The Chosen (9 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, and sat down on the edge of the bed to my right. I saw Mr Savo stare at him for a moment, then go back to his cards.

‘You were pretty rotten yesterday, you know,’ Danny Saunders said.

‘I’m sorry about that.’ I was surprised at how happy I was to see him.

‘I didn’t so much mind you being angry,’ he said. ‘What I thought was rotten was the way you wouldn’t let me talk.’

‘That was rotten, all right. I’m really sorry.’

‘I came up to talk to you now. Do you want to listen?’

‘Sure.’ I said.

‘I’ve been thinking about that ball game. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since you got hit.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it, too,’ I said.

‘Whenever I do or see something I don’t understand, I like to think about it until I understand it.’ He talked very rapidly, and I could see he was tense. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot, but I still don’t understand it. I want to talk to you about it. Okay?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘Do you know what I don’t understand about that ball game?

I don’t understand why I wanted to kill you.’ I stared at him.

‘It’s really bothering me.’

‘Well, I should hope so,’ I said.

‘Don’t be so cute, Malter. I’m not being melodramatic. I really wanted to kill you.’

‘Well, it was a pretty hot ball game,’ I said. ‘I didn’t exactly love you myself there for a while.’

‘I don’t think you even know what I’m talking about,’ he said. ‘Now, wait a minute -‘

‘No, listen. Just listen to what I’m saying, will you? Do you remember that second curve you threw me?’

‘Sure.’

‘Do you remember I stood in front of the plate afterwards and looked at you?’

‘Sure.’ I remembered the idiot grin vividly.

‘Well, that’s when I wanted to walk over to you and open your head with my bat: I didn’t know what to say.

‘I don’t know why I didn’t. I wanted to.’

‘That was some ball game,’ I said, a little awed by what he was telling me.

‘It had nothing to do with the ball game,’ he said. ‘At least I don’t think it did. You weren’t the first tough team we played. And we’ve lost before, too. But you really had me going, Malter. I can’t figure it out. Anyway, I feel better telling you about it.’

‘Please stop calling me Malter,’ I said.

He looked at me. Then he smiled faintly. ‘What do you want me to call you?’

‘If you’re going to call me anything, call me Reuven,’ I said. ‘Malter sounds as if you’re a schoolteacher or something.’

‘Okay,’ he said, smiling again. ‘Then you call me Danny.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘It was the wildest feeling,’ he said. ‘I’ve never felt that way before.’

I looked at him, and suddenly I had the feeling that everything around me was out of focus. There was Danny Saunders, sitting on my bed in the hospital dressed in his Hasidic-style clothes and talking about wanting to kill me because I had pitched him some curve balls. He was dressed like a Hasid, but he didn’t sound like one. Also, yesterday I had hated him; now we were calling each other by our first names. I sat and listened to him talk. I was fascinated just listening to the way perfect English came out of a person in the clothes of a Hasid. I had always thought their English was tinged with a Yiddish accent. As a matter of fact, the few times I had ever talked with a Hasid, he had spoken only Yiddish. And here was Danny Saunders talking English, and what he was saying and the way he was saying it just didn’t seem to fit in with the way he was dressed, with the side curls on his face and the fringes hanging down below his dark jacket.

‘You’re a pretty rough fielder and pitcher,’ he said, smiling at me a little.

‘You’re pretty rough yourself,’ I told him. ‘Where did you learn to hit a ball like that?’

‘I practised,’ he said. ‘You don’t know how many hours I spent learning how to field and hit a baseball: ‘Where do you get the time? I thought you people always studied Talmud: He grinned at me. ‘I have an agreement with my father. I study my quota of Talmud every day, and he doesn’t care what I do the rest of the time.’ ‘What’s your quota of Talmud?’

‘Two blatt.’

‘Two blatt?’ I stared at him. That was four pages of Talmud a day. If I did one page a day, I was delighted. ‘Don’t you have any English work at all?’

‘Of course I do. But not too much. We don’t have too much English work at our yeshiva.’

‘Everybody has to do two blatt of Talmud a day and his English?’

‘Not everybody. Only me. My father wants it that way.’

‘How do you do it? That’s a fantastic amount of work.’

‘I’m lucky: He grinned at me. ‘I’ll show you how. What Talmud are you studying now?’

‘Kiddushin,’ I said.

‘What page are you on?’

I told him.

‘I studied that two years ago. Is that what it reads like?’

He recited about a third of the page word for word, including the commentaries and the Maimonidean legal decisions of the Talmudic disputations. He did it coldly, mechanically, and listening to him, I had the feeling I was watching some sort of human machine at work.

I sat there and gaped at him. ‘Say, that’s pretty good,’ I managed to say, finally.

‘I have a photographic mind. My father says it’s a gift from God. I look at a page of Talmud, and I remember it by heart. I understand it, too. After a while, it gets a little boring, though. They repeat themselves a lot. I can do it with Ivanhoe, too. Have you read Ivanhoe?’

‘Sure.’

‘Do you want to hear it with Ivanhoe?’

‘You’re showing off now,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘I’m trying to make a good impression.’

‘I’m impressed,’ I said. ‘I have to sweat to memorize a page of Talmud. Are you going to be a rabbi?’

‘Sure. I’m going to take my father’s place.’

‘I may become a rabbi. Not a Hasidic-type, though.’

He looked at me, an expression of surprise on his face. ‘What do you want to become a rabbi for?’

‘Why not?’

‘There are so many other things you could be.’

‘That’s a funny way for you to talk. You’re going to become a rabbi.’

‘I have no choice. It’s an inherited position.’

‘You mean you wouldn’t become a rabbi if you had a choice?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What would you be?’

‘I don’t know. Probably a psychologist.’

‘A psychologist?’

He nodded.

‘I’m not even sure I know what it’s about.’

‘It helps you understand what a person is really like inside. I’ve read some books on it.’

‘Is that like Freud and psychoanalysis and things like that?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I didn’t know much at all about psychoanalysis, but Danny Saunders, in his Hasidic clothes, seemed to me to be about the last person in the world who would qualify as an analyst. I always pictured analysts as sophisticated people with short pointed beards, monocles, and German accents.

‘What would you be if you didn’t become a rabbi?’ Danny Saunders asked.

‘A mathematician,’ I said. ‘That’s what my father wants me to be.’

‘And teach in a university somewhere?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a very nice thing to be,’ he said. His blue eyes looked dreamy for a moment. ‘I’d like that.’

‘I’m not sure I want to do that, though.’

‘Why not?’

‘I sort of feel I could be more useful to people as a rabbi. To our own people, I mean. You know, not everyone is religious, like you or me. I could teach them, and help them when they’re in trouble. I think I would get a lot of pleasure out of that.’

‘I don’t think I would. Anyway, I’m going to be a rabbi. Say, where did you learn to pitch like that?’

‘I practised, too.’ I grinned at him.

‘But you don’t have to do two blatt of Talmud a day.’

‘Thank God!’

‘You certainly have a mean way of pitching.’

‘How about your hitting? Do you always hit like that, straight to the pitcher?’

‘Yes.’

‘How’d you ever learn to do that?’

‘I can’t hit any other way. It’s got something to do with my eyesight, and with the way I hold the bat.! don’t know.’

‘That’s a pretty murderous way to hit a ball. You almost killed me.’

‘You were supposed to duck,’ he said.

‘I had no chance to duck.’

‘Yes you did.’

‘There wasn’t enough time. You hit it so fast.’

‘There was time for you to bring up your glove.’

I considered that for a moment.

‘You didn’t want to duck.’

‘That’s right,’ I said, after a while.

‘You didn’t want to have to duck any ball that I hit. You had to try and stop it.’

‘That’s right.’ I remembered that fraction of a second when I had brought my glove up in front of my face. I could have jumped aside and avoided the ball completely. I hadn’t thought to do that, though. I hadn’t wanted Danny Saunders to make me look like Schwartzie.

‘Well, you stopped it,’ Danny Saunders said. I grinned at him.

‘No hard feelings anymore?’ he asked me.

‘No hard feelings,’ I said. ‘I just hope the eye heals all right.’

‘I hope so, too,’ he said fervently. ‘Believe me.’

‘Say, who was that rabbi on the bench? Is he a coach or something?’

Danny Saunders laughed. ‘He’s one of the teachers in the yeshiva. My father sends him along to make sure we don’t mix too much with the apikorsim.’

‘That apikorsim thing got me angry at you. What did you have to tell your team a thing like that for?’

‘I’m sorry about that. It’s the only way we could have a team.

I sort of convinced my father you were the best team around ‘and that we had a duty to beat you apikorsim at what you were best at. Something like that.’

‘You really had to tell your father that?’

‘Yes.’

‘What would have happened if you’d lost?’

‘I don’t like to think about that. You don’t know my father.’

‘So you practically had to beat us.’

He looked at me for a moment, and I saw he was thinking of something. His eyes had a kind of cold, glassy look. ‘That’s right,’ he said, finally. He seemed to be seeing something he had been searching for a long time. ‘That’s right,’ he said again.

‘What was he reading all the time?’

‘Who?’

‘The rabbi.’

‘I don’t know. Probably a book on Jewish law or something.’

‘I thought it might have been something your father wrote.’

‘My father doesn’t write,’ Danny said. ‘He reads a lot, but he never writes. He says that words distort what a person really feels in his heart. He doesn’t like to talk too much, either. Oh, he talks plenty when we’re studying Talmud together. But otherwise he doesn’t say much. He told me once he wishes everyone could talk in silence.’

‘Talk in silence?’

‘I don’t understand it either,’ Danny said, shrugging. ‘But that’s what he said.

‘Your father must be quite a man.’

He looked at me. ‘Yes,’ he said, with the same cold, glassy stare, in his eyes. I saw him begin to play absent-mindedly with one of his earlocks. We were quiet for a long time. He seemed absorbed in something. Finally, he stood up. ‘It’s late. I had better go.’

‘Thanks for coming to see me.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow again.’

‘Sure.’

He still seemed to be absorbed in something. I watched him walk slowly up the aisle and out of the ward.

My father came in a few minutes later, looking worse than he had the day before. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes were red, and his face was ashen. He coughed a great deal and kept telling me it was his cold. He sat down on the bed and told me he had talked to Dr Snydman on the phone. ‘He will look at your eye Friday morning, and you will probably be able to come home Friday afternoon. I will come to pick you up when I am through teaching.’

‘That’s wonderful I’ I said.

‘You will not be able to read for about ten days. He told me he will know by then about the scar tissue.’

‘I’ll be happy to be out of this hospital,’ 1 said. ‘I walked around a little today and saw the people on the street outside.’

My father looked at me and didn’t say anything.

‘I wish I was outside now,’ I said. ‘I envy them being able to walk around like that. They don’t know how lucky they are.’

‘No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate,’ my father said quietly. ‘That is the way the world is.’

‘It’ll be good to be home again. At least I won’t have to spend a Shabbat here.’

‘We’ll have a nice Shabbat together,’ my father said. ‘A quiet Shabbat where we can talk and not be disturbed. We will sit and drink tea and talk.’. He coughed a little and put the handkerchief to his mouth. He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes. Then he put them back on and sat on the bed, looking at me. He seemed so tired and pale, as if all his strength had been drained from him.

‘I didn’t tell you yet, abba. Danny Saunders came to see me today.’

My father did not seem surprised. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And?’

‘He’s a very nice person. I like him.’

‘So? All of a sudden you like him.’ He was smiling. ‘What did he say?’

I told him everything I could remember of my conversation with Danny Saunders. Once, as I talked, he began to cough, and I stopped and watched helplessly as his thin frame bent and shook. Then he wiped his lips and eyes, and told me to continue. He listened intently. When I told him that Danny Saunders had wanted to kill me, his eyes went wide, but he didn’t interrupt. When I told him about Danny Saunders’ photographic mind, he nodded as if he had known about that all along. When I described as best I could what we had said about our careers, he smiled indulgently. And when I explained why Danny Saunders had told his team that they would kill us apikorsim, he stared at me and I could see the same look of absorption come into his eyes that I had seen earlier in the eyes of Danny Saunders. Then my father nodded. ‘People are not always what they seem to be,’ he said softly. ‘That is the way the world is, Reuven.’

‘He’s going to come visit me again tomorrow, abba.’

‘Ah,’ my father murmured. He was silent for a moment. Then he said quietly. ‘Reuven, listen to me. The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other?’