My Name Is Asher Lev (7 page)

He left the following afternoon. I said to my mother that night, “What writers were shot, Mama?”

“Jewish writers in Russia,” she said.

“Were they our own people?”

“They were Jews, Asher.”

“Why were they shot?”

“Stalin ordered it.”

The dreaded name again; the demonic agent of the sitra achra. I felt cold hearing that name.

“Is Papa going to Europe?” I asked.

I saw sudden alarm in her eyes. “No,” she said, too quickly and loudly.

“I wish Papa wouldn’t travel so much.”

“Your father travels for the Rebbe.”

“I wish he didn’t travel so often. I don’t like Papa to be away so much.”

“You’ll get used to it, Asher.”

“No, I won’t. I don’t want to get used to it.”

“You will have to get used to it,” she said quietly. She was talking to herself, too. “It is your father’s work for the Rebbe.”

“Why?”

“Because his father traveled for the Rebbe’s father.”

“Yes, Mama. But why?”

She looked at me and was quiet a while. Then she said softly, “It is a tradition in the family, Asher. We have to help your father. Where are you going?”

“To the lake.”

“Asher, we’re in the middle of talking.”

“I finished talking, Mama.”

“It’s dark by the lake.”

“I know the way.”

I left and went down to the lake and threw stones into the water.

    There were nights during those years when I could not sleep. Often I would go to our living room and stand at the window and look out at the parkway. Late one night, I woke from a dream about my mythic ancestor and went to the window and pulled up the Venetian blind. It was a clear night with a full
moon that cast shadows upon the street. The street seemed deserted. Then I saw a man walking slowly along the street near the house. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back. Some distance in front of him walked two tall bearded men. About fifteen feet behind him were two more tall bearded men. The man had a dark beard and wore a dark coat and an ordinary dark hat. I could not see his face. He continued slowly along the street, a man with a beard and an ordinary dark hat walking alone in the shadows of the trees.

    On the last day of the year in which the writers were shot, a storm buried the city beneath four inches of snow. The following day, the first day of 1953, there was a bus strike and a dock strike. The city seemed dead.

I stood at the window of our living room one evening in the first week of January and thought the snow would never end. I walked through it to school the next morning, feeling it against my face and eyes. In the evening, it was still falling as a powdery mist, and the earlier snow was turning wet on the streets. Then in the night a windstorm came up. I watched the trees swaying crazily and heard the sound of the wind as it whipped around the corners of our building and blew against the windows. The wet snow froze. I walked to school on ice the next morning and discovered that one of my classmates had broken an elbow the night before when he slipped while going with his father to the synagogue for the evening service.

The next day was Shabbos. In the morning, we went to the synagogue. After lunch, my father went back to the synagogue to hear the Rebbe’s Shabbos afternoon talk. My mother and I spent part of the afternoon in the living room. We often spent time together on Shabbos afternoons. She would tell me about her week in school, and I would tell her about mine.

That Shabbos afternoon, she told me about a lecture she
had attended on the rise of Islam. One of the leaders of that religion had given orders to destroy the great ancient library of Alexandria, because he believed that his holy book, the Koran, was the only important book in the world and therefore no other book was worth preserving. The library was burned to the ground. Many of the greatest books ever written were lost forever because of that fire.

I was looking out the window at the snow on the trees. Was it the same kind of snow that fell on Siberia?

“Are you listening, Asher?”

“Yes, Mama.”

She went on with the story. Does Yudel Krinsky remember Siberia each time he sees such snow? I stared out the window and felt vaguely entombed.

“Are you all right, Asher?” I heard my mother ask.

“Yes, Mama.”

“You look pale.”

“I’m just tired.”

“You’re tired all the time, Asher.”

I said nothing.

“Do you want to tell me about your week in school?”

“Do I have to, Mama?”

“No,” she said quietly. “You don’t have to.”

I gazed out the window. “I’ve never seen so much snow. Is there this much snow in Siberia, Mama?”

She looked at me. After a moment, she said, “More, Asher. Much more.”

“More snow than this? How can anyone live eleven years in more snow than this?”

My mother was quiet.

“I’m glad Papa brought Reb Yudel Krinsky out of Russia.”

My mother said nothing. I thought I heard her sigh. We sat there together, gazing out the window at the snow.

The next morning, my father flew to Boston on a journey for the Rebbe.

It snowed all that day. A freezing wind blew through the parkway. Standing at the window, I saw the wind blow the snow in white waves across the parkway, saw the snow beating against the buildings and piling in huge drifts along the tall iron fences fronting some of the apartment-house lawns along the street.

I spent the morning doing homework and moving quietly about the apartment, careful not to disturb my mother, who was at the kitchen table surrounded by her books and papers. Mrs. Rackover did not come on Sundays. My mother prepared lunch. We ate on a corner of the kitchen table which she cleared by moving her books aside. After lunch, I read a story about the Rebbe’s father in the Ladover magazine for youth which was distributed to all the students in the yeshiva. It told of the Rebbe’s father teaching Yiddishkeit in defiance of Communist authorities and being threatened with a bullet from a Russian policeman’s pistol and responding that he had no fear of death because he believed in God and knew what awaited him in the next world. Instead of shooting the Rebbe’s father, they had sent him to prison.

For a long time after I finished the story, I lay in bed seeing the Rebbe’s father with a pistol at his head. I wondered what I would do if a Russian policeman pointed a pistol at my head and told me to stop teaching Yiddishkeit. I thought of Yudel Krinsky in Siberia. For the very briefest of moments, I thought of the drawing I had made years before of Yudel Krinsky. I did not even know where that drawing was. Then I forgot about the drawing and looked at my window. It was dark.

I went to the window. It was still snowing. I saw the snow falling through the lights of the lampposts. The night was wild
with wind and snow. I wondered how my father would get home.

I went to the kitchen. The table was cluttered with books. My mother was not there. Nor was she in her bedroom. I found her in the living room in front of the window, looking out at the snow-filled night. The Venetian blind had been raised almost three-quarters of the way and had jammed again. It lay diagonally across the verticals of the window. My mother stood with her face against the window. The room was dark.

Then the phone rang. My mother turned. She was past me even before the first ring had ended. She gave no indication of having seen me. I heard the second ring begin. It was cut short as the phone was lifted. I heard my mother’s voice, thin, tremulous. She listened a long time. Then she spoke again, in a strange trembling whisper. “I warned you,” she said. “I asked you not to go today.” She was silent a moment. Then she hung up.

I heard her go into her bedroom and shut the door.

I waited. I looked out the window at the snow. Slowly, the room began to fill with the noises of night darkness. I turned on the lights. I tried to lower the blind but I could not release its jammed left side. Finally, I gave it up and went through the hallway to my parents’ bedroom. I listened at the door and heard nothing.

“Mama,” I said.

There was no response.

“Mama,” I said again.

“One minute.” Her voice was soft and quavering. I could barely recognize it. I waited at the door. I waited a long time.

“Mama.”

“Asher, please go and wash your hands. We’ll have supper now.” She was still talking through the door in that same faint voice.

“Where is Papa?”

“In Boston.”

“Papa isn’t coming home?”

“The airplanes can’t land in the storm. Your father will come home tomorrow.”

I stood at the door and did not know what to say. In a child’s panic, I saw my father in snow up to his knees looking for a place to eat and sleep.

“Papa has a place to stay in Boston?”

“Your father will stay with your Aunt Leah.”

I had forgotten about my Aunt Leah.

“Please go and wash your hands,” my mother said through the door.

We ate cold chicken and vegetables, the leftovers from our Shabbos meals. My mother had put on her pink housecoat; her short dark hair was uncovered. Her face was pale and her eyes were dark. There was about her a little of the dead look she had had during the months of her illness.

Later that night, she came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed.

“Were you frightened, Mama?”

“Yes.”

“Were you thinking of Uncle Yaakov?”

She hesitated. “Yes.” Her voice trembled. She stroked my face. I felt the delicately boned fingers of her thin hand against my skin. “I’ll get used to it,” she said. “I’ll have to get used to it.” She was silent. Her eyes were dark and frightened. “My Asher,” she murmured. “I’m sorry to be such a mother.”

“Mama—”

“It’s not good to be so easily frightened.” Her eyes fixed on me intently. “Do you understand, my precious Asher? It’s bad to be easily frightened.”

I did not respond.

“But I’ll get used to it,” she murmured. She was silent a
long time, staring darkly at the thin hands folded on her lap. Then she stirred and put a hand back upon my face, gently stroking my cheek. “You’re not happy, my Asher. I want you to be happy.” She sighed and shook her head slowly. Then she smiled through dark moist eyes. “Please, Asher, don’t be like your mother. Don’t be easily frightened. Now let me hear your Krias Shema, my son. Say it for both of us. Speak to the good angels for both of us. Maybe they’ll help us not to be frightened.”

I said the Krias Shema. She leaned over me and kissed my forehead. “In the name of the Lord, the God of Israel,” she murmured, repeating one of the prayers in the Krias Shema. “May Michael be at my right hand; Gabriel at my left; before me, Uriel; behind me, Raphael; and above my head the divine presence of God. Amen, Asher. For us both. Amen.” She went slowly from my room and crossed the hallway into the living room. She was in the living room a long time. Then I heard her go along the hallway to her bedroom. The bedroom door closed softly. I lay in the darkness and listened to the snow on my window.

The storm ended sometime in the night. My father flew back from Boston early the next day and was home when I returned from school.

The following morning, we heard over the radio that nine doctors, six of them Jews, had been arrested by Soviet police on a charge of plotting to murder leaders of the Russian army and navy.

The blood drained from my father’s face. “Ribbono Shel Olom,” I heard him say. “What do You want from us?”

My mother had been standing near the stove. She sat down slowly. Her face was pale.

The news broadcast continued. The doctors had been accused by Moscow of being connected with the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called the Joint Distribution
Committee, which had been set up, according to Moscow, by the American intelligence service. A Soviet news broadcast had announced that the doctors had confessed to trying to kill top Soviet leaders by harmful medical treatment and bad diagnosis. They were accused of having killed Comrade A. Zhdanov, a leading member of the Politburo, by deliberately misdiagnosing his myocardial infarction.

There was a brief pause. The announcer began a commercial. My father turned off the radio.

“He’s going to use this,” my father said in a frightened voice to my mother. “He will start a blood bath.”

The phone rang. He went quickly from the kitchen.

My mother and I sat at the table in silence.

My father came back into the kitchen. “I have a meeting with the Rebbe and Rav Mendel Dorochoff.”

My mother sighed and nodded slowly.

“Eat something first,” she said.

“Later.”

“Aryeh, have some orange juice.”

He said the appropriate blessing and drank a small glass of orange juice. Then he put on his jacket and coat and hat and left the apartment.

“Will Papa go away again today?” I asked my mother.

“There will probably be meetings all day today.” She looked at me. “Let’s try not to be frightened, Asher. Remember we said we would try?” After a moment, she said, “I think your father will be going away more often now.” She said it resignedly and with darkness in her eyes.

Later that morning, I came into my school building and walked along the corridor to my classroom. Most of the students were already there. Some were settled at their desks. Others were running noisily around the room. I took off my coat and scarf and galoshes and went to my desk.

The boy in the desk next to mine looked up from the book
he was reading. He was short and chubby and wore thick glasses. I did not like him.

“How much is nine times twenty-two?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How much is nine times twelve?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll fail the arithmetic test.”

I had forgotten about that test. “I don’t care.”

“I wish my father was on the Rebbe’s staff. I could fail and get away with it also.”

“I wish it, too,” I said.

We did not have the arithmetic test that day. A special assembly was called. There were over three hundred boys in our school. We all filed into the auditorium. The mashpia, Rav Yosef Cutler, climbed onto the stage and spoke softly in Yiddish into the microphone.