by Chaim Potok
We did not go to the movies. After supper my mother went to her bedroom to work on another pamphlet and I wandered idly about the apartment, looking out open windows at the street and the adjoining houses, listening to voices and music from the radios of neighbors and to the family in the apartment below singing Sabbath songs together—their zemiros—like the melodies I had heard David Dinn and his family sing that night in Sea Gate after we had returned from the meeting about the war in Spain. I undressed and washed and got into bed. How far does a big ship travel in one day? Spain. Teresa. War.
My mother came into my room and stood near the door. The room was dark and I could barely see her.
“Are you awake?” she asked softly.
“Yes.”
She came over to me. “I had no idea it was so late. You put yourself to bed. I’m sorry, darling.”
I raised myself on an elbow. “How long will it take Papa to get to Spain?”
“About a week or ten days, I think.” I could see her only dimly. Her voice was low.
“I feel very lonely.”
She said quietly, “We have to work hard, Ilana. That way most of the time we can forget the loneliness. I learned that from my mother.”
“Did your father go away, too?”
“Yes. Often.”
“Did he go to war?”
“No, darling. My father was a member of a group of very religious Jews called Hasidim. He used to go away almost every Saturday and holiday to the city where the rebbe, the leader of the group, lived.”
“Your father went away? Why did he do that?”
“He went to pray in the rebbe’s synagogue with the others of the group.”
“He left you alone with your mother?”
“Yes. Very often.”
“Your father didn’t care?”
“I suppose he didn’t care enough. After all, we were only women. The only other man in the house was my grandfather, my mother’s father. I don’t know, darling. I never talked to my father about it. My mother would keep very busy while my father was away. She ran a flour mill with my grandfather. But Shabbos was very hard. She couldn’t find what to do because she couldn’t work. It was very hard.”
“Were you angry at your father?”
“Was I angry? Yes. I was angry.”
“I’m angry at Papa for going away.”
“Ilana, your father is a fine journalist and he’ll be doing something very important in Spain, important for the world.”
I lay back on my pillow. I was beginning to feel sleepy. I asked, my eyes half-closed, “Mama, would you have married Papa if Jakob Daw had been in America?”
I heard her draw in breath. There was a brief silence. Then she said in a cold voice, “I don’t like if questions, Ilana. They’re upsetting and turn your head away from your work. I don’t have time for such questions. ‘If this’ and ‘if that.’ They are not helpful questions.”
“Mama?”
“I think you ought to go to sleep, Ilana.” “Did you hear them singing downstairs?” “Yes.”
“It sounded very nice. Like David Dinn and his family. In Sea Gate. Remember?” “Yes.”
“Good night, Mama.” “Good night, Ilana.”
She kissed me on the forehead. I watched her go out of the room. I was very sleepy and closed my eyes and was quickly asleep. I thought I heard the door of the house click shut but I would not leave my warm sleep with the breeze coming through my open window and the whispering of the trees. The door fell shut again and I opened my eyes. Brilliant morning sunlight lay upon the floor and walls of the room. For a long moment I thought I was in the cottage on the beach. Then I got quickly out of bed, went to the window, and saw, coming down the front steps, the redheaded girl and her mother, both wearing light-colored summer dresses, the mother also in a pink flowery hat. They turned up the street and walked together in the direction the girl’s father had gone the evening before and with that same brisk and purposeful stride.
A letter arrived from Jakob Daw addressed to my parents and to me—“Mr. and Mrs. Michael Chandal and Ilana Davita.” It was postmarked Bilbao, Spain. I brought it upstairs from our mailbox near the front door of the house. My mother opened it quickly, scanned it, then read it aloud.
“My Dear Chandals. Germany deadly and menacing, a viper testing its poison in Spain. Switzerland antiseptic, aloof, paring its nails. Exhausting journey through France to Bilbao. Hot and dusty bus ride terrible for cough. When does Michael leave for Spain? Wrote nothing these past weeks. Cough a bit worse. Bilbao a loyalist stronghold thick with bureaucrats, generals, writers, journalists. A large city with very old churches, arcaded squares, a few museums, and squalid huddles of white cubelike houses on narrow winding hilly streets, and also a wild dark riverfront, where I have taken a room. I will remain in Bilbao a week or so to rest and meet certain people, then move on to Madrid. Rumored to be very bad in Madrid now. Must see for myself. Heavy involvement with party friends, but that is not for a letter. Remember with fondness the cottage and the beach and Ilana Davita’s castles. With affection. Jakob Daw.”
Jakob Daw was now living on the riverfront in a city called Bilbao. Hadn’t there been a riverfront once in the early years of my life amidst all the moves from apartment to apartment? Tugboats, barges, garbage scows, vast rising blocks of stone, a tangle of steel girders, wet cobbled streets, a block-long crowd of silent men waiting in line for soup and bread? Where had that been? My mother going from house to house, apartment to apartment, handing out party leaflets, talking about the cruelties of capitalism, the need for unions, and I walking with her through the grimy snow, and the river up ahead running beneath the awesome rise of the bridge, dark cold water with things floating in it, one of the things a small skeletal black bird with socketless eyes, beak wide open, floating along the scum-green bank amidst orange rinds and apple cores and bits of wood and the effluvia of human waste. “People are good by nature, Ilana,” my mother would say to me on those walks. “But this goodness is now blocked by social, political, and religious barriers. We are struggling to throw down those barriers. Then you’ll see a new day for all mankind. It will happen soon, Ilana. Soon. Capitalism is dead. You can see its corpses everywhere.” Or she would say, “You can’t imagine how much cruelty there is in this world, Ilana. Man against man. Cruelty and injustice. We’re fighting this cruelty to make a better world.” Her face was red from the icy wind. “Remember what you’re seeing, Ilana. Remember what I’m telling you.” Unshaven, hollow-cheeked men, exhausted-looking women, pale dark-eyed children—they would respond to her knocking and some would slam the door in her face and others would stand in the doorways as she talked of the need to fight the bosses, to organize the working class, to make a new dawn for the poor and the laborer, and she would urge them to come to the next public meeting of the local party branch, and she would hand out leaflets and pamphlets or stuff them into old mailboxes in decaying hallways, and we would be out on the wet street again near the river, the icy wind stinging my eyes, my mother’s hair blowing wild beneath her black woolen beret. What section of the city had that been? Where had we lived during those winter months I accompanied my mother day after day through snow and wind, watching her work for her new world? I could not remember.
“A wild dark waterfront, where I have taken a room,” Jakob Daw had written. With wet dark streets and a towering bridge and garbage scows and ragged men living in shanties along the bank and dead birds floating in the water?
In the months that followed my father’s departure to Spain, my mother began to travel two or three times a week in the evenings to Manhattan. Committees were being formed to help Spanish war refugees; there were meetings she had to attend, people she had to meet. She tried to explain it to me one evening over supper.
“Do you understand, Ilana?” “I think so, Mama.”
“Are you big enough for me to leave you alone?”
“Yes, Mama.” I was afraid of being alone at night, but I would n
ot let her know it.
“If you need anyone, go down to Mrs. Helfman. I’ll leave you a telephone number where you can call me if you feel you need to. You can spend the time doing your homework or reading your father’s articles on the war. I’ll show you how to use the phonograph so you can listen to music. You’re sure I can leave you by yourself?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“There’s a lot of work that has to be done now for the people in Spain. And I can’t do it from here.”
We would eat an early supper together and do the dishes. Then my mother would put on her coat and beret and leave the apartment, and I would hear our door harp and the click of the downstairs lock and see her through my window, walking quickly beneath the autumn trees to the subway station on the parkway. I did my homework, wandered aimlessly about the apartment, put myself to sleep. Sometimes I read the newspaper in which my father’s articles on the war had begun to appear. It seemed to me he was moving around a lot. He wrote about things he had seen in places called Salamanca, Segovia, Toledo, Valencia, Barcelona, Guadalajara, Madrid. I found the names on the map of Spain my mother had cut out of a newspaper and put up with thumbtacks on the kitchen wall near our table. I would sit at the table and look at Spain. Soon I knew its shape by heart: Spain and Portugal, a boxlike contour of land jutting into the Mediterranean and the Atlantic with knoblike protrusions here and there. I could not understand the war. My mother had tried to explain it to me, but I could not grasp it. Rebels against Reds, Fascists against Communists, aristocrats and middle class against workers, landowners against peasants. A brutally divided world. It seemed as if an ocean of blood had rolled across that land. None of my classmates talked about the war; few even knew about it. But somewhere in Spain was my father amidst bombs and shells and burned-out villages and fields littered with dead horses and human corpses. I was able to understand many of the words that I read in his articles, but I could not imagine a ruined village or a field of dead horses and men. After a while I stopped reading my father’s stories when I was alone at home at night.
One night I went into my parents’ bedroom and found on my mother’s dresser the letter Jakob Daw had sent us from Bilbao. I wished I could read German. I went out of the bedroom and into the kitchen and searched the map of Spain for Bilbao. I found it in the north, near another place called Guernica.
Sometimes when I was done early with my homework, I would go downstairs and play with Ruthie in her apartment, which was almost a duplicate of ours. Once I came down and they were in the middle of supper. Her mother invited me into the kitchen. Ruthie’s father sat at the table with a small dark skullcap on his dark hair. They were a cheerful family and spoke noisily among themselves, sometimes in English, most often in Yiddish, which I did not understand.
One evening Ruthie and I were playing together in her room when she asked me when my father was coming home. I said I didn’t know.
“I’m glad my father doesn’t go away on long trips,” she said. “What does your father do?” “He teaches in a yeshiva.”
I didn’t know what the word yeshiva meant, but before I could ask her, she said, “Where’d your father go?” “To Spain.” “Is that a country?”
“Spain is a country in Europe. It’s below France and near Italy.”
“I know about Europe. That’s where my parents came from. It’s across the ocean. My father says that Europe was like Gehennom for Jews.”
“What does Gehennom mean?”
“It’s—it’s where you get punished for your sins. You know, after you die. Gehennom.”
“Is it like a war?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s where my father is. In the war in Spain.”
“Is there a war in Spain?”
“A terrible war. Don’t you see the newspapers?”
“My father doesn’t want me to read goyische newspapers. He says I shouldn’t fill my head with garbage and leave no room for important things.”
The next morning over breakfast I asked my mother, “When is Papa coming home?”
“I don’t know, darling. Did you read your father’s story from Barcelona?”
“No.”
“It’s an excellent story, Ilana.”
“Why doesn’t Papa write to us?”
“When he comes back, ask him.”
“Are you going to a meeting again tonight, Mama?”
“Yes.”
That evening someone rang the bell to our apartment and when I opened the door there was Ruthie. The harp sang merrily from its place on the door.
“My mother said I could come up and play with you,” she said.
I closed the door. Again the wooden balls rose and fell, and the music of the harp filled the apartment hallway.
Ruthie looked at the harp in fascination. “What’s that?”
“It belongs to my father. Someone gave it to him. It’s like a good luck charm.”
She asked me to open and close the door a few times. Then she opened and closed it herself. She seemed enchanted by the random play of the swinging wooden balls, by the music that came from the taut wires.
“My mother wants us to have a piano, but my father says we don’t have the money. I like this—what do you call it?”
“It’s called a door harp.”
“I really like it,” she said.
We played awhile in my room. Outside an autumn wind blew through the nearly naked trees on the street. Later I invited Ruthie into the kitchen for a glass of milk and cookies. She said she couldn’t eat our food.
“What do you mean?”
“My father says you aren’t kosher. We can’t eat in your house.”
“I don’t understand. What does kosher mean?”
“It means your meat has to come from certain animals and be prepared in a certain way, and you have to have separate meat and milk dishes.”
“You mean I can eat in your house but you can’t eat in mine?” “It’s from the Torah,” she said. “It’s the law of God.” I didn’t understand what Torah meant, but I didn’t ask her. At the door she said, “Will you come down and play with me next time?”
I hesitated a moment, then nodded.
She put a hand on the knob and opened the door. The harp came to life. She swung the door gently back and forth. The harp sang and sang. She gave me a smile and went downstairs.
I came into the kitchen, poured myself a glass of milk, and ate some cookies. The apartment was silent. I sat at the kitchen table, eating the cookies and looking at the map of Spain.
• • •
One night while my mother was away I began to unpack some of the cartons that lay stacked about the apartment. I remembered where some things belonged—certain clothes in this dresser or closet, certain books or papers on this shelf or in that drawer. If I could not remember where something belonged, I chose a drawer or shelf for it and put it there neatly. The emptied cartons I piled in a deep closet out of sight.
My mother seemed not to notice what I was doing. One night I asked if I could help her put up the window curtains. She was too tired, she said. I asked her again the next night. We put up the curtains together.
Ruthie came in one evening as I was emptying a carton in my parents’ bedroom and began to help me. We worked together for a while, sorting pamphlets and books and clothes. At the bottom of the carton I found an album of old black-and-white photographs. One was of a family I did not recognize: a man, a woman, two boys, and a girl. They were sitting on a lawn near a huge white house. Behind the house was a tall sky and a grove of spruce trees. I thought one of the boys resembled my father and the girl looked a little like my Aunt Sarah. The man in the picture was thin and tall and stern-looking; the woman was dark-eyed and gaunt and unsmiling. Other photographs were of a small rectangular house on the edge of an open sea, taken at various angles and at different times of the day. There were birds in those photographs, white-winged terns that circled about and strutted along the wet sand of a curving be
ach. I saw photographs of my parents and their friends, some of whom I recognized from the many meetings in the different apartments in which we had lived. In one of the photographs my parents looked very young and my mother was pregnant. I looked at that photograph a long time. Was that I inside my mother? Or my brother, who was dead? There was a brittle sepia-colored photograph of my mother—very young, her hair in braids—with a woman and an old man with a long unkempt white beard. I thought they must be her mother and grandfather. The woman was short and slight of build and had dark, burning eyes. There was no photograph of my mother’s father.
Ruthie and I looked at the photographs together. Then I put them in a neat pile on my father’s desk. The next day they were gone. My mother said nothing to me about them.
One Saturday morning in early November I rose early and dressed and ate breakfast. My mother was still asleep. I went back to my room and sat on my bed, waiting to hear the click of the downstairs hallway door. There it was! I went quickly out of the apartment and down the stairway and out into the chill autumn air.
The street was ankle-deep in dead leaves. I followed behind Ruthie and her mother, keeping a distance of nearly a block between us. A cold wind blew the leaves in aimless arabesques along the ground. Ruthie and her mother turned up a side street in the direction of the parkway. I went by the grocery store where my mother and I shopped and the candy store with the newspapers on the stand outside. Heavy black metal weights held the papers down against the wind. I glimpsed a large headline as I passed: GOVERNMENT TO QUIT MADRID WITH CITY’S FALL IMMINENT. A smaller headline read PANIC SEIZES CAPITAL. What had I seen a day or two earlier on my way back from school? Yes. CENTER OF MADRID is REPORTED AFIRE. “Is Papa in Madrid?” I had asked my mother that night. “Yes,” my mother had said. “Aren’t you reading his stories?”
