Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  Jakob Daw remained inside the cottage all day. From my castle on the beach I saw him talking with my mother on the screened-in porch. My father had gone to work at his regular writing. During lunch, which my mother served us on the porch, Jakob Daw was silent and withdrawn. He ate very little. How pale and weary he looked. My mother moved about quietly. He fell asleep at the table, breathing raspingly, woke with a start, and glanced quickly around, a frightened look in his eyes. My mother put her hand on his shoulder. He slumped in his chair. A few moments later, he went to bed.

  Very late that night—the second Saturday night of July—I was awakened by the sounds of a car pulling into the driveway between our cottage and the empty house across from us. I was bathed in sweat and dazed by the heat. I got out of bed and went to the side window. The shade was up, the curtain open. I peered through the window and saw a long dark car near the side door of the wood-and-brick house that adjoined the driveway. As I watched, the car lights and the engine were turned off. Two men, a woman, and a boy about my age came out of the car. The woman held a baby and went directly into the house, followed by the boy.

  The two men began to move cartons and boxes from the car into the house. Lights were being turned on in some of the rooms of the house. By the small light over the side door of the house I saw dimly that one of the men was heavyset and bearded and the other was tall and thin. After a while the tall man climbed back into the car and drove off. The bearded man went into the house.

  There was silence. The night pulsed rhythmically with the insect life of the sea’s edge. Then the light on the screened-in porch across the way came on. I heard a door open and close and saw the boy come up to the front of the porch and look through the screen at the dark beach. There was a small high curving sliver of blue-white moon. The deep night was bathed in stars. The boy stood there a long time, gazing out at the darkness. He raised both his arms over his head and moved them back and forth a number of times. It was an odd sort of gesture, a pleading of some kind. He lowered his arms to his sides and stood still a moment longer. Then he turned and went back into the house. The porch light was extinguished. The ocean seemed loud and near in the darkness.

  I went back to bed. The heat was stifling. Insects flew against my windows. In from the beach drifted low voices: people lay on the sand near the water, driven from their homes by the heat. I thought I heard a muffled cry, and I trembled. Nothing! Was it that word again? Nothing. And was that my mother’s voice now, barely audible, soothing?

  A long time later I fell into an exhausted sleep.

  The sounds of a door opening and closing woke me. It was early morning. From my window I saw the man and the boy who had come during the night leave the house by the side door and walk toward the street. They wore dark trousers, white shirts, and fishermen’s caps. I went back to sleep.

  Sunlight woke me. I found my mother in the kitchen. She looked tired. My father and Jakob Daw had gone into Manhattan, she said. What did I want for breakfast?

  • • •

  A letter arrived from Aunt Sarah. The kitchen was too hot and my parents and I were having breakfast on the porch. Jakob Daw was still asleep. My father read the letter aloud. Aunt Sarah was back in Maine, working in a hospital in Bangor. Ethiopia had been very, very bad. She was certain we were aware of what would soon transpire in Spain. How was Ilana Davita? “Be careful of the heat. Drink lots of water and take salt tablets.” Maine was cool in the mornings and evenings and lovely even in these very hot days. If the heat of New York ever became intolerable, my parents should consider packing me off to Maine. She sent her love to all of us and a special kiss to Ilana Davita.

  “Your sister keeps herself very busy,” my mother said.

  “She’s telling us that she may go to Spain.”

  “Yes,” my mother said. “I understood that.”

  Jakob Daw came out onto the porch, looking as if he had not slept.

  “Good morning,” he said, and coughed briefly. “The heat is terrible.”

  “It’s terrible everywhere, Jakob,” my mother said.

  “Except in Maine,” my father said.

  “Sit down and I’ll get you some breakfast,” my mother said to Jakob Daw. “Did you sleep at all?”

  “No. Early in the morning I fell asleep and was awakened by your neighbors. They seem to be very devout people. They go to synagogue every morning.”

  “How do you know where they’re going?” my father asked.

  “The man carries a prayer shawl.”

  “They’re distant relatives of Annie’s,” my father said.

  “The boy is my cousin’s son,” my mother said. “The man and his wife are the brother and sister-in-law of my cousin’s wife, who died recently. They are very religious people. The boy is saying Kaddish for his mother.”

  “What does Kaddish mean?” I asked.

  “A prayer that’s said in synagogue every morning and evening for about a year when someone close to you dies.”

  There was a brief pause.

  “Did you know they were coming here to the beach?” I asked.

  “Of course. I suggested it. The boy is very upset by his mother’s death. His father asked if I would help keep an eye on him. From a distance, of course. What would you like for breakfast, Jakob?”

  I looked out our screened-in porch at the empty porch of the adjoining house.

  “Michael, are you going to the hunger march?” Jakob Daw asked. “Yes? Then I will come along.”

  “We can make the noon train to Philadelphia if we leave here inside half an hour.”

  “I will eat quickly,” Jakob Daw said.

  “Jakob, you’re exhausted,” my mother said.

  “Yes,” Jakob Daw said. “But I will go anyway.”

  My mother and I spent most of the day on the beach. We swam together for a long time—my father had taught me to swim—and then I worked on my castle. My mother sat on a chair nearby beneath a beach umbrella, reading. She wore a yellow, wide-brimmed sun hat and a dark blue bathing suit, and she looked trim and full-breasted and lovely. I saw the boy who had moved next to us walking across the beach with the bearded man. They wore white short-sleeved shirts and dark trousers rolled up almost to the knees and were barefooted. I watched them step into the edge of the surf. The boy’s face broke into a smile. The man bent and embraced him. I turned my attention back to my castle.

  We ate supper that evening on the porch in air so sultry it seemed weighted. During our meal we saw the boy and the man come off the porch of their house and start quickly along the driveway, talking in a language I could not understand.

  I asked my mother what the word religious meant.

  She said it came from an old word that meant to bind, to tie. “Religious people feel bound to their ideas,” she said.

  I asked her what language the man and the boy had been talking.

  “Yiddish,” she said, after a moment.

  “Is that the language our neighbors use where we moved in Brooklyn?”

  “Yes. I spoke it until I came to America. It was the language of my childhood.” “I never heard you speak it.”

  “I used to speak it sometimes where I worked. There’s no need for me to speak it at home.”

  Later that evening I saw the man and the boy come back up the driveway. The man went into the house through the side door, and the boy climbed up the short flight of wooden stairs to the screened-in porch. The boy stood on the porch, looking thin and pale, and gazed out at the beach and the sky, his nose and mouth pressed against the screen. He raised his arms again in that strange gesture of supplication—lifting them over his head and waving them back and forth. Then he seemed to sense that someone was watching him, and he looked quickly around and saw me. He lowered his arms.

  He stared at me a moment, his face pale and without expression. Then he turned and went quickly inside.

  That night my mother and I slept outside on blankets on the dunes. There was no breeze and no sound of birds
; birds did not fly at night, my mother had once told me. I lay still beneath the stars and listened to the surf. There were many people on the beach that night. I huddled against my mother and imagined I was the ocean. Would the westering women have done that in this heat? Imagined that they were the ocean? I was the waves and the surf, sliding smoothly back and forth, wet and cool, across the moist sand, in and out of the tidal pool where my castle stood. All that hot night I slept with the rhythm of the surf in my ears. Once I thought I heard the sand-muffled beat of horses’ hooves, but I knew that had to be a dream. When I woke it was light and gulls circled overhead, crying into the silent air. The ocean was a vast shimmering sheet of silver, and above it the hazy blue sky was piled high with masses of white luminous clouds. There was a faint humid breeze and the strong scent of brine.

  My mother stirred and moved against me. She murmured in her sleep, words I did not understand but that sounded like the Yiddish she said she no longer spoke. She opened her eyes.

  “Good morning,” she said. “How hot it is! Did you sleep well? I had a dream about my grandfather. Did I say something before I woke? Look at the sky, Ilana. How beautiful it is!”

  We had breakfast on the porch. I helped my mother with the dishes. The cottage felt large and empty without my father and Jakob Daw. They were away at the hunger march. Starving people were marching on the capital city of Pennsylvania. There was no more money to keep them on relief. About sixty thousand families. My mother had explained it to me. It was the end of capitalism, she had said. The end of a cruel and heartless system. Soon we would see the beginning of a new America, a kinder America, an America under the control of its working class, an America that cared for its poor.

  I came out on the porch. Behind me the door harp played its soft melody. The sky had turned pale and there were tall white-caps now far out on the water. Heaving waves rolled onto the beach, breaking, churning. I looked over toward my private world of tidal pool and castle. Standing near the castle and peering down at it was the thin pale boy from the house across the driveway. I went quickly out of the porch and along the dunes and the beach.

  He must have seen me crossing the dunes. He straightened and turned and stood stiffly, watching me hurrying toward him.

  “That’s my castle,” I said. “Don’t touch it.”

  He turned his head slightly so that he was looking past me at the sea. He was about my height. He wore a fisherman’s cap and a short-sleeved white shirt and dark trousers rolled up to a little below his knees. His face had a stiff, pinched look. He was barefooted.

  “I wasn’t going to touch it,” he said. His voice was thin and quavery.

  “I don’t like anyone to touch it.”

  “But the water goes over it at night.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It only reaches the bottom part.”

  “Doesn’t that get broken?’

  “So I build it again. I still don’t like anyone to touch it.”

  “You built this by yourself?” he asked. All the time he talked he did not look at me directly but gazed past me at the sea. “Where do you get ideas for such a thing?”

  “From books and magazines. From my—imagination.”

  “Such things really exist?”

  “Sure they exist. In Spain. It’s a castle.”

  “Is Spain a country?”

  “Spain is a big country in Europe. Don’t you know about Spain? Don’t you see the newspapers?”

  He looked faintly uncomfortable. “The castle looks like pictures I’ve seen of places in Yerusholayim. You’ve never heard of Yerusholayim? It’s a very holy city. Jerusalem. The city of King David.”

  I thought I had heard of Jerusalem.

  “You’re my neighbor,” he said. “I see you on your porch. Do you come here every summer? I don’t like it here. There’s nothing to do.”

  “You can go to Coney Island and the boardwalk. You can swim.”

  “I don’t know how to swim. I don’t like to swim.”

  “Why did you come to a beach if you don’t like to swim?”

  “Everyone said I needed a rest. I needed—air. I needed to get away. Everyone said that.”

  “Do you live in New York?”

  “I live in Brooklyn.”

  “We just moved to Brooklyn. Just before we came here.”

  “My name is David,” he said, still looking past me to the sea. “David Dinn.”

  “My name is—Ilana.”

  “Ilana,” he said, then repeated it. “Ilana. That’s a Jewish name.”

  “It was my grandmother’s name.”

  “Are you Jewish?” he asked, turning to look directly at me.

  “Yes.”

  He seemed surprised. “I didn’t think you were Jewish.” “Well, I am. Is the baby a boy or a girl?” “The baby? Oh. A boy.”

  “I had a baby brother once. But he died. He got sick and he died.”

  “He’s not my brother. He’s my cousin. I’m here with my aunt and uncle. My father is too busy with his work to come to the beach. My mother is—my mother is dead.” His voice broke and his eyes brimmed with tears. “My mother was a great person and now everyone says she’s with the Ribbono Shel Olom, she’s with God.”

  “What does your father do?” I asked. “He’s a lawyer. He works in a big office in Manhattan.” “My father works in Manhattan. He writes for newspapers and magazines.”

  “Where do your parents come from?”

  “My mother is from Europe. My father is from Maine.”

  “Maine?”

  “The state of Maine. It’s a state north of—”

  “Your father was born in Maine? Where were his parents born?”

  “In Maine, too, I think.”

  “Your father is Jewish?”

  “No. My mother is Jewish.”

  He stared at me.

  There was a brief, tense silence.

  “I have to go back,” he said finally.

  “All right,” I said.

  He turned and went up along the beach and across the dunes to his house.

  During lunch I asked my mother if she had said Kaddish when her mother had died. “Yes.”

  “And your father?”

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Did you say it when my brother died?”

  “No. I didn’t believe in it anymore.”

  We swam together a long time in the afternoon, and then I worked on my castle. I did not see David Dinn. Just before supper Jakob Daw returned, looking white and drained. He had left my father in Harrisburg and had come back alone because he felt ill. His hands trembled and his cough was loud. He was running a fever. He went to bed in the room next to mine and my mother brought him food and medication. I sat on the porch and saw David Dinn and his uncle come out of the house and go along the driveway together and turn into the street.

  From the porch that night I watched flashes of lightning over the horizon. Distant thunder rolled in from the sea. The air lay heavy and still. A gust of hot wind stirred the shrubs and trees into life. Then the wind blew in hard and brought with it large, pelting drops of rain. The rain fell with dull thudding sounds on the sand and the trees and the roof of the cottage.

  It rained most of the night. I lay in bed and listened to the roar of the wind-lashed surf and wondered how far up the beach it was. I thought I could hear it just below the dunes, foaming and boiling and reaching for our cottage. My mother came into my room and held me and cradled me in her lap and sang to me softly in a language I did not understand. I fell asleep inside her warmth.

  In my sleep I thought I heard a man cry out and the soft and soothing voice of a woman. There was a sudden lurid flash of lightning and a booming roll of thunder and again a man’s voice cried out, in a language I did not understand. I heard my mother in the room next to mine. Then lightning and thunder followed one upon the other for a long moment in a blinding and deafening cascade of crackling blue-white luminescence and pounding drumbeat noise. I sat up in my bed and s
tared into the darkness, listening. Whispery sounds came from the corners of my room. I felt again all the old terrors of all the cold nights in the time of our winter wanderings. Lightning crackled and the room leaped into view. The thunder that followed rattled the windows and my bed. I lay in my bed and could not sleep. The whispers went on for a long time. Sometime in the night the storm subsided and became a dull and softly drumming rain. I fell asleep finally to the rhythm of the rain on the cottage and the trees.

  I woke early in radiant sunlight. The air was cool, the cottage very still. Somewhere nearby a bird called. Hoo hoo hoo hoo. I got out of bed and dressed quickly and went out on the porch. The door harp played softly upon its taut wires.

  The sky was clear and blue. Droplets of rain clung to the trees and deutzia shrubs. On the horizon the sun glowed deep red through a low bank of dazzling clouds. The floor of the porch was wet. The air smelled of brine and clean wet sand. All the world of beach and sky and sea lay fresh and clean to the fair day. I walked across the sodden dunes and beach to my tidal pool and my castle.

  The walls and turrets had crumbled. The battlements were gone. Towers and ramparts and casements had been reduced to heaps of sand. The wharf and water gate had collapsed. The moat and bridge were indiscernible. The castle which I had built to nearly three feet in height was a flattened ruin.

  I was the only one on the beach save for the wheeling gulls. I bent over the wrecked castle and put my fingers into the wet sand. I would build it again. I got down on my knees and began to work the sand.

  I worked a long time. The sun climbed high above the horizon and the air grew warm. I had forgotten my dark glasses and felt the sun stinging my eyes. I raised my head at one point and looked across the dunes and saw David Dinn watching me from the porch of his house. Then someone was standing over me. I glanced up and saw Jakob Daw. He wore baggy pants and a rumpled shirt and old shoes encrusted with wet sand. His face was pale and his eyes were dark and weary. He stood there squinting in the sunlight and gazing down at the castle I was trying to rebuild.