in a comer, on the small wooden stepladder, on the black leather easy chair that stood in another comer, even on the window seat. Many of the books were bound in black, red, and brown leather. One book had been bound in white, and it stood out prominently on a shelf among the black-bound books around it. Danny told me later that it contained the sayings of the Ba’al Shem Tov and had been presented to his father as a gift on his fiftieth birthday by the members of his congregation. All the books seemed to be in Hebrew or Yiddish, and many of them were very old and in their original bindings. There was a musty odor in the room, the odor of old books with yellow leaves and ancient bindings.

Reb Saunders told us to clear the books off the two chairs near the desk. The desk stood in almost the exact spot where my father had his desk. Danny sat at his father’s right, I at his left.

Reb. Saunders wanted to know about my eye. I told him it wam’t bothering me at all and that I was supposed to see the doctor this Monday morning. He understood I was not permitted to read. I nodded. ‘So you will listen,’ he told me, playing with an earlock. ‘You are a good mathematician. Now we will see what you know about more important things.’ He said it with a smile on his lips, and I did not feel it as a challenge. I knew I could not match him and Danny in the breadth of their knowledge, but I wondered if I might not be able to keep up with them in terms of depth. Rabbinic literature can be studied quantitatively or qualitatively—or, as my father once put it, horizontally or vertically. The former involves covering as much material as possible, without attempting to wrest from it all its implications and intricacies; the latter involves confining oneself to one single area until it is exhaustively covered, and then going on to new material. My father, in his classes and when he studied with me at home, always used the latter method. The ideal, of course, was to be able to do both, but none of the students in my school had that kind of time available to him because of the school’s heavy emphasis on English studies.

Reb Saunders had a text of Pirkei Avot open in front of him.

He began to read from it, stopping at the end of each passage. Danny and I took turns explaining. each alternating passage. I realized soon enough that the Pirkei Avot text was merely being used as a sort of jumping-off point for them, because they were soon ranging through most of the major tractates of the Talmud again. And it wam’t a quiz or a quiet contest this time, either. It was a pitched battle. With no congregants around, and with me an accepted member of the family, Danny and his father fought through their points with loud voices and wild gestures of their hands almost to where I thought they might come to blows. Danny caught his father in a misquote, ran to get a Talmud from a shelf, and triumphantly showed his father where he had been wrong. His father checked the margin of the page for the textual corrections of Rabbi Elijah—the same Rabbi Elijah who had persecuted Hasidim!—and showed Danny that he had been quoting from the corrected text. Then they went onto another tractate, fought over another passage, and this time Reb Saunders agreed, his face glowing, that his son was correct. I sat quietly for a long time, watching them battle. There was an ease about them, an intimacy, which had been totally lacking from the show they had put on before the congregants last week. There was no tension here at all but a battle between equals, with Reb Saunders losing only a little less frequently than his son. And I soon realized something else. Reb Saunders was far happier when he lost to Danny than when he won. His face glowed with fierce pride and his head nodded wildly—the nod beginning from the waist and including the entire upper portion of his body, with the beard moving back and forth against his chest—each time he was forced to acquiesce to Danny’s rendition of a passage or to Danny’s incisive counter-questioning. The battle went on for a long time, and I slowly became aware of the fact that both Danny and his father, during a point they might be making or listening to, would cast inquisitive glances at me, as if to ask what I was doing just sitting there while all this excitement was going on: Why in the world wasn’t I joining in the battle? I listened to them for a few minutes longer, and then I realized that though they knew so much more material than I did, once a passage was quoted and briefly explained, I was on almost equal footing with them. I had this time been able to retain hold of the chain of the argument—probably because there was no tension now—and so when Reb Saunders cited and explained a passage that seemed to contradict a point that had just been made by Danny, I suddenly found myself on the field of combat, offering an interpretation of the passage in support of Danny. Neither of them seemed at all surprised to hear my voice—I had the feeling they were surprised they hadn’t heard it sooner—and from that point on the three of us seesawed back and forth through the infinite intricacies of the Talmud. I discovered that my father’s method of teaching me Talmud and his patient insistence that I learn Talmudic grammar—I had painfully memorized an Aramaic grammar book—was now standing me in good stead. I saw allusions in passages that Danny and his father overlooked, and I resolved a contradiction with an appeal to grammar. ‘Grammar!’ Reb Saunders threw up his hands. ‘Grammar we need yet!’ But I insisted, explained, cajoled, raised my voice, gestured with my hands, quoted whatever proof texts I could remember from the grammar book, and finally he accepted my explanations. I found I was enjoying it all immensely, and once I even caught myself reading aloud from a Talmud—it was the grammatical discussion of the gender of ‘derech’ road, in the tractate Kiddushin before Reb Saunders realized what I was doing and told me to stop, I wasn’t allowed to use my eye yet, Danny would read the passage. Danny didn’t need to read the passage—he quoted it by heart with mechanical swiftness. It became clear quickly enough that though I was unequal to Danny in breadth, I was easily equal to him in depth, and this seemed to please Reb Saunders enormously. Danny and I were soon involved in a heated discussion concerning two contradictory commentaries on the same passage, and Reb Saunders sat back quietly and listened. Our argument ended in a draw; we agreed that the passage was obscure and that as it stood it could be explained either way.

There was a pause.

Reb Saunders suggested quietly that Danny might go down and bring us some tea.

Danny left.

The silence that now replaced our loud voices was almost uncomfortable. Reb Saunders sat quietly, stroking his beard with his right hand. I heard Danny’s capped shoes in the apartment hallway outside the study. Then the door opened and closed. Reb Saunders stirred and looked at me.

‘You have a good head.’ he said softly. The Yiddish phrase he used was, literally translated, ‘an iron head’. He nodded, seemed to listen for a moment to the silence in the study, then folded his arms across his chest. He sighed loudly, his eyes suddenly sad. ‘Now we will see about your soul.’ he said softly. ‘Reuven, my son will return soon. We have little time to talk. I want you to listen to me. I know that my Daniel spends hours almost every day in the public library. No, do not say anything. Just listen. I know you are surprised that I know. It is not important how I found it out. The neighbourhood is not so big that he could hide this from me forever. When my son does not come home in the afternoons week after week, I want to know where he is. Nu, now I know. I also know that he is sometimes with you in the library and sometimes with your father. I want you to tell me what he reads. I could ask my son, but it is difficult for me to speak to him. I know you do not understand that. But it is true. I cannot ask my son. One day perhaps I will tell you the reason. I know the mind he has, and I know I can no longer tell him what he’s to read and what not to read. I am asking you to tell me what he reads.’

I sat frozen and felt a long moment of blind panic. What my father had anticipated was now actually happening. But he hadn’t anticipated it happening to me. He had thought Reb Saunders would confront him, not me. My father and I had acted behind Reb Saunders’ back; now Reb Saunders was asking me to act behind Danny’s back. I didn’t know what to say.

Reb Saunders looked at me and sighed again. ‘Reuven,’ he said very quietly, ‘I want you to hear me out. No one lives forever. My father led his people before me, and my grandfather before him, and my great-grandfather before him. For six generations now we have led our people. I will not live forever. Daniel will one day take my place’ His voice broke, and he stopped. He put a finger to one of his eyes. Then he went on, his voice a little hoarse now. ‘My son is my most precious possession. I have nothing in the world compared to my son. I must know what he is reading. And I cannot ask him.’ He stopped and looked down at an open Talmud on his desk. ‘How did he come to meet your father in the library?’ he asked, looking down at the Talmud.

I sat very still and said nothing. I realized I was sitting on top of a possible explosion between Danny and his father. How long would Reb Saunders remain silent about his son’s visits to the library? And I didn’t like the way my father seemed to appear in all of this—as if he were conspiring behind Reb Saunders’ back to contaminate his son. I took a deep breath and began to talk slowly, choosing my words with care. I told Reb Saunders everything, how Danny had met my father, why my father was suggesting books for him to read, what he was reading, how my father was helping him—omitting that Danny was studying German, that he planned to read Freud, and that he had read some books on Hasidism.

When I finished, Reb Saunders just sat there and stared at me.

I could see he was controlling himself with great effort. He covered his eyes and nose with his right hand and leaned forward, his elbow on the open Talmud, the upper portion of his body swaying slowly back and forth. I saw his lips move beneath the hand, and I heard the words ‘Psychology. Master of the Universe, psychology. And Darwin.’ They came out as a soft, whispered moan. He took the hand away from his face and let it drop to the Talmud. ‘What can I do?’ he asked himself softly. ‘I can no longer speak to my own son. The Master of the Universe gave me a brilliant son, a phenomenon. And I cannot speak to him.’ He looked at me and seemed suddenly aware again of my presence. ‘The pain of raising children,’ he said quietly. ‘So many troubles. So many troubles. Reuven, you and your father will be a good influence on my son, yes?’

I nodded slowly, afraid now to speak.

‘You will not make a goy out of my son?’

I shook my head, feeling numb at what I was hearing. His voice was an ache, a plea. I saw him stare up at the ceiling. ‘Master of the Universe,’ he almost chanted. ‘You gave me a brilliant son, and I have thanked you for him a million times. But you had to make him so brilliant?’