Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  At first it was difficult for me to walk, I had lost so much weight and strength. When I woke in the mornings Aunt Sarah would help me dress and then lead me out of my room to the narrow second-floor landing and past the oval-framed sepia photograph of a mother and daughter that hung on the wall at the head of the steep wooden stairway leading to the hallway downstairs. The hallway was small and narrow and brought us into the living room with its large fireplace and old chairs and sofa and, on its white walls, old pictures of a uniformed band and of a tall wavy-haired handsome man in shining white knee-length stockings and tights holding a long pole and the same man rowing a long boat on a silvery lake, and a uniformed baseball team in front of a banner that read CHAMPIONS 1884. In the living room Aunt Sarah would pray, her eyes closed, her head bowed, “O God, the King eternal who dividest the day from the darkness, and turnest the shadow of death into morning; drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to keep Thy law, and guide our feet into the way of peace….” She prayed before we ate and when we were done eating. She prayed when we witnessed a beautiful sunset, her longish face turned to the sky, her head arching back on her neck, her eyes pale blue in the light, “O Heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty; open, we beseech Thee, our eyes to behold Thy gracious hand in all Thy works….” She prayed frequently for my mother, “O God, whose fatherly care reacheth to the uttermost parts of the earth; we humbly beseech Thee graciously to behold and bless those absent from us….” She prayed at night before she turned off the light in my room, “O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done….”

  Often when she prayed she knelt and I knelt with her and said amen when she was done. There was comfort in the kneeling and a sense of my exhausted self yielding to the embrace of a presence I could not understand but felt all about me as I did the wind and the sea. “We are a congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ,” my aunt said to me one evening as we sat watching the sun go down in a fiery sky. “You and I, darling Davita. We two out here alone. Our Lord hears us and sees us and comforts us, though we are only a congregation of two. How marvelous!” I nodded and gazed at the setting sun and listened to the birds and the wind that blew in from the sea. Marvelous. Yes. And a comfort. Yes. Oh yes.

  All the furniture in the farmhouse was of dark wood. A wooden radio stood on an end table in the living room; voices and music and distant static drifted from it and faded as if borne on puffs of wind. A telephone hung from the wall near the kitchen, a party line; it rang infrequently and I never saw my aunt use it in all the time we were there.

  On occasion as we sat on the porch watching the sea, she would read to me or tell me a story. Mostly she told me stories of Jesus and Mary and the disciples. She told me about Jesus healing the sick and raising the dead, about Jesus crucified and resurrected, about Paul on the road to Damascus, about Jesus and the Second Coming. She told me local tales about Prince Edward Island: an Indian maiden so lovely that angels descended to earth to gaze upon her beauty; an abandoned house occupied by mischievous elves; a mysterious white trout that appeared suddenly in one of the island’s rivers; mermaids in a lake, fireballs in the sky; a phantom train, a phantom ship, a pirate’s treasure, a wizard’s ring. She told me wonderfully funny stories about Maine, one of them about an ocean fog so thick that a man building a fish house nailed his roof to it. And she imitated the speech of Maine as she told the story: “We was shingling the fish house when it come in to fog, and I’m telling you I never see just such a mull as that one….” And when she said, “Next morning the fog lifted and carried my fish house out to sea, I was some put out. Worst fog I ever saw”—when she said that she threw back her head and laughed, and I heard in her laughter the sounds of my father’s voice.

  She loved telling me stories about healers and the power of faith and prayer. She told me of people given up for dead who were returned to health through prayer—through psalms and other passages from the Bible and prayers written by officials of the Church. She herself had witnessed such events—in a clinic in London, in a village in Ethiopia, in a hospital in Spain. “In Him is life,” she said. “Darling Davita, when we pray we reach out to the source of all healing, we touch our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Her car, a small black coupe, stood parked alongside the farmhouse and one Sunday morning we went on a long drive to a church. I remember a white one-story building with a tall white tower and a columned portico before its entrance. I sat next to Aunt Sarah on a wooden pew and followed the prayers and knelt when she knelt. An enormous cross hung on the wall behind the altar; it frightened me. The church was crowded with worshippers, all looking stiff and restrained. The hymns were quietly sung. The walls and pews were painted white and there was a smell of moist raw earth in the air. I did not understand the sermon and fell asleep in the car on the way back and was very tired all the next day. Aunt Sarah did not take me to that church again.

  The weeks of August went by as if in a drawn-out and languorous dream. Slowly my strength returned. The warm sun, the vast and vaulting silence, the patient ministerings of my aunt—all was healing balm to me that month. And one afternoon I wandered off the porch by myself and went carefully across the grassy slope and down to the beach. I felt the sand on my feet, coarser than the sand of Sea Gate, and touched the water with my hands. Cool and calm and smooth. As far out as I could see were water and sky and horizon. How warm and sweet and clean all this wondrous ocean world! I began to build a castle but after a while abandoned it. I was done with sand castles at the edge of the sea. I stood there a moment longer, looking out at the water and the wheeling birds. Then I turned and started back up the grassy slope to the farmhouse and saw Aunt Sarah watching me from the porch.

  Over supper that night we talked about my father and Jakob Daw and Spain. I said something about the bombing of Guernica and my aunt said it was terrible but there were many horrors perpetrated by the Communists and I told her what I had heard Uncle Jakob say about Barcelona and she said she was not surprised, nothing anyone said about that war could ever surprise her again. I asked her why she had gone to Spain and she said, “Dear child, I am a nurse for our Lord Jesus Christ. I go wherever there is suffering.” I asked her how someone who believed in Jesus Christ could work for the Communist side and she said something about this being an unredeemed world and a terrible century and sometimes a person had to choose between evils. “And nothing in our century is more evil than fascism, though communism comes very close.”

  “My mother doesn’t like to hear people talk like that,” I said.

  “I pray to our Lord that your mother will one day come to her senses.”

  “Why did my father have to try to save the nun? He could be alive now if he hadn’t tried to do that.”

  She looked away from me and out across the beach to the sea. How like my father she was, a mirror of his gestures and features. But they were wrong on her, wrong on a woman, and she was not pretty.

  “I loved my brother,” she said, staring out at the sea. “He was one of the most decent people I have ever known. I pray that by that act he redeemed his immortal soul.”

  I did not understand, but was suddenly tired and did not ask her to explain.

  My mother wrote often. She was well and working very hard. She missed me terribly. How fortunate I was to be away from the city. The weather was very nearly unbearable; even the nights were hot. Mr. Dinn kept asking about me. David was back from Sea Gate. He sent his good wishes and asked if I thought my school would still be boring next year and did I want to go to his school. Jakob Daw had written her from Paris that the sea journey had been uncomfortable and the French had received him gladly and Paris was lovely as long as you did not talk too much about the war in Spain and the disastrous Communist cause. How was I feeling? She had received a letter from Aunt Sarah saying that much of my old strength was back and there was some color in my face
again and my weight was up and I was able to sleep nights without too many bad dreams. The letter had made her very happy. She was eager to see me but I should let Aunt Sarah decide when I was well enough to return. She sent me and Aunt Sarah her deepest love.

  In the last week of August it rained two straight days and nights. I lay in my bed at night and listened to the rain on the windows and roof of the farmhouse and thought I heard whispering in the living room downstairs. Then the sky cleared and the sun shone and we began to take short automobile rides to nearby villages. I saw horse-driven carts and dung-heaped cow paths and piny woods and the skeletons of old cars in grassy meadows and, in a coastal village, lobster boats tied to old wooden docks and bobbing lightly in the sun-speckled sea.

  We went on longer and longer rides through villages from another time, past red-sand dunes and long beaches to a coast where the sea was wild. And one afternoon we stood on a cliff near stunted, oddly shaped dead trees and watched the sea roll against a shoreline of jagged rocks, saw the wind-blown swells that were the juncture of two colliding tides crashing and boiling with furious violence, and I was awed and a little frightened.

  One day Aunt Sarah took me to the nearby farmhouse and I met the farmer. He was a large, taciturn man. I saw his pigs and cows and rode one of his horses. He showed me how to sit in the saddle like a girl, how to hold the reins, how to bring the horse to a halt. It was a young horse. I rode slowly with my heart thumping in my ears, feeling the horse beneath me, its rolling motions, its powerful flanks. I smelled its heat and saw the quivering motions of its muscular skin and held its mane and felt the air on my face. When the farmer helped me from the saddle I felt I had grown wings for a long moment and flown.

  That night I fell asleep to the sounds of the radio and dreamed of the stallions on the beach and saw my father and Jakob Daw on two of the horses, riding toward the sea and the darkening horizon. In all the time I was on that beach I did not once dream of Baba Yaga.

  The next day I woke early and dressed and went down the steep stairway into the living room. Aunt Sarah sat on the couch, reading. We prayed together, thanking the Heavenly Father for our health and our rest. Then we ate breakfast and sat on the porch, watching the birds and the sea. When the air grew warm we put on bathing suits and went into the water. The sea was shallow for a long way out and it was like swimming in a lake. Aunt Sarah was bony and small-breasted and seemed a little ashamed of her body. She waded out to knee-deep water and then stood watching me swim. Later we came out of the water and put on clothes and sat on the porch. Aunt Sarah wore a light flowery dress and a broad-brimmed hat. She appeared calm, her long thin body slouched in a lazy curve against the back of the beach chair. She looked very like my father then, and I found myself stealing frequent glances at her.

  Shortly before noon a long shiny gray car came down the macadam road toward the sea and turned into the dirt road that led to the farmhouse. A man in uniform stepped out.

  “Good morning, William,” Aunt Sarah called cheerfully, getting to her feet. “Did you have a pleasant drive? We shall be starting shortly. How are Mother and Father?”

  I sat looking at the sea and listening to the wind and the wheeling birds. I imagined horses on the beach galloping and turning and galloping again, their hooves drumming on the red sand. After lunch Aunt Sarah and I knelt in the living room and thanked the Merciful God for the summer and for our health. Then we closed up the farmhouse and climbed into the car and drove away.

  I returned to school. I sat in the classroom, numbed by vacant hours. No one talked to me. I could hear classmates whispering about me as I went by in the corridors. One morning a hall monitor put his hands on my chest and squeezed and said, “Grapes,” and laughed hideously. My dreams began to return.

  Letters came from Jakob Daw but I would not read them. I did not return to the synagogue.

  On occasion my mother would come into my room and find me kneeling in prayer. Mr. Dinn was often in the apartment, almost always in the late evenings. David came once and heard me describe my weeks in the farmhouse with my aunt and did not come again. I saw Ruthie often but we did not play together.

  One day I wandered away from my school and walked in a dreamlike haze through the neighborhood and then returned to the school a few minutes before the end of class. There was a big fuss about that.

  I remember long talks with my mother and Mr. Dinn. I remember the leaves beginning to turn and the cold in the evening air. I remember coming upon my mother in the kitchen one night and seeing her at the table, her head in her hands. She was crying. She did not see me and I walked quietly away.

  Again I wandered from my school and now my mother was called and we sat together in an office with a short, bald man who peered at us from behind a dark-wood desk on which papers were arranged in orderly piles. I asked him, “Is that your special writing?” They stared at me. My mother looked ill. I knelt by my bed and prayed that night and dreamed, for the first time in many weeks, of Baba Yaga. I was on the dirt road that led to the farmhouse. The door to the farmhouse opened slowly and she stepped out, Baba Yaga, and stood there, one foot on the stone step, one foot on the threshold. Then she laughed and leaped through the air and fell upon me. I woke screaming and my mother was quickly in the room.

  I remember a long night in the kitchen with my mother and Mr. Dinn, but I cannot recall what was said. I remember a long talk with Mr. Helfman in the backyard near the sycamore and the bed of fading flowers. I remember long conversations with a kindly bearded man in a small musty room whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books.

  I sat in a classroom amidst new faces and listened to a young clean-shaven man speak softly about a Jewish scholar named Rambam, who had lived hundreds of years ago in Spain. Spain was a very important country for the Jews, the teacher said. Did anyone know what was going on now in Spain? I raised my hand, “Ilana,” he said gently. “Yes.”

  I talked. I talked and talked—as if I had never spoken before in all the years of my life; as if I had never uttered words before in all the classrooms I had attended. Faces turned to me. The teacher stood behind his desk, listening.

  BOOK THREE

  Six

  That fall my mother left her job in Manhattan and began to work for an agency in downtown Brooklyn a few blocks from the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. She felt she ought to be closer to home, she said. She didn’t want me staying alone too long after school. And she was tired of having to travel day after day to Manhattan. I heard her tell Mr. Dinn that Manhattan reminded her too much of my father. What point was there to her being endlessly haunted by her dead husband? she said.

  I wandered into my mother’s bedroom one afternoon and opened my father’s closet. The strong rose-petal fragrance of a sachet rose to my nostrils. My father’s clothes and shoes were gone. Even the clothes hangers were no longer there. The sight of that closet—its cavernous emptiness—was shocking and sent through me a coldness that made the back of my neck tingle. The carton with my father’s special writing was still on the floor near the bed; and the picture of the horses on the beach still hung on the wall. But I was haunted by the vision of that empty closet.

  My mother told me that she had given all of my father’s clothes and shoes to the poor. Mr. Dinn had taken care of it. What point was there to having my father’s clothes and shoes moidering in the closet? she said. There were poor and hungry people everywhere who needed clothes and shoes. “Are you very upset, Ilana? I’m sorry. I did it while you were with Aunt Sarah. There are better ways to remember your father than by the suits and shoes he wore.”

  But each time I recited the Kaddish I would remember the look of his clothes. And I was saying it every day now, for we prayed in class at the start of each day and I was one of two students who rose at intervals and recited the Hebrew words, “Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmai rabboh …”

  After the first morning my teacher, a kindly bearded man in his middle forties, had asked me to remain behind as
the class trooped out for the morning recess. When we were alone, he said, “Ilana, a girl does not say Kaddish.”

  I did not respond.

  “I was told that you say Kaddish in shul. I cannot do anything about that. But you will not say it in my class.” I said nothing. “Is that understood, Ilana?” I nodded. He dismissed me.

  The next morning I rose during the morning service and quietly recited the Kaddish. I felt the teacher’s burning eyes upon me, felt all their eyes, staring. But he said nothing to me about it again, and after a few days there were no more stares. All uttered the necessary responses at the appropriate places. Then one day the boy who recited the Kaddish with me did not rise, and I stood alone, saying the words—“Magnified and sanctified be the great name of God …”—and still all responded.

  I found as the weeks went by and winter approached that my mother had been right: I was no longer clearly remembering the look and cut of my father’s clothes. At times I could not even recall his face. My mother said that was natural; but it frightened me to be losing my memory of my father.

  I saw David often. He was a class ahead of me. I would see him in the company of his friends in the corridors or the yard. Sometimes we would talk briefly alone together. Mostly he remained in the circle of his friends. He had an extraordinary reputation in the school. All seemed awed by his brilliance. And because the whole school knew by now that his father and my mother were first cousins, I was treated as if I belonged intimately to his family and shared in the aura of high intellect and breeding—all of this despite my mother’s known political loyalties. I realized quickly enough that no one in my class snickered or whispered or laughed when I raised my hand to ask or to answer a question, to react to a book we had been told to read, or to make a point about the opera at the Metropolitan or the exhibition of paintings at the Brooklyn Museum which the school took us to see during the first semester I was there. There was much gossip and idle talk among the students; but no one in this school laughed at learning.