Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  “Maybe I ought to go to my rosh yeshiva,” he murmured, talking to himself. “But I’m afraid. I’m afraid he may throw me out of the yeshiva. There’s no one to talk to, Ilana, if everyone thinks that you’re a saint.”

  “You can talk to me, David.”

  “Can I kiss you?” he asked suddenly.

  My heart lurched. I stared at him.

  “On your cheek. Can I kiss you?”

  I nodded. I thought my heart would tear itself apart. He came toward me and put his lips on my cheek. I felt his fear and his heat and his breath on my face. His lips were smooth and hot. He backed slowly away, his eyes strange and a little wild-looking.

  “I’m glad you’re my sister,” he said very quietly. “I’m glad you let me talk to you.”

  He went slowly from the room, closing the door behind him.

  The harp sang softly in the ensuing silence.

  Later, after my parents returned and the house was dark, I heard David in his bed. I lay very still, listening. I felt the nipples of my breasts gently beneath my fingers, felt the slow throb of warmth between my legs. David sighed and was silent. I fell asleep and woke in the darkness to a muted cry. “Nothing!” came David’s voice in Yiddish through the walls; I knew enough Yiddish by now to understand that. “It’s all worth nothing!” I lay awake a long time that night before I let myself go back to sleep.

  One day that November my English teacher asked me to remain after class. She was a tall thin woman in her late thirties with short blond hair and blue eyes. She reminded me a little of Aunt Sarah. When we were alone in the classroom, she said to me, “Where did you get the idea for your story, Ilana?” “From my imagination.”

  “It’s a marvelous story. Have you actually seen the painting?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a book?”

  “No. In a gallery a few years ago.”

  “Here, in New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the little girl going into the painting and running through the town during the bombing—you imagined that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How marvelous! Does she ever find her father?”

  “No. He got blown up by a bomb. But I don’t want to put that into my story. I want her to keep trying to find him. Rabbi Akiva said it’s our duty to help make the world more and more perfect. So it’s better if you keep trying. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I suppose it is.”

  “My father was killed in Guernica,” I said.

  Her mouth fell slightly open. “Your father?”

  “My real father. Mr. Dinn is my stepfather.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “My real father was a journalist and was killed trying to save a nun. I think it’s important not to forget. And stories help me to remember.”

  She looked at me intently and said nothing.

  “Do you know any of the stories about Rabbi Akiva?”

  She shook her head. It occurred to me that she might not be Jewish. Some of the teachers in the English Department were not Jewish.

  “He was a scholar and a fighter and a good person. He believed in justice for poor people. His wife helped him to become a great man. The Romans killed him. They tore off his flesh with iron combs. I think of him sometimes when I think of my father.”

  She did not say anything.

  “Yes,” I said. “The story is all from my imagination. All except the part about the little girl’s father running toward the river with the nun. That part happened. Will I get an A for the story?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course. It’s a marvelous story.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I walked home alone in the fading afternoon sunlight through the sea of leaves that covered the streets.

  In the winter the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we were suddenly at war with Japan and Germany. Some of the men in the synagogue went away for a while, returned briefly in uniform, and then were gone again. Stars began to appear in the windows of our neighborhood. Ruthie told me that some of her cousins were in the army.

  My father was asked by the government to do some special sort of work. He traveled to Washington and was away a few days. I asked my mother over supper, “What’s Papa doing in Washington?”

  “Something having to do with the war,” my mother said. “It’s supposed to be a secret,” David said. “Papa is doing secret work for the government?” “I don’t know,” my mother said. “We’ll find out when he returns.”

  “Is it dangerous?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Ilana.”

  “Do you want Papa to do it?”

  “We’re fighting a war against fascism,” my mother said. “We’ll do what we have to in order to win it quickly.”

  “But do you want Papa to do it?”

  “Yes,” my mother said.

  My father returned from Washington. He refused to talk to David and me about what had happened, except to say that he would not be working for the government. But I could see that in his reserved and gentlemanly way he was furious.

  “I don’t understand why they won’t let you work for the government,” David said.

  “Is it because Mama was once a Communist?” I asked. They all looked at me. My parents said nothing. “Papa?”

  “This is not anything I want to talk about, Ilana.” “The Fascists in the government—”

  “Please don’t use that word like that,” my father said, his voice rising. “Not everyone who disagrees with you is a Fascist.”

  “But why won’t they—?”

  “Ilana,” my mother said. “Enough.”

  “But Mama—”

  “Enough, Ilana. Enough!”

  We did not talk about it again. My new father did not go back to Washington.

  I remember lying in bed at night and trying to think of the whole world at war. I could not grasp it; it was beyond imagining. My classmates and I thought little about the war during the day as we talked and gossiped; but the nights were a difficult time for me, a time for touching the world, a time for flying birds and galloping horses and singing harps and long red-sand beaches in a green and distant land. How I missed my father, my real father, on those nighttime journeys into history and memory! How I missed Jakob Daw!

  Sometimes at night I thought of Rabbi Akiva. I imagined him tall and powerful, with a long flowing beard and a strong voice and dressed in a long robelike garment. I imagined him embracing his wife, Rachel. I imagined him urging the Jews on in their rebellion against Rome. I imagined him journeying to collect funds to help the poor. I imagined his skin being torn off by the iron combs.

  One morning Mr. Helfman asked me to stay behind during recess.

  “Ilana, your Hebrew essay on Rabbi Akiva is wonderful. You wrote it by yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you get the words he said to his wife?”

  “From my imagination.”

  “Your imagination? Wonderful!”

  “He was away from his wife twenty-four years, studying Torah. I thought he would say those things to her when he came back.”

  He looked at me out of his cheerful round eyes.

  “I like Rabbi Akiva,” I said. “I like the way he started to study the alphabet very late in his life and wasn’t ashamed to sit in class with young students and the way he cared about poor people and the way he died for the things he believed in.”

  “It is an excellent essay,” he said delightedly. “Go over my corrections in your spelling and the mistakes you made in grammar. Yes, an excellent essay, Ilana.”

  “I like his optimism,” I said. “I like the way when he and some other rabbis saw a jackal in the ruins of Jerusalem, and the others began to cry, he laughed and said that just as the prophecy of the destruction of the temple was fulfilled, so the prophecy of the rebuilding would also be fulfilled. I like that.”

  Mr. Helfman nodded, smiling.

  I went out of the classroo
m, the essay in my hand. On the top of the first page was the grade, written in red ink in Mr. Helfman’s characteristic slanted and sprawling style. He had given me an aleph, an A. I joined Ruthie in the front yard in a jump rope game.

  My American history teacher, a thin bald-headed man with smooth-shaven features and small dark eyes, said to me one afternoon, “Where did you get this information for your essay, Ilana?”

  The others had left. We were alone in the classroom. I could hear through the closed door the sounds of students in the corridors and the emptying of the school building.

  “From a book.”

  “Which book?”

  I told him.

  “That’s a novel. I can’t accept a novel as a source for this assignment.”

  “But the novel has stories that are true. The part about Centralia is true.”

  “I prefer that you stick closer to the subject we’re studying. I asked you to write about one of the robber barons, not about the Wobblies.”

  I said nothing.

  “And, Ilana, it isn’t necessary for you to be quite so—graphic.”

  “I was telling the truth, Mr. Mandel.”

  “Stick to the subject under discussion, Ilana. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll want another essay from you in place of this one.” He handed back the paper. I went from the room and walked home alone in the early darkness of the winter day.

  In Mr. Helfman’s class we completed studying the Book of Numbers. The next day there was a siyum, the traditional party that follows when a group completes the study of a sacred Jewish text. We brought candies and cookies and chocolates to school, and Mr. Helfman gave a little talk about how the study of Torah had kept the Jewish people alive all through the centuries.

  The siyum lasted about half an hour. Then Mr. Helfman called the class to order and stood behind his desk and began to talk to us about the Book of Deuteronomy, its first-person style, its lofty poetry, its ethical and moral themes. I listened and at the same time read quickly through the first verses. Names and dates. In the fifth verse I read two words that I remembered having read before, and I went back to the beginning of the book and found the words in the first verse: b’ever ha-Yarden. I glanced at the Rashi on the verse and found that Rashi had not bothered to explain the words—which meant that they were very easy to understand. Mr. Helfman went on with his introduction to the book, and a moment or so after he was done, the bell rang for the morning recess.

  In the school library I found an English translation of the Bible and turned to Deuteronomy. The Hebrew words b’ever ha-Yarden were translated as “beyond the Jordan.” The text read, “These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan …”

  What did those words mean? Beyond the Jordan.

  It was snowing when school let out. I walked home with Ruthie in a wind that blew the snow in a steep slant across the parkway and was piling it in drifts against fences and homes.

  Inside the apartment I found the verse in my father’s copy of the Hertz commentary. There the words were explained as meaning at the crossing of the Jordan or on the banks of the Jordan or as referring to a fixed geographical name.

  But what if there was another explanation? I thought of Jakob Daw writing this as a story. What would “beyond the Jordan” then mean? What if Jakob Daw were living on this, the Israelite, side of the Jordan? And what if he were writing this story? Wouldn’t he simply write “beyond the Jordan” to indicate where the action of the story was taking place?

  And wouldn’t that mean that the writer of the story in the Bible had lived after the story had taken place, because he was on the Israelite side of the river and in the story the Israelites had not yet crossed the river? I thought that made sense. You didn’t have to change the simple meaning of the words. I liked the idea that a human being had thought to write those words; it made the text seem more real to me.

  The next day, when we came to that verse, I raised my hand. Mr. Helfman called on me. I recounted my explanation of the words b’ever ha-Yarden. I talked for what seemed to me to be a long time. Mr. Helfman let me go on. He kept looking at me and nodding. Behind me the class was very still.

  Then I was done and sat back in my seat, listening to the drumming of my heart.

  Mr. Helfman quietly cleared his throat. “Where did you read this explanation?” he asked.

  I told him I hadn’t read it anywhere, I made it up. “You made it up,” he echoed.

  There was a silence. An airplane went by high overhead. The windows rattled faintly.

  “It is the explanation given by Ibn Ezra,” Mr. Helfman said. “Do you know who Ibn Ezra was?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is not an acceptable explanation. It creates more problems than it solves. What problems does it create?”

  I looked at him and did not know what to say.

  Two rows to my right a boy raised his hand. This was Reuven Maker, the son of a Talmud teacher in a nearby Jewish parochial high school, a dark-haired, good-looking boy who was very popular and very smart.

  “Reuven,” Mr. Helfman said.

  “If this verse was written by a person and not given by God, then how do we know other verses weren’t written by a person, including verses that deal with the law?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Helfman. “And what does that do to the Bible, Ilana? You understand, don’t you? That is why the explanation of Ibn Ezra is unacceptable. Now, let’s go on with the text.”

  I saw Reuven Maker glance at me out of the corner of his eye. His face wore a look of triumph. He was smart and had his own clique of friends; lithe and fast-running and athletic; the only real competition I had in that class for the Akiva Award.

  I sat with my eyes on the text, listening to Mr. Helfman.

  Ruthie told me one day in January that she had overheard her father tell her mother that Reuven Maker and I were the two best students in the class and the faculty would have a difficult time deciding which of us would get the Akiva Award.

  David said to me one evening, “You’re working too hard, Ilana. Even I don’t work this hard.”

  I motioned him out of my room and heard the harp sing as he closed the door.

  My mother came into my room one night and said, “It’s very late, Ilana. I want you to go to sleep.”

  I looked up from my books.

  She stood near my desk, thick now about the waist, showing the baby she carried.

  “Ilana, you’re going to make yourself sick,” she said. “Go to bed.”

  “You’re interrupting me!” I said in a furious voice. “Please leave me alone!”

  She gasped. I looked away, astonished at my anger, my heart thundering.

  After a moment she turned and went from the room. The harp sang quietly in the stillness.

  My father said to me over breakfast one morning in early February, “Are you awake, Ilana? Hello? Is anyone there?”

  “I’m awake, Papa.”

  “I wasn’t sure. When someone’s eyes are closed, you can’t be sure if they’re awake or not. I won’t ask you what time you went to sleep last night. What time did you go to sleep last night?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Your light was still on when I turned mine off,” David said.

  “You don’t look too wide awake yourself,” my father said.

  “I’m awake,” David said.

  “A family of night owls,” my father said. “A family of book eaters.” He smiled and dug into his grapefruit. “A nice family.”

  “You’re all going to be late,” my mother said. “Finish your breakfast.” She was very large with the child now and no longer working. Her face was rounder than it had been before the pregnancy, fleshier. Her eyes seemed to dominate her other features: they were radiant with expectation. She stood near the sink, the bulge of her body against the counter. Is that what happened? You grew larger and larger with the life inside you, and then you squeezed
it out and held it and nursed it?

  Ruthie told me in school that day, “Ilana, I heard my father telling my mother that—”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Ruthie.”

  She laughed. “All right.”

  “What else do you hear your mother tell your father?” She blushed scarlet. “You don’t have to be mean, Ilana.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “My head hurts and I have a stomachache.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to tell you what—?”

  “Ruthie!”

  She laughed and raced away along the corridor.

  My English teacher said to me later that afternoon, “I like your essay on Abraham Ibn Ezra, Ilana. A scholar and a poet and an astronomer and a doctor. He sounds like a very remarkable person. I especially like your description of his wanderings. Did he really travel so much?”

  “Oh, yes. And he did most of his writing while he traveled.”

  “It’s a fine essay, Ilana. Are you all right?”

  “I’m a little tired.”

  “You ought to go home and get some sleep. You look exhausted.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You don’t want to weaken yourself and become ill, Ilana. There’s a lot of flu going around this winter.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I walked home alone in a cruel winter wind. There was little traffic on the icy parkway. The side streets were deserted. My head hurt and there was a pain in my stomach. At home the pain was severe and I went to the bathroom and pulled down my panties and sat on the toilet. Then I looked down and saw the blood. I felt a trembling shock of fear and a sudden soaring sense of excitement. Sitting there, my panties down around my ankles, I called out, “Mama!”

  We had no lock on our bathroom door. The family rule was: if the door is closed, knock before entering. No one had yet violated that rule.

  My mother knocked on the door. “Ilana? Are you inside?”

  I told her to come in and she did and stopped in the doorway, then stepped quickly inside and closed the door. How big she was with the child she carried! Would it be well? Would we need Aunt Sarah again? She came over to me and I showed her the panties. I slid them off my feet and closed and flushed the toilet. She held me then and kissed my cheek. I felt the firmness of her belly. She showed me how to use the sanitary belt and napkin, and hugged and kissed me again. I went to my room and lay on my bed. Blood and discomfort month after month for as long as I could look into the years ahead. My heart beat dully. I gazed at the picture of the stallions on the beach. In his room David sat over his folio of Talmud, softly chanting.