The Gift of Asher Lev (3 page)

We drove a long time in stop-and-start traffic. Avrumel, on Devorah’s lap, began to whimper. Rocheleh sat glassy-eyed, staring out her window at the traffic and the rain. Devorah looked haggard. Her wig was slightly awry. It was night for us. In Saint-Paul the children would have been long asleep, and Devorah and I
might be sitting on our terrace with Max Lobe and John Dorman over drinks, talking. Suddenly the driver said the road was impossible; we would be better off going a different way. He took the next exit. “Longer, but faster,” he said.

We rode along a wide boulevard, crossed an intersection, and entered a narrow one-way street. Scraped and broken asphalt lay open to its dirt and crushed-stone layers. The station wagon creaked and groaned, its tires encountering with jarring shocks the rain-filled holes that pocked the street as in the aftermath of a cataclysm. Lining the broken, caved-in sidewalks were five-story red-brick houses, some with windows boarded, others open to the rain like eyeless sockets. One of the houses had suffered a fire; it stood scorched, its roof partially collapsed into its top floor, the center section of the floor deeply fissured, the cleft like an ax wound to the head, bricks littering the cement walk in front of the house. All through the street and around the houses and over the occasional empty lot lay the detritus of the neighborhood: beer cans, whiskey bottles, newspapers, dog droppings, a decaying mattress, an abandoned chair, an infant’s crib, a gutted television set—an infernal rubbish heap that was like the graveyard of all hope. The street was empty of people. An occasional car lay near a curb, doors open, wheels gone, stripped to its core: a metallic corpse abandoned to aboveground putrefaction. I turned in my seat and saw Avrumel asleep on Devorah’s lap and Devorah and Rocheleh staring at the blighted urban world through which we were passing. The driver, short in height and sitting low in the seat, kept craning his neck to spot the ruts and potholes. “Only a little more,” he muttered. “Patience, patience.” He hummed a light Ladover melody.

After two more blocks of bucking and lurching, he turned left into a wide two-way street, paved and glistening in the rain, and heaved a sigh. He glanced into his rearview mirror.

“Everybody okay back there?”

“We are well,” Devorah said in English.

He drove swiftly and skillfully through Brooklyn streets still unfamiliar to me and then into the fringes of my old world. Then we were deep into that world, and I saw Ladover Hasidim on the streets and newly renovated homes and new shops and the park-way
torn up, huge machines scraping at its entrails and heaving up the raw reddish earth.

“They’re repaving this whole section of the parkway,” the driver said. “Months they’re working on it. New trees also they’ll put in.”

The rain had eased. He turned into a tree-bordered street and came to a stop in front of a red-brick ranch-style house. He switched off the engine.

“Here we are,” he said in a somber tone. “I wish I was bringing you home on a happier occasion. I’ll help you with your bags.”

He had parked beneath a leafless sycamore. Rain dripped from the branches onto the car. The late-afternoon air was gray and cool. Gusts of wind blew through the street and rippled the puddles and shook the rain from the trees. I helped Devorah out of the car. Avrumel, in deep sleep, clung to her. The driver was busy with the bags. Rocheleh gave me her hand and stepped from the car to the sidewalk, just as a gust of wind splattered rain onto her startled face. The door to the house flew open, and two tall dark-bearded men came hurriedly down the walk that divided the front lawn. They wore dark suits and dark hats and tieless white shirts. They came over to us and, without a word, took our bags and hurried back up the walk and into the house.

I thanked the driver.

“An honor,” he murmured.

Holding Rocheleh’s bony, fragile-feeling hand, I followed Devorah into the house.

My mother stood just beyond the doorway, inside the entrance hall. She embraced Devorah lightly so as not to waken Avrumel and pointed to the men who were carrying our bags through the hallway to the interior of the house. Devorah followed quickly behind them. My mother murmured, “Rocheleh, Rocheleh,” and bent down and held my daughter to her for a long time, her face against the face of the child, and I noted fleetingly how alike they looked—straight nose, wide eyes, small lips, high-boned cheeks. “Grandmother, it was a long trip, and I am very tired,” Rocheleh said in French. My mother responded in French: “But yes, dear child, of course. Everything is ready for you.” She looked at me and asked in Yiddish, “How are you, my son?”

“I am well, thank God, considering the circumstances. How are you?”

“How should I be, Asher? Your uncle’s death is a terrible tragedy.”

“Where is Papa?”

“Next door. They are making the final arrangements for tomorrow. The Rebbe himself will speak at the funeral. You look pale, my son.”

“It’s been a very long day, Mama.”

“Papa, I am very very tired and I would like to go to bed now,” Rocheleh said.

“I am so sorry,” my mother said. “You have just flown thousands of miles, and here I stand talking. Come along with me, dear child. Asher, your room is on the left, over there. Come, Rocheleh.”

“Good night, Papa.”

“Good night, Rocheleh. Remember to say the Krias Shema.”

“I always remember, Papa. Will Mama bring me my medicine?”

“I’ll remind her.”

They went off down the hallway and turned a corner.

I entered the room my mother had pointed to: twin beds in honey-colored wood, a desk, chairs, a dresser, beige carpeting, off-white walls bare save for a picture of the Rebbe over the desk, a large sliding glass door that led to a flagstone terrace and a length of wet lawn bordered by a tall juniper hedge and a towering mottled sycamore. I had not been in this house before. The apartment had been old and cramped: small rooms, a narrow hallway, two bedrooms, mine closetlike, its single window looking out on the cement paving of a back yard encumbered with garbage cans and hungry cats. This house, new, spacious, seemed filled with light even on this murky day of rain.

There was a noise behind me, a familiar tread: my father’s slightly limping stride, the lingering residue of the infantile paralysis he had sustained as a child in Soviet Russia. He entered the room and I moved toward him and he shook my hand: a powerful grip even in grief. He had not yet removed his coat and hat; they were stained with rain. Sorrow and shock clouded the dark and mesmerizing eyes. He ran a hand through the dense white length
of his untrimmed beard and then across his forehead: long-familiar gestures of distress and fatigue. He spoke in Yiddish.

“The children are all right? I have not had a chance to see them. Your mother says they are asleep. Devorah looks very tired. How are you, Asher?”

“I’m all right. I’m so sorry about Uncle Yitzchok. Was he ill?”

“No. It was very, very sudden. He was in the living room of his house, he gave a little cough, and he was—he was gone. Your Aunt Leah Golda was with him, and some friends. One minute here, the next minute gone. God gives, and God takes. That is the way of the world, Asher. What a blow this is, what a tragedy. I cannot reconcile myself to it. My brother….” He closed his eyes and shook his head, and a tremor coursed through him. “The Rebbe will speak at the funeral in the synagogue. That is a great honor…. I cannot believe this is happening…. I should take off this coat…. An awful day outside; a terrible rainstorm we had earlier today. Your mother worried about all of you flying in such a storm…. I must take this off…. It is really good to see you and your family, Asher. Too many years. And they go by so quickly now. It is the only good thing that has come of this, that you and your family are here. This is not a time for conversation. We will talk when things settle down a little. You and Devorah should go to sleep. I know about jet lag.”

He stepped out of the room and into the hallway and was gone. The space he had occupied vibrated softly. A residue of his presence remained in the room, a palpable afterimage that faded only after some moments passed.

The bags had been set down at the foot of one of the twin beds. My attaché case was on the desk. I began to unpack.

Devorah entered the room.

“The children are asleep.”

“Did you remember to give Rocheleh her medicine?”

“Of course.” She took off her wig and stepped out of her shoes. She put the wig on the dresser. Without her shoes and wig, she looked diminutive. “Avrumel woke up and asked for Shimshon.”

“What did you tell him?”

“He fell back asleep before I could get a word out. How do you feel, my husband?”

“Very tired and very sad.”

“Do you think any good will come of this, Asher? Can God have a plan? That’s what I used to think when I was in that sealed apartment in Paris. That God had a plan, a big plan. Sometimes I would lie awake at night and try to guess what the plan was.”

“My plan is to shower and go to sleep, Dev.”

“Go ahead, my husband. I will unpack. But wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a plan to this? Wouldn’t it?”

“Absolutely. My uncle dies suddenly as part of some big plan. You’re more of a Hasid than I am, my wife.”

I headed for the bathroom and the shower.

Standing naked before the full-length mirror in the bathroom, I can barely see myself for the vapor that clouds the glass. Droplets cling to the wallpaper: lacy dogwood as in a rain. Pallid features, dark eyes, red hair and beard beginning to gray, narrow shoulders, white skin sheathing a scrawny frame down to the reddish triangle above the genitals, and then the legs, white, bony, all seen mistily, distorted, misshapen, through the fog of vapor thrown off by the hot, jetting water of the shower.

I lift my right arm and with my index finger trace slowly and with care the outline of my head and beard and then put in the locations of the eyes and nose and mouth. With my right index finger I draw the outline of my left shoulder and arm, and with my left index finger I draw the outline of my right shoulder and arm. I step back.

The drawing of me in the foggy mirror is awkward, doll-like, diminished, an ungainly semblance of myself.

Eighteen years before, I spent a night with my parents in the apartment where I grew up. I came out of the bathroom after a shower and went into my room. The phone rang. My mother tapped on my door. The call was for me. I went out into the hallway. The air was cool. I felt it cool on my face and the back of my neck, where the hair was still damp.

“Hello,” I said into the phone.

“You are Asher Lev?” a whispery, muffled voice said.

“Yes.”

“Asher Lev, the artist?” There was an cerie quality to the voice a hollowness, as if it were coming to me over a long tube from a great distance away. “You made the crucifixion paintings?”

“Who is this?”

“I will tell you who this is. Listen to me, Asher Lev.” A pause followed, strangely sinister. “I am the Angel of Death.”

Cold air brushed across the backs of my legs. Beneath the damp hair of my head my scalp tingled.

“By morning you will no longer be among the living,” the voice said. “You hear me, Asher Lev? By morning I will have taken back your corrupted soul. So perish the enemies of the Lord.”

The line went dead.

The phone in my hand was suddenly alive, pulpy, reptilian. I slammed it down, trembling, and returned to my room. Sitting on my bed, I felt soiled and thought I must take another shower, but I lay down instead and tried to sleep. I woke in the darkness of the early morning and thought I heard the phone ringing and an arctic presence in the room and the reeking stench of goatish breath. I climbed out of bed and walked in the chill night silence of the hallway to the bathroom and urinated and looked at myself in the mirror. That voice. Cold, menacing, faintly accented, sinister, like a messenger from the Other Side.

Now, on the night before my uncle’s funeral, I stand gazing at the drawing of myself in the bathroom mirror in my parents’ home, watching it slowly dissolve, dripping mist.

I had always thought of my uncle as a simple, cheerful, good-hearted man, successful in his business, devoted to his family, and loyal to the Ladover movement. But his funeral astonished me. It was the funeral of a man of power.

I was told afterward that more than three thousand people attended, many from out of town: Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Montreal, Toronto. I spotted two men in the crowd I knew from the Ladover community in Paris. The crowd, hushed, respectful, jammed the synagogue and spilled out onto the sidewalk and the parkway. Police on horses and in cars patrolled the parkway and diverted traffic from the lane adjoining the synagogue.
In their identical dark coats and suits and hats, the men turned the street into a vast silent black lake. Loudspeakers had been set up outside so all could hear the service and the eulogy, which was to be delivered by the Rebbe.

I sat in the front row of the synagogue next to my father, who wore a dark suit and a dark tie and a dark hat and sat tall, self-controlled, an imposing presence, his eyes fixed upon the sealed simple pine coffin that lay on trestles between him and the lectern. On the other side of my father sat my uncle’s two grown sons, and next to them were representatives from the office of the mayor and the governor, and some members of the city council. My father told me there were prominent lawyers and judges in the crowd. I thought I caught a glimpse of a well-known West Fifty-seventh Street art gallery owner. Why would the owner of a distinguished art gallery be at my uncle’s funeral?

Close to two thousand people crowded the synagogue, sat jammed in its seats, stood along its walls, craned their necks from the back rows, blocked the entrance hallway. Somewhere in the women’s gallery overhead, peering through the openings in the decorative arabesques of the concealing wooden screen, were my Aunt Leah, my uncle’s two grown daughters, my mother, Devorah, Rocheleh, and Avrumel. The air in the synagogue was stale, warm, faintly malodorous. I hoped Rocheleh would be all right.

All faces, raptly attentive, were turned toward the Rebbe, who sat in his tall-backed, thronelike, upholstered chair to the right of the Ark, facing the congregation. Accompanied by two tall, brawny, dark-bearded men, he had entered through the door near the Ark, and I had felt the cold touch of shock at how old he had become: wizened, slightly bowed, walking with hesitant steps, hair and beard astonishingly white. He sat down in his chair, and the two men stood on either side of him, waiting.