The Gift of Asher Lev (47 page)

Carefully, hesitantly, my mother sits down in the lawn chair next to mine. In her mid-sixties, wearing a long-sleeved cotton summer print dress of a light-pink color, with an off-white kerchief over her short silver hair, she displays the beginning of a frailty that is beyond the fragility that colored all the decades of life I shared with her and can still remember. There are more frequent visits to doctors now; her eyeglasses are changed often; she is on regular medication of some kind. Something about her heart and the chemical levels in her blood. She will not talk about it, suppresses it, remains toward me and Devorah her old self, willed to strength. Now she sits gazing across the lawn at the sycamore and through its branches and leaves at the bleached sky. On the other side of the hedge is my late uncle’s house. I have seen neither my aunt nor my cousins since my return from the mountains; they have a summer home on the shore of Lake Mohegan, about an hour’s drive from New York. My mother is talking to me. She has just spoken to the Rebbe, she says. My father is in Hebron and is, thank God, well. The Rebbe talked with my father just an hour ago. The Rebbe asked about me and sent me his blessing. The Rebbe especially asked about Avrumel.

I tell her Avrumel was all right as of this morning when I walked with him to his day-camp bus station in front of the yeshiva.

“The Rebbe asked if you will consider sending Avrumel to the yeshiva here for the coming year.”

“Why?”

“The Rebbe feels it is important.”

“Rocheleh, too?”

“The Rebbe mentioned only Avrumel. But if you wish, then Rocheleh too.”

“We have a fine yeshiva in Nice.”

“It is not the same. There is the community here.”

“Who will Avrumel live with?”

“With us, of course.”

“He doesn’t want to stay. He wants to go home.”

“Asher, since when do you ask a child where he wants to go to school?”

“Rocheleh can’t stay here.”

“There are children with asthma in our yeshiva. You think there are no people with asthma in New York?”

“New York is not a good place to have asthma. Too many die from it here. The statistics are not good.”

“We cannot build our lives around sickness, Asher. We must have faith in the Master of the Universe.”

“I can’t work here.”

“Why not? Once you worked here. All your early life you worked in Brooklyn and in Manhattan.”

“This is not my early life. I’ve lived that life already. I don’t want to repeat it.”

“Parents sacrifice for their children, Asher.”

“Why is it so important for Avrumel to go to school here? Especially now. He’s only five.”

“It is the beginning of the roots of his soul, Asher. There are no more important years than these. I am telling you what the Rebbe said. And what your father said. The roots of the soul are formed in these early years. Children come to our yeshiva from all over Europe, Australia, South Africa, South America, Turkey, Israel. Parents send them so they will be in the heart of the Ladover
world, and close to the Rebbe. Is that not something you would want for Avrumel?”

“I want Avrumel near me. I want to watch him grow up. I want to be able to talk to him every day. I want to be able to teach him about the value of art. I want him to be able to watch me paint. I don’t intend to give away my son.”

She seemed astonished. “What do you mean, give away? Who is talking about giving away? I am talking only of this coming year.”

“We came for a week of mourning and we’ve stayed four months. Now we’re talking about another year. What will we be talking about after that year? The next year and the next and the next?”

“You are making it sound as if some sort of conspiracy is taking place. Is that what you think, Asher? This is a plan, a conspiracy? A conspiracy for what, my son? For Torah? For love? It’s nothing more than grandparents whose years are numbered wanting to spend as much time as possible with their son and his family whom they have never truly seen and come to know. That is what this is, Asher.”

Nothing about her face, always open, always so easy to read, gives the faintest hint of a concealed purpose behind her request. Aging grandparents wanting a year of life with their grandson, or their grandchildren; eager to make up for all the years of neglect; hungry for reconciliation and family peace before their lives ended and they slipped into the True World. And as an added incentive, the concern of the Rebbe that the grandson receive a proper Ladover education. All the purest of innocence. Or is it the deepest of concealments, one about which she herself is not aware? Can motivations be so hidden that even the holder is ignorant of their force? What if she both knows and doesn’t know at one and the same time? What if the entire community knows and doesn’t know? The Rebbe, whom we all love, will soon remove himself to the True World. And afterward? What of afterward? Splinterings? Chaos? Who would lead? My father is the natural choice. But how long will he live? And after him? Again, God forbid, splinterings and chaos? Therefore, afterward, after my father: Avrumel. Then don’t give it to my father, give it to someone else, someone equally worthy. You would deprive your father of such
a destiny? You would remove the line of your family from such a linking with the Master of the Universe? You are prepared to live with such a decision the rest of your life? Think of the pain you have caused your father. Personal redemption is now offered you, a tikkun, a balancing, a transforming, a healing, a repairing, for all that pain. Asher Lev, artist. Asher Lev, father of a Rebbe. A Ladover redemption and a Ladover immortality. And my mother knows nothing of all this, sees it nowhere within her, has it so deeply buried I can detect not a glimmer of it anywhere in her wide brown eyes, her high-boned cheeks, her long bony delicate fingers. She knows her way through the byzantine convolutions of Kremlin power, writes of the Soviet mind as if the Russians were our next-door neighbors, and yet does not perceive the hot bright core within the Rebbe’s request. Most destinies come to us in simple declarative or interrogatory sentences: “Let there be light.” “It is not good for man to be alone.” “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “Some time afterward, God put Abraham to the test.” “Asher’s bread shall be rich.” There is destiny in this simple question: “Will you consider sending Avrumel to the yeshiva here for the coming year?” A simple sentence. Like some of the drawings of the Spaniard. Simple—and boiling as a caldron of fiery stars. And my mother knows nothing of this? How is that possible? A riddle! She is either all innocence or all guile. But she is incapable of guile. All of her is visible on the surface of her. That was why I was able to see all the years of her suffering. That was the reason I painted the crucifixions. If she is lying to me now, then the crucifixions are a lie, all my own life these past twenty years, lived in the shadow of the crucifixions, has been a lie. No, she knows nothing of what is beneath the Rebbe’s suggestion about Avrumel.

“Does Papa know you’re talking to me about Avrumel?”

“No.”

“Let Papa talk to me.”

“I don’t know when your father will return.”

“Whenever he returns, let him talk to me.”

Her lips stiffen; her face locks, wilts. She looks at me a moment, as if to say something more, seems to think better of it, and sits back in the chair. Then she nods and slowly rises and leaves the terrace through the sliding screen door.

I stare through the greenish-black underside of leaves and branches at the hot white sky. In the insect-infested shadows of the sycamore stand Max Lobe and John Dorman, looking at me angrily, accusingly, in silence.

I close my eyes. “We’re on a different track here,” I tell them. “A different train, a different destination.”

“Then get off,” John Dorman says. “Sometimes it’s my train, too,” I tell them. But it makes no difference: they stand there in the shadows of the sycamore, looking at me.

Odors waft across the lawn: roasting meat, charcoal smoke. Afternoon summer sounds: indistinct voices, the song of a bird, the barking of a dog. I am alone in the house. Devorah is at a meeting. How solidly she has settled into the Ladover community, embracing it as family. Have I kept her from family all these years? There was no community on the Rue des Rosiers, and only Max and John in Saint-Paul. We had little to do with the glitter and pleasure seeking of Nice society. Max went to its parties, and sometimes John; mostly, we stayed home, me painting, Devorah writing and caring for the children. In our apartment on the Rue des Rosiers, she would sit up nights at the kitchen table, writing. She wrote her master’s thesis on the kitchen table of Max’s parents’ apartment—that once-sealed apartment—where she lived before we were married: “Vardaman’s Fish and Addie’s Coffin in William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying.”
Accepted by the faculty of the humanities; special notice taken of her facility with the English language—a gift to her from Max’s mother, who, from the mid-twenties to the early thirties, had lived in New York, returning to her native France because of the havoc wreaked on the American branch of her family by the stock market crash and the Depression. Devorah wrote the thesis on those French pads that John disliked so much. Lately she has stopped writing. I’ve noticed that. She doesn’t talk about it. She would write every day. Now? Nothing, for weeks. A temporary halt, as with my painting? White canvas, white paper. Curious how white the sky is, heat pressing against it and bleeding it of color. A vast arc of white paper crushed by the burning air. The hottest summer in the one hundred and thirty years that the world
has been keeping records. Catastrophes everywhere. News stories about the strange disappearance of fish in one-fourth of the lakes in the Adirondacks; forty percent of the counties in the United States drought-ridden disaster areas; floating sewage on long stretches of East Coast beaches; huge holes in the ozone layer. Disaster and apocalypse heralding the redemption. Sound the trumpets! And the Rebbe, he should live and be well, very tired now and ready to give a sign. Press the hot metallic world against the white paper of the sky and see if the sky yields new textures, new fields of vision, or cracks and shreds apart. Max working the carborundum process, his face sweaty with the effort; a new success for him; another triumph; more dealers made happy. And why not? He earned his triumphs during those years in that sealed tomb of an apartment. Buried alive. Alive and not-alive. And Devorah: alive and not-alive. No vision of the sky for two years. A grave. Max painting his way out of that grave; Devorah writing her way out of that grave. Devorah suddenly in a living community and the feeling of the grave now gone. Uncle Yitzchok in his grave has made it possible for Devorah to emerge from her grave. Ironic. Am I right, Uncle Yitzchok? Am I right? From the other side of the hedge that separates my parents’ house from the house of my aunt comes a rustling sound, and I think I see my uncle in the hedge, deep in the tangled cluster of thin branches and leaves, but no one is there. Beyond the hedge is his house and, a few doors down, the house of the Rebbe. Will my parents move into that house one day? The questions one thinks about! The sky is white, veined here and there with wispy threadlike pale-gray lines. Lucien carrying the large, heavy packs of white drawing paper up the five flights of stairs as I follow, my heart pounding. Thin and barely visible gray lines lacing the white surfaces of the paper. “What is the maître planning to draw on these? More pictures to trouble the world? The maître’s last drawings were formidable.” Sketches in oils went onto those sheets of paper until I saw the painting clearly and then put it on a huge canvas, Devorah watching in tense silence as I brought it to life, her astonished eyes telling me how much she disliked it; and my father showing up at the apartment during one of his trips through Europe for the Rebbe
and staring in trembling anger and bewilderment at the finished painting, his face white, and saying, “What have you done? He did not kill him,” and I replying, “There is a midrash that states he did,” and my father saying, “But it is only a midrash. This is what you will show the world? Abraham slaughtering Isaac?” And I replying, “It’s how I feel about it.” And he finally excusing himself and leaving and never returning to that apartment all the rest of the time we lived there, because he was genuinely fearful of what he thought he might find on my easels and walls. Uncle Yitzchok came to the apartment twice during diamond-buying trips in Europe, and once years later to our home in Saint-Paul a few weeks after Avrumel’s ritual first haircut at the age of three; he gazed in silence at the walls, puffed on his cigar, stayed overnight, and left the next morning, saying not a word about what he saw. Douglas Schaeffer came to the apartment on one of his periodic trips to his European artists and stared at the painting that had disturbed my father, murmured something about “your bloody devilish master-pieces,” and with Lucien’s help had it removed through the balcony doors and shipped to New York, where he called it
The Sacrifice of Isaac
—I had wanted to name it
Legacy
—and made it the centerpiece of my next show and sold it to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I was glad to be rid of it. Why had I painted it? I don’t know. My eyes and hands painted it.

I am on the street outside my parents’ house, with no memory of how I got here. I have forgotten my sunglasses; the white light stings my eyes, bringing tears. The air is heavy with moisture. African jungle heat on the paved streets of New York. I turn into the wide traffic-choked street that leads to Brooklyn Parkway. The sidewalks are filled with bearded dark-garbed men, pregnant kerchiefed women, baby carriages. Gasoline fumes cloud the stagnant air. The bookstore is crowded. The food shops are jammed. It is the last Thursday of August; people are shopping for Shabbos. The parkway is dusty with construction. They are still working on the road—thready-muscled men in hard hats using massive equipment: bulldozers, asphalt scrapers, earthmovers, jackhammers—tearing up this stretch of the parkway to replace antiquated conduits and pave it anew. The rush-hour traffic crawls through
the construction areas. I walk beneath the dusty trees and the white sky to the camp bus stop in front of the yeshiva to pick up Avrumel.