Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  “It is clear to me,” he said, “that you prefer the ocean to this lake.”

  “I like the lake when you take me rowing on it.”

  “I see that people do not swim, in this lake. It is for boating only. Still, it is a pretty lake and this is a fine park. Americans are capable here and there of the touches of civilization. Capitalism has not yet entirely swallowed up the land. Would you like an ice cream when we are done rowing?”

  “Yes.”

  “So would I. I find that I have come to enjoy American ice cream. Is it too hot for you in the sun?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps you should wear a hat. Your blond hair will be bleached white in so much sun.”

  “No it won’t, Uncle Jakob!”

  He steered carefully between two boats. “Uncle Jakob?”

  “Yes, Ilana.”

  “Can I ask you something about the war?” “Of course.”

  “Not the war in Spain. The big war. In Europe.” He looked at me.

  “The big war,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Were you hurt in that war?”

  “I was gassed. In that war both sides used poison gas, and many of the soldiers who breathed it died. I nearly died. I was not a very good soldier. I misplaced my gas mask and did not find it until it was almost too late.”

  “Were you in a hospital?”

  “Oh, yes. For a long time.” He craned his neck and steered to avoid a boat. “Many months.”

  “Did you go back to the war?”

  “No. They thought I was well enough to go back but I would not go, so they sent me off to another hospital.”

  “Another hospital for wounded soldiers?”

  “A hospital for wounded minds. A terrible hospital.”

  I stared at him. The sunlight stung my eyes.

  “Move back to the middle of your seat, Ilana. You are tipping the boat to one side.”

  “I didn’t know they did that to soldiers.”

  “Oh, they did worse. Sometimes they shot you.”

  “Did they keep you in the second hospital a long time?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Many years.” After a moment he said, “I think I will bring the boat in now, Ilana, and we will have our ice cream. All right? Then we will go back. I am feeling a little tired.”

  He took me to the park twice again that week. He said nothing more about the war or his years in the hospital. On one of those days he told me another story about the gray horse who lived between the black horses of the mountains and the white horses of the plain—but I find I cannot remember it now. Sometimes in the evenings the three of us went to a movie in our neighborhood or on Flatbush Avenue. All night long he wrote; all morning long he slept. Sometimes in the night his room was empty, and I knew he was with my mother.

  That was the way the three of us lived during those hot July weeks of that summer of 1937: walking, rowing, talking, working, playing—and waiting.

  The wait ended one evening in the third week of July shortly after supper.

  I was sitting in my room at my open window, listening to the wind in the trees and reading. A black four-door car moved slowly up the street and came to a stop in front of our house. Two men got out. They wore dark suits. One of them looked at a paper in his hand and then at our house. Some boys playing a game of stoopball in front of the neighboring house paused to regard them curiously. The two men climbed up our front stoop. A moment later I heard the loud click of the downstairs door.

  My mother answered the ring of the doorbell.

  I sat at my window, listening. Through the hallway and into my room came a murmurous male voice and a rush of strange words: immigration police, warrant for arrest, deportation proceeding, hearing and review.

  Then I heard Jakob Daw’s voice. “Who is it, Channah? Hello? Is it for me?”

  Again I heard a murmurous male voice.

  There was a long silence.

  “I understand,” Jakob Daw said. “Yes.”

  “I will call Ezra,” my mother said in a frantic voice that trembled and seemed on the edge of panic.

  There was another silence. Jakob Daw went into his room and came out a moment later.

  My mother called my name. I went quickly out of my room and saw Jakob Daw and two strange tall men and my mother in the hallway near the door.

  Jakob Daw said he was going away. His face was gray.

  I stared at him. My mother was crying silently. The two men regarded us impassively.

  Jakob Daw bent and kissed my cheek. I sensed in that moment the flooding rush of his dread and saw in his eyes an expression I had never seen before—abject helplessness. I will never forget that expression: the wide dark empty look in his eyes, the dead pallor of his face, the faintly quivering nostrils, the rigid lips, the tightened skin of his skeletal features—as if his death mask were already upon him. He said nothing more to me or to my mother. When I raised my arms to embrace him his arms remained stiffly in front of him and I felt them wedged beneath my body. I looked down and realized with a swooning sense of horror that he could not separate his arms because his wrists were shackled together with handcuffs.

  Jakob Daw went out between the two men and down the stairway. My mother went down with them, leaving our door open. I stood at my window and watched Jakob Daw climb into the car with the two men.

  My mother stood on the curb. The car pulled away and went quickly up the street and turned the corner and was gone. My mother came back into the apartment and closed the door. The harp sang sweetly in the silent hallway.

  I sat in the synagogue and listened to the service. The air was cold. I felt everyone staring at me. I looked down at my prayer-book and thought I might pray to God, but I didn’t know what to say. I kept hearing the word please. Again and again. Please. Oh please. I rose to recite the Kaddish and there seemed to fall upon the room a dense curtain of silence in which I heard my voice with a startling clarity and heard too the responses of those around me. I thought my knees would buckle and wondered why the room was so cold.

  Outside I walked through the crowd and saw people still staring at me. I started home. Somewhere deep inside me the word please had nested and I kept hearing it all the way home. Please. Please. I heard it all that afternoon as I sat alone in the apartment waiting for my mother to return from visiting Jakob Daw. The hearing, which had taken place the day before, had gone badly. My mother had said something in the morning about Ellis Island and had rushed out of the apartment.

  She returned home ashen-faced. I heard the word please all through that hot July night and heard too strange words from my mother as she wandered through the apartment, talking out loud, singing softly, weeping.

  The next day we took the subway to Manhattan and sat huddled together through the racketing, screeching ride. A cab brought us to the river. We stood a long time in the crowd on the pier. There were journalists and newspaper photographers in the crowd.

  A black four-door car pulled up. Two uniformed men climbed out of the car along with Jakob Daw. His wrists were shackled.

  A second car pulled up and Mr. Dinn stepped hurriedly out. He looked gray-faced, exhausted, unshaven. His dark suit was rumpled, his dark tie was awry, and his hat had a dent in its side. He saw us and came quickly over, but said nothing.

  Jakob Daw craned his neck, scanning the crowd. He found us and raised his shackled hands.

  Flashbulbs popped.

  The two uniformed men took Jakob Daw quickly up the gangplank and into the ship. He looked back over his shoulder once again. Then he was gone.

  My mother and I stood with Mr. Dinn on the pier and watched the ship pull away. We scanned the decks for Jakob Daw but we couldn’t see him. Slowly the huge ship grew smaller and smaller. I felt my mother leaning heavily against me, felt all her weight upon me, and thought I would fall. Mr. Dinn put his arm around her shoulders and drew her to him. The ship, white and luminous in the bright red afternoon sun, turned into the river and toward the distant Narrows. Woul
d it sail past Sea Gate? Would I have seen it from the cottage as it sailed on toward the horizon and the darkness of Europe? We stood there watching the ship grow smaller and smaller until it could no longer be seen. Gulls wheeled over the sun-washed water. The crowd had gone. We stood awhile longer, in silence, looking at the wide expanse of the river. Then we climbed into Mr. Dinn’s car and drove back to the apartment.

  It was cold that night. I woke and went through the dark apartment to my mother’s bed and climbed in beside her. She stirred and said, “Michael? Michael?” then saw who it was and said, “We won’t cry, darling. There’s too much to do. We will be very strong.” She clung to me and I felt her softness and the heat of her breasts and thighs. We slept huddled together. Once I woke and thought I heard whispering in the apartment but it was the wind in the trees.

  She took me to Prospect Park early the next morning and enrolled me in a city-sponsored summer program. She could not leave me alone in the apartment all day, she said, and she did not want me playing on the streets. I watched her go along the path out of the park. It was queer how cold I felt in spite of the sun that shone full upon my face. I jumped rope and played running games and had milk and cookies and played more games. The adults who took care of us looked to be in their early twenties. Before lunch we were taken out on the lake in boats and I put my hand in the water. Warm and silken. Why was I so cold? It was odd how detached I felt from everything around me. I saw myself in the boat on the lake; saw myself eating lunch, resting on a blanket in the shade of a tall sycamore, playing another game, then out on the lake again in a boat. There was a separate Ilana Davita Chandal watching the Ilana Davita Chandal who now sat in a boat rowed by a deeply tanned athletic-looking young man with brown hair and muscular arms and handsome features. The separate Ilana Davita Chandal saw in that boat, amidst four other girls, a thin tall ungainly girl of about nine with long flaxen hair and milk-white skin and bony shoulders that seemed bent beneath some intolerable burden. The girl, sitting in the stern, let her hand trail in the wake of the boat for a few minutes and then did a curious thing. She stood and stepped slowly out of the boat into the water. It all seemed to take a very long time: the girl rising to her feet, the boat lurching, the astonished look on the rower’s face as the girl simply walked off the boat and slid almost without a splash into the water, her dress ballooning up and covering her face, her hair billowing out behind her and then closing up like the petals of a flower as she sank. There were screams from the girls in the boat and shouts from the shore as the rower went into the water and brought the girl to the surface. How warm and smooth the water felt to the girl! An embrace. “Never stand up in a boat!” the rower was saying. “I told you!” They were wrapping her in a blanket and calling her mother. Still it was cold. Still she was outside herself watching it happen, all the strained faces, all the noise, and the policeman writing things down. Her mother came with fresh clothes. A police car took them to the apartment.

  Ilana Davita Chandal lay in her bed shivering with cold and in the night entered her mother’s room and lay beside her mother and saw on the wall over their heads, in the moonlight that shone through the open window, the stallions on the beach and saw on two of the stallions her father and Jakob Daw, riding together. This she saw in the full and radiant clarity of her young imagination and this she continued seeing through the ensuing days when she ceased talking and would not eat and shivered with cold and watched helplessly the growing horror on her mother’s face and then talked with doctors and nurses about the bird nesting in her door harp and the gray horse dead in the mountains and the witch Baba Yaga who had turned the world cold with her evil. And it was strange too that one day one of the nurses was named Sarah and walked about the apartment in slippers and knelt in prayer by the side of Ilana Davita Chandal’s bed, murmuring, “O merciful God, giver of life and health; bless, we pray Thee, Thy servant, Ilana Davita Chandal, and those who administer to her of Thy healing gifts; that she may be restored to health of body and of mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” From this nurse Ilana Davita Chandal took some food; she let herself be bathed; and the nurse permitted her to lie alone in the big bed in her mother’s room beneath the picture of the stallions on the beach. She would lie gazing up at the picture hour after hour, hearing the surf and the wind and the beating of the hooves. Nothing in the picture ever moved; yet she could hear clearly even its faintest sounds.

  And then one day a long shiny gray car appeared at the curb in front of the house and a man in uniform climbed out and gently helped Ilana Davita Chandal and the nurse named Sarah into the backseat. Her mother stood on the curb with Mr. Dinn. Neighbors leaned out of windows, watching. Mr. Dinn said something to her through the open window of the car but she did not respond. Her mother leaned into the car and kissed her on the cheek. Cool and dry. Why was her mother crying? The car drove away.

  They drove a long time. She slept and woke and slept again. They got out of the car and slept in a big white house. She dreamed a man and a woman came into her room in the night and stood gazing down at her. The next morning they drove on again. Ilana Davita Chandal continued seeing herself in her mother’s bedroom staring up at the picture of the beach and the racing stallions. The car drove onto a big boat and she became very frightened and cried and the nurse named Sarah calmed her. They slept on the boat and drove off onto shore and rode through a green country with low rolling hills and narrow roads and old farmhouses and a startling blue sky patched with ragged clouds. And sitting in the backseat of the car, Ilana Davita Chandal caught glimpses of a distant sea beyond the hills and the farms. She felt herself curious about the odd names on the road signs: Five Houses, Dingwells Mills, Dundas, Little Pond. And then, exhausted, she slept and in her sleep again saw herself looking up at the picture of the red beach and the sea beyond and then felt herself rising in the bed, slowly standing, as she had stood in the rowboat, raising her arms carefully for balance and jumping lightly into the picture and marveling at the gritty feel of the sand beneath her feet and at the abrupt lurch into motion of the tranquil landscape within the frame, like the sudden jerking into life of a frozen motion-picture scene—wind on her face, surf on the beach, a gently rippling sea, and white birds circling and calling overhead. She woke and saw the nurse called Sarah kneeling by her bed and heard, “O Heavenly Father, we beseech Thee to have mercy upon all Thy children who live in mental darkness. Restore them to strength of mind….” She closed her eyes. A cool hand gently caressed her face and forehead and stroked her hair. She tumbled into a deep sleep.

  Sunlight woke her, hot and brilliant. Aunt Sarah stood by the bed in her white nurse’s uniform and cap.

  “Thank you, Lord,” Ilana Davita Chandal heard her say. “Thank you, dear Jesus.”

  The air was warm. A wind blew through the open window, stirring the curtains. Beyond the window lay a red-sand beach, a vast sea, an infinite sky. Birds called in the distance. I looked up at my aunt.

  “Welcome, darling Davita,” she said softly. “Welcome. You slept nearly two days. You look so much better. Isn’t it a marvelous day? We’ll get you something to eat and we’ll go out on the beach. It’s so good to have you here, Davita. We’re going to make you well. You’ll see. With the help of our Lord, we’re going to make you all well.”

  The nearest house stood about a quarter of a mile away on the crest of a low hill and was occupied by the farmer who leased and worked the land. I could see him working the land with two other men. But no one came near us all the weeks we were there save the mailman and the delivery boy from the nearby country store in Little Pond and a neatly attired young couple proselytizing for Jehovah’s Witnesses. They left behind some copies of a magazine called The Watchtower.

  The farmhouse we lived in had been built by Aunt Sarah’s grandfather before the turn of the century. It was a small two-story white clapboard house with a dark gray shingle roof and dark gray shutters and a single massive gray stone step leading to the front door. There w
as an open wooden porch on the side of the house that faced the sea and a wooden stairway led from the porch to a large grassy area that sloped toward the sandy beach and the water. The sea rolled gently onto the red land and only with the sudden changes of the tide would there be the rush of waves onto the beach and whitecaps upon the water. The land was so silent, save for the wind and the waves and the cries of the birds, that it seemed to have been formed by the wondrous magic of a dreamer of tales.

  For much of that month I sat on the porch and watched the tides. I saw the sea move slowly back and forth upon the red earth like some breathing creature of vast and mysterious dimensions. I saw the white birds circling above the beach, wide-winged terns, wheeling, calling. I watched the mists roll in from the sea and blur the hard edges of the land and turn all the world gauzy white. I saw sunsets beyond the house and low clouds bursting into flame. I sensed it all as unreal and knew I was inside a long dream from which I would one day waken. In the distant fields men rode horses and at times horses roamed loose on the land and grazed close to the beach. I could hear their occasional whinnying and from time to time saw them break into a gallop alongside the gentle surf. I thought I might see my father and Uncle Jakob on the horses, but I did not.

  I was often tired and slept at odd hours, sometimes dropping off abruptly in the midst of a sentence directed to Aunt Sarah and waking hours later alone in my bed in the dark and not knowing for a long moment where I was and thinking my father was at his desk doing his special writing or Jakob Daw was in his room in the circle of light cast by the lamp. The nights were so dark I could not see my hands. Stars burned in the sky, an infinite multitude of tiny blue-white fires in a black and boundless dome, and sometimes when I looked up at them I would burst into tears and Aunt Sarah would hold me and caress my face and pray murmurously to Almighty God or to the Heavenly Father or Merciful God or Most Loving Father or to our Savior Jesus Christ or Jesus Christ our Lord.