Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  I sat at my desk, studying the book of Hebrew letters and words the Helfmans had given me. The winter wind rattled my window. Downstairs the Helfmans were singing again. If there was no snowstorm tomorrow morning, I would go again to the synagogue. That was better than sitting home listening to all the talk about Spain and Franco and Hitler and Stalin and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the bombing of Madrid and the battle for the Jarama and seeing in my mind pictures of arms and legs everywhere. It was comfortable in the synagogue and people sang together. And I liked being in the same room with David Dinn and imagining myself back on the beach with him and in the water waiting for the waves. And I knew a few of the Hebrew words now. And the door harp would sing as I went from the apartment. My door harp. Singing.

  I sat in the synagogue behind the curtain and watched David Dinn and his father recite the Kaddish. The large room was crowded, the air warm. On the men’s side the windows were foggy with condensation. The murmurous voices, the incantatory tone of the man at the lectern before the ark, the rhythms of the congregation’s singing—I felt a drowsy languor wash over me, felt myself afloat in a warm and calming sea.

  On the wintry sidewalk outside after the service I saw David Dinn and four or five of his friends and came over to them.

  “Hello, David. Good Shabbos.”

  “Hello, Ilana.” He still looked a little embarrassed whenever I came over to him. He wore a heavy dark-blue jacket and a woolen cap that covered his ears. A bitter cold wind blew along the parkway.

  “What does the word yiyaw mean?” I asked. “I saw it in the prayerbook. Am I saying it right? Yiyaw?”

  “I don’t ever remember seeing a word like that, Ilana,” David said. “Where is it?”

  “I saw it a lot of times. Maybe I’m not saying it right. I was reading slowly to myself because I can’t follow everyone else, and I kept seeing these same two letters. I think you say them—”

  “Oh,” David interrupted. “Wait!”

  “Don’t say it!” one of his friends said loudly. “It’s the name of God!”

  “It’s pronounced Adonoi when you pray,” David said. “And you say HaShem when you’re just using it in talk. You never pronounce those letters as they’re written, Ilana.”

  “Why not?”

  “The name of God is too holy to be pronounced.” “I don’t understand.”

  “She doesn’t understand,” one of his friends echoed.

  “That’s the law,” David said. “That’s the way you’re supposed to say it.”

  I saw his father coming over to us through the crowd.

  “Adonoi,” I said. “And HaShem. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” David said, looking uncomfortable. “Then why do they write it with those two letters?” “I don’t know.”

  “Good Shabbos, Ilana,” David’s father said. He wore a dark winter coat and a dark felt hat. “How is your father?”

  “Much better, thank you. He’s going back to Spain in a few weeks.”

  “Back to Spain? So soon?”

  “My mother says he can go back if the doctor says it’s all right. My mother says he should go back.”

  Mr. Dinn stood there, looking down at me, sadness in his eyes. He seemed not to know what to say.

  “Mr. Dinn, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “Am I Jewish?”

  He looked startled. “Of course you’re Jewish,” he said.

  David turned his eyes away and gazed down at the ground. His friends had become suddenly very still.

  “Some kids in my school say I’m half-Jewish.”

  “According to Jewish law, Ilana, there is no such thing as someone who is half-Jewish. If your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish.”

  “That’s what my father once said. But I wanted to be sure.”

  “Your father was correct.”

  “But how can I be all Jewish if my father isn’t Jewish?”

  “That is the law, Ilana,” Mr. Dinn said quietly.

  “Her father isn’t Jewish?” one of David’s friends said in a loud voice.

  “Be quiet, Yankel!” David said, visibly angry.

  Mrs. Helfman came out of the crowd. “Ezra, forgive me. The Liebermans are waiting. Good Shabbos, Ilana. How is your father? Ezra, Mrs. Lieberman has a cough and this wind is not good for her. Can we go? Give your parents and your aunt my regards, Ilana.”

  “Good Shabbos, Ilana,” David said. They went off into the crowd.

  David’s friends stood in a small tight huddle, staring at me. Then they turned and walked away. I went quickly home.

  That week my father stopped using his crutches and began to walk with a cane. The cane gave him a jaunty look. Twice he traveled to the newspaper where he worked. His old barking laugh had returned. He took my mother out one night to see a Russian movie. Aunt Sarah moved about the apartment in her house slippers, quoting the Bible to herself and murmuring under her breath. One evening as she dozed on the couch in the living room I looked closely at her legs and realized why she walked about in slippers: her legs were swollen from all the hours she stood upon them as a nurse. She dozed fitfully, her thin frame looking taut even in sleep. She seemed a melancholy figure now that her task here was coming to an end. Where would she go now?

  In the first week of March the doctor informed my father that he had fully recuperated from the jaundice and the wound. He would have a slight limp but that would disappear in time. We celebrated that night with dinner and wine in the kitchen. My aunt cried and drank too much and had to be helped to bed. “My only brother,” she kept saying. “Who else do I have? Dear Jesus, be kind to us.”

  One week later my father bought a steamship ticket to Lisbon. I overheard him telling my mother one night that he was having difficulty renewing his passport.

  “Immigration is giving me a hard time. I don’t think they want me to leave the country.”

  “Shall I ask Ezra to help?”

  “I’ll handle it myself, Annie. I don’t need Ezra.”

  “All right, Michael. You know how kind he is. Please don’t be nasty.”

  “I get the jitters sometimes with him so close.”

  “What do you mean close? I saw him more often when we were moving from place to place in Manhattan than I see him now. He’s a very kind and considerate man. He knows to stay away.”

  “Is he still my competition, Annie?”

  “Oh, you foolish, foolish man. How could you think that?” “Because I love you. Because I’m getting edgy about going away. Am I doing the right thing?” “Yes. I would tell you if you weren’t.” “You always have.”

  “Promise me, no heroics, Michael. Please.”

  “No heroics, darling. I promise.”

  “Shall we go to bed now?”

  “God, I love you.”

  “My sweet darling Michael.”

  I went silently back down the long tunnel of our hallway to my room.

  One night toward the end of that week Aunt Sarah came into my room as I sat at my desk, reading. She asked if she could sit on my bed. She had on a plain dark woolen dress and looked tired and pale. She had not worn her nurse’s uniform since the day the doctor had announced my father’s recovery. She sat primly on the edge of my bed, a tall thin woman with blue eyes and short blond hair and a somewhat too long face that was handsome on my father but somehow didn’t seem to belong on a woman.

  “Well,” she said. “Your Aunt Sarah is going home.”

  I said I would miss her.

  She asked if I would mind her sending me a book from time to time. I said I would like that very much.

  “Are you going to Spain?” I asked.

  “Not right away. I may go up to the farmhouse for a week or two. I’m very tired. You would love the farmhouse, Davita. You might come to visit me in Maine one day, and I’ll take you up. It’s a long trip, but it’s so lovely there. There’s a beach and the sea and birds.”

  “And horses.”

  S
he smiled. “And horses.” She was silent a moment, and sad. “I’ll miss you, Davita. I will pray to our Lord for you and your mother.”

  “Will you pray for Papa, too?”

  “I pray for your father all the time. I wish he—I wish my brother would—” She broke off, her voice quavering. “We have to trust in our Lord,” she said. “We must have faith in Jesus Christ. I am going to pray for all of you right now. Will you pray with me?”

  I didn’t know what to say or do.

  She rose from the bed and got down on her knees in the center of the room.

  I went over to her and got down beside her. She closed her eyes and brought her hands together. Her lips moved. She was saying something that I could not hear. Then I heard her say, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …” I closed my eyes and brought my hands together and remained on my knees, listening to my aunt pray. My knees hurt. I heard her say, “Amen.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  We rose.

  She kissed me gently on my head. As she bent toward me I caught a sharp sense of her sadness and fervor. Then she went from my room. Later I heard her talking with my parents in the kitchen. She left early the next morning before I woke.

  That Saturday afternoon my parents and I walked beneath the trees along Eastern Parkway to Prospect Park a few blocks away. It was a cold windless day, the air clean and sharp, the sky so blue it seemed inside a summer day’s dream. My father walked with his cane. We passed some boys from the synagogue where David Dinn and his father prayed. They ignored me. There was little traffic on the parkway and few people in the park. We walked together through the park to the lake, where about a half-dozen people were ice-skating. The sun spangled the frozen water and gave it a hard opalescent sheen. We sat for a while on a bench and I watched small winter birds playing in the trees. Then my mother grew cold and we walked on, circling the lake and then heading out of the park and back onto Eastern Parkway. We talked very little. I held tightly to my father’s free hand. My mother’s eyes were dark, burning.

  That night my father came into my room as I was at my desk and sat down stiffly on my bed, straightening his right leg with care.

  “Well, my love,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m not feeling good, Papa.”

  “I see that,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to go away.”

  “I know you don’t, my love. But I’m going anyway because I have to. Listen, Davita, I want to tell you something. I’m not sure you’re old enough for this. I’m going to tell you a story. It’s not a Jakob Daw kind of story. And it’s not about our friends Johnny Appleseed or Baron Munchausen. It’s about your father and someone who was a little like Paul Bunyan. Are you interested? Yes? Good girl. Okay.

  “When I was about seventeen years old I caught pneumonia and almost died. This was soon after my brother died and a few weeks after I graduated from high school. I lay sick in my bed all summer, coughing and sweating, and when I recovered I was too weak to go to college. I had been accepted into Harvard. My father thought I ought to spend a few months with one of his cousins in the state of Washington. Clean air and healthy farm work would restore my strength, he said. His cousin also owned forests and lumber mills. So they put me on a train. I thought the ride would never end. Hills and valleys and lakes and plains and mountains and deserts. When I got off the train I found myself in a beautiful green world. My father’s cousin had a large farm near the town of Centralia. I loved it—the farm, the forests, the work, the animals—that cool green rainy world on the other side of the country.

  “In November I went into Centralia with my father’s cousin and his family to celebrate Armistice Day and watch the parade. A terrible thing happened that day. Are you listening, my love? This is not a nice story. This is about a different kind of America. Listen.”

  I listened.

  That was the night he told me about what happened in Centralia, Washington, on November n, 1919. But he did not tell me everything.

  He told me about a man named Wesley Everest, who worked at logging—a kind of small Paul Bunyan, he said. He had been in the army in Europe during the war and had won a medal for sharpshooting. He was from Kentucky and Tennessee, and after the war he wandered west and ended up as a lumberjack in the great forests of the Pacific Northwest. He joined the union called the Industrial Workers of the World—nicknamed the Wobblies. This union wanted workers to have good food, decent working conditions, no more than eight hours of work each day. They wanted things that a lot of people thought were bad for America. The owners of the forests and the mills hated the men who belonged to this union and called them Communists and Reds. They paid other men, who had also been in the war, to beat up those helping the union. This union had a hall in Centralia. There were rumors that the hall would be attacked on Armistice Day. But those ex-soldiers marched right past the hall and didn’t stop, and it looked like the rumors had been all wrong.

  “I remember I stood watching them. It was cold and foggy. We felt good that nothing had happened and we stood in the crowd, laughing and having a good time. But on the way back, the parade suddenly stopped in front of the union hall and some of the men broke through the door. I heard shooting. There was a lot of screaming and yelling. My father’s cousin said we had better get out of there and get back to the farm. The next day we found out that Wesley Everest had shot one or two of the men who had followed him as he had run out of the hall and the town and tried to cross a river. The river was too strong and too cold and he couldn’t make it across. They brought him to the town jail. That night some men broke into the jailhouse and took him out and killed him.”

  My father fell silent and looked down at the floor. He said, a moment later, “Davita, listen. There are two kinds of America. That’s what I realized that day. And I knew which kind I belonged to. That’s why I’m going back to Spain, my love. I don’t want fascism in my country, and the place to stop it is Spain. I’ll miss you. Be a big girl and listen to your mother. She’s a very special person, your mother. You’ll find out about that as you grow up.”

  “Papa?”

  “Yes, my love.”

  “What does your father do?”

  “He’s in the lumber business. My whole family is in the lumber industry. Now I want you to give your father a big hug, an ocean of a hug. It’s got to last me a long time. That’s right. That’s the hug I had in mind!”

  He kissed me on my face and held me a long time. He was tall and strong and I loved him, my father, Michael Chandal.

  The next afternoon my mother and I rode with him in a cab to a pier in Manhattan. It was a cold clear day, the sky a brilliant blue. My mother and I stood in the crowd on the pier and watched the ship move slowly away. My father stood on the deck, waving his cane. Gulls circled and screamed overhead. The river looked burnished beneath the late afternoon sun. Along the shoreline the water was frozen and out in the wide clear channel large blocks of ice floated on the surface and glistened in the sunlight. My father grew smaller and smaller. Then I could no longer see him.

  My mother stood huddled inside her coat, gazing down the river at the receding ship, her eyes wide and moist, her hair long beneath her beret. “It’s time again for being alone,” she said in a low, clear voice. “I hate it.”

  We took the subway home.

  That week a letter arrived from Jakob Daw, from Spain. It was addressed to me.

  “Dear Ilana Davita. Recently I thought I would not be able to write anymore. But what does a writer know? The story tells me: Write. And I write. I will write very slowly and with care so you will be able to read my terrible handwriting.

  “We return now to our little bird. He crossed the stormy ocean and suddenly found himself in an even stormier land. All the earth was filled with the storms of war. Our bird flew back and forth across the burning land. And he was astonished to find that wherever he went he heard music. How strange that in the midst of war there was music
! Men marched and fought and killed and sang. Our bird saw the war and listened to the songs and thought this must be the land where the source of all the world’s music was to be found. He flew to battlefields and watched men running and falling; he saw shells exploding, bombs falling, buildings crumbling, children dying. He saw men and horses dead in fields and alongside rivers. Sometimes he flew in the rain and still the war went on. Once he came to a small valley that lay between a range of mountains and a wide plain that bordered on a sea. And there in that valley he found a white horse, dead in a field of grass, killed by an exploding shell. What a lovely horse it must have been! Dead in the grass from the war. It seemed to our bird that all the beautiful things in the world were dying in this war—and still the music was going on, giving strength to both sides, soothing the dying and those left to grieve. ‘Make an end to the music!’ our bird cried. ‘Cover the world in a pall of silence! Let all see the truth without the false veil of this eternal welling music!’ He flew about in a frenzy, searching. He watched as the land grew darker day by day with the war. And still the music.

  “One day, while flying over a mountain, our bird saw soldiers from one army enter a small village and kill old men, women, and children who were reported sympathetic to the other side. The next day he flew over a valley and saw soldiers from the other army enter another village and kill old men, women, and children who were sympathetic to the first side. In the weeks that followed, our little bird saw that happen in many villages and towns. His eyes grew dull, his wings grew weary. How could the source of all the world’s music be in such a land? Impossible! And he decided to end his search in the land of blood and bombs and return across the ocean to the land of mountains and rivers and plains and great forests. He thought wearily that the source of the music might well be somewhere in that new land. He would search for it there. And he began his westward journey back across the great sea.