Davita's Harp

  “It’s nice,” he said. “It’s very nice.”

  “I’m not done with it.”

  “I like the way you did the tops of the walls.” He was pointing to the embrasures in the parapets. His voice was shy, hesitant. His trousers were rolled up and I could see his thin, pale, sand-encrusted feet. “What’s this on the outside?”

  “A turret.”

  “And this?”

  “A tower.”

  “And what do you call this?” “A wharf.” “And this?”

  “That’s called a drawbridge.”

  “How do you know all those names?”

  “I saw them in books.”

  A vaguely approving look came into his eyes. “In books,” he echoed softly, then was silent a moment, looking down at the castle. “What do you call this thing here?”

  He was pointing to the carving I had made in the large door over the drawbridge.

  “That’s a door harp.”

  He gazed uncertainly at the carving.

  “It plays music when you open and close the door. It gives you a good feeling.” “Do castles have door harps?”

  “I don’t know. My castle does. We have one in our house. It belongs to my father.” “Is it like a mezuzah?” “What’s that?”

  “It’s something we put on the side of a doorpost. It reminds us of God.”

  “A door harp has nothing to do with God. It just plays nice music. We don’t believe in God.”

  He turned from the castle and fixed his eyes on me. He said nothing. His eyes were dark and sad. I was reminded of the sadness in my Aunt Sarah when I once told her we never celebrated Christmas.

  “I have to go back,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “I really like your castle.” “Thanks.”

  “You made it bigger this time.”

  “That’s for protection against another storm.”

  “Did the storm scare you?”

  “Yes.”

  “The last time there was a storm like that, we were in the mountains. A year ago. My mother came into my room. That was a nice summer.” He stopped and stared at the castle. He grimaced and for a long moment held his lower lip between his teeth. “I miss my mother. It hurts inside me. Everyone says it will go away, but it doesn’t.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I have to go back,” he said. “My aunt will worry about me.” “Listen,” I said. “Do you know that your father and my mother are cousins?”

  “Sure I know. I have to go back and eat supper and go to shul to say Kaddish. You really don’t believe in God?”

  “No. My mother says that God is—”

  “I’m going,” he said. “I really like your castle.”

  He turned and walked off. I watched him go back up the beach to the dunes, thin-shouldered and a little stooped. He looked like a small Jakob Daw.

  The evening was warm. Insects droned in the darkening air. We had been invited to a supper meeting in one of the elegant homes on nearby Highland Avenue. My father had on a suit; my mother wore a lovely pale blue summer dress with half-sleeves; even Jakob Daw was dressed in a suit and tie. I felt uncomfortable and out of place in a blue dirndl skirt and white blouse.

  The house—old, white, gabled, and three-storied—had a deep encircling red-brick porch and tall dormer windows. The woman who met us at the door was tall and bony and very old. She had large watery blue eyes and networks of wrinkles on her cheeks and lips. Her name was Mrs. Greenwood. She wore a long dark cotton dress and a string of white pearls. She greeted my parents warmly and seemed a little flustered in the presence of Jakob Daw. “So good of you to join us, Mr. Daw. An honor to have you in my home. Do come in. There are others so eager to meet you. And how are you, young lady? Ilana Davita. What a charming name. There is a young girl here from Spain, about your age, I believe. Do come in, please.”

  We went through the entrance hall into a spacious living room furnished with ornately carved mahogany chairs and sofas. A wine-colored carpet covered the floor. On the walls were gilt-framed oil paintings and a large rectangular mirror which hung from the ceiling molding by two tasseled cords. A yellow cat lounged on a cushion before the stone fireplace and regarded the crowd out of enormous green eyes.

  Seated alone on a sofa in a corner of the living room was a girl about my age. She was olive-skinned, had long dark braided hair and large dark eyes and wore dark shoes and a light purple dress with a white lace collar. She sat primly on the sofa, looking lonely and forlorn, her feet dangling above the carpeted floor.

  I wandered about by myself. From the living room came my father’s loud voice. I went through rooms with leather chairs and deep sofas and tasseled portieres and tall heavily draped windows. No one noticed me going up the carpeted staircase. I wandered through neat sitting rooms, lovely dressing rooms, resplendent bedrooms. There were no bookshelves anywhere. I wondered where the books were kept. I couldn’t remember ever having been in a house that had no books.

  I was startled by a burst of applause from downstairs. I went quickly through the carpeted second-floor hallway and down the staircase and slipped unnoticed into the living room. Guests stood about in a rough semicircle in front of Mrs. Greenwood, who was introducing Jakob Daw. “He has come from Europe on a special mission, and we are so pleased to have him in our home tonight.” There was more applause. “We have with us too,” Mrs. Greenwood went on, “Mr. Michael Chandal, the renowned journalist, and his wife, Anne Chandal, an acknowledged authority on the writings of Marx and Engels. We will be hearing from our guests later this evening. But now I should like to invite you all to our buffet supper. Please, do help yourselves.”

  People moved toward platters of food decorously arranged on marble side tables along two walls of the dining room. A crystal chandelier glowed over the huge, elegantly set center table. I heard talk about Roosevelt and his cruise off the coast of Maine. Someone said, “Debs? Debs was a great man and a great thinker.” Someone else said, “That’s right, a thinker and a drinker.” I heard my father’s loud barking laugh. My mother was talking to a small group of men and women who were listening intently to her words. Someone brought me over to a small table in a corner of the dining room where the children were to sit. Three boys and the olive-skinned girl sat at the table. The boys were older than I and talked among themselves.

  The girl sat staring down at her food and not eating.

  “Hello,” I said. “My name is Ilana Davita.”

  She looked at me. “I am called Teresa,” she said in an accent I had never heard before.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Madrid.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “España.”

  “What’s España?”

  “Spain.”

  I stared at her. “When did you come?”

  “Tres días—three days ago. I come here only three days ago con mia madre y padre—with my mother and father. A long ride on a boat. A very bad storm.”

  “Is there war in Spain?”

  “I am—how you say?—I am afraid all the time in Madrid. There is shooting. All day and all night men with guns on our street. I see this. Men—how you say?—yelling and shooting their guns. My cousin is killed on the street in front of our house. Twenty years old. I see his body.”

  She lapsed into silence and gazed down at her food, her eyes dark and expressionless. Loud words from the center table moved through the large room. Franco. Rebellion. War.

  Later, the people went with their coffee cups into the living room and sat down in the folding chairs that had been arranged in neat rows. In the dining room servants quickly cleared the remnants of the buffet supper from the tables.

  Mrs. Greenwood stood in front of the guests and thanked them for coming. She wanted them to meet a young girl who had just arrived from Spain, she said. Her parents were now in Washington because of some difficulty with the immigration people and therefore could not be with her tonight. “Friends, this is
Teresa. Please tell us about yourself, dear child.”

  Teresa was sitting in the front row between me and Jakob Daw. She slid down from her chair and went slowly over to Mrs. Greenwood and turned to face the group of thirty or so people in the room. She looked frightened and frail and she spoke in a hesitant voice, her head lowered, her eyes fixed on the carpeted floor.

  “I live in España, in Madrid. I am afraid all the time. There is shooting in Madrid. My father says the Fascists will kill us all. All night there is shooting. My cousin is killed by Fascists on the street in front of our house. I see the holes in his face. He is twenty years old. My mother screams and cries and says we must go to America or the Fascists will kill us. My father says to tell you he hopes we will—how you say?—we will remain in America and not be sent back to Spain. My mother says to thank you for your—como se dice?—for your hospitality. Muchas gracias.”

  She stopped. There was silence. She looked up at Mrs. Greenwood.

  “Thank you so much, dear child,” Mrs. Greenwood said very quietly.

  Teresa sat down between me and Jakob Daw and put her hands in her lap. She looked straight ahead, blinking her eyes rapidly. A sheen of sweat lay upon her face and wisps of her hair looked pasted to her forehead. She kept looking straight ahead and blinking her eyes.

  Mrs. Greenwood asked my father if he would say a few words to the meeting. My father rose and faced the group. He was an awkward and halting speaker, unable to carry over his normal joviality into the formality of a public talk. He never knew what to do with his hands; he kept moving them in and out of the pockets of his pants. He cleared his throat and said he would try to fill everyone in on the latest news. Telephone service between Spain and Paris had been cut, he said. This was true also of telephone service between Spain and London as well as Spain and Lisbon. There were reports that a revolt had broken out. No one knew as yet how serious it was. “My own feeling is that we’re seeing the start of a long civil war. I think that Germany and Italy will probably come in on the side of Franco. The only power that will stand against the Fascists will be Russia. The British, the French, the Americans won’t lift a finger to help Spain. The alternatives are going to be an active alliance either with communism or with fascism, or neutrality—which will be the same as a passive alliance with fascism. And we know what choice decent people will make. That’s the way things look to me. I’ll be happy to try to answer your questions.”

  There were some questions. After a while he sat down. I saw he was sweating. My mother put her fingers on his arm. He slumped back in his chair.

  Mrs. Greenwood was introducing my mother and talking about a man called Angelo Herndon and some people named Scottsboro and about the Unemployment Insurance Bill and the Social Workers Conference. “Here is our own very special Anne Chandal,” she said.

  My mother stood and faced the audience.

  I almost never understood anything my mother said when she spoke before a group. She would be seated in a chair or, like tonight, be standing, and she would start by saying something like, “Capitalism and humanism are contradictory concepts,” or, “Marx states that the bourgeoisie tends to regard the wife as an instrument of production,” or, “Engels makes the point that the modern family is based on the domestic enslavement of the woman”—and I would be unable to follow her words. My father, normally effusive and gregarious, talked dully and drily about facts; my mother, normally gentle-voiced and reticent, talked dramatically and excitedly about ideas.

  My mother had begun to speak. I glanced at Teresa. She sat stiffly with her hands in her lap, her face impassive. Her eyes had ceased their nervous blinking. What was it like, guns and screams and shooting and your cousin dead on the street? I could not imagine it. I put my fingers on her arm and pressed gently. She stared at me in sudden alarm and jerked her arm away.

  I looked at my mother. “Let no one misunderstand us,” she was saying. “When the proper time comes we will be as prompt with action as we are now with words. Thank you for your attention.”

  There was a loud burst of applause. My mother returned to her chair, her face flushed. The applause went on for another minute or two, then came to an end.

  Mrs. Greenwood introduced Jakob Daw. “He has come to America from Europe on a special mission to raise funds for an international anti-Fascist organization which he and other writers are establishing to help writers whose lives have been shattered by Hitler. Mr. Jakob Daw.”

  Jakob Daw rose slowly and stood before the group. He put on his silver-rimmed spectacles and removed from an inside pocket of his jacket a sheaf of papers.

  “I am a writer of stories,” he said quietly in his raspy voice. “A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life. A writer is uncomfortable making speeches. I have made many speeches these past weeks. You will please forgive me if tonight, instead of making another speech, I read you a story I have just completed.” He coughed and put his hand to his lips. “A very brief story. Is that acceptable to you? Yes? Thank you.”

  He peered at the papers in his hands, bending over them. His hands shook slightly. I glanced at my mother and saw on her face awe, anticipation, eagerness. She noticed my glance and turned her head away. A deep crimson flush rose from her neck and spread across her face. My father sat slumped in his chair, his arms folded across his chest.

  “Here is my story,” I heard Jakob Daw say. “Please forgive my occasional cough. It is an old cough and seems not to have improved despite your sunshine and warm weather.

  “Now for my little story.

  “A young woman lived alone on the grassy slope of a wide river. She had come to this slope after an immense journey from the dark lands of her childhood. She was a lovely woman, a girl really, with legs naked and slender as those of a crane, with skin the color of ivory, with hair long and yellow as the sun, a girl gentle and kind and outwardly at peace on this slope beside this wide, clear, calm-running river.

  “Along the slope grew an unusual lilylike flower. Its outer leafy sepals were dark blue, its inner whorl of scented petals were pale blue, its stem was light purple. When dried and crushed, this flower yielded an exquisite fragrance. The girl would gather these flowers, dry them in a large ceramic dish, grind them between two smooth white stones, and sell the powder to the matrons in the nearby village.

  “No one in the village knew where she had come from. No one in the village could remember when the little cottage in which she lived had been built. Nor could anyone recall who had built it. They would watch her come along the village street of an afternoon with her straw basket filled with the little paper packets of fragrance. She asked next to nothing for the packets and would soon be returning along the village road with her basket empty. She would follow the road along its curving path through a meadow of tall grass and wild shrubs. Then the grass would fall away and the ground would begin to slope downward toward the river. And there in the midst of the sloping earth, in an expanse of emerald grass that grew thick and never too tall, was the cottage. She would go inside and not be seen until the following morning when she would emerge and once again pick the flowers which she would then crush into the fragrant powders she brought daily to the village.

  “One day a small black bird flew over the village. He circled the village twice, searching carefully, for he was on a quest. He had reason to believe that the eternal inner music of the world was the cause not of joy, as nearly all believed, but of great harm. For by comforting the pangs that often come in the wake of harm, the music dulled the conscience of man, eased the commission of evil. So this little bird believed, this bird with the shiny black body and the tiny red dot under each of his eyes. If he could find the source of the music he might discover a way of bringing it to an end and thereby awaken the world to the horror of truth and the need to live by its demands.

  “On that day, as the bird circled the village the second time, he saw the girl. It seemed to him that she gave off
a light visible even in the brightness of day. He circled again, watching as the girl sold her packets of fragrance, watching the trail of light she left behind: the very air through which she passed seemed to brighten by her presence. And the music seemed especially strong in the landscape around the village. He followed the girl to her cottage, and there the music was stronger than he had ever heard it before. Could this girl and her cottage be the source of the world’s eternal music? The bird alighted on the roof of the cottage, prepared to wait and see.

  “Many days passed. Each morning the girl picked and ground her flowers. Each afternoon she sold her packets in the nearby village. But as the days went by, the bird began to notice that she went to the village later and later each day. He noticed a weariness coming upon her shoulders, a slowness in the way she picked and ground the flowers, a reluctance to walk the path to the village, a heaviness in her legs as she moved about the slope, a growing darkness in the sockets of her eyes. And one day she rose and came out of the cottage and did not pick any flowers. Instead, she went down to the edge of the river and gazed into its clear, gray-blue, silently rushing water. She turned and with dark and solemn eyes stared up the slope at her cottage. Then she turned again and looked deeply into the water. And once again she turned and looked yearningly toward the cottage. She seemed to be measuring the steepness of the slope. Then the bird heard her murmur sadly, wearily, ‘I cannot endure the slope.’

  “She thrust her hand into the water.

  “The surface of the water congealed, turned brown and bracken. An odor rose from it, a foul and stinking putrescence. The girl turned and walked slowly up the slope and along the path through the meadow and the street through the village and was never seen again.

  “The little bird understood that this lovely girl was not the source of the world’s eternal music and flew off to continue his search.”

  Jakob Daw stopped and looked up from the papers in his hands.

  “That is my story. Thank you.”

  I saw the tremor in his hands as he folded the papers and stuffed them back into the inside pocket of his jacket. In the large room was a silence so palpable it had the density of stone. I glanced around. People were staring at him in utter bewilderment. Mrs. Greenwood sat in a front row chair with her lips fixed in a tiny frozen smile.