Davita's Harp (46 page)

He let his eyes move across my face, then looked away. “The faculty was sure you would understand. We will give the Akiva Award to a boy, and you will have your two prizes. That is what was decided.”

There was another long silence. I felt myself beginning to sweat. I kept my knees tightly together. He looked at me.

“llana?”

“Yes.”

“Is the prize worth a fuss? It’s after all only a prize, and you don’t study for the sake of a prize, do you?” I was quiet.

“We would be the only yeshiva with a girl as head of the graduating class. Your name and picture would be in the newspapers. What would the world think about our boys? It would not be nice.”

I said nothing. Sweat trickled down my back and sides. I could not believe what I was hearing. There was a long silence.

Mr. Helfman sat back in his chair and looked at me. “You may go to class now, Ilana,” he said from behind his desk.

I slid off the chair and went to the door. I felt his eyes on my back. The door closed behind me with a soft click.

I stood in the corridor. It was noisy and crowded with students. I found I was trembling. I went to the bathroom and sat on a toilet. I felt vaguely nauseated and stood with my head against the cool tile wall. I closed my eyes and felt the floor slowly move beneath my feet. I opened my eyes and washed my face and went to class.

Mr. Helfman stood behind his desk. I slid into my seat. He gave me a brief glance. We were studying Deuteronomy, chapter 16, and were about to begin verse 18. He called on Reuven Maker to read. I sat with my eyes on the text, listening to the words. “You shall appoint judges and officers for your tribes, in all the settlements that the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice.” Reuven Maker read the Hebrew text and translated the words flawlessly into modern spoken Hebrew. “You shall not judge unfairly; you shall show no partiality; you shall not take bribes, for bribes blind the eyes of the discerning and upset the plea of the just. Justice, justice shall you pursue….”

I closed my Bible and rose from my desk and started slowly toward the door, “Ilana!” Mr. Helfman called.

I did not turn. It was like rising and stepping slowly out of the boat into the lake. Slowly and deliberately and who cares what they think or say. I could feel them all looking at me as I opened the door and went out of the room and closed the door behind me.

I walked quickly home in the sunlight and golden air of that warm spring morning.

My mother was in the kitchen. She was astonished to see me home so early. I told her about the meeting with Mr. Helfman.

She stared at me. “You must have misunderstood what Mr. Helfman said, Ilana. I want you to go back to school.”

I went into my room and lay on my bed.

Soon after my father came home that day he knocked on the door of my room. He stood in the doorway, frowning, and said, “Tell me exactly what happened, Ilana. Word for word, if you can remember. Everything.”

When I was done he stood in the doorway looking at me for a long moment. Then he turned and went from the room.

David came home and passed by my door and said hello. He poked his head inside. “What’s the matter?”

I told him.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, and went up the hallway to the kitchen.

I lay on my bed and heard the three of them in the kitchen, talking.

After supper my father went downstairs to talk to Mr. Helfman. I was in my room when he returned. I heard him in the kitchen with my mother. The two of them came into my room.

I lay on my bed and looked at them standing near the door.

“What did Mr. Helfman tell you?” I asked.

“Exactly what you said,” my father told me.

“I’m furious about this,” my mother said. “They are not going to get away with it. It’s absurd and petty and stupid!”

“I intend to look into it, Ilana,” my father said. “No one is going to do this to my family, I don’t care who he is.”

They went from my room. The harp sang sweetly from the door.

My father brought a chair over to the phone in the hallway and sat there, making calls. When I fell asleep that night, he was still on the phone.

He told us over breakfast the next morning, “There’s someone on the board of directors who’s responsible. I don’t know who it is, but I’m going to find out.”

“Can one member of the board do this?” David asked.

“It depends upon who it is. And how much he gives the school.”

“You mean money?” David asked.

“Yes,” my father said.

I sat there looking down at the table and said nothing.

By the end of the day my entire class knew: Reuven Maker would receive the Akiva Award. Only Ruthie knew what had happened between her father and me.

“I’m going to tell him,” she said to me during the afternoon recess in the front yard.

“Who?” I said.

“Reuven.”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t take it now even if they changed their minds.”

She stared at me.

“It’s not worth anything anymore, Ruthie. It’s—it’s shit.” She gasped. Her mouth fell open. I left her standing there and walked away.

Mr. Helfman said to me a few days later, “You didn’t hand in your weekly essay, Ilana.” I said nothing.

He said to me from his perch behind the desk, “I want you to bring it in tomorrow.”

We were alone in the classroom. I stood in front of the desk, looking at him and saying nothing.

“Ilana, are you listening to—”

Someone knocked on the door. Mr. Helfman turned. The door opened. A man stepped quietly into the room and closed the door behind him.

Mr. Helfman took in a deep breath and rose quickly to his feet and stood staring at the man near the door.

He was a small, thin-shouldered man in his early or middle fifties, with pale gaunt features and dark eyes. He wore a dark gray striped suit and a gray felt hat. He looked tired and his eyes seemed red and weary behind his silver-rimmed spectacles, as if he had not slept in a long time. He coughed lightly and held his hand to his lips.

“Did I come at a bad time?” he asked quietly.

“No, no,” Mr. Helfman said in a deferential tone I had never heard from him before.

“You were not in your office, and I thought—”

“It’s all right, it’s fine,” Mr. Helfman said. He turned to me. “You can go now, Ilana.”

I went from the room. The man near the doorway looked at me as I went past him. I felt his eyes on me. He reminded me vaguely of Jakob Daw.

In synagogue that Shabbos Mr. Helfman said to me, “Good Shabbos, Ilana. How are you?”

“Good Shabbos,” I said politely, and turned and walked away from him.

He said to me in school, “You still haven’t turned in your essay, Ilana.” I said nothing.

“The term isn’t over yet,” he said. “I don’t want to threaten you.”

Still I said nothing.

For a long moment he stood behind his desk, looking at me. Then he dismissed me with an abrupt wave of his hand.

My father said to us that night during supper, “It had nothing to do with Mr. Helfman. He was against it from the start.”

“What do you mean?” my mother said.

“He was against the decision not to give the award to Ilana. The faculty voted for it because word came down from the board.”

“I don’t understand,” David said.

There had been secret figures behind the decision, my father said. Authorities in high academies of learning who had let it be known through intermediaries that they would look with disapproval upon a yeshiva where a girl was publicly shown to be the best student of a graduating class that had boys in it. This had not been a mean and petty decision, my father said, but a statement of strong policy from some of the most powerful figures in the Torah world. What sort of future students of Torah would come out of a class where the best student was a girl? And how could a high academy of Torah learning accept any boy from such a class? But no one would say with certainty who those mysterious authorities had been.

“I don’t believe it,” my mother said.

“That’s what I was told,” my father said.

“Some of the boys in my yeshiva heard about it,” David said, “and are laughing because a girl is graduating first in the class. They’re calling it a school for wives.”

“I cannot believe this is happening,” my mother said.

When had I heard her say that before? When my father had disappeared in Spain? When Jakob Daw had been deported? I cannot believe this is happening.

“Mr. Helfman wanted me to get the award?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father said.

“Thank you,” I said.

I went to my room and was up most of the night and handed the essay to Mr. Helfman at the start of class the next day. He
took it without a word and returned it to me the following day. I had titled it with the Hebrew words “Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue.” It was an analysis of the comments of Rashi on that verse: “Seek after a proper court of law….” He returned it without comment and I saw on top of its first page, in red ink, the Hebrew letter aleph.

My father stopped making phone calls and inquiries. In the end the issue, such as it was, faded away. Even Ruthie stopped talking about it. How long could anyone be expected to remain upset over such a small indecency?

I was graduated from that school on a sunny day in the middle of June. The large room was crowded. All our family was there. Aunt Sarah had been invited but wrote that she couldn’t come because her mother was very ill. I wore stockings and white shoes and a white short-sleeved dress with a square neck, a cinched waist, and a flared skirt. I wore a corsage of roses. My long hair was pulled up at the sides and caught in the back in a barrette. It was a hot day and people sat fanning themselves with the program, which carried in bold type the names of all who were receiving awards and prizes.

To my surprise, Reuven Maker’s name was not listed as the recipient of the Akiva Award; it was given to another male student in the class. I had avoided looking for the pictures and announcements in the newspapers. Reuven Maker received the prize in mathematics.

I do not remember what the boy who received the Akiva Award said in his farewell talk.

I was given the English prize and the Bible prize and an honorable mention in history for an essay I had written on the Spanish Civil War.

Reuven Maker came over to me immediately after the graduation ceremony.

“I don’t want anything I don’t earn, Ilana,” he said. “It wasn’t
mine, it was yours. What they did wasn’t right. If that had happened to me …”

He left the sentence unfinished.

Later I saw him walk up to a small, thin-shouldered man. The two of them embraced. It was the same man who had come into Mr. Helfman’s classroom some weeks back, the man who had vaguely reminded me of Jakob Daw.

Some hours after the graduation ceremony I lay on my bed listening to the sounds of the wind in the tree outside my open window. It was early evening. Soft light lay upon the street. My parents were in the kitchen, listening to the news. David was in his room, studying Talmud.

I lay in my white graduation dress with my hands over my eyes, thinking about the day. The dense crowd milling outside the school building. Handshakes and congratulations and smiles and noise, and the glances of my classmates—some sad, others smirking—who knew what had happened. I lay very still and felt the anger rising within me. How sweet it could have been! How proud I could have made my family! And it was mine, really mine. And it had been stolen from me for a reason I could not control: I was a girl. What else would they steal from me in the coming years? I would accomplish something, and they would tell me I couldn’t have it because I was a girl. I had made this community my home, and now I felt betrayed by it. It was like turning a corner in one of the neighborhoods where I had lived as a child and never knowing if that gang leader with the pimpled face and glittering eyes would suddenly come upon me. How could I be a part of such a community? I felt suddenly alone. And for the first time I began to understand how a single event could change a person’s life. I could understand something of my mother’s terrible moment in that forest and my father’s in Centralia and Jakob Daw’s in the gas attack. How do you fight faceless phantoms? What would the westering women do now? What would
Uncle Jakob do? They would use their imaginations. Uncle Jakob would write a story. I didn’t want to write a story. I only wanted to say a few words of good-bye. That’s all. A few words of good-bye.

I lay on my bed and kept going over the day again and again. You can’t call it back. It’s gone. Like my little baby brother. Gone. Like Papa. Gone. Like Uncle Jakob. Gone. Like Guernica. Gone. Like everyone who is dying in the war. Gone.

I felt the wind blowing into the room, felt it warm against my hot face. How I raged inside myself! I had wanted to show that I could be a Jewish hero—a scholar. I had wanted to enter Jewish history. I had wanted to be part of that warm and wondrous world—and they wouldn’t let me. They had denied it to me because of a circumstance. An injustice had been performed by a world that taught justice. How could I live in that world now? How could I be part of its heart and soul, its core? Why should I continue to be part of something that behaved this way? How could I trust it?

I lay very still with my hands over my eyes, feeling the anger like a boiling juncture of tides. The wind moved through the room, stirring the wooden balls of the harp. The harp sang softly in the stillness….

That was strange. How could so gentle a wind stir the harp to music?

I opened my eyes and sat up on the bed.

The harp hung on the door, covered by shadows. The softest of music was coming from it, faint, as if borne on wind, and an odd distant fluttering as of a waking bird shaking and fluffing and stretching its wings. I sat on my bed, listening….

And then—and then Ilana Davita came down from the bed and walked slowly to the harp and stood very still, gazing up at it, and quite suddenly the harp began to grow before her eyes, quickly, growing and growing. And then with a start she realized that it was not the harp that was growing larger but she, Ilana Davita, who was growing smaller. In her white shoes and white dress and
stockings, smaller, quickly smaller, so that the balls of the harp were suddenly like huge boulders and the strings thick, the size of the trees that Paul Bunyan used to cut down. And then she was suddenly lifted by the wind that blew in through the window and brought gently into the circular heart of the harp—and there she found herself between the black bird of Jakob Daw and the gray bird of Guernica; Ilana Davita, in her white graduation dress, between birds that were now fully awake and stirring. Wings brushed against her, beaks pecked gently at her arms. The birds stood, wings outspread, and began to grow. They stood on the edge of their circular nest, craning their necks, pecking into their feathers, stretching. Then they flew off, each to one side of the harp, and grasped the harp with their talons and lifted it off the door. The harp yawed and swayed and sang as the birds flew it carefully through the room; and, from the circular heart of the harp, Ilana Davita saw the wall near her bed and the picture of the beach and the stallions. The wall and the picture came closer and closer, and in a moment she could see nothing but the picture, and suddenly she was through some kind of unseen wall and inside the picture, and she could hear the wind that blew in from the water; and the birds, their wings fluttering, brought the harp down ever so gently on the grass near the front stone step of the farmhouse and lifted her out and set her down on the wooden porch.