Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

“That is my story.

  “How are you, Ilana Davita? Did I frighten you with my words about war? The really bad things about this war have no words as yet and I told you only those things that you are probably seeing in the newspapers. Does my story have an ending this time? I am very tired. It is easier to write a story with an ending than to write one without an ending. Is your father well? Send him my kindest regards. And to you and your mother, my affectionate good wishes. Jakob Daw.”

  I showed the letter to my mother and watched as she read it.

  “Is Uncle Jakob coming back to America?”

  “Yes,” my mother said in a barely audible voice, staring at the letter.

  “Where will he live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why is Uncle Jakob coming back to America?”

  “I don’t know. Are you finished with your homework?”

  “Yes.”

  “Help me make supper.”

  “I wanted to read the Hebrew book Ruthie gave me.”

  “I need someone’s company in the kitchen now, Ilana. Please help me.”

  Four

  My father cabled us from Paris. Smooth crossing, safe arrival, hip holding up. He cabled us again from Barcelona. Daw around somewhere. Am searching. Hip okay. Then he cabled us from Madrid. Found Daw. He and Madrid in bad shape. Hip doing nicely.

  We heard nothing from Jakob Daw.

  We began to receive mail from my father every two or three days. He told us that he loved us and missed us. He wrote about the weather—cold and wet—and the activities of some of his fellow journalists—flamboyant, contemptible, noble, cowardly. He himself was being careful. The hip was fine and he had discarded the cane. He sent on gossip about Hemingway and Malraux. He wrote about a Canadian doctor who had perfected a technique for giving blood transfusions on the battlefield—the first time this had ever been done. He wrote about some Jewish combat pilots he had met, a couple of them from Brooklyn, and the large number of Jews in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He wrote that he had come across some members of the family of the girl named Teresa. Did we remember little Teresa? We had met her in Sea Gate last summer. Then he wrote that the weather was turning warm.

  I asked my mother one morning, “Why is Papa writing so much now? He didn’t write us before.”

  “Sometimes things happen to people and they change,” my mother said.

  “They do things they didn’t do before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like when I started going to synagogue after I met David and Ruthie?”

  She hesitated a moment. “Yes, Ilana. Something like that.” “And like what happened to Papa in Centralia?” She gave me a sudden sharp look across the breakfast table and said in a tight voice, “Your father spoke to you about Centralia?” I nodded, a little frightened by the anger in her eyes. “What did he say?” I told her.

  She relaxed a little. “Yes,” she said softly. “Like what happened to your father in Centralia.”

  “I’m glad Papa changed and is writing to us,” I said.

  My mother was changing too. A sadness had settled upon her. Those moments when her eyes turned inward became more frequent and intense. Sometimes she went about the apartment talking to herself in words I didn’t understand. One afternoon I went past her bedroom and noticed the door open and peered inside and found her standing at the window that looked out onto the backyard. The soft light of early spring lay upon her lovely features—the small lips and slightly pointed chin and high cheekbones and dark eyes and the long startling spill of her raven hair. She stood sharply outlined against the window—trim, thin-hipped, full-breasted, her head nearly touching the pane. She was speaking softly to the window, her lips almost on the glass. “You know what it is, don’t you. You see through us the same way that we see through you. It’s the loneliness. That’s right. It’s Mama waking to no husband on Shabbos and yom-tov. Yes, that’s right. It’s zaideh alone with us at the table. Yes, yes. It’s the sounds in the darkness during the night, for which I need the strength of my man, and my man isn’t here. It’s pogroms that might come at any time. Yes, pogroms. Can anything be worse than this black plague of loneliness?”

  She went on talking that way awhile, then began to use words I didn’t understand. I moved quietly back from the door and went to my room.

  Now she worked half-days five days a week as a social worker in an agency in Manhattan and also taught English four nights a week to new immigrants in a nearby night school. She said to me one Saturday afternoon, “Please don’t be upset that I’m not home at night or that sometimes I get home late from the agency. You’re a big girl. Besides, I’m a very good social worker and a very good teacher of English, and I like what I’m doing. That’s right. I had very good teachers in Vienna and in Brooklyn College. I can see you’re upset. There isn’t much we can do about it, Ilana. We need the money to live.”

  On the nights when she was home she would come into my room and sit in the light padded living room chair she had moved near my desk. She would help me with my homework or sit quietly, reading. I had the feeling on those nights that it was less our need for money that drove her to work than it was her dread of being long hours alone.

  One night in the second week of April I woke trembling and went fearfully through the dark hallway to my parents’ bedroom and climbed into bed next to my mother, who lay still and warm, breathing lightly, her hair in disarray over her face and the pillow. I lay against her, trembling, and she stirred and woke and turned her head to me.

  “What is it, darling?” Her breath was stale and dry.

  “A nightmare, Mama.”

  “Poor darling. Let me hold you. You’re shivering. I’m here, Ilana. Your mother is here.”

  She soothed me and I slept inside her warmth. Through my sleep I felt her holding me, stroking my face and hair, whispering against my cheek words in a language I did not understand.

  • • •

  One Friday my mother remained in Manhattan after work in order to attend a party-sponsored rally in Madison Square Garden. That evening I went out of the apartment and stood for a long moment on the landing outside the door, listening to the song of the door harp. The house sounded eerily silent. I went down the stairs, my capped shoes echoing softly through the hallway. In the air were the distinctive odors of chicken and soup; I remembered Friday afternoons on certain streets in Sea Gate. I had on a pale blue light woolen dress with a white collar and long sleeves—my best dress. I went to the door of Ruthie’s apartment and rang the bell.

  Ruthie opened the door. “Hello, Ilana,” she said. “Good Shabbos. You shouldn’t ring the bell on Shabbos. It uses the electricity. Remember?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Come in. I like your dress. Is that for us?” She wore a white long-sleeved woolen dress which accentuated her red hair and freckled face.

  “From me and my mother.”

  “Is it Ilana?” I heard her mother call from the kitchen. “Yes, Mama. And she brought a present.” “Come in and say hello. My husband will be home soon from shul.”

  We entered the kitchen, a hot white room thick with the embracing odors of soup and meat.

  “What a beautiful plant!” Mrs. Helfman said, taking the gift I had brought. “A pothos. I like the green and white leaves. My husband is a gardener. Did you know that?” She had on a dark blue long-sleeved dress, over which she wore a white apron. A white kerchief covered her red hair. Her eyes were soft and wide and brown, and her roundish face, flushed by the heat in the kitchen, was smooth and happy-looking. “I like your mother’s taste, Ilana.” She put the plant on the windowsill near the kitchen table. “It will get the afternoon sun,” she said. “Ruthie, take Ilana into the living room.”

  “Can’t I help with something, Mrs. Helfman?”

  “You want to help? Sure you can help. I’ll tell you what you can do. But first put on an apron. I don’t want you to spoil such a pretty dress.”

  We made a salad. We bro
ught dishes from the kitchen to the living room, where a console table had been moved away from the wall, opened and widened and covered with a white cloth. On the buffet stood a polished triple-branched silver candelabrum. White candles, their drip pans still clean, cast soft yellow light and pale shadows throughout the room. The table gleamed with its six settings of dishes and glasses and silverware and silver wine cups. On the wall over the buffet was a dark blue velvet hanging on which was painted in gold a representation of the Old City of Jerusalem. Above the city, in a flaming nimbus from which spokes of golden light radiated in all directions, were Hebrew words which Ruthie had once translated for me: “I believe in perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah; and even though he delays, still I believe in him.” There were no other pictures or drawings anywhere in the apartment. On the righthand lintel of each door, at about eye level for adults, was a little box which Ruthie called a mezuzah. There were holy writings inside each box, she said. The box reminded you that God was in your house. The silver filigree mezuzah on the front door had been carried by her father to America after the big war. It was one of the few possessions left in his house in a small town in Poland after the pogrom in which his parents and his two sisters had been killed. No one could understand how the mezuzah had survived the pogrom. It was a miracle, Ruthie said.

  I knew that word: pogrom. Ruthie had explained it to me during one of the many times we had played together. The organized killing of Jews by a mob. The word frightened me. Pogrom. Like the word war. Ruthie would talk to me often about her parents’ European beginnings. Her father was a descendant of teachers and rabbis; her mother’s father and both grandfathers had been merchants. Ruthie’s parents had been introduced to each other in America; and Ruthie had been born two days before me. We had laughed with delight when we discovered that coincidence in dates. Often, as I listened to her talk about her parents, I wondered why I knew so very little about my mother’s life in Europe. She had been born in Poland and educated in Vienna. Her father was a Hasid and on Sabbaths and festivals was often away from home visiting the leader of his sect. She had been raised by her mother and grandfather. Sometimes I wondered what it was like to have your mother’s father acting as your father. It had to be better than having no father at all.

  The three of us stood around in the kitchen, engaged in warm and idle talk. Mrs. Helfman wanted to know what kind of rally my mother was attending. When I told her, she raised her eyes to the ceiling, shook her head, and sighed. Ruthie wanted to know what a Communist party was like. Mrs. Helfman asked her to take the braided bread called challah into the living room and put it on the table; the men would be here soon, she said. I asked which men. I had seen the six settings but did not know who else was coming. “My husband and my nephew and his son David,” Mrs. Helfman said. “Take this challah cloth out to the table, Ilana, and give it to Ruthie. She’ll know what to do with it.”

  I went through the hallway to the living room and handed the white embroidered cloth to Ruthie. I heard a knock on the door. Mrs. Helfman went to open it. For a moment I expected to hear the soft tones of the door harp. I heard instead Shabbos greetings and the voices of Mr. Helfman, David Dinn, and his father as they entered the apartment.

  I stood in the doorway to the living room, looking down the hallway. They all wore dark coats and suits and dark felt hats. Mr. Helfman, short and portly, was talking in what I thought was Yiddish to Mr. Dinn, whose tall, spare figure seemed to dwarf the presence of his son.

  David saw me and raised a hand in greeting. Mr. Helfman was putting the coats away in a closet near the door. Mr. Dinn kissed Ruthie’s mother on the cheek.

  They all came up the hallway into the living room, the men wearing dark skullcaps now. David appeared thinner than usual in a dark suit that seemed a size too large for him.

  “Good Shabbos, Ruthie,” Mr. Dinn said in his urbane and courtly manner. “Good Shabbos, Ilana. I understand your mother is busy tonight.” As he said this, a faint note of disdain entered his voice. “Well, it’s certainly nice to see you, Ilana. What a lovely dress on such a lovely girl! Two lovely girls! We must not forget our Ruthie. What do you hear from your father, Ilana?”

  “Papa and Uncle Jakob left Madrid and are going to the north of Spain.”

  “Uncle Jakob?” Mrs. Helfman asked.

  “Mr. Jakob Daw. Mama’s friend.”

  “Jakob Daw, the writer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jakob Daw is one of Channah’s friends from her Vienna days,” Mr. Dinn said. “My cousin has very interesting friends. She has other friends as well, but we won’t talk about them.”

  Again, that tone of disdain entered his voice. He had pronounced the first consonant of my mother’s name with a guttural sound on the first letter, like someone clearing his throat. Uncle Jakob called her by that name. Some called her Hannah. My father called her Annie. Most called her Anne. What did it mean when a person was known by many different names? Channah, Hannah, Annie, Anne. Like my mother calling me Ilana, and my father calling me Davita, and Uncle Jakob almost always calling me Ilana Davita, and Aunt Sarah—

  “Now and then I read your father’s stories on the war,” Mr. Dinn was saying. “He’s a very good writer, when he gives us facts. But he’s not very good when he starts in with the Communist propaganda. Is Jakob Daw also writing about the war? It seems every writer of importance is in Spain now writing about that war.”

  “How do you know so much about the war?” Mr. Helfman asked.

  “I read the papers and magazines. I see refugees in my office. Don’t you read what’s going on?”

  “I read. But it doesn’t interest me. I refuse to fill my head with it. Who cares about goyische wars? A head has just so much space in it, and if you fill it with junk you have no room for important matters.”

  We had all taken seats in the living room. Ruthie and her mother sat together on the blue upholstered couch, Mrs. Helfman leaning against the tufted side cushion at her right, her plump fingers playing idly with the ornament of the curved wooden scrolled arm of the couch. I sat next to Ruthie, who had on her face the blank look she wore when she was bored. Mrs. Helfman listened with interest to the conversation but said little. Mr. Helfman sat in an easy chair across from David and his father.

  “We all ought to care very much about this war,” Mr. Dinn was saying. “If Franco wins, Hitler has a green light.”

  “I don’t believe it for a minute,” Mr. Helfman said. “What green light? What? Hitler is a clown and a yold. What will he do?”

  “Hitler is not a clown,” Mr. Dinn said quietly. “It would be a dreadful error if we thought he was.”

  “What can he do?” Mr. Helfman asked. “You think America and England and France will let him do what he wants? Not a chance.”

  “They have been letting him do what he wants for years,” Mr. Dinn said. “That’s why Franco is winning in Spain. That’s why we have the choice we have today: fascism or communism. What a choice! It’s like choosing between Sedom and Amorrah.”

  David sat in an easy chair next to his father. From time to time he raised his eyes and glanced at me. His eyes were sad and dark in the milky whiteness of his face, and his neck, sticking out of the collar of his too-large shirt, gave him a scrawny, birdlike appearance.

  “I don’t know if Uncle Jakob is still writing about the war,” I said to Mr. Dinn. “Uncle Jakob wrote to us that he’s tired of the war.”

  “Is he?” Mr. Dinn said without apparent interest.

  “He wrote that both sides in the war are terrible and that he wants to come to America.”

  “Jakob Daw wants to come to America?” Mrs. Helfman said.

  Mr. Dinn turned to me. “When is he coming?” There was a vague tightness in his voice. “He doesn’t know. My father wrote that the Americans won’t give him a visa. So they’re going together to Bilbao. That’s a city in the north of Spain.”

  “Yes, I know where Bilbao is, Ilana. Why are they going to Bilbao?”


  “I don’t know. Mama says maybe Papa wants to help Uncle Jakob get back across the border into France.” There was a brief silence.

  “Perhaps we should make Kiddush and wash and eat,” Mrs. Helfman said quietly. “Everything is ready.”

  We moved to the table. Mr. Helfman poured wine from a silver beaker into the silver cups. He and Mr. Dinn had large cups; the other cups were small. We stood in front of our chairs as Mr. Helfman, holding up his cup, began to chant the prayers in a thin, unmelodious voice. I could make out some of the words; I had seen them in one of the books Ruthie had given me and in the synagogue prayerbook. “Boruch atuh Adonoi, elohainoo melech hu’olum….” He chanted slowly, and when he was done, everyone said, “Amen.” He sat down and drank from his cup. Then he stood again as Mr. Dinn began to chant the same prayer. David stood next to his father, his head turned slightly sideways, gazing up at him. I could see his lips mouthing the words.

  Mr. Dinn finished. We all said, “Amen,” and sat down in our chairs and drank from our cups. Then we all filed into the kitchen. Ruthie showed me how to wash my hands with the special two-handled beaker. I didn’t know the blessing for washing one’s hands; nor did I know the blessing over bread; but when Mr. Helfman made the blessing and cut the challah, I answered, “Amen.”

  The challah was warm and light and had a sweet taste.

  We sat around the table, eating and talking. I had been placed next to Ruthie and across the table from David and his father. Ruthie’s parents sat at opposite ends of the table. The talk among the adults was about the yeshiva and its new principal, a devout young man from England; about its English and Hebrew teachers and board of directors; about something called the Akiva Award; about the run-down condition of some of the classrooms; and about the school’s serious money problems. “People don’t have jobs, how can they give to a yeshiva?” Mr. Helfman said. I didn’t understand most of what they were saying. Ruthie sat eating quietly, her face a blank. David listened but said nothing.

  Between the soup and meat courses, Mr. Dinn steered the conversation back to the war in Spain until Mr. Helfman said, “It is against the law to talk of matters that might disturb one’s Shabbos.” Mr. Dinn broke off. We did not talk of Spain again during the meal.