Davita's Harp (2 page)

One Saturday morning I was in the corner grocery store with a penny my mother had given me and was searching for a candy when he came in, tall, gangly, dirty, his cap set at an angle over his dark eyes. A cold wind blew in with him.

“Close the door,” the grocer called from the counter. “I don’t need the winter inside my store.”

The boy banged the door shut and took some steps inside. He spotted me. I tightened my fist around my penny.

He came over to me. I stared up at him. He was so tall!

“My old man said he heard you lived down near the bridge a couple years ago and over on Broome Street before you moved here.”

Vaguely I remembered a towering bridge and dark water and the stench of bloated things near barnacled pilings.

“There’s a gang on this block that beats up little kids who ain’t protected. You want protection?”

I did not know what to say because I did not understand the word protection.

The boy bent toward me. I saw his dark gleaming eyes and pimpled features and moist lips, and felt in that instant his contempt for my weakness.

“Hey, I’m talking to you. Girls need protection on this block. You give me a penny a week, and I’ll—”

From behind the counter came the voice of the grocer, a bigchested man with thick arms and callused hands. “Izzie, you do your business in my store and I’ll break your head. Leave her alone.”

The boy straightened, tipped his head back, glared at me from under the peak of his cap, then turned and left the store, banging the door shut behind him.

That evening during supper I asked my mother what the word protection meant.

My mother explained words to me in a special way. She would give me the present meaning of the word and a brief account of its origin. If she did not know its origin she would look it up in the dictionary in the bedroom near my father’s desk.

She told me that the word protection came from a word in an old language and had once meant to be covered in front. Now it meant to guard someone against attack or insult.

She wanted to know where I had heard the word, and I told her.

“Ilana, you see how the exploited working class lives?” she said. “Look at what happens to their children.”

“He sounds like a very indecent fellow,” my father said. “I think I’ll have a talk with his father.”

I lay awake that night listening to the beating of my heart. The radiator made loud banging noises. My mother had explained to me once that the janitor let the furnace burn down and the radiators go cold so the landlord who owned the house could
save money. Landlords were capitalists, she said. Exploiters of the working class. But that would end soon. The world would change. Yes. Very soon.

Her dark eyes burned when she talked like that.

In the darkness of my room I heard a shout. The boy’s voice pierced my wall. “I won’t bother her. No, I won’t go with Uncle Nathan to Newark! He’s nothing!
Nothing!”

Through the wall came the sounds of a man’s angry voice and flesh striking flesh and a muffled cry.

About a week later my mother told me that we were moving again.

The apartments we lived in changed often, but my parents’ friends seemed to remain the same. Sometimes there were meetings in the apartments. Adults hugged me, kissed me, tickled me, ignored me. A fog of cigarette smoke would collect in the air. Almost all the talk was noisy and about politics. Strange words and names would fly about like darting birds. Dialectical materialism, historical materialism, tools of production. Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Trotsky. Brownshirt gangsterism, black-shirt murderers. Unions, bosses, capitalists. On with the struggle!

The meetings always ended with singing. I liked the singing and would listen to it from my room. My father had a rich baritone, and sometimes I would hear his voice above the others. They sang, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, Alive as you and me.” They sang, “Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, For the union makes us strong.” They sang, “And just because he’s human, A man would like a little bite to eat; He won’t get full on a lot of talk; That won’t give him bread and meat.” Sometimes the singing was so loud I was sure it could be heard all through the house and perhaps even in the street. I would lie awake in my dark cold room and listen to the singing and to the beating of my heart.

Once someone went past my door, and I heard, “What the hell are they doing living in this place? Don’t they have money?”

“I don’t know,” a second voice said. “Maybe they want to live with the proletariat.”

Over breakfast the next morning I asked my mother what the word proletariat meant.

She said it was an old word from another language and it originally meant a worthless person who had nothing to give to his country except his children. Now it meant the lowest and poorest of people.

I was not sure I understood, and asked her with a child’s exasperation why she always needed to give me the old meanings of words, why couldn’t she simply tell me what a word meant today? And she said, patiently, in her slightly accented English, “Everything has a name, Ilana. And names are very important. Nothing exists unless it has a name. Can you think of something that doesn’t have a name? And, darling, everything has a past. Everything—a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future. We are going to build a new world, Ilana. How can we ignore the past?”

At those meetings, my father, with his loud voice, ruddy features, wavy brown hair, and amiable nature, seemed nearly always at the center of talk that made people laugh; and my mother, with her scholarly demeanor and lovely features and long dark hair and soft musical voice, was almost certain to be at the heart of talk that turned people somber. Everyone liked my father; everyone seemed awed by my mother.

One morning, after a meeting that had ended in shouts, arguments, threats, and the sounds of things breaking, I lay in my bed in my cold room and heard the doorbell ring. My father’s footsteps echoed through the apartment hallway. I listened to the soft tinkling of the door harp and to a brief conversation I did not understand. Two weeks later we moved again.

•  •  •

My mother was pregnant. I touched her hard belly. She went to a hospital and gave birth to a boy.

My father went around looking dazed. He prepared our meals. I set the table and helped him clean up. I lay awake in the darkness, listening to scurrying mice.

I walked to and from school on snow made brown with city grime and frozen to ice on the sidewalks. One afternoon, to shorten the walk, I cut across an empty lot, a miniature wilderness of dead grass, gray shrubs, rusted cans, and dog droppings atop a thin cover of snow and ice. I walked quickly through the lot to the parallel street. An icy gale blew through the streets. On a bleak side street a boy in my class spotted me and called out from his doorway, “Hey, Ilana, don’t go into the next block. The gang there don’t like it if you ain’t a goy.”

I didn’t understand what he was saying and went on. The gusting wind brought tears to my eyes. Was my mother warm in the hospital? Did the landlord of the hospital turn off the heat at night? I walked quickly along the gray, late afternoon streets, needing badly to go to the bathroom and expecting the sudden appearance of a raging horde of boys. Nothing happened.

“What’s a goy?” I asked my father that evening.

“That’s what Jewish people call someone who isn’t a Jew. It’s the Hebrew word for Gentile. To Jews, I’m a goy.”

“Am I a goy?”

“No, my love. Your mama is Jewish and so you’re Jewish. Jewish people go according to the mother.” “According to you, am I Jewish?”

“According to me, Davita, all of you is Jewish, all of you is Gentile, all of you is Marxist, all of you—”

“Papa!”

“—is beautiful, and all of you is my special love.”

He tickled me and I laughed and hugged him.

My mother returned home. She looked pale and was very weak.

They named my brother after my mother’s grandfather. He looked red and scrawny and cried a great deal. There seemed to be
something wrong with his stomach and his breathing. He made queer coughing sounds and could not eat or sleep.

A darkness settled upon my mother’s lovely features. My father went softly about the apartment, speaking in a murmur.

There was a snowstorm. I walked to school in the snow and, on my way home, cut across the lot and went along white winter streets that were nearly empty of traffic and pedestrians.

One day three boys came out of an alley and stood in front of me, blocking my way. They wore winter jackets and dark caps. One of them had a cigarette in his mouth.

“You live here, kid?” he wanted to know.

“She don’t live here,” another said. “I know everyone that lives here.”

“What’re you doin’ on this block, kid?” the third one asked. I said, in a voice I did not recognize, “I’m going home from school. I’m in first grade.” There was a brief pause.

The one with the cigarette said, “You Jewish?”

They stood there looking at me, and waiting. I shivered in the bitter wind. A car went by, spraying dirty snow.

“My father isn’t Jewish,” I heard myself say in that voice that I did not recognize.

“We don’t like strangers on our block, kid,” the third one said. His tone was no longer hostile. He was talking now to impress the others.

The one with the cigarette said abruptly, “Your old lady, is she Jewish?”

I said nothing.

They stood there in the wind, waiting.

“Hey, kid,” the one with the cigarette said. “You deaf or what?”

“My mother is Jewish,” I said in that same strange voice.

They stood there, indecisive, and would not let me pass. The wind blew through my clothes. I needed a bathroom. I held my books and stood shivering. Then I was crying and no longer able
to control myself. I stood crying and urinating into my clothes, feeling the wet warmth spread through my panties and down along the insides of my thighs and into my snowsuit.

One of them said, “Ah, shit, let her go. She’s only a kid.”

The one with the cigarette said, “She’s got some Jew in her and she’s on our block.”

The third one said, “Aw, come on, Vince. For Christ’s sake, she’s only a little girl.”

“Okay,” the one with the cigarette said. “Okay. Get outa here, kid. And stay off our block.”

“Yeah,” the second one said. “You won’t be so lucky next time.”

I ran. Behind me I heard them laughing. I remember that laughter. The wetness was cold now, clammy, a pool of secret shame.

I let myself into the apartment with my key. The door harp sounded its gentle tune. No one was home. I changed my clothes and said nothing and wondered why the apartment was empty.

My mother had gone with my brother to the hospital. That night he died.

My mother cried and my father held her. I could hear her through the walls of my room. I don’t know where we lived then, but I remember my mother crying and my father trying to soothe her and the radiators in the apartment contracting with cold and a voice in the darkness saying, Hey, kid, you Jewish? and my heart like an animal struggling against its prison inside my chest.

A few weeks later my mother began once again to pack up our apartment.

Soon after that last move my mother fell ill. She could not leave her bed. A doctor came. The tall courtly man in the dark suit and dark felt hat came too; I heard him talking with my father but could not understand what they were saying. From time to time I caught glimpses of my mother through the partly open bedroom
door. She lay still on her white pillow, her long dark hair across her face and shoulders. An infection, I heard my father say to a neighbor. A women’s sickness. Oh yes, a high fever, very high. Yes, serious, very serious.

One afternoon a few days after my mother took ill, I came back to the apartment from school. I closed the door and stood still for a moment, listening to the music of the harp. Out of the kitchen came a woman I had never seen before. I was very startled.

“Hello!” the woman called out in a cheerful voice. “You’re Ilana Davita. I’m your Aunt Sarah, your father’s sister. It’s about time we met. Dear Jesus, aren’t you a beauty! Put down your books and take off your coat. How about a glass of milk and some cookies?”

I looked at her suspiciously. “How did you get in?”

“Dear child, your father let me in and then went off to work.”

“Papa didn’t tell me you were coming.”

“He never knows when I’m coming. I never know when I’m coming. But here I am! Do you want the milk and cookies?”

She was tall and thin and flat-chested and had pale skin and blue eyes and long fingers. Her hair was short and straight and flaxen. She was about my mother’s age. She settled into the apartment and went around in a white nurse’s uniform—dress and cap—and house slippers, and spoke in low, cheerful tones. She had many of my father’s features and mannerisms: the corners of her thin lips seemed drawn up in a perpetual smile; she walked about in a loose-jointed sort of way; she would slide into a chair and drape herself over it, leaning back, deeply relaxed. She pronounced her words as my father did his. There was a carefully restrained fervor about her manner and a sharp light in her eyes—like the light in the eyes of my father when he wrote about strikes or talked about Communists and Fascists.

She slept on the studio couch in our living room. She cooked and did the laundry and swept and mopped the floors. Each morning she woke and dressed and read for a few minutes from a book, speaking the words softly. She read from that book after
each meal and before going to sleep. Sometimes she sang songs with odd words and melodies. “English folk songs,” she said in answer to my question. “And songs about Jesus. Aren’t they lovely?”

She spent a great deal of time in the bedroom with my mother. I wondered what they talked about. Was my mother able to speak? No, my aunt said. My mother just lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling or the picture of the beach and played with her hair. Mostly she slept a lot. My aunt stayed with her so she would remember there were other people around her; it was important for everyone to know all the time that they weren’t alone, my aunt said. I asked my aunt what she did all the time she was there. Oh, she kept herself busy, she said cheerfully. There was plenty to do. “Sometimes I read from the Book of Psalms,” she said.