Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll bet Mr. Dinn knows. He’s a smart man. He knows everything.”

  “He didn’t know how to keep the Fascists in the American government from sending Jakob Daw back to Europe.”

  “Papa said Mr. Daw wouldn’t let him do anything.”

  “He should’ve done something anyway. Smart people know how to do something even when they can’t.”

  “Papa says if you tell your lawyer not to do anything, the lawyer—”

  “They’re all ending up in Europe, and they’re all going to end up dead. Jakob Daw is in Europe and he doesn’t write us anymore. And my Aunt Sarah is in Europe and she doesn’t write us anymore, either. She went back to Spain. She’s a nurse and a Christian missionary. She tries to make everybody believe in Jesus Christ.”

  “Don’t say that word!”

  “Which word?”

  “You know.”

  “Jesus Christ?”

  “Don’t say it, Ilana! Papa told me you’re not supposed to say his name. If you don’t say his name it means he doesn’t exist.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s what Papa told me.”

  “But why can’t we say it?”

  “Papa said that Christians believe that he’s their God and that the Jews killed him.”

  I stared at her. “I don’t remember that in any of the stories Aunt Sarah told me. We killed him?”

  “Papa said that Christians have been killing Jews for thousands of years because they say we killed their God.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t, either,” Ruthie said.

  We were both frightened.

  I asked my mother about it during supper that night.

  “They accuse Jews of crucifying Jesus,” she said, and explained the meaning of the word crucify. I had never thought to associate the crucifixes I saw on Christians with a slow and horrible kind of execution. “All of Europe believed it in the past and most of Europe probably believes it today. It’s one of the ways the capitalists and the Church control the working class—by turning them against the Jews. That’s the true reason Jews are hated. And that’s the true reason for all the pogroms.” She explained the meaning of the word pogrom. “An organized killing of Jews. It’s a Russian word.”

  “I think Ruthie told me about that once. Were you ever in a pogrom?” “Yes.”

  “Were your parents in it too?”

  “My mother and my grandfather were in it. My father was with the rebbe. Please, Ilana, let’s not talk about it any more tonight. Are you done with supper? Then finish your homework.”

  Later I lay awake in my bed and listened to the howling wind. Ice cracked and snapped and tumbled from the trees. After a while I fell asleep. There was a heavy rain that night and toward morning it turned to sleet and fell with an irregular drumbeat upon the street. In the pale light of morning a film of gleaming crystal-white ice lay upon the street and clung to the trunks and branches of the trees. It seemed as if the lake had overflowed and now covered all the neighborhood. I walked carefully to school on the ice.

  In March a letter arrived from Jakob Daw, written in German. My mother read it to me.

  Paris was cold, wet. His flat on the rue des Solitaires was small and damp. He could see from his bedroom window the chimney pots of the Nineteenth Arrondissement and the little rivers of rain on the narrow streets below. France was glutted with right-wing exultation and left-wing despair over the Fascist victories in Spain. Now and then he got together with Max Jacob and Picasso and Jean Renoir. He had seen Picasso’s Guernica. It was a knife in the heart of the human species that would turn and turn forever. He himself was weary and dispirited but still writing. On cold nights in his flat he remembered their days together in Vienna, and that warmed him. The cough was bad. He thought he might go south to a warmer climate. Perhaps Marseilles. How was Ilana Davita? “Please tell her the bird still nests in our harp. Do not ask her what it means. It is between me and your lovely daughter. Frequently I run across someone who remembers Michael. It is astonishing how many people came to know him during his months in Spain. Now I am tired and will lie down and rest. Jakob Daw.”

  We were in the living room. My mother sat very quietly on the sofa, looking at Jakob Daw’s letter. “Mama?” “Yes, darling.”

  “Why did your father let you go to Vienna?” She colored slightly and did not respond. “Mama?”

  “I went to Vienna to study.”

  “But why did your father let you go?”

  “My mother wanted me to go.”

  “And your father?”

  “He wanted me to go too.”

  “Mama, was it a bad pogrom?”

  She hesitated. “There are no good pogroms, Ilana.”

  “But was it very bad?”

  “Yes,” she said, after a moment.

  “Did the Russian soldiers hurt you?”

  “Yes. They hurt me and they killed my sister.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “I had two sisters. One died of pneumonia, the other was—she was killed; she was killed by those Russian soldiers. So was my grandfather. He tried to stop them from hurting me and my sister, and they killed him.” She gazed out the window at the late afternoon winter light. “Is it snowing again? What a long winter this is.” She turned her gaze back upon me. “A father should protect his daughters, don’t you think? A father shouldn’t leave that to a grandfather. My grandfather was an old man. He tried to help us, and a Russian soldier shot him. Then they left us in the forest and my mother and I came back to the town. It was my mother’s idea that I go to Vienna.”

  “But why did your father let you go?”

  “He was ashamed to have me in the house.”

  I stared at her.

  “They hurt me very badly, Ilana.”

  I was quiet. We sat together awhile in silence.

  My mother broke the silence. She said, looking down at the letter in her hand, “The years in Vienna were beautiful. It took a long time for the bad memories to begin to fade even a little. Jakob Daw helped me. Then he went to war and was hurt. This is a terrible century, Ilana. So many people are being hurt in it. I was so happy when the Russian government was overthrown. How I hated those soldiers! I remember one of them wore a cross on top of his tunic, and when he—when he—” She broke off for a moment, and then continued. “When I came back home to my parents from Vienna, it was impossible to live with my father. Then my mother died of influenza, and I came to America.”

  “Did you become a Communist in Europe?”

  “No. Your father introduced me to that after we met. I stopped being religious when I lived in Vienna. But I was not very political. I wanted to be a writer, an—an intellectual. How pretentious that sounds! But I would have become political soon enough. You can’t be an intellectual in Europe and not be political. Do you understand any of this, Ilana? I think you understand enough. Look at the snow! And so late in March!”

  “Is that why you don’t like religion, Mama? Because of your father?”

  “That and other things. It made a slave of my mother.” “Not everyone is like your father. Mr. Helfman isn’t. Mr. Dinn isn’t.”

  “I only know my own life, Ilana. In my life there was my father, not Mr. Dinn or Mr. Helfman. You can’t forget the bad things that are done to you by telling yourself that the world isn’t all bad. We really can know only the people and things that touch us. Everything else is like words in a dictionary. We can learn them but they don’t live deep inside us. Can you understand that, Ilana?”

  “I think so.”

  “Religion is a dangerous fraud, Ilana, and an illusion. It prevents people from seeing the truth and expressing their discontent, and sometimes it inflames the heart so that people follow horrible ideas like fascism.”

  “But I like my school and the shul.”

  “I know you do, darling. It’s all right. They keep your mind working
and that’s very important. It’s fine to learn the grammar and the words and the stories and to be with people. It’s very important to be with people, Ilana. You don’t have to believe in God in order to understand a verse in the Bible or a passage from the Talmud. You can study it as literature. You can learn how the Jews were oppressed the way so many other people were and still are. It’s all right that you like the school and the shul, Ilana.”

  “I especially like the shul.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “I like the singing.”

  She said nothing.

  “I don’t like the wall in the middle.” She grimaced but was quiet.

  “Mama, David said the law is that you’re supposed to stop saying Kaddish after eleven months.” “I know,” she said.

  “Will you come to shul with me the last time I say Kaddish?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t go to shul. I haven’t been in a shul in almost fifteen years. Are you done with your homework, Ilana? Yes? Then I think you can help me make supper.”

  I went alone to the synagogue that Saturday morning. Mr. Dinn led the service. The synagogue was crowded and warm and filled with the rhythms and songs of the service. Afterward I returned home and heard the singing of the door harp. I found my mother in the living room, rereading the letter from Jakob Daw.

  That week my mother completed her work on my father’s book. The day after she journeyed into Manhattan to deliver the manuscript to the publisher, she was invited by another publisher to write an introduction to a collection of the stories of Jakob Daw, some of which were to be translated by her. She seemed a little dazed by that and immediately sent off a letter to Jakob Daw.

  She began to work far into the nights on that book. I wondered when she slept. I would get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and the light would still be burning in her room. Once she fell asleep at the kitchen table during supper and I woke her because I was afraid she would fall off the chair. She opened her eyes with a start and spoke some words in a language I did not understand. Then she looked at me and smiled shamefacedly and asked if I had finished my homework and would I help her with the dishes.

  She had always been neat and caring about her housework, save for the few months that had followed our move to this apartment. Clothes were meticulously folded, beds carefully made, floors swept and washed, corners dusted free of cobwebs, shades raised to the same level in each window, books arranged in straight lines on their shelves, newspapers set down in their separate piles on the living room coffee table, street clothes and shoes placed in orderly fashion in our closets. My father had been the careless one in our family and had gone about leaving trails of his presence throughout the apartment: parts of newspapers in the kitchen and bathroom, magazines on the floor of the living room, books face down on the kitchen table, pages of his writing strewn about the bedroom; once I found a small packet of some sort in the bathroom sink and brought it to my mother and she blushed scarlet and said it belonged to my father.

  Now she became strangely uncaring about the apartment. Books, magazines, and newspapers lay strewn about everywhere. I found her underwear beneath the bathroom sink, kitchen towels in the living room, an unopened bar of laundry soap on her desk, one of her berets on the hallway floor, a box labeled Kotex on the bookcase in her bedroom. She would wear the same dress three or four days in a row. She had taken to wearing house slippers in the apartment and shuffled about in a way that reminded me of Aunt Sarah. And she began to put on weight: I found her late one night in the living room letting out one of her dresses. She looked embarrassed.

  Vaguely, I wondered if I would ever again have a father. I asked her about that one day that spring and she laughed in a high nervous way and said she wasn’t thinking about that, no man could ever take the place of my real father.

  She was busy, very busy. People continued coming to the apartment for meetings; the two men and the woman kept showing up on Sundays for the study sessions on the writings of Karl Marx; she went out to meetings, worked at the agency, labored over the collection of Jakob Daw’s stories. Yet a strange sort of leadenness had settled upon her; a shadow had entered her eyes. At odd moments—at night before I turned off my light; in the morning on Eastern Parkway as we were about to go our separate ways; on early Saturday afternoons just as I got back from the synagogue—she would suddenly embrace me and cling to me suffocatingly and kiss my face with her cool, dry lips. The frantic quality of those embraces frightened me a little.

  One Saturday morning that spring I went to the synagogue and recited the Kaddish for my father for the last time. I pronounced each word with care, my eyes closed so I would not be distracted. All around me women uttered the appropriate responses. As I left the synagogue I thought I saw the pale, haunted face of my mother. Then the face was gone into the crowd. I came outside and threaded my way quickly through the mass of people milling about in front of the building and looked up and down Eastern Parkway. I saw no one who resembled my mother. I ran to the corner where I normally turned off the parkway and saw a woman in my mother’s brown coat hurrying up the side street. I ran and came alongside her and it was my mother. I took her hand. Her skin was hot and dry. We walked in silence together back to the apartment. That night I woke and listened to her crying and lay quietly in my bed and let my own tears come too.

  Mr. Dinn’s visits became more frequent as the weeks went by. It was a little annoying to have him sitting at the table in our kitchen and never eating anything and drinking only water or soda out of a glass. Always he came in a suit and a tie and a hat, and would take off his jacket and hat only at my mother’s insistence. In place of his hat he would wear a small dark velvet skullcap. Sometimes he would remove his vest and loosen his tie. He was a tall, angular man, loose-jointed, with strong, bony features, a smooth, prominent forehead, and a jutting Adam’s apple whose up-and-down dancing movements above the knot of his tie fascinated me. His deep baritone voice would echo throughout the apartment and often woke me long after I had fallen asleep. He seemed comfortable in our apartment and it was clear that my mother was at ease in his presence.

  One Saturday night he came to the apartment and he and my mother went out together. “We’re only going to a movie,” she had said to me earlier. I had said nothing.

  I wandered through the silent rooms, opening closets and drawers. My father’s closet echoed with emptiness. The only object in it now was the carton of his special writing. I bent down and opened the carton; it was filled with magazines and newspapers and pages of typescript. A notebook lay on top of the pages, small and with hard dark cardboard covers. I held it and carefully opened it and saw on its first page, in the handwriting of Jakob Daw, the words Eine Geschichte. I turned the pages slowly. The writing was in a language I could not read. I replaced the notebook in the carton and went from the room.

  I was in bed when they returned. The door harp sang in the hallway. They went into the kitchen. My mother laughed softly at something Mr. Dinn said. It was a lovely sound, high and girlish. I had not heard her laugh in a long time.

  My mother left the apartment early the next morning and took the subway into Manhattan to attend a rally. It was the first day of May, one week after Passover. We had not observed the festival; and my mother had politely but resolutely turned down Mrs. Helfman’s invitation to their Seder. “I don’t really believe in it,” she had said to me afterward. “And there are too many memories of Sedorim when my father was with the rebbe instead of being with us. Why should I sit at the Helfmans’ Seder and spoil their night with my bad memories?”

  “David and his father will be there.”

  “We won’t,” she said. “I don’t need it. I have enough memories for now.”

  Her color was high, her mood buoyant, when she returned to the apartment that Sunday afternoon. The rally had been a great success. Thousands had marched, many thousands. She packed food and an old blanket into a shopping bag. Her mood continued high all during our
walk along Eastern Parkway. She talked on and on. You could sense the effect that the party was having on American life, she said. Union legislation, an awareness of horrors like Georgia chain gangs, laws to protect the working man, the efforts of writers and artists for the people of Spain. The capitalists who thought they could do whatever they wished with America should have come out to that rally. She was still in this exuberant mood when we turned into Prospect Park and walked along the curving path beneath spring trees past the lake, with its boats, and past playing children and adults on blankets under the trees, to the edge of a long stretch of young green grass where her friends waited for us.

  There were about a dozen of them, men and women her age and a little older, and four children, all younger than I. Most of the adults I knew from the meetings in our apartment, but I had not met the children before now. We sat on blankets and ate. It was a warm and brilliant day. The sun shone on the lake and the trees. I lay on the blanket and listened to them talking about the rally and the brief skirmish with the police somewhere along their line of march and about the war in Spain and the Popular Front and the coming revolution and Comrade Stalin and someone called Robert Epstein who had enlisted in the loyalist air force and was leaving that Tuesday for Spain. I caught glimpses of the lake through the trees. They seemed an ardent and intense group; the air vibrated with their talk. My mother was their center, their magnetic pole. She looked radiant with her long dark hair, white blouse, red beret, and brownish red skirt. I wondered idly what she and Mr. Dinn had talked about the night before. I had not even asked her what picture they had seen. How could someone as religious as Mr. Dinn go out with someone as irreligious as my mother?

  I lay back on the blanket and put my hand over my eyes and listened to the happy noises in the park.