The Promise (23 page)

“Mr. Saunders. He’s nice. I like him. Does he always wear a skullcap? He’s very religious. I think he’s more religious than you are. But he’s honest and I like him.”

“Then talk to him, Michael.”

“About what? What do they want me to talk about?”

“Aren’t there things that are bothering you?”

“I can’t talk about that.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“But why not, Michael?”

“I don’t know. I can’t.” He tore off another piece of the leaf and shredded it between his fingers. “Listen, Reuven. I want to go home. Can’t you tell them to let me go home?”

“I can’t do anything like that, Michael.”

“How do I get out of here? Am I supposed to be here all my life?”

“Talk to Mr. Saunders about it.”

“You won’t help me?”

“I think we had better go back. It’s getting dark.”

“Okay,” he said quietly. He closed the palm of his left hand over the remaining portion of the leaf and crushed it and let it fall slowly to the ground. He looked at the pagoda. “I don’t think I’m going to invite you to visit us. I don’t think I’d want that at all.”

He walked off. I followed behind him. A few feet before the wide stone staircase in front of the house, he stopped abruptly and turned to me.

“Did you read that article?”

“Rav Kalman’s?”

“Did you read it?”

“Of course.”

“Why does he say those things about my father?”

“He disagrees with him, Michael.”

“But why does he have to say those things about him? My
father is killing himself for religion. Why does he say those things?”

“That’s the way Rav Kalman expresses himself, Michael. You shouldn’t take it so seriously.”

“But they’re all like that, Reuven. Why are they all like that?”

I did not say anything.

“I don’t understand it. I don’t understand any of it.”

He started up the stone stairway. I walked alongside him. We were almost to the wooden double door at the head of the stairs when it was opened from inside and Ruth and Abraham Gordon came quickly out. Michael saw them and ran up the few remaining steps and I saw Abraham Gordon, hatless, his coat collar raised—I saw Abraham Gordon spread his arms wide and then close his arms around his son in a tight embrace. They embraced a long time and Abraham Gordon kissed his son on the forehead and then Michael embraced his mother and kissed her and I could see they were all fighting back their tears. Abraham Gordon put his arm around Michael’s shoulders and turned his head to me and nodded toward the door, and I followed them through the door and the foyer and into the living room. We sat on a couch near one of the windows. The living room was almost empty. I sat very still and listened to Michael and his parents talk. Did he need anything? his mother asked him gently. She looked very beautiful in a dark-blue woolen suit and a small white hat over her chestnut hair. But she seemed fatigued and there were dark circles under her eyes. No, he did not need anything, Michael replied. Why wasn’t he eating? she asked. Michael stared down at the carpeted floor and was silent. Had he read the Hebrew books they brought him last time? his father asked. Not yet, Michael said. Did he want any more books on astronomy? Yes. Was he able to use his telescope? Sometimes. The talk moved on to the activities of relatives and friends. They talked quietly together, intimate family talk, and finally Ruth Gordon turned to me and asked how the visit had been, and before I could respond Michael said, “It was a wonderful
visit. Reuven promised to come next Sunday too. Didn’t you, Reuven?”

I had made no such promise. But I nodded.

“I’m so very pleased you had a good visit,” Ruth Gordon said.

“When can I go home?” Michael asked suddenly.

Abraham and Ruth Gordon looked at each other uncomfortably.

“Not for a while yet,” Abraham Gordon said quietly.

Michael did not ask them again. They talked a while longer about some of the trips Abraham Gordon was making to universities and the book he was writing and how Mother was up very late every night editing the manuscript and how much they missed him. They loved him very much and concealed none of their feelings from him and at one point there were tears in all their eyes and Ruth Gordon cried silently and Abraham Gordon put his arm around her shoulders and Michael looked at his mother and I saw tears flowing down his cheeks.

Then we were putting on our coats and Michael came with us to the door. We stood inside the foyer. Michael embraced his parents. I shook his hand.

“Will you come next week, Reuven?” he asked eagerly.

“Sure.”

“Maybe you can stay late and we can look at the stars through my telescope.”

“I can’t next week, Michael. It’s the first night of Hanukkah. I’ll want to be home with my father.”

“That’s right,” Abraham Gordon said. “We’ll light the candles in your room, Michael.”

“They won’t let you. You can’t have any kind of matches or fires in the rooms.”

Abraham Gordon stared at him. Ruth Gordon looked down at the floor.

“We’ll arrange something, son. We’ll stay until the candles go out.”

“Reuven, will you have dinner with us sometime during Hanukkah?” Ruth Gordon asked.

I looked at her.

“We would so like to have you. A week from tomorrow night.”

I saw Michael looking at me.

“We’ve hardly even talked,” she said. “Do have dinner with us next Monday night.”

Michael was looking at me intently, his blue eyes narrow. I did not know what to say.

“Reuven is a busy young man,” Abraham Gordon said.

I felt Michael’s eyes on my face. It was quite warm in the foyer and I was sweating inside my coat.

I told them I would be very happy to accept their invitation.

Michael’s face broke into a delighted smile and I saw his eyes shining. He looked suddenly a different person. His parents saw it too. I was not certain I understood why, but there was the same light in his eyes now I had seen during the times we had gone sailing—that private blinding sun shining out again from behind his eyes. And he was still looking like that when his parents and I went out the door.

We came silently down the stone stairs and walked through the grounds to the street. The sky was very pale now with the last remnants of the day’s light.

“I owe you a great deal, Reuven,” Abraham Gordon said quietly.

I told him he didn’t owe me anything.

“Everything gets balanced out sooner or later,” he said. “One day I’ll be able to repay you.”

I was quiet. His round, fleshy face was red with cold. He had his hands in his pockets and the coat collar up around his neck.

“How well do you know Daniel Saunders?” he asked softly.

I told him I knew him very well.

“Are you still very close?”

“Yes. I don’t get to see him too often though.”

“He’s incredibly brilliant. Tell me something. Why did he rebel against taking his father’s position?”

“He wanted to study psychology.”

“Why?”

“He liked it.”

“He is still very much a Hasid, isn’t he? Except for the beard and the clothes.”

“Yes.”

“But he seems an enlightened Hasid, almost a Lubavitcher.”

“I suppose so.”

“I have great regard for the Lubavitcher Hasidim. They’re not afraid of the twentieth century.”

“I suppose he thinks a lot like the Lubavitcher Hasidim.”

“He might not have rebelled were his father a Lubavitcher.”

“I don’t know. I think he would have rebelled anyway.”

“Yes?”

“His mind forced him to rebel.”

“His mind.”

“He felt trapped.”

“His mind felt trapped?”

“Yes.”

“That’s interesting. I have the impression it was his soul that felt trapped.”

I looked at him.

“It’s his soul that interests me, not his mind.” He smiled sadly. “Does that sound strange coming from Abraham Gordon?”

“Abe, we can talk on Monday night,” Ruth Gordon broke in quietly. “There’s the meeting we must get to.”

“That’s right. Also, I’m freezing. I should have listened to you and put on my long underwear. I don’t listen to her enough, Reuven. Good night.”

I watched them walk up the street, two very tall people, walking quickly and close together, their dark coats looking fused in the disappearing twilight.

I got home after six o’clock. My father was eating supper. I
washed my hands and sat down at the kitchen table and received one of Manya’s stern frowns, my reward for coming late. The frowns got darker and more frequent as I ate and told my father all that had happened that day. Manya had definite ideas about how her meals were to be eaten. They excluded excessive conversation. It was bad for the stomach and it let the food get cold.

I ate and talked and my father ate and listened and Manya stood in front of the stove and frowned.

“I thought it would come to that, Reuven,” my father said quietly after a brief silence. “I am not surprised. The influence of those who came after the war is felt everywhere. I am only surprised it did not happen sooner. Reuven, you will have dinner with the Gordons?”

“Yes. I couldn’t say no. You had to have seen Michael’s face.”

He was silent.

“What do I do?”

“What do you do? I do not know what to tell you. You must make your own choice. You are a man, not a child, and a man must make his own choice.” He seemed strangely tense and resigned. “I cannot help you, Reuven.”

“I want smicha. But I’m not going to lie to get it.”

“They are so rigid,” he said in a sudden angry voice. “Why do they not see that this rigidity turns away our greatest minds?” His face was gray. “Our greatest young minds,” he said. “We lose the best we have.”

Manya turned to look at him. I saw him put his hand over his chest.

“Are you all right, abba?”

Manya said something to him in Russian. He responded in Russian. She went quickly from the kitchen.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

He closed his eyes and sat in the chair and did not answer. Manya returned with a bottle of pills, babbling excitedly in Russian. He swallowed a pill and some water. He sat quietly for a
moment, his eyes closed. Then he took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

“Nothing,” he said. “A spasm. I am fine.”

I sat there and stared at him. Manya said something in Russian to both of us. My father smiled again and picked up his fork.

“No more talking,” he said. “Until we are done eating. Very strict orders.”

“Are you all right now?”

“Yes.”

“Should I call Dr. Grossman?”

“No. If we called Dr. Grossman every time I had a spasm we would be paupers. Eat your food, Reuven. We will talk after the meal.”

But he was very tired by the time the meal was over, and he went immediately to bed.

I sat at my desk in my room and studied Talmud. Then I worked on some logic problems. Then I thought I would call Danny and I dialed his number but there was no answer. I went back to my desk and studied some more Talmud and did some more logic problems. At about nine thirty I went into my father’s room and saw he was asleep. I left a note on the kitchen table in case he should waken and put on my hat and coat and went out of the apartment. I needed to walk. I walked for over an hour along Lee Avenue, past the shops of the Hasidim, some of which were still open. It was dark and cold and an icy wind blew along the street and sent the black city dust swirling across the sidewalks and there were many Hasidim on the street and I listened to their Hungarian Yiddish and they seemed strange to me, so far apart from me, though they were my own people and we shared the same distant origins and studied the same Torah. I walked past the synagogue where my father and I prayed and on past the block where Danny’s father lived and thought how these remnants of the concentration camps had changed the face of things. They were the remnants, the zealous guardians of the spark. And now
everything traditional was being drawn toward that zealousness. They had changed everything merely by surviving and crossing an ocean. They had brought that spark to the broken streets of Williamsburg, and men like Rav Kalman who were not Hasidim felt swayed by their presence and believed themselves to be equally zealous guardians of the spark, and no one at Hirsch would fight them because the spark was precious, it was all that was left after the blood and the slaughter, and you dimmed it when you fought its defenders. It had been merely a matter of time for me. I had not really seen it until now, but it had only been a matter of time until it all caught up to me. Now it had caught up because I had been seen in the Zechariah Frankel Seminary working on my father’s book and I was in the middle and my father could not help me and I walked the Williamsburg streets in the cold and the wind and did not know what to do.

He did not call on me to read but he asked me to remain behind after class. He had my father’s book with him and when we were alone he motioned me alongside him and I pulled over a chair and we sat together behind the desk. He moved the Talmud aside and opened the book.

“Tell me what this means, Malter. I do not understand the difficulty your father sees in this passage.”

I explained it to him. He stroked his beard and listened and then looked down a long time at the book.

“Yes,” he murmured. “I understand. But it is not necessary to change the words in order to obtain that meaning from the Gemora.”

I told him the words as they stood could not possibly have that meaning. There was a problem with the Aramaic grammar, I said.

“Explain the problem, Malter.”

It was a very technical problem and I tried to make it as simple as possible.

“I understand,” he said. “I understand. For grammar you change the words.”

I decided not to respond to that and glanced at my wristwatch.

“You are in a hurry?” he asked.

I told him I had a logic exam in five minutes.

“Ah,” he said. “A logic examination. But you came prepared today, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Go take your logic examination, Malter.”

I left him behind his desk and raced up to my logic class and did quite well in the exam.