by Chaim Potok
“I’m only reading, Papa.”
“Yes,” he said. “I see how you are only reading. Your Uncle David was also always only reading.” He was silent a moment, wreathed in memories. Then he put down his glass and said, looking at the surface of the table, “We owe the dead an obligation. That is the most difficult job of all. When two people believe in the same thing and fight for it and one dies and the other lives—what a debt he owes. I wonder if goyim understand this.” He stared down at the table. “I wonder how many Jews understand this.” After a moment he said, “Yes, Jews understand this. They may not do anything. But they understand it. I try to pay my debts. That is how my father was, and that is how I am. I will owe my little brother nothing.” He lapsed again into silence. Pools of darkness had formed around his eyes. “I loved him,” he murmured. “I was wild. My uncles called me a goy. I played with goyim and fought with them. I was more with them than I was with Jews. I loved their-wildness. My little brother taught me a little about gentleness. Not enough. It is an effort for me to be gentle. Then the war came and he was married and the goyim killed him. He was the kindest and gentlest person I have ever known. The stupid goyim. They killed the wrong Jew. They should have tried to kill me. I am the threat to goyim. Instead the fools killed him. Stupid goyim. What did they care? Another dead Jew they could laugh about as they got drunk. The stinking bastard idiotic goyim.” All the weariness had washed off him as he spoke. He sat straight, his short stocky figure rigid, and turned upon me dark burning eyes. “I owe you a debt. It was my fault your mother fell when she carried you. Your injury was my fault. No matter what your mother may say to you, it was my fault. I should have supported her arm. I will pay part of my debt to you this summer with your operation. I am not able to repay you for your years of suffering. There are a few debts in this world that cannot be repaid. I can only ask you to forgive me. I also ask you to remember whose name you carry. It is the name of my dead little brother. You want to fight the goyim with words? All right. Good. Fight them with words. My little brother would not have been troubled too much to see you reading German books if you were thinking to use them as weapons. I will fight them with guns. When this war is over there will be a Jewish war. I do not know how many Jews will be left in Europe after this war, but Bader and others will try to bring them to Eretz Yisroel and then our war will begin. You will fight with words and I will fight with guns.”
I stared at him and felt myself turning cold. “What war?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Against the British,” he said. “We are building an army in Eretz Yisroel to fight the British, and we are building an army here to help them fight the British.”
I kept staring at him and did not know what to say. A dark fatigue seemed abruptly to descend upon me. I felt desperately the need to lie down.
“It will take years,” he said with a fierceness in his voice. “Three years, five years, ten years. But we will win. We would win sooner without Weizmann and his gentlemanly ways. With a goy who wants to kill you a Jew should not be a gentleman. That was what I tried to teach my little brother in return for what he taught me. I failed. He died gentle. Most Jews who are dying now are gentle. There will not be many gentle Jews left after this war. I think—I think I will have another glass of tea. My stomach is bothering me again. Go to sleep, David. You look like you are falling off your feet. You want to fight goyim, you have to be strong. Go to sleep.”
I heard myself say, with great effort, “What army, Papa? What do you mean?”
“We are doing the work of Jabotinsky. If he had not died, he would be doing this work. But because a leader dies suddenly does not mean his work should come to an end. His followers become leaders. This is all I care to say. It is not your job. Look what time it is. Your job now is to go to sleep so tomorrow you will be able to read your books with a clear head.”
I left him in the kitchen pouring himself another glass of tea. Later, I heard him shuffling about; I had the impression he was pacing slowly back and forth between the kitchen and the living room. Then I heard my mother’s voice call out softly from their bedroom, “Max? Max?”
The pacing stopped.
“Max?” my mother called again, a little louder this time.
“I am here,” I heard him answer. “I am all right.”
“What are you doing? Come to bed.”
“Soon,” he said.
I heard her come out of their bedroom and go through the living room to the kitchen.
“What’s the matter?” I heard her say in an agitated tone.
His reply was indistinct. There was a momentary silence. Then I heard their quiet voices coming from the kitchen. They were still talking together in the kitchen when I finally fell into a haunted sleep.
I would take the Hertz Commentary to school with me and in my free periods sit reading it either in the library or, if the weather was warm and sunny, on a bench in the little park overlooking the river. Sometimes a classmate would come over and ask what I was reading and I would show him the book. Most of them seemed unimpressed. One of them told me he had once heard his sociology professor refer to higher Biblical criticism as higher anti-Semitism. Another informed me that Hertz had been a graduate of a non-Orthodox rabbinical seminary.
Yaakov Bader came over to me one afternoon and I talked to him for a while about what I was reading. He listened. I talked for a long time. He asked what the difference was between lower and higher Biblical criticism. I told him “lower” dealt mostly with the text of the Bible and “higher” dealt with literary analysis and historical and ideological matters. For example, I said, if you change the second word in Genesis from bara to bro, that’s lower criticism; but if you say that the Book of Deuteronomy was written after the period of Judges, that’s higher criticism. He replied jovially that the higher could end up getting you into the lower, and he pointed toward the ground.
“What’re you reading that stuff for, Davey?”
“It’s important. I want to know what the goyim are saying about the Bible.”
“Why?”
“Because it interests me.”
“Does it interest you that you have an English lit class now?”
I looked at my watch. “I forgot,” I said, and rushed from the park. I was late to the class.
All through the rest of that month I sat in the park or in the library every chance I had, reading the Hertz Commentary. Saul saw me in the library one day and came over to my table. It was raining outside. He stood next to me peering down at the book; then he muttered, “They told me you were reading this. I didn’t believe it.”
I looked up at him. His thin sallow face was shrouded in gloom.
“This is a real stealing of time from the study of Torah,” he pronounced unhappily.
“Hertz didn’t think so.”
“Hertz graduated from a goyishe seminary.”
“Hoffmann didn’t think so.”
“It’s stealing time from Torah, Davey. I’m telling you.”
The librarian came out from behind his desk near the staircase to the stacks and informed us that the study hall downstairs was the place where you studied in a loud voice, not the library.
Saul walked away, looking troubled and unhappy.
I saw him two days later in the study hall. He seemed these days to be carrying about him a permanent pall of gloom. He passed my table on his way back from the bookshelves where he had gone for a medieval commentary text. I asked him if my Hertz was still making him unhappy. He looked over at Yaakov Bader, whose head was buried in his volume of Talmud, and said in a low voice, “I’m so scared I can’t sleep nights anymore.”
I asked him what he was scared about.
“My Gemara class,” he muttered. “The whole class is scared.”
I told him it was the end of the year, why were they all suddenly so scared?
“You’ve been in a fog all year, Davey. Nothing’s changed. I’ve been scared all year but you’ve been like a piec
e of stone. ‘They have eyes and they see not,’ ” he quoted in Hebrew.
“You told me he was a great man.”
“He’s a phenomenon. That’s why we’re all so scared. You know what it’s like to be studying with the greatest Talmudist in the world?”
I told him I didn’t know. He went off gloomily, in that stooped and curving posture of his, holding the heavy black-bound folio volume of the medieval commentary in his pale white hands.
That Shabbat morning I ventured into a non-Orthodox synagogue and discovered that the Hertz Commentary was used by the entire congregation during the Torah reading. The reader, a middle-aged man, was excellent. I held the Commentary in my hand and realized that sooner or later I would have come across it; the encounter in the synagogue a few weeks ago when I had first seen the Commentary was not as extraordinary as I had thought. And the Hertz Commentary would have led me directly to Hoffmann and Wellhausen and the others. The rabbi of the non-Orthodox synagogue preached smoothly and clearly. But I would not return to that synagogue; an organ was played during the service and I felt my Orthodox religious sensibility violated. I decided to return to my father’s synagogue and endure in silence the carnage inflicted upon the text of the Torah by the aged reader.
On the second Shabbat in July we came out of the little synagogue, my parents and brother and I and Saul and his parents, and walked in the warm blue air of the late morning toward 170th Street. I heard my father and uncle continuing the conversation they had begun while removing their prayer shawls inside the synagogue after the service. Discussions had been taking place between the Revisionist party in Palestine and the Labor Zionists in an attempt to work out a compromise plan whereby the Revisionists would rejoin the World Zionist Organization from which they had seceded in 1933. My uncle, in a loud voice, was expressing his anger at “Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, and that fuzzy-headed socialist crowd.” He wanted the largest number of Jews brought to Palestine in the shortest period of time, he said; not small-scale immigration based on the slow procedure of immigration certificates. It was always surprising to me how loud and angry his gentle voice would become whenever he discussed Zionist politics. My father said he favored support of private initiative and private capital investment and that the way the socialists were building the country would create a nation of lazy workers and daily strikes. He favored compulsory arbitration, he said, and agreed with my uncle that the Revisionists should remain separated from the World Zionist Organization. Meanwhile Saul was explaining to Alex a passage of midrash on today’s Torah reading. Alex did not appear especially interested; he was probably burning to get back to the Thomas Wolfe novel he had been reading all week. My mother and aunt talked about a lovely little bungalow colony near Hunter, New York, that my aunt had heard about and the possibility that all of us might be able to go up there for two weeks in late August. We turned into 170th Street and went past the little grocery store and delicatessen and corner service station.
“Are you feeling well, David?” asked my mother anxiously.
“I’m all right, Mama.”
“You must not become ill now.”
I was quiet. She was smartly dressed in a dark blue summer dress and a yellow wide-brimmed flowery hat. She had put on weight; her waist and arms and legs had thickened; but her face had remained pale and taut, and her eyes would not look directly at me as she spoke.
“Everything will be all right,” she said. “I swear to you, David.”
I did not respond.
Two days later I entered the hospital.
I lay in a white bed in a large white room and men and women in white clothes kept coming over to me and doing things to my body. It seemed to be no longer my body. I had a low-grade fever. They came over with needles and injected them into my buttocks and they came over with water and told me to drink. My body suffered the injections and drank the water. The man in the bed to my left had white hair and spoke hollowly through a tube in his throat. He was skeletal and he wheezed and coughed hoarsely, echoingly, through the night. I listened to him and felt all the dread of the world upon my body. The fever did not abate and they kept putting needles into me and giving me water. You’ll be fine, young man, just fine, said a nurse in a white starched dress and cap. She smiled. She had uneven teeth and seemed kind. It was night. The man next to me coughed chokingly. Someone in a bed farther down cried out and there were the sounds of scurrying feet and whispers. I kept my eyes tightly shut. They had followed me to the hospital, the dark leaping forms, and I could not sleep. David, I heard someone whisper, and I turned my head and opened my eyes. I saw the darkness of the wall to my right and the faint yellowish light of the nurses’ desk reflected off the ceiling. Deep shadows lay in the corner over my head where the ceiling joined the wall. David, came the whisper from the shadows. My David. I closed my eyes. The old man wheezed and coughed and seemed to be strangling. Oh my God, I thought. What did I ever do to be punished this way? I saw them inside my eyes, leaping about. What were the words? Ochnotinos, chnotinos, notinos. David! came the sharp whisper. I lay still and listened to the hospital night. Finally, exhausted, I slept, and was immediately awakened by a form in white. How are we this morning? the form said. Next to me the old man lay very still, wheezing softly. White sunlight streamed through the windows. The white form was doing things to the body that was no longer mine. I closed my eyes. The form went away. Later it returned with a small pill and water. I took the pill and lay in my bed and felt my body sink deeply into the mattress. I could not lift my arms or legs. Two men in white came with a stretcher table. They wheeled it alongside my bed. Easy, kid, one of them said. Don’t be no hero. They helped me onto the table and covered me with a sheet. I watched the ceiling slide by above me. Good luck, kid, someone called from a bed. David, came a whisper close to my ear. I closed my eyes and felt the rolling motion of the stretcher. The air was cold against my face. I felt my head upon the pillow. Soon it would no longer be my head. I did not know what they would be doing to it but I knew it would no longer be my head while they did it. People in surgical gowns and masks would take it from me for a while. I lay still, feeling the terror and the strange coldness of the air as it brushed against my face. Then the air grew still. The stretcher came to a stop. I opened my eyes and found myself alone in a narrow corridor. I lay very still and listened and heard only silence. Then a warm hand very gently caressed my forehead and the side of my face and I closed my eyes. I listened to the silence. There were dark shapes within it, swarming, waiting. A door opened somewhere and I opened my eyes. A white form approached, murmuring words in a gentle voice, and put a needle into my arm. The ceiling moved again, briefly. Strong arms supported me as I was moved to another table. Close your eyes, David, someone said. And keep them closed. We are washing your face. I felt fingers on my nose and cheeks and forehead and lips and jaw, strong fingers, washing briskly the face that was no longer mine. Then they were tying down my arms. Then they were tying down my forehead. These are local anesthetics, David, a gentle voice said. We will need you to be awake for the surgery. If at any time you feel pain, you are to tell us. I kept my eyes tightly shut. Tiny pricks of pain entered my nostrils. There were clinking sounds and the murmur of voices and I opened my eyes briefly and stared into a light and masked faces and I closed my eyes. I felt something touch my face and move briefly across it and then I knew it was really no longer my body and everyone became very busy with the still silent form on the table. I left this form and wandered about in the dark corners of the room and found in a juncture of wall and floor an opening; it was a warm narrow cavern of smooth walls that glowed faintly red and I let myself rush into it and thought how merciful it was to be out of that room. I kept running downward and thinking it was so good to be away from there. Once, when the surgeon began to use the bone saw, I came swiftly from the cavern onto the operating table. The grinding of the saw on the bones of my face filled me with unutterable terror; and just when I thought I could no longer endure it, the grin
ding ceased. Someone kept using a suction tube. After a moment I felt myself again able to wander away from the inert form on the table. I sought the solace of the cavern. But I was drawn back to the table when hands grasped my nose tightly and completed the breaking of the bone. I lay helpless and disbelieving beneath strong and swiftly moving fingers. Then I drifted away, not knowing any longer whether to be afraid or merely to weep, and I found the cavern once again and this time tumbled into it and let myself fall. I do not know how long I fell. When I stopped, I lay suspended in reddish darkness for what seemed to me to be a long time. Then I began to rise. And again I felt a warm hand caress my face and forehead. David, came a distant whisper. My precious David. Again the hand caressed my face. My soul, said the whispered voice. My life. Are you afraid? Do not be afraid. I promise you a complete healing. And I felt myself gently embraced.
There was silence. The bands about my arms and head were loosened and removed. I was lifted and put down and the ceiling slid by again above me. I was lifted again and felt the bed beneath me. The angle of the sunlight on the windows had changed. Was the skeletal old man still here? And the man with one leg, was he still in the bed near the nurses’ desk? And the old man who had undergone cataract surgery? And the young handsome blond-haired boy who was in for cancer tests? And the jovial ladies’ man with his right leg in a cast up to his hip? Were they all still here? My face was thickly bandaged. I was tired; I could not remember ever having felt so tired before. I saw reflected sunlight on the ceiling and a vague dance of shadows as an orderly passed by wheeling a stretcher table. I closed my eyes and fell immediately into a deep sleep.