My Name Is Asher Lev (30 page)

My mother said to me early in May, “Where will you spend the summer, Asher?”

“In Provincetown.”

“Your father and I will be in the Berkshires.”

I was quiet.

“Can you spend some time with us this summer, Asher?”

“I need all my time for painting, Mama.”

“Two weeks, Asher.”

“Would Papa let me paint?”

“I don’t know.”

“I need every minute, Mama.”

“Your father is trying very hard to understand you, Asher. It would help if we could all be together this summer.”

I said nothing.

“Asher,” she said. “Asher. You have no idea what it’s like to be standing between you and your father.”

I spent the summer in Provincetown with Jacob and Tanya Kahn and returned with paintings and a tan and without my sidecurls. My father said nothing to me about the sidecurls. In a curious way, he seemed almost relieved. He himself wore sidecurls because his father had worn them. He had never made much of an issue about them with me. Now he seemed relieved
by my tacit indication that the sidecurls were as far as I intended to go, for I had retained my beard and the ritual fringes beneath my shirt.

My mother said to me during one of our morning walks to the subway, “I’m ashamed to ask you again, Asher.”

“I don’t know yet, Mama.”

“Why do there have to be nudes? There are so many other great paintings you have.”

“They’re important to me as an artist.”

“I understand why others paint nudes. But I don’t understand why you must paint nudes and exhibit the paintings.”

“I paint and exhibit them for the same reason others paint and exhibit them.”

“You’ll hurt your father, Asher. He won’t come.”

I was quiet.

“I wish you wouldn’t do it, Asher.”

“I may have to, Mama.”

“Why will you have to?”

“I’m an artist, Mama.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I only understand that you’ll hurt your father.”

Jacob Kahn and Anna Schaeffer came over to my uncle’s house one evening to help me choose the paintings. They chose almost everything I had. I hesitated over the nudes.

“What is wrong?” Jacob Kahn said.

“Nothing.”

“Our artist has become shy, Anna.”

“Our artist cannot afford to be shy, Jacob. Our artist is an important figure in the art world. Our artist is an important investment. Our artist is being given a very big show. There are artists in this world twice his age who would cut off their painting arms for such a show. We will ignore our artist’s shyness and take the nudes. You understand we are taking them merely
to exploit you, Asher Lev. It is only an accident that they happen to be magnificent paintings.”

I let them take the nudes.

The show was in January. It lasted three weeks. My parents did not come. When it was over, I stared at the walls and was sick with a new dread.

“My God, they’re swallowing up my world faster than I can paint it. They even took my fishermen.”

Jacob Kahn said nothing.

“What am I going to do?”

Anna Schaeffer said soberly, “Jacob, walk with him.”

“What am I going to do?” I had never felt such emptiness and horror and dread. “I don’t want to repeat myself.”

Jacob Kahn took me outside. We walked along Madison Avenue. It was a cold windy day. The streets were filled with old snow.

“Your parents did not come,” Jacob Kahn said.

“No.”

“That was the business with the nudes.”

“Yes.”

“Asher Lev, you have been too good a student.” He was silent a moment. The wind blew against his white hair and mustache and dark beret and against the raised collar of his coat. “But you were right to let Anna have the nudes. They are fine works. Even our friend of the Picassoid forms thought they were fine.”

I looked at him and was quiet.

“Our friend of the Picassoid forms now thinks you have surpassed your master. It is in the nature of critics to be fickle.”

I said nothing. The cold wind stung my eyes.

“There are distinct disadvantages to reaching eighty,” Jacob Kahn said, talking into the wind and not looking at me. “But it is better to reach it than not to reach it. I think I will try for
ninety. That old Spaniard is going to make ninety. Why not this old Jew? But even if I make it I will probably be disappointed.” He was quiet. We walked together along the winter street. Then he stopped and turned to me. “You will have to find other worlds, Asher Lev. I told you once about the happy years. There will never again be such years. You understand now, you will always have to find new worlds or you will die as an artist. Here is your subway.” He held out his hand. “Goodbye, Asher Lev.” He turned and walked away.

I called Tanya Kahn the next day. Jacob Kahn was ill, she said. No, she did not know how long it would last this time. I called her a few days later. He was still not well, she said.

Anna Schaeffer told me during a phone conversation the following day that Jacob Kahn had requested an exhibition of his paintings and sculptures for the fall and was working furiously in his studio.

“The master is jealous of the apprentice,” she said into the phone. “It is good for artists to be jealous. It is especially good for Anna Schaeffer.”

That Friday night, I sat with my parents at our dining-room table. We were between courses and had just finished singing one of the Shabbos zemiros. My father sat with his eyes closed. There was a long silence. My mother said quietly, “Will you have another exhibition soon, Asher?” She used the word “exhibition” because my father did not like the word “show.”

“Not for a while. Not for another two years, probably.”

“Why so long?”

“It isn’t long, Mama. I can’t keep grinding out paintings. I have to think of what I want to do next.”

My father opened his eyes. “Paint more naked women,” he said.

“Aryeh,” my mother said. “Please.”

I felt the blood in my face. My father tugged slowly at his beard.

“Asher, do you know what it’s like to have people I have worked with for years come over and ask me why my son paints naked women?” He spoke quietly and with pain in his voice.

“They aren’t naked women, Papa. They’re nudes.”

His dark eyes brooded. He rubbed the side of his face. “This isn’t Shabbos talk,” he said. “We shouldn’t be talking about these things at a Shabbos table.”

“I’ll bring in the dessert,” my mother said.

“There’s a difference between naked women and nudes, Papa.”

My father looked at me intently. He turned to my mother. “Rivkeh, did you know that there’s a difference between a naked woman and a nude?” Pink spots appeared on my mother’s high cheekbones. She did not reply. My father turned to me. “Asher, I’m a reasonably intelligent man. Tell me what the difference is between a naked woman and a nude.”

“A naked woman is a woman without clothes. A nude is an artist’s personal vision of a body without clothes.”

“Is such a personal vision important in your art?”

“That’s what art is, Papa. It’s a person’s private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.”

His dark eyes narrowed. My mother glanced at him, then looked at me.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand. But why do you have to have personal visions about naked women, Asher? I’ve seen your paintings. I don’t understand your style of painting, but at least I didn’t find them offensive. Why do you have to paint and display to the public things that are offensive?”

“They aren’t offensive to people who understand art.”

“They’re offensive to people like me, Asher. I’m asking you why you have to paint that way.”

“Because I’m an artist.”

“Asher, look at me. I’m not a fool. I speak to senators and
governors. I sit behind a desk that helps the Rebbe to run almost half the Ladover machinery in the world. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s in political science. Explain it to me so that I can understand it. Why do
you
have to paint and display nudes?”

“Because I’m part of a tradition, Papa. Mastery of the art form of the nude is very important to that tradition. Every important artist who ever lived drew or painted the nude.”

“Art is a tradition.”

“Yes.”

“I understand. But why is the nude so important in this tradition?”

“Because it has always been part of that tradition.”

“Who began it?”

“The Greeks.”

“Ah,” he said. “The Greeks. Our old friends, the Greeks. All right, Asher. I can understand a little better now why you paint nudes. Why do you display them?”

“I don’t want to sit in a room painting for myself. I want to communicate what I do. And I want critics to know I can do it.”

“Even if it offends people?”

“Everything offends someone.”

“Even if it offends your father?”

I did not respond.

“There is such a matter as respect for your father. That’s also a tradition.”

“I respect you, Papa. But I can’t respect your aesthetic blindness.”

“Aesthetic blindness? Do you hear, Rivkeh? Aesthetic blindness.” My mother looked slowly from my father to me, then back to my father. “An interesting concept. Aesthetic blindness. And what about moral blindness, Asher?”

“I’m not hurting anybody, Papa.”

“One day you will, Asher. This will lead you to the sitra achra.”

“No.”

“Asher, if you had a choice between aesthetic blindness and moral blindness, which would you choose?”

I said nothing.

“I’m warning you, Asher. One day you’ll hurt someone with this kind of attitude. And then you’ll be doing the work of the sitra achra.”

You’re hurting me now with your attitude, I thought. But I remained silent.

“I’ll bring in the dessert,” my mother said quietly.

“Not yet, Rivkeh. Let’s sing some more zemiros first. Nudes and Greeks are not Shabbos talk. Let’s sing zemiros and bring the Shabbos back to the table.”

He said to me a few days later, “I’ve been reading what the critics are writing about your last exhibition. I pride myself that I understand the English language. But I don’t understand what your critics are talking about.”

“It’s a technical language, Papa. Doesn’t political science have a technical language?”

He asked me to explain some of the concepts. We talked for a long time about the two-dimensional surface of the canvas, about illusion, depth, planar structure, points, areas, lines, dispersive and progressive shapes, surface control, color separation, values, contrasts, accents, matrix. I began to lose him somewhere around planar structure, and by surface control it was hopeless. He listened attentively to what I was saying. But there was nothing in his intellectual or emotional equipment to which he could connect my words. He possessed no frames of reference for such concepts. He could not even ask intelligent questions. My world of aesthetics was as bewildering to him as his insatiable need for travel was to me.

We spent days discussing those concepts and came slowly to understand how futile it all was. He stopped talking to me about my painting. In the weeks that followed, he began to react to my presence in the apartment with a brooding silence.

My mother said to me one day in April, “Is Jacob Kahn well?”

“As far as I know, yes.”

“You haven’t been going to see him.”

“No.”

“Will you see him again soon?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked at me. I thought I heard her sigh.

I was in the living room one night that week when I heard my father’s voice come from their bedroom. “I’ve tried, Rivkeh. But it’s impossible. What do you want from me?”

I stared out the window at the street. There were young leaves on the trees. But the street seemed colder and darker now than it had ever been before. I turned away from the window and from the bleak parkway below.

    Florence is a gift, Jacob Kahn had said.

In the first week of May, my father flew to Chicago for the Rebbe. It was his first lengthy trip since he and my mother had returned from Europe. Ten days later, he flew to Denver.

My mother stood gazing out the window of the living room. “You know, I thought I had gotten used to it. How many windows have I waited at? But I’m not used to it at all.”

“Mama?”

“Yes, Asher.”

“I want to go to Europe this summer. After I graduate.”

She turned slowly from the window to look at me. Her face was pale and her eyes were dark.

“To Europe?” she said softly.

“I think it’s very important to me that I go to Europe now.”

She turned back to the window and was silent a long time. Then she said very quietly, “It’s strange, Asher, how a person can do something for half a lifetime and still not get used to it. I thought I was used to it. But I was fooling myself.”

I talked to my father when he returned from Denver very late that night.

“It’s a fine idea.” He seemed elated. “Where will you go?”

“To Florence.”

“We can give you the names of people to see in Florence. It’s a fine idea. Isn’t it a fine idea, Rivkeh?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I would also go to Rome and Paris.”

“We can give you the names of people in Rome and Paris, too. Remember the Levis in Rome, Rivkeh?”

“Yes.”

“Remember they took us to that hill and the man there tried to sell us statues because he thought I was Greek Orthodox?”

“I remember.”

“I’ll make a list of all the places where you can eat without worry. And I’ll give you the names of people you can call. Europe is something I happen to know about. Isn’t that right, Rivkeh?”

“Yes, Aryeh.”

Florence is a gift, Jacob Kahn had said.

     I remember the river and the shadows of the bridges on the dark surface of the water. The river ran dark even in sunlight, except along its deep banks where the reflections of the stone walls and houses were the color of summer sand and rippled faintly in the lazy flow of water. In a little more than a year, that river would rage and flood the city and destroy things so precious to me that I would weep into the silent mornings of Paris. But that summer the river was gentle, a dark cool benign presence beneath the hot Florentine sun, and I would cross it in the morning to enter the old city and cross it again in the evenings to return to the room where I lived.

The room was on the third floor of a four-story hotel that stood along the southern bank of the river. It had a bed, a chair, a table, and a washroom. The window looked across the river and the city to the hill villages and mountains beyond. In the early mornings, with the city still cool from the night, I would come from the hotel and walk along narrow streets to the house of an old woman whose name my father had given me. There, in a room filled with the furniture of a time long before I was born, I would eat the breakfast she prepared for me. She was in her seventies, a widow, from a Leghorn family dating back five hundred years. During the war, she had been concealed in the hills by Florentines and Sienese. Her husband had been killed in the German retreat. Now she lived alone with her furniture
and her memories and an Italian translation of the Book of Psalms which she was forever reading. I ate her breakfasts and suppers. Lunch consisted of iced tea or a Coke from a paper cup in a shop or café in the city.

After breakfast, I would walk across a stone bridge into the old city and go through shaded narrow streets heavy with tourists and traffic and lined with shops. All through the month of July, I walked the streets of that city. From a Berlitz grammar, I taught myself tourist Italian. Walking through Renaissance streets and squares, feeling against my feet the stone stairways and battlements of the Palazzo Vecchio and the Bargello, feeling against my face the cool damp faintly musty interiors of the Santa Croce and the Santa Trinità, gazing at the fresco of the
Last Judgment
on the Duomo and at the chancel beneath the huge dome where one Medici was wounded and another was killed—walking and tasting the sudden sun and shade of its streets, the dimness of its churches, the wealth of its galleries, the echoing savagery of its palaces and squares, I learned of the city’s beauty and blood, of the Ghibellines and Guelphs, of the Pitti, the Strozzi, the Pazzi and the Medici, of Savonarola, of Dante and Machiavelli, of Giotto and da Vinci and Raphael and Michelangelo. Florence was a gift.

In the late afternoons, I would go back across the river along the covered Ponte Vecchio and gaze into the gold- and silversmith shops and watch the faces of merchants and shoppers and feel the coolness of the air beneath the roof of the bridge. I would walk the narrow streets to the house of the old woman and eat my supper and return to my room on the third floor of the hotel. From the window, I would watch the evening and the night come slowly across the city; watch the golden hue of the sun over the hills; watch the hills change hues and go slowly misty and soft; watch the darkness come into the sky and the lights of the city come to life in the slow falling of night. Those
hours by that window in the evenings were of a loveliness I have never again felt in my life—hours in a Renaissance city lived by a man born in a Brooklyn street, a man wearing a red beard and ritual fringes and a fisherman’s cap.

I went to the Piazza del Duomo often in those weeks to see the Michelangelo
Pietà
and the Vasari fresco and the Ghiberti East Doors of the baptistery. I carried my sketchbook and drawing pencils wherever I went, but I remember that the first time I saw the Michelangelo
Pietà
in the Duomo I could not draw it. It was the fifth day of July. I stared at its Romanesque and Gothic contours, at the twisted arm and bent head, at the circle formed by Jesus and the two Marys, at the vertical of Nicodemus—I stared at the geometry of the stone and felt the stone luminous with strange suffering and sorrow. I was an observant Jew, yet that block of stone moved through me like a cry, like the call of seagulls over morning surf, like—like the echoing blasts of the shofar sounded by the Rebbe. I do not mean to blaspheme. My frames of reference have been formed by the life I have lived. I do not know how a devout Christian reacts to that
Pietà.
I was only able to relate it to elements in my own lived past. I stared at it. I walked slowly around it. I do not remember how long I was there that first time. When I came back out into the brightness of the crowded square, I was astonished to discover that my eyes were wet.

I returned the next day and studied it again. Then I began to draw it. I drew its rhomboid contour. I drew each of its four people separately. I drew the heads separately. I drew the twisted arm. People stood behind me, watching. A long time later, I stopped drawing and walked back through the cool interior of the cathedral and out into the hot sun-flooded square.

In the square, between the cathedral and the baptistery, there was a traffic safety zone, a small island surrounded by a river of buses and cars. Often a man would stand in that safety
zone feeding the pigeons of the square. He was an old man with a lined face and shrunken gums. He wore torn baggy trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. He stood in the island with his arms outstretched, palms turned upward. There was birdseed in his palms and the pigeons flocked to him, using him as they would a telephone pole or a tree, sitting on his arms and shoulders and waiting for a chance at the seed. He stood very still, smiling toothlessly, and tourists would snap his picture and drop a coin into the small cardboard box at his feet.

I came out of the Duomo that day after having spent hours drawing the
Pietà
, and there was the man with the pigeons on his arms. I watched him for a while, then opened my sketchbook and began to draw him. He reminded me vaguely of the fishermen of Provincetown. I felt people watching. I drew him quickly. “Hey, he’s good,” I heard someone say. When I was done, I closed the sketchbook and walked away.

I returned to the Duomo the following day, but the man with the pigeons was not there. I went into the cathedral and was there the rest of the morning, drawing the
Pietà.
When I came out of the cathedral, the square was hot with sunlight, and the man was there again, his arms covered with pigeons. I watched him for a while, then had some iced tea and began walking through the streets.

I walked to the Accademia. It was a long walk and I stopped often on the way and drew the people and the streets of the city. Inside the Accademia, I walked slowly through the long tapestry-lined hall to the
David.
I stared at it and after a moment I walked away and leaned against a wall.

I did not draw it. I leaned against the wall and looked at it, then walked close to it and looked at it, then walked slowly around it. It stood bathed in the sunlight that poured down upon it through the dome overhead, a white marble giant that dominated the space around it and was its own frozen dimension.
I looked and I did not draw, and finally I came away and went into the street.

I began to walk quickly. I came to a narrow street and rested for a while in the shade of stone houses. The street was crowded. I felt tired. I walked a while longer, then took a cab back to my room. I lay down on the bed in my clothes and slept. After about an hour, I woke feeling hot and faintly dizzy. I washed my face in cold water and went back outside. I walked across the Ponte Vecchio and wandered about the city. I went past the Uffizi and found it had closed at four o’clock. It was almost six. I went quickly back across the bridge to the house of the old woman. She served me supper, then sat in an old leather chair reading from her Book of Psalms. I watched her for a while, then did a rapid drawing of her. She did not see me.

The next day, I drew her again. I drew her looking younger this time, sitting with the Book of Psalms on her lap. In my room, I looked closely at the drawing and found it vaguely resembled my mother. I stared at the drawing, then tore it from my sketchbook and threw it away.

The following morning, I returned to the Accademia and stood for more than an hour drawing the
David.
I drew the head, with the eyes that reflected the decision to enter the arena of power; I drew the huge veined hands that would soon kill; I drew the shouldered sling being lifted in preparation for the delivery of death. The little man with the broken nose had created this sculpture in an act of awesome rebellion against his tradition and his teacher. Other
Davids
I had seen were small in size and represented David after the battle. This
David
was a giant and represented the decision to enter the battle. The little Italian had effected a spatial and temporal shift that had changed the course of art.

I spent almost the entire morning in the Accademia drawing the
David.
Then I walked to the Duomo. The man with the
pigeons was in the square. I drew the bent head of the
Pietà.
I spent the afternoon in the Uffizi.

That night, my mythic ancestor returned after a lengthy absence. But he was less thunderous than he had ever been before and did not wake me from my sleep.

One evening in the last week of July, I came into the house of the old woman and found a man waiting for me. He wore dark trousers, a white open-collar short-sleeved shirt, and a dark hat. He was tall and thin and black-bearded and looked to be in his thirties.

“Asher Lev?”

“Yes.”

“Your father told me how to reach you.” He spoke in Yiddish and had a deep nasal voice. “I am Dov Lieberman.”

“Hello, Dov Lieberman.”

We shook hands. His palm was moist.

“You are leaving for Rome the day after tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“By train?”

“Yes.”

“What train?”

I told him.

“I wonder if I might ask a favor.” He produced a small white envelope. “Someone will meet you at the station.”

“What is it?”

“A letter.”

“There is no mail service in Italy?”

He smiled. “It is sometimes untrustworthy.”

I took the envelope. He thanked me.

“You are a Ladover?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“There are other Ladover in Florence?”

“Not yet. I only arrived two days ago from Rome.”

“Where are you from originally?”

“Leningrad.”

We shook hands again and he left.

I spent the next morning in the Duomo with the
Pietà.
In the early afternoon, I took a cab to the synagogue; it seemed an exquisite part of the loveliness of the city. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the Uffizi, then had supper and returned to my room.

That night, I sat at the window and looked out at the lights of the city and found I could not stop thinking of the
Pietà
and the
David.
The next day, on the swiftly moving train to Rome, I drew the
Pietà
from memory, and discovered that the woman supporting the twisted arm of the crucified Jesus bore a faint resemblance to my mother. I stared at the drawing in horror, and destroyed it.

A bearded man in a dark suit and hat met me in the Rome station. He was short and looked to be in his early forties.

“Asher Lev?”

“Yes.”

“Sholom aleichem.”

We shook hands. He told me his name. I handed him the envelope.

“You are staying here long?” He spoke in Yiddish.

“A week.”

“If you have time, come and visit.” He gave me his name and phone number. “I will show you the yeshiva your father built. You know where you may eat?”

“Yes.”

“Call me if you have time. Goodbye.”

He disappeared into the crowd inside the huge terminal.

I spent the week touring Rome. The city seemed glutted with tourists. I saw the Arch of Titus and the Colosseum. I saw
the stone ruins of the Forum and the stone monuments of the new city. I saw the towering Baroque magnificence of St. Peter’s. What had Jacob Kahn once said about the Baroque? I could not remember. The Sistine Chapel seemed a multilingual mob scene. But I looked at the ceiling and the walls, and the noise faded. There, in the
Last Judgment
, was the hell I had once drawn in an act of vengeance. How long ago had that been? I could not remember.

I called him on my last day in Rome. He came in an old Fiat to my hotel and took me on a long ride through narrow streets and old neighborhoods.

“How old is the yeshiva?” I asked him.

“Five years.”

“How many students do you have?”

“One hundred and eight.”

“How many students did you have five years ago?”

“Seventeen.”

I looked at him.

“Your father did it. It was creation out of nothing.”

Somewhere on a crowded side street in the middle of the city, he showed me a four-story building with a beige-colored façade. Inside were classrooms, offices, a small social hall, and a synagogue.