My Name Is Asher Lev (25 page)

I drew her again the following Sunday, and it was easier. I drew her again the Sunday after that, and it was easier still.

I had been traveling to Jacob Kahn’s studio on Sundays and Tuesdays, and sometimes on Thursdays. Now I began to go almost every day. A few times, he was not there and I worked alone. On occasion in the late afternoons, artists would come in, men whose paintings I had seen in reproductions and in the Museum of Modern Art. I would listen to them talking with Jacob Kahn. It was during those late-afternoon conversations that I learned about the Social Realists and Regionalists of the Depression decade; about the Federal Art Project; about the mottoes “Paint Proletarian” and “Paint American”; about Stuart
Davis’s attack against the Regionalist John Steuart Curry; about the group called the American Abstract Artists and their rejection of Impressionism, Expressionism, and Surrealism; about Neoplasticism and Abstract Cubism and Russian Constructivism; about gesture painters and color-field painters; about Abstract Expressionism. I painted and listened. I understood some of it and remembered most of it. Once the introductions and curious glances were over, they did not seem to care about my skullcap and earlocks. They only seemed to care about my painting.

My parents returned to the United States by boat on the first Sunday of September. I did not see Jacob Kahn again until the middle of October.

    I barely recognized my father. He was gaunt. He limped badly. His eyes were tired. His beard was turning gray. He was nearly forty, but he looked to be sixty. I cried inside myself when I first saw him.

He came into my room two days before Rosh Hashonoh and stood leaning against the wall near the doorway. I had turned the room into a small studio. An easel stood near the window. There were reproductions of great paintings all over the walls. My father stood near Andrea del Sarto’s
Sculptor
and Raphael’s
School of Athens.
I had been working on a canvas when he had come in. I stopped and put down my brushes.

“Please sit down, Papa.”

But he stood near the doorway and would not come further into the room. He was in his own home, but my room had become alien ground to him.

He said wearily in Yiddish, “I have not even had a chance yet to talk with my son. How are you, Asher?”

“I am feeling well, Papa.”

“You look well. You look—happy.” He gazed slowly around the room at the reproductions on the walls, at the clutter of
drawings on my desk and dresser and bed, at the canvases stacked beneath the window and along the wall near the closet. “You have been busy,” he murmured.

I was quiet.

He looked at me. “Jacob Kahn is a good teacher?”

“Yes.”

“I have known Jacob Kahn for a long time. He was one of those the Rebbe helped bring from Paris before the Germans came. He is a good person.”

“Are you well, Papa?”

“Yes. But I am tired.”

“You’ve lost weight.”

“I have worked hard. But we are succeeding now. It was nearly creation out of nothing. Now there is something. In Paris and Rome and Vienna and Geneva, there is now something.” He looked at me sadly. “All this material, Asher. The paper and the paints and the easel. All this you bought with the money you made doing errands for your Uncle Yitzchok and Reb Yudel Krinsky?”

“Mama helped. Jacob Kahn helped.”

He nodded slowly. Then he said, “I am not reconciled, Asher. I am unable to accept what you are doing. I have told the Rebbe I am not reconciled.”

I was quiet.

“It is not possible for me to accept this.” He moved his arm in a weary gesture, indicating the reproductions on the walls, the canvases near the window, the drawings on the desk. “This is not what I wanted from my son. In this matter, I do not care what the Rebbe tells me. You are my son, not the son of the Rebbe. I am not reconciled. Asher, do you intend to go to college?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“You will continue to study with Jacob Kahn?”

“Yes.”

“You will not be able to come to Europe?”

“No.”

He nodded slowly. “The Ribbono Shel Olom is sometimes unkind. What would it have hurt Him to have kept the sitra achra away from you? What? Do not forget your people, Asher. That is all I ask of you. That is all that is left for me to ask of you.”

I was quiet. There was a long silence. He turned and started from the room.

“Papa.”

He looked at me.

“Were you in Russia, Papa?”

He blinked and stiffened. He said very quietly, “Sometimes there are questions that should not be asked, Asher. I also have questions I do not ask.” I saw him looking at the drawings on my desk. I followed his eyes. He was looking at one of the drawings I had made of the nude model in Jacob Kahn’s studio. I had signed and dated the drawing. The date stood out clearly beneath the signature. “Good night, Asher.” He went quietly from the room.

My mother said to me one day during Succos, “Asher, do you think you could move in with your Uncle Yitzchok if I went with your father to Europe?”

I stared at her and was afraid.

“Your father needs me. I was here when you needed me. Now your father needs me.”

“This year?”

“No. Next year.”

“I don’t want to live a whole year with Uncle Yitzchok.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We’ll talk about it,” she said. “You are not the only member of this family with special needs.”

My father returned to Europe in the second week of October and I resumed my journeys to Jacob Kahn’s studio.

    I came into the kitchen one night in November and found my mother staring at the table.

“Mama?”

She looked up at me.

“Is anything wrong, Mama?”

“No. I was—remembering.” Her voice sounded strange.

“Remembering?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Just—remembering.”

Another night, I found her standing alongside her table in the living room, gazing out the window at the dark street. The table was piled high with her books and papers.

“Mama?”

She did not respond.

“Mama?”

“Yes, Aryeh,” she said softly. “Of course. I’m coming.”

“Mama, are you all right?”

She turned then, startled. “Asher,” she murmured. “Asher.” She seemed small and frail and I thought she had been crying.

One Shabbos night in December, we sat together at the dinner table and after a pause during zemiros she began to hum my father’s melody to Yoh Ribbon Olom. Her eyes were closed. She hummed softly. I had the feeling she was not aware of what she was doing. She opened her eyes and smiled faintly. Then she looked quickly around. She seemed surprised to find herself with me. She began another melody. I joined her and we sang together.

She said to me a few nights later, “You’re out so late, Asher. What do you do in the library so late?”

“I study.”

“For school?”

“No. For Jacob Kahn.”

She looked at me in surprise.

“Art history. Reproductions. It’s very important, Mama.”

“Can’t you bring the books home, Asher?”

“A lot of them are reference books, Mama.”

“It’s very lonely here at night, Asher.”

At breakfast one morning in January, my mother said to me, “I finished my dissertation, Asher. The university is asking me about my plans for next year. Shall I tell them I’ll be in New York?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

She sighed softly and was quiet.

I heard her in the living room late that night talking to herself in strained whispers. I had wakened from a dream about my mythic ancestor. I had not dreamed about him for a while now. He had made up for his absence. My heart pounded from the dream. I felt the blood in my head. I lay rigid in my bed, and then heard my mother in the living room. She was whispering words I could not understand. Then I recognized the sounds of the words. She was whispering in Russian. I lay in my bed and did not know if I was more terrified by the dream or by my mother’s whispers. After a while, she stopped. I heard her slippered feet come through the hall. Then she went into her room.

I could not sleep. I turned on the light and went to the bathroom. I came back to the room and sat at the desk and could not draw. I went back to my bed. Faint light framed my window by the time I was able to sleep.

Jacob Kahn watched me work on a painting in his studio that Sunday afternoon, and after a while he said angrily, “What
are you doing? Stop it. You are making a mess. Where is the unity of form? The colors do not hold together. Wipe it out and start again.”

I put the brushes down.

“What is the matter with you today? Are you ill?”

“No.”

He looked at the canvas. “What were you painting?”

“My mother.”

He looked at me. “You are not ready yet to move away from representational form. You think such painting is a joke?”

I felt my face go hot. “No,” I heard myself say. “I never thought it was a joke.”

“I am sorry,” he said quickly. “That was a foolish thing to ask. I apologize. Now, pick up your brushes and start again. You are making a painting. I do not care what your painting is about. First it must be a painting. Straighten out your feelings inside yourself and make a painting. Or go home and take a shower and go to sleep.”

I wiped the face from the canvas. But I could not do anything else. I could not even paint a line.

“I don’t know what I want to say. I don’t know how I feel.”

“Go home, Asher Lev. We all have impossible days.”

My mother said to me sometime during the week, “Asher, why don’t you want to live with your Uncle Yitzchok?”

“I don’t.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t.”

“You’re not being nice,” she said. “You’re behaving like a child.”

“A summer is all right. But not a whole year.”

“Once you would have been delighted for our permission to live with your Uncle Yitzchok.”

I did not say anything.

“I have to make a decision in the next few weeks, Asher. The university has begun hiring staff for the coming year.”

“I don’t want to be alone, Mama.”

“I know,” she said. “But it may be time for you to concern yourself with what others want, Asher. You are not the only person with needs in this world.”

I could not sleep that night. The next night, I slept and dreamed of my mythic ancestor, who came thundering through dark primal forests of tall moist trees, shouting at me in a voice that splintered the words into long slivers of metal. I woke and remained awake the rest of the night.

The next morning, I fell asleep over my Gemorra in class and was awakened by the teacher’s heavy hand on my shoulder. He was a short round man with a dark beard and glittering dark eyes and he was considerably less indulgent toward me than my other teachers had been.

“Rembrandt sleeps,” I heard him say in Yiddish. “The whole world must hold its breath while Rembrandt sleeps.”

Soft laughter moved through the classroom. Eyes fastened upon the teacher. I had been the butt of their laughter for years now; I was still unaccustomed to it.

The teacher glared down at me. “Listen, Rembrandt Lev.” There was loud laughter. “In my class, no one sleeps. You have to sleep, go home. In my class, we study Torah. We do not study how to sleep. If you fall asleep again in my class, I will make life bitter for you. Do I make myself clear? Are my words simple enough for you to understand? If you fall asleep and make people say sha sha, I will make your life bitter like gall gall.”

There was a slowly widening ripple of laughter as the explanation of the play on the name Chagall was whispered through the room. The teacher turned and walked up the aisle to his desk.

That was the day someone slipped a note into my Gemorra during the lunch recess. I found it when I returned to my desk. It was written in ink on white paper and printed in block letters:

I looked up from my seat in the back row of the room. I felt the blood in my face and head. I looked carefully through the room. The teacher’s voice droned dully over a passage Gemorra. A few seats in front of me to my right, I saw a student’s head begin slowly to turn in my direction. I looked quickly down at the poem. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the smile spread quickly across the pimply face. I could almost hear the high piercing voice: “Here comes Asher Picasso Lev, the destroyer of Torah. Make way for goy Lev. Hey, Asher, do you draw dirty pictures, too? Draw a dirty picture for the mashpia. Draw me, Asher Lev. No, draw me, Asher Lev. Draw me. Draw me.”

I folded the note and put it into one of my pockets. I could see the block letters and the words. Soutine lived in strife; Pascin took his life … I saw those words all the rest of that day in school and was still seeing them that night as I lay in my bed trying to fall asleep.

The next day, there was another note in my Gemorra:

That night, I found myself seated at my desk, shaking with rage. I sat in front of a blank sheet of drawing paper and felt the rage like a wild torrent inside me. I had never felt such rage before; I wanted to kill him, to beat him and smash him and kill him, so I would never again have to see his pimply face or hear his piercing voice. I drew a line on the paper. Then I drew circles and points and whorls. I drew more lines. I looked at the paper. It was meaningless and absurd and very bad. I threw it away.

My mother said to me on Saturday night, “I will be back late. Don’t wait up for me.”

“Is the meeting about Russian Jews, Mama?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to talk to the Rebbe about next year?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you to go away, Mama.”

“I know what you don’t want. Good night, Asher.”

I worked a long time on a canvas in Jacob Kahn’s studio the next day. I avoided recognizable forms. He came over to me and peered at the canvas.