The Chosen

'No,' he said.

'No indication at all?'

'No, I get nothing from him but silence.'

'Is he silent with Levi, too?'

'No.'

'Was he silent with your sister?'

'No.'

'I don't like your father,' I told him. 'I don't like him at all.'

Danny said nothing. But his eyes blinked his fear.

A few days later, he told me, 'My father asked me why you're not coming over anymore on Shabbat.'

'He talked to you?'

'He didn't talk. That isn't talking.'

'I study Talmud on Shabbat.'

'I know.'.

'I'm not too eager to see him.'

He nodded unhappily.

'Have you decided which university you're going to?'

'Columbia.'

'Why don't you tell him and get it over with?'

'I'm afraid.'

'What difference does it make? If he's going to throw you out of the house, he'll do it no matter when you tell him.'

'I'll have my degree in June. I'll be ordained.'

'You can live with us. No, you can't. You won't eat at our house.'

'I could live with my sister.'

'Yes.'

'I'm afraid. I'm afraid of the explosion. I'm afraid of any time I'll have to tell him. God, I'm afraid.'

My father would say nothing when I talked to him about it. 'It is for Reb Saunders to explain,' he told me quietly. 'I cannot explain what I do not completely understand. I cannot do it with my students, and I cannot do it with my son.'

A few days later, Danny told me that his father had asked again why I wasn't coming over to their house anymore.

'I'll try to get over,' I said.

But I didn't try very hard. I didn't want to see Reb Saunders.

I hated him as much now as I had when he had forced his silence between me and Danny.

The weeks passed and winter melted slowly into spring. Danny was working on an experimental psychology project that had to do with the relationship between reinforcement and rapidity of learning, and I was doing a long paper on the logic of ought statements. Danny pushed himself relentlessly in his work. He grew thin and gaunt, and the angles and bones of his face and hands jutted like sharp peaks from beneath his skin. He stopped talking about the silence between him and his father. He seemed to be shouting down the silence with his work. Only his constantly blinking eyes gave any indication of his mounting terror.

The day before the start of the Passover school vacation period, he told me that his father had asked him once again why I wasn't coming over to their house anymore. Could I possibly come over on Passover? he had wanted to know. He especially wanted to see me the first or second day of Passover.

'I'll try,' I said half heartedly, without the slightest intention of trying at all.

But when I talked to my father that night, he said, with a strange sharpness in his voice, 'You did not tell me Reb Saunders has been asking to see you.'

'He's been asking all along.'

'Reuven, when someone asks to speak to you, you must let him speak to you. You still have not learned that? You did not learn that from what happened between you and Danny?'

'He wants to study Talmud, abba.'

'You are sure?'

'That's all we've ever done when I go over there.'

'You only study Talmud? You have forgotten so quickly?'

I stared at him. 'He wants to talk to me about Danny,' I said, and felt myself turn cold.

'You will go over the first day of the holiday. On Sunday.'

'Why didn't he tell me?'

'Reuven, he did tell you. You have not been listening: 'All these weeks – '

'Listen next time. Listen when someone speaks to you.'

'Maybe I should go over tonight.'

'No. They will be busy preparing for the holiday.'

'I'll go over on Shabbat.'

'Reb Saunders asked you to come on Passover.'

'I told him we study Talmud on Shabbat.'

'You will go on Passover. He has a reason if he asked you to come especially on Passover. And listen next time when someone speaks to you, Reuven.'

He was angry, as angry as he had been in the hospital years ago when I had refused to talk to Danny.

I called Danny and told him I would be over on Sunday.

He sensed something in my voice. 'What's wrong?'

'Nothing's wrong. I'll see you on Sunday.'

'Nothing's wrong?' His voice was tight, apprehensive.

'No.'

'Come over around four,' he said. 'My father needs to rest in the early afternoons.'

'Four.'

'Nothing's wrong?'

'I'll see you on Sunday,' I told him.

Chapter 18

On the afternoon of the first day of Passover, I walked beneath the early spring sycamores on my street, then turned into Lee Avenue. The sun was warm and bright, and I went along slowly, past the houses and the shops and the synagogue where my father and I prayed. I met one of my classmates and we stopped to talk for a few minutes; then I went on alone, turning finally into Danny's street. The sycamores formed a tangled bower through which the sun shone brightly, speckling the ground. There were tiny buds on these leaves. In a month, those leaves would shut out the sky, but now the sun came through and brushed streaks of gold across the sidewalks, the street, the talking women, and the playing children. I walked along slowly. remembering the first. time I had gone up this street years ago. Those years were coming to an end now. In three months, in a time when the leaves would be fat and full, our lives would separate like the branches overhead that made their own way into the sunlight.

I went slowly up the wide stone staircase of Danny's house and through the wooden double door of the entrance. The hall way was dim and cold. The synagogue door stood open. I peered inside. Its emptiness whispered echoes at me: mistakes, gematriya, Talmud quizes, and Reb Saunders staring at my left eye. You do not know yet what it is to be a friend. Scientific criticism, ah! Your father is an observer of the Commandments. It is not easy to be a true friend. Soft, silent echoes. It seemed tiny to me now, the synagogue, so much less neat than when I had seen it for the first time. The stands were scarred, the walls needed paint, the naked light bulbs seemed ugly, their bare, black wires like the dead branches of a stunted tree. What echoes will Reb Saunders'study have? I thought. And I felt myself go tight with apprehension.

I stood at the foot of the inner stairway and called Danny's name. My voice moved heavily through the silent house. I waited a moment, then called his name again. I heard the tapping of metal-capped shoes upon the third-floor stairway, then in the hallway over my head; and then Danny was standing at the head of the stairs, tall, gaunt, an almost spectral figure with his beard and earlocks and black satin caftan.

I climbed the stairs slowly, and he greeted me. He looked tired.

His mother was resting, he said, and his brother was out somewhere. He and his father were studying Talmud. His voice was dull, flat, only faintly edged with fear. But his eyes mirrored clearly what his voice concealed.

We went up to the third floor. Danny seemed to hesitate before the door to his father's study, almost as if he was wishing not to have to go back in there again. Then he opened the door, and we stepped inside.

It had been almost a year since I had last been inside Reb Saunders' study, but nothing about it had changed. There was the same massive, black wood, glass-topped desk, the same red carpet, the same glass-enclosed wooden bookcases jammed tight with books, the same musty old-book odor in the air, the same single light bulb glowing white behind its ceiling fixture. Nothing had really changed – nothing, except Reb Saunders himself.

He sat in his straight-backed, red leather chair and looked at me from behind the desk. His beard had gone almost completely gray, and he sat stooped forward, bent, as though he were carrying something on his shoulders. His brow was crisscrossed with wrinkles, his dark eyes brooded and burned with some kind of invisible suffering, and the fingers of his right hand played aimlessly with a long, gray earlock.