My Name Is Asher Lev (2 page)

I drew my memory of my father and me walking together to our synagogue. He was so tall and I was so short, and he would incline his head toward me as we walked. I drew him as
he prayed at home in his prayer shawl and tefillin on those weekday mornings when for some reason he could not go to the synagogue. He would stand at our living-room window, his head covered with the prayer shawl, swaying faintly back and forth, with only the edge of his red beard protruding from the white black-striped shawl.

I drew my memory of him praying in our synagogue on Shabbos, garbed in his prayer shawl, only his red beard visible. I drew my memory of him weeping on Yom Kippur as he chanted the prayer describing the slaughter of the ten great sages by the Romans. I would stand close to him in the white sanctity beneath the prayer shawl and I would see him cry as if the killing were taking place before his eyes. I drew my memory of him carrying the palm frond and citron on the festival of Succos, the small lemonlike fruit dwarfed by his large hand. I drew my memory of him lighting our Hanukkah candles on the sill of our living-room window. He would chant the blessings and light the candles and my mother and I would join him in the songs. Then he would stand a long time at the window and watch the tiny flames burning against the huge night.

Often on Shabbos or festivals, I would see him in the living room, studying Talmud or a book on Hasidus. Sometimes I would find him looking at the passage in the tractate
Sanhedrin
, “Any man who has caused a single Jewish soul to perish, the Torah considers it as if he had caused a whole world to perish; and any man who has saved a Jewish soul, it is as if he had saved a whole world.”

I asked him once, “Is it only if he kills a Jewish person, Papa?”

“No, Asher. Elsewhere the same passage appears without the word ‘Jewish.’”

“Papa, how can a man who kills one person be like one who kills a whole world?”

“Because he also kills all the children and children’s children who might have come from that person.”

“Why do you study that so often, Papa?”

He smiled faintly and his eyes grew dreamy. “My father liked to study it often, Asher.”

And I drew my memory of my father studying that tractate of the Talmud.

He said to me once, gazing at one of my drawings, “You have nothing better to do with your time, Asher? Your grandfather would not have liked you to waste so much time with foolishness.”

“It’s a drawing, Papa.”

“I see what it is.”

“A drawing is not foolishness, Papa.”

He looked at me in surprise. But he said nothing. I was almost five at the time.

He was indifferent to my drawing; he thought it something children did when they were very young and then outgrew. But I continued to draw him anyway, though after a while I stopped showing him the drawings.

I drew my memory of him singing zemiros during our Shabbos meals. My mother and I would sing with him. He had a deep voice but he sang softly, his eyes closed, his head thrown slightly back so that I could see the white skin of his neck below the start of the thick growth of red beard.

I drew my memory of the first time he sang his father’s melody to Yoh Ribbon Olom during the Shabbos meal four days after the death of his mother—a haunting tune that carried with it pain and suffering and faith and hope. “Yoh ribbon olom, ribbon olom veolmayoh,” he sang, his eyes closed, his voice soft and quavering, the upper part of his body swaying faintly back and forth between the back of his chair and the edge of our dining-room table. “Ant hu malka, melech melech malchayoh …”
He paused, swaying. He let the pause linger tremulously, then continued, “Ovad gevurtaich. …” Tears flowed from his closed eyes. My mother looked down at the table. I stared at him. I felt my mother’s hand on mine.

That melody echoed inside my head for days. Again and again, I drew my memory of my father singing his father’s melody.

He sang it again the week my mother was taken to the hospital.

I have only vague memories of the darkness and fog of that week. It was January. I had just turned six. There was a phone call. My father rushed from the apartment and returned a while later, the blood driven from his face. Then my mother began to scream. The phone rang endlessly. The apartment filled with relatives and friends. My mother continued screaming. People moved about aimlessly, their faces filled with horror and shock. I was in my room, peering out the door, which I had opened to a tiny crack. I watched the faces of the people and listened to my mother’s screams. A cold uncontrollable trembling took possession of me. Something had happened to my mother. I could not endure the screams. They cut—like the sliver of glass that had once opened my hand, like the curb of the sidewalk that had once gashed my knee. The screams cut and cut. People were becoming frenzied and hysterical. I heard loud weeping. Then, suddenly, the noise died. My mother stopped screaming. There were whispers. I peered into the hallway. Two tall dark-bearded men came along the hallway. Behind them walked a man of medium height, wearing a dark coat over a dark suit. He had a short dark beard and wore an ordinary dark hat. He walked in the path cleared by the tall dark-bearded men. People murmured softly as he passed. His presence seemed to fill the apartment with white light. It was the Rebbe. Behind the Rebbe walked two more tall dark-bearded men. The Rebbe was in my
house. I was certain my mother was dead. I lay down on the floor in my room, and wept.

Later, someone remembered me. I was taken to a neighbor’s apartment. The next day, I was brought back. My mother was not dead. She lay in her bed, but I could not see her. Uncle Yaakov had been in an accident, my father explained. A car accident. In Detroit. While traveling for the Rebbe.

My Uncle Yaakov was my mother’s only brother. He had been to our apartment only three days before. He would visit us all the time. He lived alone two blocks away. He was short and slight and dark-haired, with brown eyes and thin lips. He looked like my mother. He was studying history and Russian affairs. He was to be an adviser to the Rebbe. His favorite expression was “What’s new in the world?” He spoke in a soft voice and was gentle. Now he was dead of a car accident at the age of twenty-seven.

The following day, my mother was taken to the hospital. That Shabbos, my father sang his father’s melody to Yoh Ribbon Olom. We were in his older brother’s home a few blocks away from us, for his sister-in-law would not hear of us having Shabbos in our apartment without my mother. We sat at the table that Friday night and there were long silences and feeble attempts at zemiros by my father’s brother. And then, suddenly, my father began to sing his father’s melody.

There was an unearthly quality to the way he sang that melody that night—as if he were winging through unknown worlds in search of sources of strength beyond himself. His eyes were open, fixed, but gazing inward. There was a sweetness and sadness, a sense of pain and yearning in his voice—soft, tremulous, climbing and falling and climbing again. And when he was done there was a long silence—and in that silence I thought I heard distant cries, and I was afraid.

Late, late that night, I came slowly awake from dream-filled
sleep and heard the melody again and thought I was still dreaming. But even when I knew I was truly awake the melody still went on. It was my father’s voice coming from our living room. I saw him standing in front of the window. The huge Venetian blind had been pulled up. It stood rigidly perpendicular to the two tall rectangles that were the window’s frames. A single small light glowed faintly in the baseboard socket near the window—the light we left on in that room all through Shabbos. It cast weak shadows across the floor and a soft reddish glow on my father’s face. He stood looking through the window at the street outside, quietly singing his father’s melody. He wore his dark-red dressing gown over his pajamas. A tall skull-cap covered his head. His sidecurls hung uncombed alongside his cheeks. The room was dark save for the single weak night light. I stood in the doorway behind him and saw his face reflected in the window. I saw his eyes and watched his lips move. He held his hands to both sides of his head. Standing there, with the room in shadows and his faintly illumined features reflected in the window that looked out onto the dark street, he seemed to spread himself slowly across the wide night, to embrace and cover the darkness with his blanket of melody and soft light.

    My mother returned from the hospital and my father stopped traveling.

The Rebbe’s staff had suffered a number of casualties since its reorganization in America after the Second World War: one of its members had had a heart attack while on a mission in West Germany; a second had been in a serious car accident in Rome; a third was badly beaten one night in Bucharest. There had been others. But my mother’s brother was the first to die.

There had been a special kind of relationship between my mother and her brother, and his death almost destroyed her.

She had always been thin; she returned from the hospital skeletal. At first, I did not know who she was. I thought there had been an error, that somehow they had sent back the wrong person.

For the first few days, she remained in her bed. Then she came out and moved specterlike about the apartment in her nightgown, her eyes dark dead pools, her short dark hair uncombed and uncovered by a wig. She would not speak to anyone. I thought she had lost her voice until I heard her talking in the living room late one afternoon and found she was talking to herself.

“You had to go?” she was saying. “Yes? Why did you have to go? How will I cross the street?”

I felt cold listening to her. I said to my father that night as he was putting me to bed, “Is my mama going to die?”

He drew in breath sharply. “No, Asher. No. Your mama is not going to die.”

“Is my mama very sick?”

“Yes.”

“Will my mama get better?”

“Yes, with God’s help.”

“I want my mama to get better. I want to make pretty drawings for her.”

My father hugged me to him. I felt his beard on my face. “Now go to bed, Asher. And let me hear your Krias Shema.”

She wept easily. She tired easily. She cared nothing for the apartment, for food, for the things a person must do to stay alive.

A woman came into the apartment every day to clean and cook. Her name was Mrs. Sheindl Rackover. She was a widow with married children, short, plump, stern, energetic, and fiercely pious. She spoke only Yiddish. My mother avoided her. My mother avoided friends and relatives. She avoided me. She
avoided my father. She seemed to cringe in the presence of another person.

One day, sitting alone in our living room, she began to sing. It was a Hasidic melody, but I did not recognize it. She was imitating a soft voice.

“Why does my mama sing that way?” I asked my father that night.

“What way?”

“In Uncle Yaakov’s voice.”

He was helping me put on my pajamas. His hands trembled. “Your mother is remembering her brother, may he rest in peace.”

“Papa, you remember Uncle Yaakov.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t sing like that, Papa.”

He turned his head away for a moment. Then he said, “It’s time for sleep now, Asher. Let me hear your Krias Shema.”

I found her alone in the living room one afternoon about a week after she came back from the hospital. I said to her, “Mama, are you feeling better?”

She gazed at me but did not seem to see me. Then I saw a flicker of light in her eyes.

“Asher?”

“Mama?”

“Asher, are you drawing pretty things? Are you drawing sweet, pretty things?”

I was not drawing pretty things. I was drawing twisted shapes, swirling forms, in blacks and reds and grays. I did not respond.

“Asher, are you drawing birds and flowers and pretty things?”

“I can draw you birds and flowers, Mama.”

“You should draw pretty things, Asher.”

“Shall I draw you a bird, Mama?”

“You should make the world pretty, Asher. Make it sweet and pretty. It’s nice to live in a pretty world.”

“I’ll draw you some pretty flowers and birds, Mama. I’ll draw them for you right now.”

“Never mind,” she said sharply. She looked out the window. “It’s not complete. Can it make a difference? Tell me how.”

And the dead look returned to her eyes.

She seemed to hate the kitchen and would flee from it as soon as she was done eating. She never came into my room. She either lay in her bed, sleeping or staring at the ceiling, or she sat on the sofa in the living room, gazing out the window at the street below.

She began to smoke. She sat in the living room wreathed in smoke, the ashtrays on the end table beside her spilling over. Mrs. Rackover muttered to herself as she cleaned the ashtrays, but she said nothing to my mother. I began to find stubs of gray ash on the floor of the apartment.

About two weeks after my mother returned from the hospital, I came into my parents’ bedroom late in the morning and found her in bed. It was a large double bed. She lay beneath the green quilt, looking shrunken. Her face was sallow. Her bony hands protruded from the sleeves of her nightgown. She had seemed dead when I came in, but now her eyelids fluttered open and she raised her head from the pillow and looked at me. She started to speak, stopped, and lay back on the pillow. She gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, then closed her eyes. Her closed eyes looked like ashen knobs in the blue-gray darkness of their sockets.

I stood there for a long time. She seemed to be barely breathing. There was a strange fetid odor in the air.

I had come to show her a drawing I had made earlier that morning. It was a drawing of two birds. One of the birds was in a nest; the other was settling into the nest, its wings wide
and fluttering. The nest was pale yellow, the birds were orange and deep blue, and there were green leaves and red flowers everywhere. There was a pale-blue sky and white clouds and birds off in the distance. The bird in the nest had large round black eyes.

I stood alongside the bed and watched my mother’s slow breathing.

“Mama,” I said.