Davita's Harp (22 page)

David stood among his friends and gazed at me out of his large dark eyes. Dusty sunlight came through the early spring trees of the parkway and fell upon his face, giving his skin a translucent appearance and revealing the veins in his cheeks and along the sides of his head.

“They died because they were very bad,” he said.

“What did they do?”

“The midrash says they would be marching along behind Moshe and Aharon, and the children of Israel would follow, and all the time the sons of Aharon would keep saying to each other, ‘When are those two old people going to die so we can become the leaders?’ They had evil hearts.”

“Where does it say that? I didn’t see it in my book.”

“It’s in the midrash. Those are stories that explain the Torah.”

“But why isn’t that story in this book?”

“Because it isn’t. Not everything—”

“What kind of book is that?” one of David’s friends suddenly interrupted.

“It’s a Bible book,” I said. “I found it in—”

One of the boys had come alongside me and was peering at the spine of the book. “It’s the King James Bible,” he said in a tone of horror.

They all backed away a step or two as if I were holding in my hand a specimen of forbidden vermin.

“That’s a goyische Bible, Ilana,” David said.- “It’s used by missionaries.”

“Did she bring it into shul?” another boy asked.

A rush of heat swept across my face. They stood before me in a tight semicircle, about a half-dozen of them, in dark suits and hats, gazing at me out of dark accusing eyes. I felt myself swiftly judged and instantly impaled upon their cold and demeaning stares.

“I’ll get you a different Bible,” David said. “You shouldn’t bring that one to shul. You shouldn’t even read from it. There’s
my father. Good Shabbos. I’ll give the Bible to Ruthie and she’ll bring it to you.”

He stepped into the crowd and was gone. I walked quickly home.

A letter had arrived from my father. He was in Bilbao with Jakob Daw. Hip okay. Daw okay. Visa not okay. War very definitely not okay.

Over lunch I asked my mother what the word missionary meant. She said it meant a person who was sent by a church to some area to do educational or hospital work and to win followers for the church. “It comes from an old word meaning to send off,” she said.

“I took your Bible to shul today and David said it was a Bible for missionaries.”

“Missionaries use it, yes.”

“He said I shouldn’t bring it to shul anymore.” “I’m not in the least bit surprised.” “Why do you have such a Bible?”

“It’s a lovely work of English literature, Ilana. I read it for the pleasure I get from its language.”

“Is Aunt Sarah a missionary?”

“Yes.”

We ate for a while in silence.

“Are you going to ask Mr. Dinn to help Uncle Jakob get a visa?”

“Yes.”

“Is the war very bad in Bilbao?”

“The war is bad everywhere in Spain.”

“Can we go for a walk in Prospect Park later?”

“Yes.”

“I want to go for a walk and see if there are flowers and watch people rowing on the lake.”

“You’ll see tulips and daffodils, Ilana. Those are lovely flowers.”

“Mrs. Helfman said that Mr. Helfman plants flowers in the backyard in the spring.”

My mother said nothing. She seemed abstracted, elsewhere in her thoughts.

After a while I said, “David’s friends are pretty nasty, you know? I don’t like them.”

“Boys are nasty sometimes.”

“They laugh at me. They’re cruel.”

“Men can be like that too sometimes,” my mother said.

“They’re mean and evil. They’re like the sons of Aaron.”

“Finish your lunch, Ilana.”

“I wish God would send a fire and kill them.”

“Ilana!”

“I hate them.”

“Please finish your lunch, Ilana. Then you’ll help me clean up and we’ll take our walk.”

I did not go back to that synagogue for a long time.

The weather turned warm. There were days of brilliant sunshine and clear blue air. Young birds played in the budding trees outside my window. The sycamore in our backyard took on a soft and lacy look. One Sunday afternoon I saw Mr. Helfman turning over the earth near the far fence of the backyard and planting seeds. I watched him from the window of my parents’ bedroom, a short, pudgy, genial man wearing an old sweater and pants and a dark skullcap. He worked a long time, pausing frequently to wipe his face with a handkerchief. That was the afternoon three strangers—two men and a woman—came to the apartment and sat with my mother in our living room, studying. They looked to be in their middle or late thirties. I stood in the doorway to the living room and listened. They sat in the afternoon sunlight that came through the bay window. Each held a book and each read from it in turn. From time to time they would discuss a passage at length. My mother would respond to their questions in her quiet, determined, authoritative tone. Her face, bathed in sunlight, wore a soft gauzy luminous look. After a while I returned to my room and lay on my bed gazing at the sunlight coming through my
window and listening to my mother’s voice coming through the wall and thinking of Sea Gate and the sunlight on the beach and wondering where Jakob Daw and my father were. The war was now in the mountains all around Bilbao.

After the people had gone I asked my mother who they were.

“Friends.”

“What were you doing?”

“Studying a work by Karl Marx.”

“Will they come back?”

“Every Sunday afternoon.”

By filling all the hours of her days with work she was removing from her life the hollows of what she called empty time. Empty time led to loneliness, she had once said to me. And sometimes one might do strange and hurtful things out of loneliness. Loneliness was to be prevented as one prevents the spread of a plague.

The following Sunday afternoon the strangers returned and sat with my mother in our living room, studying Karl Marx. They studied the text sentence by sentence, stopping often to ask questions of one another and to listen to my mother’s explanations. Sometimes my mother would answer by quoting from the original German. I lay on my bed listening to my mother’s voice through the wall.

Four letters had arrived from my father that week. He wrote that Jakob Daw had a visa waiting for him in Lisbon and would soon be leaving Bilbao. Hip fine, war bad, visa large surprise and small miracle. I thought of Jakob Daw and my father in the war that was all around Bilbao. Pieces of arms and legs and the corpses of horses and people and the fires of shells and bombs. War.

I spent the rest of the day reading a book Ruthie had given me. It was about an ancient plague that had struck the students of a great rabbi during a revolt of the Jews against the Roman empire. The rabbi’s name was Akiva. Thousands of students died of that plague. Suddenly the plague stopped. This happened about two thousand years ago, the book said, and Jews still celebrated the day the plague began to come to an end. There were color pictures
of boys and girls picnicking and playing at racing games and with bows and arrows.

My mother and I went to the movies that evening and saw a long news reel on the war in Spain. We watched Madrid being bombed and the fighting in the hills around Bilbao. There were fiery explosions and huge columns of boiling black smoke and collapsing buildings and men lying dead in tall grass beside a swiftly flowing river.

I became ill that night in my bed and vomited and my mother changed my nightgown and my sheets and held me and sang me to sleep with a lullaby in Yiddish. I was running a high fever and later in the night had a dream. There was a sudden rustling noise and I looked and Baba Yaga was in the sycamore tree outside my window, peering at me through the branches, green-visaged, monstrous. A shock of terror pierced me. I found you, dear child, she said. Now you will go with Baba Yaga. Abruptly she sprang from the tree through my window and stood at the foot of my bed, laughing hideously, her mouth huge and black, her eyes red and burning. I was paralyzed with terror and could not scream. I felt myself wanting to scream, tried to push the scream from my throat, but my throat was tight, nothing would come from it. She moved toward me, a vile stench rising from her. How loathsome and grotesque she was! She stood beside me and reached out. I felt her touch my face. Icy cold and burning and an image of dead things floating in the green scum of a river’s edge. I screamed and woke. My mother was immediately in my room. I cried and shivered. She held me and remained with me until I fell back asleep. In the morning the fever was gone but I lay shivering and my mother stayed with me all that day, nursing me as Aunt Sarah had once nursed her and my father. That night my temperature was still normal, and the next morning I returned to school.

I felt weak all that day. The weather was alternately cloudy and sunny, the air suddenly cold each time clouds slid across the sun. The cold prickled my skin and I would find myself shivering. On the way home from school I went past the yeshiva but saw no one
I knew in the front yard. My mother was at her work in Manhattan. I let myself into the apartment and stood near the door a moment, listening to the harp. In the kitchen I had a glass of milk and some cookies, then wandered listlessly through the rooms and hallway. From the window in the spare bedroom I saw cats playing among the garbage cans in the cellarway. I thought of Aunt Sarah and wondered where she was. Had she come back from Spain? What did she do in her work as a missionary: nurse sick people to health and ask them to believe in Jesus Christ? Did she ask them to get down on their knees with her? I remembered myself on my knees in this room. It seemed an awkward position for prayer—and yet strangely comforting in a way I could not understand. On your knees with your hands together. I felt myself sliding to my knees and raising my hands. I knelt at the window a foot or so from the bed in which Aunt Sarah had slept. I didn’t know what to say or to whom to say it. Finally I said, “Please protect my father and my Uncle Jakob. Please. Please. My name is Ilana Davita Chandal. Please protect them. I love them very much.”

I got to my feet, feeling cold. The apartment was warm but my feet and the tips of my fingers were icy. I went out of the spare bedroom and walked slowly through the hallway to my parents’ bedroom. From the window I saw that someone had suspended a bird feeder from a branch of the sycamore. Birds perched on the feeder and fluttered about it, pecking at the seeds. It seemed far enough away from the branch to prevent a cat from getting at the birds. The earth of the garden bed lay scraped and naked to the sky. In the east the sky had begun to empty of color. I walked back slowly through the dim hallway. Entering my room, I heard, echoing through the silence that lay heavily upon the house, the clear loud click of the lock on the downstairs hallway door. Someone was quickly climbing the stairs. I went to the door and opened it and saw Mr. Dinn come onto our landing.

He wore a dark spring coat, a dark suit, and a dark felt hat, and he carried in his hand a copy of
The New York Times.
He seemed startled by my appearance at the door.

“Hello, llana. Is your mother home?”

I stared at him and said my mother was in Manhattan and would be home soon.

“I was on my way back from the office and thought your mother might be home,” he said, trying to make it sound light and matter-of-fact. Then he said, “How are you feeling? Are you over your fever?”

I told him I was feeling fine, and wondered who had told him I had been ill.

“Please tell your mother I was here,” he said. “Ask her to call me.”

I watched him start back down the stairs, a tall thin man, walking straight and stiff, and had a sudden image of the way my father used to sit slouched against the back of a chair with one foot draped across its arm. At the foot of the stairs Mr. Dinn turned and went through the hallway to the Helfman apartment. I heard him knock, heard the door open, heard Mrs. Helfman’s voice. I went back into the apartment. The wooden balls of the door harp pinged softly upon the taut wires.

A while later, from the window of my room, I saw my mother walking up the street. What a sweet and lovely sensation that was each time, watching my mother moving toward the house and toward me! I heard the lock click shut. I waited but did not hear my mother’s footsteps. I waited a while longer and went to the door and opened it. I heard my mother and Mrs. Helfman talking together quietly in the downstairs hallway. Then my mother started up the stairs. I came out onto the landing and she saw me. She looked very pale.

“Mama, Mr. Dinn was here and asked you to call him.”

“I know, darling. Mrs. Helfman told me.”

“What’s the matter, Mama?”

“Let me come inside and close the door. There was a very bad bombing near Bilbao yesterday and Mr. Dinn wanted to know if your father was all right.”

She removed her light coat and her beret and placed them in the closet.

“Is Papa all right?”

“If anything had happened, the paper would have called us. I’ll phone Mr. Dinn. Then I’ll make us something to eat. I’m sorry I’m so late today. The office was jammed. I have to go out later and teach my English class. I’ll call the paper in the morning. Come inside the kitchen, Ilana, and help me with supper. First, let me call Mr. Dinn.”

Her voice sounded strange. I watched her go along the hallway to the telephone on the stand between the kitchen and her bedroom.

During supper we heard a radio news broadcast about a bombing raid by rebel aircraft against a small unprotected town in northern Spain.

“Fascist barbarians,” my mother said venomously. “Like the Cossacks. Barbarians!”

“Mr. Dinn could have trusted me to remember to tell you. I’m not a child.”

“He was being very kind, Ilana. He wanted to make sure.”

“He doesn’t trust me because I’m a girl. David is the same way. They think I have no brains.”

“It’s very difficult for me to imagine anyone thinking that you have no brains. What’s troubling you, Ilana?”

“I’m afraid about Papa,” I said, after a pause.

“I’m sure your father is fine,” my mother said. “He’s taking good care of himself these days. Will you do the dishes, please? I must run to my class.”