My Name Is Asher Lev (31 page)

“Six years ago, it was a hotel.”

“Who raised the money to buy it?”

“Your father. I helped when I came.”

“You are not originally from Rome.”

“No.”

“From where are you?”

“Kiev.”

“Do you have anything you want me to deliver in Paris? I am flying to Paris tomorrow.”

“No. Thank you. I have nothing.” We stood outside on the
crowded street, looking up at the yeshiva building. “Your father did it all,” the man said. “He is a remarkable person, your father.”

I flew to Paris the next morning. During the flight, I drew the
Pietà
again from memory, and omitted the figure of the man behind the dead Jesus. I could not understand why I felt the need to remove that figure. I stared curiously at the drawing and found its structure distasteful. I tore it up. I was strangely tired. I took a cab from the airport to the hotel, checked in, and lay down on the bed.

I woke in the night in the dark room and felt myself entombed in suffocating dread. I was bathed in sweat. I groped for the light. The sudden brightness hurt my eyes. I sat on the edge of the bed and realized I had fallen asleep in my clothes. I got into pajamas and washed and went back to bed. I was immediately asleep.

He came then, smashing through the tall forests, looking mountainous with anger. I saw him push apart the giant trees and come bearing down upon me, dark-bearded and dark-visaged, thundering his rage. I felt myself screaming in my sleep and I came awake and stared into the darkness and, for a long moment of horror, thought I had gone blind. Then I saw the faint slits of light around the curtains of the window and I got out of the bed and went to the bathroom. I could not sleep. I pulled aside the curtains and peered through the window. I saw mist and gray morning light and tall ghostly spires in the distance. I stood by the window and watched the morning move slowly into the sky and across the Paris streets.

I had slept almost half a day and a full night. But I was still tired. I dressed and prayed the morning service and came out of the hotel. I went up the side street to the Boulevard des Italiens and walked slowly along the boulevard to the restaurant where my father had told me I could eat. During breakfast, I drew on the tablecloth the contour of the Duomo
Pietà
with the vertical figure eliminated. I made the two side figures into
bearded males, giving them the same robes as those worn by the Marys. I looked at the drawing. The dread was gone. I had no strength left for fighting. I would have to let it lead me now or there would be deeper and deeper layers of the wearying darkness. And I dreaded that darkness more than I did anything I might do with canvas and paint. I finished my breakfast, left the drawing on the tablecloth, and came out onto the boulevard. It was still cool. The street was crowded now with people and traffic. I returned to the hotel.

There was a message for me with a name and a telephone number. I made the call from my room, then left the hotel and walked up the Avenue de l’Opéra to the Louvre.

At five that afternoon, I stood at the bookstand near the Pont des Arts and watched the thick flow of cars along the Quai du Louvre. It was hot and the sky was pale blue and hazy. Boats moved up and down the Seine. Over to the right, the towers and spire of Nôtre Dame jutted mistily into the sky.

A small Peugeot disengaged itself from the stream of traffic and stopped at the curb. Brakes screeched and horns sounded. The man in the car motioned to me frantically. I saw a gendarme start toward the car. I climbed inside. The car pulled away quickly and rejoined the traffic. The gendarme stood at the curb, pointing to his head with a finger.

“Sholom aleichem,” the man said. “Avraham Cutler.” He was the administrative head of the yeshiva my father had established in Paris.

“Aleichem sholom. My name is Asher Lev.”

“Welcome to Paris, Asher Lev.” He spoke in Yiddish. “Your father gave you something for me?”

I handed him an envelope. He was in his forties, of average height, portly, and wore a dark suit, white shirt, and dark hat. He had pale-blue eyes and a dark beard. He put the envelope into a pocket.

“How is your father?” he asked.

“He is well, thank you.”

“You know my father?”

“Of course. The mashpia.”

“I have not seen him in over a year. How does he look?”

“Very well.”

“We are driving to the yeshiva. We have about an hour until dinner. Is there any place you would like to go first?”

“Is Montmartre too far out of our way?”

“Where in Montmartre?”

I told him.

“It is only a little out of the way. We have time. What is this place?”

“The old studio of Picasso.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “I understand.”

We drove through wide tree-lined boulevards and narrow side streets and over a sprawling cemetery.

“Montmartre,” he said. He looked at me and smiled. “A Ladover makes a pilgrimage to the Bateau Lavoir. Interesting.”

He lost his way and we had to ask for directions. His French was fluent. We drove through winding streets, then up a steep hill. At the top of the hill, he pulled the car over to the curb and turned off the motor.

“There,” he said, and pointed. “Place émile-Goudeau.”

I crossed into the small cobblestone square and looked at the dilapidated building. It was only one story high on this side of the hill, old, flaked with peeling white paint. It had a scarred dark-green wooden door and gray-framed windows. On one side of it stood a three-story hotel. On the other side was a stone house partly concealed behind a tall tree and a wooden fence. A dark metal fountain with four female figures stood in the square. Pigeons and stray dogs moved lazily about the cobblestones. I stood in the square and with the blunt end of a pencil drew into the dust alongside a bench the contour of my mother’s
profile. I did not know why I felt the need to do that. I got back into the car and we drove away. A few years later, that building would be gutted by fire and only the side I had faced would remain. But that day it seemed the building would be around at least as long as the little Spanish man who had once painted inside it.

“You are doing more paintings?” Avraham Cutler asked.

“I am thinking about it.”

“What does the Rebbe say about your paintings?”

“I have never asked him.”

He looked at me and smiled knowingly. “Our Rebbe is a wise man.”

We drove to a cream-colored four-story stone building on a wide tree-lined boulevard. He parked the car on the street and we came inside. I saw classrooms, offices, a dining room, a social hall, and a small gym.

“The social hall converts to a synagogue,” he said.

“How many students do you have?”

“One hundred seventy-nine. They are all over sixteen. They live and eat here. Six years ago, there was nothing. This was an apartment house. You are welcome to eat here with us whenever you wish. We have a room, too, if you should need it.”

“I have a room.”

“Your father said you would be in Paris three weeks.”

“I am not sure.”

He looked at me.

“I may stay longer,” I said.

“In that case, you are certainly welcome to live and eat with us.”

I ate with them that evening. The dining room was crowded and noisy. The yeshiva ran all through the year and was not affected by the summer. I was introduced over and over again as Asher Lev, son of Reb Aryeh Lev. They all knew my father.

Later, he drove me back to my hotel.

“You are visiting the museums?”

“Yes.”

“It is a beautiful city. Where did you learn your French?”

I told him. He smiled knowingly. “Yes,” he said. “The Rebbe is a very wise man.”

He called me the next morning. A Ladover was coming in from Israel on his way to the Rebbe and would be giving a lecture in the yeshiva on Wednesday night. Was I interested in attending? I was interested.

The lecturer was tall and thin, with a pale-blond beard and delicate hands. I introduced myself to him after the lecture.

“Ah,” he murmured. “The painter.”

“You know my father?”

“Who does not know Reb Aryeh Lev?”

I produced a white envelope. “Could you give this to him?”

“Of course.” He put the envelope into a pocket. “You are working on more pictures?”

“Yes.”

The following week, someone left a letter for me with Avraham Cutler. I went down to the yeshiva by cab and picked it up. It was from my parents. They did not understand why I wanted to remain in Europe, but they respected my wishes. I was not a child. My father gave me his blessings.

A few days later, I received a letter at the hotel from my mother. She missed me. She wished I had not felt it necessary to remain in Europe. She wished me all that I wished for myself, and informed me that my father was once again traveling regularly for the Rebbe.

I rented a three-room furnished apartment two blocks from the yeshiva and converted one of the rooms to a studio. I discovered an art-supply store on a nearby boulevard and asked Avraham Cutler to help me haul canvases and paints and an easel to the apartment.

“You are settling in for ten years?” he said, puffing up the narrow wooden stairs under a load of canvas stretchers.

“For one or two.”

“In that case, you should meet some of our families. It is not healthy to be always alone.”

The apartment was on the top floor of a five-floor walk-up. I could see the roofs and chimneys of the adjoining buildings. The windows of the apartment were huge, extending almost from floor to ceiling. They were covered with curtains and drapes.

By the first of September of that year, I had begun a new painting—the old man with the pigeons in the Piazza del Duomo. I wrote Anna Schaeffer to let her know I was alive and well and working in Paris. She wrote me back immediately. Now I was a real painter, she said. Asher Lev in Paris. It had a ring to it. Asher Lev in Paris. I should stay away from cafés and night life and paint pictures that would make us rich. I should stay away from the artists of the New School of Paris; they were timid bores. I should paint and paint and make her happy and rich. She did not mention Jacob Kahn.

Four weeks later, on a day when I could feel the cold of the fall begin to settle into the city, I received a package from her in the mail. I opened it and saw a new dark-blue beret. There was a card: “From an impossible old lady to an impossible young man. Affectionately, Anna.”

I put the beret into a drawer and continued to wear my fisherman’s cap.

    I remember the winter rain and the way it washed across the roofs of the houses and stained the beige façades of the walls. The house stood near the head of a steep narrow cobblestone street, and from the windows of the apartment I could see the rain flow in swift rivulets along the stone curbs, then follow
the turn of the curbs into the wide boulevard below. It was cold in the rain but I did not have to walk in it often. I lived and painted in the apartment; I ate in the yeshiva’s dining room, prayed in its synagogue, and attended an occasional lecture on Hasidus. Sometimes, gazing out the window at one of the blue windless days of winter, I would feel the need to leave the apartment. Then I would walk beneath the chestnut trees of the city’s boulevards or take the Metro to the Louvre or to the Jeu de Paume near the Place de la Concorde. I did not stay away from the artists of the New School of Paris, as some call it; and I did not find them to be bores.

I had stretched my own canvases. They stood stacked against a wall of the room I had turned into a studio. In the early morning, I would pray and eat breakfast in the yeshiva, then go back along the boulevard and up the steep street to the house. There would be schoolchildren on the street then and men pulling away from the curb in little cars and shopkeepers opening their stores. I would climb the narrow stairs to my apartment and come into the studio and stare at the white canvases against the wall.

Weeks passed and became months. It rained. The skies were dark often now. Few people walked the narrow street. The canvases remained bare.

Away from my world, alone in an apartment that offered me neither memories nor roots, I began to find old and distant memories of my own, long buried by pain and time and slowly brought to the surface now by the sight of waiting white canvases and by the winter emptiness of the small Parisian street. It was time now for that. I had painted my visible street until there was nothing left of it for me to put onto canvas. Now I would have to paint the street that could not be seen.

I remembered my mythic ancestor. He had never been too difficult to bring to memory. But now I could recall tales told
to a wondering child about a Jew who had made a Russian nobleman rich by tending his estates. The nobleman was a despotic goy, a degenerate whose debaucheries grew wilder as he grew wealthier. The Jew, my mythic ancestor, made him wealthier. Serfs were on occasion slain by that nobleman during his long hours of drunken insanity, and once houses were set on fire by a wildly thrown torch and a village was burned. You see how a goy behaves, went the whispered word to the child. A Jew does not behave this way. But the Jew had made him wealthy, wondered the child. Is not the Jew also somehow to blame? The child had never given voice to that question. Now the man who had once been the child asked it again and wondered if the giving and the goodness and the journeys of that mythic ancestor might have been acts born in the memories of screams and burning flesh. A balance had to be given the world; the demonic had to be reshaped into meaning. Had a dream-haunted Jew spent the rest of his life sculpting form out of the horror of his private night?

I did not know. But I sensed it as truth.

I began to paint my mythic ancestor. Over and over again, I painted him now, in his wealth and his journeys, in the midst of fire and death and dreams, a weary Jew traveling to balance the world.

I remembered my grandfather, the scholar, the recluse, the dweller in the study halls of synagogues and academies of learning. What had transformed him from recluse and scholar to emissary for the Rebbe’s father? Had the encounter with the journeying Ladover Hasid brought back to memory the journeys of his ancestor? I wondered how a journeying ancestor could suddenly transform a recluse into a journeying Hasid. Had something inarticulate been handed down from generation to generation that came to life in each individual at a time most appropriate to him?