Davita's Harp (32 page)

Shortly before noon a long shiny gray car came down the macadam road toward the sea and turned into the dirt road that led to the farmhouse. A man in uniform stepped out.

“Good morning, William,” Aunt Sarah called cheerfully, getting to her feet. “Did you have a pleasant drive? We shall be starting shortly. How are Mother and Father?”

I sat looking at the sea and listening to the wind and the wheeling birds. I imagined horses on the beach galloping and turning and galloping again, their hooves drumming on the red sand. After lunch Aunt Sarah and I knelt in the living room and thanked the Merciful God for the summer and for our health. Then we closed up the farmhouse and climbed into the car and drove away.

I returned to school. I sat in the classroom, numbed by vacant hours. No one talked to me. I could hear classmates whispering about me as I went by in the corridors. One morning a hall monitor put his hands on my chest and squeezed and said, “Grapes,” and laughed hideously. My dreams began to return.

Letters came from Jakob Daw but I would not read them. I did not return to the synagogue.

On occasion my mother would come into my room and find
me kneeling in prayer. Mr. Dinn was often in the apartment, almost always in the late evenings. David came once and heard me describe my weeks in the farmhouse with my aunt and did not come again. I saw Ruthie often but we did not play together.

One day I wandered away from my school and walked in a dreamlike haze through the neighborhood and then returned to the school a few minutes before the end of class. There was a big fuss about that.

I remember long talks with my mother and Mr. Dinn. I remember the leaves beginning to turn and the cold in the evening air. I remember coming upon my mother in the kitchen one night and seeing her at the table, her head in her hands. She was crying. She did not see me and I walked quietly away.

Again I wandered from my school and now my mother was called and we sat together in an office with a short, bald man who peered at us from behind a dark-wood desk on which papers were arranged in orderly piles. I asked him, “Is that your special writing?” They stared at me. My mother looked ill. I knelt by my bed and prayed that night and dreamed, for the first time in many weeks, of Baba Yaga. I was on the dirt road that led to the farmhouse. The door to the farmhouse opened slowly and she stepped out, Baba Yaga, and stood there, one foot on the stone step, one foot on the threshold. Then she laughed and leaped through the air and fell upon me. I woke screaming and my mother was quickly in the room.

I remember a long night in the kitchen with my mother and Mr. Dinn, but I cannot recall what was said. I remember a long talk with Mr. Helfman in the backyard near the sycamore and the bed of fading flowers. I remember long conversations with a kindly bearded man in a small musty room whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books.

I sat in a classroom amidst new faces and listened to a young clean-shaven man speak softly about a Jewish scholar named Rambam, who had lived hundreds of years ago in Spain. Spain was a very important country for the Jews, the teacher said. Did
anyone know what was going on now in Spain? I raised my hand, “Ilana,” he said gently. “Yes.”

I talked. I talked and talked—as if I had never spoken before in all the years of my life; as if I had never uttered words before in all the classrooms I had attended. Faces turned to me. The teacher stood behind his desk, listening.

That fall my mother left her job in Manhattan and began to work for an agency in downtown Brooklyn a few blocks from the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. She felt she ought to be closer to home, she said. She didn’t want me staying alone too long after school. And she was tired of having to travel day after day to Manhattan. I heard her tell Mr. Dinn that Manhattan reminded her too much of my father. What point was there to her being endlessly haunted by her dead husband? she said.

I wandered into my mother’s bedroom one afternoon and opened my father’s closet. The strong rose-petal fragrance of a sachet rose to my nostrils. My father’s clothes and shoes were gone. Even the clothes hangers were no longer there. The sight of that closet—its cavernous emptiness—was shocking and sent through me a coldness that made the back of my neck tingle. The carton with my father’s special writing was still on the floor near the bed; and the picture of the horses on the beach still hung on the wall. But I was haunted by the vision of that empty closet.

My mother told me that she had given all of my father’s clothes and shoes to the poor. Mr. Dinn had taken care of it. What point was there to having my father’s clothes and shoes moidering in the closet? she said. There were poor and hungry people everywhere who needed clothes and shoes. “Are you very upset, Ilana?
I’m sorry. I did it while you were with Aunt Sarah. There are better ways to remember your father than by the suits and shoes he wore.”

But each time I recited the Kaddish I would remember the look of his clothes. And I was saying it every day now, for we prayed in class at the start of each day and I was one of two students who rose at intervals and recited the Hebrew words, “Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmai rabboh …”

After the first morning my teacher, a kindly bearded man in his middle forties, had asked me to remain behind as the class trooped out for the morning recess. When we were alone, he said, “Ilana, a girl does not say Kaddish.”

I did not respond.

“I was told that you say Kaddish in shul. I cannot do anything about that. But you will not say it in my class.” I said nothing. “Is that understood, Ilana?” I nodded. He dismissed me.

The next morning I rose during the morning service and quietly recited the Kaddish. I felt the teacher’s burning eyes upon me, felt all their eyes, staring. But he said nothing to me about it again, and after a few days there were no more stares. All uttered the necessary responses at the appropriate places. Then one day the boy who recited the Kaddish with me did not rise, and I stood alone, saying the words—“Magnified and sanctified be the great name of God …”—and still all responded.

I found as the weeks went by and winter approached that my mother had been right: I was no longer clearly remembering the look and cut of my father’s clothes. At times I could not even recall his face. My mother said that was natural; but it frightened me to be losing my memory of my father.

I saw David often. He was a class ahead of me. I would see him in the company of his friends in the corridors or the yard. Sometimes we would talk briefly alone together. Mostly he remained in the circle of his friends. He had an extraordinary reputation in the
school. All seemed awed by his brilliance. And because the whole school knew by now that his father and my mother were first cousins, I was treated as if I belonged intimately to his family and shared in the aura of high intellect and breeding—all of this despite my mother’s known political loyalties. I realized quickly enough that no one in my class snickered or whispered or laughed when I raised my hand to ask or to answer a question, to react to a book we had been told to read, or to make a point about the opera at the Metropolitan or the exhibition of paintings at the Brooklyn Museum which the school took us to see during the first semester I was there. There was much gossip and idle talk among the students; but no one in this school laughed at learning.

The school day was divided in half: Hebrew and religious studies in the morning, English and secular studies in the afternoon. I was in my regular fourth-grade class in the afternoon; but, because my Hebrew was so poor, I had been placed in the second grade for the morning hours. Ruthie, who was in my afternoon class, and Mr. Helfman, who taught sixth grade, tutored me after school hours in Hebrew. I felt myself floating and gliding and flying through this school, where no one whispered about you as you went through the corridors and no one put his hands on your chest and squeezed and yelled, “Grapes!” and no one called you a Commie Jew shit to your face.

I was busy with my studies, and my mother was busy with her work. She seemed always to be doing something: reading, cleaning, washing, cooking, writing, attending meetings, talking with Mr. Dinn, studying with the two men and the woman who continued coming to our apartment on Sunday afternoons. She went to bed long after I did and woke long before. In all the months of that fall and early winter I do not remember ever seeing her rest during the day.

We would leave the apartment together in the morning and walk to Eastern Parkway and then go our separate ways, she to work and I to school. The mail arrived after we left and I would hurry home from school and use the duplicate mailbox key my
mother had given me. But the letters we waited for did not come. Nothing from Jakob Daw. Nothing from Aunt Sarah. Jakob Daw had not written us in weeks. Where was he? And was Aunt Sarah back in Spain?

In December there was a Chanukkah assembly in the school in the same large room where people prayed on Saturdays and holidays. The dividing ninon wall had been removed. A tall plywood wall stood before the ark, separating it from the room. Boys and girls sat together and one of the boys in the eighth grade chanted the blessings and lit the first candle. Another boy delivered a brief talk about the courage of the Maccabees and the miracle of the lights. “The few prevailed against the many,” he said, “because they had faith in the Ribbono Shel Olom.”

During supper that night I asked my mother if we could light Chanukkah candles in our house. She said no, she didn’t believe in it.

“But they’re so pretty, Mama. And they remind me of when Papa was here last year.”

“No,” she said, after a moment. “I have enough trouble on my hands sending you to the yeshiva. All I need is for someone in my section to pass by our window and see Chanukkah candles burning.”

I had not realized that by going to a religious school I was endangering her position in the party.

Yes, she said. There had been a hearing. She had been given the opportunity to offer a lengthy explanation. She had reminded them of the price our family had already paid for the cause. They had listened courteously. There had been a few sarcastic remarks. The hearing had ended with no official action being taken.

I did not ask my mother again. Instead I would walk down to Ruthie’s apartment just before supper and watch Mr. Helfman light the candles. Then I would go upstairs and have supper with my mother.

I knew little of what was happening now in Spain. I no longer read newspapers and only occasionally glanced at a headline. I
knew the Fascists were winning the war. I did not want to hear anything more about it.

One evening my mother came back from work carrying a carton filled with house plants. She distributed the plants throughout the apartment, placing them on windowsills and tables where they could catch the sunlight. “We need some green life in this apartment,” she said. “How did we go all these years without plants in the house? Aren’t they pretty? And inexpensive. Would you like one for your room, Ilana?”

She attended rallies in Manhattan and party meetings in Brooklyn. On occasion groups of people would come to our apartment, quiet, serious men and women about my mother’s age, and they would sit for hours in the living room and have long discussions and listen to her lectures. There was no drinking at those meetings, no rowdiness. How the door harp played to the comings and goings of those people on those nights!

I asked my mother who the people were.

They were writers and artists and theater people, she said.

“Don’t they sing?”

“I promised Mrs. Helfman there would be no singing or drinking.”

“I miss the singing.”

“So do I,” she said. “There are many things I miss now, Ilana. What can we do?”

One night after a long meeting of that group I woke and came out of my room and went along the hallway. The apartment was dark, the air rancid with tobacco smoke. I wanted a glass of water and started into the kitchen, when I noticed that the door to my mother’s room was slightly ajar. Light streaming out of her room cut a sharp wedge into the hallway darkness. I moved toward the door and put my hand on the knob. Then I stopped and remained very still, peering into the room through the narrow opening of the door.

My mother stood naked before the full-length mirror that was attached to the door of her closet. I had never seen her entirely
naked before. The mirror magnified the ceiling light and sent it cascading upon her as she turned her body slowly this way and that, keeping her eyes fixed upon her reflection. I saw the lovely smooth white nakedness of her, saw her slender arms and curving shoulders and the flat planes of her shoulder blades and the curving indentation of her spinal column and the deep cleavage between the rounded buttocks. I glimpsed from the side the round firm fleshiness of her left breast and, in the long mirror, saw all the golden fullness of her body, breasts and nipples and belly and the clump of triangular darkness that sent a shiver through me. She was fondling her breasts, stroking the nipples with the palms of her hands, slowly, an expression of rapt concentration on her pale and lovely face, her eyes nearly shut, her mouth open and her tongue pressing tightly upon her upper lip; then rubbing the nipples, gently, with her index fingers and thumbs, gently and slowly, rubbing. The nipples were dark and hard, her body rigid, her back slightly arched. She stood there in front of the mirror, rocking slowly back and forth. Then, slightly parting her legs, she raised herself on tiptoe. “Michael,” I heard her say, in a long drawn-out whisper and in a voice I barely recognized. “Michael …”