Davita's Harp (24 page)

April moved slowly into May. My room was very cold. In the nights I woke crying and shivering. I wet my bed and lay curled into a tight ball. There was comfort in that position. My mother changed my sheets and held me and stroked my face and hair. She went stiffly about her work, her face controlled and without expression. I did not once see her cry.

People began to visit us. They came in the evenings and on weekends and stayed for hours. Many of them I recognized from the meetings with which I had grown up in our previous apartments. They chucked me under the chin, remarked how grown up and brave I was, told me I was beautiful, and warned me to be careful of the sons of bosses and capitalists. Some were strangers to me, quiet men and women who seemed to give off a radiance of power and yet were hesitant and deferential in the presence of my mother. The two men and the woman who studied the works of Karl Marx with my mother came one evening and stayed for more than an hour. From time to time Mrs. Helfman would suddenly
appear at our door with a pot of soup or meat, which she would transfer to my mother’s pots and dishes before quietly leaving. The door harp sang incessantly.

In my school only a few seemed aware of my father’s disappearance. A pimply-faced boy came over to me in the yard during recess one afternoon and said, “Your old man was a Commie, serves him right he’s dead.” I turned and walked away from him. My teacher took me aside and said to me, “Is there any way we can help you, dear? If there is, be sure to let us know.” I found I had nothing to say to her.

Sometimes Ruthie would come up and invite me down to play with her. Often I stood near the window in my parents’ bedroom and watched Ruthie’s father tending the flowers in the backyard. On occasion Mr. Dinn would appear in the apartment. He and my mother spent long periods of time talking together in the kitchen or living room.

On the Saturday of the first week in May, David walked me part of the way home from the synagogue. He was pale and solemn and for a while could find nothing to say. Then, in a thin and hesitant voice, he said that he didn’t know what to say, it was reminding him of last year when his mother had died and the world felt black and cold and he didn’t want to get up in the mornings. “But I got up anyway,” he said. “I had to get up. I had to say Kaddish.”

People continued to come and go. Slowly I began to find unendurable the endless music of the door harp. Pinging each time the door opened. Pinging each time the door closed. The harp grated against my ears and tightened the cold hand around my heart. One afternoon I taped the wooden balls to the wires with strips of adhesive and the harp fell mute. My mother said nothing to me about that.

Early in the second week of May my mother traveled to Manhattan to talk to some of the people on the paper for which my father worked. She was told that someone had news about my father: an American writer for the Hearst chain who had known
him in Bilbao and had just returned to the States. Briefly they recounted his story and then said that he wanted to talk privately with my mother.

One night that week a tall, heavily built man with a dark mustache and a thin voice came to our apartment. He had dark straight hair and wore steel-rimmed spectacles and a rumpled tweed jacket and light-colored creased trousers. We sat in our living room. My mother brought him a Scotch-and-water. He held the glass, peered at it, sipped from it, and began to talk. He spoke a bit hesitantly and with an accent I had heard before only in movies. He had needed to be in the States anyway right about now, the man said, and had decided he would come see us rather than write. A priest he knew had been to see him in Bilbao, he said. This priest had heard a strange story from another priest, a Basque, who had survived the air raid on Guernica. The planes had used carefully planned tactics, the man said. He sipped from his glass. His voice became cool and clinical. First, small groups of aircraft had appeared and randomly dropped heavy bombs and hand grenades all over the town. They proceeded from one section of the town to the next in an orderly manner. Some of the bombs made holes twenty to thirty feet deep and drove the people out of their dugouts and shelters. Immediately after those planes came wave after wave of fighter aircraft, swooping very low and machine-gunning the people who had run from the shelters. This drove the people back into the shelters. Then came another wave of bombers that dropped heavy bombs and incendiaries on the shelters, burying those who had fled from the machine guns. “Clever bastards,” the man said. “Very methodical. Made military history. Opens up a new chapter in the annals of war. Could I trouble you for another drink, Mrs. Chandal?”

My mother took his glass and went from the living room. He sat looking at me through his steel-rimmed spectacles.

“How old are you, little girl?”

I told him.

“What’s your name?”

“llana Davita Chandal.”

“You got any brothers or sisters?”

“I had a little brother once but he died.”

He looked at me and was silent.

My mother returned with his drink. He resumed his story.

A young Basque priest had been driving to the railroad station in the center of Guernica when the first bombs fell near the Mundaca River. He saw one of the bombs knock down the front of a four-story hotel not far from the station. Women and children had been standing around in front of the building and when the bomb fell he saw a rain of arms and legs and heads. He ran toward the station to help. More bombs fell in the distance.

The man paused. “You sure you want the little girl to hear this?”

“I want her to hear everything,” my mother said.

“All right,” the man said, and took another sip from the glass. Then he went on.

As the priest was running toward the station, the man said, a car suddenly appeared out of a swirl of dust, and a tall, brown-haired man jumped out. Two aircraft swooped down and began a strafing run. The priest turned and raced toward the river and found concealment under a paved bridge that rested on metal beams and cement pillars. Machine-gun bullets struck the car in which the brown-haired man had ridden, and it exploded. The man was knocked to the ground. He scrambled to his feet and began to run toward the river and the bridge. In front of him a nun was hit in the strafing run and fell. The man lifted her in his arms and went on running for the bridge. Behind him came a wave of bombers. He would have made it but his right leg suddenly seemed to collapse under him and he fell near the bank of the river. The priest started toward them when the first bombs fell, knocking him backward into the ankle-deep water at the river’s edge. He saw the man and the nun disappear in the explosion. When the earth settled, there was nothing except—

The man stopped, glanced briefly at me, and sipped from his glass.

“There was nothing,” he said.

A long silence went by. I looked at my mother. Her face was composed. Around my heart the icy hand squeezed until I thought I would cry out. I sat very still.

The man went on.

It was only a long time afterward, when the driver, who had jumped before the car exploded, began making inquiries about a brown-haired journalist, that the priest realized the man had been an American correspondent. The priest learned of these inquiries from a nun in the Carmelite convent outside Guernica and had no way of locating the driver. He informed his superior, who in turn told a number of officials as well as the Hearst correspondent in Bilbao, whom he had befriended some months before during a particularly bad night of shelling in Madrid.

“There’s no certainty, you understand,” the man said. “There was chaos that day. The priest could be mistaken.”

“He is not mistaken,” my mother said in her firm and quiet voice.

“How do you know?”

She told him about the wounded right hip.

There was a brief silence.

“I see what you mean,” the man said. “Yeah. Real sorry.” There was another silence.

The man finished his drink and put the glass down on the coffee table near the pile of copies of the newspaper for which my father had written. He looked first at me, then at my mother.

“Anything I can do?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“It was good of you to come,” said my mother.

“No trouble,” said the man, getting to his feet.

My mother walked with him to the door.

When he was gone my mother returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa. She sat stiffly and kept her knees tightly together. Her eyes were black, burning. “Michael?” she said in a strange small voice. “Michael?”

I felt the cold around my heart and now also on the nape of my neck and went quickly downstairs for Mrs. Helfman. To my astonishment, Mr. Dinn appeared at our door almost immediately after Mrs. Helfman came in. My mother did not cry. She sat on the sofa and kept calling my father’s name. I lay in my bed in the darkness and did not cry, either. The room was very cold.

The next day my mother went out before breakfast and returned with the morning papers. One was the newspaper for which my father had worked; she had walked a long distance for that paper. My father’s picture was on the front page. Wavy hair, eyes full of light, jaunty smile. My mother and I sat at the kitchen table, staring at my father’s picture.

The headline read, in large letters,
MICHAEL CHANDAL KILLED IN GUERNICA RAID.
Beneath that, in smaller letters, I read,
NOTED CORRESPONDENT DIES ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF WOUNDED NUN.

The story described my father as a well-known journalist devoted to workers’ causes, as a loyal comrade and a tireless worker. It mentioned his family origins—“New England stock, aristocrats, heads of a timber empire against whom Chandal had rebelled in his early years.” It talked of his writings, his travels, his journalistic style, his high reputation. Then it told how he had died—and it was the same story the man had told us the night before.

My mother turned the pages of
The New York Times.
Again there was my father’s picture and a headline:
JOURNALIST MICHAEL CHANDAL
, 36,
DEAD IN GUERNICA RAID.

“What does obituary mean?” I asked.

My mother corrected my pronunciation and explained the word.

The article described my father’s New England origins. It said his family had pioneered the lumber industry in the United States. It mentioned the brother who had died in the last war and the change that had come over my father as a result of certain events he had witnessed during and after a riot against Wobblies on Armistice
Day, 1919, in Centralia, Washington—“events described in
Nineteen-Nineteen
, the novel by John Dos Passos,” the article added. It told of my father’s journalistic career, his known association with Communists and Socialists, his “lean, nonrhetorical style,” and the “possible permanent value of what Mr. Chandal used to refer to as his special writing.’” The article closed with the statement that Mr. Chandal left behind, in his immediate family, a wife and daughter, as well as parents and a sister. And it announced the time, date, and place of a memorial service.

The other newspapers carried similar stories. One of them, writing about Centralia, used the words “grisly events.”

Once again the apartment filled with visitors. And once again Mr. Dinn appeared one night after I was supposed to be asleep and spent a long time in the kitchen, talking with my mother.

A few days later my mother and I took the subway into Manhattan. She wore a dark dress and a dark beret. She sat very straight and still in the train, gazing out the window into the tunnel through which we sped. Her lovely face was set in an expressionless ivory mask; her eyes were dark, shining. I had yet to see her cry over the death of my father. There was about her now a quality of grace, a regal poise; suffering seemed to have added to her reservoir of courage.

We came out of the subway and walked along a crowded downtown street in a warm rain. We turned a corner and entered a hotel and climbed a wide carpeted staircase to a carpeted hallway and a vast elegant ballroom. The wooden pillars of the room were of imitation marble and on the ceiling pink cherubs and bosomy maidens frolicked amidst flowers along the banks of a blue and misty river. The room was filled with chairs and crowded with people. Heads turned as my mother and I entered the room. We walked through a sea of stares toward the stage.

A man I had never seen before came toward us. He was of medium height, his head entirely bald, and he wore a dark brush mustache. He greeted my mother deferentially, nodded briefly at me, and led us onto the stage. My hands and feet and heart were
cold. All around us on the stage people were shaking my mother’s hand. I felt entombed by the darkness of their suits and dresses. And all the faces in the enormous room beyond the stage: silent now, raised, solemn, expectant.

A man stood and began to talk in a low voice about my father. The sound system sent his words back to the stage in a softly reverberating echo. He talked about Michael Chandal the comrade, Michael Chandal the journalist, Michael Chandal the writer, Michael Chandal the hero. My mother sat very straight, gazing fixedly at the speaker’s back, her head raised and her hands in her lap. The speaker finished and there was a burst of applause. The speaker turned and started back to his seat. As he crossed the stage, I saw him glance furtively at my mother, as if seeking her approval for his words, and I saw my mother give him a single nod. He smiled faintly and slid into his seat and took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

There were many speeches about my father that afternoon. There were speeches too about the party, about the menace of fascism, about the cause—
causa
, the speaker called it—about the glorious achievements of the Soviet Union. Someone quoted a poet who had been to Russia and had said, upon his return, “I have seen the future and it works.” That received long and loud applause. Someone else quoted the words of a member of the Lincoln Brigade: “Men may die, but let them die in a working class cause. Men die and mean to die (if necessary) so that the revolution may live on. They may stop us today, but tomorrow we still take up the march.” Again loud and long applause.