Davita's Harp (8 page)

He stared at me a moment, his face pale and without expression. Then he turned and went quickly inside.

That night my mother and I slept outside on blankets on the dunes. There was no breeze and no sound of birds; birds did not fly at night, my mother had once told me. I lay still beneath the stars and listened to the surf. There were many people on the beach that night. I huddled against my mother and imagined I was the ocean. Would the westering women have done that in this heat? Imagined that they were the ocean? I was the waves and the surf, sliding smoothly back and forth, wet and cool, across the moist sand, in and out of the tidal pool where my castle stood. All that hot night I slept with the rhythm of the surf in my ears. Once I thought I heard the sand-muffled beat of horses’ hooves, but I knew that had to be a dream. When I woke it was light and gulls circled overhead, crying into the silent air. The ocean was a vast shimmering sheet of silver, and above it the hazy blue sky was piled high with masses of white luminous clouds. There was a faint humid breeze and the strong scent of brine.

My mother stirred and moved against me. She murmured in her sleep, words I did not understand but that sounded like the Yiddish she said she no longer spoke. She opened her eyes.

“Good morning,” she said. “How hot it is! Did you sleep well? I had a dream about my grandfather. Did I say something before I woke? Look at the sky, Ilana. How beautiful it is!”

We had breakfast on the porch. I helped my mother with the dishes. The cottage felt large and empty without my father and Jakob Daw. They were away at the hunger march. Starving people were marching on the capital city of Pennsylvania. There was no more money to keep them on relief. About sixty thousand families. My mother had explained it to me. It was the end of capitalism, she had said. The end of a cruel and heartless system. Soon we would see the beginning of a new America, a kinder America, an America under the control of its working class, an America that cared for its poor.

I came out on the porch. Behind me the door harp played its soft melody. The sky had turned pale and there were tall white-caps now far out on the water. Heaving waves rolled onto the beach, breaking, churning. I looked over toward my private world of tidal pool and castle. Standing near the castle and peering down at it was the thin pale boy from the house across the driveway. I went quickly out of the porch and along the dunes and the beach.

He must have seen me crossing the dunes. He straightened and turned and stood stiffly, watching me hurrying toward him.

“That’s my castle,” I said. “Don’t touch it.”

He turned his head slightly so that he was looking past me at the sea. He was about my height. He wore a fisherman’s cap and a short-sleeved white shirt and dark trousers rolled up to a little below his knees. His face had a stiff, pinched look. He was barefooted.

“I wasn’t going to touch it,” he said. His voice was thin and quavery.

“I don’t like anyone to touch it.”

“But the water goes over it at night.”

“No, it doesn’t. It only reaches the bottom part.”

“Doesn’t that get broken?’

“So I build it again. I still don’t like anyone to touch it.”

“You built this by yourself?” he asked. All the time he talked he did not look at me directly but gazed past me at the sea. “Where do you get ideas for such a thing?”

“From books and magazines. From my—imagination.”

“Such things really exist?”

“Sure they exist. In Spain. It’s a castle.”

“Is Spain a country?”

“Spain is a big country in Europe. Don’t you know about Spain? Don’t you see the newspapers?”

He looked faintly uncomfortable. “The castle looks like pictures I’ve seen of places in Yerusholayim. You’ve never heard of Yerusholayim? It’s a very holy city. Jerusalem. The city of King David.”

I thought I had heard of Jerusalem.

“You’re my neighbor,” he said. “I see you on your porch. Do you come here every summer? I don’t like it here. There’s nothing to do.”

“You can go to Coney Island and the boardwalk. You can swim.”

“I don’t know how to swim. I don’t like to swim.”

“Why did you come to a beach if you don’t like to swim?”

“Everyone said I needed a rest. I needed—air. I needed to get away. Everyone said that.”

“Do you live in New York?”

“I live in Brooklyn.”

“We just moved to Brooklyn. Just before we came here.”

“My name is David,” he said, still looking past me to the sea. “David Dinn.”

“My name is—Ilana.”

“Ilana,” he said, then repeated it. “Ilana. That’s a Jewish name.”

“It was my grandmother’s name.”

“Are you Jewish?” he asked, turning to look directly at me.

“Yes.”

He seemed surprised. “I didn’t think you were Jewish.” “Well, I am. Is the baby a boy or a girl?” “The baby? Oh. A boy.”

“I had a baby brother once. But he died. He got sick and he died.”

“He’s not my brother. He’s my cousin. I’m here with my aunt and uncle. My father is too busy with his work to come to the beach. My mother is—my mother is dead.” His voice broke and his eyes brimmed with tears. “My mother was a great person and now everyone says she’s with the Ribbono Shel Olom, she’s with God.”

“What does your father do?” I asked. “He’s a lawyer. He works in a big office in Manhattan.” “My father works in Manhattan. He writes for newspapers and magazines.”

“Where do your parents come from?”

“My mother is from Europe. My father is from Maine.”

“Maine?”

“The state of Maine. It’s a state north of—”

“Your father was born in Maine? Where were his parents born?”

“In Maine, too, I think.”

“Your father is Jewish?”

“No. My mother is Jewish.”

He stared at me.

There was a brief, tense silence.

“I have to go back,” he said finally.

“All right,” I said.

He turned and went up along the beach and across the dunes to his house.

During lunch I asked my mother if she had said Kaddish when her mother had died. “Yes.”

“And your father?”

She hesitated. “Yes.”

“Did you say it when my brother died?”

“No. I didn’t believe in it anymore.”

We swam together a long time in the afternoon, and then I worked on my castle. I did not see David Dinn. Just before supper Jakob Daw returned, looking white and drained. He had left my father in Harrisburg and had come back alone because he felt ill. His hands trembled and his cough was loud. He was running a fever. He went to bed in the room next to mine and my mother brought him food and medication. I sat on the porch and saw David Dinn and his uncle come out of the house and go along the driveway together and turn into the street.

From the porch that night I watched flashes of lightning over the horizon. Distant thunder rolled in from the sea. The air lay heavy and still. A gust of hot wind stirred the shrubs and trees into life. Then the wind blew in hard and brought with it large, pelting drops of rain. The rain fell with dull thudding sounds on the sand and the trees and the roof of the cottage.

It rained most of the night. I lay in bed and listened to the roar of the wind-lashed surf and wondered how far up the beach it was. I thought I could hear it just below the dunes, foaming and boiling and reaching for our cottage. My mother came into my room and held me and cradled me in her lap and sang to me softly in a language I did not understand. I fell asleep inside her warmth.

In my sleep I thought I heard a man cry out and the soft and soothing voice of a woman. There was a sudden lurid flash of lightning and a booming roll of thunder and again a man’s voice cried out, in a language I did not understand. I heard my mother in the room next to mine. Then lightning and thunder followed one upon the other for a long moment in a blinding and deafening cascade of crackling blue-white luminescence and pounding drumbeat noise. I sat up in my bed and stared into the darkness, listening. Whispery sounds came from the corners of my room. I
felt again all the old terrors of all the cold nights in the time of our winter wanderings. Lightning crackled and the room leaped into view. The thunder that followed rattled the windows and my bed. I lay in my bed and could not sleep. The whispers went on for a long time. Sometime in the night the storm subsided and became a dull and softly drumming rain. I fell asleep finally to the rhythm of the rain on the cottage and the trees.

I woke early in radiant sunlight. The air was cool, the cottage very still. Somewhere nearby a bird called.
Hoo hoo hoo hoo.
I got out of bed and dressed quickly and went out on the porch. The door harp played softly upon its taut wires.

The sky was clear and blue. Droplets of rain clung to the trees and deutzia shrubs. On the horizon the sun glowed deep red through a low bank of dazzling clouds. The floor of the porch was wet. The air smelled of brine and clean wet sand. All the world of beach and sky and sea lay fresh and clean to the fair day. I walked across the sodden dunes and beach to my tidal pool and my castle.

The walls and turrets had crumbled. The battlements were gone. Towers and ramparts and casements had been reduced to heaps of sand. The wharf and water gate had collapsed. The moat and bridge were indiscernible. The castle which I had built to nearly three feet in height was a flattened ruin.

I was the only one on the beach save for the wheeling gulls. I bent over the wrecked castle and put my fingers into the wet sand. I would build it again. I got down on my knees and began to work the sand.

I worked a long time. The sun climbed high above the horizon and the air grew warm. I had forgotten my dark glasses and felt the sun stinging my eyes. I raised my head at one point and looked across the dunes and saw David Dinn watching me from the porch of his house. Then someone was standing over me. I glanced up and saw Jakob Daw. He wore baggy pants and a rumpled shirt and old shoes encrusted with wet sand. His face was pale and his eyes were dark and weary. He stood there squinting in the sunlight and gazing down at the castle I was trying to rebuild.

“Good morning, llana Davita. Your mother and I saw you from the porch. That was a terrible storm.”

“It wrecked my castle.”

“I see. I am very sorry.”

“I have to rebuild it now.”

“Your mother asks you to come to breakfast.”

“Not now. Are you feeling better, Uncle Jakob?”

“Yes. The fever is gone. It will take you a long time to rebuild this castle, Ilana Davita.”

“It’s our protection against the Fascists on the other side of the ocean, Uncle Jakob. I have to rebuild it.”

He said nothing. I felt his hooded eyes looking at me.

“It’s our magic protection. We’ll live in it and never move from it. That’s why I can’t let it be wrecked.”

I felt him standing there and looking at me. I worked on the sand. The ocean rolled quietly and rhythmically upon the shore.

Jakob Daw coughed and cleared his throat. Then I heard him ask in his soft and raspy voice, “Ilana Davita, may I help you?”

“Yes,” I said.

He bent stiffly over the castle and put his white hands into the sand. His delicate fingers kneaded the sand, shaping it, smoothing it. Overhead in the enormous sky birds wheeled and screamed. A distant freighter moved ponderously toward the horizon. Jakob Daw and I worked together rebuilding my castle.

During those summers in Sea Gate my parents and their friends would meet together regularly in different homes. The night after the storm my mother went to a meeting alone and left me with Jakob Daw, who was tired and did not wish to go out. When I went to bed he was on the porch, writing. From the window near my bed I saw him seated at the table, hunched over his pad. The spectacles he wore when writing gave his face a scholarly look. Insects, attracted by the light, flew against the screen walls of the porch. Through the darkness came the monotonous sounds of the surf. I returned to my bed and sat propped against my
pillow, reading a children’s book about Spain that I had found during my weekly trip with my mother to the local public library.

There was a faint knock on my door. I called out and the door slowly opened and Jakob Daw came hesitantly into my room. He had seen my light burning, he said. Wasn’t I tired from the day’s work on the castle? He had promised my mother I would not stay up late. Was there something he could get me? Perhaps a glass of milk? Water? Perhaps I would like to hear a story. People sometimes said that his stories put them to sleep. Yes? A story? Good. Very good.

He sat on the edge of my bed. I put the book down and lay back on my pillow and listened. He spoke quietly in his hoarse voice and sometimes I had to strain to hear his words.

“There was a horse that lived in a narrow valley at the foot of a tall range of mountains. This was a young horse, a beautiful horse, gray in color, all gray, even its eyes and mane and hooves and tail were gray. The grayness had about it a special quality: it glowed with a warm, soft light. Can you imagine such a horse, Ilana Davita? A young, strong, gray horse, shining as it galloped about during the day, shining as it stood asleep during the night. A very beautiful horse.

“In the mountains along the valley lived a herd of black horses. These were powerful creatures who always went racing about in the gulleys and crevices and along the shoulders of the hills. Often the gray horse, hearing the distant beating of their hooves, would look up and see them running along a high ridge, silhouetted against the sky. They were entirely black; their manes were black, their eyes and hooves and tails were black. And the black was a deep black, with no glow, no light, a flat, strong black, like a night without moon or stars. Sometimes it stormed in the hills and the gray horse would see the black horses running in the rain and outlined against the sky when lightning flashed. They were awesome seen like that, running in the lightning and the rain.

“The little valley where the gray horse lived emptied onto a broad, sandy plain. Here lived another herd of horses that grazed peacefully in the oases that grew out of sand watered by underground streams. White was the color of these horses, a white that hurt the eyes. Every part of them was white—their eyes, their manes, their tails, their hooves. Pure, clean, dazzling white. On dark nights their whiteness was seen for miles, each horse a pulsing glow of light. The gray horse would look at the white horses on dark nights and at the black horses during the day and in lightning storms.