Swimming Across the Hudson by Joshua Henkin

didn’t yet like girls, didn’t want to have a girlfriend, but still I wondered about my bashert . At dinner my father would quiz us on geography. He’d ask us the capitals of all fifty states. He’d have us locate Timbuktu on an unmarked map. On the wall above my desk hung a huge map of China. What would I do if my bashert lived in China? I saw my bashert and me without a word in common, forced to wed by God’s command.
    â€œIt’s not a command,” my mother said.
    â€œThen what is it?”
    â€œThink of it as a prediction. God is simply placing a bet.”
    Still, I believed I had a bashert . Every morning, I said a prayer that she be someone I loved, someone I could spend a life with. I was compassionate, my mother said. I gave money to the beggars onBroadway. There was a boy in my class who had cerebral palsy; during recess, I pushed him in his wheelchair while my friends played dodgeball in the gym.
    I was doing a mitzvah, my father said. God would reward me in the world to come.
    But I was concerned about this world. Rabbi Appelfeld had told us that God tests people with inner strength. I hoped I didn’t have inner strength. I imagined myself with a wife like that boy, someone to wheel about and feel sorry for.
    Jonathan and I said we’d travel the world, but mostly we wanted to be like our father, who’d traveled the world in uniform, fighting the Germans in World War II. He was a professor of political science; he never went to work without a jacket and a tie. But years before, he’d been someone else. He’d spent a thousand nights inside army barracks. He went for weeks with little food or sleep, keeping himself sane by reciting poetry. He helped the other soldiers compose letters to their girlfriends, mud-stained declarations of love and honor, carefully honed sentences in fountain pen. He was a poet himself, his army mates thought.
    Unarmed, he’d come upon a battalion of Germans. His German was rusty, but he managed to communicate, getting the Germans to lay down their weapons.
    â€œHow did you do that?” I asked him once.
    â€œPersuasion,” he said. “It was 1944, and the war was almost over. It was clear we were going to win. I told the Germans the Senegalese were coming. The Senegalese were rumored not to take prisoners.”
    â€œ Were the Senegalese coming?”
    â€œIt was possible. I wasn’t sure.”
    I liked hearing him tell stories about the war, liked holding the objects he’d captured. He had a pair of German field binoculars sopowerful that when we used them at Shea Stadium we could see the color of the batters’ eyes. He had a gray wool blanket with German writing across it. Sometimes at night, lying beneath that blanket, I tried to picture him when he was young.
    Was this why I feared I would die, knowing my father could have been killed in World War II and everything that followed would have been different?
    Was it simply that I was adopted?
    I imagined that my birth mother had died. I persuaded Jonathan that his birth mother had died too. “They died in childbirth,” I said.
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œTelepathy. I have ESP.”
    In school we’d learned about our foremother Rachel, who for years had been unable to bear a child and who was buried by the roadside on the way to Bethlehem after giving birth to Benjamin. “Benjamin killed Rachel,” I said.
    â€œNo he didn’t.”
    â€œWe killed our birth mothers too.”
    I thought about this on Yom Kippur, the year I was ten, crying out to God and hoping not to die. In synagogue we read a list of ways to die—plague, famine, pestilence, fire—deaths too awful even to think about. A family down the block from us had been killed in a fire, so every week that year when the sabbath was over I held the havdala candle lit beneath the smoke alarm to make sure the battery was still working.
    â€œYou’re being