The Chosen

When the school year ended and July came around, I went over to Da

Reb Saunders sat in his straight-backed red leather chair surrounded by books and the musty odor of old bindings. His face seemed lined with pain, but his voice was soft when he greeted me. He was, he said quietly, very happy to see me. He hesitated, looked at me, then at Da

That was all he said. Not a word about Zionism. Not a word about the silence he had imposed upon Da

Chapter 17

Our last year of college began that September. Over lunch one day I told Da

I realized immediately what I had said, and felt myself go cold.

I muttered a helpless apology.

For a long moment, he said nothing. His eyes seemed glazed, turned inward. Then his face slowly relaxed. He smiled faintly. 'There's more truth to that than you realize,' he murmured. 'You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all it's own. It talks to me somtimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.'

The words came out in a soft singsong. He sounded exactly like his father.

'You don't understand that, do you?' he asked.

'No.'

He nodded. 'I didn't think you would.'

'What do you mean, it talks to you?'

'You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes – sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.'

I felt myself go cold again, hearing him talk that way. 'I don't understand that at all.'

He smiled faintly.

'Are you and your father talking these days?' He shook his head.

I didn't understand any of it, but he seemed so somber and strange that I didn't want to talk about it anymore. I changed the subject. 'You ought to get yourself a girl,' I told him. I was dating regularly now on Saturday nights. 'It's a wonderful tonic for a suffering soul.'

He looked at me, his eyes sad. 'My wife has been chosen for me.' he said quietly.

I gaped at him.

'It's an old Hasidic custom, remember?'

'It never occurred to me,' I said, shocked.

He nodded soberly. 'That's another reason it won't be so easy to break out of the trap. It doesn't only involve my own family: I didn't know what to say. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. And we walked together in that silence to Rav Gershenson's shiur.

Da

Levi Saunders was now tall and thin. He seemed a ghostly imitation of Da

As if to emphasize the tenuousness of Levi Saunders' existence, he became violently ill the day following his bar mitzvah and was taken by ambulance to the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital. Da

My father apparently had heard my troubled voice, because he was standing now outside the kitchen, asking me what was wrong.

I told him.

We resumed our supper. I wasn't very hungry now, but I ate anyway to keep Manya happy. My father noticed how disturbed I was, but he said nothing. After the meal, he followed me into my room, sat on my bed while I sat at my desk, and asked me what was wrong, why was I so upset by Levi Saunders' illness, he had been ill before.

It was at that point that I told my father of Da

My father's face became more and more grim as he listened.

When I was done, he sat for a long time in silence, his eyes grave. 'When did Da

'The summer I lived in their house.'

'That long ago? He knew already that long ago?'

'Yes.'

'And all this time you did not tell me?'

'It was a secret between us, abba.'

He looked at me grimly. 'Does Da

'He dreads the day he'll have to tell him. He dreads it for both of them.'

'I knew it would happen,' my father said. 'How could it not happen?' Then he looked at me sharply. 'Reuven, let me understand this. Exactly what is Da