Davita's Harp (13 page)

Strange and fearful events were being reported. Off the coast of New Jersey the pilot of a small plane swerved to avoid hitting a bird, and the man in the rear seat fell to his death in the sea. I dreamed about that: hurtling through the air to the sea. I imagined
it was the bird in the story by Jakob Daw. I saw a headline that read
AMERICAN WOMAN WOUNDED IN SPAIN
, and thought of Teresa. On the cover of the magazine
New Masses
, for which my father wrote, I read
MASSACRE OF AMERICAN JEWS SET FOR SEPTEMBER
! I did not talk to my parents about that but lay awake nights in my bed thinking of David Dinn and his family, and waiting.

A letter came from Jakob Daw. He was in Zurich for the time being and would probably soon be going to Spain. Europe was darkness. He had written a story during the crossing to Europe and would read it to us the next time we were together. Very good wishes to Ilana Davita.

My Aunt Sarah showed up suddenly one Friday afternoon and stayed the weekend. She looked thin and there were circles of darkness around her eyes. I watched her on her knees by her bed, praying, and saw her on the porch, talking to my parents about Ethiopia. She hated the Italians and called them lustful for empire and thin-blooded throwbacks to the ancient Romans. “Look how tan you are, darling!” she said to me. “I burned and burned in Ethiopia. You certainly appear to be having a good summer. Yes, I do think I’ll be going to Spain fairly soon. They’ll need nurses in Spain. Did you celebrate Easter at all? How sad!” She left on Sunday afternoon to catch a train north.

My father told me one evening as I lay in bed, “My paper may send me to Spain.”

I sat up. “Will you be away long?”

“Don’t know, my love. Not too long.”

“But there’s a war in Spain.”

“That’s why they’re sending me. To write about the war.” Jakob Daw. Aunt Sarah. My father. Europe was devouring the people I loved.

The summer was coming to an end. I dreaded the oncoming winter. How many times would we move? Who would protect me and my mother?

One morning in the last week of August David Dinn’s aunt and uncle loaded their summer belongings into a car, closed the
house, and drove away. A few days later I helped my mother pack. The harp came down off the door; the colored picture of the horses on the beach came down off the wall. From our porch I looked at the ocean and the beach and the wheeling gulls. I stood near my castles a long time, gazing out across the sea. The next morning we returned to our apartment in the city.

On a warm and sunny Friday afternoon in late September, with the trees still in full leaf and no hint of autumn in the air, my mother and I traveled with my father by cab to a pier in Manhattan. I remember my mother wore a dark gray crocheted beret and a light gray cotton summer dress and her long dark hair fell upon her shoulders and down her back and picked up highlights of the sun that shone through the windows of the cab. Her eyes burned with apprehension. We said almost nothing to each other during the long ride to the pier.

I stood on the stone pier and stared in awe at the ship: vast, mountainous, painted a dazzling white, festooned with flags, crowded with passengers, and named the
Lisbon.
How does it stay afloat, it’s so huge? And it’s taking my father across the ocean to the darkness on the other side.

We went up the canopied gangplank and through winding corridors to my father’s stateroom. It was a small room with a narrow bed, a desk, a closet, a porthole, and a tiny bathroom. It reminded me of my rooms in the apartments in which we had lived over the years. Would it turn cold at night?

My father and mother stood near the porthole, talking quietly. I went over to them.

“Will you see Uncle Jakob in Europe?”

“I told you, Davita. Maybe.”

“Will you see Aunt Sarah?”

My father gave me a patient smile.

“Ilana,” my mother said.

“I don’t want you to go, Papa.”

“I know that, my love.”

“Europe is a place where people are made dead.”

“I’ll be careful,” he said. “I promise. Now give us a decent hug, my love. It’s got to last me for a while.”

I clung to him with all my strength.

“That’s
a decent hug!”

I watched as he and my mother embraced. He held her a long time. He was a handsome man, tall and ruddy and with wavy brown hair. My father, Michael Chandal.

Later my mother and I stood on the crowded pier and he waved to us from the deck. The ship slid slowly away, gulls circling overhead. I watched my father become smaller and smaller. Then he was gone. The ship moved downriver toward the sea. It looked like the freighters I had watched all summer, not seeming to move at all but getting smaller and smaller. I stood on the pier, frightened and crying.

“Now is not a time for crying,” my mother said, sounding like my Aunt Sarah. “Now is a time for working.” She gazed across the pier at the river and the ship. “Always they go off and we wait.” A deep sadness was in her eyes and on her face. “It’s for something worthwhile. But we wait.” She turned to me and blinked her eyes rapidly. “We should go home. I feel cold.”

A hot wind was blowing in from the river.

We took the subway back to the Brooklyn brownstone where we lived.

The apartment was still in disarray from our June move. The door harp was up; the picture of the horses had been hung on the wall over my parents’ bed. But bulging cartons stood everywhere; windows were without curtains; books were still in crates; not
even all the dishes had been unpacked. I wondered how long it would be before we moved again.

Inside the apartment that early fall afternoon after our return from the pier, my mother stood at her bedroom window looking down at the small grassy yard and at Ruthie Helfman, the redheaded girl about my age who lived on the floor below and who sat on a chair, reading. She stood by the window a long time. Then she removed her beret and slowly shook her head, and I watched the shimmer of sunlight in her long dark hair.

“Work,” she murmured to herself, but distinctly. “Work, work, work.” She turned from the window and went through the room into the hallway. I heard the bathroom door close behind her.

I stood near the window. There was a sycamore along the rear boundary of the yard and small birds sang and played in its leaves. I looked at the redheaded girl and wondered why she wore a long-sleeved dress on a hot day. Her mother, a short, plump woman in her middle or late thirties, also wore long-sleeved dresses, and always kept her hair covered with a kerchief. I thought of David Dinn and his long trousers and white shirts. That had been fun, swimming and building the castle with him. I imagined him going to synagogue every morning and evening to say—what was it?—Kaddish for his mother. Did he still go now that school had begun? Up so early every morning? And in the winter too? Awake in the darkness and cold?

I stood near the window looking at the girl and thinking of David Dinn. Then I thought of the white ship sailing on the ocean to the war in Spain. The papers were talking about the siege of Madrid. Big guns and airplanes and bombs. And tanks? Had I read about tanks? And my father and Jakob Daw in Spain. I stood at the window and looked out at the sycamore and the ocean and the bombs and the redheaded girl and wondered when my father would come home.

I heard a woman’s voice. The girl’s mother was calling to her in a mixture of English and a language I could not understand. I watched the girl read on awhile longer, then slowly close the
book. As she stood, she raised her eyes and saw me looking at her and waved. I waved back. She had a freckled face and a pug nose and cupid’s-bow lips. I watched her climb the stairs to the wooden back porch and go into the house through the back door.

I sat on the windowsill, looking at the yard. It was a small rectangle of grass bordered by a picket fence, with yards on either side and the sycamore beyond that separated us from the backyard of the house on the parallel street. The houses on these streets were nearly all of brown stone, either two or three stories high, some colonial style or mock Tudor, others boxlike and nondescript. The two-story brownstone into which we had moved had two front-facing windows on each floor. As you approached the house, the window to my room was to the left, the bay window of the living room was to the right. On the second floor—our floor—each of the windows was flanked by a turretlike structure that seemed an architect’s afterthought and gave the house an odd castlelike appearance. I came out of my parents’ bedroom and went through the long tunnellike hallway past the kitchen and the bathroom to my room.

The room I lived in now was long and narrow. Its single window looked out onto the tops of the trees that lined the street. Opposite the window was the door that led to the small narrow hallway that separated my room from the spare bedroom where a window faced the cellarway and the grassy backyard.

I stood in the doorway and looked at my room: the narrow bed, the small dark-wood chest of drawers, the chair, the old table that was my desk, the small bookcase, the bare pale-blue walls. I was very tired. I lay down on my bed and put my hand over my eyes. The street was still, the trees silent in the hot afternoon. The odors of cooking chicken and soup rose from the apartment below. I remembered the odors on some of the streets in Sea Gate on Friday afternoons. From somewhere in our apartment came my mother’s voice singing a slow dirgelike tune I had never heard before and in a language I could not understand. The tune abruptly ended. The silence returned.

I heard the downstairs hallway door of the house close. The
door had a lock that snapped shut with a loud, echoing click. I went to my window and saw the redheaded girl’s father go quickly down the front stoop and turn up the street. I had talked to him once, briefly, a short, round-faced man with small round merry eyes and an ebullient voice. Now he wore a dark suit and tie and a dark felt hat, and he walked briskly up the street. There was about his stride a certain taut hurried purposefulness that reminded me of the way David Dinn and his uncle would leave their beachside house day after day in the mornings and evenings. It was nearly sundown; the sharp edges of the street were beginning to soften and blur. Maybe my mother and I would go to the movies tonight.
Modern Times
was showing in a neighborhood theater. I wanted to see it again. I went back to my bed and lay down and put my hand over my eyes. A vague memory surfaced. Somewhere in the past my mother and I had waited outside a movie theater. When had that been? It was snowing. An icy gale blew in from the nearby river. The lights of a towering bridge winked through the snow. Along the bank under the bridge, men lived in shanties. I had once seen them: ghostly figures in tattered clothes huddled around trash-can fires. My mother was handing out leaflets to people emerging from the theater. Most ignored her. One man called her a vile name. An old woman spat at her, the spittle blown away by the wind. My mother stood defiantly in her thin coat and dark beret. I had shivered in the cold and tried not to cry. What movie had been showing in that theater that night? I couldn’t remember. Now I wanted to see
Modern Times
again: Charlie Chaplin caught in the cogs, rollers, cams, and gears of the runaway factory. Was that like someone caught in a war? War. Sailing. Spain. I lay on my bed imagining the huge ship and my small stateroom and the ocean outside my porthole and waiting for the darkness of Europe.

We did not go to the movies. After supper my mother went to her bedroom to work on another pamphlet and I wandered idly about the apartment, looking out open windows at the street and
the adjoining houses, listening to voices and music from the radios of neighbors and to the family in the apartment below singing Sabbath songs together—their zemiros—like the melodies I had heard David Dinn and his family sing that night in Sea Gate after we had returned from the meeting about the war in Spain. I undressed and washed and got into bed. How far does a big ship travel in one day? Spain. Teresa. War.

My mother came into my room and stood near the door. The room was dark and I could barely see her.

“Are you awake?” she asked softly.

“Yes.”

She came over to me. “I had no idea it was so late. You put yourself to bed. I’m sorry, darling.”

I raised myself on an elbow. “How long will it take Papa to get to Spain?”

“About a week or ten days, I think.” I could see her only dimly. Her voice was low.

“I feel very lonely.”

She said quietly, “We have to work hard, Ilana. That way most of the time we can forget the loneliness. I learned that from my mother.”

“Did your father go away, too?”

“Yes. Often.”

“Did he go to war?”

“No, darling. My father was a member of a group of very religious Jews called Hasidim. He used to go away almost every Saturday and holiday to the city where the rebbe, the leader of the group, lived.”

“Your father went away? Why did he do that?”

“He went to pray in the rebbe’s synagogue with the others of the group.”