The Gift of Asher Lev (50 page)

“What happened?”

“After about a week, the heat went away and the roaches disappeared.”

“Poor Dev.”

“It was a terrible time. Isn’t it strange that I didn’t remember it until now?”

“Not so strange.”

“Asher, I think I want to go back in now and have a cup of coffee and go to bed. Do you think we can go to bed? I know it’s beautiful out here, but I think I really want to go to bed.”

We lie in my bed and listen to the night. The walls of the cottage are thin, and I hear Avrumel cry out in his sleep: the nightmares of a child. Is he dreaming of his friend who fell with his face on that rock? Why were they playing baseball on a field with a rock? I hold Devorah and listen to the wind on the lake. She is warm and silken in my arms. From time to time she quivers in her sleep. What is she remembering from that sealed apartment? It is a long time before I am able to sleep.

On Monday afternoon we drove back to the city. The next day Rocheleh and Avrumel returned to the yeshiva.

The neighborhood returned to its presummer life. Signs of the coming holidays began slowly to appear. Clothing stores were crowded. There was a heightening of stress, a quickening of the street rhythms, a scurrying about.

The Rebbe returned from the mountains. He did not appear in the synagogue. But lights burned in his home into the early hours of each morning.

I thought to sell some of the prints in my Uncle Yitzchok’s collection and establish a yeshiva scholarship fund in his name. But word came swiftly from Cousin Yonkel through the principal that he would never permit his father’s name to be even remotely connected to any funds that originated with the art collection, and if I or the school went ahead with the idea, he would take us to court. Cousin Yonkel, it seemed, was demented when it came to his father’s art collection: he saw it as crawling with the demonic minions of the Other Side, as a corruption that could spread and poison the air and endanger the entire community. I called Douglas Schaeffer and told him not to sell the prints.

My mother was back teaching at New York University. Devorah tended to the children and went to women’s meetings, where
she spoke of her wartime experiences and growing up in a Ladover home in Paris and her childhood memories of the months the Rebbe lived with her family in their Paris apartment. She remembers the Rebbe far more clearly than she remembers her parents and relatives. My mother told me that the women were charmed by Devorah’s accent and intrigued by her as the wife of Asher Lev. My father made a brief trip to Israel and said little to me about it when he returned. “Meetings and politicians,” he murmured, with an edge of contempt in his voice. “Descent for the sake of ascent. We do it for the sake of heaven.”

I roamed the neighborhood, drawing. “It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly,” I read in the collection of letters written by Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien, “that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character…. You must
harness
yourself to drawing.” I drew endlessly: the faces along the parkway; the machines scarring the road; the children walking to school; the angles of sun and shade on the houses; a dead cat, crushed by a passing car; the Ladover ambulance at its parking station near the headquarters building; people pouring out of the Kingston Avenue subway station during the rush hour; Rocheleh and Avrumel returning home with their schoolbooks amid a crowd of their friends. I did not show the drawings to anyone.

One afternoon I bought a box of pastels in the neighborhood art supply store and made some drawings of faces I saw somewhere inside myself—whitish faces against black-and-red backgrounds. I put the drawings into my attaché case.

A few days later, I bought a small set of watercolors and paper and some mailing tubes and set up on the terrace a card table I hauled out from a closet in the den. I diluted some cadmium red and, with a number 6 brush, washed the hue across the fingertips of my right hand. The color moved into the skin and mixed with the ingrained grime of years and sank into the tiny trenches, forming spiky rivulets. I looked at my hand. It quivered faintly. Then, leaving most of the white on the paper, I painted an old white-bearded man walking along Brooklyn Parkway with a little boy beside him, passing a bulldozer that was tearing up the street. Then, once again leaving most of the white on the paper, I did a
watercolor of Avrumel talking to his Shimshon doll, and another of Devorah talking with my mother. The paintings had a strange quality: they were figurative but there were no figures in them. They looked as if they might suddenly dissolve. I let them dry, then rolled them up, slid them into a mailing tube, put the tube into my big valise, and returned the valise to its closet.

Devorah noticed the watercolor set later that day and said, “Asher, are you working with color?”

“I played with it a little.”

“And what came of it?”

“I can’t tell yet.”

“May I see it?”

“It’s not ready to be seen.”

“Not even by your wife?”

I shook my head.

She sighed. “You are so difficult sometimes, Asher. Are you sure you cannot work here this coming year?”

“We’ve been through this already, Dev. I lived part of my life here once. I can’t repeat myself.”

“Asher, I do not understand you.”

I told her of a letter Camille Pissarro once wrote to his son about Monet’s dealers, who were insisting he exhibit only one kind of painting, the one that had become very popular with collectors. The collectors only wanted
Sheaves.
Pissarro wrote that he couldn’t understand how Monet could subject himself to the demand that he repeat himself. He called it a terrible consequence of success. “It’s a kind of death to keep repeating yourself and your life over and over again,” I said.

“I do not understand. Are all the people here dead? This entire community? Your parents?”

“I’m talking only about
me,
Dev. It’s death for
me.”

She shook her head and was quiet. Sadness darkened her eyes.

As we drew closer to the sacred time of the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement, I sensed the neighborhood growing more populous, expanding. Stores crowded all day long; street corners jammed solid with pedestrians waiting for lights to change. Every day there were more congregants in the synagogue for the Morning Service; the
New York Times
sold out earlier each morning
from the vendor I passed on my way back from the synagogue. I began to hear a variety of languages on the streets and in the shops: Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch, Israeli Hebrew, British and Australian English. Sidewalk vendors appeared: electronic toys for children; pictures of the Rebbe; adult and children’s books in many languages. One of Devorah’s books was there, in its English edition:
Rebekah Runs Home.
A little girl returns home one day to the apartment where she lives and finds that her parents are being arrested by two policemen. She is about to cry out to her mother, when her mother sees her and screams at her to get out, this is not a zoo or a circus, go home to your own parents. The little girl realizes in an instant what her mother is saying, and she turns to run away, and as she turns she sees the two policemen looking at her and then at each other. She is out of the door and running to her big cousin’s apartment in a building nearby, and she runs and runs and scrambles up the dark staircase and rushes into her cousin’s apartment, only to discover that somehow she is back inside her own apartment and her parents are being arrested by the two policemen. The policemen turn to look at the little girl and then the little girl wakes up and discovers it has all been a very bad dream, how lucky she is to have her own family, and how wondrous it is for them all to be safe in their own home.

I remarked to my mother one day about the crowds and the many languages I was hearing on the streets, and she said, “They have come here from all over the world to be with the Rebbe for the holidays.”

“Every year so many come?”

“More and more come each year. We have grown, thank God.”

“Maybe they expect the Rebbe will give a sign.”

“What sign?”

“About who will succeed him.”

Her face stiffened. She looked past me. “We do not talk about such things, Asher. The people are here to be with the Rebbe, may he live a long and healthy life.”

I came out of the Kingston Avenue subway station late one afternoon after a day in Manhattan galleries—at the Marlborough, startling black paintings of landscapes and cityscapes by Alex Katz; at the Sidney Janis, black and white sculptures by George Segal
named
The Street
and
Abraham’s Farewell to Ishmael
—and saw the crowds on the street. It took a minute or two for me to realize that something strange was happening. The streets were choked with dark-garbed men milling about, darting, walking agitatedly back and forth. Some waved their arms over their heads; some were talking aloud to the sky; some were biting their clenched fists. The air was turbulent with confusion. I asked an old man what had happened, and he said the Rebbe had been taken very ill. A coldness of utter bereavement washed over me, and I looked blindly about, expecting the heavens suddenly to turn black and torrents of blood to come pouring from the sky. In front of the synagogue the crowd was impenetrable, a solid wall of black-garbed, wide-eyed, frantic men. I headed toward the house, wondering where my father was—at the Rebbe’s bedside?—and saw men and women weeping openly on the streets and children looking around wide-eyed and people standing helplessly about. I turned the corner into my parents’ street and saw another crowd in front of the Rebbe’s home, spilling out across the sidewalk and blocking traffic. I went past my parents’ house and my Uncle Yitzchok’s house toward the home of the Rebbe, and suddenly the perimeter of the crowd in front of the Rebbe’s home began to break into fragments; it seemed to go flying off in all directions. Young men went running through the streets, shouting. One raced past me, and I heard him cry, “Thank God! Thank God!” and another cried, “The Rebbe will recover!” and the news flew through the neighborhood: the Rebbe had fainted during a meeting, but it was not serious, only something having to do with low blood pressure, thank God, thank God!

Avrumel and Rocheleh told us later that when the news came of the Rebbe’s sudden illness, all the students in the yeshiva ceased their learning and began to recite Psalms. Devorah was giving a talk to a group of women in a nearby apartment when the phone rang with the news; the women immediately recited a chapter of Psalms and returned to their homes. My mother was teaching and found out about it when she arrived home, after it was over.

My father had been with the Rebbe at the meeting. He helped carry the Rebbe to his bed. He was with the doctor. He brought the doctor’s diagnosis to the Ladover elders waiting outside the bedroom.
When he came home from his office that night and told us what had taken place, he looked worn, ashen. He could not eat and went to lie down. Later, as Devorah and I were getting ready for bed, we heard him go down the hallway, heard his recognizable slightly limping tread and the front door open and close. He was going back to his office and the Rebbe.

Days later, the Rebbe was well enough to stand on the bimah before the entire congregation on the two days of Rosh Hashanah and each day sound the shofar. A motionless sea of white-garbed men stood silent and tense as the reader called out the notes and the resonating sounds of the ram’s horn pierced the air of the synagogue. The long notes, the broken notes, the staccato notes, again and again, coming from the shofar blown every year at this time by the Rebbe. The call to watchfulness, to action, to redemption.

On the second day, the Rebbe faltered at the start of the final long note. He tried repeatedly and could not get the note out. The congregation stirred, tensed, leaned forward as if imparting to the small white-clad figure on the bimah its own collective strength to enable him to continue—and he raised the ram’s horn to his lips and blew on it a long, pure, sustained note that went on and on and on until it seemed no human was sounding that ram’s horn but some messenger from the Master of the Universe, someone bringing a clear musical note from the heavens, heralding transformations soon to come. And when the note came to an end, all in the congregation whispered, murmured, sighed, stirred. Not a word was spoken. Yet everything was spoken. The Rebbe is well. It will be a good year. Thank God! Thank God!

On the Shabbos between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Rebbe stood at his lectern before the Ark and spoke about the role of the Ladover in America and in the world. America, this great land, is a tragic country today, he said. Its best minds can only watch helplessly the ugliness, the vulgarity, the disintegration all around. Who could ever have believed this would befall America? We waste our resources, human and natural. Families are in disarray. Whole sections of our great cities are in ruins. What has happened to us? The destiny of the Ladover is to collect broken souls, to bind up broken lives, to save Jews and thereby, in doing
our share of the work of redemption, help save America and the world.

Asher Lev sits in the synagogue between his father and his son, listening to the words of the Rebbe. How clearly the words come to him from this small, saintly, aged man. For more than two hundred years the world has tried to save itself through secularism, the Rebbe says. And where are we? Two world wars. The Holocaust. The atomic bomb. Blood and devastation. Is it better for man to live with uncertainty? Is the answer of Freud an answer? We should simply learn to accept our position as strange sick creatures? Is the answer of Nietzsche an answer? We should learn to live gladly as guests in a murderous but fascinating world that cares nothing about our presence? That was odd, the Rebbe mentioning Freud and Nietzsche; he quoted only from Rebbes and the Rabbis of the Talmud when he spoke in the synagogue. Perhaps there was someone in the congregation he was addressing directly. Freud and Nietzsche, he went on. The two extremes of secular life. Stoic acceptance and gay defiance in the face of—nothing; in the face of indifference, boiling violence, inexorable chaos; in the face of—the Other Side. Two hundred years of this. Enough. Jews must return to Torah. The world must return to God. There must be a center to human life or, God forbid, there will be no human life left on this planet. A man may not live alone. A man is part of a larger world. Even a great man, a creative man, a man who needs solitude, even such a man is part of a larger world. To live alone, apart from a community of men, is to live in death. I listened and looked at him and realized with cold shock that he was talking to me, directly to me. I wondered how many others realized that. Many, I was certain. I saw myself as part of this community and this country, concerned about both their futures. What was happening to our world was unbearable to me. But I had no illusion that I could ever change anything. I could only do my part by doing my own work and playing out the string of my own aberrant gift. Could one love only if one was present as part of the flesh and sinew of the beloved? Could one not love also as witness and distant participant? “The Jewish world will return to Torah and to its Father in Heaven,” the Rebbe said. “And then surely the final redemption will come. May it come
speedily and in our day. Amen.” And the congregation thundered, “Amen!”