Davita's Harp (42 page)

Mr. Margolis wanted to know if there was any problem in that verse with the Hebrew word
oz
, then.

He stood behind his desk, tall and dark, one finger in a pocket of his vest, waiting.

No one said anything.

Eyes stared at the Hebrew word. Who paid attention to a small word like that?
Oz.
Then. “The Canaanites were then in the land.” I had gone over the text before class but had not thought to stop on the meaning of that word.

Then. At that time. That’s what it meant. At the time when Abraham came to Shechem there were Canaanites in the land. But why did we have to be told that? Obviously there were Canaanites in the land. It was called the land of Canaan.

“I want you to think about it,” Mr. Margolis said.

I raised my hand.

“Ilana.”

“Rashi says the Canaanites were conquering the land from the children of Shem.” “Very good, Ilana.”

“But if the Canaanites were conquering the land from the children of Shem, why was it called the land of Canaan?”

He stood tall and dark behind his desk, fingering his pocket watch, and looked at me. “What should it have been called, Ilana?”

“The land of Shem.”

“The land of Shem.” He looked down at the open Bible on his desk and scanned the Rashi. The top of his skullcap formed a dark shiny satin moon as it caught and reflected the winter sunlight that came through the windows. Steam hissed softly in the silver-painted radiators. There were cracks in the pale green walls and flaking paint on the white ceiling. The room was overheated.
Oz.
Then. What could that little word mean? Clearly the then of the story was the time of Abraham. But, again, why did we have to be reminded that there were Canaanites in the land of Canaan? Perhaps—perhaps—

Something hung elusively on the edge of thought, but I could not grasp it and it was gone.

Mr. Margolis looked up from the Bible on his desk and gave the class a thin smile. “Ilana asks a good question. Why was it not called the land of Shem if, according to Rashi, the Canaanites were not actually living there but were conquering it?”

Along the periphery of my vision I saw Ruthie raise her hand.

“Ruth?”

“Maybe the Canaanites were living in it a long time already and were still trying to conquer the rest of it.”

Mr. Margolis’s thin smile widened. “Very good, Ruth. Very good. The Canaanites had no doubt been living in it a long time already. Like America. It was called America even while Americans were still conquering the west. Very good, Ruthie.”

Ruthie, her face suddenly a shade of high color that accentuated her freckles, looked astonished at having stumbled upon the answer wanted by Mr. Margolis.

I talked about the verse during supper with my father, and he said Ruthie’s explanation made sense to him. David said there
couldn’t be any other explanation. My mother sat at the table looking very tired and said nothing. Her early risings to get to the synagogue, her half-days at work, her journeys to the synagogue for the afternoon and evening service—all had put her in a state of permanent fatigue.

Later I lay in my bed reading a novel my mother had taken out for me from the Brooklyn Public Library on Eastern Parkway. On the other side of the hallway, David was softly studying Talmud in his room, the chanting reaching me through the walls that separated us. I thought again of the word and looked up from the novel at the harp that hung on the back of the door. It lay in the shadows cast by the bed lamp. Suppose Jakob Daw had used that word in a sentence in one of his stories. What would it mean? I tried to imagine it in his story about the bird who went wandering through the world in search of the source of the world’s music. Suppose it left its land, its flock, its nest, and found a land of tall hills and fertile valleys. And suppose Jakob Daw had then said, There were Canaanites then in the land. What would that mean? It would mean—it would mean that at the time Jakob Daw was telling me the story—or was writing the story—there weren’t any Canaanites in the land. And if it was important for my understanding of the story that I know of the existence of Canaanites in the past, he would have to remind me of it. And he would do that by saying or writing, There were Canaanites
then
in the land.

What was that? Had a wooden ball lifted of itself and fallen upon a string of the harp? Had the birds stirred? I was in a dream, of course. I had drifted off to sleep for a moment and had been in a dream. I put the book on the night table, removed my glasses, and snapped off the light.

The last thing I thought I heard as I slid into sleep was the faint singing of the harp blending with the quiet music of the Talmud that came from David’s room.

The next day I raised my hand in Mr. Margolis’s class and waited to be called.

“Yes, llana.”

“May I go back to yesterday and give another explanation of
oz?”

“Of course.”

We had been on a difficult verse. I could sense the class relaxing all around me. My mouth was dry, my heart beat loudly.

“Oz
can mean that at the time this story was written down, there were no longer any Canaanites in the land; and the writer of the story is reminding the reader that at the time the story took place there
were
Canaanites, because Canaanites are important to the story.”

Mr. Margolis stood very still behind his desk, gazing at me. He asked me to repeat my explanation.

I repeated it, slowly, my heart thumping wildly. Why was he looking at me like that?

He said, solemnly, “You mean to say, Ilana, that a writer wrote this story?”

“Yes.”

“And who was this writer?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. And when did he write this story?”

“When there were no longer any Canaanites in the land.”

“There were always Canaanites in the land, Ilana.”

“When there were no longer any Canaanites near Shechem.” The room was strangely hushed, as if all had long ceased breathing.

“Ilana,” Mr. Margolis said, after a pause that seemed endless, “we do not study the Torah this way here.” I sat very still, my heart thundering.

“God wrote the Torah,” Mr. Margolis said. “Not a writer. God. It’s the holy word of God. Do you understand?”

I had never seen him so dark and stern. He seemed to be growing in darkness before my eyes.

“If people wrote the Torah, why should we bother with it? Why should we sacrifice ourselves for it? Why should we read it
in shul every Shabbos and yom-tov? Why should we be willing to die for it? God spoke every single word of the Torah to Moses, who wrote it all down, every word. Even his own death Moses described, with tears running down his face.”

He paused for a moment and took a breath, then went on. “The Torah is not stories, Ilana. The Torah is not a piece of make-believe. It is not like Shakespeare or like—what is his name?—James Joyce or like your good friend Jakob Daw. The Torah is God’s stories. God’s! The truth of God. The eternal truth given to us by the Master of the Universe. Rashi has the correct understanding of the verse. And that is the way we will learn it here. I want you to think about that, Ilana. I want you to remember that. All right? Very good. Now let us continue reading.”

I sat in a pall of confusion and shame and heard nothing of what went on for all the rest of the day in that class.

My father had an English commentary in his library in the living room. I went to it that evening after supper. The commentary was by a modern English rabbi named J. H. Hertz. I found the verse and read the commentary:

I read it again.

Ibn Ezra, I knew, was one of the greatest of the Jewish commentators of the Middle Ages. He had been born in Spain and wandered throughout Europe. I had ventured a guess—and had come up with Ibn Ezra’s answer! I wondered how Ibn Ezra would have responded to Mr. Margolis’s questions. Would Ibn Ezra have sacrificed himself for the Torah? I couldn’t understand why Mr.
Margolis seemed fearful of there being more than one way to understand the meaning of the Torah. Was he afraid he would lose control over our thinking? Why did he need to control the way we thought? Did he believe that God wrote stories with only one kind of meaning? It seemed to me that a story that had only one kind of meaning was not very interesting or worth remembering for too long.

The harp sounded muted that evening as I came into my room and sat down at my desk to my homework. I looked at it, wondering if something was wrong with its strings. Across the hallway from me David softly sang his talmudic music. In the living room my parents were listening to a symphony on the phonograph. Outside an icy wind moaned in the trees, rustling bare branches in a sad music of its own.

Winter slipped away. The days grew warm. Trees began to bud. Mr. Helfman planted his garden.

That spring of 1941 was a dream time for me, an idyll, the loveliest time of my young life. I felt untouched by Europe and its war, freed of the dark burden of politics and history. My body was changing. There were long, shy, intimate conversations with girls in my class about boys, menstruation, brassiere sizes, clothing styles. Some of the girls seemed ashamed of their growing breasts. Boys began to look at me in awkward masculine ways.

My father marveled at my growing. “You’re a beauty,” he kept saying. “Isn’t she a beauty, Channah?” And from time to time, in the kitchen or the living room, I would feel David’s eyes upon me, and something would begin to turn warm inside me, and I would feel it moving slowly between my legs, a warm and gentle throbbing, and I would turn my eyes to David and see him blush scarlet and turn away. And the image of my mother naked in her bedroom would return to me, and I would see her standing before the mirror, rubbing the hard nipples of her breasts and whispering, “Michael? Michael?” She slept now with my new father.
What was it like to have slept in the same bed for years with my father and now to sleep with my new father? I could not bring it into my imagination.

My mother continued going to the synagogue twice a day to say Kaddish for Jakob Daw. She kept on with her half-time job at the social work agency. With the coming of the warm weather she seemed to gather strength. Two or three of the acquaintances she had made in the synagogue became her friends and discovered that she knew her way through certain rabbinic texts which she had been taught by her grandfather. They would meet once a week on Sunday evenings in our living room and study together. I would hear the music of their voices from my room. My father would retire to the kitchen with the Sunday
Times
or to his desk in the bedroom where he did some of his law work. Only women came to those study sessions, three or four of them, week after week, from late winter and into the early weeks of summer.

From my room I would hear, too, David chanting talmudic texts and also the Torah portion he was learning for his bar mitzvah in June. His graduation, too, would be in June. He had been told at the start of the year that he might qualify for the Akiva Award if he maintained his English grades, but he seemed indifferent to the award and was concentrating all his energies on Talmud. He wanted the Talmud prize, the award that would gain him automatic entry into the highest and best talmudic academies of learning. All kinds of music filled our apartment that spring.

There were other kinds of meetings in our apartment that spring, meetings conducted by my father. During those meetings my mother would sit in the kitchen, reading, or go into the bedroom and work at the desk. She was trying to complete her translation of the stories Jakob Daw had written when he had stayed with us. I would sit in my room and listen to those meetings with my father. New words flew through the air like strange birds: controlling votes; Agudah people; fanatics; Hungarians. And a harsh-sounding guttural word that I could not pronounce and did not know how to spell. I would imagine other meetings, in cold
apartments, and other words that had flown about—and it seemed as if it all had happened in a distant time and had been witnessed by someone other than a girl named Ilana Davita Dinn. And perhaps it had. Perhaps the girl who had listened to those distant words had been someone named Ilana Davita Chandal. Was I two people? What connected me to my past? Memories? Save for certain sharp images, they seemed to be fading. Stories? Yes, stories. I still remembered the stories. Even though I didn’t understand them. I remembered. A bird and music and a gray horse. And the girl on the slope along the river who sold her ground-up flowers in the nearby village. And, yes, even Baba Yaga. What stories had Jakob Daw written while living with us? I would have to ask my mother about that one day.

Ruthie came over to me in school one morning and told me she had overheard her father telling her mother that David was receiving the Talmud prize. But I was not to tell him, she said. We sat in class, glancing repeatedly at each other and filled with our secret, and Mr. Margolis wanted to know what we were smiling about so much and why weren’t our eyes in the book.

David told us the news at the kitchen table that evening.

“That’s my boy!” my father said, and thumped him on the back.

“I’m so proud,” my mother said.

“Congratulations,” I said.

David smiled shyly, his face crimson.

He became a bar mitzvah on a Shabbos morning at the end of the second week of June. My parents had very little family in America—on my father’s side, the Helfmans, some cousins, and his late wife’s brother’s family; on my mother’s side, no one—and so almost everyone in the synagogue that morning was a member of the school and synagogue community to which we belonged. There were also present lawyers and social workers who knew my parents at their jobs. My mother and I sat up front in places of honor reserved for female relations of the bar mitzvah.