The Gift of Asher Lev (14 page)

The afternoon slowly waned. I went with the men to the synagogue for the Afternoon and Evening Services. The Rebbe did not appear. After the final Mourner’s Kaddish, my father and I returned with my cousins to my Uncle Yitzchok’s home. The period of mourning resumed.

I did not think a private home could contain as many people as my uncle’s home held the next day. Many who had been there the previous week returned; others came for the first time. It was the final full day of mourning. Ladover arrived from Rome and London; two arrived from the Ladover village in Israel; one from
Bucharest; one from Buenos Aires. There were muted conversations with my parents; condolences were repeatedly offered my aunt and cousins. The shuffle of tight bodies and chairs; the subdued voices; the body-heated air. It was very late when my parents and I returned home.

The children were asleep. Devorah was in bed, reading. I fell asleep with the lights on and dreamed I was in Jacob Kahn’s studio in Manhattan, painting a nude, and my father sat nearby, watching, his face the shape of a sphere, smooth and without expression.

The next morning, after the service and the final Mourner’s Kaddish, my uncle’s family and my father sat for a while on their low stools. About two dozen men occupied the wooden folding chairs. They sat there talking quietly about my Uncle Yitzchok. Then the men filed past the mourners and spoke the traditional words of consolation—and the mourners rose from their stools and left the house and walked slowly around the block and returned to the house. The week of mourning was at an end.

The house was silent, empty of visitors. I helped Cousin Nahum and Cousin Yonkel fold and stack the chairs. I asked Cousin Nahum for the key to his father’s study. Cousin Yonkel glowered, but Cousin Nahum gave me the key ring without a word. We went into the kitchen for breakfast.

My aunt sat at the table, crying. No consoling crowd now; no distracting bustle. She fled into the den, and her two daughters and my mother went after her. Cousin Yonkel and Cousin Nahum said they had business to take care of; they excused themselves and left. My father said he wanted to look at the mail that had accumulated in his office during the past week. I found myself alone in the kitchen with the dishes and the food and the sudden crushing silence of the house. I sat and stared out the window at the terrace and the lawn and thought of Max Lobe and John Dorman and the valley and the walled village on the hill, and was eager to return home. Tomorrow morning the meeting with Douglas Schaeffer. Tomorrow night the flight home. I sat there thinking of home.

Afterward I climbed the stairs and went along the carpeted second-floor hallway and opened the door to my uncle’s study. How velvety the silence, how feather-soft the stillness of calmly
anticipated astonishments! I turned on the lights and sat down in the recliner and gazed at the paintings on the walls.

Each painting was encased in the sort of gilded decorative frame accorded vaunted classics. Each glowed beneath the lights; each appeared to be sending forth waves of light from the pigments on the surface of the canvas. The tiny color planes in the Cézanne, like the pieces of a riddle, exquisitely explored, investigated, probed, resolved, each daub of color another piece of his answer to the greatest riddle of all: how we see and think the world. Trees and valley and mountain and sky; put together piece by piece, with infinite peasant perseverance. Prussian blue here; pale violet there; ultramarine here; cadmium red there. Trees and valley and mountain and sky suddenly a world on a two-dimensional surface. What an act of creativity by a painter’s fragile fingers! And the flowers and leaves of the Renoir; the climbing red and white roses, the flood of geraniums, the trumpet vines, the peonies and impatiens; the blurred and heady gushing of color from the potted and earth-sown plants. And the cadmium yellow of the curtains and the burnt-sienna arabesques of the balcony and the cobalt blue of the sea and the cadmium-red goldfish in the emerald-green bowl and the purple and red and ultramarine of the walls in the Matisse. What joy to be able to sit and gaze at leisure upon these paintings after such a week of sadness! I wished there were a blessing that could be uttered over such a display of pagan beauty!

I sat alone with the paintings. After a while I turned off the lights and went out of the study and down the stairs and out of the house.

The late-morning air was warm and burnished with sunlight. Soon there would be leaves on the trees and grass on the lawns. An elderly couple walked along the street, leaning on canes. Three doors away was the Rebbe’s home. White-bearded elders stood on the sidewalk, talking quietly, and dark-garbed men kept going in and out. A stray dog loped by in front of my uncle’s house, urinated against the maple, and ambled off. I went up the walk to my parents’ home and let myself in.

I was very tired. I lay down on my bed in my clothes and fell asleep. Devorah woke me for lunch. She had gone to the nearby
Hebrew bookstore and returned with books for the children:
In the Streets of Moscow, The New York Express, The Mezuzah Maker, A Children’s Treasury of Chassidic Tales, Tales from Reb Nachman, Emunah.
We ate together in my parents’ kitchen. Was there anything I wanted her to buy for me before she began to pack for the return trip? There was nothing. Oh, yes, let’s not forget John Dorman’s writing pads.

That afternoon I sat on the terrace of my parents’ home and with a soft pencil made a drawing of my uncle. I drew him as I remembered him from twenty years before, dark-bearded, round-faced, smiling. I drew him gently—the small radiating lines in the outside corners of his eyes; the rounded fullness of his nose; the high forehead with the ridge below the hairline and the slope to the lined valley below and then the twin rise of bone above the eyebrows. I made the lines soft and wispy, brushing passages from plane to plane with my middle and small fingers, drawing it the way Renoir would have painted it. Rocheleh and Avrumel returned from school and must have seen me through the glass doors of the living room, because suddenly I was aware of them on the other side of the doors, watching me. They stood silently until I put down the pencil and looked up at the sunlight on the high branches of the sycamore.

“Who is it, Papa?” Avrumel asked. He held the Shimshon doll by one of its hands, its feet dragging on the floor.

“My Uncle Yitzchok.”

“That’s not the way you draw,” Rocheleh said.

“That’s right. It’s a special drawing.”

At supper that night we sat around the kitchen table. My father talked about the mountain of mail that had greeted him when he returned to his office, the meetings he had attended all day, the people who wanted to see him, decisions that needed to be made, travel plans that had to be finalized, budgets that had to be reviewed. He looked weary.

I had something for him, I said. A gift. And I opened the large drawing pad I had been holding on my lap and pulled out the drawing of Uncle Yitzchok and showed it to him.

He sat looking at it, his mouth slightly open.

“Asher,” my mother said in an awed tone. “It is exquisite.”

“You made him … alive,” my father murmured. He blinked, and brushed a hand over his eyes. Suddenly he was weeping, silently. He sat there, silently and unashamedly weeping, the drawing in his hands. Devorah looked down at her plate. The children were very quiet.

“This kind of art I appreciate,” my father said through his tears. “Please excuse me for a moment.”

He went from the kitchen, taking the drawing with him. A few minutes later he returned, without the drawing. We finished the meal. He had to go back to his office. Meetings, he said.

Some minutes later, the phone rang. Devorah poked her head into our room and said it was for me. I turned away from the drawing pad on the desk and looked at her.

“Who is it?”

“I didn’t ask. Do you want me to ask?”

Sudden memories of that sibilant voice and that threat of death. “No.”

I took the call in the hallway.

“Is this Asher Lev?” said the voice at the other end, clearly, nasally.

I said it was.

“I am calling you from the Rebbe’s office. My name is Rav Hershel Specter. I am one of the Rebbe’s aides. The Rebbe would like to speak to you.”

“All right.”

“Alone. Tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Eleven o’clock. In his house.”

“Yes.”

“Come a few minutes early.”

“All right.”

“Did you go to the mikvah today?”

“No.”

“You should go to the mikvah before you see the Rebbe. When you come, one of the men at the door will tell you what to do and where to wait.”

“Thank you.”

“Be well, Asher Lev.” He hung up.

I put the phone down and could not stop the trembling of my hands. I returned to the room and the desk. The pencil danced and quivered upon the page. Wavy curves. Jagged lines. I kept remembering the phone call of eighteen years ago. Devorah asked what the call was about, and I told her. I sat staring at the photograph of the Rebbe on the wall over the desk and could not continue drawing.

A few minutes before eleven, I left the house and walked along the street toward the home of the Rebbe, treading carefully in the shadow-laced lamppost lights shining dimly on a cracked and broken sidewalk that was yielding to the relentless upward thrusting of tree roots. The air was cool, the street still. Yellow rectangles of light shone from the windows of houses. I shivered in the cool air; the hair on the back of my neck was still damp from my immersion in the mikvah. My uncle’s house was dark and silent, Aunt Leah no doubt asleep, my cousins gone. Cousin Nahum had wished me a safe trip back to Saint-Paul. Cousin Yonkel had said he hoped he would not see me again for a long time, because we would only be seeing each other again in a time of sorrow, since there was no reason on earth for us to see each other otherwise. Cousin Nahum shook his head and rolled his eyes. “It’s the truth,” Cousin Yonkel had said. “I am telling the truth. If it hurts, so be it.”

I turned off the sidewalk and started up the narrow walk to the stone porch. Two tall dark-bearded men stood on either side of the wide wooden front door. One of them told me to wait in the large room to my right just off the entrance hall. I stepped into the house, and the door closed silently behind me.

I was in a large hall with a parquet floor and bare white walls and two arched doorways on either side open to rooms beyond. At the far end of the hall, a wide carpeted flight of stairs led to the dimness overhead. Voices sounded somewhere in the house, distant, indistinct. The room to the right was large, carpeted, furnished with chairs and low tables on which were numerous Ladover publications: newsletters, children’s magazines, catalogues of books published by the Ladover press, the most recent radio
and television talks given by the Rebbe, magazines for teenagers, application forms for Ladover summer camps for children. The publications were in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. The walls were bare save for a large oil painting of the Rebbe, ornately framed in a style reminiscent of the frames that contained the Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir in my Uncle Yitzchok’s study. I sat down in one of the chairs near the window that faced the street. Across the room from me was a white wall with a walnut-stained door, curls of dark metal embedded along its wooden surface, long triangular wedges of black metal clinging to its frame. Faraway voices kept drifting into the room from somewhere in the house.

A clock struck eleven times, the sound reaching me as if muffled by thick curtains and wall hangings. I sat quietly, waiting.

The door opened silently. A man stepped into the room, closed the door behind him, crossed the room, and sat down in the chair next to mine. He wore an old windbreaker and baggy brown trousers. His craggy features were windblown and deeply lined, and his hands were huge, the fingers callused and stained with paint. He had a thick shock of flowing white hair, on which he wore a dark beret. I stared at him and felt the sudden jolt of astonishment and the swift dizzying whirling of the world.

The man gazed at me and smiled through his walrus mustache. “It is a surprise to me how young you look. Are you really thirteen?”

I nodded.

“You are so skinny and pale. Like Chagall.”

“My name is Asher Lev,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I know your name. My name is Jacob Kahn.”

We shook hands. He had a powerful grip. I felt myself drawn into his pale-blue eyes.

“Do you have any idea what you are doing? Better to become a carpenter, Asher Lev. Become a shoemaker.”

I did not respond.

“I know your father. He will become my enemy.”

I said nothing.

He sighed. “Our Rebbe is very clever. If it isn’t Jacob Kahn who teaches you, it will be someone else. He prefers to take a chance
with me. My father was all his life a follower of his father. I myself am not an observant Jew. But I will watch you. Yes, we have a clever Rebbe.” He looked at me sharply. “Do you know what you are getting into, Asher Lev? It is a world without peace. Do not expect redemption if you enter the world of art. Redemption is death to art. Tranquillity is the poison the artist takes when he is ready to give up his art. Do you hear me, Asher Lev?”

“Yes.”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Asher.”

I opened my eyes.

“Asher.” My father stood before me. I stared up at him and felt myself trembling. “Are you all right?”

“I dozed off for a moment.”

“Do not expect redemption, Asher Lev,” Jacob Kahn said from the chair where he was sitting.

“Come with me,” my father said.

I got to my feet and followed my father to the wooden door. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that the chair on which Jacob Kahn had been sitting was empty.

My father stopped in front of the door. He was a tall and distinguished presence in his dark suit and dark tie and white beard and small dark skullcap—and for the first time in my life I felt a rise of pride in what he had achieved for himself, this position as chief of staff to the Rebbe. All the years of travel; all the anguish over my mother’s illness and his son’s slide into the alien world of art; all the energy he had given to the founding of Ladover schools in America and Europe; all the focused tenacity of his selfless determination to succeed in behalf of the Master of the Universe and the Rebbe—all the sum of his life had brought him to this exalted position as the right arm of the Rebbe. Now he touched me lightly on my arm, and in that touch I sensed his reverence for the person who sat in the room beyond the door, and I recalled his words to me the first time I had gone to see the Rebbe, the week I had become a bar mitzvah: “Remember with whom you will be speaking.”