Davita's Harp

  For about an hour, the same boy who had led the service read aloud from the scroll, in a rhythm and chant I had never heard before, his voice high and clear. All sat silent as he read. From time to time he would stop and one of the men at the podium would chant something and a hum of talk would fill the room. Then the scroll was raised high in the air and all stood. With everyone once again seated, the boy remained alone at the podium, chanting, swaying slowly back and forth, a thin pale-faced boy in a suit and tie and a small dark skullcap and the fringed white and dark-striped woolen garment over his narrow shoulders. Then he was done and a shower of small brown bags and bits of candy flew through the air amidst shouts of “Mazol tov! Mazol tov!” Children scurried about for the bags. A swelling rise of laughter and talk accompanied the rain of candy and the scampering of the children. Some minutes later the scroll, carried by the boy, was again paraded through the men’s side of the room and brought up to the closet in front of the room. All sang in response to the boy’s singing. I liked the music and tried to sing along.

  Later, everyone stood in silence a long time, praying. And still later, David Dinn and his father rose together and recited the Kaddish. Others stood too, but I could not see them all for the narrowness of the open seam.

  Afterward on the sidewalk in front of the building I moved slowly through the noisy throng to where David Dinn was standing with his friends.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He turned to me and said quietly, “Hello, Ilana.”

  “Was that a celebration?”

  “Where?”

  “Inside. This morning.”

  “That was a bar mitzvah,” he said.

  “My God,” one of the other boys said. “She doesn’t know what a bar mitzvah is.”

  “Are you Jewish?” another asked me.

  “She’s Jewish,” David Dinn said. “Leave her alone.”

  “Why is that curtain in the room?” I asked. “Why do the men and women sit separately?”

  They all looked at me. One of them snickered loudly.

  “It’s the law,” David Dinn said.

  “What law?”

  “Jewish law.”

  “She’s not one of us,” a boy said.

  “Where does she come from?” another asked.

  “Can I ask one more question?” I said to David Dinn.

  “Sure,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable.

  “Is it the law that instead of helping you’re supposed to laugh at someone who’s trying to learn?”

  They stood there, staring at me and saying nothing. All around us the crowd moved and surged, joyous, boisterous.

  David Dinn’s father came out of the crowd, looking tall and courtly in his dark coat and dark suit and hat. “There you are,” he said to David. “And there you are, Ilana. How are you and how is your mother?”

  “My mother is fine. My father is coming home.”

  “He is? I’m glad to hear that. Is he well?”

  “No. He was wounded in Madrid. He’s coming home to rest. My Aunt Sarah is a nurse in Spain. She’s bringing him back.”

  His face darkened. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Ilana.”

  I saw David Dinn staring at me, his mouth open. The others had fallen very silent. The noise of the crowd rose and fell all around me like the back-and-forth rushing of surf in a storm.

  Mr. Dinn said, “Why didn’t your mother—?” then abruptly stopped. He was silent a moment, his fingers tapping rapidly upon one of the buttons of his coat. He ran a finger along the inside of his shirt collar. Then he said to me, “Have a good Shabbos, Ilana. I wish your father a speedy recovery. We must go now. Come, David.”

  “Good Shabbos,” David Dinn said.

  They stepped into the crowd and were gone.

  I stood a moment amidst David Dinn’s friends. They all looked alike in their dark coats and hats and pale faces, all standing there and staring at me in silence.

  I turned up the parkway and walked home alone.

  A letter arrived from Jakob Daw. He was in Madrid.

  “My dear Channah. I write in English to show you I have not forgotten the language we once studied together. I write to tell you that I have entirely ceased writing stories. Here things happen daily for which there are no words. One hears sounds that language cannot name: sounds from children and animals as the shells fall, sounds later when the shelling has stopped. Michael was with La Pasionaria at the Segovia Bridge. He will be hurt if he is not more careful. I tell him he has a beautiful wife and a lovely, sharp-minded daughter to go home to and care for. He answers that all the world is in peril now and if the Fascists win we are all doomed. He washes his face with water from a dirty basin in our bombed-out hotel and gets something to eat and rushes back to the front. And the front is everywhere, everywhere, all around Madrid. He is handsome, your Michael. How do you say it? Dashing. Yes. He has friends wherever he goes. I sit alone in my room. I have a drink sometimes with an officer who comes to visit and talks to me about my stories. Here there is a hell beyond the ability of even a Dante to depict. No words for it, no names. Kazantzakis said the other night that an officer told him the Spaniard has many souls inside himself and is all full of unreconciled and contradictory desires; he is a mixture of many races still uncrystallized. He loves life, but something in him cries out, ‘All this is nothing!’ Then he hungers for death. He goes from extreme to extreme, yearning, suffering. He has too much blood inside him. Blood must be taken from him. He has a need to burst into violence. There is inhuman joy and passion in this war. And at the root of this passion is the despair at the possibility that all is nothing. Kazantzakis says that here there is madness. Spaniards talk of death as if it were a neighboring land where all go to visit sooner or later. Madness. Convulsions of hatred. Anarchy. A time of apocalypse. Can an entire people become insane? Can all of mankind go mad? Chaos is king in Spain. Here little children carry flags and guns. Here priests urge on the killing. All the air is filled with the song of a dying bird. Journalists watch the bombing raids with curled lips and sarcastic smiles; others are cold, indifferent. All is a prologue to a great catastrophe. How can one write stories? I saw a child Ilana Davita’s age lose her legs to a shell. Stories! How lovely Vienna was when we were there in our dream time. How sad that we did not know we were leaving forever our youthful lives. We might have bade good-bye in some appropriate way to those early years. How much there is to regret! What a cruel century we now live in! The cough is better in Madrid than it was in Switzerland. I shall try hard to restrain your impetuous Michael. You will please give Ilana Davita my most affectionate greetings. Jakob.”

  The letter had been addressed to my mother, who had not told me about it. I found it on the desk in her bedroom one evening that week as I wandered about the apartment while she was in Manhattan. There was much in the letter I could not understand. But I understood enough.

  Later that evening I stood at my window gazing down at our darkening street. How quickly the green life had gone from the trees! Would my room be cold again in the coming winter? Probably we would move again soon. The lamp-post lights came on, sudden yellow-white pools in the evening’s shadows. Behind me the apartment seemed to pulse with menacing words. Death as a neighboring land. I did not understand that. All the air is filled with the song of a dying bird. What did that mean? Perhaps I should not have read the letter. Perhaps I really hadn’t understood it. But no more stories! I understood that. What would happen now to the little bird?

  Through my window I saw Mr. Helfman walking along the street on the way back from work. He taught Hebrew and Bible at the school named after David Dinn’s great-grandfather. He went up the front steps. I heard the clear echoing click of the closing hallway door. I lay down on my bed and thought of Jakob Daw.

  On Saturday afternoon in the first week of December a cab pulled up at our house. My mother and I went racing downstairs. Aunt Sarah stood on the curb, wearing a nurse’s uniform and a wide dark-gray cape. She was help
ing my father out of the cab. He seemed unable to move his right leg.

  “Hello, Annie!” my father called out when he saw my mother. “I’m back in one piece!”

  My mother bit her lip and held back her tears. She did not kiss him. I saw Ruthie and her parents looking at us through the bay window of their living room. All up and down the street people were looking at us.

  “Hello, my love!” my father said to me. “Christ, how you’ve grown! Look what’s happened to your old dad. Be very careful, love. No hugs now. Give us a hand, Sarah. The steps will be tricky.”

  My aunt and the cabdriver helped him up the stairs and into the apartment. He glanced at the singing harp as he came through the door. “Hello!” he said to the harp. “Are you glad to see me? I’m damn glad to see you!”

  My aunt and my mother took him into the bedroom and closed the door. The cab drove away.

  I waited in the hallway outside the bedroom. I had almost not recognized him. He had lost a great deal of weight and seemed smaller now than when he had left. His face had a yellowish cast that accentuated and darkened the blueness of his eyes. His wavy brown hair had been cut very short and I could see clearly the stark whiteness of his scalp. Later my mother explained to me that he had been ill for a while in Spain with a stomach sickness called dysentery. Now he was recovering from a sickness of the liver called jaundice and from a deep wound in the hip caused by the fragments of an exploding grenade.

  He lay in the double bed in my parents’ bedroom. My mother, white-faced, rigidly calm, borrowed a cot from Mrs. Helfman and placed it next to the double bed. Aunt Sarah moved into the room across the hallway from me.

  The last of the leaves fell from the trees. The weather turned bitter cold.

  Strangely, my room remained warm.

  In some houses in the neighborhood little candles burned in the windows. Ruthie told me one night as we played together in her living room that the candles were in celebration of a Jewish holiday called Chanukkah. There had been a war a long time ago, she said, to free the Jews from pagan conquerors. The candles were for the miracle that had happened during that war when the temple in Jerusalem had been recaptured from the pagans and re-dedicated to God.

  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.”