Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  Mr. Dinn raised the glass again and went on chanting, his voice louder now. Then he was done and he sipped from the glass and put it down and David blew out the candle. The lights came back on in time for us to see a small column of smoke drifting upward from the extinguished candle and forming a thin cloud below the ceiling.

  Jakob Daw stood very still next to my mother, his eyes closed.

  “Goot voch,” Mr. Dinn said. “I wish everyone a good week.”

  He kissed his son. He shook my mother’s hand—with a special tenderness, I thought. He bent to kiss my head and I sensed in him a rush of gentleness and warm concern that surprised me; I had not thought him capable of deep feelings.

  “Goot voch, Mr. Daw,” he said, offering his hand.

  Jakob Daw opened his eyes and for a moment seemed not to know where he was. He shook Mr. Dinn’s hand.

  “Some memories are good, most are bad,” Jakob Daw said. “This was a good memory.”

  “You can make Havdoloh by yourself,” Mr. Dinn said. “You don’t need someone to do it for you.”

  “There are many things I cannot do by myself,” Jakob Daw said, “and Havdoloh is one of them. I appreciate the memory. Believe me when I tell you that in Barcelona I did not think I would ever be in Brooklyn listening to a Jew make Havdoloh. It is all very strange. Nothing I write could ever be as strange as our real world.”

  “We must go,” Mr. Dinn said. “I’ll come over tomorrow and we’ll talk some more. Keep in mind what I suggested. There will definitely be trouble. That much I know.”

  “It is probably someone who does not like my stories. I have been told that my stories often have strange effects upon my readers.”

  “It’s not your stories, it’s your politics.”

  “But I no longer have any politics. I have renounced my party affiliation. Stalinism is dead for me after Barcelona.”

  My mother gave Jakob Daw a piercing look.

  “We’ll have to convince the people at Immigration,” Mr. Dinn said.

  “Will that be difficult to do?” “Yes,” Mr. Dinn said.

  “But what can they do to me? I have the visa. It was given to me by a fine gentleman in Marseilles. Can they revoke a visa?”

  “They can come up with a visa charge. They can claim fraud. They can do a deep search and charge you with failure to disclose some petty offense. It’s called material fraud bearing on admissibility. They can get you if they really want to. Or they can simply let the visa run out and not renew it.”

  “You are saying, if I understand you correctly, that I am in the clutches of a bureaucracy and now share the common lot of the working class. Perhaps it would have helped if I were a different kind of writer. What a pity! It would be so ironic to have come to America only to be sent back to Europe for something I no longer am. It would be a little like living inside one of my own stories.”

  “You won’t be sent back,” Mr. Dinn said. “I can promise you that. Come, David. We have to go. Say good night.”

  “Will you visit me again?” I asked David.

  “I don’t know,” he said, not looking at me directly.

  My mother accompanied David and his father to the door. I heard the harp. My mother came back into the kitchen and sat down at the table.

  “What happened at the meeting?” Jakob Daw asked.

  “Precisely what you expected. They were delicate but firm.”

  “Well,” Jakob Daw said, “it is beginning. Barcelona or Brooklyn, they are the same Stalinists.”

  “I don’t want to hear you talking like that, Jakob,” my mother said.

  “No? Listen to me, Channah. I was in Barcelona. My eyes saw this. They slaughtered anarchists, Trotskyists, P.O.U.M. people. Stalin’s hand purged Barcelona. If it were not for Ezra Dinn and the visa waiting for me in Marseilles, I would have remained in Barcelona and would now be either in a jail or dead. It was more important for the Communists in Barcelona to kill anti-Stalinist workers than to kill Fascists. This my eyes saw, Channah.”

  “The party is my life, Jakob,” my mother said in a small voice. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I am going to lie down,” Jakob Daw said. “I am very tired.”

  He went out of the kitchen and along the hallway to his room.

  I woke in the night to go to the bathroom and passed by the partly open door to Jakob Daw’s room. He was at the small desk, writing. Later I woke again after a vivid dream about my father: he was swimming in the ocean off the beach at Sea Gate and three horses suddenly thundered across the sand and when I looked again for my father I could not see him. I woke with my heart beating fiercely and got out of bed to go through the hallway to the bathroom—and there was Jakob Daw at the little desk in his room, still writing, the desk lamp brushing his face with a soft and luminous wash of yellow light. He still had on his clothes of the day before, and I wondered if he had slept at all. He wore his spectacles and, in the moment or two that I stood there watching, the glasses flared in the light and it was as if his eyes were on fire. I heard nothing save the scratching of his fountain pen on paper and it seemed to me a wondrously musical sound. Words and ideas were coming from him through his fingers and pen onto paper, and a story was being created! I was seeing it but I could not understand it, this act of creating a story.

  My mother went out early the following morning. Jakob Daw was asleep. I wandered about the apartment. In my mother’s bedroom I stopped to gaze at her large bed and wondered what she must feel like sleeping alone and knowing my father would never return. I opened her closet, saw her few clothes and shoes: skirts, dresses, a cardigan sweater, spectator shoes, pumps, walking shoes, slippers. On a shelf were her berets and two purses. Then I opened my father’s closet. His clothes and shoes were still there. That was a strange feeling, standing there and staring at my dead father’s clothes and shoes. All seemed to be waiting patiently for his return. I closed the closet door. The bed had been neatly made with its pale blue flowered spread. Near the bed I saw an open carton with a white label on which were printed the words SPECIAL WRITING in my father’s hand. My father’s desk was clean; my mother used it now for her own writing. I stood in the doorway and it seemed to me my father was everywhere in that room—on the bed, at the desk, by the window, in the corners. I went back through the hallway to my room and spent the rest of the morning at my desk, reading.

  My mother returned home shortly before lunch. Jakob Daw woke coughing and came out of his room in the same clothes he had worn the day before. His door was across the hallway from mine and I saw him stagger a little as he went from his room. He appeared haggard, exhausted. His eyes were swollen, his face unshaven. He saw me looking at him and said something in a language I could not understand and went along the hallway, coughing. The bathroom door closed.

  In the kitchen my mother dropped something: the noise of shattering glass was abrupt and jarring. Angry words exploded from her, uttered, it seemed to me, in the same language Jakob Daw had used a moment before.

  In the early afternoon the three of us walked along the parkway to Prospect Park. For some fresh air, my mother said. We all needed fresh air. We watched people rowing on the lake. There were small fish in the lake and they made tiny rippling circles along the surface of the water as they fed off the bread crumbs people threw them. The park was crowded. We sat on a bench with our faces to the sun. Birds flew high overhead against a cloudless sky. My mother and I had come to this park with my father the day before he had sailed back to Spain. That seemed a long time ago. When had that been?

  I asked Jakob Daw if he knew how to row a boat. He smiled tiredly and said in a brooding tone, speaking not to me but to the sky and the air, that it was another of the many things he could not do.

  “There were other things to do in Vienna when I was growing up. Many other things. I rowed through Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. And through Marx and Freud and others. Those were deep and beautiful lakes. Sometimes they became wide rivers. Once I even rowed throug
h Theodor Herzl, but it proved uninteresting. But I did not learn to row in ordinary water.” He coughed. “Another of my many failings, along with ineptitude in the trenches and in—” He stopped, glanced at my mother, and looked quickly away. “In other matters.”

  He leaned back on the bench, his hands clasped behind his head. He had changed into different clothes, as baggy and as wrinkled as those he had worn before. I was sitting between him and my mother and felt a gray sadness rising from him and, at the same time, felt myself drawn to him as if by some dark mesmerizing force. He had cut himself while shaving; a clot of blood lay on his bony chin. I wanted to touch the blood, wash it away, dress the wound. The afternoon sunlight accentuated the network of small lines around his eyes and showed clearly the flecks of gray in his hair. I could not remember having seen gray in his hair when I had first met him last year in our apartment in Manhattan.

  My mother had been sitting quietly, looking at the lake. She wore a white beret and a dark blue skirt. “I used to go rowing,” she said. “With my grandfather. We lived near a wide river. He used to take me rowing when I was a little girl. I was too young to row the boat myself. And then the war came and we ran from the town—it was a border town between Russia and Poland, and we were told the Russian cavalry was coming. We hid in a forest. I remember the forest. That was all the rowing I ever did.”

  “Didn’t you ever go rowing with your father?” I asked.

  “I never did anything with my father. Once my mother took me out on the river and we almost overturned the boat. My mother was a very modern woman, but she didn’t know anything about boats. Your father had an uncle once who knew about boats. But he died in a boating accident. I don’t like boats. Boats frighten me. People I love keep going away from me on boats.”

  We sat on the bench in the sunlight, looking at the lake.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “Will we go to the beach this summer?”

  “I don’t know. I will have to work all summer. There’s no more money from your father’s job. And I will not take money from—” She stopped. “I don’t know about the summer, Ilana.”

  Jakob Daw had closed his eyes and seemed to have fallen asleep. Now he said, with his eyes closed, “How serious do you think it is, Channah?”

  “If Ezra is worried, it’s very serious.”

  “I used to boast about being hated by the right people. I am not boasting now. I am very tired.” My mother said nothing.

  “I am not looking forward to another sea journey.”

  Still my mother said nothing.

  “I will not fight to remain here, Channah. I do not wish to become a cause that the Stalinists and the Fascists will turn into a circus. Nor do I wish to live in a country where I will be hounded constantly by nameless government officials. I will not permit Ezra to waste his time with this. The French will take me in. The French appreciate my writing. Malraux himself is a devoted reader. The French will certainly take me back in.”

  “Stop it, Jakob,” my mother said.

  “I detest boats and ships,” Jakob Daw said, opening his eyes and looking at the lake. “I cannot begin to tell you how much I detest boats and ships. Perhaps I will write a story about it one day.”

  “Please stop it,” my mother said.

  “I think we should return to the apartment,” Jakob Daw said. “I am very, very tired.”

  “Can I help you, Uncle Jakob? You can lean on me.”

  “You are a dear child. I hope someone will soon teach you how to row. Are you ready to start back, Channah?”

  That evening my mother met again in our living room with the two men and the woman. They studied together. New words flew into my room: exchange value, commodities, universal money, labor power. Jakob Daw lay in his room, asleep. Later Mr. Dinn came over and he and my mother sat in the kitchen, talking. I woke in the night to go to the bathroom and saw Jakob Daw sitting at the desk in his clothes, writing, the scratching of his pen a sibilant music in the dark stillness of the apartment.

  I walked home from school past the yeshiva and saw Ruthie playing in the wide front yard during her afternoon recess. The yard was crowded and noisy. A number of teachers stood along the rim of the sidewalk, forming a protective phalanx. Most of the teachers in the yard were women; two of the men were young and wore beards.

  I waved to Ruthie. She came over to me. We stood in the shade of a sycamore. A car sped by close to the sidewalk.

  “We heard David’s father making Havdoloh in your apartment,” Ruthie said. She had been jumping rope and her freckled face was flushed and sweaty. “Why did he do that?”

  “Mr. Daw asked him.”

  “David’s father said he wouldn’t sing again outside his own house until after he stopped saying Kaddish.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Are you going to keep saying Kaddish?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t have to, you know. Girls don’t have to say Kaddish.”

  “I want to.”

  “Everyone’s talking about you, Ilana.”

  I did not respond. One of the girls in the yard called Ruthie’s name.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that everyone is talking about you?”

  “No.”

  “You shouldn’t do it, Ilana.”

  One of the young, bearded teachers was looking at me. I said, “Ruthie, does your father ever take you rowing?”

  She stared at me. “What?”

  “In the lake in Prospect Park. Does your father ever take you rowing there?”

  “My mother takes me. In the summer, mostly.”

  “Do you stay in the city in the summer?”

  “We go to the country where there’s a lake. Are you all right, Ilana?”

  “I’m not all right. My Uncle Jakob may have to leave America. The government doesn’t want him to stay.”

  She stared at me. Once again a girl called her name.

  “I have to go home,” I said. “Maybe he’s awake and will want something to eat. What kind of government do we have? Is it a Fascist government? David’s father is trying to keep him here. I dreamed last night that he went away on a big boat, like my father.”

  The teacher who had been looking at me came over to us. He was a short thin man with a dark beard and he wore a brown suit and a gray felt hat. He said something to Ruthie in what sounded like Yiddish.

  “Your uncle will be okay,” Ruthie said. “My father says that David’s father is a very good lawyer.”

  “I wonder if David’s father knows how to row. I’ll see you, Ruthie. Good-bye. I like the ocean anyway better than the lake.”

  I went along the parkway, turned up the side street, and walked past the candy store without looking at the newspapers. The air was warm and bright; brilliant sunlight covered the streets. On the street where I lived the brownstones seemed to be glowing in the sunlight and deep green shadows lay beneath the full-leafed trees. Baby carriages had been parked in the shade and in one of them a child lay crying. I looked up and saw Jakob Daw in the bay window of our living room.

  He had the apartment door open for me before I reached the landing. I heard the final notes of the door harp. As he closed the door behind me the door harp sang again.

  He asked how my day had been. I said school was boring. He looked surprised. We came into the kitchen. I brought a glass of milk and a plate of cookies to the table. He poured himself a cup of coffee. He was wearing the same rumpled pants he had worn on Saturday. He looked pale and weary. His eyes were red with fatigue, his cheeks sunken. From time to time as we sat there together, he coughed behind his fingers.

  He said, in his hesitant way, that he had looked at the books in my room and hoped I didn’t mind. Did I like the Hebrew books? I told him I especially liked the books about the Bible. They were good stories, I said.

  “Stories,” he echoed softly.

  “And I like the fairy tale books. And the book about Paul Bunyan. I especially lik
e that book.” Then I said, “Uncle Jakob, why did my father die?”

  He looked down into his cup, his gaunt features tight. “Because a Fascist airplane killed him.”

  “Why did he try to save the nun?” “Because that was the kind of man your father was.” “If he hadn’t tried to save her he might still be alive.” Jakob Daw was quiet. Then he said, “If my grandmother had had wheels, she would have rolled.” I looked at him.

  “An old proverb,” he murmured. “Forgive me. I do not like to play the game of if, Ilana. It gives me a headache and, worse, a heartache. No ifs, please.”

  “Uncle Jakob, are you a stay-at-home writer?”

  “What is a stay-at-home writer, Ilana? Ah, yes, I see what you mean. Yes, I am mostly a stay-at-home writer.”

  “I wish my father had stayed home more. Did you see my father much in Spain?”

  “I was with your father in Madrid and then in Bilbao, before he went to Guernica and I went to Barcelona. I thought I might go to Lisbon, but that turned out to be impossible. It was difficult even to travel to Barcelona. Do those names mean anything to you?”

  “I know all those places. I can show them to you on the map.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I am sure you can.”

  “Do you always write at night, Uncle Jakob?”

  “Almost always. The day is too filled with noise. I can hear my voices better in the silence of night. The voices of the people I write about.”

  “Can you hear the voice of your little black bird better at night too?”

  “Yes. But even at night that voice is weak. The bird is now very tired, Ilana. He is looking for a place to build a nest.”

  “I hope you won’t go back to Europe, Uncle Jakob.”

  He said nothing. I watched as he went over to the stove, poured himself another cup of coffee, put in it a teaspoon of cocoa from an open tin on the counter near the sink, stirred the cup briefly with a teaspoon, and returned to the table.

  “Is America a Fascist country?” I asked.

  “No. But there are Americans who are Fascists.”