Davita's Harp (37 page)

Late that spring on a warm and sunny day I climbed into a bus along with my classmates and rode to an art gallery in Manhattan. I think it was named the Valentine Gallery; I am not certain. We did that sort of thing from time to time: went on trips to museums, the theater, the ballet. But this was our first visit to an art gallery. We had been told by our English teacher that the gallery was showing a very special painting; she knew someone who worked there and had obtained permission for this class visit.

I remember the ride through the tunnel and along the river and up narrow streets thick with people and traffic. There were only about twenty of us on that trip and we walked in a huddled mass about half a block through the heart of Manhattan and into the entrance of a tall building. I think it was a tall building; I am not certain. I remember my English teacher being greeted by a handsome, dapper-looking man in a dark suit, and how we all quietly tittered at that. I remember carpeted rooms with paintings on the walls. Then the man led us into a room that was dominated by a huge painting on one of its walls. I do not remember if there were
other paintings in the room; there may have been drawings and sketches on the other walls. Ruthie, standing next to me, eyed the painting and giggled. “Look at it,” she whispered. “Isn’t it crazy?” The teacher began to talk to us about the painting.

I had to crane my neck in order to see it. We stood near the wall across the room from it and still it was enormous and I could not see all of it at one time. I had never seen such a painting anywhere. It seemed inhabited by monsters and was not even in color but in black and white and gray. Most of my classmates seemed bewildered and bored. The teacher kept on talking and I stood there trying to see all of the painting at the same time and could not. She had mentioned the name Pablo Picasso a number of times and I was trying to remember where I had heard that name before. And then she said something and I grew very still and I stood looking at the painting and took a step toward it and stood very still, staring at the painting.

The teacher had said the painting was called
Guernica.

A slight shiver ran through me. I could not stop staring at the painting. It was odd how silent the room had become, the teacher’s voice slowly fading as if absorbed by the walls.
Guernica.
Black and white and gray. Grotesque bodies of women and a horse and a bull. A woman with a dead child, screaming. A woman with naked breasts, running. A woman with arms raised, burning. A black and white bull, staring. A lamp clutched in a disembodied hand. And a light overhead. And bits and pieces of a dead soldier. And what was that in the darkness between the screaming head of the horse and the staring head of the bull? A bird! A small gray bird, head upturned, beak wide open, crying. And all in black and white and gray. How easy it was to do now what I had done once before—a bending of the knees and an upward thrust and lightly through the air and landing effortlessly beside the bird and gently scooping it up and running with it away from the bull and the horse and through the rubble of blasted streets and fallen houses and fires and pieces of bodies to the river and the bridge at the edge of the town where my father
was and helping him carry the wounded nun so his hip wouldn’t crumple beneath her weight. People were shouting at me and I responded but I did not know what I was saying. I ran back and forth through the town, holding the bird to me, and I could not find my father. Fires and bombs and airplanes and screams and a bridge somewhere and a river. He was here and I could not find him. I turned a corner—and there was the bull, staring, and the horse, screaming. I held the bird, felt its warm and terrified pulsing.

Ruthie was talking to me. My teacher was talking to me. I stared at them. I was fine, I said. Sure. I was okay.

My mother was talking to me. “What is the matter with you? You haven’t eaten a thing. How can you waste food this way?”

How did I get back to my house? And my room? It should have been easy to find him. Guernica was a small town. Only a few thousand people. Where was the river and the bridge?

I lay in my bed with the gray bird in my hand and when I woke in the early morning the bird had grown tiny during the night, tinier than a thumbnail; but I could still feel its beating heart and its warmth. Outside it was raining. I saw the rain in the leaves of the trees and on the street, a gray rain that ran in rivulets along the gutters, and I wondered if all the rains in all the world could ever put out the fires of Guernica. I got out of bed and went silently through the hallway, the tiny gray bird still in my hand. And I placed the bird in the circular hollow of the door harp next to the black bird nesting there. Then I dressed and ate breakfast and left early for school.

We lived in the city that summer and Mr. Carter came often to the apartment. Sometimes he stayed very late. Once he and my mother were in her room together for a long time. I played in the park and sometimes I imagined myself in Guernica, saving my father. David and Ruthie were away and Mr. Dinn no longer visited us. I went to the synagogue on Shabbos mornings but no one I
knew well was there. My father’s book would be published in September. My mother was sad when Mr. Carter left in early August for Chicago.

It was a sweltering summer. I slept naked and sweating in my bed. Often I dreamed of all the ways I would save my father and the nun. Sometimes I prayed that my mother and I would never go to Chicago. Let something happen, I prayed. Not anything terrible. But enough to keep us from going. I did not know whom I was praying to. But it was good to think and whisper the words in the darkness of my room. I did not pray on my knees.

Letters arrived from Jakob Daw, all in German, and my mother would not read them to me. They were personal, she said. Yes, he sent me his good wishes. No, he was not well. Would I please stop pestering her; she was definitely not going to read me Jakob Daw’s letters. And she would grow angry and sometimes shout at me. We had become strangers to one another. At times I thought I hated her, and that frightened me terribly. After each of our quarrels I would journey into the painting, searching for my father.

Always somewhere in our lives that summer there seemed to be a radio. On weekdays I played in the park with others in the day-camp program and went rowing on the lake. There was a radio in the small house that was the camp office and the news would come from it like some dark utterance from a region of fire and pain. It would move across the grassy meadows and through the trees and over the lake. And in the nights the news would enter my room from the radio in the kitchen and become caught in the corner shadows and I would hear it there, vibrating softly with words I was listening to for the first time: mobilization, war of nerves, brink, hostilities—words of impending war. It was over that radio that the news first came to us of the treaty between Hitler and Stalin.

We heard it during supper one night in the last week of August, the announcer’s voice calm and smooth: Germany and Russia had signed a nonaggression pact. He talked about it at some
length, then went on to other news. My mother turned off the radio.

“Capitalist lies,” she said. “What they go through to slander us!”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“Never mind.”

“What does nonaggression pact mean?”

“Finish your supper, Ilana. Filthy lies. Even the radio news is corrupt.”

The phone rang. She went out of the kitchen to the hallway. I heard her talking in a low, tight voice, but could not make out her words. Some minutes later she returned to the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee. She spilled coffee on the table as she set down the cup and washed it off with a towel. Her hands were trembling.

“Mama?”

“Leave me alone, Ilana.”

“Mama?”

“Ilana!”

I went out of the kitchen. The phone rang again. From my room I heard my mother’s voice, low, urgent. Later that night I went back into the kitchen for a glass of water and saw the radio was gone. I stood at the closed door to my mother’s room and heard the voice of a news announcer softly through the darkness. In the morning the radio was back on its shelf in the kitchen. We listened to the news. My mother stared at the radio, her face a clear mirror of her emotions: anger, pain, disbelief, bewilderment. She would not respond to any of my questions and left quickly to go to work.

On my way to the day camp I stopped at a subway newsstand and looked at the headlines. I read,
GERMANY AND RUSSIA SIGN TEN-YEAR NONAGGRESSION PACT.
I asked the news vendor what it meant and he told me to get out of the way, I was keeping him from taking care of his customers. In the park I listened to the radio and, later, in the rowboat on the lake I asked the counselor
at the oars what nonaggression pact meant, and he explained it to me. He was the same counselor from whose boat I had jumped two summers before.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He explained it again. The others in the boat were giving me queer looks.

“You mean the Communists have become friends with the Fascists?”

“That’s right,” he said. Then he said, “Ilana, sit still and stop rocking the boat.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said.

“I don’t care whether you believe it or not. Sit still!”

I sat very quietly. I believed none of it. He was a liar and a capitalist tool. I hated him and wished he would hurry and bring us to shore so I could get out of his boat.

I did not go rowing with him in the afternoon but sat beneath a tree and read a copy of the
Times
that I had found in a trash can. I read:

“Moscow, Aug. 24.—With the meticulous punctuality of a perfectly staged arrival, two huge Focke-Wulf Condor planes conveying Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, and his thirty-two assistants, landed at the Moscow airdrome on the stroke of 1
P.M.
yesterday.

“Adequate but not excessive police precautions were taken at the airdrome. For the first time the Soviet authorities displayed the swastika banner, five of which flew from the front of the airdrome building, but were placed so as not to be visible from the outside….”

I put the paper back into the trash can.

There was a party meeting in our apartment that night. People arrived angry. I could hear the anger in their tread as they came up the stairs. The harp sang and sang. I sat at my desk and listened to the shouting in the living room. “With that murderer?” someone was screaming. “That barbarian? I shit on the whole thing! You want to know what I think of it? I’ll tell you what I think of it.
You can take this card and shove it up your ass!” Angry footsteps sounded through the hallway and then the slamming of our front door. The harp sang.

There was an explosion of voices in the living room. A woman was shouting. I did not hear my mother. Some more people left, slamming the front door. The harp sang and sang.

Two nights later there was another meeting. A man I had seen only once before came to the apartment that night, the bald-headed man who had spoken at the memorial meeting for my father. I heard his quiet, authoritative voice through the walls of my room. He talked about the need for discipline, for buying time, for secure frontiers. I heard a man’s voice suddenly shout, “Fuck you, comrade! You think I’m going to kill myself for the party when it—”

“Sit down!” a woman shouted. “Listen to what he has to say!”

“To hell with it!” the man shouted back. “We’re being played for suckers. Can’t you see it?”

“I see breach of discipline,” a second man shouted. “That’s what I see.”

“To hell with all of it!” the first man shouted. “I gave you years of my life to fight fascism and now you give me this shit! To hell with all of it!”

Again, angry footsteps sounded through the hallway and, again, the door harp sang.

I said to my mother at breakfast the following morning, “Mama, what are you going to do?”

She gave me a look of pain, a look that implored me to ask no more questions of her—and I finished my breakfast in silence and went off to the day camp.

She went to a meeting that night and to another meeting a few nights later. In the middle of September, about two weeks after I had returned to school, yet another meeting took place in our apartment. Again, I heard raised voices and angry imprecations. And again, others shouted their demands for total adherence to party discipline: there was a reason for the move; it was a life-or-death
choice; it was needed to buy time for the world revolution; sometimes you were forced to make an alliance with an enemy for the sake of a—

And then I heard my mother’s voice and I turned cold and felt the skin rise on the nape of my neck. I had never heard her sound like that before: strident, coldly raging, gulping some of her words, and the words pouring from her in a torrent of unrelenting fury. She understood everything, she said. It all made perfect sense, the treaty, the opportunity to increase the security of Russia’s borders, to augment the power of the Russian people and strengthen the hand of Comrade Stalin. It all made perfect sense, and yet it made no sense at all. It had nothing to do with the Communist cause. It was a pure geopolitical act having to do with national security—and as far as she was concerned Russia was no longer the leader of world communism. No truly Communist state could ally itself with the absolute enemy of communism, no matter what its self-interest might be. She for one could never live at peace with any person or state that tied itself to Nazi Germany. She began to quote from the writings of Marx and Engels. She quoted from Lenin. She even quoted from Stalin. She went on and on in that coldly furious high-pitched voice—and then I had the feeling that she was no longer making any sense. A deep silence had settled upon the meeting, and still my mother continued talking. How can one justify this theoretically and morally? she asked again and again. How can one explain it? It defied elementary morality. An alliance with Hitler, who had helped Franco conquer Spain, whose aircraft had destroyed the town of Guernica, who persecuted Jews. How is such an act even remotely justifiable, no matter what geopolitical reality is taken into consideration? Again, she quoted Marx. She was beginning to sound hoarse. Suddenly someone said, “Anne, please, enough, enough. Sit down.” Someone else said, “What are you talking about? How can you have world communism and revolution without Russia? You’re babbling!” A third voice said, “Listen to her, for heaven’s sake!” The first voice said, “We don’t have
time for this. There’s work to be done. Without discipline we’re nothing.” My mother fell silent.