My Name Is Asher Lev (26 page)

“It is interesting,” he said. “But it is a failure.”

I put my brushes down.

“Your feelings about your mother are producing terrible art. Paint still-lifes for a while. Do some self-portraits. You are making a mess with these other efforts.”

He was merciless over failure. The subway ride back home that night was a torment.

The next day, I found another copy of the first poem in my Gemorra: “Modigliani, Pascin, and Soutine …” And two days later I found: “Asher Lev/Won’t go to Heav …”

My mother was at a meeting that night and I was alone in the apartment. I wandered through the silent rooms, stopping for a moment to gaze through the living-room window at the
parkway outside. The street had begun to feel quietly hostile to me, as if resentful of my journeys away from it and of the alien skills I brought back each time I returned. The metal lampposts felt cold to my eyes; the light they cast seemed filled with darkening mists. The trees swayed in a winter wind, their naked branches black in the night and strangely insubstantial. I saw it then, quite suddenly, and knew what I would do. One second there had been nothing, and then there was the idea. I did not understand what had happened to bring on the idea. I went away from the window and came into my room. Sitting at my desk, I drew with a pen, working slowly, calmly, and with ease, the segment from Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment
of the boat beached on the Styx and Charon striking at his doomed passengers with an oar, forcing them onto the shores of torment and hell. I drew much of it from memory, but I wanted to be as accurate as I could, so I checked it repeatedly against a reproduction in a book I had purchased on Michelangelo. I drew the writhing twisting tormented bodies spilling from the boat. I drew the terror on the faces of the dead and the damned. I made all the faces his face, pimply, scrawny—eyes bulging, mouths open, shrieking in horror. I exaggerated the talons and painted ears of Charon; I darkened his face, bringing out the whites of his raging eyes. I folded the drawing and went to bed.

The next day, on my way out of the classroom for the noon recess, I slipped the drawing into his Gemorra. I saw the sudden stiffening of his shoulders when he found it. I saw him stare at it. I saw him turn to look at me, then stop. He crumpled the drawing. But he did not throw it away. He put it into a pocket.

That night, I drew a segment from the
Last Judgment
of a man being pulled headlong into hell by serpentine demons. I drew his face on the man and put the drawing into his Gemorra the next day.

He said nothing to me about the drawings. But he began to
avoid me. His thin face would fill with dread whenever he caught me looking at him. I had the feeling he regarded me now as evil and malevolent, as a demonic and contaminating spawn of the Other Side.

I did not attempt another painting of my mother that Sunday. Instead I did a painting of the boy in my class at the moment he saw the first drawing I had slipped into his Gemorra. Jacob Kahn called the painting evil and excellent.

Two days later, my mother told me she would be going to Europe at the end of June and would remain there throughout the coming year. I was to live with my Uncle Yitzchok, or I could come with her to Europe and live in Vienna.

“Asher, look at me,” she said, in response to my pleas. “How many of me do you see?”

I did not answer.

“You see only one. There is only one of me. I can be in only one place at a time. Your father needs me. Do you understand? And I want to spend the year with your father. I don’t want to talk about it any more. The Rebbe approved of the decision. Your father will remain in Europe and I will join him at the end of June.”

“Papa will not come back for Pesach?”

“No.”

She became angry when I continued to plead that she stay. Pink spots colored her high cheekbones. Her voice became strident. She called me a child. She said that half a dozen children would not have made more demands on her than I had. Now it was time for my father. He needed her. Did I understand that? He needed her. He was exhausted from his work and he wanted her to be with him. If I wanted her, too, I would have to come to Vienna.

She stormed angrily from the room.

I talked to Jacob Kahn.

“Yes,” he said. “I know all about it. Your mother called me.”

“I don’t want to live with my uncle.”

“Why not?”

“He’s loud and fat and rich.”

“There is nothing wrong with being rich. It is the rich who buy paintings. It is when you are bought by the rich that you will know you are a successful artist.”

“He’s a boor.”

“You will have to grow accustomed to it. The world will indulge you just so long, Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.”

The mashpia called me into his office during the first week of April. The Rebbe wanted to see me, alone.

For the second time in my life, I climbed the flight of stairs in the Ladover building and went along the hallway to the waiting room. This time, the room was crowded. I was there almost an hour before Rav Mendel Dorochoff took me into the Rebbe’s office.

The Rebbe sat quietly behind the bare desk. His eyes were dark. Outside the arched window, the street glittered in the April night.

“Sit down, Asher. There, yes, sit down. It has been a while since I have seen you. But I have been kept informed. Yes. They tell me the world will hear of you one day as an artist.”

I was quiet.

“I have you in my mind and heart, Asher Lev. I pray to the Master of the Universe that the world will one day also hear of you as a Jew. Do you understand my words? Jacob Kahn will make of you an artist. But only you will make of yourself a Jew.”

I was quiet.

There was a long silence. The street throbbed faintly beneath its dark canvas of night.

“Asher Lev.”

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“Your mother has told you of my decision.”

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“It is necessary for your father and mother to be together now. For your father’s health and for your father’s work. You will live with your uncle and continue to study with Jacob Kahn.”

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“You will behave toward your uncle and aunt as you would toward your father and mother. They have accepted the responsibility of caring for you.”

“Yes, Rebbe.”

Outside the window, the street vibrated softly, menacingly, in the black night.

“Asher Lev.”

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“You are entering the world of the Other Side. Be careful. I knew your grandfather. I knew your mother before you were born. I remember you as a child. I remember your mother’s illness. Your family is very precious to me. I have looked upon you as a son. I have you and your parents constantly in my mind and heart. Be careful of the Other Side, Asher Lev.”

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“I give you my blessings and my good wishes for a kosher and joyous Pesach.”

I went quickly along the hallway and down the stairs and out into the dark street. It was cold. The street was cold. I saw a cobblestone square and a dilapidated building and trees. I saw a young man drawing figures in the dust of the square, using a stick and drawing in one continuous line the contours of hens and horses and birds. Steep narrow streets led from the square. The square was warm. Sunlight fell across the trees and the old building and the young man gazing at the hens and horses and birds in the dust out of burning dark eyes.

My street was cold now in the April night. I felt it cold against my face as I turned in to the apartment house where I lived. I felt it cold all through the first two days of Passover. Then I journeyed to galleries in Manhattan and was on streets filled with color and form. My father was not home. I had no school until the end of the festival. I used the intermediate days of the festival to wander along streets warmer than my own.

I wandered into Anna Schaeffer’s gallery. It was a large modern gallery, taking up the entire fourth floor of a tall building in the Seventies along Madison Avenue. I came out of the elevator and saw her sitting behind an ornate intricately carved desk at the far end of the gallery to my left. She saw me and motioned me over to her. She seemed delighted.

The gallery was crowded. There was a sculpture show that had received excellent notices and was attracting a great deal of attention. There were people at the desk. But she talked to me alone in a back room stacked with canvases and sculptures. Yes, she knew exactly how I was getting along. Did I know Jacob Kahn was having a show in late October? I didn’t know. Did I know he would be spending the summer in Provincetown, painting, and that he would take me with him? I didn’t know.

She stared at me. “You are Asher Lev?”

“Yes.”

“You are the student of Jacob Kahn?”

“Yes.”

“What do you do in the studio?”

“I paint.”

“You do not talk to each other?”

“We talk.”

“He is a wicked old man. He is waiting to surprise you. Do not let on I said a word. Promise.”

I promised.

She came with me to the elevator.

“One day, you will have your own show here, Asher Lev.
Then you will be famous and we will be rich. Do not forget to act surprised when that wicked old man tells you.”

He told me two weeks later. I acted surprised.

The days grew warm. The street remained cold. My mother had begun the preparations for her journey. She purchased clothes. She shipped part of her library to an address in Vienna. She rented our apartment to a family that had recently arrived from Russia. She attended meetings with the Rebbe’s staff. She defended her dissertation and received her doctorate. She seemed filled with new energy. She did everything quickly, radiantly. Sometimes I would hear her singing to herself. She seemed fulfilled.

One day, movers came and took away the small table in the living room that had been her desk. She had decided to ship that as well to the address in Vienna. It had good memories, she said. She wanted to be near that table. I stared at the empty space in the living room where it had stood, and it seemed a chasm now lay across the floor and wall near the window.

I wandered the cold street. In Jacob Kahn’s studio, I began to paint my memories of my early years on that street. I painted my mother young, with myself in her arms. I painted her holding me. I painted her walking with me. I painted us together on a parkway bench. I painted us standing against tall buildings. I painted us walking through Prospect Park. I painted us in a dreamlike green land with distant hills and pale clouds in a deep-blue sky. Week after week, I painted my mother and myself together, though I did not always give the mother and the child our faces. Jacob Kahn watched me in silence. One Sunday in June, he stood behind me as I worked on a huge canvas of a mother and child seated on a mound of grass beneath tall leafy trees. I heard him say softly, “Asher Lev, do you have any idea what you are doing?”

I told him I was painting a mother and her child.

He said nothing more to me about those paintings.

On the last Thursday in June, my mother and I took a cab to a dock in Manhattan. I held her to me. I was as tall as she now. She cried. The cabin was narrow. I held her to me and felt her small and frail in my arms.

“Have a safe journey, Mama,” I said.

Later, I stood on the dock and watched the huge ship pull away. I took a cab back to my street. I stood outside the building, looking up at the window of our living room. Then I walked slowly beneath the cold trees to my Uncle Yitzchok’s house.

    That summer I lived in a house on the edge of sand dunes. My room was a low-ceilinged attic with a window that looked out on the dunes and the beach and the ocean. In the early morning, I could see the sun on the water and the silver foaming of the surf. The sun rose through the morning mist and burned the mist away, and then was golden on the beach and white on the Cape Cod houses a few hundred yards on up the dunes, where dark scrub brush grew in the sandy earth. Gulls wheeled and called above the water and the sand, their wings stark white in the sun. I watched the gulls from the window of my room and from the porch of the house, and I painted them over and over again, using watercolors or washes of oils; painted their soarings into the sun, their wings in the wind, their wide diving circles over the surface of the waves. Often I did not paint at all, but sat on the porch listening and watching, feeling the salt wind on my face, hearing the surf and the cries of the gulls.

“An artist needs time to do nothing but sit around and think and let ideas come to him,” Jacob Kahn said to me one afternoon on that porch after I had sat on a chair for hours, gazing at the sunlight on the water and the sand and the houses farther up along the dunes. “Gertrude Stein said that once. She was an impossible human being. But she was wise.”

“Now I understand the sunlight in paintings by Hopper.”

He gazed at the houses along the dunes. “Yes,” he said. “That is Hopper’s white sunlight. One day, you will understand the sunlight in Monet and Van Gogh and Cézanne.”

Often in the early mornings, I came out of the house and walked across the dunes to the beach. The dunes were cool then from the night. I wore sandals and shorts and a shirt and had on my tefillin. Those mornings, the beach was my synagogue and the waves and gulls were audience to my prayers. I stood on the beach and felt wind-blown sprays of ocean on my face, and I prayed. And sometimes the words seemed more appropriate to this beach than to the synagogue on my street.

One morning, I finished praying and came back across the dunes and found Jacob Kahn on the porch.

“I was watching you,” he said quietly. “I used to pray once. Do you talk to God when you pray?”

“Yes.”

“I have lost that faculty. I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.”

“That’s also prayer.”

He smiled faintly, the morning sun on his face. “The Rebbe said precisely that. You are following the party line, Asher Lev. But we know it is not the same thing, don’t we?”

Sometimes in the mornings, I came out onto the porch and saw him walking with his wife across the dunes. She was a shy quiet woman with short white hair and soft brown eyes. Her name was Tanya and she spoke English with a heavy Russian accent. She loved to sit on the porch reading books in Russian and in French. I would watch them walking together across the dunes. She came to below his shoulders in height and often he would bend toward her as they walked. I would watch them together and then turn my eyes away and stare out across the waves at the distant joining of water and sky.

I would not eat food that was not kosher, so they brought
a table and chair and a portable electric stove and refrigerator into my room and I prepared my own food. Mostly, I ate canned foods and hard-boiled eggs and raw vegetables. On occasion, as I sat at the table eating, I wondered how my father had managed to eat during all his years of travel.

After breakfast, Jacob Kahn and I would set up our easels at the edge of the dunes and paint. He taught me how the Impressionists had painted light and what Cézanne had done with color and form. Once a sailboat came close to the shore and was circled by the gulls. Using washes of oils, he showed me how John Marin might have painted that. I had seen Marin’s water-colors in museums. Now I began to understand their lines of tension, their fluidity and power.

I began to understand, too, though only with difficulty, why and how he painted as he did. The canvas was a two-dimensional field, he said. Any attempt to convert it to an object of three dimensions was an illusion and a falsehood. The only honest way to paint today was either to represent objects that were recognizable, and at the same time integral to the two-dimensional nature of the canvas, or to do away with objects entirely and create paintings of color and texture and form, paintings that translated the volumes and voids in nature into fields of color, paintings in which the solids were flattened and the voids were filled and the planes were organized into what Hans Hofmann called “complexes.” I watched him paint and began to understand what he meant. But I could not paint that way myself. I needed hands and faces and eyes, though for a while now I had not needed them to be three-dimensional.

“You are too religious to be an Abstract Expressionist,” he said to me one morning. “We are ill at ease in the universe. We are rebellious and individualistic. We welcome accidents in painting. You are emotional and sensual but you are also rational. That is your Ladover background. It is not in my nature to
urge a person to give up his background and culture in order to become a painter. That is because it is not in my nature to be a fool. A man’s painting either reflects his culture or is a comment upon it, or it is merely decoration or photography. You do not have to be an Abstract Expressionist in order to be a great painter. In any event, by the time you reach your twenties Abstract Expressionism may be gone as an important movement in American painting. Though I do not think so. I think people will paint this way for a thousand years.”

Toward noon, with the sun hot and glaring overhead, we would bring our easels and paints into the house and cross the dunes to the beach. We would swim in the cold ocean water. I learned to swim that summer with the help of Jacob Kahn. He was a powerful swimmer. I would stand on the beach and watch him swimming off in the distance, his arms flashing in the sunlight. He had bronzed quickly in the sun; I had burned. Part of my first week in that house I spent realizing how fair-skinned I really was.

Sometimes, standing on that beach, I would remember the beach along the lake in the Berkshires where my mother and I had walked years ago. It seemed another world now, just as my street seemed another world, cold and distant from the warmth of dunes and summer sun. I wondered where my mother was and what she was doing. When the wondering edged into pain, I came off the beach into the water and swam beneath the sun and the wheeling gulls.

In the afternoons, we went off by ourselves and painted alone. I painted in my room or outside on the porch. He painted in his studio, a huge room that took up most of the interior of the house. It had tall windows and was always filled with light. He was painting large canvases and they lay stacked against one of the walls. I had helped him stretch those canvases, setting up a platform with horses and plywood, placing the stretchers
on top of the plywood, rolling the canvas onto the stretchers and cutting it and tacking it, fighting wrinkles and dangerous tightness. It had taken us almost a week to stretch those canvases. Now he was filling them with color and form.

I painted the dunes and the beach and the vast sweep of ocean beyond. I painted the gulls and the sun and the pale-blue arc of the sky. I painted my mother on a lakefront. I painted my father eating an indistinct meal at an indistinct table near a window overlooking vague gabled buildings and blurred lights.

One afternoon, I painted a portrait of myself in my fisherman’s cap, with my long red earlocks and the tufts of red hair on my cheeks and chin and my eyes dark but flecked with tiny spots of light. I looked at the portrait and I tucked my earlocks behind my ears.

In the evenings, Jacob Kahn and I often walked along Commercial Street. He looked at me that evening when I came down after my private supper and said nothing. We drove to the Chrysler Museum in his new Buick. Inside one of the rooms, he spent twenty minutes explaining the structure of a huge Picasso to me. Then we came out into the night and walked along Commercial Street. It was crowded with traffic and people.

“This is a street I like,” he said. “But in five years it will be for tourists. Still, it is a good street.”

He wore dungarees and a light shirt and sandals. People greeted him repeatedly as we went along the street. He took me into some of the galleries. The owners all knew him. He introduced me to everyone who spoke to him.

In one of the galleries on Commercial Street, we stood in front of a series of canvases and he said to me, “I do not like geometric abstraction. It has no contact with our time. It is not in touch with what is human in man. Mondrian is a great artist.
But he cannot express the feeling that is necessary in a painting if I am to care for it.”

A man came over to us, tall and tanned, with dark hair and pale-blue eyes. They shook hands. The man was an artist. He had a show in a nearby gallery. Had Jacob Kahn seen it? No? He ought to see it. Who’s the boy? Asher Lev? Nice to meet you, kid. Had Jacob Kahn heard the word that the heavy money would probably be in Tokyo in five to ten years? That was the word. The whole art world was going to shift to Tokyo. That was where the next center of art would be. New York was through. He himself was thinking of moving to Tokyo in a year or two. Nice to meet you, Jack. Nice to meet you, kid. Catch the show if you can. He went out of the gallery into the crowded street.

“Every trade has them,” Jacob Kahn said. “They are called whores.”

We walked along the street in the warm night. There was the salt smell of the ocean and the dark star-filled sky and the odors of broiling fish and meat from the open-air restaurants. We walked together a long time. Then we drove home.

We stood on the porch of the house and looked across the dunes to the ocean. We could hear the distant thunder of the surf along the shore.

“Asher Lev,” Jacob Kahn said softly. “Do not become a whore.”

I stared at him. His face was indistinct in the dark night.

“It is not likely that you will starve as an artist. It is also not likely that you will become very rich. Anna tends to be optimistic with her artists. In any event, poor or rich, do not become a whore.”

I told him I had no intention of becoming a whore.

“No? You are already on the way, Asher Lev. I would not object if you did that to your payos out of conviction. But you
did it out of shame and cowardice. That is the beginning of artistic whoring.”

I felt my throat thicken. “My father wears his payos behind his ears. Some Ladover Hasidim do not even wear payos. They aren’t that important to us.”

“Asher Lev, an artist who deceives himself is a fraud and a whore. You did that because you were ashamed. You did that because wearing payos did not fit your idea of an artist. Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist. It is of no importance to me whether you wear your payos behind your ears or whether you cut off your hair entirely and go around bald. I am not a defender of payos. Great artists will not give a damn about your payos; they will only give a damn about your art. The artists who will care about your payos are not worth caring about. You want to cut off your payos, go ahead. But do not do it because you think it will make you more acceptable as an artist. Good night, Asher Lev. Tomorrow morning, I will begin to teach you what Kandinsky tried to accomplish. I will also show you why Abstract Expressionists are indebted to Chaim Soutine.” He peered at me intently in the darkness. “Asher Lev, did I upset you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I spoke bluntly. It is not in my nature to be circumspect about important matters.”

I was quiet.

“Good night, Asher Lev.”

He went into the house.

I stood alone on the porch and stared out across the sands at the water and the night. There was a wind now from the ocean, cool and damp against my face. The porch ran the length of the house and was screened off from the outside. The darkness throbbed softly with the earth life of an ocean shore. I heard the
tapping of insects upon the screen. A mosquito buzzed nearby, strangely loud in the pulsing night. Distant laughter floated toward me, borne by the night wind. I felt hot, and I shivered. And I was ashamed.

We did not talk again about my earlocks. I left them as they had been, loose and long against the sides of my face.

Nor did we talk about how we spent Shabbos. I would not paint on Shabbos. I spent Shabbos mornings praying and reviewing the Torah reading. I spent Shabbos afternoons studying a book on Hasidus I had brought with me. Jacob Kahn spent Shabbos mornings on the beach with his wife and Shabbos afternoons painting.

On Tisha b’Av, I read the Book of Lamentations aloud to myself in my room. I fasted and would not paint. I sat on the porch in the afternoon, watching the sun on the sand. Tanya Kahn sat nearby, reading. She looked up at one point and in her heavy accent said quietly, “When will you be able to eat, Asher?”

“After dark.”

“You are skin and bones. You should not starve yourself.”

I did not respond.

“My younger brother was very religious. Like you. Everyone admired him. But the Nazis killed him anyway. It did not do him much good to be so religious.”