The Gift of Asher Lev (39 page)

Afterward I walked through the village to the cemetery and stood outside the open gate with the dark metal cross over the entrance and gazed across the lines of tombstones at the marble tomb of Chagall. The sun touched the crests of the nearby hills and sent long shadows into the cemetery. Crowded with old and new tombs and studded with tall cypresses, the cemetery stood hushed in the approaching twilight, its host of crosses clear and sharp in the bronze sheen of the sunset. After a while I walked back to the house and sat on the terrace, watching the night come, with the lights of the valley like motionless fireflies in the advancing darkness. I fell asleep in the chair on the terrace and slept a long time and was awakened by the racketing noise of a motorbike on the road. The air was soft, cool, scented with flowers. I went inside.

It was nearly midnight. Sitting on my bed and looking out at the lights of the village, I picked up the phone. It was answered by Devorah on the second ring. She sounded as if she were on the bed beside me.

The family, thank God, was well, she said. She had talked with Rocheleh by phone before Shabbos. She liked the camp very much. How was my father? Did I have a good Shabbos? Was the house all right? How were Max and John? She had gone rowing in Prospect Park with my mother and Avrumel. It was very hot in New York. My mother was fine. She was right there.

“Asher? Are you well?”

“Yes.”

“Your father?”

“He’s in Israel, rounding up votes. We had a good Shabbos together in the yeshiva.”

“I’m glad, Asher. Devorah and I are having a fine time being together. It is like finding a daughter.”

“Has anybody heard anything more from Cousin Yonkel?”

“Nahum told me after shul yesterday that your Cousin Yonkel
is going to try to have you removed as trustee. He is going to take you to court.”

“Can he do that?”

“I don’t know, Asher. It saddens me that there is such a fight in the family.”

“It saddens me, too. I don’t know what to do about it. Is Avrumel around?”

“Here he is.”

“Papa?” The high voice, breathless. I imagine the red hair, the freckled face.

“How are you, my son?”

“I am fine, Papa. We went rowing today. I helped Mama row.”

“That’s great.”

“And guess what, Papa.”

“What?”

“When Grandfather comes back from Israel, he will take me with him to his office on Sundays. Grandfather says I can maybe even see the Rebbe.”

I was quiet.

“And I play baseball in the camp. Every day. Where are you, Papa?”

“At home.”

“Did you find Shimshon?”

“Yes.”

“Will you bring him back with you?”

“Sure.”

“Here’s Mama.”

Devorah came back on. “I miss you, my husband. Did you get everything done in Paris that you needed to do?”

“Yes.”

“I am really having a wonderful time with your mother.”

“How is the book coming along?”

“Very well, thank God. It’s quiet here now. A good place for writing.”

“Take care of yourself, my wife.”

“Goodbye, Asher. Travel well.”

In the silence that followed, a motorbike moved laboriously
along the road like a truculent mosquito. The village stood on its hill, bathed in the nighttime glow of halogens. I thought I saw Jacob Kahn in the window of a village home, gazing out at me. After a while I fell asleep.

The village bells woke me, clanging sweetly in the morning air. I lay in my bed and felt the sounds softly against my ears. Soon the bells fell silent; the bedroom began to fill with a strangely foreboding stillness. I felt the stillness all through the house, and after a while I got up and dressed. I prayed the Morning Service and walked up the hill in the morning sunlight to the café for breakfast. It was early; the storekeepers were washing down the streets in front of their shops, and there were only a few people in the café. One of the waiters came over, a short round man in his fifties who had once been a painter, and we talked for a while about the forthcoming Léger exhibition in the Fondation Maeght outside the village. He had it on the best authority: it would be formidable. A new look at Léger from his very early days to just before his death. He himself was not one of the great admirers of Léger. But it would be a formidable exhibition.

Afterward I went to the post office and mailed a tubular package to the widow of Lucien Lacamp in Paris. It contained the drawing of the girl drawing I had made the day before on the train. There were other postal matters to settle. The line behind me grew long. Finally I was outside the post office in the shade of a green pine. Two gendarmes stood talking on the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy across the street. There were cars and motorbikes on the road, and the streets were beginning to receive the first waves of tourists. I walked out of the village to the sculpture at the road juncture and turned right and started up the steeply climbing road to the Fondation Maeght.

Up the climbing road in sunlight that is bright and warm now and on past the Fondation Maeght to the gravel road with the wrought-iron gate and the two sculptures in polished white marble—a mother and child and the trumpeting Gabriel—on the grass inside. The voice of the housekeeper, a woman from a nearby
village, answers my ring. It comes through the black metal box mounted in the stone pillar to the right of the gate. “Ah, Monsieur Lev, welcome back, welcome back. How good to hear your voice. Ah, no, I am sorry; Madame is away today.” The gate slides open, and I step through. A moment later, it slides shut.

I walk along the curving path bordered by lantana and rose of Sharon and mandarin trees and up the grassy lawn to the knoll and the lone cypress and the grave of Jacob Kahn. The pale-gray marble slab, flat on the grassy earth, glistens in the sunlight, giving off sparkles of light as if inlaid with precious stones. The inscription on its polished surface reads:

JACOB KAHN 1884–1983

The pale-brown stucco-and-wood house lies beyond the garden and terrace where he would sit with Tanya and listen to the wind. It was the one clear sense left him toward the end, his hearing, and he would sit with his head inclined toward the wind and say there were subtleties to the mistral and the sirocco that one hears only when there are no other senses to distract one, faint nuances that reminded him of certain color patterns he had seen in Matisse at one point and on occasion in that madman Soutine and often in the work of the Spaniard. It moved differently through the white pines and the apple trees, a surge of cadmium red in one and a subtle earth green in the other, and in the slender leaves of the olive tree a wash of cerulean blue like a cool, caressing hand. Among the silver-barked cherry trees the wind played in a flow of dark purple, and it was bright yellow in the juniper hedge and orange among the marguerite. He was so old, so brittle, and a dry fetid odor rose from him, and he needed his Indian blanket—the one I had bought him as a gift during a trip to Arizona—he needed it even in the sunlight.

Tanya always sat nearby on the terrace, reading another of her novels in Russian. Émigrés and old friends brought them to her: recently released Jews; Russian writers; diplomats on trips to the West. She was more than fifteen years younger than her husband,
a woman of striking appearance, high cheekbones, silver hair drawn back into a bun, dark-eyed, aristocratic. Before the Russian Revolution her family had been wealthy Odessa merchants with connections everywhere. She would read as Jacob Kahn and I talked.

“What are you doing these days, Asher Lev?” he would ask each time I saw him, and I saw him often in those years, two or three times a week. I was a son in their home; sometimes Devorah would come along and bring Rocheleh.

“This and that,” I would answer, and we would talk technical matters for a while.

It was difficult for him to speak for long periods of time in any one language. He would move from English to Yiddish to French to Russian. At first, the language he used would be appropriate to the years of his life he was describing to me: an account of his early life in Russia would be told in Yiddish; his years in Montmartre with Picasso would be recounted in French; his years in America were relayed in English; to Tanya he often spoke Russian, which I did not understand. Then he began to move from one language to another within sentences, and there seemed no clear connection between subject and word. His talk was layered with language as his canvases were with paint.

“I do nothing any longer,” he said to me once. “I hear Chagall is still able to paint. But I do nothing. The eyes do not see. The legs will not stand. The hands refuse to work. Only the ears are still able to hear. No matter. I have done what I was put here to do. I have a right to my fatigue. It is an earned fatigue.”

He sat—the blanket with its dance of Indian colors and forms tight around him—with the sun on his astonishingly withered face, the walrus mustache sagging and the dry white hair loose and uncombed on his skeletal head and the brownish blotches on his pale pink skin and the hooded eyes shiny with the watery glaze of age.

He said to me another time, “Do you remember when the Rebbe first brought us together? I had no hope it would succeed. You could draw, yes. You had an eye. But many can draw. It is not a rare gift. And you were such a child. Thirteen years old, and a naïve child. I think the Rebbe expected you to fail. I wonder if the
Rebbe does not regret having brought us together. Have you ever considered that, Asher Lev?”

“I have, yes.”

“I think of that often these days. Because soon you will be my future.”

“Enough.”

“Oh, do not think it was all done out of the goodness of my heart, Asher Lev. Artists are not kind. Artists are selfish and calculating. If you had only a talent for drawing, it would have ended quickly. But you possessed the capacity for rage. Even the Rebbe could not see the anger in you. I saw those demons. They were the source for your art. I saw that right away, during the first weeks we were together. I gave you years of my life because I saw in you my future.”

“You are talking too much,” Tanya said to him, raising her eyes from her book. “You should rest.”

He said something to her in Russian, and she shook her head.

“She wants me to rest,” he said to me in his hoarse, throaty voice. “What for? I have already had more time alive than most people who have ever lived. I will talk with my student, who is my future.”

Tanya responded to him in Russian, and he laughed and coughed and wrapped the Indian blanket tighter around himself. He was so gaunt, there was so little of him inside the blanket, that the folds and ridges of wool seemed to be wrapped around bones and air. I sat in a short-sleeved sport shirt and khaki pants and sandals and my fisherman’s cap. He turned to me. “You know what she said? ‘It is your funeral.’ How right she is, my Tanya! Will you say a prayer for me, Asher? I do not believe in God, you know. But a prayer cannot hurt. Oh, yes, he is a clever man, the Rebbe.”

Another time he asked me, “Do you ever go back there? To Brooklyn?”

I shook my head. I had not told him about that phone call.

“Not at all?”

“I went back once.”

“It is all over between you and Brooklyn?”

I said nothing.

He nodded soberly. “You do not answer. That is called ambivalence. I am glad you save it for Brooklyn and do not put it into your art. Ambivalence in art is like piss in coffee.”

“Kahn,” Tanya said, looking up from her book. “Old age should not become an excuse for vulgarity.”

He ignored her. “They will not let you alone, you know. Wait. A time will come and you will need them or they will need you. They will make demands. When they need you, they will call you. What will you do then, Asher Lev?”

“It will depend upon what they want.”

“You think so? My father, you know, was a Ladover, a follower of the Rebbe’s father. I remember my father singing and dancing in our little synagogue in Kiev, frightened of the Communist bastards all around us. Me, I believed in nothing except my art. Still, when they called on me—” He broke off and stared into the late-afternoon sunlight.

“When was that?”

“Long ago.”

“What did you do?”

“I took you on as my student, Asher Lev.” He turned his eyes upon me. A wan smile played over his dry lips. “It is difficult to say no to them. They touch something deep, very deep. They deal in eternity, the roots of the soul.”

“They are charlatans,” Tanya said. “They take advantage of one’s natural feelings of self-doubt and guilt. You will excuse me, Asher. I do not number you among them.”

“Our Asher is among them and not among them. Is that not right, Asher?”

I was quiet.

“Listen to his silence, Tanya. He does not answer. The silence is a mark of his ambivalence. Look at him. Ambivalence covers him like a mist. Oh, they will call on you one day, Asher Lev. One does not require an overabundance of wisdom to foresee that. I know the Rebbe from our days together in Paris. Yes, yes, sooner or later demands will be made.”

Devorah asked me once, on our way back from one of our evening visits, “Why do you see him so often? Most of the time when you’re with him he sleeps.”

“He’s my teacher,” I said.

“But you rarely talk now.”

“I don’t need words to talk with him.”

“Was he really so close to Picasso and the others?” Earlier Jacob Kahn had talked ramblingly of the Bateau Lavoir days.

“He was in some ways Picasso’s equal and in other ways his student. What Picasso was to painting, Jacob Kahn was to sculpture.”

“What does he mean when he says you are his future?”

“I don’t know.”

She was silent. We walked on down the hill and past the sculpture and onto the main road. She took my arm. “We won’t talk about it, my husband. Some burdens are best borne in silence.”

Jacob Kahn said to me one afternoon, “Do you think about women?”

“Often,” I said. “Devorah, Rocheleh.”

He laughed dryly. “I have been remarkably faithful for an artist, considering what has come my way.” I saw Tanya look up from her book. “And now, the older I get, the more I think about them. I always believed it would be the other way around. How life surprises you. Have you seen the Spaniard’s
347 Suite?
An astonishment. What he could no longer do with his penis he did with his pen.”