My Name Is Asher Lev (32 page)

I did not know. But I sensed it as truth.

I painted my grandfather. Over and over again, I painted him now, seated in dusty rooms with sacred books, traveling across endless Russian steppes, dead on a dark street with an axe in his skull, his journey incomplete.

Outside my window, there was snow. A cold wind blew through the boulevards and stripped the last dead leaves from the trees.

I remembered my father during my mother’s illness. He had been as torn by her illness as by his inability to journey for the Rebbe. I had never been able to understand that torment. Now I wondered if journeying meant to him more than a way of bringing God into the world. Was journeying an unknowing act of atonement? In the dim past, a village had burned to the ground and people had died. The Gemorra teaches us that a man who slays another man slays not only one individual but all the children and children’s children that individual might have brought into life. Traditions are born by the power of an initial thrust that hurls acts and ideas across the centuries. Had the death by fire of those individuals been such a thrust? Was my ancestor’s act of atonement to extend through all the generations of our family line? Had he unwittingly transmitted the need for such an act to his children; had they transmitted it to their children?

I did not know. But I sensed it as truth.

I remembered my mother and the long quiet conversations between her and my father when I had been a child. Surely she had sensed the depth of his feelings about his journeys. She, too, had told me stories about my mythic ancestor. Had she somehow dimly perceived the true nature of my ancestor’s journey? Then, perceiving it, had she joined her brother’s incompleted task to my father’s beginning journeys and thereby, without being fully aware of what she was doing, made possible the continuation
of the line of atonement? Had I, with my need to give meaning to paper and canvas rather than to people and events, interrupted an act of eternal atonement?

I did not know.

Now I thought of my mother and began to sense something of her years of anguish. Standing between two different ways of giving meaning to the world, and at the same time possessed by her own fears and memories, she had moved now toward me, now toward my father, keeping both worlds of meaning alive, nourishing with her tiny being, and despite her torments, both me and my father. Paint pretty pictures, Asher, she had said. Make the world pretty. Show me your good drawings, Asher. Why have you stopped drawing? She had kept the gift alive during the dead years; and she had kept herself alive by picking up her dead brother’s work and had kept my father alive by enabling him to resume his journeys. Trapped between two realms of meaning, she had straddled both realms, quietly feeding and nourishing them both, and herself as well. I could only dimly perceive such an awesome act of will. But I could begin to feel her torment now as she waited by our living-room window for both her husband and her son. What did she think of as she stood by the window? Of the phone call that had informed my father of her brother’s death? Would she wait now in dread all the rest of her life, now for me, now for my father, now for us both—as she had once waited for me to return from a museum, as she had once waited for my father to return in a snowstorm? And I could understand her torment now; I could see her waiting endlessly with the fear that someone she loved would be brought to her dead. I could feel her anguish.

Then I found I could no longer paint and I walked the winter streets of the city and felt its coldness. There was snow and rain and the city lay bleak and spent beneath the dark skies. I wandered through museums and galleries. I walked the winding
streets of Montmartre and peered through the misty windows of its shops and restaurants. I walked up the mountain of steps to the Sacré-Coeur and wandered through its awesome dimness. I remember that during all this walking and wandering letters went back and forth between me and my parents and between me and Anna Schaeffer. My father had fallen and hurt his leg, but was well now. Jacob Kahn’s show had been very well received. My uncle was fine. Yudel Krinsky was fine. It was all vague. Even the walking and wandering was vague. I could not paint.

The rains ended. There were days of blue and warming air. One day, I sat in a café over a warm Coke around the corner from the Sacré-Coeur and found myself drawing the contour of the Duomo
Pietà
on the red tablecloth. I looked at it and paid for the Coke and returned to the apartment.

I sat at my table in the apartment and drew the
Pietà
again, leaving the faces blank. I drew it a third time and made the two Marys into bearded males and made the central figure into one of the Marys. Then I drew the central figure of Jesus, alone, head bent and arm twisted, alone, unsupported. Then I left the apartment and went down the narrow stairs and came out onto the street. I walked beneath the trees of the boulevard and was astonished to discover tiny green buds on the branches. Was the winter gone? Was it spring?

I returned to the apartment and sat at the table and thought of the
David
and its spatial and temporal shift. I looked at the painting of the old man with the pigeons that stood against a wall. And it was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be no other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way.

The preliminary drawings came easily then. After a while, I put them away. It was Passover, and I rested.

On a warm spring day, with the sun streaming through the tall window and leaves now on the chestnut trees of the boulevard, I started the painting. I sketched it in charcoal on the huge canvas, drawing the long vertical of the center strip of wood in the living-room window of our Brooklyn apartment and the slanted horizontal of the bottom of our Venetian blind as it used to lie stuck a little below the top frame. I drew my mother behind those two lines, her right hand resting upon the upper right side of the window, her left hand against the frame over her head, her eyes directly behind the vertical line but burning through it. I drew the houses of our street and the slanting lines of the blind and the verticals and horizontals of near and distant telephone poles. Then I went away from it and came back the next day and reworked some of the geometry of its forms. Then I painted it—in ochres and grays, in dark smoky alizarins, in tones of Prussian and cobalt blue. I worked a long time on my mother’s eyes and face. I had used a siccative. The paint dried quickly. I took the canvas down and put it against a wall. I felt vaguely unclean, as if I had betrayed a friend.

The following day, I put a fresh canvas on the easel. It was a small canvas and I thought I would fill it quickly. But I found I could not paint. I stood and stared at the canvas. I put the charcoal stick away and tried to do a drawing on paper. I could not draw. I came out of the house and walked down the cobblestone street to the boulevard. Girls in summer dresses walked beneath the trees. I returned to the apartment and looked at the blank canvas. I found I was sweating. I felt the sweat on my forehead and back. I removed the clean canvas from the easel and put the large canvas of my mother in its place. Then I looked a very long time at the painting and knew it was incomplete. It was a good painting but it was incomplete. The
telephone poles were only distant reminders of the brutal reality of a crucifix. The painting did not say fully what I had wanted to say; it did not reflect fully the anguish and torment I had wanted to put into it. Within myself, a warning voice spoke soundlessly of fraud.

I had brought something incomplete into the world. Now I felt its incompleteness. “Can you understand what it means for something to be incomplete?” my mother had once asked me. I understood, I understood.

I turned away from the painting and walked to the yeshiva. I had supper and prayed the evening service. I returned to the apartment. Children played on the cobblestone street below my window. I stared at the painting and felt cold with dread. Then I went to bed and lay awake in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the street through my open window: a quarrel, a distant cough, a passing car, the cry of a child—all of it filtered through my feeling of cold dread. I slept very little. In the morning, I woke and prayed and knew what had to be done.

Yes, I could have decided not to do it. Who would have known? Would it have made a difference to anyone in the world that I had felt a sense of incompleteness about a painting? Who would have cared about my silent cry of fraud? Only Jacob Kahn, and perhaps one or two others, might have sensed its incompleteness. And even they could never have known how incomplete it truly was, for by itself it was a good painting. Only I would have known.

But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence.

I stretched a canvas identical in size to the painting now on the easel. I put the painting against a wall and put the fresh canvas in its place. With charcoal, I drew the frame of the living-room window of our Brooklyn apartment. I drew the strip of wood that divided the window and the slanting bottom of the Venetian blind a few inches from the top of the window. On top—not behind this time, but on top—of the window I drew my mother in her housecoat, with her arms extended along the horizontal of the blind, her wrists tied to it with the cords of the blind, her legs tied at the ankles to the vertical of the inner frame with another section of the cord of the blind. I arched her body and twisted her head. I drew my father standing to her right, dressed in a hat and coat and carrying an attaché case. I drew myself standing to her left, dressed in paint-spattered clothes and a fisherman’s cap and holding a palette and a long spearlike brush. I exaggerated the size of the palette and balanced it by exaggerating the size of my father’s attaché case. We were looking at my mother and at each other. I split my mother’s head into balanced segments, one looking at me, one looking at my father, one looking upward. The torment, the tearing anguish I felt in her, I put into her mouth, into the twisting curve of her head, the arching of her slight body, the clenching of her small fists, the taut downward pointing of her thin legs. I sprayed fixative on the charcoal and began to put on the colors, working with the same range of hues I had utilized in the previous painting—ochres, grays, alizarin, Prussian and cobalt blue—and adding tones of burnt sienna and cadmium red medium for my hair and beard. I painted swiftly in a strange nerveless frenzy of energy. For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats. For the
Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting—an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.

I do not remember how long it took me to do that painting. But on a day of summer rain that cooled the streets and ran in streams across my window, the painting was finally completed. I looked at it and saw it was a good painting. I left it on the easel and went to the yeshiva in the rain and had supper and prayed. Then I walked through the streets of the city and felt the rain on my face and remembered how I had once watched the rain of another street through windows that seemed so distant now and that I suddenly wanted to see once again.

A few days later, I thought I would destroy the paintings. I had done them; that was enough. They did not have to remain alive. But I could not destroy them. I began to paint in a delirium of unceasing energy. All through that summer, I painted my hidden memories of our street. Sometime during that summer, Avraham Cutler introduced me to a family and I returned the greetings of a girl with short dark-brown hair and brown eyes. Later, there were more greetings. Someone once said that there are things about which one ought to write a great deal or nothing at all. About those greetings, I choose to write nothing at all.

Looking old and elegant and rich, Anna Schaeffer showed up at the apartment one fall day on one of her European talent hunts.

She gazed a long time at the two large paintings.

“They are crucifixions,” she said very quietly.

I said nothing.

“Asher Lev,” she murmured. “Asher Lev.” That was all she seemed able to say. She stared at the paintings. A long time later, she looked at me and said, “They are both great paintings.” Then she added, “This one is truer than the other,” and pointed to the second of the two canvases.

I was quiet.

She looked again at the paintings. Then she said, “What will you do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you come back to America for the show?”

“Yes.”

We were quiet then, gazing together at the paintings.

“How is Jacob Kahn?” I said.

“He is working to reach ninety.” After a moment, she said, “Where is the beret I sent you?”

“In a drawer.”

“You should wear it.”

“No.”

“All right,” she said gently. “Now, please, you will go outside and take a very long walk.”

We shook hands. I walked for hours through narrow streets and along wide boulevards. When I returned, the paintings were gone. I looked out the window of the room that was my studio, and I wept.