The Chosen

'Do you want to hear any more of this?' I asked Billy. He didn't answer, and I saw he was sleeping.

'Turn it off, kid: Mr Savo said. 'How much of that junk can a guy take?'

I turned off the radio and lay back on my pillow.

'Never knew people could get clopped so hard the way they clop them on those soap operas,' Mr Savo said. 'Wen. well, look who's here.'

'Who?' I sat up.

'Your real religious clopper.'

I saw it was Danny Saunders. He came up the aisle and stood alongside my bed, wearing the same clothes he had the day before.

'Are you going to get angry at me again?' he asked hesitantly.

'No,' I said.

'Can I sit down?'

'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 basebalclass="underline" '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.'