Davita's Harp (33 page)

I took a silent step back and then another and was in the dark hallway. I turned slowly and put my hand on the wall and went carefully back to my room. I lay on my bed in the darkness and kept seeing my mother naked before the mirror in her room. I knew that image would always remain with me, deep inside me, and return to my eyes at odd and unexpected times; like the image of the gang leader offering protection to a little girl with a penny in her hand; like the image of the boy with the cigarette asking, You Jewish?; like my father’s face when he threw back his head and laughed; like the veiled look in my mother’s eyes when she drifted into the past; like Jakob Daw bent over his desk, writing; like the sadness in the dark eyes of the little girl named Teresa; like the dunes and the beach and the sand castles of Sea Gate; like the birds that called
hoo hoo hoo hoo;
like Aunt Sarah on her knees
in our spare room; like the candles of Chanukkah in the Helfman apartment; like the black bird and the gray horse and Baba Yaga. Images of a childhood. My mother naked. Would my body look like that one day? Ripe and round and lovely, the boniness and angularity smooth and soft, and the forest of darkness between my legs?

I barely slept that night and in the morning could not look directly into my mother’s eyes when she spoke to me. “Are you feeling all right?” she asked. I nodded. I kept imagining her naked body beneath her dress. In school I fell asleep in class and was gently wakened by my teacher, who put his hand on my forehead and wanted to know if I felt ill.

The weather turned cruel. Frozen snow lay crystal white upon the trees and grimy upon the sidewalks and streets. Cars moved cautiously across the ice, chains rattling. I began to wake in the night to the creaks and groans of the ice-laden trees that lined our street: eerie sounds that came through my window and seemed to inhabit the shadows in my room.

One Saturday afternoon in January my mother and I walked to Prospect Park. It was a cold blue windless day. The lake was frozen. Skaters glided across its smooth white surface. I stood at its edge with my mother and imagined myself stepping out of the rowboat into the water. Why had I done that? I could not imagine ever feeling bad enough to want to do that. And what if I had drowned? What if I had not been found? How deep was the lake? Would I now be somewhere in its depths, frozen to ice?

Walking with me along the frozen paths beneath the bare trees, my mother said the lake reminded her of the river where she had lived as a child. In the winters they had to break the ice to keep a channel open for the barges and ferries. She had learned to ice-skate on that river. But she had not ice-skated for a long time and probably could no longer do it.

I asked her where she had gone to school.

“In Vienna.”

“No, before Vienna.”

“In a little Jewish school near where I was born. It was run by a cruel old teacher who didn’t like teaching girls. He taught us to read the prayerbook.”

“Did your father study with you?”

“My father didn’t do anything with me. My grandfather taught me Bible and Mishnah and a little Gemora, and my mother taught me Polish and German.”

“Would your father be angry if he was alive and knew I was going to a yeshiva?”

“I don’t know how my father would feel about that,” my mother said. “I don’t know very much about my father. He was almost never home. Probably he would be angry. Yes, I think he would be very angry. He didn’t believe girls should be educated.”

“Was your mother very lonely because your father wasn’t home?”

“Yes. So was I. My mother once told me that terrible mistakes are sometimes made in the name of loneliness. If not for my grandfather—” She broke off, suddenly lost in some memory.

“I wish your grandfather was still alive.”

“So do I,” my mother said. “But he’s not. Shall we start back? I’m beginning to feel cold.”

On Eastern Parkway, a block from our street, we met David and his father. They had been visiting a friend and were on their way to the synagogue for the afternoon and evening services. I walked with David. My mother and Mr. Dinn walked on ahead.

“It’s really cold,” David said. “Aren’t you cold?” His face was red and he spoke through stiffened lips. “I hate this weather.”

“David, did you study the Mishnah Brochos?”

“Sure.”

“There’s something we learned in class this week that I don’t understand.”

“What?”

We walked carefully on the icy streets beneath the black frozen
trees, talking. Long shadows of buildings and trees lay upon the parkway. I listened to David, watched the dancing of his hands as he talked about words and ideas, listened to the high eagerness in his voice, saw the dark fires in his eyes. He was a little taller than I, and very thin. I wondered if he and his father had a housekeeper who cared for them. How did they live?

We continued along the street behind my mother and his father, talking about some problems I was having with Hebrew. After a while I began to invent problems; I liked watching him talk.

My mother took me to a neighborhood movie theater that evening and we saw a detective story and a love story. The love story seemed very long. More and more my mother went to such movies, either with me or alone. I liked the detective story and thought the love story boring. No one I knew talked so ponderously or breathed so heavily as the actors in those love stories.

Sometimes we took the subway into Manhattan to see a Russian movie, but my mother seemed increasingly uneasy about traveling to Manhattan. Manhattan reminded her too much of my father; certain streets caused searing pain. She would travel on party business to rallies and meetings; but that was all. By the middle of that winter, less than ten months after my father’s death, we were no longer going together to Manhattan.

Yet she seemed tenaciously loyal to my father’s memory. Often in the evenings I would see her at the desk in her room carefully going through the carton of my father’s special writing: magazine articles, newspapers, journals, typescripts. My father had become a hero of sorts to a certain segment of the political world and, at the invitation of a small New York publisher, my mother was preparing a book-length collection of his serious work. And she was, at the same time, translating into English one of the stories Jakob Daw had written during the time he had lived with us. He had left those stories with my mother.

One cold Saturday night in February we saw a movie in which a young woman was attacked and badly hurt by two men. Nothing
of the brutality was shown; the gaps were left to the imagination. Afterward my mother came out of the theater and hurried away as if I were not there. I had to run to keep up with her.

Later in our warm kitchen she said to me, as I sat over milk and cookies, “I had no idea it was such a movie. I’m sorry, Ilana.”

“I liked it, Mama.”

“Didn’t it frighten you?”

“Yes. But it was a good story.”

“They show movies like that to make money,” she said. “They are capitalist exploiters of the working class. They should tell people in advance if such things are in a movie. Please finish your milk, Ilana, and go to sleep. It’s late.”

She sat staring into her cup of coffee, a dark brooding in her eyes.

Very late that night, as I lay on the edge of sleep, she came into my room and stood near my bed. She placed the palm of her hand on my cheek. I felt her caressing me, her fingers smooth and hot. Then she bent to kiss me. Her face was wet. I heard the beating of my heart and was certain she heard it too. After a moment she straightened and went silently from the room.

On occasion Mr. Dinn would come to visit, always at night and always remaining after I went to bed. From my room I could hear them talking in the kitchen. He never ate or drank anything in our house, save a glass of water or soda, because we did not observe the laws of kashruth. I didn’t like that: it was strange having a guest in your house who refused to eat or drink there.

Once I heard him raise his voice and say clearly, “For God’s sake, Channah, open your eyes and look at what he’s doing. Those trials aren’t a travesty? The country is drenched in blood. Their constitution is a mockery and their laws are a joke. The man is a murderous barbarian!”

And I heard too my mother’s querulous reply. “He is transforming a backward country overnight, Ezra. I trust him. Whom do you want me to trust? DuPont? General
Motors? John D. Rockefeller? You know how they treat their workers. You know how they are all tied to I. G. Farben and the Fascists. Talk about barbarians! The capitalist is the true barbarian, but in a fancy suit!”

“Why do you judge socialism by its dreams and capitalism by its deeds? Is that fair, Channah? Is it logical?”

“Ezra, I judge both by their deeds. Fascism is the dictatorship of finance capitalism. If I must choose between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat, I will choose for the proletariat.”

One night in the kitchen Mr. Dinn helped me with my Hebrew homework and seemed surprised at how quickly I was learning the language. “My mother was like that,” he said.

“So was mine,” said my mother.

“Did your father also never stay at home?” I asked.

He gave my mother a quick glance and looked back at me. “My father was home.”

“What did your father do?”

“He owned a clothing factory.”

“Is he alive?”

“No. He died when I was nineteen.”

“You had ten more years of your father than I did.” The two of them glanced at each other and said nothing. “Did you hate your father for dying?”

He looked surprised. “No. I was angry. But I didn’t hate him.”

“Sometimes I think I hate my father.”

“Ilana,” my mother said softly.

“He didn’t have to try to save that nun. He didn’t even believe in religion. Why did he try to save that nun?”

“Your father was a kind and generous man,” Mr. Dinn said. “A gallant man. He saw a woman in danger and wanted to help her.”

“He shouldn’t have,” I said.

They looked at me and were quiet.

“I’m tired,” I said, after a moment. “I think I’ll go to bed now.”

I felt them looking at me as I collected my books and went from the kitchen.

Ruthie told me the next evening that she was having trouble with the composition our class had been assigned to write. I helped her with it; she helped me with my Hebrew homework. She was a serious but poor student and seemed to have difficulty remembering things.

“I wish I had your memory,” she said. “You remember everything.”

“Sometimes that’s not so good, Ruthie.”

“How far back can you remember? Can you remember to the age of five or six?”

“I remember when I was three my parents came home from a demonstration. They were all bloody. Policemen on horses hit them with sticks. My mother kept screaming about Cossacks. I remember that.”

“You remember to the age of three?”

“I wish I could forget that. I wish I could forget all the different times we moved until we moved here. Have you lived here all your life?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lucky. This is a nice house. It looks a little like a castle.”

“It does?”

“And you have a backyard with grass and flowers and a porch, and there’s even a park and a museum nearby.”

“My father won’t let me go to the museum. He says it has pictures that aren’t decent. Mr. Dinn likes our house. He once wanted to live upstairs where you live now, but his wife liked the other apartment better, so they didn’t move. You know, Mr. Dinn and your mother knew each other before they were married. I heard Mama tell Papa they once were in love, but he wouldn’t marry your mother because she didn’t believe in religion and was a Communist. Why did your mother become a Communist?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll bet Mr. Dinn knows. He’s a smart man. He knows everything.”

“He didn’t know how to keep the Fascists in the American government from sending Jakob Daw back to Europe.”

“Papa said Mr. Daw wouldn’t let him do anything.”

“He should’ve done something anyway. Smart people know how to do something even when they can’t.”

“Papa says if you tell your lawyer not to do anything, the lawyer—”

“They’re all ending up in Europe, and they’re all going to end up dead. Jakob Daw is in Europe and he doesn’t write us anymore. And my Aunt Sarah is in Europe and she doesn’t write us anymore, either. She went back to Spain. She’s a nurse and a Christian missionary. She tries to make everybody believe in Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t say that word!”

“Which word?”

“You know.”

“Jesus Christ?”

“Don’t say it, Ilana! Papa told me you’re not supposed to say his name. If you don’t say his name it means he doesn’t exist.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s what Papa told me.”

“But why can’t we say it?”

“Papa said that Christians believe that he’s their God and that the Jews killed him.”

I stared at her. “I don’t remember that in any of the stories Aunt Sarah told me. We killed him?”

“Papa said that Christians have been killing Jews for thousands of years because they say we killed their God.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t, either,” Ruthie said.

We were both frightened.

I asked my mother about it during supper that night.

“They accuse Jews of crucifying Jesus,” she said, and explained
the meaning of the word crucify. I had never thought to associate the crucifixes I saw on Christians with a slow and horrible kind of execution. “All of Europe believed it in the past and most of Europe probably believes it today. It’s one of the ways the capitalists and the Church control the working class—by turning them against the Jews. That’s the true reason Jews are hated. And that’s the true reason for all the pogroms.” She explained the meaning of the word pogrom. “An organized killing of Jews. It’s a Russian word.”

“I think Ruthie told me about that once. Were you ever in a pogrom?” “Yes.”

“Were your parents in it too?”

“My mother and my grandfather were in it. My father was with the rebbe. Please, Ilana, let’s not talk about it any more tonight. Are you done with supper? Then finish your homework.”