The Gift of Asher Lev (34 page)

“We study. We listen to stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Stories about the Patriarchs. Stories about Rebbes. Stories about the Messiah.”

“What stories do you hear about Rebbes?”

“The story about the Rebbe who couldn’t sleep if there was money in his pockets and he always gave the money to the poor every night before going to bed. And the story of the Rebbe who wouldn’t talk for twenty years. And the story of the Rebbe who loved orphans, and when he died, he was buried with music at his funeral.”

The Rebbe glances at my father, who is behind Avrumel. Their eyes lock briefly. Then he turns again to Avrumel. “Do you have a favorite story?”

“Yes.”

“Which is it?”

“It’s about an artist named Hersheleh Kutin.”

“Yes? Tell us.”

“Hersheleh Kutin was a great artist. He did paintings for rich people. But he didn’t live like a rich person. People didn’t like him because he wouldn’t give money to charity. Some people hated him. When he died, no one cried for him. But the week he died, the poor people of the town went to the butcher and the baker for their food for Shabbos—and they were very surprised. For years
the butcher and the baker were giving the poor people meat and bread for free. Now they suddenly stopped. Because Hersheleh Kutin, the artist, was paying for it secretly, and now he was dead. And the people were sorry they had said bad things about him. My papa told me the story.”

The Rebbe gazes intently at Avrumel. My father runs his hand over his beard and is very still.

“What class will you go to after the summer?” the Rebbe asks after a moment.

“I will begin first grade, God willing,” says Avrumel proudly.

The Rebbe nods slowly. He glances at my father, then looks again at Avrumel. “You like it here with us in Brooklyn?”

“Yes, I like it. But I won’t like it when it gets cold and it snows. We don’t have snow in France where we live. Cold and snow are very bad for Rocheleh.”

“Where I grew up in Russia, we had snow nine months of the year,” the Rebbe says. It is very rare for the Rebbe to talk of his childhood in Russia. My father stirs slightly and runs his fingers through his beard.

“My mama says she doesn’t like snow because it reminds her of the winters in Paris during the big war when she had to stay locked up in an apartment with her Cousin Max.”

The Rebbe gazes a long time at Avrumel, nodding, his dark hat moving slowly up and down.

“I think I will tell you a riddle,” says the Rebbe. “I just reminded myself of one, and I think I have a little time. Would you like to hear a riddle?”

“Yes,” says Avrumel eagerly.

“An old Jew was once walking along a road to a city, when the road suddenly divided and went in two different directions. There was a little boy standing at the side of the road, and the old Jew asked him which road he should take. The boy said, ‘This road is very short but also very long. The other is very long but also very short.’ And then the little boy ran off, leaving the old Jew all alone. What do you think the boy meant, and which road should the old Jew take to the city?”

There is a brief silence.

“The long road that is short,” Avrumel says.

Another silence follows. The Rebbe and my father are both looking at Avrumel. “Tell me why,” the Rebbe asks.

“Because the short road that is long can lead him to a river or a mountain, and the man may not be able to cross even though the road is short. But the long road will bring him to the city even though it is long. And because of that, it is really short. My papa once told me that a long way that is sure is better than a short way that is not.”

Now I gaze at them: the Rebbe, my father, my son. The Rebbe seated at his desk, Avrumel standing beside him, my father behind Avrumel. They form a tableau of arrested time. I have them before my eyes. I have drawn them on the page in my pad.

Now I slowly turn the page—and they are gone.

Outside my hotel room, it is still drizzling. The evening has begun its slow glide across the vast gray Parisian sky.

The following day I walk to the new Musée d’Orsay and wander through its nineteenth-century world. I look carefully at Courbet’s
A Burial at Ornans
and
The Artist’s Studio.
I take a taxi to the Pompidou Center and gaze up at its gaudy oil refinery look, at the crisscrossing white steel rods and exposed brightly colored pipes, ducts, girders, vents. I watch the jugglers in the plaza and draw an elderly bearded sketch artist sketching a fire-eater, and I ride the glass-enclosed tubular escalator to the roof garden and stand there a long time, looking out at the city. Kings, wars, a revolution, uprisings, barricades, riots, military occupation, treachery. Disorder and frequent sorrow the mulch for creativity. Like Florence. Is a Brooklyn tranquillity—community, continuity, serenity of soul in a sacred world—a killing acid?

I wandered through some parts of the Pompidou. I took a train to the Louvre and visited old friends. I made swift pencil drawings of the Avignon Pietà, Delacroix’s
The Massacre at Chios,
Géricault’s
The Raft of the Medusa,
Tintoretto’s
Susanna at the Bath,
El Greco’s
Christ Crucified,
Rembrandt’s
Pilgrims of Emmaus,
da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa.
Old familiar friends. Just to keep the eyes working and the fingers nimble. I had copied them many times before. Run the eyes across each minute detail of the facture; keep the circuit to the
fingers clear and clean, and render what the eyes see. Old and dear friends. Jacob Kahn took me through the Louvre the first time. Old and dear and dead friend. My drawing of the
Mona Lisa
begins to draw a crowd. People gather around me, peering over one another’s shoulders. Someone says, “I think that’s Asher Lev.” A guard approaches, looks at the drawing, nods approvingly, and saunters away.

I walk back to the hotel, past the quai with the trumpet players in the rain, past the apartment house on the Quai Voltaire where Jacob and Tanya Kahn once lived, past the street where rain like grapeshot caught me three days before. What were they doing there, those trumpeters? Whom were they heralding?

When I returned to the hotel there was a message from Shaul Lasker. My father had arrived safely.

The next morning I took a taxi over to a studio on the Rue de l’Université and spent some time helping a young artist select paintings for his first one-man show in Paris. I had met him in Nice two years before at a party given by Max Lobe. He was in his mid-twenties, very talented and very unsure of himself. “This one is good? You are sure, maître? It is not too facile? And this one? The fête galante in the style of the Fauves? Yes, of course, an Expressionist satire. You like it? I am happy. But this one you do not like. The linear perspective is a cliché? It is intended as irony. Yes, I will put it aside for the time being. I thank you, maître. Will it be a good show, do you think?” He smoked and sweated and paced. His girlfriend was in the studio. She had long shiny raven hair and was lovely. She kept staring at me. They were both French, he from Paris, she from Lyons. I wished him good luck and said goodbye to the girlfriend. Outside, the air was cool and wet. I returned to the hotel.

Later that afternoon, I packed my bags, checked out of the hotel, and took a taxi to the Ladover yeshiva.

5

The taxi rolled past the apartment house in which I had created the two crucifixion paintings, turned into a wide tree-lined boulevard, went on for two more blocks through heavy afternoon traffic, and came to a stop. I paid the driver. He helped me with my bags, climbed back into the taxi, and drove away.

I stood on the sidewalk in front of a cream-colored four-story stone building. Stone front stoop, wooden entrance doors, tall windows, ornate grillwork on the narrow balconies. It looked like any of the other buildings on the boulevard. Once there had been a small sign over the doorway:
LADOVER YESHIVA DE PARIS
. But it was removed in
1982,
during the time of the terrorist bombings of Jewish institutions in Paris.

Parked at the curb was a police car with two gendarmes in the front seat. I saw them watching me.

The front doors opened, and two young men in dark suits and dark hats and white open-collared shirts came out and let the doors close behind them. They wore short dark beards and were of the same height. I heard them talking in Yiddish and saw them break off their conversation when they noticed me. I imagined them looking at me, saw myself through their eyes: baggy chinos, creased photographer’s jacket, fisherman’s cap, red beard.

The two young men came over to me.

“Can we help you?” one of them asked in American-accented French.

“I’m here for Shabbos,” I said in English. “Is Rabbi Lasker inside?”

The young man nodded. The other stood looking at me curiously.

“Where are you from?” the first one asked in English.

“Brooklyn.”

“No kidding. Crown Heights?”

“That’s right.”

“No kidding. What street?” I told him.

“Hey, I live one block away, but I’ve been in the Paris yeshiva for two years. My father wrote me the parkway is all torn up.”

“That’s right. They’re repaving.”

“I know you,” the second young man suddenly said. “It comes to me. Aren’t you Asher Lev?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a familiar face, I told myself. I know that face.”

“Asher Lev,” the first young man said. “I once read a book about you.”

“I knew I recognized your face,” the second one said. “The minute I saw you, I knew.”

“I have to tell you right off that I don’t like what you paint,” the first one said. “I have to be honest with you.”

“Did you see the article on your father in today’s
Le Monde?”
the second one asked. “They interviewed him about Russian Jewry and
glasnost.”

“I didn’t see it.”

The gendarmes sat in the police car, smoking; they had lost interest in me as soon as the two young men and I had begun talking.

“It’s a good article,” the second one said. “There’s a good picture of your father and the foreign minister.”

“We’ll give you a hand with your bags,” the first young man said. “Tell me something. How do you get away with painting crucifixions and nudes and all that other stuff? Doesn’t the Rebbe tell you not to do it?”

“It’s a long story.”

“In the newspapers and magazines where I see your picture, your beard isn’t so gray,” the second one said. He picked up my large bag; the other took the attaché case.

I followed them along the cement walk to the double doors and into an office on the right side of the entrance hallway. They put down my bags.

Shaul Lasker sat behind a cluttered wooden desk, his ear to the telephone. He got quickly to his feet and shook my hand across the desk, his ear still to the phone. He gave me an upright index-finger signal to indicate that the conversation would be brief, pointed to a chair, and sat back down. The two young men wished me good Shabbos and left. I took a narrow slatted wooden chair and waited.

The office was small and had three wooden chairs, a single tall window, and the desk. The walls were painted the same pale-green color as the walls in the Ladover yeshiva in Brooklyn, where Rocheleh and Avrumel had attended classes and I had taught an art class weeks back. I shuddered, thinking about that class. A fiasco. But a lovely-looking person, that Miss Sullivan. I would have liked to be able to paint her. Silhouetted against the rain-splattered windows of the room. The softness of her against the cold grayness of the rain. And the geometrics of her form: the head held a certain way, the arms in this position, the legs here, the torso slightly curved…. All right. Enough. You’re in a yeshiva. So much for the Spaniard in Asher Lev. I wondered who had erased the picture of the Rebbe I had drawn in chalk on the blackboard. A large bulletin board took up most of the wall across from where I sat. Tacked to it were lists, schedules, announcements in French and Yiddish, and a recent letter from the office of the Rebbe, typed in either Yiddish or Hebrew; I could see the headquarters letter-head and the signature of the Rebbe, but I was too far away to make out the words. A large framed color photograph of the Rebbe hung from the wall behind Shaul Lasker’s desk. It showed the Rebbe in a dark suit and tie and dark hat and had been taken about twenty years before.

Through the tall window of the office I saw the boulevard and its leafy trees and the police car at the curb with the two gendarmes and the afternoon traffic on the street. In two hours it would be Shabbos. What time was it now in New York? What was Avrumel doing? Playing baseball? Studying Torah? Listening to a story about one of the Rebbes?

Shaul Lasker was talking to me. “You look tired, Asher. Are you all right?”

“I’m okay. How’s my father?”

“He’s terrific, thank God. He runs around like he’s in his forties. You called home since you got to Paris? What do you hear about the family?”

“They’re fine, thank God.”

“What’s next from you? Paintingwise, I mean.”