The Chosen by Chaim Potok

  “My father said in a few days.”

  ‘Well, that’s great. You’re a lucky boy. It could’ve been a lot worse.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I wondered if he knew about the scar tissue and didn’t want to talk to me about it. I decided not to mention it; he was looking a little sad and uneasy, and I didn’t want to make him any more uncomfortable than he already was.

  “Well, I got to go teach a class, trooper. Take care of yourself and get out of here soon.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you for everything and for coming to see me.”

  “Anything for one of my troopers,” he said.

  I watched him walk away slowly up the aisle.

  “It’s too bad he couldn’t be a soldier,” Billy said. “My father isn’t a soldier, but that’s because my mother was killed in the accident and there’s no one else to take care of me and my little sister.”

  I looked at him and didn’t say anything.

  “I think I’ll sleep a little now,” Billy said. “Would you turn off the radio?”

  “Sure, Billy.”

  I saw him put his palms under his head on the pillow and lie there, staring vacantly up at the ceiling.

  I lay back and after a few minutes of thinking about Mr. Galanter I fell asleep. I dreamed about my left eye and felt very frightened. I thought I could see sunlight through the closed lid of my right eye, and I dreamed about waking up in the hospital yesterday, afternoon and the nurse moving the curtain away. Now something was blocking the sunlight. Then the sunlight was back again, and I could see it in my sleep through the lid of my right eye. Then it was gone again, and I felt myself getting a little angry at whoever was playing with the sunlight. I opened my eye and saw someone standing alongside my bed. Whoever it was stood silhouetted against the sunlight, and for a moment I couldn’t make out the face. Then I sat up quickly.

  “Hello,” Danny Saunders said softly. “I’m sorry if I woke you. The nurse told me it was all right to wait here.”

  I looked at him in amazement. He was the last person in the world I had expected to visit me in the hospital.

  “Before you tell me how much you hate me,” he said quietly, “let me tell you that I’m sorry about what happened.”

  I stared at him and didn’t know what to say. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt open at the collar, and a dark skullcap. I could see the earlocks hanging down alongside his sculptured face and the fringes outside the trousers below the jacket.

  “I don’t hate you,” I managed to say, because I thought it was time for me to say something even if what I said was a lie.

  He smiled sadly. “Can I sit down? I’ve been standing here about fifteen minutes waiting for you to wake up.”

  I sort of nodded or did something with my head, and he took it as a sign of approval and sat down on the edge of the bed to my right. The sun streamed in from the windows behind him, and shadows lay over his face and accentuated the lines of his cheeks and jaw. I thought he looked a little like the pictures I had seen of Abraham Lincoln before he grew the beard—except for the small tufts of sand-colored hair on his chin and cheeks, the close-cropped hair on his head, and the side curls. He seemed ill at ease, and his eyes blinked nervously.

  “What do they say about the scar tissue?” he asked.

  I was astonished all over again. “How did you find out about that?”

  “I called your father last night. He told me.”

  “They don’t know anything about it yet. I might be blind in that eye.”

  He nodded slowly and was silent.

  “How does it feel to know you’ve made someone blind in one eye?” I asked him. I had recovered from my surprise at his presence and was feeling the anger beginning to come back.

  He looked at me, his sculptured face expressionless. “What do you want me to say?” His voice wasn’t angry, it was sad. “You want me to say I’m miserable? Okay, I’m miserable.”

  “That’s all? Only miserable? How do you sleep nights?”

  He looked down at his hands. “I didn’t come here to fight with you,” he said softly. “If you want to do nothing but fight, I’m going to go home.”

  “For my part,” I told him, “you can go to hell, and take your whole snooty bunch of Hasidim along with you!”

  He looked at me and sat still. He didn’t seem angry, just sad. His silence made me all the angrier, and finally I said, “What the hell are you sitting there for? I thought you said you were going home!”

  “I came to talk to you,” he said quietly.

  “Well, I don’t want to listen,” I told him. “Why don’t you go home? Go home and be sorry over my eye!”

  He stood up slowly. I could barely see his face because of the sunlight behind him. His shoulders seemed bowed.

  “I am sorry,” he said quietly.

  “I’ll just bet you are,” I told him.

  He started to say something, stopped, then turned and walked slowly away up the aisle. I lay back on the pillow, trembling a little and frightened over my own anger and hate.

  “He a friend of yours?” I heard Mr. Savo ask me.

  I turned to him. He was lying with his head on his pillow.

  “No,” I said.

  “He give you a rough time or something? You don’t sound so good, Bobby boy.”

  “He’s the one who hit me in the eye with the ball.”

  Mr. Savo’s face brightened. “No kidding? The clopper himself. Well, well!”

  “I think I’ll get some more sleep,” I said.

  I was feeling depressed. “He one of these real religious Jews?” Mr. Savo asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve seen them around. My manager had an uncle like that. Real religious guy. Fanatic. Never had anything to do with my manager, though. Small loss. Some lousy manager.”

  I didn’t feel like having a conversation just then, so I remained silent. I was feeling a little regretful that I had been so angry with Danny Saunders.

  I saw Mr. Savo sit up and take the deck of cards from his night table. He began to set up his rows on the blanket. I noticed Billy was asleep. I lay back in my bed and closed my eyes. But I couldn’t sleep.

  • • •

  My father came in a few minutes after supper, looking pale and worn. When I told him about my conversation with Danny Saunders, his eyes became angry behind the glasses.

  “You did a foolish thing, Reuven,” he told me sternly. “You remember what, the Talmud says. If a person comes to apologize for having hurt you, you must listen and forgive him.”

  “I couldn’t help it, abba.”

  “You hate him so much you could say those things to him?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling miserable.

  He looked at me and I saw his eyes were suddenly sad. “I did not intend to scold you,” he said.

  “You weren’t scolding,” I defended him.

  “What I tried to tell you, Reuven, is that when a person comes to talk to you, you should be patient and listen. Especially if he has hurt you in any way. Now, we will not talk anymore tonight about Reb Saunders’ son. This is an important day in the history of the world. It is the beginning of the end for Hitler and his madmen; Did you hear the announcer on the boat describing the invasion?”

  We talked for a while about the invasion. Finally, my father left, and I lay back in my bed, feeling depressed and angry with myself over what I had said to Danny Saunders.

  Billy’s father had come to see him again, and they were talking quietly. He glanced at me and smiled warmly. He was a fine-looking person, and I noticed he had a long white scar on his forehead running parallel to the line of his light blond hair.

  “Billy tells me you’ve been very nice to him,” he said to me.

  I sort of nodded my head on the pillow and tried to smile back.

  “I appreciate that very much,” he said. “Billy wonders if you would call us when he gets out of the hospital.”

  “Sure,” I said.


  “We’re in the phone book. Roger Merrit. Billy says that after his operation, when he can see again, he would like to see what you look like.”

  “Sure, I’ll give you a call,” I said.

  “Did you hear that, Billy?”

  “Yes,” Billy said happily. “Didn’t I tell you he was nice, Daddy?”

  The man smiled at me, then turned back to Billy. They went on talking quietly.

  I lay in the bed and thought about all the things that had happened during the day, and felt sad and depressed.

  • • •

  The next morning, Mrs. Carpenter told me I could get out of bed and walk around a bit. After breakfast, I went out into the hall for a while. I looked out a window and saw people outside on the street. I stood there, staring out the window a long time. Then I went back to my bed and lay down.

  I saw Mr. Savo sitting up in his bed, playing cards and grinning.

  “How’s it feel to be on your feet, Bobby boy?” he asked me.

  “It feels wonderful. I’m a little tired, though.”

  “Take it real slow, kid. Takes a while to get the old strength back.”

  One of the patients near the radio at the other end of the ward let out a shout. I leaned over and turned on my radio. The announcer was talking about a breakthrough on one of the beaches.

  “That’s clopping them!” Mr. Savo said, grinning broadly.

  I wondered what that beach must look like now, and I could see it filled with broken vehicles and dead soldiers.

  I spent the morning listening to the radio. When Mrs. Carpenter came over, I asked her how long I would be in the hospital, and she smiled and said Dr. Snydman would have to decide that. “Dr. Snydman will see you Friday morning,” she added.

  I was beginning to feel a lot less excited over the war news and a lot more annoyed that I couldn’t read. In the afternoon, I listened to some of the soap operas—Life Can Be Beautiful, Stella Dallas, Mary Noble, Ma Perkins—and what I heard depressed me even more. I decided to turn off the radio and get some sleep.

  “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. “Well, 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 practiced,” he said. “You don’t know how many hours I spent learning how to field and hit a baseball.”

  “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.
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  “I studied that two years ago. Is this 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.