Davita's Harp (17 page)

She talked as if from memory and not from understanding.

I asked her when it had all happened.

“About two thousand years ago, I think.”

“Who were the enemies of the Jews?”

“I think they were called Syrians.”

“Who were the Syrians?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was the Greeks.”

“I like the candles. They’re pretty.”

“Ilana, is your father very sick? Why does the doctor come so often?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he getting better?”

“My Aunt Sarah says he’s getting better. She’s a nurse.”

“Was she in Spain, too?”

“Yes. She was in Badajoz and Toledo and Madrid.”

“I don’t know any of those places.”

Behind her on the windowsill the little candles burned in the bronze candelabrum she called a menorah. The curtains of the bay window had been pulled aside and the candles cast warm and golden light against the blackness of the street. Small and pretty orange candles burning in the darkness of the enormous night.

Aunt Sarah bought a little pine tree and placed it in her room. She began to leave her door open during the day and I could see the tree small and green and glittery with tinsel.

I asked her one day what the word Christmas meant.

She looked astonished. “Dear child, do you know nothing about Jesus Christ, our Messiah, our Prince of Peace, the Son of God?”

I said I knew only what I had heard and learned in public school. And school was very boring, I added. “Dear, dear child.”

Briefly she told me the story of the child Jesus and the three wise men.

“Why is there a war in Spain if Jesus is the Prince of Peace?” “We must pray to Jesus Christ for peace, Ilana. He is our Lord.”

I didn’t understand. And she had not explained to me the meaning of the word Christmas. In my public school the tree was tall and decorated with lights. It felt comforting to have had the candles of the menorah the week before and to have the green life and lights of the trees now in a time when the streets were raw and cold and the nights were long and often filled with odd and fearful sounds.

Sometimes in the blackness that followed midnight or in the dimness of early morning I would wake to the sounds of my mother singing. Her voice moved softly through the darkness, and always I thought I was dreaming: a haunting, melancholy rise
and fall of melodies I had never before heard and words I did not understand. Sometimes it seemed there were no words at all to her songs but only sounds like ai dai dai and bim bim bom. Once I heard her repeat a word a number of times with a sad and defiant tone in her voice. “Guttenyu,” she said. “Ai, Guttenyu.” Another night she said, “Mamaleh. Mamaleh.” She said that over and over again that night. “Mamaleh.”

That was the night my father lay burning with a fever that had come suddenly during the day. The doctor had been in again that afternoon. He was a short, thin, bald-headed man with a slight stoop and a heavy accent of some kind. He had treated me often during my early childhood illnesses and was—as my father had once put it—“one of our people.” He remained in the bedroom a long time with my father and Aunt Sarah and my mother, and when they all emerged he looked dark and serious. “Hot compresses, hot, hot, must clean it out,” he said. He saw me in the long narrow hallway near the kitchen. “Ilana Davita,” he said. “How are you? How are you? Your papa will be fine. Look who his nurses are. Look. How can he not be fine? You take after your father. You will be a big help to us one day with those Scandinavian looks of yours. Help us to organize the Swedes.”

My mother stood in the doorway to the bedroom, looking over her shoulder into the room. Her face was ashen.

My father cried out that night and I woke in terror. I thought his voice was coming at me from the walls of my room. Who had cried out like that once, the words coming through my walls? Someone in one of the many buildings in which we had lived. I lay rigid in my bed. “Dear Christ!” he screamed. “What kind of a country is this? It’s all nothing! Can’t you see? It’s
nothing!”

I heard my Aunt Sarah’s slipper-shod feet going quickly through the hallway.

The next morning I asked my mother, “Did Papa have a bad dream?”

“Yes,” she said and looked away.

One afternoon in early January I came into my parents’ bedroom.
Aunt Sarah was there on a bed near the chair. My father’s brown hair was growing back and formed a dark halo against the whiteness of his pillow. He looked frail and shrunken beneath the covers. I wanted to hold him.

He turned his head to me. “Hello, my love. Come to visit me again?”

“How are you, Papa?”

“Under repair. Your mother and aunt are splendid mechanics of the flesh.”

“Papa, did you see castles when you were in Spain?”

“Castles? Oh, yes. I saw castles, my love.”

“Were they pretty?”

“Was what pretty?”

“The castles.”

“Nothing in Spain is pretty these days, Davita.”

“Weren’t the castles pretty?”

“No, my love. The castles I saw were full of holes and people were dead in them.”

He turned his head away.

“Are you going back to Spain, Papa?”

He said nothing.

“I don’t want you to go back.”

“It’s a hell,” he said, not looking at me. “But it’s the only place to be. A decent person knows where he belongs now.” “Papa.”

“Davita,” Aunt Sarah said. “Enough.” I went from the room.

When I returned from school the following day the harp was gone from the front door. My father had asked that it be moved to the bedroom. It hung directly in his line of vision on the inside of the door across the room from the galloping stallions.

Once or twice a week Mrs. Helfman cooked a pot of soup and brought it up to us. She would not leave the pot but transferred
the soup to one of my mother’s pots and took her pot back down. I met her on the parkway one cold Saturday afternoon in mid-January. She was out for a walk with Ruthie.

“How is your father, Hana?”

“Better, thank you, Mrs. Helfman. He says he likes your soup.”

“Yes?” She smiled with pleasure. Then she said, “Listen, Ilana, you don’t have to sit by yourself in shul. You can sit up front with us. All right?”

“Sit up front with us,” Ruthie echoed. “You don’t have to stay in the back against the curtain.”

Snow fell. Visitors came through the snow to see my father. Some of the visitors had attended the meetings in the many apartments in which we had lived. The discussions; the words that had flown about; the singing. I remembered. One of the visitors was a short, thick-chested man who wore a wool stocking cap, a brown leather jacket, and dark gray work pants. He had hard gray eyes and a small white scar that ran down from a corner of his mouth to the end of his chin. Once I saw him take off his jacket and roll up the sleeves of his flannel shirt. Garish tattoo marks rippled along the bulging muscles of his arms. He came often and each time sat alone with my father for hours.

“What do they talk about?” I asked Aunt Sarah in her room one night after the man had gone. The room was neat, clean. The pine tree had long ago been removed. Outside the window snow fell onto the garbage cans in the cellarway.

“The revolution,” she said with a bitter tone in her voice.

“I heard Mama say the man is going into industry. What does that mean?”

“I have no idea. I wish my brother had more sense. I wish he had never gone to Centralia. I wish—” “Aunt Sarah?” “Yes, Davita.”

“Don’t you want a better world? The revolution will make a better world. I don’t like this world, Aunt Sarah. I think Baba Yaga is everywhere in this world. How will it ever become better?”

“Dear child—”

“Is Jesus Christ going to make it a better world?” “Yes! Our Lord is the Way and the Truth and the Life!” “Will Jesus Christ bring a revolution?” “He will come again and everything will be changed.” “He
will
bring a revolution!”

“Dear child, it will be our Lord’s doing, not man’s. Our Lord will bring a new world of the spirit.”

“Aunt Sarah, if you don’t believe in what Papa and Mama believe in, why did you go to Spain?”

“I am a nurse, Davita. I have a religious duty to go wherever there is suffering. I despise both communism and fascism. But I despise fascism more.”

“Did you meet Jakob Daw in Spain?”

“Yes. In a hotel in Madrid. He was surrounded by friends and admirers.”

“Did he look all right?” “He was ill.”

“He wrote to us and said that he won’t write any more stories. I don’t like his stories, but he shouldn’t stop writing. My mother knew Jakob Daw in Vienna when she was very young. Did you know that? Do you hear my mother singing at night sometimes? She frightens me when she sings like that.”

“Take good care of your mother, dear child. Special care. Your father is not the only one in this family who has been wounded.”

“Jakob Daw was wounded in the big war in Europe. Mama says he was gassed.”

Aunt Sarah was quiet.

“I don’t understand what that means.”

She turned her head to the door of the room. “Was that your father?”

“I didn’t hear anything.” “It’s your father.”

She got up and went from the room, leaving the door open. I listened to her walking through the long hallway in her house slippers. The door harp sounded. I sat on the edge of her bed,
staring at the partly open door. My mother was away in Manhattan. The apartment was silent now, its corners filled with shadows. I went to the window in Aunt Sarah’s room and peered through the darkness and the snow at the cellarway. The narrow cement walk was lit by a dim bulb; it reminded me of the driveways between many of the cottages in Sea Gate. The dunes the beach the castles the surf the ocean. David Dinn and Kaddish. The two of us together in the waves. The sun and the warm wind and the water. What had Jakob Daw called the years in Vienna with my mother? The dream time. Yes. The dream time.

I said to my mother one night in late January, “Will Papa ever write again?”

She had come into my room while I was reading at my desk and had sat down on the edge of my bed.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course. He has to get well first. What are you reading?”

I showed her the book:
A Christian Child’s Bible.

“Aunt Sarah gave it to me. I like the stories. Abraham and Joseph and Moses. And Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel. I like Rachel. And Mary and the child Jesus.”

“I don’t care for religious books.”

“It’s only stories,” I said.

There was a brief silence.

“Mama, will Uncle Jakob ever write stories again?” “I don’t know.”

“Are you going away again tomorrow to Manhattan?” “Yes.”

“I miss the meetings we used to have. I miss the songs. Where are all the people?”

“The people in Manhattan can’t come here for meetings.”

“Why not?”

“I meet with people in Brooklyn now, Ilana.”

“I don’t understand why—”

“Is this the first book Aunt Sarah has given you?”

“No. There were two others. One was about Christmas in Maine. I liked that one. The other was about Jesus and King Herod and a massacre of little babies when King Herod was told the messiah was born.”

“A massacre?”

“All the Jewish babies were killed. Did you know that? And King Herod was Jewish.”

“So was Jesus.”

“Jesus was Jewish? Aunt Sarah never told me that.”

We were silent a moment. The door harp sounded softly through the hallway. I heard Aunt Sarah’s footsteps. She entered the kitchen. The radio came on to the sounds of laughter. It was the Jack Benny program.

“I don’t like to see you reading Christian books,” my mother said quietly. “Christians once hurt me. I don’t—” She stopped and looked at the window. Falling sleet tapped lightly on the panes.

I stared at her. “Christians hurt you?”

“During the big war. Cossacks and Poles. Christians.” She seemed to shrink into herself, to grow smaller and smaller before my eyes.

“Mama.”

She was silent, lost in her darkness. “Mama.”

She stirred. “It’s a frozen rain,” she said as if to herself, but clearly. “Must we go out in this frozen rain?” “Mama!”

She looked at me. “I’m all right, Ilana.” “It’s only stories, Mama.”

“Yes? All right. Read whatever you want, Ilana. You’ll find your own way. Isn’t your room too warm?”

“I like it this way. All my other rooms were cold. I miss the meetings in the other places, but I don’t miss the cold.”

“The Helfmans keep the house warm. This is their house.” She
rose from the bed. “Good night, darling. I have some work to do. Listen to that rain! How nice it is to be in a warm room.”

She kissed me on the forehead and went from the room. I continued reading the book of Bible stories my Aunt Sarah had given me.

On the parkway the next afternoon on my way home from school I met Mrs. Helfman. She was carrying a copy of
The New York Times.
In her heavy dark-brown winter coat and her woolen hat with its long scarf, which she wrapped around her neck and tucked into the beaver collar of her coat, she looked a little like a short round bear. It had snowed briefly in the morning and cars now moved cautiously along the wide parkway, trailing plumes of smoke. Mrs. Helfman, her face red with cold, greeted me cheerily.

“Hello, Ilana. Isn’t this weather terrible? Worse than I ever remember in Poland. You are coming home from school? This isn’t out of your way? How is your father?”

“Better, thank you. He’s beginning to walk around.”

We went past the yeshiva named after David Dinn’s greatgrandfather. A few boys and girls milled around outside, their breath vaporizing in the freezing air. I did not see David Dinn.

“You walk this way all the time?” Mrs. Helfman asked. “It adds at least two blocks. You look frozen, poor child.”

We turned off the parkway into the side street and walked beneath trees that glistened with ice. The wind gusted fiercely between the tall apartment houses that made a tunnel of the street. It cut through my leggings, touched icily the insides of my thighs, and moved between my legs. I needed to go to the bathroom. The briefcase I carried was very heavy. There was our street with its brownstones and sycamores and the sky open and dull gray through the naked swaying trees. The houses looked shrunken and cold in the wind. We walked along quickly, skirting patches of frozen snow that lay upon the sidewalk.