by Chaim Potok
“Forgive me, Anne. I did not mean to burden you with a homily in this time of grief but to say that though I despised my brother’s political ideas, I loved him as a person; and I prayed that such love would be a possibility for us all. I prayed that with patience and compassion I would win him back to the true path, or, at the very least, learn to understand something of his path and thus not sever myself from him, from my only brother. ‘Him that is weak in the faith, receive ye.’ I did not lose him, and so at least to that extent my prayers were answered. But how naive I was to believe in the power of patience and love in all mankind! How foolish! The rivers of blood that now soak the soil of Spain are a testament to the unredemptive savagery of mankind. ‘A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.’ How we love our killing time! We appear to need it. I do not know why. I realize now that events do occur to some of us that set us upon our life’s path. I do not know exactly what it was that happened to Michael in Centralia and that changed him so. He never told me. I wish he had.
“Dear Anne, let us not sever the feelings between us because my brother is no longer alive. We are linked together by memories and by the lovely life that is Ilana Davita. It is my intent to return home this summer, a respite from the carnage that is Spain. The truth is that the Republican cause is lost, the Rebels triumph. Shall we somehow see one another? Yours in affection. Sarah.”
My mother stopped reading and sat very still, gazing down at the letter.
“She is at least correct about the outcome of the war,” Jakob Daw said, and coughed briefly.
There was another sheet of paper in the envelope: a letter to me. I took it from my mother and read it quickly to myself. Then I read it aloud.
“Dearest Davita. This is your Aunt Sarah writing. How I loved your father and how I shall miss him! What shall I say to you? Your father was a soldier; his weapons were words. He would have wanted you to have courage and to be strong. I shall be at the farmhouse this summer. Is the lovely picture of the horses on the beach still hanging on the wall? Perhaps Jesus will be good to us and enable us to be together for a while—your mother, you, and I. How I wish we two could pray together again as we once did, on our knees before Jesus Christ! I wish you strength, Davita. Remember your father’s kindness and laughter and, more important, his love for your mother and you. I send you my love. I pray for you and your mother constantly. Aunt Sarah.”
There was another silence. Jakob Daw put his delicately boned hand to his mouth and coughed.
My mother asked, “What did Aunt Sarah mean about your praying together on your knees?”
I told her about that and saw her exchange looks with Jakob Daw.
“It’s late,” my mother said. “I think we should eat lunch. Ilana, will you help me?”
“Uncle Jakob, where will you be living?”
“I do not know as yet.” His voice was hoarse, raspy. He was thinner now than he had been before. There were blotchy bluish-black circles around his heavy-lidded dark eyes. His straight dark hair was combed back flat. All his features—the arching eyebrows and sharp-edged nose and concave cheeks and slightly pointed jaw—had become harshly angular and somewhat exaggerated in a face that was now nearly skeletal-looking. Yet I felt strength in him, felt a quality of being I did not understand, a strong and nearly overpowering sense of his presence as he sat there next to me at the kitchen table.
“You could live in the room next to me where Aunt Sarah stayed,” I said eagerly.
Jakob Daw smiled. “We will see,” he said.
“Help me set the table, Ilana. We’ll talk later about where your Uncle Jakob will stay.”
“Will you tell me more stories about the bird?”
“I shall first have to think if there is anything more to tell.”
“You’re putting the knives on the wrong side of the plate, Ilana,” my mother said.
“Let me help you,” Jakob Daw said. “We will have lunch and then I will lie down. I am very tired. It is a big ocean and it seems to get bigger each time I cross it.” He coughed again, his thin shoulders shaking, his face as white as the paper on which Aunt Sarah had written her letters.
He slept the entire afternoon, woke briefly for a light supper, and slept again. My mother had to be out somewhere that evening and I wandered about the apartment, stopping from time to time at the window in my parents’ bedroom and gazing out at the slowly darkening sky. I saw Ruthie standing in the backyard near the flowers her father had planted. I thought about the sunsets over Sea Gate and imagined the cottage and the dunes and the long gentle glide of the beach toward the surf and the castles I had built in the wet sands of the tidal pool. I stopped by the partly open door to Jakob Daw’s room and peered inside. The light was dim. How thin he was, how frail-looking! The tiny quivering movements of his nostrils, the delicate rise of his thin upper lip, the full and feminine lower lip, the boniness and chalky whiteness of his face—a sticklike figure in baggy pants and rumpled shirt, lying still and softly breathing. He seemed the most fragile person I had ever known.
I came into my room and sat at my desk awhile, reading another of the books Ruthie’s father had asked her to bring up to me. The doorbell rang. I went to open the door. The harp sang clearly in the silent apartment.
It was David and his father.
“Hello, Ilana,” Mr. Dinn said solemnly, looking tall and austere. “How are you?” He said something that sounded like “Goot voch.” David, not looking directly at me, said hello in a shy voice and repeated what his father had said.
I stood in the doorway, looking at them. They were dressed in their Shabbos clothes—dark suits, dark ties, dark hats.
“We came straight from shul,” Mr. Dinn said. “Is your mother home?”
I told him my mother was at some kind of meeting. “Did Mr. Daw arrive safely?” “Yes. He’s asleep.”
“Good. I won’t bother him. Please tell your mother—” Jakob Daw came out of his room. His hair was disheveled and his eyes blinked repeatedly. He looked gaunt, untidy.
“The doorbell woke me,” he said in his hoarse, phlegmy voice.
He seemed a bit dazed. “Who is it, Ilana? Hello? Is it someone for me?”
“It’s Mr. Dinn and his son, David.”
“Dinn?” Jakob Daw said. He appeared to collect himself quickly and advanced into the hallway toward the door. “Come in, come in. Channah went to a meeting and will be back soon. I thank you for all you did. Please come in.”
Mr. Dinn shook Jakob Daw’s hand and I saw on his long narrow face a hint of deference and awe. “A pleasure to meet you,” he murmured. “An honor. I apologize for waking you.”
“No, no, I slept too much today. Ilana, can we make a glass of tea for Mr. Dinn? Or, better, perhaps a cold drink. Yes? Good.”
They came into the apartment. Jakob Daw and Mr. Dinn started along the hallway to the kitchen. I closed the door. David turned, attracted by the play of sounds on the harp as the balls struck the taut wires.
“What’s that?”
“A door harp.”
“I never saw anything like that.” “It belonged to my father.” “It’s pretty. I like the music.” “Do you want to see my room?”
The question flustered him. Behind me I heard a key go into the lock and the door opened.
My mother stood in the doorway. The harp sang. She saw David and looked astonished.
“Well,” she said, coming inside and closing the door. “David. Hello.”
I heard Jakob Daw call from the kitchen. “Channah? Dinn is here. We are in the kitchen.”
“Can I bring David into my room?” I asked my mother.
“Of course,” my mother said, removing her beret.
“Maybe another time,” David said, looking uncomfortable, his eyes darting about.
“Oh, please, David.”
“Go ahead,” my mother said, and went quickly up the hallway and into the kitchen.
David followed me to my room and st
ood in the doorway, looking at my chair and desk and bed and bookcase.
“You’re very neat,” he said.
“Come inside,” I said. “Why are you standing in the doorway?”
He took small halting steps into the room and slipped into the chair at the desk. He was still wearing his dark hat. I sat on the edge of my bed, keeping my legs together and tugging my dress down over my knees. I saw him look down at the Hebrew book on my desk.
“You read Hebrew?” he asked. “Where’d you get this book?”
“I’m teaching myself to read. It’s not hard. Ruthie and her father help me. It’s Mr. Helfman’s book.”
He scanned the shelves of my bookcase. “You like fairy tales?”
“I love fairy tales. I love stories. My—my father and my mother got me those books. Don’t you like fairy tales?”
“No. Fairy tales are for girls.”
“Where’d you hear that? Don’t you like stories that come from your imagination?”
“No. I don’t like my imagination. It keeps me awake at night. Sometimes it keeps me from studying. Sometimes it shows me things that scare me.”
“What things?”
“Things. People.” “What people?”
“Sometimes it shows me my mother in her grave.” I stared at him and said nothing.
He gazed down at the floor, his face very pale, his lips trembling faintly. All the time he talked he would not look directly at me.
“I miss my mother,” he said. “Every day I see her dead in my imagination.”
I did not know what to say.
“I know my mother is with God,” he said. “But I see her in her grave and I can’t help it. I can’t help how I see her.” He was still not looking at me as he spoke. “It helps if I study a lot. That keeps my imagination away.”
“I’m not afraid of seeing my father in my imagination. I love to see my father. There’s a picture of three horses on a beach in my parents’ room, and now sometimes I see my father riding one of the horses.”
“Do you ever see him in his grave?”
“He doesn’t have a grave. He was blown up by a big bomb and no one could find anything.”
He looked at me then and his mouth fell open. Then he looked slowly away.
“I think imagination is a wonderful thing,” I said. “My Aunt Sarah told me it helped the pioneer women who had to live alone when their husbands were away hunting. Sometimes it gives me very bad dreams. But it gives me nice dreams too. Especially in school. It helps me get through my classes.”
“You don’t like your classes?”
“They’re boring.”
“My school isn’t boring.”
“Sometimes I fall asleep in class and have dreams. Sometimes I dream with my eyes open.” “What do you dream?” “All kinds of things. Stories.” “You wouldn’t find my school boring.”
“I couldn’t go to your school, David. I don’t know enough Hebrew.”
“You could learn. We have students who don’t know too much Hebrew when they come in. They learn.” “And I don’t believe in God.”
Once again he looked straight at me. “You don’t believe in—? Why do you come to shul?”
“I like to be with everyone. I like to listen to the songs. I like it when the Torah is taken out and read. It’s warm and nice. It feels good and everything feels like it’s being changed into something very beautiful like when I was building the castles on the beach. Remember? I don’t like the curtain though. I don’t like having to sit behind the wall where I can’t see clearly. Why do they have that wall? I don’t like it when people are separated like that.”
“It’s the law,” he said quietly, still looking at me.
“Someone should change it.”
“You can’t do that. God made the law.”
“No He didn’t. My mother says that people make the laws, then they say that God made them so that everyone will obey. My parents taught me—”
He broke in angrily, “Your parents are—” He stopped and fidgeted on the chair through a brief silence. Then he said, “Are you going to keep saying Kaddish for your father?”
“Yes.”
“You really shouldn’t, Ilana. You really don’t have to. Everyone’s talking about it.”
“Will they tell me to leave the shul if I keep saying it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
My mother called us from the kitchen.
“I don’t understand why a girl can’t say it.”
“A woman doesn’t have to pray, she doesn’t have to come to shul. Why are you doing it?”
My mother called us again.
“I have to do more for my father than just attend one memorial meeting. He was my father.”
David said nothing. He rose from the chair and I slid off the bed. My mother called us a third time. We went from my room and along the hallway toward the kitchen, our footsteps echoing faintly on the wooden floor.
My mother, Mr. Dinn, and Jakob Daw looked at us as we came into the kitchen. They were standing at the table. Mr. Dinn held in his hand two new white candles whose tips had been scraped back, exposing additional lengths of wick; the wicks were bent toward each other. On the table was a small glass dish in which was a reddish substance; next to the dish was a shot glass filled nearly to overflowing with an amber liquid that, upon my coming close to it, smelled like my father’s Scotch.
“David, we’ll make Havdoloh here,” Mr. Dinn said. His dark hat was tipped back on his head.
David looked very surprised. “Here?” he blurted out. “Why here?”
“Because Mr. Daw has requested it.”
“For my dead grandfather,” Jakob Daw said quietly. “It is the service he loved most. The Havdoloh. I would stand next to him while he said it. My father, you must understand, was first a follower of the ideas of Lassalle and later of Bakunin. Those names mean nothing to you, of course. And yet my father could never once bring himself to forbid me to listen to my grandfather’s Havdoloh and to drink the wine afterwards.”
“Tonight we’ll have Scotch instead of wine,” Mr. Dinn said. “We don’t seem to have the proper wine in this house.”
My mother looked down at the glass dish and the shot glass on the table and said nothing.
“In Madrid,” Jakob Daw said in his raspy voice, “I once said to myself that if I came out alive I would do something that would make my grandfather happy. I said it again in Bilbao, and I said it three or four times in Barcelona. Once I said it very loudly in Barcelona so I should be heard above the machine-gun fire by whoever or whatever listens to such promises. I do not believe in God, you understand, but I do believe in my grandfather’s Havdoloh.”
Mr. Dinn handed the candles to David, who held them tightly together, his eyes fixed on the wicks.
“The word havdoloh means separation,” Mr. Dinn said. “We separate the Shabbos from the other days of the week. First we light the candles as a sign of this separation, because you’re not permitted to use fire on Shabbos.”
The hand in which David held the candles shook slightly. Mr. Dinn struck a match and, a moment after it flared into life, reached over and turned off the kitchen light. Shadows danced on the ceiling and walls. My mother’s eyes shone in the flame.
“At home we use one candle with many wicks,” Mr. Dinn said softly. “It’s a beautiful candle of many colors.”
“I remember such a candle,” Jakob Daw said. Lights and shadows played on his gaunt face as the wicks were fed by the match and became fused into a single tall flame.
“The spices in the dish help to make the service more beautiful by their aroma,” Mr. Dinn said. “Some say their purpose is to strengthen you for the coming week’s burdens. At home we have a special silver box for the spices. My wife, of blessed memory, bought it.”
I saw David look up at his father, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and dark.
“I remember my grandfather’s box,” Jakob Daw said. “It wa
s a filigreed silver box shaped like the tower of a castle.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Dinn. “Exactly.”
I looked at David. He was staring uneasily at the flame. A narrow spiral of smoke rose upward from the candles and vanished into the ceiling shadows.
My mother stood very still, saying nothing.
Mr. Dinn raised the little glass in his right hand and began to chant. His eyes were closed and he swayed slightly as he sang the words. He had a rich baritone voice that rang out clearly in the small kitchen but did not assault our ears. The melody moved through the apartment, returning faintly from distant corners. Then David and his father chanted something briefly together, and Mr. Dinn went on alone. He put the glass down on the table and picked up the dish of spices. He said a blessing over the spices, sniffed them, and gave the dish to Jakob Daw, who sniffed and passed it to my mother. She put the dish briefly to her nose and gave it to David, who took a deep breath of the spices and passed it to me. The scent was sweet, heady, aromatic. I put the dish back down on the table.
Wax was running down the candle onto David’s fingers. His hand continued its faint trembling.
Mr. Dinn cupped his hands together, knuckles down, and moved them close to the flame. He chanted a blessing and opened his hands so that the light of the flame bathed his palms. David repeated the gesture with his left hand. Jakob Daw, my mother, and I did nothing for a moment. Then I saw Jakob Daw extend his arms, cup his hands, and open his palms. How pale his hands looked, how dry and brittle! I could see ridges of bones, outlines of veins.
