I sat up in my bed and put down the book. “Yes.”
He came slowly into the room and sat down in the chair near the head of the bed. The light of my reading lamp fell upon his pale, almost feminine features, bathing them in lights and shadows. Beyond him the room was a blur of dim and shapeless forms.
He asked with a quiet, apologetic smile, “Did I interrupt your reading? I am sorry. What book is it?”
“It’s about the Spanish people and their cities and also their castles, especially the castle called the Alhambra.”
“The Alhambra. A beautiful castle.” He hesitated, looking down at his hands, which lay limply on his knees. “Well, I thought I might, that is if you are interested, I might, well, tell you a story.” He gazed at me hesitantly, the apologetic smile still on his lips. “Are you interested?”
Yes, I was very interested.
The smile widened. “Good,” he said. “Good.” He peered at me a moment, then looked down at his hands. He raised his eyes and looked at me directly. “The story is about a bird,” he said. “A little bird with black feathers and short wings and a small red spot under each of its large dark eyes. Are you ready, Ilana Davita? Here is my story.
“The bird woke one day from a long deep sleep and found himself in a strange land. How had he come to this land? From where had he flown? The bird could not remember. It was a beautiful land—lovely soft green hills and leafy trees and dew on the flowers and grass and cooling breezes and the sun always shining but never too hot and at night a full moon and a gentle wind. There were animals in the land and they were like animals everywhere, peaceful when left alone, hunting and killing only for food. The people of the land lived in small groups that were often at war with one another. Some people were cruel; others were kind. They were like people you meet everywhere. But the land itself was like no land the bird had ever seen or imagined. It seemed enchanted, a magical land, filled with crystal lakes and fields of wheat and corn, with rolling sunlit meadows and deep forests—and music. A soft haunting music could be heard everywhere. It seemed to come from the earth itself, a low enthralling tinkle of sound, like joyous bells far off beyond the blue hills, beyond the green meadows, far, far away. Music.
“The little bird loved the land and did not like the people. He wondered why the people made war, why they were so cruel. He thought it might be a good idea to try and change them. Now, how could a little bird do that? One day as he sat on the branch of a tree in the cool green shade of overhanging leaves, he had an idea. It occurred to him that in some way it might be the music that was the cause of the cruelties he saw. People hurt one another, killed one another, made war with one another—and instead of feeling sorrow and regret, went ahead and were soothed by the music. Perhaps if the music came to a stop; perhaps if there was no music to soothe a person who did someone harm—perhaps then the harm itself might come to be felt as intolerable and be brought to an end. And so the bird set out to discover the source of the music. He began to fly back and forth across the land, back and forth, and back and forth.”
Jakob Daw stopped. There was silence.
I asked quietly, “Did the bird find the music?”
“He is still searching.”
I thought a moment. “I don’t think I like the story.”
Jakob Daw smiled sadly and sighed. “So many people do not like my stories.”
“Mama said you’re a great writer.”
“Did she? Your mother is very kind.”
“The bird is still searching?”
“Yes.”
“Will he ever find where the music comes from?”
“I do not know.”
“Is the music a kind of magic?”
“Magic? Perhaps. Yes. It might be a kind of magic.”
“I’ve never heard a story like that before, Uncle Jakob. It doesn’t even have an ending.”
“Yes. I see. No ending. Perhaps you would like me to tell you another story.”
“Not now, Uncle Jakob. I’m tired.”
“I thought you might be.”
“Why do people read your stories if they don’t really like them?”
“I ask myself that very often. I do not know. Good night, Ilana Davita.” “Good night, Uncle Jakob.” He went quietly from the room.
I lay in my bed. What a strange story! It was a long time before I was able to sleep.
I dreamed of the bird that night, flying, flying, to find the source of the healing music and wake the world to its befouling cruelties. A little black bird flying, a small red spot beneath each of his glittering eyes. Jakob Daw’s story had been very confusing and I had not understood it. Yet I was dreaming about the little bird flying to find the source of the music. What would he do if he ever found it? Flying, flying across the blue hills and crystal lakes and sunlit meadows of my enchanted land. Flying, the magical music a warm solace. Flying.
Jakob Daw was with us for two weeks. Then he packed his bags to go away for a while to a country called Canada. He would be back in the summer, he said. He stood at the door to the apartment with me and my parents. He shook my mother’s hand, gently, and I saw pass between them a look that seemed burdened with memories. My father saw it too, and a deep pity entered his eyes. Jakob Daw bent to kiss me, and I felt his gentle shyness. It was a dry kiss, briefly delivered to my forehead. His fingers brushed my cheek. They felt hot.
I dreamed often of the little bird. I could not grasp the story; yet I kept dreaming of the bird. How strange to be so affected by a story I did not understand!
One night over supper, a week or so after Jakob Daw had left, I told the story to my parents. They did not understand it, either.
“There’s something hidden in it,” my father said. “But I don’t know what it is. I wish more of his stuff was out in English. What’s it like to read him in German?”
“Extraordinary,” my mother said.
“He’s a strange guy. Was he this way when you knew him in Vienna?”
“Yes,” said my mother. “But he wasn’t ill in Vienna. That came later.”
Flying. The little black bird flying to find the music of the world.
A letter came from Aunt Sarah. She was still in Ethiopia. My father read it to us at the kitchen table. She described the heat and the suffering of the Ethiopians and the horrible medical facilities. She prayed a great deal and read often from the Book of Psalms. It was difficult to do the work of our Lord in this dreadful land, but she was certainly trying. “And how is Ilana Davita? I must see her again and tell her more of my Maine stories.”
“Is the war in Ethiopia over?” I asked.
“Yes,” my father said, frowning.
“The Italians think it’s over,” my mother said. “It isn’t over for the Ethiopians.”
“It’s over,” my father said with an uncharacteristic scowl. “Chalk up one more for the Fascists.”
The weather had turned very warm. I walked alone through the neighborhood now, seeing streets clearly, remembering them. I had words for most of the things I saw, and it was the words that I remembered. I began to like the streets and the people. In school a boy who sat near me in my class and whose father hated Mussolini came over to me during recess, and we played together on the bars. I liked the neighborhood and the school and the walks to the park with my mother and the scent of the river. We received no more mail from my Aunt Sarah and heard nothing from Jakob Daw.
One morning in early June, as I was washing in the bathroom, I heard our doorbell ring. My father went through the hallway and opened the door.
A man’s voice said, “Mr. Michael Chandal?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Sloane. I own this building.” “Well, hello. Come on in.”
“No, thanks. Mr. Chandal, I have to tell you that you’re in violation of the terms of your tenancy.”
“What?” my father said.
“The meetings you hold in your apartment are a gross disturbance to the peace and quiet of the other tena
nts. Also, I’m told you’ve taken in someone to live with you. That’s another clear violation.”
“That individual is no longer here,” my father said. I heard my mother call from the kitchen. “Michael, what is it?” “I’ll handle it, Annie,” my father called back. “I’ve got to ask you to vacate the premises,” the owner of the building said. There was a pause.
“I’ll do you this favor,” the owner of the building said. “I’ll give you thirty days. After that the sheriff will be here to evict you.”
“For Christ’s sake—”
I heard the door close.
The harp sent warm, soft, shivery music through the air.
“Capitalist son of a bitch,” my father said.
He went back along the hallway. I flushed the toilet and washed my hands and went quickly through the hallway to the kitchen, my heart pounding.
“I want to call Ezra,” my mother was saying.
“We don’t need Ezra,” my father said.
“I want to call him anyway,” my mother said.
The door harp came down. The picture of the horses on Prince Edward Island came down. My mother’s cousin appeared one evening in his dark suit and dark felt hat and spent a long time in the kitchen, talking to my parents. I helped my mother pack the large barrels and cartons. My father packed the books and magazines and papers. The apartment filled with shadows and echoes. I had bad dreams about Baba Yaga, who had somehow returned to life.
Early one morning burly men climbed the staircase and appeared at our door. Neighbors hung from windows, watching. The men grunted and sweated as they carried our furniture out of the house and loaded it into a van. We moved across the river into the second floor of a narrow two-story brownstone house in a distant part of the city called Brooklyn.
About one week later we moved again—not with furniture and barrels, but with summer clothes, pots and pans, towels and bedding, the door harp, the picture of the horses, and some of my parents’ papers and books—to the cottage in the shore section of New York City called Sea Gate, where we had spent the past few summers. My mother had written earlier to Jakob Daw in Canada, giving him our new address in Brooklyn and inviting him to join us in the cottage. He did not reply.
Two
The cottage—three small bedrooms, a kitchen, a small dining room, a parlor—looked out on the sand and the sea. It had a screened-in front porch and a back lawn where grass and scrub brush grew from sandy soil. From the porch I would look eastward and see Rockaway Beach in the distance to my left, and the Atlantic Ocean, and Sandy Hook almost directly before me, and Staten Island to my right. I would come out the front door onto the porch—the front of the cottage faced the beach; the rear of the cottage faced the street—and hear the song of the door harp. Then I would come down off the porch onto the dunes, skirt the wild deutzia shrubs with their white blossoms and green leaves, and walk along the smooth clean yellow-white sand of the sloping beach to the rim of the sea. And there I would often stand for long minutes, looking at the water—at the rhythmic roll and crash of the waves, at the sparkles of sunlight on the curling crests, at the rush of foaming surf. The water was dark green near the shore and deep blue along the horizon. Ships sailed in the blue distance toward the line of sea and sky, freighters moving with such ponderous slowness they seemed fixed in the water. I watched them often that summer and wondered where they were sailing. To the Austria of Jakob Daw? To defeated Ethiopia and my Aunt Sarah? To the Spain that my father and mother and I were now reading about in newspapers and books and magazines?
My room faced the dunes and the sea. In the mornings, through the narrow line of high uncurtained clerestory windows came the pale brightness of dawn and then the fires of the new sun. What enchantment there was in the light and the warmth and the scent of the sand and the sea! I would listen to the wind in the giant poplars and the young sycamores; to the cries of gulls in the morning stillness; and to the occasional loud, ringing call of a strange bird, a call that sounded like a woman’s voice: Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo. I remember waking on our first morning in the cottage in that burning summer of 1936, the sense of newness sharp and pure, and hearing that bird’s call, and wondering if it was the bird in Jakob Daw’s story. Hoo hoo hoo hoo, the bird called as I lay in bed bathed in the morning sunlight. Hoo hoo hoo hoo ha ha ha.
Later that morning I went for a walk along the shaded streets of Sea Gate. The air was warm, the sun white in a blue sky. There was little traffic and no concern about unwanted strangers: Sea Gate was fenced and protected. I walked beneath the poplars and sycamores past the empty lots with their dwarf forests of wild grass and low bushes, past the small frame houses built in the twenties and the large, old, wealthy homes with their cupolas and dormer windows and deep wrap-around porches—the homes designed by Stanford White and William Van Allen for the very rich. Sea Gate was a small community, a few hundred homes, a few thousand people, and it contained in the summers I was there—the summers before my father went to Spain and our lives changed—the last remnants of that legendary set of upper-class Protestant pirates, along with the first of the Italians, Greeks, and Jews, as well as atheists, Socialists, Communists, writers, editors, theater people, and their various wives, mistresses, and children.
We were in a small world of sand and sea about ten miles from the heart of Manhattan. A trolley ran through the area to a ferry. The ferry brought you to South Street at the tip of Manhattan. My father would take the trolley and the ferry to the newspaper where he worked. Almost always by the time I woke in the morning he was gone. But he was always back in time for a swim and supper—unless he needed to go out of the city on a story. He would come home carrying three or four newspapers in addition to the one for which he worked, get into his bathing suit, and head across the beach to the water. He was a fine swimmer and would swim very far out, his arms and shoulders and face flashing in the afternoon sunlight. Sometimes my mother would swim with him and I would watch them moving together smoothly in the sea.
I loved the beach and the surf. In front of our cottage a small stone jetty came off the beach at a sharp angle and, together with the low wooden jetty that ran straight from the beach into the water, helped form along the water’s edge a shallow tidal pool of gentle surf and smooth wet sand. I would wade in the pool, feeling the tugs of the surf; or I would sit for hours, building tall castles in the sand. I spent much of that summer building castles, sometimes with friends, often alone.
Sometimes in the mornings after breakfast or at night while my parents were talking quietly together, I would look at the newspapers my father brought home. At first I did not understand most of what I read. But certain words and phrases became quickly familiar to me that summer: heat, drought, dust bowl, weather bureau alarmed, rain is needed. Repeatedly I saw the names North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, Illinois, Virginia. I imagined fields and meadows and hills burning beneath the relentless sun. The same sunlight that I loved to play in here was killing people out west. And the names of all those places were like the names in the stories about westering women told me by Aunt Sarah. How would those women have used their imaginations to save themselves from this cruel sun?
At the end of the first week in July the newspapers said that the temperature in the Midwest had reached 120 degrees. More than one hundred people had died of the heat. My father told us when he returned from the newspaper that day that the heat had begun to move eastward. I sat in my little pool, rebuilding the castle that had been attacked by the night tide and waiting for the heat.
The next day the heat in New York climbed to over 100 degrees. In the late afternoon I stood on the screened-in porch gazing at the beach and the sea. The air was still and hot. Gulls circled slowly overhead, calling. The surf rolled lazily in and out across the sand. There were many people on the beach and in the water. I heard my father’s voice from somewhere in the cottage: he had just returned from his work in Manhattan. I heard my mother’s voice return his greeting. Then I heard a th
ird voice. I went quickly into the cottage.
“He looks awful,” my father was saying to my mother. “Look at him, Annie. We’ve got to do something about how he looks.”
“You chose such a hot day to return,” my mother said. “Can I get you a cold drink?”
“The heat in Canada was unimaginable,” Jakob Daw said. “To me it seemed the air was burning. Birds would not fly.”
“Uncle Jakob!” I called from the kitchen doorway. They had not seen me standing there.
Jakob Daw turned, his pale face startled. Then he broke into a smile. “Ilana Davita. How good to see you again. Look at your suntan! A Viking with a golden suntan!”
“Here’s something cold for you, Jakob,” my mother said.
Jakob Daw took the glass from my mother. He arched his gaunt body slightly forward from the waist, put the glass to his mouth, and drank thirstily. His Adam’s apple moved up and down on his thin neck. His face was wet with perspiration.
“We have to sit and talk,” my father said. “Tanner wants a report on Canada for Tuesday’s meeting.”
“There is much to talk about. Canada was—interesting.”
“How long will you stay with us, Uncle Jakob?” I asked.
“I do not know.”
“Will you stay a few days?”
“Oh, yes. At least a few days.”
“Can I get you a real drink?” my father asked.
“No, thank you. Another iced tea would be very pleasant, Channah.”
“Would you like to see the sand castle I made?” “I will be happy to see your sand castle, Ilana Davita.” “Let Uncle Jakob sit down and relax now, Ilana,” my mother said.
“Would you tell me another story later?”
He looked at me, a weary smile on his pale face. “Of course I will tell you another story. Of course.”
That night he was up late with my parents. I could hear them talking quietly on the screened-in porch. The air was hot and humid. I lay in my bed, moist with heat, listening to the distant roll of the surf. Insects lurched wildly against the screens of my windows; I thought the heat must be driving them mad. I slept fitfully and had disquieting dreams, though when I woke I could not be certain what they had been about.