My Name Is Asher Lev (19 page)

When I woke in the morning, I found he had already left for the mikveh. My mother was in the kitchen. Her face wore a radiant look. I had a glass of milk and waited for my father to return so we could go to the synagogue together. I waited a long time. He was clearly not returning from the mikveh to the apartment. I went to the synagogue alone and found him at his usual place, with his tallis covering his head. He had either forgotten about me or had chosen not to go with me to the synagogue. I did not talk about it with him.

We spent the first Seder at my Uncle Yitzchok’s house. The table was crowded. I remember that when we were reading the section about the four sons my father looked up at the mention of the evil son and glanced at me. It was an involuntary gesture; I saw he regretted it immediately and looked away. I felt a shiver of dread run through me. My father regarded me as an evil son. I do not remember anything about the rest of that Seder.

Nor do I remember anything about the Seder on the following night, which we celebrated alone in our own apartment. I recall only that I drank too much wine and became a little ill and was put to bed feeling hot and sweaty and faintly nauseated. I lay beneath the blanket and felt the taste of the wine on my tongue and the throbbing inside my head. I opened my eyes and the nausea moved through me and I thought I would be sick. I closed my eyes quickly and was rocking back and forth in the bed, slowly rocking back and forth, feeling very hot and sweaty, feeling the sweat on my face and in the hollows of my eyes. Behind my eyes was one of the nudes I had copied. I felt my eyes begin to move across the contours. I was drawing with my eyes inside myself, copying the painting slowly, very slowly, and feeling the contours with my eyes. I stopped and let my eyes rest. My eyes rested a long time in the dark softness of the picture. Then I felt them begin to move again across the
rise and fall of the contours, across the warm light and dark colors. I felt the colors and the lines. I felt the forms. I felt light and shade and color and shape. I felt the picture move inside myself, slowly, in a gentle spin. Then it began to whirl and suddenly it was white, color and shape all fusing into brilliant white light, and I felt the picture spinning wildly, all white light quivering and spinning crazily inside my head, and I opened my eyes and was very frightened. I was bathed in sweat. My hands were wet. I lay in bed, terrified. It
is
the Other Side, I told myself. It
is
the Other Side. But I can’t help it. I lay in bed and stared into the darkness and listened to the strange new pounding of my heart.

    My mother said to me during the first of the intermediate days of Passover, “You shouldn’t be so frightened when your father and I quarrel.”

“I hate it.”

“People who love each other sometimes quarrel, Asher.”

“I hate to hear Papa shouting at you.”

“Your father is a little frightened. So he shouts at the person closest to him. My brother, olov hasholom, used to shout at me.”

“Why is Papa frightened?”

“He has many responsibilities. And he sees you aren’t learning. He thinks you will become a goy. He doesn’t want to go back to Vienna. But he also doesn’t want to remain here and stop his work in Europe. Are you listening, Asher?”

“Mama, can I go to the museum this week?”

She sighed softly. “Wait until after your father leaves,” she said.

I woke one night later in the week and heard them quarreling in their bedroom. The words were muffled but the sounds were loud. I lay in the darkness. Stop it, I thought. Stop it. Please
stop it. I heard his voice and I thought of my mother in the bedroom with him. Ribbono Shel Olom, stop it. Maybe I can go to Vienna now. I’ll tell him in the morning that I’ll go. But I felt sudden terror and knew I could not tell him. The quarreling ended abruptly. I listened to the silence. My window was slightly open. The shade scraped softly against the sill.

In the morning after my father left the apartment, I said to my mother, “I heard you fighting last night, Mama.”

She looked upset and embarrassed.

“I don’t like Papa when he shouts at you. Why was he shouting at you?”

“Your father wanted me to promise I would not let you go to the museum.” She shook her head sadly. “I can’t promise the impossible.”

“I don’t like Papa when he’s like this.”

“I’m not sure your father is wrong, Asher.”

I stared at her.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

I went to the museum later that day. I wanted to look again at one of the Picassos. On the way to the Picasso, I stopped at one of the paintings of Jesus. I did not copy the painting; I merely looked at it. My eyes moved across it. The wounds intrigued me. How had he made the wounds so real? Had there really been wounds like that? I wondered what it felt like having wounds like that.

I returned home late in the afternoon. My mother did not ask me where I had been.

I remember little else about that Passover, save the quality of menacing darkness that seeped into everything we said and did inside that apartment. All my life, I had loved that festival. It had meant for me warmth and love, the end of winter and the coming of grass and summer sun. Now it was choked with bitterness and fear. My father dominated the apartment on the nights when he was there, and dominated it, too, on the days
when he was not. The small kitchen echoed his anger. I lay awake in the nights and heard his shouts even when the apartment was silent and the only sound in my room was the soft scraping of the window shade against the sill.

He seemed a different person. He was in his mid-thirties now, but his red hair had begun to gray. There were weblike lines around his eyes and deep wedges along his forehead and on the bridge between his eyes. He had never been a happy person; but there had always been some moments when he had been light-hearted and frivolous. That was all gone now. He carried himself erect; he was tall and strong. But he carried, too, a burden he had brought back with him from Europe, the burden of the years it would take him to realize his dream.

He had his own dream. He needed all his strength for that dream. Interference drained his strength. He would fight interference. It was clear enough that he now regarded me as a serious interference.

He said very little to me during the last two days of the festival. He spent most of his time in the synagogue. In the apartment, he read a Hasidic book or talked with my mother. There was another loud quarrel the night after Passover. It took me out of deep sleep and was over even before I came fully awake. But I was awake enough to feel a sense of fear at his presence and, together with the fear, a sense of sudden anger at my helplessness.

I was not unhappy to hear my mother wish him a safe journey two days after Passover and see him go off to his waiting aircraft, limping slightly, his black attaché case and a copy of the
New York Times
in his hands.

    I chose two subjects, the two I knew concerned him most: Talmud and Bible. I began to study those two subjects. I read and memorized. I did not stop drawing, but I did not draw as
often as I had earlier. Whenever I felt unable to study, I remembered the quarrels and my mother’s pale features, and I studied. I studied only what I thought the teacher wanted me to know for class and for tests. I continued going to the museum, but less frequently than before. I continued copying paintings of Jesus and nudes, and other subjects as well.

My mother saw me studying and said nothing. My teacher smiled triumphantly. The mashpia blessed me. At the end of May, my mother told me she had written to my father about the improvement in my schoolwork.

My father wrote habitually two or three times a week. By the end of the first week in June, ten days had passed without mail from him. By the end of the second week, there was still no mail, and my mother was showing signs of concern. She called the Rebbe’s office and was told they, too, had not heard from my father and that she should have faith in the Master of the Universe, everything would be all right. By the middle of the fourth week, my mother seemed ill; her face was sallow; there was darkness around her eyes; when I talked to her, she did not hear me. She did not get out of bed on Thursday. Mrs. Rackover came early, gave me breakfast, and sent me off to school.

Late that night, I heard my mother in the living room, chanting from the Book of Psalms. I came quietly into the room and saw her standing by the window. The room was dark. She stood by the window staring out into the street and chanting Psalms by heart. Then she stopped. She moved forward slightly, inclined her head, and rested her forehead against the window-pane. “Yaakov, do not let anything happen to Aryeh,” she said softly in Yiddish. “Yaakov, are you listening? This is your sister. Do not let anything happen to my Aryeh. Are you listening to me, Yaakov? Please. Yaakov. Please.”

I went back to my room. I did not sleep that night.

The next day, Friday, was the final day of my school year.
My mother was unable to get out of bed and would not eat all day. I spent that Shabbos with my Uncle Yitzchok and his family. My uncle tried hard not to let me see his fear, and failed.

Early Monday morning, the phone rang. My mother answered it. I heard her talking in Yiddish. It was a brief conversation.

I stood next to her in our hallway.

“The Rebbe’s office called. Your father is in Vienna.”

“Where was he all that time?”

“They only told me that he was safe in Vienna.”

“He would have written if he had been Vienna all that time.”

“Yes.”

“He was in Russia,” I said.

“Get dressed,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day outside. We’ll go somewhere. Where do you want to go, Asher? Let’s go to Prospect Park. We’ll go to Prospect Park and take food for a picnic and we’ll even go rowing. You can draw me rowing. But don’t draw me if I fall backward off the seat. Then we’ll go to the museum. Yes,” she said, “we’ll go to the museum.”

    We spent the summer in the bungalow colony in the Berkshires. I painted and drew and studied Talmud and Bible. My mother read and worked on the last section of her master’s dissertation. She was in her early thirties now, and she seemed particularly lovely that summer, rowing with me along the lake, walking with me beneath the pines, watching a summer rain with me from the porch of our bungalow. I drew her over and over again that summer.

My father spent the summer in Vienna. He returned a week before Rosh Hashonoh. His dark eyes glittered with achievement. It had been a good summer. Ladover yeshivos were opening
in Vienna and Paris. Yes, it had been an excellent summer. He said nothing to me about my studies.

I remember that Rosh Hashonoh. I remember the sounding of the shofar, the congregation standing, a sea of heads covered with prayer shawls, the Rebbe at the podium, the shofar at his lips. He wore a long white garment over his dark clothes. On the podium lay the white sacks filled with pieces of paper containing prayers the people wished the Rebbe to say for them. He sounded the shofar over the prayers. The sounds pierced the silence. Over and over, he sounded the shofar. I remember that day because I saw my father look up from his prayer book and stare at me across the synagogue. He stared at me through almost the entire sounding of the shofar. It occurred to me later that one of the prayers in those sacks had contained my name.

He asked me during Succos if I thought I would want to come to Vienna the following year. But now I did not want to be any place where he was, for he had set himself up as an adversary to me and I feared going with him. He could not force me now to go to Vienna; my schoolwork was good. I had the feeling he regretted the improvement in my grades.

He left for Vienna toward the end of October, two days after Simchas Torah.

    The following summer, my mother went to Europe. She told me in the last week of June that she missed my father very much; five days later she sailed to Le Havre. She had her master’s degree now and was working on her doctorate. From time to time throughout the year, she had gone to the Ladover building; for meetings with the Rebbe’s staff, she had said in answer to my questions.

I lived with my Uncle Yitzchok all that summer. I drew and painted and spent a lot of time in Yudel Krinsky’s store. He
was married now. He no longer wore the kaskett. I ran errands for him. Occasionally I ran errands for my Uncle Yitzchok.

That was the summer three new Ladover families moved into the big apartment house across the street from my Uncle Yitzchok’s home, all of them from Russia. I would watch them from the stoop of my uncle’s house—shy, hesitant, bewildered, glancing fearfully at whoever came near them. There was a boy my age in one of the families. I saw him on the street one day in front of his apartment house. I went over to him. He was shorter and thinner than I and had wide eyes and long dangling earlocks.

“How are you?” I said in Yiddish.

He looked at me suspiciously.

“Welcome to Brooklyn.”

He started to turn away.

“My name is Asher Lev.”

He stopped and gazed at me intently, his eyes narrow. I saw him glance quickly around.

“The son of Reb Aryeh Lev?” he said in a quiet voice.

“Yes.”

“How do I know you are the son of Reb Aryeh Lev?”

“Everyone knows.”

“Yes? Everyone?” He glanced around again. “What do you want?”

“Where are you from in Russia?”

He looked at me again out of narrowed eyes. “Tashkent.”

“Did you meet my father in Russia?”

His lip stiffened.

“How did my father get you out?”

“Who said your father got us out? Who said that?” He seemed suddenly frightened. “I never said that.”

“I thought he might have helped to get you out.”

“Listen, what do you want from me? Ask your father.”

“My father is in Europe.”

“Listen,” he said in a thin tight voice. “In Russia, there are Jews with beards and earlocks who spy for the government. What do you want from me? If your father will not tell you, how can I tell you? I do not know anything.”

He turned and walked quickly away and disappeared into the apartment house. I did not speak to him again.