Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  “She’s a nurse.”

  “Your Aunt Sarah is a nurse in Ethiopia? Does she work in a hospital?”

  “Sometimes she works in a hospital. Mostly she works in villages. She helps the Ethiopians who are hurt by the Italian Fascists in the war.”

  The class was quiet.

  “The Italians invaded Ethiopia last year and are bombing villages. They kill women and children. And Fascists are going to start a war in Spain. They’re going to rebel against the government and try to take over the country.”

  The class was very still.

  “Well,” the teacher said with a thin smile, “we certainly know a great deal about politics, don’t we. Do we know who Mr. Adolf Hitler is?”

  “Adolf Hitler is the Fascist leader of Germany. He’s an evil person.”

  “And Benito Mussolini?”

  “He’s the Fascist leader of Italy.”

  “And Stalin? Do we know about Stalin?”

  “Stalin is the leader of Russia.”

  “Is Stalin a Fascist?”

  “Stalin is a Communist. He is not afraid to use his power for good purposes.”

  The teacher stood behind her desk, looking at me. Her round face seemed a pale floating disc above the darkness of her dress, which began just beneath her chin and reached to well below her knees.

  “Where are you hearing all these things, young lady?”

  “From my father and mother and their friends.”

  “I see. Well. All right. Let us leave the subject of politics. We were talking about aunts and uncles. Would anyone else like to tell us about his or her aunt or uncle? Robert? Yes. Go ahead.”

  I stopped listening and sat bored, gazing out the window at the cement expanse of the school yard and thinking about Aunt Sarah.

  During the recess a boy came over to me in the yard as I played alone on the bars. He was short and heavy, with olive skin and lusterless eyes. He sat two rows behind me in class.

  He said, “Hey, listen, kid. Watch out what you say about Italians.”

  I swung myself into a sitting position on one of the bars and looked at him.

  The boy said, “My father says Mussolini is a great man. You watch your mouth.”

  Another boy came over, lanky and flaxen-haired, with cold blue eyes and a sharp chin. I had never seen him before.

  He looked up at me sitting on one of the bars. “Hey, you, four eyes.”

  I looked around. The yard was crowded and noisy. Along the far side near the chain-link fence a group of teachers stood talking to one another.

  “You little bitch,” the flaxen-haired boy said. “My kid brother told me what you said about Adolf Hitler. You better watch it.”

  “That’s what I told her,” the first boy said.

  “My father says Adolf Hitler is the best thing that ever happened to Germany. He’s gonna get rid of all the Commies and Jews. You better keep your mouth shut or you won’t make it back home one day.”

  I climbed down from the bars. The flaxen-haired boy stepped in front of me.

  “Are you Jewish?” he asked, bending toward me, his eyes bright with hate. The other boy stood by, watching.

  My legs trembled. “My father isn’t Jewish. My mother is Jewish.”

  He seemed not to know what to make of that.

  “Watch your mouth,” he said, after a moment.

  “Yeah,” the other one said. “Watch what you say.”

  They sauntered off in different directions and were gone into the crowds of playing children.

  I leaned heavily against the bars, my heart thundering. I had not thought words could be so dangerous. Cold and murderous blue eyes. He had really wanted to hurt me. I would have to be careful of what I said in school from now on.

  A whistle blew. I came out of the yard into the crowded corridor and went to my classroom. I sat stiffly in my seat. Behind me sat the boy who had warned me to watch what I said about Mussolini and Italians. I sat very still, gazing out the window and listening vaguely to the teacher and thinking of my Aunt Sarah in the villages of a place called Ethiopia.

  That night I woke from dream-filled sleep and lay in my bed listening to the soft music of the door harp. I heard a voice I did not recognize, a man’s voice, hoarse and raspy, speaking quietly in a language I did not understand. My mother said something to him in that same language. The man coughed. Then my father said loudly, in a tone of exasperation, “You can’t imagine what a pain in the behind that was, Annie. You’d think we were bringing in Karl Marx or Lenin. All very polite, you understand. The bastards.”

  “They were merely doing their job, Michael,” I heard the man say in accented English. “It is your State Department and immigration people in Washington whom you must blame.”

  “Anyway, Jakob, you’re here,” I heard my mother say.

  “Yes, Channah,” the man said. “I am here.”

  “It is so good to see you again after so many years. Can I get you a cup of coffee? And something to eat. Mocha coffee. See, Jakob? I remembered.”

  “Yes, please. It was a terrible trip. We were in a storm three whole days. Terrible.”

  I listened to their voices for a while longer and then drifted back into sleep.

  Pale morning sunlight woke me. I lay in my bed listening to the sounds of the street. Cars and trucks and the distant clang of a trolley. After a while I put on my slippers and went from my room. Walking past the living room, I saw a man asleep on the studio couch. I stood there a moment looking at him, then went back to my room for my glasses. Standing again in the entrance to the living room, I peered closely at the man on the couch.

  He lay beneath a blanket and I could see only his face and head. He had a wide forehead, straight dark hair, thin arching dark eyebrows, and an aquiline nose that seemed almost knifelike. Faint movements of his small nostrils signaled his silent breathing. Beginning in dark corner wedges, the wide thin upper lip rose delicately to a small pink petallike plateau at the center of the mouth; the lower lip was full, effeminate. The chin was pointed, the cheeks slightly concave. His smooth face and forehead were shockingly pale. I had never before seen anyone with such chalky features. I moved nearer to him and stood watching. A moment passed. Then, like a doll that is turned this way or that, his eyelids abruptly slid open, and he was looking directly up at me.

  I drew back, frightened by the suddenness of his waking and ashamed at being caught looking at him as he slept.

  His eyes were black and large and shiny. The heavy lids gave them an owllike hooded look. He gazed at me and did not move.

  My heart beat loudly in my ears.

  Lying there, moving only his lips, he said quietly, “Is it morning already? Yes, I see it is.” He coughed briefly, a wet soft cough. “Good morning, dear child.”

  “Good morning,” I heard myself respond.

  “You are Ilana Davita.”

  I nodded.

  “I am Jakob Daw.”

  He began to sit up. I moved away.

  “Dear child, where are you going?”

  “To the toilet.”

  I went quickly through the hallway to the bathroom near the door to the apartment. I saw the harp on the door, its gentle curves, its wooden balls, its circular hollow beneath the strings and taut wires. Standing on tiptoe, I touched the balls gently and watched them strike the wires. Soft sweet music filled the silent hallway. Ting tang tong tung ting tang tung. I went into the bathroom.

  When I returned to the living room, Jakob Daw, dressed in baggy dark trousers and an old rumpled white shirt, stood near a window gazing out at the street. He turned as I entered. He was a small man, not much taller than my mother, thinly boned, with delicate fingers and white hands and narrow shoulders. He looked fragile and infirm.

  He said to me in his hoarse, raspy voice, “Again, good morning, Ilana Davita. Your parents did not do you justice when they told me about you. A Viking beauty. Clearly your father’s side dominates, at least on the outside. How old are you?”
/>   “Eight.”

  “A lovely age, an innocent age.” He put a hand to his mouth and coughed delicately. “Excuse me. You go to school, of course.”

  “I go to public school.”

  “And you read? Good. Very good. Now for what may be a more difficult question. Can you show me where things are in the kitchen so I can make for myself a cup of coffee? I am lost in the morning without my coffee. Yes? Thank you. But first I will go to the washroom. It is at the end of the hall, if I remember correctly. Yes. Is it all right to call you Ilana Davita? Good. It is very important to call people by their correct names.”

  A few minutes later we sat at the kitchen table. Jakob Daw smoked a cigarette and sipped from the cup of hot mocha coffee. He seemed tense, distracted, and kept glancing out the window at the red-brick wall of the adjacent apartment house. The hand holding the cup trembled slightly as he brought it to his lips. Sitting close to him, I noticed the network of small bluish veins on the backs of his white hands and along his temples.

  I asked him, “Do you wear glasses, Mr. Daw?”

  He said, “I wear glasses when I write.”

  “I just got new glasses.”

  “Do they help you?”

  “I see things very clearly now. And I don’t have headaches.”

  “Must you wear your glasses all the time?”

  “Yes. But sometimes I forget.”

  “You must not forget. It is important to see clearly all the time.”

  “Mr. Daw, do you write stories?” “Yes.”

  “Do you write stories like Baba Yaga?”

  He inhaled on his cigarette and gazed at me curiously over the rim of his cup. “I am afraid I do not know that story.”

  “It’s about an evil witch who chases a girl and boy, and they have three magic things with them to protect themselves against her.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That Baba Yaga. Yes. Well, my stories are only a little like the story of Baba Yaga.”

  “I hate Baba Yaga. But she’s dead now.”

  He looked at me through his hooded eyes.

  “The dead don’t ever come back, you know. My mother told me that.”

  He put down the cup. “That is true,” he said. “And also not true.”

  “Do you know Adolf Hitler?”

  “Do I know Adolf Hitler? Personally? No.”

  “Have you been to Spain?”

  “No. Not yet.” He raised his cup and drank from it. “There will soon be a war in Spain.” “What does war mean?”

  He looked at me. A sad smile played briefly along his lips. He said, “War is a fight between large groups of people or between countries. War is terrible. It is one of the most terrible things that man does.”

  “Do people become dead in war?”

  “Yes. Many people.”

  “Mr. Daw, do you have children?”

  “No, Ilana Davita. I have never been married.”

  “I had a baby brother once, but he died.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know. I think I will have another cup of this very good coffee.”

  He started to rise, then stopped. There were footsteps in the hallway. My mother came into the kitchen, wearing her pink house dress. Her long dark hair lay loosely over her shoulders and back. Jakob Daw looked at her, then looked away, then looked at her again.

  “Well,” my mother said, “you two have met.” “We have met and are having a splendid conversation,” Jakob Daw said.

  “Mr. Daw taught me the word war, Mama.”

  “The child asked about Spain,” Jakob Daw said.

  My father came breezily into the kitchen. “Good morning, my love.” He kissed my cheek and I smelled his shaving lotion. “Good morning, Jakob. You look terrible. Have you had your coffee? I see you have. You look like that after your coffee? I want to review your itinerary, and then I’ve got to get over to the newspaper. Christ, we’ve got to get you looking better, Jakob. You can’t go around the country talking to people and looking like that. Annie, what can we do to put some life into our Jakob?”

  The three of them sat around the table, talking. I could not understand most of what they were saying.

  I said, “How long will you be here, Mr. Daw?”

  They looked at me. Jakob Daw said, “Ten days. Perhaps two weeks.”

  “Do you have ideas, Mr. Daw?” “Ideas?”

  “Do you see ideas in your head?”

  “Oh, yes. I have ideas. Yes. Listen. May I ask of you a favor? Please do not call me Mr. Daw. Call me—” He stopped and looked at my mother. “Channah, what should Ilana Davita call me?”

  “Perhaps Uncle Jakob,” my mother said.

  “Good idea, Annie,” my father said.

  “That is fine,” Jakob Daw said. “Is that all right with our Ilana Davita? Good. I am going out now with your father and I will return later in the day. Good-bye, Ilana Davita.”

  “Good-bye, Uncle Jakob,” I said.

  • • •

  In the park the following Saturday afternoon I asked my mother, “What does Uncle Jakob write?”

  “Stories. Articles.” She sat with her eyes to the sun. Her face had a worn and haunted look. “He is a great writer, and one day the whole world will know about him.”

  I could not understand why a great writer had to sleep on the studio couch in our living room.

  “What kind of stories does Uncle Jakob write?”

  “Strange stories. Wonderful stories.”

  “Why doesn’t Uncle Jakob stay in a hotel?”

  “He’s not well and doesn’t want to be by himself.”

  “Did you and Uncle Jakob grow up together?”

  “No, darling. We went to school together in Vienna.”

  “Were you good friends?”

  “Yes. We were very young. And the war was everywhere. We were—friends.”

  She lapsed into silence, her eyes brooding.

  I sat on one of the swings, and my mother pushed me. Back and forth, gently, sunlight on my face, oaks and maples with young leaves overhead, earth with young green grass below. Back and forth, like the wooden balls of our door harp. Back and forth, my mother pushing.

  That night the weather was strangely warm. My father opened the windows and breezes pushed against the curtains and shades. There was a meeting in our apartment, noisy and tense, though there was also some singing and my father’s barking laugh. Jakob Daw spoke about Germany, Russia, and Spain. His voice was quiet, hoarse. I watched people straining to hear, leaning forward to catch his words. A quality of intense power seemed to radiate from his fragility, from his hooded eyes and hoarse voice, from his occasional cough. I found myself often staring at him, fascinated, unable to take my eyes from his face.

  I asked my mother the next day after school, “Does Papa know that you and Uncle Jakob went to school together?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did Papa know Uncle Jakob before he came to stay with us?” “Only through his reputation,” she said. “Through his name as a writer.”

  In the first week that Jakob Daw was with us, he and my father traveled together a number of times to different parts of the city. Meetings, my mother explained. Jakob Daw would return from those trips looking exhausted.

  “A vast and ugly city,” he said one night over supper. “The heart of decaying capitalist power. A city without hope and without compassion.”

  “Capitalism and compassion are incompatible,” my mother said.

  “You won’t find too much compassion among my New England Episcopalians,” my father said. “Except for my sister Sarah, and a few others.”

  At times that week I woke in the night and put on my glasses and went into the living room where Jakob Daw slept. By the light of the street lamps I could make out dimly his straight dark hair and pale features. I would stand there, staring at him, entranced in a way I could not understand. One night I woke and went into the living room and he was not there. I heard voices from my parents’ bedroom. The three of them we
re talking quietly together; I could not make out their words. Two nights later I was awakened by a loud, piercing cry, a single brief scream that ended in a choking sob. I rushed into the living room and saw Jakob Daw sitting up on the studio couch, his knees drawn up to his chin, his eyes wide, his hands over his ears. “Ah, you cannot do this!” he cried. “How can you think to do such a thing?”

  My mother was suddenly in the room. “Ilana, go back to your bed immediately,” she said to me in a voice I did not recognize.

  In the morning I thought it had all been another of my bad dreams and did not talk of it with anyone.

  One night my father went alone to a meeting in a section in Philadelphia called Strawberry Mansion. I woke to go to the living room and Jakob Daw was not there. His clothes were on the chair near the studio couch. I went quietly through the hallway to my parents’ bedroom and saw him through the partly open door. He was sitting at my father’s desk. On the wall above the desk was the framed picture of the horses on the red-sand beach on Prince Edward Island. I saw them galloping against the wind, manes flying, sand spraying out behind their thundering hooves. Jakob Daw had on spectacles rimmed in silver metal. Somewhere in the room with him was my mother, but I could not see her. Jakob Daw was writing with a black fountain pen. The only light in the room came from the desk lamp; it bathed his features in soft lights and shadows. He sat bent over the desk, writing. He turned his head slightly. The spectacles flared; his dark eyes burned.

  I went quietly back to my room.

  That image of Jakob Daw writing, his face bathed in warm lights and shadows, his glasses flaring, his eyes burning—it lingered in memory. I fell asleep with that image fixed in my mind. A picture. An idea. Jakob Daw writing.

  The following day Jakob Daw and my father went to an evening meeting in Brooklyn. Then they began to travel to places outside the city. I heard names like Newark, Jersey City, Long Island, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Wilmington.

  One night I lay in bed reading another book about Spain that my father had brought home for me. Someone tapped on my door. It was Jakob Daw.

  He stood hesitantly in the doorway. “May I come in?”