by Chaim Potok
I didn’t understand what he was saying and went on. The gusting wind brought tears to my eyes. Was my mother warm in the hospital? Did the landlord of the hospital turn off the heat at night? I walked quickly along the gray, late afternoon streets, needing badly to go to the bathroom and expecting the sudden appearance of a raging horde of boys. Nothing happened.
“What’s a goy?” I asked my father that evening.
“That’s what Jewish people call someone who isn’t a Jew. It’s the Hebrew word for Gentile. To Jews, I’m a goy.”
“Am I a goy?”
“No, my love. Your mama is Jewish and so you’re Jewish. Jewish people go according to the mother.” “According to you, am I Jewish?”
“According to me, Davita, all of you is Jewish, all of you is Gentile, all of you is Marxist, all of you—”
“Papa!”
“—is beautiful, and all of you is my special love.”
He tickled me and I laughed and hugged him.
My mother returned home. She looked pale and was very weak.
They named my brother after my mother’s grandfather. He looked red and scrawny and cried a great deal. There seemed to be something wrong with his stomach and his breathing. He made queer coughing sounds and could not eat or sleep.
A darkness settled upon my mother’s lovely features. My father went softly about the apartment, speaking in a murmur.
There was a snowstorm. I walked to school in the snow and, on my way home, cut across the lot and went along white winter streets that were nearly empty of traffic and pedestrians.
One day three boys came out of an alley and stood in front of me, blocking my way. They wore winter jackets and dark caps. One of them had a cigarette in his mouth.
“You live here, kid?” he wanted to know.
“She don’t live here,” another said. “I know everyone that lives here.”
“What’re you doin’ on this block, kid?” the third one asked. I said, in a voice I did not recognize, “I’m going home from school. I’m in first grade.” There was a brief pause.
The one with the cigarette said, “You Jewish?”
They stood there looking at me, and waiting. I shivered in the bitter wind. A car went by, spraying dirty snow.
“My father isn’t Jewish,” I heard myself say in that voice that I did not recognize.
“We don’t like strangers on our block, kid,” the third one said. His tone was no longer hostile. He was talking now to impress the others.
The one with the cigarette said abruptly, “Your old lady, is she Jewish?”
I said nothing.
They stood there in the wind, waiting.
“Hey, kid,” the one with the cigarette said. “You deaf or what?”
“My mother is Jewish,” I said in that same strange voice.
They stood there, indecisive, and would not let me pass. The wind blew through my clothes. I needed a bathroom. I held my books and stood shivering. Then I was crying and no longer able to control myself. I stood crying and urinating into my clothes, feeling the wet warmth spread through my panties and down along the insides of my thighs and into my snowsuit.
One of them said, “Ah, shit, let her go. She’s only a kid.”
The one with the cigarette said, “She’s got some Jew in her and she’s on our block.”
The third one said, “Aw, come on, Vince. For Christ’s sake, she’s only a little girl.”
“Okay,” the one with the cigarette said. “Okay. Get outa here, kid. And stay off our block.”
“Yeah,” the second one said. “You won’t be so lucky next time.”
I ran. Behind me I heard them laughing. I remember that laughter. The wetness was cold now, clammy, a pool of secret shame.
I let myself into the apartment with my key. The door harp sounded its gentle tune. No one was home. I changed my clothes and said nothing and wondered why the apartment was empty.
My mother had gone with my brother to the hospital. That night he died.
My mother cried and my father held her. I could hear her through the walls of my room. I don’t know where we lived then, but I remember my mother crying and my father trying to soothe her and the radiators in the apartment contracting with cold and a voice in the darkness saying, Hey, kid, you Jewish? and my heart like an animal struggling against its prison inside my chest.
A few weeks later my mother began once again to pack up our apartment.
Soon after that last move my mother fell ill. She could not leave her bed. A doctor came. The tall courtly man in the dark suit and dark felt hat came too; I heard him talking with my father but could not understand what they were saying. From time to time I caught glimpses of my mother through the partly open bedroom door. She lay still on her white pillow, her long dark hair across her face and shoulders. An infection, I heard my father say to a neighbor. A women’s sickness. Oh yes, a high fever, very high. Yes, serious, very serious.
One afternoon a few days after my mother took ill, I came back to the apartment from school. I closed the door and stood still for a moment, listening to the music of the harp. Out of the kitchen came a woman I had never seen before. I was very startled.
“Hello!” the woman called out in a cheerful voice. “You’re Ilana Davita. I’m your Aunt Sarah, your father’s sister. It’s about time we met. Dear Jesus, aren’t you a beauty! Put down your books and take off your coat. How about a glass of milk and some cookies?”
I looked at her suspiciously. “How did you get in?”
“Dear child, your father let me in and then went off to work.”
“Papa didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“He never knows when I’m coming. I never know when I’m coming. But here I am! Do you want the milk and cookies?”
She was tall and thin and flat-chested and had pale skin and blue eyes and long fingers. Her hair was short and straight and flaxen. She was about my mother’s age. She settled into the apartment and went around in a white nurse’s uniform—dress and cap—and house slippers, and spoke in low, cheerful tones. She had many of my father’s features and mannerisms: the corners of her thin lips seemed drawn up in a perpetual smile; she walked about in a loose-jointed sort of way; she would slide into a chair and drape herself over it, leaning back, deeply relaxed. She pronounced her words as my father did his. There was a carefully restrained fervor about her manner and a sharp light in her eyes—like the light in the eyes of my father when he wrote about strikes or talked about Communists and Fascists.
She slept on the studio couch in our living room. She cooked and did the laundry and swept and mopped the floors. Each morning she woke and dressed and read for a few minutes from a book, speaking the words softly. She read from that book after each meal and before going to sleep. Sometimes she sang songs with odd words and melodies. “English folk songs,” she said in answer to my question. “And songs about Jesus. Aren’t they lovely?”
She spent a great deal of time in the bedroom with my mother. I wondered what they talked about. Was my mother able to speak? No, my aunt said. My mother just lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling or the picture of the beach and played with her hair. Mostly she slept a lot. My aunt stayed with her so she would remember there were other people around her; it was important for everyone to know all the time that they weren’t alone, my aunt said. I asked my aunt what she did all the time she was there. Oh, she kept herself busy, she said cheerfully. There was plenty to do. “Sometimes I read from the Book of Psalms,” she said.
I did not know what that was.
At the start of the second week of my mother’s illness my father was sent out of New York by his newspaper. “A strike,” he said over his breakfast coffee, trying to make his voice sound light. “Back in a few days, my love. Be a good girl and listen to your Aunt Sarah.”
That Sunday morning my aunt woke very early—as she had the Sunday before—put on a green woolen dress and low-heeled brown shoes, and left the apartment. The door har
p woke me. She was gone for about an hour. The harp sounded its tones upon her return. I was in the kitchen, eating cereal. My aunt’s cheerful face was flushed with cold. I could smell the cold coming off her clothes.
“A delicious Maine day,” she said happily. “Cold clean air. Is your mother still asleep? Good. Dear child, why don’t I make us some hot cocoa. Let me slip out of these Sunday clothes. Have you ever been to church? And Christmas? Do you celebrate the birth of our Lord? No, I suppose not. I’ll be back in a moment.”
She would put me to bed at night, turn out the light, and tell me strange stories in her throaty, expressive, somewhat nasal voice. She told me about a Pilgrim man named Smith and an Indian woman named Pocahontas. She told me about the woman writer George Sand. “One hundred years ago she was the most famous woman in Europe. Are you asleep, Davita?” I was not asleep. She told me about pioneer women who left comfortable homes to go west with their men. “The west was a terrible wilderness then. The women settled in houses that were miles apart. Bare earth, no trees, cruel winds. The sun burned you in the summer and the snow blew endlessly in the winter. Those were the prairies. Miles and miles of flat emptiness. Can you picture it, Davita? Flatness and emptiness all around you, and overhead the enormous sky. The men would go off hunting and trading and be gone for weeks. It’s terrible to be alone, terrible. What do you think the women did in all that lonely time? Are you still awake, Davita? Are you listening? They used their imagination. That’s right, their imagination.”
I listened. In the chill darkness of my room I lay in my bed and listened to my Aunt Sarah from Maine telling me those stories about Pilgrims and Indians and lonely women who used their imagination to fight their loneliness. My mother never told me stories like those; her stories were about Poland and Russia and sometimes about an evil witch named Baba Yaga. I listened to my Aunt Sarah’s stories and sometimes I saw the women inside my eyes.
One night she told me about a pioneering woman who would lie down among her sheep for company. “Can you imagine that, Davita? There was no one around her for miles and miles. Her husband was away and she was alone. How horrible loneliness can be! She lay among the sheep, looking up at the sky and feeling their warmth. She did that through most of the winter and into the spring. All alone in that small house on that vast prairie with only the sheep. One day in the spring the water began to rise in the stream near the house. She saw that the sheep were on the other side of the stream. She hitched horses to one of the wagons and went back and forth across the swirl of rising water, transferring the sheep. The water came up to the bed of the wagon. She was terrified. But she saved all the sheep.”
That was an exciting story! I liked that story. Back and forth across the rushing water to save the sheep.
Aunt Sarah told me many such stories in the weeks she stayed in our apartment, tales about women who had helped to settle places with names like Kansas, Oklahoma, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado—names with an echoing music that I would continue to hear each night long after she thought me asleep and left my room.
One night I asked her what she did. Was she a journalist like Papa? No, she said. She was a nurse. “A nurse for the Church and for our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I didn’t understand what that meant.
My mother began to walk about the apartment, white-faced and laden with grief. It was early spring now. The snows were gone from the streets.
Four weeks after my aunt arrived, she packed her bags. I watched her. “Time to go home,” she said briskly, cheerily. “A time for everything under the sun. A time for this and a time for that. Now it’s time to go home. Where did I put my slippers?”
I stood in the doorway with my parents and my Aunt Sarah. She bent to kiss my forehead and I felt in that instant her warmth and burst into tears. “No tears,” she said. “Aunt Sarah does not like tears. A waste. Did the pioneer women cry? Don’t forget my stories, Davita.”
My father carried her bags out the door. The harp played softly its sweet and simple tune.
For weeks afterward I would wake at night thinking my Aunt Sarah was in my room. I would lie in the darkness and imagine myself listening to her stories. Some months after my aunt left we moved again.
Now we lived in a four-story red-brick apartment house on a narrow street on the West Side of Manhattan. My father was away often. There were many strikes that winter and he wrote about them for his newspaper and for magazines.
At breakfast one morning I asked my mother, “What does strike mean, Mama?”
She gazed at me somberly and said it was a word with many meanings.
“What does it mean where Papa is?”
“That strike is when people stop working in order to force the owners to give them more money or a better place for working.”
She gave me some of the other meanings of the word. I did not understand how one word could have so many meanings. To stop working. To make someone afraid. To hit someone. To enter the mind. Strike.
“Were you ever in a strike, Mama?”
“Yes, darling. Years ago. And my grandfather, when he was young, once organized a strike in Russia, in a city called Odessa.” Her dark eyes grew dreamy whenever she mentioned her grandfather. She talked about him often.
“Is your grandfather dead?”
“Yes.”
I had begun to realize that all living things died. Often I lay awake at night trying to understand that. All living things died.
“Can a strike hurt people?”
“Sometimes.”
“Will Papa be hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Mama, where do dead people go?”
She told me.
I could not grasp it. Endless unimaginable darkness in the earth or as scattered ashes.
“Is my little brother dead like that?” “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “Will you and Papa die?”
“Yes. But I hope not for a long, long time, darling. Now finish your breakfast. I don’t want you to be late to school.”
My father returned home two days later, tired and grimy. He bathed and slept and sat at his desk, writing. Outside my window snow fell silently on the streets and cars moved by on muffled wheels.
I asked my father over breakfast the second morning he was back, “Were people hurt at the strike, Papa?”
He sat hunched over his food, lost in thought. Often when he was writing he did not hear people speaking to him. He did two kinds of writing. One he called his special writing; that he did at home at his desk, often far into the night. The other he called his regular writing, which he did somewhere in a newspaper office in Manhattan. His regular writing appeared in the newspaper for which he worked; his special writing was published in magazines.
I asked my mother, “Is Papa still doing his special writing?”
She looked at my father and nodded.
He was unshaven and seemed not to have slept. He was then in his middle thirties, a tall and handsome man with wavy brown hair and blue eyes, straight nose and strong chin, and a mouth given easily to laughter. Save when he was doing his special writing, he seemed possessed of a singing geniality of spirit that buoyed the hearts of those around him. He had a way of coming lightly into my room at night and sitting down on my bed and saying, “It’s talking time, my love.” It was from him that I first heard of Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Baron Munchausen, and other such gentlemen of fabled accomplishment. He especially loved telling me about Paul Bunyan. And it was from him that I learned about Maine and its lakes and hills and coastal villages and islands.
He said to me that morning after I asked my question again about the strike, “Yes, people were hurt. One was badly hurt.”
“No one was made dead?”
“No.”
“I’m glad.”
“Eat your cereal, Ilana,” my mother said quietly.
“I don’t like anyone to be dead, Papa. It’s dark like a big forest and it goes on and on and never ends.”
My father slowly turned his head and looked at me.
“What does it feel like to be dead, Papa?” “I don’t know, my love. No one has ever come back to tell us about it.”
“You can talk to Papa about it another time, Ilana,” my mother said. “Papa has to finish his article today.”
Often they worked together on his special writing. My father would come into the living room or the kitchen and read aloud what he had written; he wrote in longhand and my mother sometimes had difficulty with his handwriting. Softly she would make suggestions. My father would return to his desk.
“I was afraid Papa would be made dead in the strike.”
“Wrong, my love. Wrong. Come here and give me an ocean of a hug. That’s right. Harder. Yes. That’s a hug!”
From where she stood near the stove my mother said, “You’ll be late to school, Ilana. And your father has work to do. Let’s finish breakfast. Do you want another cup of coffee, Michael?”
My father completed his special writing that night. Two nights later about twenty people came to the apartment for a meeting.
I lay in my bed and listened to the meeting. How noisy it was! From time to time, above the tide of noise, I would hear the boom of my father’s voice. I would imagine him laughing and his eyes filled with light. He was a strong man with muscular arms and shoulders. I lay in the darkness, listening to my father’s voice. It seemed inside my room, his voice with its New England music.
Abruptly the noise faded and the meeting grew silent. My mother had begun to speak. How quiet they all became whenever my mother spoke. I listened to the silence, the occasional cough, the soft music of the door harp that accompanied the entry of a latecomer. My mother mentioned the name Stalin. She said, “We are not slaves to a universal idea,” and, “In the capitalist family, the husband is the bourgeois, the wife is the proletariat.” She talked on for a while. I heard someone quietly interrupt her to say, “Comrade, we don’t take orders here the way they do in the Bronx.” I could not hear my mother’s response. My room was icy cold, my bed a frozen lake. On and on my mother spoke. I fell asleep.
