Davita's Harp (28 page)

My mother returned home shortly before lunch. Jakob Daw woke coughing and came out of his room in the same clothes he had worn the day before. His door was across the hallway from mine and I saw him stagger a little as he went from his room. He appeared haggard, exhausted. His eyes were swollen, his face unshaven. He saw me looking at him and said something in a language I could not understand and went along the hallway, coughing. The bathroom door closed.

In the kitchen my mother dropped something: the noise of
shattering glass was abrupt and jarring. Angry words exploded from her, uttered, it seemed to me, in the same language Jakob Daw had used a moment before.

In the early afternoon the three of us walked along the parkway to Prospect Park. For some fresh air, my mother said. We all needed fresh air. We watched people rowing on the lake. There were small fish in the lake and they made tiny rippling circles along the surface of the water as they fed off the bread crumbs people threw them. The park was crowded. We sat on a bench with our faces to the sun. Birds flew high overhead against a cloudless sky. My mother and I had come to this park with my father the day before he had sailed back to Spain. That seemed a long time ago. When had that been?

I asked Jakob Daw if he knew how to row a boat. He smiled tiredly and said in a brooding tone, speaking not to me but to the sky and the air, that it was another of the many things he could not do.

“There were other things to do in Vienna when I was growing up. Many other things. I rowed through Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. And through Marx and Freud and others. Those were deep and beautiful lakes. Sometimes they became wide rivers. Once I even rowed through Theodor Herzl, but it proved uninteresting. But I did not learn to row in ordinary water.” He coughed. “Another of my many failings, along with ineptitude in the trenches and in—” He stopped, glanced at my mother, and looked quickly away. “In other matters.”

He leaned back on the bench, his hands clasped behind his head. He had changed into different clothes, as baggy and as wrinkled as those he had worn before. I was sitting between him and my mother and felt a gray sadness rising from him and, at the same time, felt myself drawn to him as if by some dark mesmerizing force. He had cut himself while shaving; a clot of blood lay on his bony chin. I wanted to touch the blood, wash it away, dress the wound. The afternoon sunlight accentuated the network of small lines around his eyes and showed clearly the flecks of gray in
his hair. I could not remember having seen gray in his hair when I had first met him last year in our apartment in Manhattan.

My mother had been sitting quietly, looking at the lake. She wore a white beret and a dark blue skirt. “I used to go rowing,” she said. “With my grandfather. We lived near a wide river. He used to take me rowing when I was a little girl. I was too young to row the boat myself. And then the war came and we ran from the town—it was a border town between Russia and Poland, and we were told the Russian cavalry was coming. We hid in a forest. I remember the forest. That was all the rowing I ever did.”

“Didn’t you ever go rowing with your father?” I asked.

“I never did anything with my father. Once my mother took me out on the river and we almost overturned the boat. My mother was a very modern woman, but she didn’t know anything about boats. Your father had an uncle once who knew about boats. But he died in a boating accident. I don’t like boats. Boats frighten me. People I love keep going away from me on boats.”

We sat on the bench in the sunlight, looking at the lake.

“Mama?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Will we go to the beach this summer?”

“I don’t know. I will have to work all summer. There’s no more money from your father’s job. And I will not take money from—” She stopped. “I don’t know about the summer, Ilana.”

Jakob Daw had closed his eyes and seemed to have fallen asleep. Now he said, with his eyes closed, “How serious do you think it is, Channah?”

“If Ezra is worried, it’s very serious.”

“I used to boast about being hated by the right people. I am not boasting now. I am very tired.” My mother said nothing.

“I am not looking forward to another sea journey.”

Still my mother said nothing.

“I will not fight to remain here, Channah. I do not wish to become a cause that the Stalinists and the Fascists will turn into a
circus. Nor do I wish to live in a country where I will be hounded constantly by nameless government officials. I will not permit Ezra to waste his time with this. The French will take me in. The French appreciate my writing. Malraux himself is a devoted reader. The French will certainly take me back in.”

“Stop it, Jakob,” my mother said.

“I detest boats and ships,” Jakob Daw said, opening his eyes and looking at the lake. “I cannot begin to tell you how much I detest boats and ships. Perhaps I will write a story about it one day.”

“Please stop it,” my mother said.

“I think we should return to the apartment,” Jakob Daw said. “I am very, very tired.”

“Can I help you, Uncle Jakob? You can lean on me.”

“You are a dear child. I hope someone will soon teach you how to row. Are you ready to start back, Channah?”

That evening my mother met again in our living room with the two men and the woman. They studied together. New words flew into my room: exchange value, commodities, universal money, labor power. Jakob Daw lay in his room, asleep. Later Mr. Dinn came over and he and my mother sat in the kitchen, talking. I woke in the night to go to the bathroom and saw Jakob Daw sitting at the desk in his clothes, writing, the scratching of his pen a sibilant music in the dark stillness of the apartment.

I walked home from school past the yeshiva and saw Ruthie playing in the wide front yard during her afternoon recess. The yard was crowded and noisy. A number of teachers stood along the rim of the sidewalk, forming a protective phalanx. Most of the teachers in the yard were women; two of the men were young and wore beards.

I waved to Ruthie. She came over to me. We stood in the shade of a sycamore. A car sped by close to the sidewalk.

“We heard David’s father making Havdoloh in your apartment,”
Ruthie said. She had been jumping rope and her freckled face was flushed and sweaty. “Why did he do that?”

“Mr. Daw asked him.”

“David’s father said he wouldn’t sing again outside his own house until after he stopped saying Kaddish.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Are you going to keep saying Kaddish?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have to, you know. Girls don’t have to say Kaddish.”

“I want to.”

“Everyone’s talking about you, Ilana.”

I did not respond. One of the girls in the yard called Ruthie’s name.

“Doesn’t it bother you that everyone is talking about you?”

“No.”

“You shouldn’t do it, Ilana.”

One of the young, bearded teachers was looking at me. I said, “Ruthie, does your father ever take you rowing?”

She stared at me. “What?”

“In the lake in Prospect Park. Does your father ever take you rowing there?”

“My mother takes me. In the summer, mostly.”

“Do you stay in the city in the summer?”

“We go to the country where there’s a lake. Are you all right, Ilana?”

“I’m not all right. My Uncle Jakob may have to leave America. The government doesn’t want him to stay.”

She stared at me. Once again a girl called her name.

“I have to go home,” I said. “Maybe he’s awake and will want something to eat. What kind of government do we have? Is it a Fascist government? David’s father is trying to keep him here. I dreamed last night that he went away on a big boat, like my father.”

The teacher who had been looking at me came over to us. He
was a short thin man with a dark beard and he wore a brown suit and a gray felt hat. He said something to Ruthie in what sounded like Yiddish.

“Your uncle will be okay,” Ruthie said. “My father says that David’s father is a very good lawyer.”

“I wonder if David’s father knows how to row. I’ll see you, Ruthie. Good-bye. I like the ocean anyway better than the lake.”

I went along the parkway, turned up the side street, and walked past the candy store without looking at the newspapers. The air was warm and bright; brilliant sunlight covered the streets. On the street where I lived the brownstones seemed to be glowing in the sunlight and deep green shadows lay beneath the full-leafed trees. Baby carriages had been parked in the shade and in one of them a child lay crying. I looked up and saw Jakob Daw in the bay window of our living room.

He had the apartment door open for me before I reached the landing. I heard the final notes of the door harp. As he closed the door behind me the door harp sang again.

He asked how my day had been. I said school was boring. He looked surprised. We came into the kitchen. I brought a glass of milk and a plate of cookies to the table. He poured himself a cup of coffee. He was wearing the same rumpled pants he had worn on Saturday. He looked pale and weary. His eyes were red with fatigue, his cheeks sunken. From time to time as we sat there together, he coughed behind his fingers.

He said, in his hesitant way, that he had looked at the books in my room and hoped I didn’t mind. Did I like the Hebrew books? I told him I especially liked the books about the Bible. They were good stories, I said.

“Stories,” he echoed softly.

“And I like the fairy tale books. And the book about Paul Bunyan. I especially like that book.” Then I said, “Uncle Jakob, why did my father die?”

He looked down into his cup, his gaunt features tight. “Because a Fascist airplane killed him.”

“Why did he try to save the nun?” “Because that was the kind of man your father was.” “If he hadn’t tried to save her he might still be alive.” Jakob Daw was quiet. Then he said, “If my grandmother had had wheels, she would have rolled.” I looked at him.

“An old proverb,” he murmured. “Forgive me. I do not like to play the game of if, Ilana. It gives me a headache and, worse, a heartache. No ifs, please.”

“Uncle Jakob, are you a stay-at-home writer?”

“What is a stay-at-home writer, Ilana? Ah, yes, I see what you mean. Yes, I am mostly a stay-at-home writer.”

“I wish my father had stayed home more. Did you see my father much in Spain?”

“I was with your father in Madrid and then in Bilbao, before he went to Guernica and I went to Barcelona. I thought I might go to Lisbon, but that turned out to be impossible. It was difficult even to travel to Barcelona. Do those names mean anything to you?”

“I know all those places. I can show them to you on the map.”

“Yes,” he said. “I am sure you can.”

“Do you always write at night, Uncle Jakob?”

“Almost always. The day is too filled with noise. I can hear my voices better in the silence of night. The voices of the people I write about.”

“Can you hear the voice of your little black bird better at night too?”

“Yes. But even at night that voice is weak. The bird is now very tired, Ilana. He is looking for a place to build a nest.”

“I hope you won’t go back to Europe, Uncle Jakob.”

He said nothing. I watched as he went over to the stove, poured himself another cup of coffee, put in it a teaspoon of cocoa from an open tin on the counter near the sink, stirred the cup briefly with a teaspoon, and returned to the table.

“Is America a Fascist country?” I asked.

“No. But there are Americans who are Fascists.”

“Is the man who wants to send you back to Europe a Fascist?”

“I do not know who wants to send me back to Europe.”

“I’m afraid of you going back to Europe.”

He drank from his cup and sat there staring down at the table. “I think I will lie down for a while,” he said. “I am very tired. Please forgive me, Ilana.”

I sat at the table, listening to him go slowly along the hallway to his room.

My mother returned from her work. Jakob Daw joined us for supper but said little. After supper my mother came into my room and stood near the door.

“Ilana?”

I looked up from my reading.

“Mrs. Helfman told me this morning that you said Kaddish in the synagogue.” I said nothing.

“You are not supposed to say Kaddish.” “I want to.” “Ilana—” “I want to.”

She looked at me and seemed not to know what to say.

“Mama, do you want me to stop saying it?”

There was a silence. She stood rigidly near the door, looking at me, her dark eyes burning, her face pale. “I don’t even want you to go to that synagogue,” she said finally. “But I won’t stop you. Not if it means that much to you.” And she went from my room.

That night I woke and heard sounds from the darkness of the apartment. I thought at first that Baba Yaga had returned, but there was no evil in the sounds; there was wind in trees and a distant sighing and the softest of laughter amidst the silken back-and-forth sliding of night surf. And softly out of the darkness, through walls that somehow always yielded to my listening ears, came a far-off rhythmic beat like the thudding hooves of stallions racing across the red sands of an endless beach.

•  •  •

The days passed. Sometimes in the evenings visitors would come to the apartment, people I had never seen before. Many were well dressed. They would sit in the living room, speaking respectfully with Jakob Daw and listening intently to his words. I marveled at the deference in their manner, the awe in which they held him. He seemed the shyest of people. Diffidence clung to him, a nervous reluctance to offend. He bent toward you as you spoke, inclined his ear to your words.

On occasion he and my mother went out together of an evening. He never wore anything other than baggy pants and wrinkled shirts and sometimes an old sweater if the evening was cool. His shoes were scruffy, unpolished. Color had returned to his face; much of the darkness was gone from around his eyes. He still coughed from time to time but I had come almost not to notice it.

At times my mother and Jakob Daw would go to Manhattan on their evenings out and bring back newspapers and magazines in languages I could not read. Once Jakob Daw brought me a book of stories by two brothers named Grimm.