The Gift of Asher Lev (11 page)

My uncle rises from the recliner and turns off the lights. The paintings vanish. I am in the living room. The Evening Service is at an end. I hear the final Mourner’s Kaddish being recited by Cousin Nahum and Cousin Yonkel.

Inside the living room everyone was seated. Those in the hallway strained forward, watching. My aunt and her two daughters slipped silently into the room and sat down on their stools.

The Rebbe rose. Immediately, everyone in the living room, except the mourners, stood.

The Rebbe walked the few steps to my aunt and cousins.

“May God comfort you together with all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” His voice was soft, tremulous. “He was a good soul, a good man. I loved him as one loves a brother. I give you my blessing for strength in this time of darkness. Soon, soon the redemption will come, and there will be an end to our exile and suffering. Soon….”

He turned away and, together with his tall dark-bearded retinue, went slowly through the living room and the hallway and then through the front door and out of the house.

A silence followed. People stood about or moved slowly, as though fearful a sudden flurry of sound or action would tear apart the fabric of sanctity brought to my uncle’s home by the Rebbe.

The house slowly emptied.

Later, we sat around the dining-room table. Devorah came in with the children. “Did anything special happen in school?” I asked Rocheleh. I always asked her that when I saw her after a school day.

Nothing special had happened to her, Rocheleh reported.

I turned to Avrumel.

“Ça va, Papa,” said Avrumel. It came out “Tha va.”

“Nothing special to report?”

“My teacher asked me if my papa is Asher Lev.”

“Oh? And you said?”

“I said of course my papa is Asher Lev.”

“And your teacher said?”

“My teacher said nothing.”

I looked at Devorah. She shrugged. My father glanced at my mother. I thought I heard him sigh.

“What does the child say?” Aunt Leah asked.

I translated.

“Even in kindergarten they talk about Asher Lev,” said Cousin Yonkel in his best sour manner.

“What an honor to Yitzchok, of blessed memory, that the Rebbe came,” my mother said, in an effort to change the direction of the conversation.

“Better my husband should be alive,” my aunt said, “than the Rebbe coming to console me because he is dead.”

“The Rebbe almost never goes out,” my father said. “I am astonished that he was here.”

“Better my husband here than a thousand such astonishments,” said my aunt.

In the kitchen in my parents’ home later that night, I said to my mother, over a cup of coffee, “Have you and Papa seen Uncle Yitzchok’s art collection?”

“Of course.”

“Yonkel said they’d sell it the first chance they get.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Yonkel would probably burn it if it wasn’t worth all that
money. Someone put a lot of thought into that collection. What a shame it will be to break it up.”

“It’s theirs to do with as they wish.”

“Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and Uncle Yitzchok. What a pretty picture!”

“You should get some sleep, Asher. You look very tired.”

My father had returned home from Uncle Yitzchok’s house exhausted and had gone to bed. Devorah was putting Avrumel to sleep. Rocheleh was in her room, reading her French
Alice in Wonderland.

“Devorah tells me she is trying to persuade you to stay on for another week or two,” my mother said.

I said nothing.

“You don’t want to?”

“I’m in the middle of a lot of things.”

“We should have come more often to see you in Paris and Saint-Paul. We were both always so busy, your father and I. And the travel is so expensive. It was very difficult, especially for your father.”

“Difficult when he wasn’t there, or difficult when he was?”

She smiled sadly. “Both were difficult, Asher.”

Difficult. They had visited us twice in Paris, and once my father had come alone. And they had been with us once in Saint-Paul, and each had also come alone. They had sat in our apartment in Paris on the Rue des Rosiers and looked at our walls. The walls were crowded with paintings and posters and prints. They sat there looking around the apartment and seeing a strange world of color and form: oddly shaped sculptures in corners and on book-shelves; modernist and occasionally grotesque figures and designs on the walls. Outlandish mobiles hung from the ceiling and turned slowly in invisible currents of air. My father sat and fidgeted and stared and combed his beard with his fingers. What nightmarish congruence of fateful events could have made possible the issuance of such a son from such a father? Had he thought evil thoughts while lying with his wife? Had the moment of conception somehow been invaded by a corrupting spirit from the Other Side? Another riddle! He sat and stared at the walls and shook his head, and fled as soon as he could.

Difficult. So why does he want us to stay? Maybe it’s easier for
him with us here because this is his world. Maybe it’s easier now because we’re all older, tireder, closer to the gray time before the final darkness.

Devorah put her head into the kitchen. “Godzilla wants his father,” she said. “And I want a cup of coffee.”

I went into Avrumel’s room. “Go to sleep,” I said, “or I will never let you pose again for a painting.”

“Yes pose,” he said, undaunted by the tired threat. He had posed once, had recognized himself in the result, thought it magical that he could somehow be present inside and outside himself simultaneously, and had posed three times more. Twice I had painted him with his Shimshon doll. On occasion he would slip silently into my studio and sit holding the Shimshon doll on his lap, watching me work, waiting to be painted.

I kissed him. He smelled of warmth and fresh nightclothes and a bath and soap. He clung to me a moment, his red curls against my face. Then he let me cover him. A little more than halfway through his Krias Shema, he fell asleep.

I went back into the kitchen. Devorah and my mother were at the table. I refilled my cup and joined them.

My mother said, “I was telling Devorah about your Uncle Yitzchok’s art collection.”

“When did he start it?”

“Exactly when? I’m not sure. Perhaps your father knows. I think it may have been after your New York show, the show with the—with those paintings. He said to me once that he bought one of the paintings from that show.”

“No, he didn’t. A museum bought both crucifixions.”

“No, not one of those. He would not buy one of those. He bought another of the paintings in the show.”

“I don’t remember that. I’m always told who buys my paintings.”

“Someone bought it for him. He didn’t want you to know.”

“Why?”

“Because the show caused all the … trouble.”

“Then why did he buy a painting?”

“He was very proud of you and also ashamed of you, both at the same time.”

I glanced at Devorah. She was looking down at the table, circling the rim of her cup with a long, slender finger.

“A year after he bought it, someone—I think it was his lawyer or his accountant—offered him more than twice what he had paid for it. He said he began to realize that there was more to art than meets the eye. Those were his words, Asher. He got in touch with your Aunt Leah’s family friend, the dealer in Chicago, and started to collect art.”

We sat in silence awhile, drinking our coffee and listening to the soft rhythmic noises of the kitchen. It had begun to rain again, and we could hear it on the windows.

“Asher, what can I do to persuade you to stay on a little longer?” my mother asked.

I looked at Devorah. She kept circling the rim of her cup with her finger.

“Asher,” my mother said. “For the sake of peace in the family.”

“Let me think about it,” I said. “You really believe it will bring peace? I’ll think about it. But it won’t bring peace.”

In the bathroom I showered and toweled myself dry and gazed at the streaky outline of my face and shoulders that I had drawn in the mirror my first night here. The steam of the shower had brought it back: ghostly lines sliced into the vapor on the surface of the glass. I put my face and shoulders into the outline and stood there with the towel around my loins and my head and beard still wet. How the Spaniard hated mirrors! He saw his dying each time he looked in one. I brushed the towel brusquely across the steamed glass surface. The outline blurred and smeared and vanished.

When Devorah entered our room a few minutes later I told her I did not want us to change our plans; we would be returning home on the Tuesday-night flight.

“You will hurt your parents,” she said. Suddenly she looked her full fifty years, weary, leaden.

“We’re going home,” I said. “I’ve had my turn here.”

Her eyes blinked nervously. “I do not understand.”

“They’re trying to suck me back in, and then they’ll kill whatever I’ve got left.”

She looked stunned.

“We’re going home, Dev. We came for my uncle’s funeral, not for mine.”

The day dawned wet and disheartening. During the Morning Service the clouds broke and a pale sun emerged. After breakfast with my uncle’s family—Cousin Yonkel going on about being unable to sleep because he kept feeling the waves of contamination from his father’s art collection—I went out of the house and walked to the end of the street and turned up the avenue toward the parkway. I passed a fruit-and-vegetable store, the produce in open crates on the sidewalk and arranged colorfully inside; a large Hebrew bookstore, its windows crowded with books and toys and pictures of the Rebbe, its interior deep and tiered with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books in English and Hebrew for adults and children, stationery items, games, toys, T-shirts with Ladover mottoes—
BRING MOSHIACH NOW; SAVE A JEW AND HEAL THE WORLD; KOSHER
is
IN
—and nearly an entire wall filled with framed color pictures of the Rebbe in a variety of poses. Farther down I passed a real-estate storefront, a cosmetics store, an art-supplies and picture-framing shop, an all-night cafeteria. The street, bare of trees, lined mostly with two-story brick houses, and thick with pedestrians and Friday-morning traffic, wore a tired look; its better days were long behind it. Beyond the small neighborhood of the Ladover, the side streets were home for urban poor and drifted off into griminess and decay.

I turned into Brooklyn Parkway. It lay raw and exposed in the resurfacing project, manhole covers projecting above the brown-red earth, noisy construction machines impeding traffic. Boys in skullcaps and ritual fringes, girls in coats and long stockings, rushed to school. Sunlight slanted between the tall red-brick and whitestone apartment buildings and shone like a limpid orange-red wash upon the cracked cement squares of the sidewalks, the leafless trees, the dark asphalt. A boy went past me, ten or eleven years old, red hair, dangling earlocks, thin pale features, a dark velvet skullcap on his head, hurrying along, bent slightly forward—and the years all seemed to turn to glass, all their blurring
opacity miraculously gone, and I could see through them with shocking clarity, and I had to restrain myself from asking him if he had been born with a gift for drawing pictures.

On a corner stood the apartment house where I had been raised: five stories, red brick, wide cement walk leading to the double entrance doors. The living room facing the parkway and the trees; the window where we waited for each other to return home, where our eyes smarted with the watching and waiting and our hearts beat with dread at the dark memory of my uncle’s—my mother’s older brother’s—early death while on a mission for the Rebbe; my mother waiting for my father to return from
his
missions for the Rebbe; and my father and I waiting for my mother to return from her graduate-school classes; and my mother waiting for me to return from my long painting sessions with Jacob Kahn. The Window of Waiting. Like the wait for the end of the exile, for the redemption, for the Messiah. Endless waiting. Who lived in that apartment now? Who slept in my room? Were they Ladover Hasidim? I hadn’t asked my parents. I didn’t want to know.

A block and a half from where we had lived stood the Ladover headquarters building: three stories, tawny stone façade, leaded stained-glass windows bordered with whitestone in a Gothic style, flagstone front porch with a whitestone railing. A wide cement walk led from the street through a low red-brick wall to the wooden entrance door. Always parked in front of the building was a police patrol car with two cops inside. No one here worried about terrorist bombs the way we did in Paris. No one here was blown up in a synagogue or a Jewish restaurant. Paris and Lucien La-camp, and the restaurant across from where we had once lived on the Rue des Rosiers. The bomb must have shattered all the front windows of the apartment, spraying glass into the rooms. If not for Rocheleh, we would still have been in that apartment. But we were in Saint-Paul by then. Who was living in that apartment when the bomb went off? I had never asked. I didn’t want to know.

I turned off the street and went up the cement walk and entered the headquarters building.

Off the entrance hall, a wide flight of wooden stairs climbed to a well-lit second floor. To the right and left of the hall ran corridors that led to warrenlike offices, many behind half walls topped
with glass partitions. The doors to the offices kept opening and closing. Men in dark suits and dark skullcaps and beards kept going in and out of the doors. They spoke to one another in Yiddish or English. I heard phones ringing and saw computers on desks everywhere. I walked slowly through the building. My father had worked here for years until he had become the Rebbe’s personal secretary. The Rebbe himself had lived in an apartment on the second floor and then had moved into the more comfortable home where he lived now. On the second floor I wandered past a television studio; and a room lined with telephones under which were the names, it seemed to me, of most of the big cities of the world; and a large tinted plate-glass window behind which was a room crowded with the boards, panels, tapes, and switches of a radio station. None of this had been here when I was growing up.