The Gift of Asher Lev (49 page)

The Rebbe sits behind a desk in a small office that is bare of everything save the desk and three chairs. He sits in a soft chair, wearing a dark suit, a tie, and a dark hat. A window air conditioner hums softly. He beckons me toward him and motions me into a chair.

He has asked to see me now, he says, because tomorrow night, after Shabbos, there will be many people who will want to see him. How was I feeling? How were Devorah and the children?

He speaks softly. His eyes are alert. His hands seem curled, weary. Harsh white sunlight shines through the windows of the office, cutting the air into stark zones of shadow and light. He sits in shadows, motionless behind the desk.

“The art collection of your uncle, may he rest in peace. What will you do with it?”

“I don’t know, Rebbe.”

“Your cousin has strong feelings about the collection. It is difficult to reason with him.”

“On certain matters, Cousin Yonkel is an unreasonable man.”

“Perhaps it would be best if you sold it.” I do not respond.

“He is a person of deep piety and conviction, your cousin, an uncompromising man. Does one have the right to disregard the wishes and feelings of such a person?”

“I will try to think what to do.”

“Your Avrumel came to see me yesterday. He has a good head. Has he a talent for art?”

“Not for making art. But he loves to look at it.”

“He has a talent for Torah. That I can see. What will you do, Asher?”

“I am thinking of that, too, Rebbe.”

He sighs. “Some troubles do not go away as we grow older. They grow older with us. I give you and your family my blessing, Asher Lev.”

I went outside and walked back to the beach and stood there watching Devorah and my mother out in the rowboat, and Rocheleh and Avrumel splashing about on opposite sides of the wooden wall. After a while I went into the cottage and got my drawing pad and sat under the tree at the edge of the beach and made a drawing of Avrumel talking to the Rebbe and another of Avrumel swimming.

The next morning the Rebbe came to the synagogue for the Shabbos service. The synagogue was crowded, and a shiver of astonishment passed through everyone when the Rebbe slowly
entered, together with the two tall dark-bearded men. All were tremulous with restrained happiness as he sat down on the chair near the Ark. He left soon after the Silent Devotion of the Musaf Service. Afterward some of the men did a dance on the grass outside.

During the dance, I stood next to my father, and he said he wanted to talk to me. After the Shabbos meal. We would go for a walk somewhere. Just the two of us. Together.

We walk in the woods, in air dense with the rich dark smell of rotting leaves. It is cool and moist in the leafy shade. My father wears a white shirt and dark trousers; a small dark velvet skullcap covers his head of thick white hair. I see his mouth beneath the long white beard, the full lips, the start of the firm jaw. Under our feet the earth is ridged with bulging and spidery roots. Huge fallen trees lie here and there across the ground, hoary giants, home to ants and maggots. We walk slowly beneath the embowering oaks and birches and pines. Birds sing invisibly from the branches; insects sail about in swarms, and we brush them from our eyes and lips. Pencil-thin beams of sunlight pierce the trees: dancing dots of light on the earth at our feet.

My father asks me how I am feeling. He is concerned about me, he says. I have lost weight. I seem listless, distant. He is worried that I might be—he hesitates—depressed.

I tell him I am not depressed; I have a lot on my mind.

“Are you still troubled by the reactions to your Paris exhibition?”

“No. That seems to have faded. A healed wound.”

“What, then?”

I am quiet.

“Is there any way I can help you, Asher? It hurts a father to see a son this way. It makes no difference what age the son is; it hurts.”

“I don’t think you can help me. I’ll work it out.”

He was silent. We walked on and came to the clearing and stood quietly in the shade along the edge. Butterflies played in the sunlight, gliding low and circling lazily over the grass and the flat shining rock.

“I saw your latest drawings,” he said. “Devorah showed them to me before I went back to Israel. There will be an exhibition of these drawings in the fall?”

“Yes.”

“I do not understand them. I have always had … problems with your work, but at least I think I understood it. These new drawings I do not understand at all. Bits and pieces of things, like puzzles. Do you aim deliberately to be difficult? Is that a sign of being modern?”

“Some art is difficult because life is difficult.”

“The Rebbe likes to make things clearer, not more difficult. A leader should clarify, Asher, not deliberately confuse. He should bring light to the world. One of our great mystical books is called
The Book of Brightness.”

“Difficulty and darkness are not the same. When something has many sides to it, it’s not easy to show it simple and clear. The world is sometimes very ambiguous.”

“God did not create an ambiguous world, Asher. We only at times experience it as ambiguous.”

“What else do we have but our experience of the world?”

“We have our faith. We have our work. Our work is to bring God into this world. Look what has been done to this world and its people in this Godless century. It is a horror. Our task is to redeem this horror. We cannot redeem it by offering people ambiguity.”

“I try to redeem it through my art.”

“An artist redeems through his art?” He seemed astonished by that idea. “Acts redeem, Asher. Acts.”

“Art is also acts.”

“Sacred acts, Asher. Acts connected to the Master of the Universe. Sacred acts saved you. If you had not remained an observer of the commandments all these years, it would have made no difference that I was your father: the Ladover would have cast you out long ago.”

My heart pounded. I stood next to him along the edge of the clearing, watching the butterflies sail back and forth over the grass. “Do we understand everything about the people we know?” I asked.

“Not everything, no.”

“How can we expect to know everything about God?” He looked at me, his eyes narrowing.

“I call that ambiguity,” I said. “Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the light side to the darkness, different perspectives on the same things. Nothing in this whole world has only one side to it. Everything is like a kaleidoscope. That’s what I’m trying to capture in my art. That’s what I mean by ambiguity.”

“No one can live in a kaleidoscope, Asher. God is not a kaleidoscope. God is not ambiguous. Our faith in Him is not ambiguous. From ambiguity I would not derive the strength to do all the things I must do. Ambiguity is darkness. Certainty is light. Darkness is the world of the Other Side. Tell me something, Asher. Do you think Avrumel will be better off if he learns ambiguity from you or certainty from me?”

I said nothing.

“Will Avrumel redeem the world through art?”

“Avrumel won’t be an artist.”

“Then let him study Torah.”

“Who said he won’t study Torah?”

“Let him start in the yeshiva here.”

“We have a fine yeshiva in Nice.”

“His grandparents don’t live in Nice; they live in Brooklyn. The Rebbe once said, ‘The Master of the Universe enables us to live to see grandchildren so that we can have the privilege of experiencing the world as it was at the Creation. Each grandchild is a beginning.’ Like the young trees here in these woods. How many years do your mother and I have left, Asher? How will it hurt you if you let Avrumel spend the next year with us?”

I look at him closely. I know all the languages of his face, every emotion in it, its angers and laughters and fears. I know all the messages he sends when his eyes cloud over or sparkle, when his nostrils flare, his lips tighten, his jaws clench. There is nothing hidden in him now, not the faintest hint of duplicity. He knows nothing. Or perhaps he knows and doesn’t know—simultaneously. If an entire community can know and not know something at one and the same time, certainly so can its individual members. Should
I tell him? I will tell him. Now. Papa, do you know who the next Rebbe will be? You. But only if I give my word to the Rebbe that Avrumel will follow you. The Rebbe wants to create a dynasty. You will not become Rebbe without Avrumel, even though you deserve to be, because when you die and there is no one to replace you—not even a child; children have replaced Rebbes before; charisma is heedless of age—there will be worse confusion and dissension than there might be now if the Rebbe were to die—God forbid!—without making a sign regarding a successor. I will tell my father all that. Now. Yes.

He will look at me as if I have lost my mind, for he regards himself as utterly unworthy of succeeding the Rebbe. He, a Rebbe? Unthinkable! A blasphemy! And how is it that I know of this, I, Asher Lev, who haven’t lived among the Ladover for twenty years? Am I suddenly a prophet? He will call me a troublemaker, an irresponsible dreamer, an artist, a defiler of Ladover Hasidus and of the great name of the Rebbe, and he will stalk off in a rage.

I tell him nothing.

“You will do your mother and your father a great kindness, Asher, if you let Avrumel spend the coming year with us.”

Does he want Avrumel to remain with them for a year—and will it then be another year, and another?—because of the reason he gives, or because he is somehow aware of the condition attached to the sign the Rebbe wishes to give? Is he aware of both—and unaware? Can the mind ride two such separate tracks simultaneously? Concealed ambivalence. Hidden ambiguity. Are we so flawed that we can never truly know our own most secret motives?

“What about Rocheleh?” I ask.

“Rocheleh is not Avrumel.” That is his way of saying: Rocheleh is a girl; we must concern ourselves with the men.

“I don’t think Devorah will go back without Avrumel.”

He gazes across the clearing and is silent. He is telling me by his silence that this is a boundary he will not cross. A man must resolve such matters himself with his wife; no one may interfere. Finally he says, after a long pause, “Devorah is very happy here. She has found a home and a community here.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

We go back through the woods to the cottage. Later that afternoon,
I see him sitting under the tree near the beach with Avrumel. I walk by. He is telling Avrumel a story about the Rebbe’s grandfather.

On the beach that night, after the children are asleep, Devorah says to me, “You look so troubled, my husband.”

My parents are with the Rebbe. There are parties in some of the cottages. We hear laughter and traditional Hasidic music and the music of a Hasidic rock band. The sky is black and studded with stars. I feel the sand of the beach beneath my shoes and think of the summers in Provincetown with Jacob Kahn. How memory accordions time and places disparate moments next to one another like photographic slides on a tray!

“I’m thinking of the coming year, Dev.”

She is silent.

“We can’t leave until after the holidays. The children have to go to school. We should put them for the time being in the yeshiva.”

“I have already done that.”

A cool wind brushes across the faintly moonlit surface of the lake and sends wavelets rippling against the rowboats. The lights in the Rebbe’s cottage are ablaze: meetings. Day after day, meetings. And one day my father as the Rebbe? Asher Lev, artist, son of Aryeh Lev, the Rebbe of the Ladover Hasidim? It sounds vaguely like a blasphemy. Should I tell it to Devorah? Yes. I will tell it to her. Now. Listen to me, my wife—

No.

She will recoil. Or she will grasp at it too swiftly, see it as the fulfillment of the Divine Plan she believes began with her years in that scaled apartment, and she will give herself to it entirely, mindlessly, dissolving herself in it, consumed by it. No. Let it come to her gradually. The Spaniard is right. That day in the rain, stumbling about Paris, looking. The old Jew on the street showing me where it was. The Spaniard appearing suddenly amid his paintings and sculptures and telling me that some truths are best given in riddles. Sound advice. The advice of an artist’s rebbe. A demonic rebbe, as it were, from the Other Side. Let the truth about Avrumel be unriddled very slowly, so it does not strike with the force of
lightning but is a gentle illumination, like a picture one learns to read color by color and shape by shape, one color or shape at a time.

The wind rises and ripples the lake. A shooting star streaks across the black sky, blazes, and swiftly vanishes. Devorah and I are alone on the beach. I put my arm around her and hold her to me. She came to me so thin and shy that day Max brought her to my apartment, wide gray resolute eyes with pinpoints of darkness in them, a long thin oval face, pale and determined—to finish her work at the Sorbonne, to make some sense of her lost life, above all to overcome the darkness of those two years of entombment. She was one of those who would never ask to be looked at when someone talked to her; she herself had so much difficulty looking at the world. Yet she wanted to face everything, and sometimes it wore her down and she lay in her bed, trying to fall asleep with the lights on. And she wrote stories. And she was a mother and a wife. And I loved her very much. And we were now going to have a strange and unforeseen life. Another riddle.

Suddenly I feel her sag against me. She has remembered something from the distant past. These moments are palpable, these sudden passages into remote memory; they come as real burdens with tangible weight. “The second summer we were in the apartment,” she says softly, “it was so hot we could barely breathe. It was like breathing through hot, wet wool. And I remember we couldn’t take baths because there was something wrong with the plumbing. One night that summer the Americans bombed a part of the city, and the next day there were roaches everywhere in the apartment. We couldn’t kill them quickly enough; they were all over, on the walls and the floors. And it was so hot. I slept with almost nothing on, and on top of my sheet, and I was terrified I would wake up covered with roaches. Sometimes I thought I could hear them crawling around in my room in the dark, on the floor and walls and all over my bed. The concierge told us the whole neighborhood was full of them. He said they were crazy from the heat and the bombardment.”