Davita's Harp (15 page)

Ruthie and I looked at the photographs together. Then I put them in a neat pile on my father’s desk. The next day they were gone. My mother said nothing to me about them.

One Saturday morning in early November I rose early and dressed and ate breakfast. My mother was still asleep. I went back to my room and sat on my bed, waiting to hear the click of the downstairs hallway door. There it was! I went quickly out of the apartment and down the stairway and out into the chill autumn air.

The street was ankle-deep in dead leaves. I followed behind Ruthie and her mother, keeping a distance of nearly a block between us. A cold wind blew the leaves in aimless arabesques along the ground. Ruthie and her mother turned up a side street in the direction of the parkway. I went by the grocery store where my mother and I shopped and the candy store with the newspapers on the stand outside. Heavy black metal weights held the papers down against the wind. I glimpsed a large headline as I passed:
GOVERNMENT TO QUIT MADRID WITH CITY’S FALL IMMINENT.
A smaller headline read
PANIC SEIZES CAPITAL.
What had I seen a day or two earlier on my way back from school? Yes.
CENTER OF MADRID
is
REPORTED AFIRE.
“Is Papa in Madrid?” I had asked my mother that night. “Yes,” my mother had said. “Aren’t you reading his stories?”

I saw Ruthie and her mother turn into the parkway. I followed, keeping behind the trees that lined the wide street. There was little traffic along the six center lanes of the parkway. I saw Ruthie and her mother turn into a four-story red-brick building set far back from the curb and fronted by an open cemented area that looked like a school play yard. They went up a short flight of stone steps and through a wide wooden double door into the building. Over the door was a large sign with blue
letters on a white background: RABBI ISAAC DINN TORAH ACADEMY.

I stared at the sign. Three boys about my age came out the door and stood near the steps, talking and laughing. They fell silent as I went past them up the steps and through the door. I could feel them looking at me.

I was in a wide entrance hall. The air was warm. Lights glowed from a ceiling chandelier and from fixtures on the walls. The floor was covered with worn brownish linoleum. The walls were bare and painted a cream color. At the far end of the hall a wide staircase ran up into deep shadows. To my left a corridor formed a long narrow tunnel between a double row of closed rooms.

I heard a rush of voices to my right as a wide door swung open and two men came out. They were bearded and wore over their dark suits some sort of dark-striped cloth garment from which dangled long white fringes. They went past me into the corridor. Behind me two women entered the building and went quickly through the wide door. Again I heard voices as the door opened. I pushed against the door and felt it open easily. I slipped inside and stood very still against the wall near the door.

I was standing in an aisle formed by the wall and a low wooden partition. Men and women moved past me in and out of the door. Beyond the partition was a large room with a single wall of tall windows that faced the street. The room was crowded with chairs and divided nearly in half by a wall seven or eight feet high, its lower half made of plywood, its upper of sheer ninon. Men sat on the window side of this wall, women on the other. Many of the women wore kerchiefs or hats. The men had on either felt hats or skullcaps. On the men’s side, near the wall across the room from me, was a small lectern at which a man now stood, his back to the room, his white-fringed garment drawn over his head. A large ornate red velvet curtain covered a section of the wall that he faced. The room was crowded. I saw girls my age on the men’s side of the room, but they all seemed to be with their fathers. Most of the older men wore the dark-striped white garment. The men’s side of the room looked like a lake of white water.

I slipped into an aisle chair in the back row on the women’s side of the room, first removing from the chair and holding in my hand a dark-bound book. I opened the book and found it was printed in a language I could not read. I looked up and found I could see only dimly through the curtain that divided the room. Next to me sat an elderly woman with a kerchief over her white hair and brown spots on her face. She handed me her open book, pointing a bent finger at the page, took my book, opened it, and brought it up to her nearsighted eyes. I watched her carefully out of the sides of my eyes, turning the pages with her, rising and sitting together with her and the other women. I could not see Ruthie or her mother. Then I saw them, in front, seated near the curtain. On the other side of the curtain I heard a man’s voice chanting against a background of murmured response and low talk. I sat very still, listening carefully and waiting.

There was a momentary pause. Then I heard it, the soft tuneless recitation I had once heard briefly before. I peered through the curtain but everything looked distorted. I went from my chair to the back of the room and stood on tiptoe, peering over the partition. There he was, standing next to his father in one of the front rows and swaying slightly as he recited the Kaddish; there was David Dinn.

I went back to my seat. A few minutes later I followed the crowd out of the room and the entrance hall through the double doors to the wide cement area in front of the building. There I waited near a tree at the edge of the sidewalk.

The area became dense with people standing around and talking. There was heavy traffic now along the parkway. A cold wind blew through the trees, sending leaves to the street. Ruthie and her parents came out of the building together. I saw them greeting people and laughing. After a while they started along the parkway, Ruthie walking between her parents and holding their hands. Then David Dinn emerged alone from the building and went over to some boys his age. I waited. It was cold. He kept on talking to the boys. I moved through the crowd and came over to him.

“Hello,” I said. “Do you remember me?”

He looked at me in surprise.

“The beach,” I said.

He seemed not to know who I was.

“The ocean. The castle.”

His pale face lighted with recognition. “Ilana,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you in—without—I didn’t recognize you.”

He became flustered. The boys in the group were staring at me.

“Is this your building?” I asked.

“What?”

“The name is the same as yours. Is it your building?” I heard laughter.

He looked embarrassed. “It’s named for my father’s grandfather. He was a great rabbi in Germany.”

“It’s nice to see you again, David. Do you live near here?”

“A couple of blocks away.”

“Do your friends always laugh at someone who makes a mistake?”

“What?”

They were all staring at me and grinning.

“Good-bye. Have a nice—how do you call it?—Shabbos. Have a nice Shabbos.”

I turned to walk away, feeling their eyes on my back.

A man had come through the crowd. He was tall and finely tailored in a dark coat and suit and felt hat. It was David Dinn’s father. He came over to us.

“Hello, Ilana,” he said. “How are your parents?”

I stared at him. “They’re—” I stopped. “My father is in Spain.”

He nodded as if he knew all about my father.

“In Madrid.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“My father is a journalist and his newspaper sent him to write about the war.”

They were all staring at me. No one was grinning now.

“My father wrote about the battle for Toledo. You know, the castle there, the fortress. The—” I couldn’t remember the name.

“The Alcazar,” David Dinn’s father said. “That’s right. The Alcazar. It was on the front page of his newspaper.”

“I’m afraid I don’t read that newspaper,” David Dinn’s father said. He spoke in a kindly way. There was a polished and courtly manner about him. “I’m afraid we have to go now, Ilana. Someone is expecting us. I wish you a good Shabbos. And your mother, too. I hope your father returns home soon and in good health. Come, David.”

I watched them walk away.

When I got home I found my mother seated at the kitchen table, listening to the radio.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“Out for a walk.”

“They expect Madrid to fall today,” she said. I said I didn’t understand.

“It will be captured by the Fascists,” she said.

The radio announcer was talking about the fighting for the bridges and roads leading to Madrid.

“Where is Papa?”

She said nothing.

The announcer was describing a reporter’s eyewitness account of a battle for a crucial bridge. Fifty Moors stormed a seven-story apartment house near the bridge. The Moors were professional soldiers from Morocco, Franco’s best troops. They raced inside the building, throwing hand grenades and firing their machine guns. They fought their way to the second floor and then the third, killing the defenders. As they kept climbing higher, their pace grew gradually slower. Each floor slowed them more. They had succeeded in killing every one of the occupants; but no Moors had come out of the building.

The announcer went on to other news about Madrid.

“I saw David Dinn,” I said. “I passed by his synagogue. I saw his father.”

The announcer was describing Madrid as a doomed city. Franco and his Moors were ready for the kill, he said.

“Mama, what does David Dinn’s father do?” “What? Oh. Mr. Dinn is a special kind of lawyer. He helps people who come to America with immigration problems.” “Like Teresa and her parents?” “Teresa? Oh. Yes. Like Teresa.”

“Did you tell Mr. Dinn to rent the cottage next door to us on the beach?”

“Yes, Ilana. He needed a place close to the city so he could visit David. And he wanted David to be near me in case something happened. The boy was—he was very upset by his mother’s death.”

“Did Mr. Dinn help us get this apartment?”

She looked surprised. “Yes,” she said. “You
are
clever. You have my mother’s head. Now be quiet, please. I want to hear the news.”

I left her at the kitchen table and went into my room. Through the white lacy curtains on my window I saw the thinly leaved trees and the street and children playing stoopball a few houses away. A car went up the street, scattering leaves. I wish you a good Shabbos, Ilana. And your mother, too. I hope your father returns home soon and in good health. I stood there gazing through my window curtains at the cold November street.

One cold afternoon that week I went with my mother by subway to Manhattan. The train was crowded, the ride noisy and jarring. My mother said little to me during the ride. We came out of the station into chill air brown with mist and smoky with burning charcoal from hot pretzel and roasted chestnut stands. We walked along crowded streets lined with stores and cafeterias and turned into a cavernous loft building with tall ceilings and echoing corridors. An ancient elevator took us up; through its folding metal gate I saw the iron entrails of the shaft. We went along a wide corridor with light green walls that sorely needed painting and entered through a door whose top frosted glass panel had
painted on it in large black letters the words
AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR REFUGEE AID.

We were in an enormous, high-ceilinged, barnlike room. A wall of tall wet windows looked out at the brown buildings of the street. The room was crowded with desks and chairs and noisy with talk. At each desk sat a man or woman, writing or talking into a phone or to someone seated at the desk. Along one of the walls were rows of wooden folding chairs occupied by men and women who sat quietly, waiting. In the front row, one woman sat slowly twisting a handkerchief; another held in her fingers a rosary; a man with a scar on his face sat with his eyes closed and his arms folded across his chest, the scar a livid white line between two smooth planes of olive-colored skin.

My mother directed me to a chair next to a middle-aged woman and told me to wait until she was done with her work. I sat quietly in the chair and watched my mother go over to one of the desks and sit down and pick up the phone. From time to time a name was called out over a loudspeaker and someone rose from one of the chairs and went toward the desks. I looked around at the faces of others seated near me. Were they all from Europe? From war? My father and Uncle Jakob and Aunt Sarah had gone to Europe and all these people had run away. Europe. I disliked the sound of the word. It was the land of Baba Yaga.

It seemed to me I was in that room a long time. The air was cold and damp, and tense with misery. I watched my mother talking to the man with the scarred face. After a while he left, and an elderly woman took his place at my mother’s desk. The minutes passed slowly. I had taken a book along but could not read. I watched the faces of the people in the chairs.

War.

Later I walked with my mother through crowded evening streets. A din rose from the dense traffic. The brown sooty air was spectral with garish fluorescents and plumes of steam rising from grates. We went into a small restaurant and sat at a small round table near the window, looking out at the people and the traffic.
We ordered supper. A light rain began to fall. I saw it on the window and the street. Halos of mist formed around the lights of the street lamps. My mother sat in her dark dress and beret, eating slowly, the distant look in her eyes.

I asked her what the play she was taking me to see was all about.

“It’s about the big war in Europe and someone who tries to stop it.”

“Does he stop it?” “No.”

“I don’t want to see a play about war.”

“It’s a fine play, darling, and I want us to see it.”

We finished supper and walked through the rain to the theater. It was crowded. Our seats were in the balcony. I had a good view of the stage. My mother sat quietly, her face pale with apprehension.

I leaned over to her. “Are you all right, Mama?”

“I’m fine, darling.”

“Is anything wrong with Papa?”

“No, no.”

I sat back. A moment later the curtain rose.

The play was about a simple, good-hearted man named Johnny Johnson who enlists in the army during the big war to fight the Germans. He joins up only because the girl he is going to marry insists that he be patriotic and kill Germans. He doesn’t want to kill anyone. He gets sent to Europe. On the front lines he befriends a German soldier. The two of them are amazed that they wanted to kill each other. The German says his friends really don’t want to fight. Johnny Johnson says they should all stop fighting. He very nearly succeeds in stopping a major offensive against the Germans. But the American officers in charge of the offensive arrest him. He is sent to a lunatic asylum. Many years later he is released. He spends the rest of his life selling toys on the street. “Toyees for sale!” he cries. “Toyees for sale!”