My Name Is Asher Lev (3 page)

Her eyes fluttered faintly but remained closed.

“Mama,” I said again.

Her hands moved then, and she turned her head toward me and opened her eyes.

I held up the drawing. She gazed at it blankly.

“Here are the birds and flowers, Mama.”

She blinked her eyes.

“I made the world pretty, Mama.”

She turned her head away and closed her eyes.

“Mama, aren’t you well now?”

She did not move.

“But I made the world pretty, Mama.”

Still she did not move.

“I’ll make more birds and flowers for you, Mama.”

Behind me someone came quickly into the room. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“What are you doing?” Mrs. Rackover whispered fiercely in Yiddish.

“I made a drawing for my mama. I’m making my mama well.”

“Come away from here.” Her fleshy face quivered. She seemed frightened my mother would wake.

“My mama asked me to make a drawing.”

“Come away, I said.” She turned me forcefully around. I felt her pushing me out of the room. “What kind of boy disturbs
a sick mother? I am surprised at you. A good boy does not do such a thing.” She sent me to my room.

I sat on my bed and stared at the drawing. Then I was frightened in a dark and trembling way I had never known before. I went to my desk. A long time afterward, Mrs. Rackover called me to lunch. I found myself in front of a drawing filled with black and red swirls and gray eyes and dead birds.

    Relatives and friends came to visit my mother. Often my mother would refuse to see them. Sometimes she would let my father persuade her to join a group of visitors in the living room. She would sit in one of the easy chairs, looking small and fragile, and say nothing. There would be awkward silences, feeble attempts at conversation, and more silences. In those moments, my mother seemed a ghostly spectator, hollow, without a core to her being.

Her older sister, a short robust woman in her early thirties, came in one day from Boston, where she lived with her husband and four children. She sat with my mother in our living room.

“Rivkeh, you have a husband and a son. How can you neglect them? You have a responsibility.”

My father was in the room at the time. There were other relatives there, too, but I do not remember who they were.

“Look at the boy,” my mother’s sister said. “Look at him. He’s dirty. How can you let him be so dirty?”

“Asher is always dirty,” my father said. “Even after he’s bathed he’s dirty.”

“He should not be left alone. How can you leave a little boy alone?”

“He is not left alone.”

“A boy left with a housekeeper all day is alone. A boy without children to play with is alone.”

My father said nothing.

“You should send him to your kindergarten.”

“Asher doesn’t want to go to the kindergarten.”

“Then he should come and live with me,” my mother’s sister said. “We have a big house. There are four children. A boy Asher’s age should not be by himself all the time.”

“Asher likes being by himself.”

“It isn’t healthy. It leaves scars. You don’t want to leave scars on the boy. Let him live with me.”

There was a brief pause. I felt myself shivering inside.

“Let me think about it,” my father said.

My mother had been staring blankly at her sister and saying nothing.

“It’s wrong, Rivkeh,” her sister said. “The boy will have scars.” Then she said, “Rivkeh, it is forbidden to mourn in this way.”

My mother was very still.

“Rivkeh, the Torah forbids it.”

My mother sighed. Her frail body seemed to shrink even more in the large chair.

“Papa and Mama would have forbidden it,” her sister said.

My mother said nothing.

“Rivkeh,” her sister said. “He was my brother, too.”

A dark light flickered in my mother’s sunken eyes. “The Torah forbids it?” she said quietly. “It is forbidden? Yes?”

“Yes,” her sister said.

“But there are scars everywhere,” my mother said. “And who will hold my pennies?” She stared out the window at the afternoon sunlight on the trees below. “Who will tell me about the fox and the fish? Yaakov, you had to go? You left it unfinished. Who said you had to go?”

Then she lapsed into silence and would say nothing more.

Her sister stared at her, open-mouthed. Then she turned her head away and shuddered.

That night, alone in my room, I drew my Aunt Leah. I drew her in the shape of a fish being eaten by a fox.

“What did the doctor say?” I asked my father the next evening as he was helping me out of my clothes.

“To have patience.”

“Will my mama get well?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“It will take a long time.”

“Will you send me to live with Tante Leah?”

“No. We’ll think of something else. Now let me hear your Krias Shema, Asher.”

The weeks passed. The visitors ceased coming.

In the first week of March, my father began to take me with him to his office. He worked at a desk in the Ladover headquarters building a block and a half from where we lived. The building was a three-story house of tawny stone, with Gothic windows and a flagstone front porch with a whitestone railing. It contained offices, meeting rooms, a room with about a dozen mimeograph machines, two suites of rooms for the editorial offices of the various Ladover publications, and a small press in the basement. Men came and went all day long. They sat behind desks, met in conference rooms, rushed along corridors, talked frenetically, sometimes quietly, sometimes in loud voices. All the men were bearded and wore dark skullcaps and dark suits with white shirts and dark ties. No women worked inside that building; secretarial work was done by men.

On the second floor of the house, in an apartment facing the parkway, lived the Rebbe and his wife. To the left of the entrance hall beyond the carved wooden doors that led into the house was a carpeted wooden staircase. There was endless two-way
traffic up and down that staircase: men with and without beards; young men and old men; men who were obviously poor and men who were clearly affluent; men who were Jews and men who, it seemed to me, were not; and an occasional woman. Twice during those weeks, I saw a tall gray-haired man in a black beret climb the stairs and turn into the second-floor hallway. I noticed his hands; they were huge, rough, and calloused. I wanted to climb those stairs, too, but my father had told me never to go beyond the first floor of the building. I would wander through the first floor of the building alone, trying not to get in anyone’s way. People knew I was Aryeh Lev’s son; they patted my head, pinched my cheek, smiled, nodded indulgently at my drawings—I took my pad and crayons with me every day—and fed me cookies and milk.

My father’s office was the third along the corridor to the right of the entrance hall. It was a small office, with white walls, a dark-brown linoleum on the floor, and a window that looked out onto the parkway. There were filing cabinets along the wall opposite the desk. The walls were bare, except for a large framed photograph of the Rebbe that hung near the window. My father’s desk was old and scarred and seemed a relic of ancient academies of learning. It was cluttered with piles of paper and copies of
Time, Newsweek
, and the
New York Times.
Often he sat tipped dangerously back in his swivel chair, his feet on the desk, his small velvet skullcap pushed forward across his red hair onto his forehead. He would sit reading a newspaper or a magazine and I would worry that he would fall over backward, but he never did.

There were two telephones on the desk. Frequently he would talk into one or the other of them and write as he talked. Sometimes one of the men from another office would come in and sit on the edge of the desk and speak quietly with my father. I heard the word “Russia” often in those conversations.

My father spoke English, Yiddish, or Hebrew into the phones. But the second week I was in his office I heard him use a language I did not recognize. On our way back to the apartment for lunch, I asked him what language it had been.

“That was French, Asher,” he said.

“I never heard my papa speak French before.”

“I use it when I need it, Asher. I don’t need it around the house.”

“Does Mama speak French?”

“No, Asher.”

“Did you learn French in Europe, Papa?”

“I learned it in America. The Rebbe asked me to study it.”

“Didn’t the Frenchman on the phone know Yiddish, Papa?”

“The Frenchman on the phone wasn’t a Jew.”

“What did my papa speak to him about?”

“You are full of questions today, Asher. Now I have a question. Your papa also has questions sometimes. Here is my question. Do you think Mrs. Rackover made chocolate pudding for dessert? You wanted chocolate pudding.”

Mrs. Rackover had not made chocolate pudding.

Even when my father used the languages I understood, it was often not clear to me what he was saying. Calls seemed to come to him from all over the country. He would listen and write. He would talk into the phone about train and boat schedules, about this person flying here and that person sailing there, about one community in New Jersey that did not have enough prayer books, another community in Boston that needed school-books, a third community in Chicago whose building had been vandalized. At the end of a day behind that desk, he would be tired and a dark look would fill his eyes.

“I’m not made for this,” he would say. “I need people. I hate sitting with telephones.”

He would walk home with me in brooding silence.

One day, he spent almost an entire morning on the telephone
arranging to move two Ladover families from somewhere in France to the United States.

“Why are they moving, Papa?” I asked him on the way home to lunch.

“To be near the Rebbe.”

“What is the State Department, Papa?”

He told me.

“Why did you talk to that man in the State Department?”

“He’s the man who is helping the families to come to America.”

“How is he helping?”

“Asher, you’ve asked enough questions. Now it’s my turn. Are you ready? Do you think Mrs. Rackover finally made chocolate pudding for dessert?”

Mrs. Rackover had indeed made chocolate pudding for dessert. My absence from the apartment had begun to mellow her.

Late one afternoon toward the end of March, I sat in my father’s office drawing the trees I could see through his window. One of the telephones rang. My father put down his pen, picked up the receiver, and listened for a moment. I looked at his face and stopped drawing.

Lines of anger were forming around his eyes and along his forehead. Two sharp furrows appeared above the bridge of his nose between his eyes. His lips became rigid. He gripped the phone so tightly I could see the knuckles of his hand go white. He listened for a long time. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice of cold rage. He used a language I had never heard before. He spoke briefly, listened again for a length of time, spoke again briefly, then hung up. He sat at the desk for a moment, staring at the phone. He wrote something on a piece of paper, read over what he had written, made some corrections, then picked up the paper and went quickly from the office.

I sat there alone. One of the phones rang. Then the second
phone rang. The first stopped ringing. The second continued. The ringing sounded suddenly piercing and thunderous inside that little office. I went out and spent the rest of the day on the flagstone porch, drawing the street.

On the way home, I asked my father what language he had spoken.

“When?”

“When you were angry, Papa.”

“Russian,” he said.

“You were very angry, Papa.”

“Yes.”

“Did the man hurt you?”

“No, Asher. He was telling me what some people are doing to hurt others.”

“They’re hurting Jews, Papa?”

“Yes.”

We were walking together along the street. The parkway was clogged with late-afternoon traffic.

“There are lots of goyim in the world, Papa.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed.”

That evening, my mother refused to join us for supper. I heard my father through the closed door of their bedroom, pleading with her. “Rivkeh, please eat with us. We ask you to eat with us. You can’t go on like this, Rivkeh.” She would not move from the bed. We ate in heavy silence without her, served by Mrs. Rackover.

Later that night, I was awakened by the sound of my father’s voice. I went on bare feet along the hallway and looked into the living room. He was standing in front of the window, chanting softly from the Book of Psalms.

The next day, there were more phone calls in Russian. My father was tense and restless. Between calls, he sat staring morosely at the top of his desk. He went to the window and
stood gazing out at the busy parkway. He paced the floor. He seemed caged.

He saw me looking at him. “I’m not made for desks, Asher.” He rubbed the side of his face. “I should be there, not here. How can I spend my life talking on the telephone? Who can sit like this all day?”

“I like to sit, Papa.”

He gave me a dark brooding look. “Yes,” he said. “I know you like to sit.”

I held up the drawing I had made that morning of my father behind his desk talking into a telephone. It showed him with an angry face.

“It was before, when you were talking Russian, Papa.”

He looked at the drawing. He looked at it a long time. Then he looked at me. Then he sat down behind the desk. One of the phones rang. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then began talking in Yiddish. I went out and spent the rest of the day on the porch, drawing the trees and the cars and the old women on the benches along the street.

My mother joined us for supper that evening. She smoked cigarette after cigarette. She had put on one of her blond wigs, but it was awry and gave her head a grotesque elongated look. My father tried talking to her but she would not respond. Finally, he gave it up. We ate in silence. The cigarette smoke formed an acrid cloud around our heads. Mrs. Rackover moved about quietly. From time to time, I heard her sigh.