The Gift of Asher Lev (30 page)

Above the rooftops of the city the day has slowly waned. By its final light I draw a picture of Devorah: the pale slender face, the curve of shoulder and breast, the roundness of thigh and leg. I draw her with Rocheleh. I draw her with Avrumel. I draw Avrumel hugging his rag doll, Shimshon. “How goes it, Avrumel?” “It goes well, Papa.” I draw Devorah in her bed in Saint-Paul, the arching of her neck, the wide-open eyes, her tongue
moist on her lips as she holds me in the final moments of one of our together-times. She calls it that on occasion: together-time. “Together-time tonight, Asher,” she would sometimes whisper to me in the presence of the children. The Spaniard was not the only one who could draw good erotica—though I always concealed mine and rarely showed it even to Devorah. I am not a Neanderthal troll; but neither am I a bloodless angel.

It is dark. The city hums and throbs with its streams of traffic and nocturnal lights. I pray the Evening Service and lie in my bed and feel inside the room the heavy presence of the living and the dead. I finally fall asleep, imagining Devorah beside me, her arms gently encircling my neck in the warm and rocking embrace of a together-time.

4

I woke from turbulent sleep to the banging and clanging of the bells. Troubled by dreams I could not remember, I dressed and prayed the Morning Service. I had something to eat at a café across the street from the hotel. At the table next to mine a middle-aged German couple sat talking in low voices about the Airbus accident and the train disaster at the Gare de Lyon. I went back upstairs to my room to use the bathroom and for the address book in my attaché case. I was looking through the address book when the phone rang.

The operator said it was a person-to-person call for Asher Lev from the United States. I said I would take the call, and thought, Something must be very wrong for Devorah to be calling me at three o’clock in the morning.

“One moment, please,” the operator said.

“Hello,” a man’s voice said in English. “Is this Asher Lev?”

“Yes.”

“Asher Lev, the artist?”

“Yes.” Was there another Asher Lev? “Asher Lev, the Rebbe wishes to speak with you.”

The Rebbe! At three o’clock in the morning! When did he sleep?

I waited, my heart hammering. I was seated at the desk, and found myself staring at the drawing I had made the night before of Devorah in her bed in Saint-Paul. I couldn’t remember having left the drawing pad open when I had gone out earlier. Still waiting, I flipped the pages. The Spaniard. Jacob Kahn. Anna Schaeffer.
Devorah and Rocheleh. Avrumel and his Shimshon doll. Devorah and I in a together-time. I closed the pad.

“Asher Lev.” I heard the voice, distant, tremulous.

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“You are well?”

“Thank God, yes.”

“Your wife and children are well. Your parents are well.”

“Thank you, Rebbe.”

“Asher, I speak to you as if you were here before me. I see you clearly. Distance is an illusion if one trusts in the Holy One, blessed be He. You understand?”

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“I want to tell you something. Listen to me. You are now on a journey. We are told that when Jacob set out to journey from Beersheba to Haran, he stopped at a certain place for the night and had a dream. What did he dream? A stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it. Some were going from the earth to the heaven, others from the heaven to the earth. The great Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudlikov once said that this comes to teach us the following. A man does not always remain at the same stage. He is always ascending or descending. When he reaches the lop, he must concern himself with the probability that he will fall. When he reaches the bottom, he must strive once again to climb to the top. That is the nature of man. When the soul of a man is in its darkest night, he must strive constantly for new light. When one thinks there is only an end, that is when one must struggle for the new beginning. This is true, Asher Lev, not only for the individual but also for the community. I wish you a safe journey up the ladder, Asher. Do you understand me?”

I did not respond.

“Asher, do you understand my words?”

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“I wish that your journey will be to a light not only for yourself but for all of us. I wish that it will be a journey for the sake of heaven. I give you my blessing, Asher Lev.”

The line went dead.

I hung up the phone.

For some minutes afterward I sat at the desk, staring down at the phone and the drawing pad. There was a strange tingling sensation in the tips of my fingers. The sounds of traffic came distantly through the closed doors of the balcony. Finally I locked my drawing pad in my attaché case, put the attaché case in the armoire, and took the elevator down to the lobby. I walked quickly in the gauzy mist of the Paris morning to the Métro.

Narrow cobblestone streets encumbered with traffic and tight with sidewalk cafés. Flower stands, fish stands, meat hanging raw and bloodied from hooks in butcher shop windows, sides of sheep, cuts of pork, rows of plucked, pink-skinned chickens. The warm and inviting aromas of food from the cafés mixing with the hot and repellent stench of diesel exhaust from the trucks. A dirt-blackened man sits on the sidewalk, propped against an apartment house wall, with a coal-black dog asleep beside him. On the man’s lap is a sign that reads
NOUS AVONS FAIM AIDEZ-NOUS
. Cracked and peeling seventeenth-century apartment houses, their gray and yellow outer walls misshapen and bulging, lean precariously toward one another over the streets as if on the point of collapse.

An alleyway overarched by a yellow stone building brings me to a small bare inner courtyard and a short flight of iron stairs. At the end of the iron landing is a heavy wooden door that opens smoothly to my push.

I am inside an enormous, high-ceilinged room. Drawing tables, chairs, printing presses, stacked cans of color, tall piles of paper, laden drying racks. Men and women in stained aprons, hands blackened with ink, are working the presses. An entire wall is covered with decades of old lithographs, some so well known they are used as decorative tiles for bathrooms. Two of my prints are on that wall. Along the adjoining wall stands a ponderous cutting machine operated by a man who feeds it stacks of thick cardboard, which it guillotines with thudding sounds. At the tables, draftsmen are bent over opaque plates and color transparencies. In a far corner of the room, another flight of stairs leads up into darkness. Crossing the room, I see the workers looking at me, and I acknowledge their greetings with a wave of my hand. I climb to the
landing at the top of the stairs, push open the heavy iron door, and step inside. The door swings closed behind me with a loud clanging noise.

About half a dozen men are standing at a long, cluttered table. Max Lobe, in protective goggles, is bent over a thin, flat sheet of metal, a lighted blowtorch in one hand, a scraper in the other. The noise of the closing door startles them, and they turn. Max Lobe cuts off the flame and removes his goggles.

“Asher Lev!” he calls out. “It is you, my friend!”

He puts down the scraper and the blowtorch and hurries toward me.

“Hello, Max,” I say.

He embraces me and kisses my cheeks. He is short, roundish, robust. I smell his cologne. “How are you, Asher? You are so late, I almost despaired. Come see what I am doing. I am still unable to give it the shape I wish. How is my Devorah? And the children? You must tell me what I am doing wrong. The truth. Do not waste our time being gentle. Be like your Jacob Kahn. Here, stand here.”

I move through the room, shaking hands with the others as I approach the table. One of the printers, a genial young man with shell-rimmed glasses and ink-smeared hands, offers me his elbow instead, and I shake it and we laugh. A tall, thin young man is introduced to me as a poet. He wears round silver-framed glasses. A wispy blond beard covers his long, pale face. His hand is limp, his fingers moist.

“Enchanted,” he murmurs. “An honor to meet you.”

Max is wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt and sharply pressed light-blue trousers. His round, smooth face and bald head glisten in the overhead lights. The printers have moved off discreetly and are talking among themselves. Max smooths his brush mustache with a stubby finger. “I am not happy with it; it does not sing. The texture is not quite right, but I am afraid if I play with it more it will cause the paper to crack. The first proof is on the wall there. Tell me what you think, my friend. The truth, as always.”

On the white wall beyond a lithographic press gleaming beneath a fluorescent lamp is a print. Against a smoky background of blue and purple grays, bold strokes of black and red hover over an
indistinct smear of ochres that vaguely resembles a cloud in which are suspended blurred numbers painted in primary colors. The thick paper is densely textured; it swells and dips and bulges; ridges and valleys lie beneath the fields of color; splashes of viridian and cobalt blue streak the surface; a thin swath of cadmium red gashes the upper-right-hand corner like a brief cry of danger.

“What do you think?” Max asks. His anxiety is as gray and tangible as the rain now falling on the rooftops outside the tall windows of the print shop.

“It is formidable.”

He laughs uneasily. “You sound better when you say that than most Frenchmen I know. But I see in your eyes that there is something wrong. Tell me what you think about the red in the corner.”

“The blacks and reds are a Clavé combination.” He blinks and says nothing.

“And the Clavé combination, striking as it is, is borrowed from Picasso.”

“Dead, he still haunts us all, that Spaniard,” Max says, with some bitterness. “Can you imagine him still alive?”

“Yes, I can. I do, often.”

He stands gazing at the print, his thick shoulders sagging. “One has to be as good as you are, my friend, in order to endure him. I am not that good. I can live without such kings.”

“To get back to the work,” I say, indicating the print on the wall. “One should not use blacks and reds without giving them a center that attaches to black and red. Certainly the texturing should have a center.”

“I tried to build it up, but it cracks the paper.”

“Possibly it isn’t necessary to build it higher, but to play a variation on what you have already done. Right now it’s like the six days of creation without a focus. Maybe you ought to consider doing this.”

We return to the metal plate on the table. The printers stand in a tight quiet knot, watching us out of the corners of their eyes. Max and I talk for some while in the technical language of art—linear accents, surface patterns, passage, movement patterns, multiple centers of interest, distribution of space, bridging tension points,
space and surface control, techniques of texturing, color movement, graphic balance. Max puts on his goggles, strikes a match, and touches the flame to the blowtorch. The torch spurts into life with a hard popping sound. I talk to him quietly as he works the carborundum over the surface of the plate, softening it with the flame, then spreading, smoothing, leveling, gouging, pitting, raising, lowering, streaking—so the thick paper will be alive with a textured surface that is a unity with its colors and forms. We work together a long time, and we are deep in it, lost in the working of it, and then Max has caught it and I can sense him moving into it alone, his face moist with concentration, and I step back and watch him for a while, and there is much pleasure in that for me. I find myself at a long table before a large sheet of empty drawing paper, and I motion to one of the printers and he quickly brings me a box of charcoal sticks, a bottle of India ink, and a reed pen, and I stand there suddenly drawing and very soon there is a sliding away of the time span between thinking and drawing and I feel the warm sensation of self-transparency as the charcoal and the pen move across the surface of the paper. I am drawing variations of the number three: one double curve floats alone; another interlocks with a third; a fourth wears an ordinary dark hat; a fifth leans against a sixth, which is tall and stalwart. Variant forms, the ink flowing from the pen as if from a brush and shaping often surprising marks, and quickly drying into a range of subtle textures and values. And the center a face swiftly drawn and molded in charcoal, the face of Avrumel, and a child’s hand, barely visible, clutching a Shimshon doll. I look at the drawing and it is done, and I sign it and date it and put down the stick of charcoal and step away from the table—and bump into one of the printers. He apologizes softly, profusely. On the pale face of the poet, who stands beside him, is a look of rapture. His eyes are wide and round behind his round silver-framed glasses. They have all been standing bunched behind me, watching. Max has been watching me, his blowtorch still spurting flame, his goggles on the table near the metal plate. Avrumel, I hear myself silently calling. Avrumel. And he replies, Here I am, Papa, and I hear his eager laugh. A vast and overwhelming sadness takes possession of me.

Max turns off the blowtorch and puts it down. His face is pale
and moist. “Enough for now,” he says in a faintly tremulous voice. He seems troubled. “We will pull another proof after lunch.” He gazes at my drawing. In his eyes are conflicting emotions: admiration, awe, dejection, envy. “How do you do that?” he murmurs. “I have seen you do it a hundred times. How? It is … incredible.”