Davita's Harp (40 page)

I had asked my mother, shortly before she remarried, what her new name would be.

“Dinn,” she said.

“And my name?”

“Ilana Davita Dinn.”

“Why?”

“That’s the way it will be, Ilana.”

“Not Chandal?”

“No.”

“I don’t want to lose Papa’s name.”

“Your new father will adopt you and you will have his name.” “What does adopt mean?”

She explained it to me. To take as one’s own child. Papers and courts and signatures and—a new name. I found I could not reconcile myself to no longer carrying my father’s name. I told myself I would do something about that one day.

In the library at Sea Gate I asked the librarian one day if she knew the meaning of the word Chandal. She knew my name had been Chandal and was now Dinn. She searched for it in the dictionary on her desk and could not find it.

“Perhaps it hasn’t any meaning,” she said. “Sometimes words and names refer to sounds and not to things or ideas.”

I went to the shelves, found two more books by the author of the book I had read and returned, and brought them to the librarian. She stamped them and said, “I found your word. Chandal. I went to our largest dictionary. Not precisely that word, but the one closest to it.”

She pointed to the huge dictionary she had brought over to her desk. I followed her finger and read, “chandala: an Indian of low caste:
OUTCAST; UNTOUCHABLE
; esp.: the son of a Sudra by a Brahman woman.”

“I don’t understand what that means,” I said.

She explained it to me.

“But Chandal can’t mean that,” I said.

“That is all I can tell you, Ilana. That is the closest to Chandal that I am able to find.” Chandala. Chandal. I told my mother.

“No,” she said. “It can’t have any connection to that. How could it?”

It seemed strange not to know the meaning of your own name, even if it was a name you were no longer using.

“What does our name mean?” I asked my new father one Shabbos that August on our way back from the little synagogue where we prayed—the synagogue to which I had once followed David and his uncle. “Din means law in Hebrew, doesn’t it?” I added.

He smiled. “I don’t think it’s connected to that, Ilana. Dinn is a town in southern Germany.” “What does it mean?” “I don’t know,” he said.

One Sunday afternoon my mother and I went swimming together while David and his father sat on the porch studying Talmud. We came dripping out of the water and lightly toweled ourselves and lay on our blanket with our faces to the sun. I began to tell my mother of the dreams I had been having that summer.

“No more dreams about Baba Yaga?” she asked when I was done.

“No.”

“Good-bye to Baba Yaga. I’m glad. Only dreams about birds falling into the ocean and a gray horse chasing you through the school and Jakob Daw coming to America and David jabbing you with his fountain pen. That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“How busy you are at night, Ilana.” She raised herself on one elbow and gazed at me, squinting in the sunlight. Over her face
seemed to come a sudden startling realization. “Your body has begun to change,” she said very softly. “Perhaps soon you will begin to menstruate.”

I sat up and looked at her and heard the beating of my heart. I knew that word from school. Menstruate. Unwell. Got your period.

“Come with me, Ilana. I want to show you something.”

She took me to the wet sand along the edge of the sea. There she drew with her finger the outline of a female body. “Listen to me, darling. Let me explain this to you.” And she gave me a dictionary lecture about the word menstruate, its origin and meaning, and a biology lecture on what would soon be happening inside my body. She went on for what seemed to me to be a very long time. I listened to her and heard also the thumping of my heart. “When it starts,” my mother said, “you will have become biologically a woman. I’ll show you how to take care of yourself.”

She fell silent. I stared at the figure in the sand. The surf rolled in from the sea, licking at the drawing as it had once licked at my castles.

“Does it still happen to you, Mama?”

“Of course. It stops when you become pregnant.”

I looked at her and saw the color rise in her cheeks. She shook her head with a smile. “No, darling, I am not pregnant. Shall we go back in for another swim? It’s very hot today.”

I marveled at my mother. She seemed so easily to have become once again an observant Jew. She still read the
New Masses
—for the fine writers it published. She remained a fervent advocate of the working class and an opponent, as she put it, of the greed and rot of capitalist exploiters. When she spoke of Stalinist communism her voice shook with anger and bitterness, with her sense of having been used and duped and betrayed. She had been brought up well by her mother and grandfather and was familiar with the details of those parts of the Commandments a woman needed to observe. She lit candles on Friday evenings and was scrupulous with regard to the laws of kashruth. Her household was neat,
clean, orderly. She had two pasts now. On occasion I saw returning to her eyes the old dark brooding look. During her years with my father she had thought often about her religious past; now she reflected upon her Communist past. She seemed unable to bring together those two parts of herself. And that haunted her.

I realized, as we sat together week after week in the little synagogue in Sea Gate, that she never prayed. One Shabbos during the service I quietly asked her about that.

“A woman is not required to pray,” she said.

“What do you mean?” All around us women were praying.

“A woman may pray if she wishes. But she is not required to pray. That’s the law. Ask your father. I don’t wish to pray. I prefer to read the Bible instead.”

The women’s section in that little synagogue was even more confining than the one in the yeshiva synagogue. A heavy muslin curtain had been drawn across the last few rows from wall to wall, forming a space that resembled a large cage. We could hear the service and see nothing. I found no holes or tears in that curtain. My new father was leading the service. I enjoyed hearing his deep baritone voice and wished I could see him.

Two days later he brought back with him from the city a letter from Jakob Daw. A brief note inside the envelope told us that someone had carried the letter from Marseilles to Dakar and had mailed it to us from Mexico.

We sat around the kitchen table in the cottage and waited as my mother read the letter. She read very slowly, then looked up.

“Is Uncle Jakob all right?” I asked.

“He’s been in the hospital again.”

“Can he leave Marseilles?”

“He’s trying very hard.”

One night soon after they were married I had heard my mother and new father talking about Jakob Daw. Now I imagined him in his flat in Marseilles. A small, dark, bug-ridden room on a narrow, dirty street.

“Papa, can’t you get Uncle Jakob to America?”

My new father looked down at the table and slowly shook his head.

“The Fascists in the government won’t give him a visa?” “Ilana,” my mother said.

“They’re not Fascists,” my new father said. “Don’t throw that word around so easily, Ilana.”

“Papa,” David said quietly. “You can’t do anything?”

“All the doors are closed. When I knock no one answers.”

There was a brief silence. Through the open windows came the sounds of the ocean and the warm evening wind.

My mother stood up, folded the letter carefully, and put it into a pocket of her apron. “I’ll wash my face and we’ll have supper. All right? Whose turn is it to set the table?”

Later I walked alone on the beach, watching the eastern horizon slowly pale and darken in the aftermath of a lovely sunset. I walked along the edge of the sea and saw, farther down the beach, a man in rumpled trousers and a creased shirt. I came up to him and he turned to me with a sad half-smile and said, “You see what people will do to you when they do not like your stories?” I stared at him, my heart thundering. But of course he had not said that; all he had really said was, “It’s a pretty night, ain’t it?”

I had never seen him before and wondered who he was and how he had got through the guards onto the beach.

“You live here?” he asked in a very quiet voice. His face looked blurred in the fading light. He was thin and pale and had straight dark hair and dark glittering eyes.

“Yes. In that house.”

“A pretty house. Would you like to take a walk with me?” I looked at him.

“We could take a walk and I could buy you an ice cream. Would you like that?” His voice had risen slightly. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“No,” I said, and felt myself shiver.

“I could buy you a pretty doll. And we could see a nice movie. Wouldn’t you like that? There’s a Charlie Chaplin movie playing in Coney Island. That’s not far. What do you say?”

I turned and walked quickly away from him up the beach toward the house. The wind blew suddenly hard and the ocean seemed very loud and my heart beat so fast I thought it would burst. Was he following me? On the dunes outside the cottage I turned and looked back. He was gone. Had I imagined it? For a long moment I felt a swooning sense of weakness, a blurring of lines between real and imagined worlds. The feeling was still with me as I climbed the stairs to the screened-in porch where David sat chanting a passage of Talmud.

Two days later my new father brought back with him a second letter from Jakob Daw. It had been mailed to an address in Casablanca, where the letter in its original envelope had been placed in a fresh envelope and mailed to an address in Rio de Janeiro. There the letter in its two envelopes had been put in a third envelope and mailed to our apartment.

The letter was addressed to me. I read it in the strong light of the late afternoon sun while sitting on the dunes and facing the sea and a warm east wind.

“Dear Ilana Davita. Are you well? I am quite ill. I lie in bed and remember the stories I told you. Do you remember them? I am never certain what happens to my stories. Your new father—your mother’s letter reached me after a few weeks of wandering—is a good man. I thought to cross Spain to Lisbon and go from there to South America. But it appears that I am too ill. The doctors here do not look directly into my eyes when they speak to me. Do you wear your glasses when you read and write? Always remember to do that so you can see the world sharply and truthfully. Truth is often very painful, but it alone will save us. How is our little bird? Does it still nest peacefully in our harp? Ilana Davita, sooner or later birds grow weary and close their eyes. Some fall from the heavens while in flight, dropping like stones to the earth, others run into a mountain, a house, a tree. Still others are caught in the talons of a bird of prey. And still others simply fall asleep, and sleep on and on and on. Care for our bird and do not let it close its eyes. It is wrong to face this world with one’s eyes closed, no matter how deep the weariness. It is a world of mountain-dwelling
black horses. Keep your eyes open, wide open, Ilana Davita. Of what use is a bird with its eyes shut—save to be cooked and eaten? Are you on the beach this summer? I remember your castles as dreams in the sunlight, each with its own story. Now I think I will rest again. Try to remember the stories of your Uncle Jakob.”

In the kitchen my mother and new father were talking quietly together. David was somewhere in the cottage. I walked along the dunes, holding the letter in my hands and listening to it jerk and snap in the wind as if it were alive.

Later I showed the letter to my mother. She read it and began to cry. I let David and my new father read it.

“I admire that man,” my new father said. “But he should have let me fight for him. He might still be here.”

My mother said nothing.

That evening I walked on the beach for a long time. At a distant jetty I saw a solitary figure standing barefoot in the surf, gazing out across the sea. He wore baggy trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. Gulls wheeled overhead in wide circles, screaming. I saw the man begin to walk slowly into the surf. I watched as the water lapped at his knees and thighs. Waves broke against him. And then, as I watched, he disappeared: the bobbing light that was his face winked out, vanished. I stood very still, looking for the man, but saw no one. I ran back to the cottage and told my parents what I had seen.

My mother stood at the sink, staring at me. My father called the police.

I walked with my father across the beach to the edge of the surf where I had seen the man enter the water. The waves rolled and crashed in the hot wind.

Two policemen came across the sand, burly men, walking steadily and deliberately toward me and my father.

One of them said, “You the party that called?”

“Yes,” said my father.

The other took out a pad and asked for my father’s name. “My daughter saw it happen.”

“What’s your name?” “Ilana Davita Dinn.”

He wanted to know my age and where I lived. He wanted to know what I had seen and if I could describe the man. He put away his pad.

The four of us stood there, staring out at the sea.

“We’ll call it in,” one of the policemen said.

They walked off, going back across the sand to the street where they had left their car.

My father and I stood there a moment longer.

“Was that what he really looked like?” my father asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?” “Yes.”

He sighed. “All right. Let’s go back. It’s late.”

My mother said to me later that night, “Are you well, Ilana?” She put her hand on my forehead. “You’re running a fever.”

I lay in bed gazing up at the ceiling and wishing I had not left the door harp in the apartment.

I was in bed four days. David came into my room on the morning of the first day and stood at the foot of the bed. He looked shy and would not gaze at me directly.

“How are you feeling, Ilana?”

“Sick. I wish I could read, but my eyes hurt.”

“Did the man on the beach really look like that?”

“Yes.”

“They haven’t found anybody yet. They’re looking as far as Brighton.” I said nothing.