Davita's Harp (27 page)

“You read Hebrew?” he asked. “Where’d you get this book?”

“I’m teaching myself to read. It’s not hard. Ruthie and her father help me. It’s Mr. Helfman’s book.”

He scanned the shelves of my bookcase. “You like fairy tales?”

“I love fairy tales. I love stories. My—my father and my mother got me those books. Don’t you like fairy tales?”

“No. Fairy tales are for girls.”

“Where’d you hear that? Don’t you like stories that come from your imagination?”

“No. I don’t like my imagination. It keeps me awake at night. Sometimes it keeps me from studying. Sometimes it shows me things that scare me.”

“What things?”

“Things. People.” “What people?”

“Sometimes it shows me my mother in her grave.” I stared at him and said nothing.

He gazed down at the floor, his face very pale, his lips trembling faintly. All the time he talked he would not look directly at me.

“I miss my mother,” he said. “Every day I see her dead in my imagination.”

I did not know what to say.

“I know my mother is with God,” he said. “But I see her in her grave and I can’t help it. I can’t help how I see her.” He was still not looking at me as he spoke. “It helps if I study a lot. That keeps my imagination away.”

“I’m not afraid of seeing my father in my imagination. I love to see my father. There’s a picture of three horses on a beach in my parents’ room, and now sometimes I see my father riding one of the horses.”

“Do you ever see him in his grave?”

“He doesn’t have a grave. He was blown up by a big bomb and no one could find anything.”

He looked at me then and his mouth fell open. Then he looked slowly away.

“I think imagination is a wonderful thing,” I said. “My Aunt Sarah told me it helped the pioneer women who had to live alone when their husbands were away hunting. Sometimes it gives me very bad dreams. But it gives me nice dreams too. Especially in school. It helps me get through my classes.”

“You don’t like your classes?”

“They’re boring.”

“My school isn’t boring.”

“Sometimes I fall asleep in class and have dreams. Sometimes I dream with my eyes open.” “What do you dream?” “All kinds of things. Stories.” “You wouldn’t find my school boring.”

“I couldn’t go to your school, David. I don’t know enough Hebrew.”

“You could learn. We have students who don’t know too much Hebrew when they come in. They learn.” “And I don’t believe in God.”

Once again he looked straight at me. “You don’t believe in—? Why do you come to shul?”

“I like to be with everyone. I like to listen to the songs. I like it when the Torah is taken out and read. It’s warm and nice. It feels good and everything feels like it’s being changed into something very beautiful like when I was building the castles on the beach. Remember? I don’t like the curtain though. I don’t like having to sit behind the wall where I can’t see clearly. Why do they have that wall? I don’t like it when people are separated like that.”

“It’s the law,” he said quietly, still looking at me.

“Someone should change it.”

“You can’t do that. God made the law.”

“No He didn’t. My mother says that people make the laws, then they say that God made them so that everyone will obey. My parents taught me—”

He broke in angrily, “Your parents are—” He stopped and fidgeted on the chair through a brief silence. Then he said, “Are you going to keep saying Kaddish for your father?”

“Yes.”

“You really shouldn’t, Ilana. You really don’t have to. Everyone’s talking about it.”

“Will they tell me to leave the shul if I keep saying it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

My mother called us from the kitchen.

“I don’t understand why a girl can’t say it.”

“A woman doesn’t
have
to pray, she doesn’t
have
to come to shul. Why are you doing it?”

My mother called us again.

“I have to do more for my father than just attend one memorial meeting. He was my father.”

David said nothing. He rose from the chair and I slid off the bed. My mother called us a third time. We went from my room and along the hallway toward the kitchen, our footsteps echoing faintly on the wooden floor.

My mother, Mr. Dinn, and Jakob Daw looked at us as we came into the kitchen. They were standing at the table. Mr. Dinn held in his hand two new white candles whose tips had been scraped back, exposing additional lengths of wick; the wicks were bent toward each other. On the table was a small glass dish in which was a reddish substance; next to the dish was a shot glass filled nearly to overflowing with an amber liquid that, upon my coming close to it, smelled like my father’s Scotch.

“David, we’ll make Havdoloh here,” Mr. Dinn said. His dark hat was tipped back on his head.

David looked very surprised. “Here?” he blurted out. “Why here?”

“Because Mr. Daw has requested it.”

“For my dead grandfather,” Jakob Daw said quietly. “It is the service he loved most. The Havdoloh. I would stand next to him while he said it. My father, you must understand, was first a follower of the ideas of Lassalle and later of Bakunin. Those names mean nothing to you, of course. And yet my father could never once bring himself to forbid me to listen to my grandfather’s Havdoloh and to drink the wine afterwards.”

“Tonight we’ll have Scotch instead of wine,” Mr. Dinn said. “We don’t seem to have the proper wine in this house.”

My mother looked down at the glass dish and the shot glass on the table and said nothing.

“In Madrid,” Jakob Daw said in his raspy voice, “I once said to myself that if I came out alive I would do something that would make my grandfather happy. I said it again in Bilbao, and I said it three or four times in Barcelona. Once I said it very loudly in Barcelona so I should be heard above the machine-gun fire by whoever or whatever listens to such promises. I do not believe in God, you understand, but I do believe in my grandfather’s Havdoloh.”

Mr. Dinn handed the candles to David, who held them tightly together, his eyes fixed on the wicks.

“The word havdoloh means separation,” Mr. Dinn said. “We separate the Shabbos from the other days of the week. First we light the candles as a sign of this separation, because you’re not permitted to use fire on Shabbos.”

The hand in which David held the candles shook slightly. Mr. Dinn struck a match and, a moment after it flared into life, reached over and turned off the kitchen light. Shadows danced on the ceiling and walls. My mother’s eyes shone in the flame.

“At home we use one candle with many wicks,” Mr. Dinn said softly. “It’s a beautiful candle of many colors.”

“I remember such a candle,” Jakob Daw said. Lights and shadows played on his gaunt face as the wicks were fed by the match and became fused into a single tall flame.

“The spices in the dish help to make the service more beautiful by their aroma,” Mr. Dinn said. “Some say their purpose is to strengthen you for the coming week’s burdens. At home we have a special silver box for the spices. My wife, of blessed memory, bought it.”

I saw David look up at his father, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and dark.

“I remember my grandfather’s box,” Jakob Daw said. “It was a filigreed silver box shaped like the tower of a castle.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Dinn. “Exactly.”

I looked at David. He was staring uneasily at the flame. A narrow spiral of smoke rose upward from the candles and vanished into the ceiling shadows.

My mother stood very still, saying nothing.

Mr. Dinn raised the little glass in his right hand and began to chant. His eyes were closed and he swayed slightly as he sang the words. He had a rich baritone voice that rang out clearly in the small kitchen but did not assault our ears. The melody moved through the apartment, returning faintly from distant corners. Then David and his father chanted something briefly together, and Mr. Dinn went on alone. He put the glass down on the table
and picked up the dish of spices. He said a blessing over the spices, sniffed them, and gave the dish to Jakob Daw, who sniffed and passed it to my mother. She put the dish briefly to her nose and gave it to David, who took a deep breath of the spices and passed it to me. The scent was sweet, heady, aromatic. I put the dish back down on the table.

Wax was running down the candle onto David’s fingers. His hand continued its faint trembling.

Mr. Dinn cupped his hands together, knuckles down, and moved them close to the flame. He chanted a blessing and opened his hands so that the light of the flame bathed his palms. David repeated the gesture with his left hand. Jakob Daw, my mother, and I did nothing for a moment. Then I saw Jakob Daw extend his arms, cup his hands, and open his palms. How pale his hands looked, how dry and brittle! I could see ridges of bones, outlines of veins.

Mr. Dinn raised the glass again and went on chanting, his voice louder now. Then he was done and he sipped from the glass and put it down and David blew out the candle. The lights came back on in time for us to see a small column of smoke drifting upward from the extinguished candle and forming a thin cloud below the ceiling.

Jakob Daw stood very still next to my mother, his eyes closed.

“Goot voch,” Mr. Dinn said. “I wish everyone a good week.”

He kissed his son. He shook my mother’s hand—with a special tenderness, I thought. He bent to kiss my head and I sensed in him a rush of gentleness and warm concern that surprised me; I had not thought him capable of deep feelings.

“Goot voch, Mr. Daw,” he said, offering his hand.

Jakob Daw opened his eyes and for a moment seemed not to know where he was. He shook Mr. Dinn’s hand.

“Some memories are good, most are bad,” Jakob Daw said. “This was a good memory.”

“You can make Havdoloh by yourself,” Mr. Dinn said. “You don’t need someone to do it for you.”

“There are many things I cannot do by myself,” Jakob Daw said, “and Havdoloh is one of them. I appreciate the memory. Believe me when I tell you that in Barcelona I did not think I would ever be in Brooklyn listening to a Jew make Havdoloh. It is all very strange. Nothing I write could ever be as strange as our real world.”

“We must go,” Mr. Dinn said. “I’ll come over tomorrow and we’ll talk some more. Keep in mind what I suggested. There will definitely be trouble. That much I know.”

“It is probably someone who does not like my stories. I have been told that my stories often have strange effects upon my readers.”

“It’s not your stories, it’s your politics.”

“But I no longer have any politics. I have renounced my party affiliation. Stalinism is dead for me after Barcelona.”

My mother gave Jakob Daw a piercing look.

“We’ll have to convince the people at Immigration,” Mr. Dinn said.

“Will that be difficult to do?” “Yes,” Mr. Dinn said.

“But what can they do to me? I have the visa. It was given to me by a fine gentleman in Marseilles. Can they revoke a visa?”

“They can come up with a visa charge. They can claim fraud. They can do a deep search and charge you with failure to disclose some petty offense. It’s called material fraud bearing on admissibility. They can get you if they really want to. Or they can simply let the visa run out and not renew it.”

“You are saying, if I understand you correctly, that I am in the clutches of a bureaucracy and now share the common lot of the working class. Perhaps it would have helped if I were a different kind of writer. What a pity! It would be so ironic to have come to America only to be sent back to Europe for something I no longer am. It would be a little like living inside one of my own stories.”

“You won’t be sent back,” Mr. Dinn said. “I can promise you that. Come, David. We have to go. Say good night.”

“Will you visit me again?” I asked David.

“I don’t know,” he said, not looking at me directly.

My mother accompanied David and his father to the door. I heard the harp. My mother came back into the kitchen and sat down at the table.

“What happened at the meeting?” Jakob Daw asked.

“Precisely what you expected. They were delicate but firm.”

“Well,” Jakob Daw said, “it is beginning. Barcelona or Brooklyn, they are the same Stalinists.”

“I don’t want to hear you talking like that, Jakob,” my mother said.

“No? Listen to me, Channah. I was in Barcelona. My eyes saw this. They slaughtered anarchists, Trotskyists, P.O.U.M. people. Stalin’s hand purged Barcelona. If it were not for Ezra Dinn and the visa waiting for me in Marseilles, I would have remained in Barcelona and would now be either in a jail or dead. It was more important for the Communists in Barcelona to kill anti-Stalinist workers than to kill Fascists. This my eyes saw, Channah.”

“The party is my life, Jakob,” my mother said in a small voice. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I am going to lie down,” Jakob Daw said. “I am very tired.”

He went out of the kitchen and along the hallway to his room.

I woke in the night to go to the bathroom and passed by the partly open door to Jakob Daw’s room. He was at the small desk, writing. Later I woke again after a vivid dream about my father: he was swimming in the ocean off the beach at Sea Gate and three horses suddenly thundered across the sand and when I looked again for my father I could not see him. I woke with my heart beating fiercely and got out of bed to go through the hallway to the bathroom—and there was Jakob Daw at the little desk in his room, still writing, the desk lamp brushing his face with a soft and luminous wash of yellow light. He still had on his clothes of the day before, and I wondered if he had slept at all. He wore his
spectacles and, in the moment or two that I stood there watching, the glasses flared in the light and it was as if his eyes were on fire. I heard nothing save the scratching of his fountain pen on paper and it seemed to me a wondrously musical sound. Words and ideas were coming from him through his fingers and pen onto paper, and a story was being created! I was seeing it but I could not understand it, this act of creating a story.

My mother went out early the following morning. Jakob Daw was asleep. I wandered about the apartment. In my mother’s bedroom I stopped to gaze at her large bed and wondered what she must feel like sleeping alone and knowing my father would never return. I opened her closet, saw her few clothes and shoes: skirts, dresses, a cardigan sweater, spectator shoes, pumps, walking shoes, slippers. On a shelf were her berets and two purses. Then I opened my father’s closet. His clothes and shoes were still there. That was a strange feeling, standing there and staring at my dead father’s clothes and shoes. All seemed to be waiting patiently for his return. I closed the closet door. The bed had been neatly made with its pale blue flowered spread. Near the bed I saw an open carton with a white label on which were printed the words
SPECIAL WRITING
in my father’s hand. My father’s desk was clean; my mother used it now for her own writing. I stood in the doorway and it seemed to me my father was everywhere in that room—on the bed, at the desk, by the window, in the corners. I went back through the hallway to my room and spent the rest of the morning at my desk, reading.