Davita's Harp (3 page)

I did not know what that was.

At the start of the second week of my mother’s illness my father was sent out of New York by his newspaper. “A strike,” he said over his breakfast coffee, trying to make his voice sound light. “Back in a few days, my love. Be a good girl and listen to your Aunt Sarah.”

That Sunday morning my aunt woke very early—as she had the Sunday before—put on a green woolen dress and low-heeled brown shoes, and left the apartment. The door harp woke me. She was gone for about an hour. The harp sounded its tones upon her return. I was in the kitchen, eating cereal. My aunt’s cheerful face was flushed with cold. I could smell the cold coming off her clothes.

“A delicious Maine day,” she said happily. “Cold clean air. Is your mother still asleep? Good. Dear child, why don’t I make us some hot cocoa. Let me slip out of these Sunday clothes. Have you ever been to church? And Christmas? Do you celebrate the birth of our Lord? No, I suppose not. I’ll be back in a moment.”

She would put me to bed at night, turn out the light, and tell me strange stories in her throaty, expressive, somewhat nasal voice. She told me about a Pilgrim man named Smith and an
Indian woman named Pocahontas. She told me about the woman writer George Sand. “One hundred years ago she was the most famous woman in Europe. Are you asleep, Davita?” I was not asleep. She told me about pioneer women who left comfortable homes to go west with their men. “The west was a terrible wilderness then. The women settled in houses that were miles apart. Bare earth, no trees, cruel winds. The sun burned you in the summer and the snow blew endlessly in the winter. Those were the prairies. Miles and miles of flat emptiness. Can you picture it, Davita? Flatness and emptiness all around you, and overhead the enormous sky. The men would go off hunting and trading and be gone for weeks. It’s terrible to be alone, terrible. What do you think the women did in all that lonely time? Are you still awake, Davita? Are you listening? They used their imagination. That’s right, their imagination.”

I listened. In the chill darkness of my room I lay in my bed and listened to my Aunt Sarah from Maine telling me those stories about Pilgrims and Indians and lonely women who used their imagination to fight their loneliness. My mother never told me stories like those; her stories were about Poland and Russia and sometimes about an evil witch named Baba Yaga. I listened to my Aunt Sarah’s stories and sometimes I saw the women inside my eyes.

One night she told me about a pioneering woman who would lie down among her sheep for company. “Can you imagine that, Davita? There was no one around her for miles and miles. Her husband was away and she was alone. How horrible loneliness can be! She lay among the sheep, looking up at the sky and feeling their warmth. She did that through most of the winter and into the spring. All alone in that small house on that vast prairie with only the sheep. One day in the spring the water began to rise in the stream near the house. She saw that the sheep were on the other side of the stream. She hitched horses to one of the wagons and went back and forth across the swirl of rising water, transferring the sheep. The water came up to the bed of the wagon. She was terrified. But she saved all the sheep.”

That was an exciting story! I liked that story. Back and forth across the rushing water to save the sheep.

Aunt Sarah told me many such stories in the weeks she stayed in our apartment, tales about women who had helped to settle places with names like Kansas, Oklahoma, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado—names with an echoing music that I would continue to hear each night long after she thought me asleep and left my room.

One night I asked her what she did. Was she a journalist like Papa? No, she said. She was a nurse. “A nurse for the Church and for our Lord Jesus Christ.”

I didn’t understand what that meant.

My mother began to walk about the apartment, white-faced and laden with grief. It was early spring now. The snows were gone from the streets.

Four weeks after my aunt arrived, she packed her bags. I watched her. “Time to go home,” she said briskly, cheerily. “A time for everything under the sun. A time for this and a time for that. Now it’s time to go home. Where did I put my slippers?”

I stood in the doorway with my parents and my Aunt Sarah. She bent to kiss my forehead and I felt in that instant her warmth and burst into tears. “No tears,” she said. “Aunt Sarah does not like tears. A waste. Did the pioneer women cry? Don’t forget my stories, Davita.”

My father carried her bags out the door. The harp played softly its sweet and simple tune.

For weeks afterward I would wake at night thinking my Aunt Sarah was in my room. I would lie in the darkness and imagine myself listening to her stories. Some months after my aunt left we moved again.

Now we lived in a four-story red-brick apartment house on a narrow street on the West Side of Manhattan. My father was away often. There were many strikes that winter and he wrote about them for his newspaper and for magazines.

At breakfast one morning I asked my mother, “What does strike mean, Mama?”

She gazed at me somberly and said it was a word with many meanings.

“What does it mean where Papa is?”

“That strike is when people stop working in order to force the owners to give them more money or a better place for working.”

She gave me some of the other meanings of the word. I did not understand how one word could have so many meanings. To stop working. To make someone afraid. To hit someone. To enter the mind. Strike.

“Were you ever in a strike, Mama?”

“Yes, darling. Years ago. And my grandfather, when he was young, once organized a strike in Russia, in a city called Odessa.” Her dark eyes grew dreamy whenever she mentioned her grandfather. She talked about him often.

“Is your grandfather dead?”

“Yes.”

I had begun to realize that all living things died. Often I lay awake at night trying to understand that. All living things died.

“Can a strike hurt people?”

“Sometimes.”

“Will Papa be hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Mama, where do dead people go?”

She told me.

I could not grasp it. Endless unimaginable darkness in the earth or as scattered ashes.

“Is my little brother dead like that?” “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “Will you and Papa die?”

“Yes. But I hope not for a long, long time, darling. Now finish your breakfast. I don’t want you to be late to school.”

My father returned home two days later, tired and grimy. He bathed and slept and sat at his desk, writing. Outside my window
snow fell silently on the streets and cars moved by on muffled wheels.

I asked my father over breakfast the second morning he was back, “Were people hurt at the strike, Papa?”

He sat hunched over his food, lost in thought. Often when he was writing he did not hear people speaking to him. He did two kinds of writing. One he called his special writing; that he did at home at his desk, often far into the night. The other he called his regular writing, which he did somewhere in a newspaper office in Manhattan. His regular writing appeared in the newspaper for which he worked; his special writing was published in magazines.

I asked my mother, “Is Papa still doing his special writing?”

She looked at my father and nodded.

He was unshaven and seemed not to have slept. He was then in his middle thirties, a tall and handsome man with wavy brown hair and blue eyes, straight nose and strong chin, and a mouth given easily to laughter. Save when he was doing his special writing, he seemed possessed of a singing geniality of spirit that buoyed the hearts of those around him. He had a way of coming lightly into my room at night and sitting down on my bed and saying, “It’s talking time, my love.” It was from him that I first heard of Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Baron Munchausen, and other such gentlemen of fabled accomplishment. He especially loved telling me about Paul Bunyan. And it was from him that I learned about Maine and its lakes and hills and coastal villages and islands.

He said to me that morning after I asked my question again about the strike, “Yes, people were hurt. One was badly hurt.”

“No one was made dead?”

“No.”

“I’m glad.”

“Eat your cereal, Ilana,” my mother said quietly.

“I don’t like anyone to be dead, Papa. It’s dark like a big forest and it goes on and on and never ends.”

My father slowly turned his head and looked at me.

“What does it feel like to be dead, Papa?” “I don’t know, my love. No one has ever come back to tell us about it.”

“You can talk to Papa about it another time, Ilana,” my mother said. “Papa has to finish his article today.”

Often they worked together on his special writing. My father would come into the living room or the kitchen and read aloud what he had written; he wrote in longhand and my mother sometimes had difficulty with his handwriting. Softly she would make suggestions. My father would return to his desk.

“I was afraid Papa would be made dead in the strike.”

“Wrong, my love. Wrong. Come here and give me an ocean of a hug. That’s right. Harder. Yes.
That’s
a hug!”

From where she stood near the stove my mother said, “You’ll be late to school, Ilana. And your father has work to do. Let’s finish breakfast. Do you want another cup of coffee, Michael?”

My father completed his special writing that night. Two nights later about twenty people came to the apartment for a meeting.

I lay in my bed and listened to the meeting. How noisy it was! From time to time, above the tide of noise, I would hear the boom of my father’s voice. I would imagine him laughing and his eyes filled with light. He was a strong man with muscular arms and shoulders. I lay in the darkness, listening to my father’s voice. It seemed inside my room, his voice with its New England music.

Abruptly the noise faded and the meeting grew silent. My mother had begun to speak. How quiet they all became whenever my mother spoke. I listened to the silence, the occasional cough, the soft music of the door harp that accompanied the entry of a latecomer. My mother mentioned the name Stalin. She said, “We are not slaves to a universal idea,” and, “In the capitalist family, the husband is the bourgeois, the wife is the proletariat.” She talked on for a while. I heard someone quietly interrupt her to say, “Comrade, we don’t take orders here the way they do in the Bronx.” I could not hear my mother’s response. My room was icy cold, my bed a frozen lake. On and on my mother spoke. I fell asleep.

In the morning over breakfast I asked my mother what the word idea meant.

“That’s a good one,” my father said cheerfully, looking up from his newspaper. “Work on that one, Annie. That’ll keep you busy for a while.”

“Your eggs are getting cold, Michael.”

He put down the paper. I saw his name beneath the headline on the right-hand column of the front page: Michael Chandal.

“I heard you using idea last night, Mama.”

“Don’t you ever sleep, my love? You’re acquiring my bad habits, becoming a night person. Beware of the night people, Davita. Avoid us like the plague.”

“I’ll try to explain idea to you, Ilana. Eat your cereal while I talk.”

The word idea, she said, came from an old word that originally meant to see. An idea was something that existed in a person’s mind. It could be a thought, an opinion, a fantasy, a plan of action, a belief. It used to mean an image in the mind, a picture of someone or something, a likeness. But no one used it that way anymore.

“Davita, my love, did we understand any of that?” my father asked genially.

“Mama, is what you call Stalinism an idea?”

My father stopped chewing and looked at me.

“Yes,” my mother said, smiling faintly.

“Is my being cold in bed at night an idea?”

“No, darling. That’s a feeling.”

“That’s
an exploiting capitalist landlord, is what that is.”

“Is when I hear the door harp an idea?”

“No, darling. That’s hearing. That’s one of your senses, like seeing and touching and smelling. An idea is in your mind, your head. When you think about the door harp, it’s an idea.”

“When I think about the cottage and the beach and the ocean, is that an idea?” I had suddenly remembered the seaside world where we spent our summers.

“Yes, Ilana.”

“Do ideas become dead, like people and animals and birds?” “Sometimes.”

I sat at the table in our small kitchen and gazed at the pale winter sunlight that shone through the window.

“Well,” my father said, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. “This has certainly been one of my more enlightening breakfasts. Now I’ve got to go to work. There’s an idea for you. Work. A powerful idea. Annie, you’ll remember to call Roger about Jakob.”

“I’ll remember,” my mother said.

My father turned to me. “Davita, a writer named Jakob Daw will be coming to stay with us for a while. I’m telling you now so it won’t be the shock it was when you walked in on your Aunt Sarah.”

“Is Jakob Daw from Maine?”

“Jakob Daw is from Austria. He’s an old friend of your mother’s.”

I saw my mother look down at the floor, her face without expression.

“Does Jakob Daw write ideas?”

“I don’t know. Does he write ideas, Annie?”

“Yes. You could say that he writes ideas.” My mother’s voice sounded unusually subdued. “And about things from his imagination.”

“Well,” said my father, “this has been an interesting breakfast. Will my girl give her dad a hug? A big mountain of a hug.”

I saw my mother looking at us, her eyes troubled.

Mama is thinking something, I told myself. She is having an idea.

“That
was a hug!” my father said.

Two days later my father went off to cover a strike in a textile mill in northern Maine. He was gone nearly a week. He returned with a deep cut on his scalp and a painfully wrenched left shoulder.

He sat at his desk, writing.

I wandered silently about the apartment, frightened. One afternoon I passed by my parents’ bedroom and saw, through the partly open door, my father lying on the bed, his hands over his eyes, the light from the desk lamp falling upon his papers and the black Waterman’s fountain pen with which he wrote. On the wall over the desk was the glass-framed photograph of the beach and the horses. I gazed a long time at the photograph. I imagined I could hear the sand-muffled sounds of their beating hooves. Then I heard my father say clearly, in a voice I did not recognize, “Ah, Christ, what the hell is it all about? How can it be anything? It’s not a damn thing. It’s nothing. That’s what it is.
Nothing!”