The Chosen (24 page)

The Battle of the Bulge ended about the middle of January, with the newspapers reporting seventy-seven thousand Allied casualties and one hundred twenty thousand German casualties.

Throughout the entire month of that battle—from the middle of December to the middle of January—I did not see Danny once. We spoke on the phone a few times; he told me his brother was sick again and might have to spend some time in a hospital. But the next time I called him his brother was all right—the doctor had changed his pills, Danny said, and that seemed to work. He sounded tired and sad, and once or twice I could barely hear his voice over the phone. The Battle of the Bulge? Yes, he said vaguely, a terrible business. When was I coming over to see him? As soon as I could breathe a little, I said. He said not to wait too long, he needed to talk to me. Was it very important? I wanted to know. No, it could wait, it wasn’t very important, he said, sounding sad.

So it waited. It waited through my midyear exams and through the first two weeks of February, when I managed to get to Danny’s house twice and we fought our customary Talmud battles together with his father but didn’t get a chance to be alone long enough for us to talk. And then the news of the war in Europe suddenly reached a peak of feverish excitement. The Russians captured Konigsberg and Breslau and came within thirty miles of Berlin, and at the end of the first week in March American troops reached the Rhine River at Remagen and discovered, to their astonishment, that the Ludendorff Bridge had, for some reason, not been destroyed by the Germans. My father almost wept with joy when we heard the news. There had been talk of bloody battles and high casualties in crossing the Rhine. Instead, American troops poured across the bridge, the Remagen beachhead was quickly enlarged and held against German counterattacks—and everyone began to talk of the war ending in two months.

My father and I were overjoyed, and even Danny, whom I saw again in the middle of March and who generally took little interest in the details of the war, began to sound excited.

‘It is the end of Hitler, may his name and memory be erased,’ Reb Saunders said to me that Shabbat afternoon. ‘Master of the Universe, it has taken so long, but now the end is here.’

And he trembled as he said it and was almost in tears.

Danny caught the flu in the last week of March and was in bed for more than a week. During that time, the Saar and Silesia were taken, the Ruhr was encircled by American troops, and another bridgehead was formed across the Rhine by soldiers of General Patton’s army. Almost every day now there were rumors that the war had ended. But each rumor proved to be false and did nothing but add to the already intolerable anxiety and suspense my father and I were feeling as we read the papers and listened to the radio.

Danny returned to school at the end of the first week in April, apparently too soon, for he was back in bed two days later with bronchitis. I called his mother to ask if I could visit him, but she said no, he was too sick, and besides what he had was contagious, even his brother and sister weren’t permitted into his room. I asked if I could speak to him, but she told me he was running a high fever and could not leave his bed to come to the phone. She sounded worried. He was coughing a great deal, she told me, and was exhausted from the sulfa he was taking. Yes, she would give him my wishes for his speedy recovery.

On the Thursday afternoon of the second week in April, I was sitting at a meeting of the student council. The meeting had started pleasantly enough with the usual reading of the minutes and committee reports, when Davey Cantor burst into the room. looking as though he was crying, and shouted breathlessly that someone had just told him President Roosevelt was dead.

He was standing by the door of the classroom, and there was a sudden movement of heads as everyone turned and gaped at him in total astonishment. I had been in the middle of a sentence, and I turned, too, remaining on my feet next to my desk, and I heard myself saying angrily that he had a hell of a nerve barging in here like that, he wasn’t being one bit funny.

‘It’s true!’ he shouted, crying. ‘Mr Weinberg just told me! He heard it on the radio in the faculty room!’

I stared at him and felt myself slide slowly back onto my desk.

Mr Weinberg taught English. He was a short, bald man, with no sense of humor, and his motto was ‘Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see.’ If Mr Weinberg had told Davey Cantor that President Roosevelt was dead … I found myself in a sudden cold sweat. Someone in the room giggled, someone else moaned, ‘Oh, no!’ and our faculty advisor stood up and suggested that the meeting be adjourned.

We left the building and came out onto the street. All the way down the three flights of stairs I wouldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. It was like God dying. Davey Cantor had said something about a cerebral hemorrhage. I didn’t believe it. Until I got to the street.

It was a little after five o’clock, and there was still sunlight.

The late afternoon traffic was heavy. Trucks, cars and a trolley choked the street, waiting for the comer light to change. I crossed quickly, ran for the trolley, and made it just as the light changed. I found a seat next to a middle-aged lady who sat staring straight ahead, weeping silently. I looked around. No one in the trolley was talking. It was crowded, and it became more crowded as it went along, but there was only the silence inside. I saw one man put his hands over his eyes and just sit there like that for a while. I stared out the window. People stood around in small groups on the sidewalks. They didn’t seem to be talking. They just stood there, together, like an animal herd bunching up for protection. An old gray-haired woman, walking with a child, held a handkerchief to her mouth. I saw the child look up at her and say something, but I couldn’t hear it. I found myself crying too, and felt a gnawing emptiness, as though I had been scraped clean inside and there was nothing in me now but a terrible darkness. I was feeling as though it had been my father who had died.

The whole ride home was like that: silence in the trolley car, weeping men and women, groups of people standing about dazedly in the streets, little children looking bewildered and wondering what had happened.

Manya and my father were home. I heard the radio in the kitchen as I opened the door, quickly put my books in my room, and joined them. Manya was cooking supper, and sobbing. My father was sitting at the table, his face ashen, his cheeks hollow, his eyes red, looking as he had when he had visited me in the hospital. I sat at the table and listened to the news announcer. He was talking in a hushed voice and giving details of President Roosevelt’s death. Harry S Truman was now President of the United States. I sat there and listened and couldn’t believe it. How could President Roosevelt die? I had never even thought of him as being mortal. And to die now, especially now, when the war was almost over, when there was to be a meeting soon of the new United Nations. How could a man like that die?

We ate our supper listening to the radio—something we had never done before; my father never liked to have the radio on during a meal. But it was on during that meal and every other meal we ate that entire weekend—except for the Shabbat—and it stayed on every moment either my father or Manya or I was home.

I tried calling Danny on Friday afternoon, but he was still too sick to come to the phone. My father and I spent Shabbat morning in the synagogue, where the pain of death showed itself clearly on every face, and where my friends and I just stood around aimlessly after the service, not knowing what to say. My father began to cough again,· the deep, dry, racking cough that shook his frail body and frightened me terribly. On Shabbat afternoon, he talked of President Roosevelt, of the hope he had brought to the country during the Depression.

‘You do not remember the Depression, Reuven,’ he told me. ‘Those were terrible days, black days. It is impossible to believe he is gone. It is like when -‘ His voice broke, and he was suddenly sobbing. I stared at him, feeling helpless and terrified. He went into his bedroom and stayed there the rest of the afternoon, and I lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, my hands clasped behind my head, trying to grasp what had happened. I couldn’t. I saw only emptiness and fear and a kind of sudden, total end to things that I had never experienced before. I lay on my bed and thought about it a long time. It was senseless, as—I held my breath, feeling myself shiver with fear—as Billy’s blindness was senseless. That was it. It was as senseless, as empty of meaning, as Billy’s blindness. I lay there and thought of Roosevelt being dead and Billy being blind, and finally I turned over and lay with my face on the pillow and felt myself crying. I cried a long time. Then I slept, fitfully. When I woke, the room was dark, and I heard the radio going again in the kitchen. I lay on the bed a while, then joined my father. We sat together in the kitchen. It was after midnight when we went to sleep.

The next day, President Roosevelt was buried. Our school was closed for the funeral, and my father and I sat in the kitchen all that day and listened to the radio.

Danny called me a few hours after the funeral. He sounded tired, and he coughed a good deal. But his temperature was down to normal, he said, and he had been normal for twenty-four hours now. Yes, Roosevelt’s death was a terrible thing, he said. His parents were all right. His brother was sick, though. He was running a high fever, and coughing. Could I come over during the week? he asked me. I didn’t think so. Could I come over on Saturday, then? Yes, I could, I would see him on Shabbat, I said. He sounded relieved when we hung up, and I wondered what was happening.

But on Wednesday I came home from school with a fever, and by Thursday afternoon I was running 103.6 The doctor called it the flu and warned my father to keep me in bed or there might be complications. I asked my father to call Danny and tell him. I was in bed for ten days, and when I finally got back to school I found I had missed so much work that for two weeks I dropped all my student council activities and spent every moment I had catching up. I used Shabbat afternoons for reading, and by the first week of May I had caught up enough to be able to begin attending student council meetings again. Then Reb Saunders became ill, and at the same time my father also took to his bed with the flu, a severe case that bordered on pneumonia for a while and frightened me terribly. Both Reb Saunders and my father were quite ill on the day in May when word finally came that the war in Europe was over.

I was with my father when we heard the news over the radio in his bedroom.

‘Thank God!’ my father said, his eyes wet with joy. ‘What a price to have paid for Hitler and his madmen!’ And he lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes.

And then, together with the official report of the signing of the unconditional surrender on May 7, there came the news, at first somewhat guarded, then, a few days later, dear and outspoken, of the German concentration camps. My father, recuperating slowly and looking worn and weary, sat in his bed propped on pillows, and read the newspaper stories of the horrors that had occurred in those camps, His face was grim and ashen. He seemed unable to believe what he was reading.

It was while my father, read to me an account of what had happened at Teresienstadt, where the Germans had imprisoned and incinerated European Jews of culture and learning, that I saw him break down and weep like a child.

I didn’t know what to say. I saw him lie back on his pillows and cover his face with his hands. Then he asked me to leave him alone, and I walked out and left him there, crying, and went to my room.

I just couldn’t grasp it. The numbers of Jews slaughtered had gone from one million to three million to four million, and almost every article we read said that the last count was still incomplete, the final number would probably reach six million. I couldn’t begin to imagine six million of my people murdered. I lay in my bed and asked myself what sense it made. It didn’t make any sense at all. My mind couldn’t hold on to it, to the death of six million people.

Danny called me a few days later, and I went over to his house the next Shabbat afternoon. We did not study Talmud. Instead, his father talked of the Jewish world in Europe, of the people he had known who were now probably dead, of the brutality of the world, of his years in Russia with the Cossack bands looting and plundering.

‘The world kills us,’ he said quietly. ‘Ah, how the world kills us.’

We were sitting in his study, and he was in his straightbacked chair. His face was lined with suffering. His body swayed slowly back and forth, and he talked in a quiet singsong, calling up the memories of his youth in Russia and telling us of the Jewish communities of Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Germany, and Hungary—all gone now into heaps of bones and ashes. Danny and I sat silent and listened to him talk. Danny was pale and seemed tense and distraught. He tugged constantly at an earlock, his eyes blinking nervously.

‘How the world drinks our blood,’ Reb Saunders said. ‘How the world makes us suffer. It is the will of God. We must accept the will of God.’ He was silent for a long moment. Then he raised his eyes and said softly, ‘Master of the Universe, how do you permit such a thing to happen?’

The question hung in the air like a sigh of pain.

Danny could not walk me back that night, he had too much schoolwork to do, so I went home alone and found my father in his bedroom, listening to the radio. He was in pajamas, and he wore his small black skullcap. The announcer was talking about the United Nations. I sat in a chair and listened, and when the news program was over my father turned off the radio and looked at me.

‘How is Reb Saunders?’ he asked quietly.

I told him what Reb Saunders had talked about that afternoon. My father nodded slowly. He was pale and gaunt, and his skin had a yellowish tint to it and was parchment like on his face and hands.

‘Reb Saunders wanted to know how God could let something like this happen,’ I told him quietly.

My father looked at me, his eyes somber.

‘And did God answer him?’ he asked. His voice had a strange quality of bitterness to it.