The Gift of Asher Lev (2 page)

I called John Dorman and heard his slurred words. “Real sorry to hear that, Lev. Heartfelt condolences. Ten days? It’s okay to take your daughter? Listen, do me a favor, get me some decent
American writing pads while you’re there. Can’t stand these French pads. Safe trip.”

Devorah woke the children at their usual time and told them we were going to New York. They looked bewildered and a little frightened. Rocheleh put on a brave face and helped Avrumel get dressed. Neither of them remembered Uncle Yitzchok from the one time he had visited us in Saint-Paul.

The taxi arrived. It was a lovely spring morning, the sun glistening on the red-pantiled houses of the villages, the air cool and clear and honey-colored all through the cypress-studded valley to the green hills and the sea. The driver helped me load the bags. I locked the house and the gate, and we drove to Nice to the airport.

We were on line waiting to board the flight when Avrumel, five years old and still confused by the abrupt wrenching from his comfortable world, suddenly realized he had forgotten to bring Shimshon, the Samson rag doll that had been his companion since birth and with which he held long, intimate conversations. He began to cry. Devorah said she was sure we would be able to buy him a new Shimshon doll in New York, but he was inconsolable. She held him as he cried. Eleven-year-old Rocheleh, pale of face and large of eyes, said, in her tone of grownup disdain, “He’s such a child.”

Avrumel had on his high red sneakers and green jogging suit. He sat next to me in the Airbus, weeping. I took my drawing pad and a soft-leaded pencil from my attaché case and quickly drew from memory an exact and realistic picture of Shimshon, shading it into three-dimensionality with the side of my small finger. Avrumel watched through his tears as his rag doll came to life under the point of my
4B
pencil: frayed right ear, gouged right eye, thick-chested, broad-shouldered, wearing a tunic and sandals, its chiseled face topped by an enormous shock of hair. I gave him the drawing, and his freckled face broke into a smile of delight. He hugged it to himself.

“Ça va, Avrumel?”

“Ça va, Papa.”

I sat in my seat looking at my son and seeing the face of my uncle and listening to his voice.

•   •   •

We were seated in the four-seat center row: Rocheleh on the aisle, Devorah, Avrumel, and I. The Airbus bumped through dense clouds and turbulent Mediterranean air. I felt it banking and saw through the window to my left a hazy pale-blue world of sea and sky. Avrumel fell asleep. Rocheleh was reading
Alice au pays des merveilles,
in which she had been living for the past three days. Her light-brown hair was combed back into a high ponytail. She wore blue sneakers and white knee socks and a lilac-colored dress-length jersey with a picture of Madame Curie on it Madame Curie was Rocheleh’s love ever since she had read a
cadet biographie
of her by Eve Curie a year ago. I had drawn the picture of Madame Curie, and a T-shirt shop in Nice had baked it onto her jersey.

Devorah sat holding tightly to the armrests of her seat as the Airbus bucked on its climb through the clouds. She wore a light-gray cotton suit and a gray print blouse and had on her brown pageboy wig, which normally gave her a young, almost schoolgirl appearance. But now her face was locked with anxiety. Her eyes kept darting about. She had never flown before. Was the sealed interior of the aircraft bringing back poisoned memories?

“Are you all right, Dev?”

“I am so-so. How long is it to New York?”

“I think about nine hours. Can I do something for you?”

“Did you say the prayer for a safe journey?”

“I said it.”

She sat very stiff and straight, staring into space. The Airbus went on racing through the clouds on its climb to cruising altitude.

I closed my eyes for what I thought would be a brief sleep and when I opened them we were out over the Atlantic, hours into the flight. Some minutes later, a young couple came down the aisle and stopped at our row. Devorah and Rocheleh had gone to the lavatory. Avrumel was asleep, my drawing of his Shimshon doll still clasped to his chest. The man had on a pink shirt and plaid trousers, and the woman wore a short-sleeved yellow cotton dress. Was I by any chance Asher Lev, the artist? the man asked. I said
yes, I was. He said they were on their honeymoon and had been to Rome, Florence, and Venice. They lived in Chicago. His father was a collector and owned two of my paintings and some prints. The man talked with the hearty self-assurance one sometimes sees in wealthy Americans. His bride seemed nervous. He asked for my autograph. Then they wanted to shake my hand. I shook the man’s hand but politely declined the woman’s because it is not permissible in my tradition to shake a woman’s hand, and she looked surprised and hurt.

A few minutes later, a middle-aged man came over and asked if he could take my photograph. He took the picture and thanked me and went away. I closed my eyes, feigning sleep, not wanting to be disturbed again. But I was quickly in a real sleep, and as in a fever dream saw myself as a child in my uncle’s jewelry store, asking if I could live with him because my parents were going to Vienna on a mission for the Rebbe and I did not want to go with them. I was frightened of Vienna; it was a city that hated Jews. My uncle took the cigar from his mouth and said something to me, but I could not hear him.

Devorah and Rocheleh returned to their seats. I woke, dazed.

The intercom crackled. The pilot announced that we would be late coming into New York because of strong headwinds. Devorah, busy with our food—she had made sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and cut up some raw vegetables before we left Saint-Paul; the airline had not had enough advance notice to prepare kosher food for us—Devorah gave me an apprehensive look. Her eyes blinked nervously.

Rocheleh ate with her customary daintiness. Avrumel, as always, was reducing his food to its rudimentary state of powder and paste.

The movie came on—something about the game of baseball; it did not interest me. I closed my eyes. As if I were the screen for some mad projectionist’s bizarre amusement, I began to see inside my head brief, clear, disconnected pictures of my past world, like a series of superrealist slides of my swaddling-clothes years: the Brooklyn apartment in which I grew up, its small rooms and white walls; my closetlike room and its paint-it-yourself furniture; my father praying in his tallis and tefillin near the living-room window, tall, dark-eyed, heavy-shouldered, thick red hair and beard;
my mother at her desk, small and slight, clear brown eyes, high-boned cheeks, long, thin, delicately boned fingers; my image of my great-great-grandfather, garnered from stories told me by my parents, coming to me in dreams like some mythic ancestor and thundering that I was wasting time drawing pictures; my father in his dark coat and hat, carrying his bag and attaché case and
New York Times,
ready for yet another journey for the Rebbe; my mother standing at the window of our living room, gazing out at the parkway, waiting for him to return; Jacob Kahn and I stripped to the waist, painting; Jacob and Tanya Kahn and I in their summer home in Provincetown: the shimmering heat, the sun on the baking sand, the hot wind blowing in from the ocean; Paris and my two crucifixion paintings; the rage of my Brooklyn community; the Rebbe saying to me, “Go to the yeshiva in Paris. You did not grow up there. People will not be so angry in Paris. There are no memories in Paris of Asher Lev.” Pictures flashing kaleidoscopically into and out of view, a chilling slide show of memory.

To get the pictures to stop, I recited silently and by heart some chapters from the Book of Psalms. That calmed me. I took from my attaché case one of the books I had brought along, a gift from John Dorman, the English translation by Joel Agee of Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Letters on Cézanne.
The exquisite still life on the pale-blue cover: bottles, apples, a glass, a cloth. What was it the Spaniard had once said about Cézanne? “If there were not anxiety behind those apples, Cézanne would not interest me any more than Bouguereau.”

In the Rilke book I read:

It seems to me that the “ultimate intuitions and insights” will only approach one who lives in his work and remains there, and whoever considers them from afar gains no power over them. But all that already belongs in the area of personal solutions. Basically it’s none of our business how somebody manages to grow, if only he does grow, if only we’re on the trail of the law of our own growth.

I read that again and closed my eyes and saw a brief slide show of the words “if only we’re on the trail of the law of our own
growth” and then went on reading until I read these words about Cézanne:

I know a few things from his last years when he was old and shabby and children followed him every day on his way to his studio, throwing stones at him as if at a stray dog. But inside, way inside, he was marvelously beautiful, and every once in a while he would shout something absolutely glorious at one of his rare visitors.

I closed the book. Cézanne an old man and children throwing stones at him as he trudges to his studio. The image persisted.

The flight dragged on. The plane was about half full, its interior dim, most of the shades lowered. Passengers sat watching the movie. I listened to the rhythmic revolutions of the two huge engines and the rushing streams of wind and saw ourselves miles above the earth in this sealed tubular craft sailing swiftly through the blue sky; the vision chilled the backs of my legs. Avrumel grew restive. I told him a story about the Rebbe in Paris during the war. Rocheleh coughed, but it was nothing; she had merely swallowed some water too fast. Devorah, working now by the overhead light on the manuscript of her children’s book, looked pale, apprehensive. From time to time she would raise her eyes from her work and gaze about anxiously. She would look at the children and at me, and return to her manuscript.

We crossed the coastline and banked toward Boston and New York. The captain came on the intercom and said a storm was moving into the New York area and we would circle over Connecticut for a while and if the storm did not run its course before we ran low on fuel we would set down in Philadelphia, refuel, and return to New York. I saw Devorah look up from her manuscript and stare into space and murmur words I could not hear.

We sat belted into our seats, the passengers still, the giant aircraft circling. Below us was a world of dark clouds menacingly shot through with silvery tints; above us, the pale-blue sky of the spring day. The engines suddenly changed pitch, and the captain came on the intercom and said we had been cleared for landing in New York. We entered the clouds and bucked and bounced and
rode the air currents like a carnival roller coaster. I was certain Rocheleh would be ill, but she sat calmly through it all, reading about Alice and her Wonderland. Avrumel wanted to know if it was like riding a horse, and I told him I didn’t know, I had never been on a horse. Devorah sat very straight, her small chin rigid, her eyes closed. Then we were through the clouds and I could see water below, slate gray in the rain, and brown sodden earth and rows of private homes and cars on the wet roads. The ground tilted and rose swiftly toward us and the wheels bumped heavily on the runway and we lurched and slowed and then rolled on for a while and came to a stop.

After a moment, the captain told us that all the gates were in use, there would be a gate for us in ten minutes. Thirty-five minutes later, we rolled into a gate and disembarked.

I carried Avrumel. He clung to me. I felt his warmth and his slight weight and his cheek against my bearded face. Rocheleh walked alongside Devorah, her eyes behind her glasses taking in the long herdlike trek through corridors and the waiting lines at passport control and customs and the dense milling crowd outside. We started through the crowd.

“Papa,” Rocheleh called, and pointed.

A bearded young man stood along the edge of the crowd, carrying a large white sign on which was written in thick red letters: “Asher Lev.” People kept passing him and looking at the sign.

We steered toward him.

He was in his early twenties, deep-voiced, heavily built. He wore a dark suit, a tieless white shirt, and ritual fringes that dangled beneath his jacket.

“Asher Lev?”

I said yes, I was Asher Lev.

“The artist?” he said.

I nodded.

He said my father had asked him to meet us; we were two hours late. He told us his name was Binyomin. He shook my hand and said it was an honor to meet me, he had known my uncle, what a terrible loss, a tragedy for the entire Ladover world. He led us through the glass exit doors and across a wide busy road to a traffic island. He told us to wait, and hurried off.

Avrumel said he was hungry. Devorah took him from me and held him. “Soon,” she murmured in his ear. “Soon.” He held tightly to the drawing of the Shimshon doll. Rocheleh stared at the traffic in the rain and the churning crowds and people on the island rushing and cars loading up and pulling away and buses and vans stopping to let off and take on passengers.

A long blue station wagon drew up alongside the island and stopped, and the bearded young man jumped out. He held on to the brim of his dark hat with both hands as a gust of wind threatened to lift it from his head. We loaded our bags and climbed inside and moved into the traffic.

I sat in the front seat next to the young man and watched the terminal slide slowly away. An odd coldness settled upon me, a fearful and darkly textured sensation that was like a gust of fetid wind from the Other Side, and a curiously colored slide dropped into view, smoky reds and blacks beneath a dusky glaze, and I had a precise, stark, lucid presentiment that I would not be returning to this airport for a long time.

He took us along the Belt Parkway. It was raining hard. The highway was glutted with slow-moving afternoon traffic. The rain fell drearily from low clouds and washed across the road. Wipers arced rhythmically, and I saw the blurred faces of drivers through streaked windshields. Here and there the road was under repair. The traffic crawled and stopped and crawled on again. The car was old, its interior shabby. A used Styrofoam cup lay on the seat between me and the driver, on top of a folded Yiddish newspaper and a crumpled copy of the
New York Times.
He kept talking about my uncle. A true Jewish soul. A gift to us from the Master of the Universe. One of those who held the world together. A good heart. Always happy. A rare soul. One who binds up the wounds of the world.