The Promise (39 page)

She looked back into the flames. A moment later she said, “It was all lies, you know, the way I was taught by my parents. The parting of the Red Sea and voices from mountain tops and the sun standing still. You cannot ask of a person that he respect intellectual nonsense.” She looked at me again, the flames dancing in her eyes. “You see, for a long time it was all nonsense to me and quite abhorrent. People ought not believe such nonsense in this century.” She gazed into the fire and sipped slowly from her glass of wine. “It can be made to have sense,” she said. “If one has the courage …”

Abraham Gordon returned and sat down on the couch next to his wife. Ruth Gordon looked at me.

“May I get you some more wine, Reuven?”

We sat and talked and had a fine meal and did not mention Michael once. We did not have to mention Michael. We could see him everywhere.

The next day Rav Kalman asked me to remain behind after class.

“How is the son of Gordon?” he asked.

I told him there had been no change.

He sighed and stroked his beard. He was no longer tugging and pulling at it now, but stroking it, his hand with the misshapen fingers moving across it in a rough but not angry caress. “Tell me, Reuven,” he said, leaning toward me. “What is the experiment with the boy? Are you permitted to describe it to me?”

I was not sure whether or not I ought to, but I decided to tell him about it anyway, thinking that there could be no harm in it. I described it.

I saw his mouth drop open as though he had been slapped. “Alone?” he said, sounding as if he were choking on the word. “In a room, alone, by himself? Master of the Universe! Rav Saunders knows what he is doing?”

“Yes.”

“But alone! Master of the Universe! Alone!” He seemed to be writhing in pain and I was frightened for a moment. But he grew quickly calm. He lit a cigarette. His trembling hand showed plainly how agitated he still was, though he gave no other outward indication of his feelings.

“Alone,” I heard him say softly, speaking more to himself than to me. “Master of the Universe, if only one of them had been spared, I would have had someone to talk to. Only one … Was that too much to ask? One … We could have talked about what happened … But there is no one to talk to …” He became aware then of his words and sat up straight, trying to compose himself. His dark eyes were wet. He looked at me and opened his mouth to say something but could not. He dismissed me with a wave of his hand.

I asked around the next day and one of my classmates told me
he lived by himself in a small apartment in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. Why hadn’t he remarried? I asked, and was answered with a shrug. There was talk that something had been done to him in Maidanek, he said.

That Thursday he stormed into the classroom and placed his books on the desk and without opening his Talmud began pacing back and forth, his face wild with rage. He tugged at his beard and paced and smoked and went into a violent and almost incoherent tirade, his arms waving, his eyes bulging, the words coming out in a torrent of raging sarcasm. He had heard there were plans being made for a department of rabbinics in the graduate school where modern methods would be taught. Rabbinics! He uttered the word with shrill contempt. There would be no such department! Not while he was in this school! Rabbinics! They would not defile the Torah as long as he was still within the walls of this yeshiva! What kind of a yeshiva permitted the teaching of rabbinics? He went on like that for about a quarter of an hour. I sat very still and watched him. I had been expecting it and wondered why it had taken him so long to find out. I sat and listened and felt no need to do a logic problem in my head.

When I told my father about it that night, he said quietly, “They will establish the department. I have been told that is now definite. The only question is whether I wish to teach in a school filled with quarrels. It will be oppressive. It will be my own yeshiva again, but on a higher level.”

I asked him if he had any other choice.

“There are other choices,” he said. “But first I will want to think about Hirsch University.”

I told Abraham Gordon about Rav Kalman’s tirade the next Sunday afternoon as we walked through Prospect Park, the sky thick with clouds and the feel of coming snow in the air. He reacted in almost the same way my father had about two weeks earlier after I had told him of Danny’s sudden appearance in the classroom.

“He is trying to save what is left of his world. I can’t blame him.
I wish it could be otherwise. I wish—Ah, what difference does it make what I wish? The concentration camps destroyed a lot more than European Jewry. They destroyed man’s faith in himself. I cannot blame Rav Kalman for being suspicious of man and believing only in God. Why should anyone believe in man? There are going to be decades of chaos until we learn to believe again in man.” He stared at the cloud-filled sky. “I have no one else I
can
believe in,” he said quietly. “But I can understand your Rav Kalman.”

A few minutes later, I asked him how Michael was coming along.

“He sits.”

I stopped and looked at him.

“Daniel calls it an intensification of resistance. He has been the same now for days. He sits on his mattress and stares and is quiet.” I saw his lips quiver. “I find it hard to imagine Michael sitting for days and days, and not—” His voice broke. He turned quickly away from me and his hands brushed across his face.

Two days later Rav Kalman came into the classroom and, together with his books, he carried a copy of
The New York Times
. He put the
Times
away in a drawer of the desk and conducted the shiur. A moment before the end of the class he asked me to stay behind.

He removed the
Times
from the drawer and placed it on top of the desk. He was upset and a little frightened and his face was almost the color of the starched white shirt he had on. He pointed a finger at a headline on the front page.

“What is it?” he asked querulously. “They will die?”

I looked at the story. I had not yet had a chance to see the
Times
that day. The newsstand where I boarded the bus had sold out its copies very early.

The story reported that the death sentence of the Rosenbergs had been upheld by a higher court. The Rosenbergs had been tried for spying against the United States and had been sentenced to death in the electric chair.

“They will die?” he asked again, his voice tremulous.

“Probably,” I said.

“Because they are Jews?” He was really frightened.

“No,” I said. “Because they’re spies.”

“Spies? Only because they are spies?”

“That’s enough,” I said.

“Reuven, there will be—trouble?” His voice was tense with fear.

“What kind of trouble?”

“For Jews.”

“No. There won’t be any trouble for Jews.” Then I realized what was disturbing him. “It doesn’t work like that,” I said, very gently. “There will be no pogroms because of the Rosenbergs.”

He looked at me in disbelief. He had been in the country about two years and he still didn’t understand what it was really all about. He was unable to put aside his blood-filled parcel of memories.

“No pogroms,” I told him. “Do not worry. No pogroms.”

“A strange land,” he murmured, shaking his head. “So much goodness and so much ugliness all in one land …” He looked at me sharply. “You are sure?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I grew up here.”

“A strange land,” he murmured again. “How does one learn to live in such a land?… It is difficult to know what to like and what to dislike … A strange land …” He shook his head in bewilderment.

Irving Goldberg was waiting for me near the coat racks in the synagogue, looking his usual round and solemn self.

“What do the two of you do in there?” he asked.

“We talk.”

“You talk? All those times you’re in there, all you do is talk?”

“What do you think we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“We talk.”

He looked awed. “You and Rav Kalman, you just talk?”

“That’s right.”

“Maybe the Messiah has come and no one knows it.”

“Sure,” I said.

“What do you talk about?”

“Dybbuks,” I said.

He gaped at me.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

It snowed that Shabbat and my father and I remained home all day and studied Talmud together. It snowed all day and into the night, and the next morning the city lay like a crippled giant beneath almost five inches of snow. On Sunday afternoon we began to hear the snow trucks moving through the streets and that evening my father and I walked carefully through the snow that had drifted high against the houses and stores on Lee Avenue. We turned into the block where Reb Saunders lived and by the time we were halfway down that block we were caught up in a steady stream of dark-clothed, bearded, fur-capped Hasidim, all of them going to Reb Saunders’s synagogue.

It was my father who had urged me to make Danny my friend during the days I lay in the hospital hating him for turning the baseball game into a war between our teams and for sending that ball into my eye—and my father had never yet been inside that synagogue. Some weeks before the game, he had met Danny on the third floor of a public library, had watched him reading novels, books on psychology, Darwin, a boy dressed in the garb of a Hasid reading forbidden books, hungrily, swiftly, as if he were swallowing the pages. Then Danny had hesitantly approached my father and asked him to recommend more books for him to read, and they had sat in the library and talked—and my father discovered that Danny was able to remember by heart every word he read. He told no one, not even me, of Danny’s visits to the library—until
the day they had both come to see me at the same time in the hospital. That had been more than seven years ago. In all those years my father had never met Reb Saunders. Now we were going to Reb Saunders’s synagogue. We had been invited to participate in the celebration of the tenaim, the ceremony that would mark the engagement of Danny and Rachel.

About ten feet away from the stone staircase that led up to the brownstone where Reb Saunders lived, we were stopped by a solid wall of jostling Hasidim. I started to push my way in, then stopped. I did not want my father to have to move through that crowd. My father looked at me and saw my concern and was about to say something when I felt a tug on the sleeve of my coat. A young Hasid in his late teens stood alongside me. He had on a dark coat and a black hat and his pale face was covered by a scraggly black beard.

“You are Malter?” he asked in Yiddish.

I nodded.

“Come with me,” he said, and proceeded to elbow his way gently but firmly through the crowd, opening a path that enabled us to move with some ease and that closed behind each step we took. We were swallowed by Hasidim. Holding on to my father’s arm, I wondered how the Hasid had been able to find us in the crowd, and then realized he had simply been told to look for two people in ordinary clothes. We came up the crowded staircase and into the crowded hallway and then into the packed synagogue where it seemed no one could get through the mass of Hasidim jamming the chairs and the aisles and the benches—but we kept moving behind the young Hasid, somehow the crowd kept parting and we kept moving until we were seated in a front row of seats facing a long table and chairs that had been placed in the middle of the synagogue. The rows of seats formed a rectangle around the table and chairs. Beyond the seats to my left was the podium and beyond that was the Ark. Along the walls in the rear of the synagogue there were long tables and chairs. Between the back row of seats to my right and the long tables was an open space that
was filled with Hasidim. There were no women in the synagogue, only men and boys. The women were in another room somewhere with Rachel and her mother, celebrating by themselves. I thought of Rachel and her mother surrounded by Hasidic women. Rachel and her passion for James Joyce and county fairs surrounded by Hasidic women. I couldn’t picture it.

The noise inside the synagogue was loud, almost deafening, a crescendo of joy accompanied by faces that seemed frenzied with happiness. It moved in huge waves between the walls of the synagogue, ecstatic, pulsing, and my father and I sat quietly, watching, listening, and I felt the joy of the night move through me as something quite tangible and was suddenly struck with peculiar bittersweet force by the thought that Danny—Danny!—was becoming engaged. I must have had a strange look on my face for I saw my father gazing at me and smiling somewhat sadly. I was about to ask him how it felt to be in the midst of the holy of holies—my father cared very little for the frenetic zealousness of Hasidism and even less for the tzaddikim who were its leaders—when I saw him notice someone sitting in the row of seats on the other side of the long table and raise his hand in greeting. I looked and saw Abraham Gordon. He was seated in the second row across from us, surrounded by caftan-garbed, dark-bearded men. He wore a dark suit and a white shirt and dark tie, and I had not seen him earlier because of the crowd that kept milling around the table. He saw my father and his face broke into a smile and he returned the greeting with a wave of his hand. I wondered who had brought him inside. I wondered if a young Hasid had been instructed to meet him too in the crowd in front of the brownstone and to ask him, “Are you Gordon?” My father seemed deeply moved to see Abraham Gordon there. I saw him smile to himself and nod his head, and was surprised to discover that he appeared not all uncomfortable in the midst of this tumultuous, jostling, liquid crowd. I caught glimpses of Abraham Gordon; he sat very still, gazing straight ahead of him, a pale smile on his face. There was a small, dark skullcap on his balding head. His heavy shoulders and
tall body stood out quite sharply against the shorter caftan-garbed men who surrounded him.