The Gift of Asher Lev (31 page)

Outside the tall windows of the print shop the gray rain falls steadily on the rooftops and the chimney pots of the city.

“You were very helpful, my good friend,” Max says. “I thank you.”

“How long will you be in Paris?”

“I fly back this evening if there is no strike. I try not to stay too long in Paris. It reminds me too much of gendarmes and sealed apartments.” He looks at my drawing and slowly shakes his head. “I have no idea what it means, yet it touches me…. You are having a problem with little Avrumel?”

I do not respond.

“What is it? You are concealing something from Max Lobe?” Still I am silent.

He says, after a moment, “My friend, if I can help you with something …”

Everyone in the shop is silent. We hear the rain on the windows. For some reason I suddenly recall the horn players on the quai and the gendarme on the bridge and Jacob Kahn in his apartment overlooking the Louvre and the riverboats.

“There is mystic significance to the number three?” asks the poet in a hushed tone.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

“Of course,” he murmurs after a moment. “I understand.” He gazes at the drawing. “I understand perfectly.”

I go over to the sink in the corner near the table and wash my hands. The white porcelain is smeared and stained with ink. The soap foams on my hands. I wash off the soap and dry my hands with a paper towel. Stains remain on the fingers of my right hand and along the edge of my left hand where I brushed across the paper for shading.

Max is inviting everyone to lunch. The printers are washing their hands. The poet says to me, “Where do you live now?”

“Saint-Paul.”

“Ah, yes? Saint-Paul-de-Vence?”

“They call it Saint-Paul now. The village fathers don’t want the world to think they belong to Vence.”

We leave the printer’s shop and walk along the narrow street. The rain has eased.

“You have a family?” the poet asks me.

“A wife, a daughter, and a son.”

“Ah, how nice. I myself do not believe in marriage. An unhappy marriage results in quarrels that drain away one’s creative energies. And a happy marriage results in laziness and a fear of disequilibrium. I believe that without disequilibrium there is no genuine art. Excuse me for asking, but are you truly a member of this group of—how are they called?—Hasidim?”

“Yes.”

“How interesting! I read about it in
Le Monde,
in an article that appeared during your recent show in Paris.” I said nothing.

“May one ask if Asher Lev is working on something new?”

“At the moment, no. I am between things.”

“I understand,” he says. “I understand perfectly.”

We stop at the entrance to the restaurant. I shake hands with the printers and the poet, and they go inside. Max lingers in the doorway.

“You cannot join us?”

“You know I can’t eat in here.”

“Where do you eat?”

“I have an arrangement with a café near the hotel.”

“There is a kosher café near your hotel?”

“The owner provides for me. I repay him with a print or a drawing.”

“That is a wise restaurateur. Like the owner of the Colombe d’Or. Yes. Very wise. Goodbye, my friend. John Dorman looks forward to your company once again. He is not well. You are staying only for a week after next Sunday? Too bad. You leave for ten days and are gone, it seems, forever. When I see you, you will tell me everything that is going on in Brooklyn. I should have gone to that funeral in your place. Me they would have sent back immediately.”

“We’ll talk next week, Max.”

“What are you doing with that drawing? Shall I bring it down with me?”

“I’m giving it to André. I need the bon à tirer of an old print. An exchange.”

“Which print?”

I told him.

“You are exchanging that drawing for a bon à tirer? You really are not well, my friend.”

“I’m repaying an old debt, Max.”

We shake hands, and I walk along the busy streets in the light rain. On the crowded nearby boulevard I stand waiting at a covered taxi station. Empty taxis come along and go by without stopping. The drivers do not even glance at me but sit behind their wheels, staring straight ahead. Are they all off duty? I wait a long time in the light rain. A taxi pulls up for a red light. I go over to the driver and through the partially open window ask him if he’s free. He is olive-skinned, unshaven, thickly muscled, and wears a tight dark shirt and dark pants. He wants to know which arrondissement, and I tell him, “Eighteen.” He motions with his head, and I jump into the back of the cab as the light changes.

I will not enter that apartment house again; enough to see it now from the outside. A pilgrimage of sorts to the dark core of the Other Side. A gray cement building, one of four on the block, each seven stories high. Narrow streets, paved now, cobblestoned when Max and Devorah lived here for the two years of their tomb-time, as Devorah once bitterly labeled it. Rue Gustave Rouanet on one side, Rue du Ruisseau on the other. A school on the street opposite the entrance to the building. A church on the corner diagonally across the street from Devorah’s room. Housewives and children. Stores and shops and the heavy stir of traffic.

I have been inside the building once, with Devorah. Narrow entranceway, long dimly lit corridors, slow rattling elevator. We did not go up to the apartment. Who lives there now? Do they know what once took place within those walls? Imagine if every apartment and home had its history written on its doorposts. An
unendurable notion. Max has never been back here, not once, since the day he left Paris. He says very little about that tomb-time. Nor has he ever drawn or painted it. Max and his decorative bursts of color. His swirling reds and blacks and floating clouds and rectangles and upside-down letters and numbers. Max says he paints to celebrate life. But you can only be a true celebratory modernist if, like Matisse, Dufy, Chagall, you really mean it. Max paints to conceal the terror of his tomb-time, and his lightheartedness is seen by the discerning as drawn too taut, with minute cracks showing here and there; an unconvincing and derivative decorativeness. He is a fine colorist, and very popular; important collectors have him on their walls. But he is not in museums, and that embitters him. I tell him often that he should paint the darkness he feels, not the false light that he covers it with. “You paint it,” he responds. “You are a specialist in darkness.” I tell him, “I didn’t live through it.” He says, “We all lived through it, everyone; all of humanity lived through it. Was Picasso in Guernica? Did Guido Reni see with his own eyes the slaughter of little children in Bethlehem?”

On the July day of the roundup, Devorah came home from playing with a friend in the schoolyard and noticed cars and trucks parked up and down the street. But it meant nothing to her. She was four years old.

They lived on the third floor. Inside the front door she pushed the button for the temporary light. The entrance hallway was silent and deserted, and this, too, meant nothing to her. The door to the apartment was open, and from the corridor she saw the two gendarmes and the two men in ordinary clothes, and her parents in the living room stuffing things into suitcases. She was about to call out, “Mama!” when her mother spotted her in the doorway and shouted in a voice that jolted her like an electric charge, “What are
you
doing here? What do you
want?
There is
nothing
for you to see here! This is
not
a circus or a zoo!
Go home to your parents!”
The voice was a wall of energy; it had a force of will that bent her response to it. Her mother stared at her with raging features; her father had his back to her and did not turn. The men looked at her and at each other. She whirled and fled.

She fled to the next-door corner apartment house of her Cousin Max. Fearful of the slow elevator, she raced up the stairs to her
relatives’ apartment—just in time to be scooped up by them as they were fleeing the apartment before the arrival of the gendarmes. The concierge, an elderly man, a Gentile, rushed them to an empty apartment on the seventh floor. There they waited in dread—Max, his parents, and little Devorah—until the concierge returned to tell them that the police had arrived, found them gone, sealed their apartment, and left. He and Max’s father then conferred in low voices in a corner. Devorah went to a window to look out at the street; perhaps she could see her parents. Max’s mother quickly pulled her away. She began to cry, softly. Max, ten years older than Devorah, tried to comfort her in his awkwardly gallant way. Everything would be all right. He was sure she could stay with them. He would protect her.

Later that night the concierge led them back downstairs through the eerily silent corridors and stairwell, took off the wax seals and the wire placed on their apartment door by the gendarmes, quickly removed the mezuzah from the doorway with the claws of a hammer and handed it to Max’s father—who subsequently lost it; it was never found—and closed the door behind them. A few days later, a man from the French resistance brought them food.

Five small rooms. The dimmest of electric lights. Who paid their very low electric bill? They never found out. No heat. Two bitter winters. Metal shutters fastened across the windows, angled downward so they could see only slitted views of the street. For two years no glimpse of the sky.

Late one morning, about a year after the roundup, cars and trucks filled with German soldiers suddenly appeared at the corners, sealing the street, and they knew it was over, someone had betrayed them. They waited in terror for the knocks on the door. But it was only the German commandant of Paris coming to be photographed distributing oranges to French children in the nearby school. And one night American bombers struck at the nearby railroad yard and lit the sky to high noon, and two blocks away a row of houses disappeared beneath an errant cluster of bombs, and they felt the walls of the apartment shaking and the windows rattling and plaster falling from the ceiling, and she cried again and Max held her awkwardly to him, patting her shoulder, soothing her with promises of his dauntless protection. Darkness
and terror for two years until August 1944, when the great bell of Notre-Dame peals the liberation of the city. Crowds in the street, shouts, distant gunfire. Devorah and Max open the door to the apartment and do not wait for the elevator. They race down the stairs together, he holding her little hand—she is six years old—and burst out onto the street, the air warm and the sky cloudy, and feel their eyes pierced and blinded by the hazy late-afternoon light.

Max went to art school, struggled for ten years, and began to sell. That was when I met him, in the sixties, through the Ladover representative in Paris. He came up to my studio apartment to look at the crucifixions. “I heard of you all the way from New York,” he said. “Now I know what the tumult is all about.” He came often, alone. Then he came with Devorah. By then Anna Schaeffer had arrived on one of her regular European jaunts, and the crucifixions were on their way to New York. Devorah has never seen them except in reproductions. She does not want to see them. “The reproductions frighten me enough,” she told me once.

The taxi driver was looking at me in his rearview mirror. “Is this the place you wanted?”

“Yes.”

He was waiting for me to pay him and leave the cab. He kept looking at me in the rearview mirror.

A woman emerged from the apartment house, accompanied by a girl and a boy. She hesitated near the entranceway and looked up at the cloudy sky, squinting. She took the hands of the children. The boy reached up to her, and she lifted him and held him tight. Clearly, as though she were sitting beside me in the taxi, I heard her say to the boy, “There is a plan. With all my heart and soul I believe there is a great plan.”

They went together up the street and turned the corner.

I told the driver to take me back to my hotel. He drove away from the apartment house and out of that neighborhood.

The rain continued to fall. On the stoop in the rain sat the old woman, beneath a large brown sheet of plastic, staring with raging eyes at passersby. I ate a late lunch near the hotel and, through the rain-streaked window of the café, watched the traffic and the
people on the puddled streets. When I returned to the hotel, the concierge told me my wife had called about half an hour earlier. It was now close to three o’clock in Paris: nine in the morning in New York. I took the elevator to my room and called the overseas operator.

Devorah answered. “Asher? How are you, my husband?”

“Is everything all right? How was the first day of camp?”

“Everyone is well. Rocheleh loves the camp.”

“And Avrumel?”

“He’s fine. He’s learning to play baseball.”

“Baseball.”

“Are you all right, Asher? You sound tired.”

“Jet lag. I spent the morning with Max at the printer’s. He sends his love. What else is Avrumel doing?”

“He studies Torah, he plays all sorts of games, he eats. It’s a good day camp. He went on a long walk yesterday evening with your father. Your father says he’ll take him to his office on Sundays now and then.”

“Have you heard anything more about Uncle Yitzchok’s will?”

“Your Cousin Yonkel came over to the house last night and said you exerted undue influence on his father and that’s why he left you the collection. Asher, are you all right? You sound exhausted.”

“I went over to look at the apartment house.”

There was silence. The line seemed to have gone dead.

“Devorah?”

“I’m here, Asher.”

“They painted the outside of the entranceway, so it looks a little better than the last time I was there. Otherwise, nothing has changed. How is my mother?”

“She’s wonderful. We have beautiful talks together.”

“Take good care of Avrumel.”

“Of course.”

“Goodbye, Dev.”

“Goodbye, my husband.”

In the silence that followed I could hear clearly the rain on the panes of the balcony doors. I was seated at the desk, and I looked at my drawing pad and found I had drawn in it, on a single page, in contour, the face of the Spaniard and the face of the Rebbe, both
in profile and facing one another. The Rebbe had on his ordinary hat, the Spaniard his beret: two kings gazing upon each other on the page of my drawing pad. I could not remember removing the drawing pad from the attaché case, and I could not remember making the picture.