Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  He explained it again. The others in the boat were giving me queer looks.

  “You mean the Communists have become friends with the Fascists?”

  “That’s right,” he said. Then he said, “Ilana, sit still and stop rocking the boat.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said.

  “I don’t care whether you believe it or not. Sit still!”

  I sat very quietly. I believed none of it. He was a liar and a capitalist tool. I hated him and wished he would hurry and bring us to shore so I could get out of his boat.

  I did not go rowing with him in the afternoon but sat beneath a tree and read a copy of the Times that I had found in a trash can. I read:

  “Moscow, Aug. 24.—With the meticulous punctuality of a perfectly staged arrival, two huge Focke-Wulf Condor planes conveying Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, and his thirty-two assistants, landed at the Moscow airdrome on the stroke of 1 P.M. yesterday.

  “Adequate but not excessive police precautions were taken at the airdrome. For the first time the Soviet authorities displayed the swastika banner, five of which flew from the front of the airdrome building, but were placed so as not to be visible from the outside….”

  I put the paper back into the trash can.

  There was a party meeting in our apartment that night. People arrived angry. I could hear the anger in their tread as they came up the stairs. The harp sang and sang. I sat at my desk and listened to the shouting in the living room. “With that murderer?” someone was screaming. “That barbarian? I shit on the whole thing! You want to know what I think of it? I’ll tell you what I think of it. You can take this card and shove it up your ass!” Angry footsteps sounded through the hallway and then the slamming of our front door. The harp sang.

  There was an explosion of voices in the living room. A woman was shouting. I did not hear my mother. Some more people left, slamming the front door. The harp sang and sang.

  Two nights later there was another meeting. A man I had seen only once before came to the apartment that night, the bald-headed man who had spoken at the memorial meeting for my father. I heard his quiet, authoritative voice through the walls of my room. He talked about the need for discipline, for buying time, for secure frontiers. I heard a man’s voice suddenly shout, “Fuck you, comrade! You think I’m going to kill myself for the party when it—”

  “Sit down!” a woman shouted. “Listen to what he has to say!”

  “To hell with it!” the man shouted back. “We’re being played for suckers. Can’t you see it?”

  “I see breach of discipline,” a second man shouted. “That’s what I see.”

  “To hell with all of it!” the first man shouted. “I gave you years of my life to fight fascism and now you give me this shit! To hell with all of it!”

  Again, angry footsteps sounded through the hallway and, again, the door harp sang.

  I said to my mother at breakfast the following morning, “Mama, what are you going to do?”

  She gave me a look of pain, a look that implored me to ask no more questions of her—and I finished my breakfast in silence and went off to the day camp.

  She went to a meeting that night and to another meeting a few nights later. In the middle of September, about two weeks after I had returned to school, yet another meeting took place in our apartment. Again, I heard raised voices and angry imprecations. And again, others shouted their demands for total adherence to party discipline: there was a reason for the move; it was a life-or-death choice; it was needed to buy time for the world revolution; sometimes you were forced to make an alliance with an enemy for the sake of a—

  And then I heard my mother’s voice and I turned cold and felt the skin rise on the nape of my neck. I had never heard her sound like that before: strident, coldly raging, gulping some of her words, and the words pouring from her in a torrent of unrelenting fury. She understood everything, she said. It all made perfect sense, the treaty, the opportunity to increase the security of Russia’s borders, to augment the power of the Russian people and strengthen the hand of Comrade Stalin. It all made perfect sense, and yet it made no sense at all. It had nothing to do with the Communist cause. It was a pure geopolitical act having to do with national security—and as far as she was concerned Russia was no longer the leader of world communism. No truly Communist state could ally itself with the absolute enemy of communism, no matter what its self-interest might be. She for one could never live at peace with any person or state that tied itself to Nazi Germany. She began to quote from the writings of Marx and Engels. She quoted from Lenin. She even quoted from Stalin. She went on and on in that coldly furious high-pitched voice—and then I had the feeling that she was no longer making any sense. A deep silence had settled upon the meeting, and still my mother continued talking. How can one justify this theoretically and morally? she asked again and again. How can one explain it? It defied elementary morality. An alliance with Hitler, who had helped Franco conquer Spain, whose aircraft had destroyed the town of Guernica, who persecuted Jews. How is such an act even remotely justifiable, no matter what geopolitical reality is taken into consideration? Again, she quoted Marx. She was beginning to sound hoarse. Suddenly someone said, “Anne, please, enough, enough. Sit down.” Someone else said, “What are you talking about? How can you have world communism and revolution without Russia? You’re babbling!” A third voice said, “Listen to her, for heaven’s sake!” The first voice said, “We don’t have time for this. There’s work to be done. Without discipline we’re nothing.” My mother fell silent.

  I was asleep when the meeting ended and did not hear them leave the apartment or the door harp singing.

  My mother slept late the next morning and did not go to work. I went out of the apartment and walked to school. She was in her room when I returned in the late afternoon. I found her on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. She told me to close the door and leave her alone.

  In the weeks that followed she seemed to grow old before my eyes. Her face sagged and became strangely dull, her eyes took on a pinkish, inflamed look, her mouth became a hard, ragged line between perpetually pursed lips. An odor began to rise from her, sour, fecal. Her skin became dry and flaky, her long hair scraggly. She seemed to be growing smaller and smaller. She went to work, prepared our meals, wrote letters, worked on Jakob Daw’s book—but all the light was gone from her, and I barely knew who she was.

  There were no more meetings in our apartment.

  One day in early October I went shopping with her, and in the grocery store we met the woman who had regularly attended the Sunday afternoon study sessions. The woman—short and thin and plain-looking, with straight brown hair and moist brown eyes—turned on her heel and walked off without a word. My mother’s face reddened; her lips trembled.

  There were no more study sessions in our apartment.

  A letter arrived from Charles Carter. My mother read it and read it again and then went with it to her room. I heard her choking sobs through the closed door. When she emerged she looked ill.

  “Mama, shall I ask Mrs. Helfman to—”

  “We will not be going to Chicago, Ilana,” she said.

  I stared at her and felt a slow turning of the world.

  “Can you make supper by yourself? You’ll find things in the icebox. No, we won’t be going to Chicago after all. What shall I do now? I think I’ll go out for a walk. Can you take care of yourself for an hour or so, Ilana?”

  Every weekday morning she went to work. Every evening she returned. At night she would wander about the apartment like a shade. She favored the darkness and would sit for hours in the living room without a light. One night I went into the living room and turned on a light and saw her in her nightgown in an easy chair. She jumped, startled, and threw up her hands before her eyes. “Turn off the light!” she screamed. “Turn it off!”

  Sometimes she would begin to hum melodies I had never heard
before. She fell asleep over books and newspapers. “What shall I do?” I heard her say at times as she wandered about the apartment. One day I realized that she was no longer listening to music. I went by the bathroom once and saw her, through the door she had left open, asleep on the toilet, her panties pushed down to her ankles. She sat there in her nightgown, which had been pulled up over her knees, her hands clasped together in her lap and her knees slightly apart. Her head had fallen forward over her left shoulder. I did not wake her. I went quietly to my room and closed my door and lay on my bed and put my hand over my eyes. Some minutes later I heard the toilet flushing and my mother’s footsteps in the hallway to her room. The image of her on the toilet asleep would not go away. Like the image of her naked. Like all the other images burned into me over the years.

  It was autumn now and cold. My father’s book had been published, but its birth had gone unnoticed in the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet pact and in the din of death now coming from Europe. Germany had invaded Poland in the first week of September, and the Second World War had begun.

  I remember the frenzy into which the neighborhood and the school had been thrown by that invasion. Nearly everyone in the school had relatives somewhere in the war zone. What had Jakob Daw written? Yes, I remembered—and I lay awake at times imagining the curtain of darkness being drawn across the sky and the barbarous drums beating to the rhythm of war. I hated that word. War. How many bits and pieces of arms and legs would now litter the world?

  A letter arrived from Jakob Daw. It lay for days on a shelf in the kitchen. My mother would pick it up, stare at it, and put it down. Finally she opened it one evening and sat at the kitchen table, reading. She wore her nightgown. Her hair was scraggly, uncombed. A strange dry stale odor rose from her. I wondered when she had last bathed.

  “What does Uncle Jakob say?”

  “He says he heard someone mention that on the day Germany invaded Poland all the lakeside beaches in Berlin were crowded. He says that Goebbels told the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra that war is the father of all things, and a musician must play and not be silent. He says other things too, but they’re personal.”

  I asked who Goebbels was and she told me.

  “Jakob Daw is not well,” my mother said. “He was in the hospital for a while.” She was silent and sat staring down at the letter. “It’s all ended,” she said. “All the dreams. And what shall I do now?” She slumped in the chair and let the letter fall to the top of the table. “I think I’ll lie down now, Ilana. I’m very tired.”

  “You didn’t have supper.”

  “I don’t want supper. I’m not hungry. You ate enough for both of us.”

  She went to her room.

  I noticed that she was eating little and losing weight. She drank a great deal of coffee. Her face was haggard. Tiny wrinkles had appeared in the corners of her eyes and around her lips. She continued to grow smaller and smaller.

  Mr. Dinn had begun to visit us again. He would sit in the kitchen with my mother late into the night, talking. She cried a great deal when he was alone with her. Often they talked in Yiddish.

  In the first week of November my mother collapsed in the office where she worked and was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Mrs. Helfman rushed to the school to tell me about it; the police had come to the house, looking for a relative. I moved in with the Helfmans and shared Ruthie’s room. In the synagogue a prayer was said for my mother’s health and people told me they wished her a speedy recovery.

  The Helfmans were warm and kind. Mr. Helfman loved to tell stories about famous rabbis and Jewish heroes. He told about the Maharal of Prague who created out of clay a huge manlike creature called the Golem to protect the Jews from persecution; about the Gaon of Vilna who would study Talmud with ice on his head so he would not fall asleep; about Rabbi Amnon of Mayence who wrote religious poetry and accepted torture and death rather than let himself be converted to Christianity.

  “Where is Mayence?” I asked him.

  “In Germany,” he said.

  One day when Ruthie and I were alone in the apartment, I wandered through the rooms and on top of a wooden file cabinet in her parents’ bedroom found a pile of newspaper clippings with stories and pictures of the past few years of Akiva Award winners. The stories talked about the award as the ultimate recognition of achievement given by the school, as a mark of permanent membership in the annals of the yeshiva community. All the winners were boys.

  My mother returned home from the hospital in the middle of November. She would not eat. I was afraid to look at her eyes, they seemed dead. She began to talk to me one night about dead dreams being like dead children. Her words frightened me.

  That Friday night before supper she saw me light candles and asked me brusquely what I was doing. I had set candles in two small glass dishes, first heating the bottoms of the candles and fixing the molten wax to the glass.

  I said I had seen Mrs. Helfman light Shabbos candles when I had stayed with them and weren’t they pretty.

  “I don’t want those candles in my house,” my mother said.

  “Shall I blow them out?”

  “No,” she said, after a long moment.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t think they would upset you.”

  She said nothing. From time to time during the meal she glanced at the candles. She fell asleep at the table. I helped her to her room and into bed. How white and gaunt she looked. I was very frightened. Her life had suddenly swerved, and she was bereft. Had something like this happened to her in Poland and Vienna, this kind of bewilderingly abrupt change?

  I asked her one night why none of her old friends came to see her and she said she had no friends, she was no longer a member of the party.

  “You didn’t have any friends outside the party?”

  “Friends outside the party? Real friends? No. Who had time for that, Ilana?”

  The days went by. She grew thinner and weaker. One night she fainted in the kitchen as I sat eating supper and I ran to call Mrs. Helfman.

  It seemed to me that my mother was slowly dying of loneliness.

  I read and studied a great deal. I talked with Ruthie and her parents. I talked with David in the corridors of the school and on Shabbos mornings outside the shul. I wrote a letter to Aunt Sarah.

  Late one night in December Mr. Dinn came over and was in the kitchen with my mother for a long time. I heard the rise and fall of their voices, and at one point I heard my mother laughing. It was a strange, harsh sound.

  • • •

  Mr. Dinn came to see my mother two more times that week.

  The next Sunday morning he pulled up to the house in his black sedan and helped my mother inside. She was dry-eyed and looked docile, defeated. Mr. Dinn loaded her bags into the trunk. Then he kissed my cheek. I stood on the curb with Mrs. Helfman and watched the car pull away. My mother looked at me through the window, her eyes wide and haunted. I stood on the curb, crying. Later that day I moved in with the Helfmans.

  Mr. Dinn drove my mother to Newton Centre, and Aunt Sarah brought her from there to the farmhouse. Aunt Sarah had asked for and received a leave from the Boston hospital where she worked. A family emergency, she had explained.

  Aunt Sarah wrote me often; my mother wrote infrequently. I imagined my mother in my bed in the farmhouse, the silence, the vast sky, the quiet sea, the long red curving beach, and the birds circling, skimming the water, calling. She was being cared for by my Aunt Sarah as my father and I had once been. I hoped they prayed together. I thought my mother needed the comfort of words uttered in prayer.

  Aunt Sarah wrote, “Your mother is ill but she will be better soon, I promise. Davita, how can you know what it means to have your dreams collapse all about you? Your mother has the soul of a poet. Such souls are easily broken by the real world. She is in great spiritual pain. We will help her. She loves you very much. Be patient. Such illnesses take time before they are healed. She speaks a great deal about you and your father and about her mot
her and grandfather. And about Ezra Dinn, whom I found to be a most decent gentleman, indeed.”

  She wrote, “Your mother has begun to take walks with me along the beach and through the little forest near the house. Remember the forest? It is deep in snow but the farmer cleared a path for us and we are able to walk and see the sky through the dense bare branches. How lovely it is up here in the snow—a white world of untouched snow stretching as far as the eye can see; and the ocean, gray and wintry-looking and rolling on and on to the horizon that seems to be on the very edge of the world. I am taking good care of your mother, Davita. You take good care of yourself. Your mother is a very special person and I am glad she is in my family. I will send her back to you healed.”

  My mother wrote, “Darling Ilana. With every passing day I grow stronger and stronger. What a remarkable individual your Aunt Sarah is! If only all Christians were like her. She is so kind, and very devout. She tends to my needs, is strict with my diet and medication, and listens to me talk. And I talk a great deal. I do love this place—especially the quiet all about us, the utter silence. I can feel the silence. It is like an enormous and very gentle healing hand. I am so sorry to be away from you and so happy to hear of your grades. Your Aunt Sarah prays for you very often. She believes with all her being. I envy her. I had such belief once. It is the finest of comforts. I love to watch the birds over the sea. I sit at the window and watch them circling and calling. Some of them make strange sounds, like hoo hoo hoo hoo. A flight of gray fowl flew by yesterday afternoon low over the water; a beautiful sight. Horses often come down to the beach and wander about. They remind me of the photograph in my room, the one with the running horses that your father loved so much. I don’t know when I will be coming home. Aunt Sarah will tell me. I am tired now and will conclude with words of love to my darling Ilana. Your mother.”