The Gift of Asher Lev (38 page)

I returned to my car. The sliding doors opened and closed without difficulty. I sat in my seat, watching the girl drawing.

A conductor came quickly up the aisle, anticipating the automatic opening of the doors, and the doors would not open and he nearly ran into them. He did a little dance in front of the doors, searching for the contact. They slid slowly open. He reached up and did something to the top of the right door and then went on through to the next car. The doors remained open. Stiff gusts of sultry air blew into the car, bearing the hot scents of sodden fertilized fields. The girls looked up and wrinkled their noses. The woman shook her head and laughed. Small stations kept rushing by. There was a river and hills terraced with vineyards and, along a macadam road, an Esso service station. I fell asleep and woke and saw, as in a speeded-up motion picture, train stations—Donzère and Pierrelatte—and fields of corn and a huge green-and-gold expanse of tall sunflowers, and without thinking I reached up and touched my ear. The train slowed and stopped in Avignon.

The twin girls and the woman collected their luggage and left the car. I saw them met on the platform by a tall flaxen-haired man in his forties and an elderly couple. They all looked neat and
decent and untroubled. I thought of the Spaniard and his brothel painting and began to draw from memory the faces of the whores. But I was tired, and besides this was not the Avignon of that painting. The station was long and wide, with glassed-in waiting areas and platforms with high arched roofs and the pipe supports showing. Devorah’s parents were taken to a train station that July and sent out of Paris to Auschwitz and Budy. There must be a plan, my husband. The train started up and a sign glided by:
200F LA NUIT CENTRE VILLE TOUT COMPRIS
. I fell asleep again.

Through sleep I sensed the train slowing as it took a long curving length of track that tilted it steeply to the left. I opened my eyes to an expanse of brilliant blue water. In the distance was a curving shoreline and glistening white houses and boats. The train picked up speed and shot through Debeaux. I saw an old cemetery with a wrought-iron fence and weather-worn leaning tombstones. Uncle Yitzchok, was that really you last night in my room with the Rebbe? What do you want with Avrumel? You want me to give him up so the Ladover will be assured of continuity and leadership deep into the next century? The Rebbe will not transfer the mantle of leadership to my father, even though he merits it, unless he is assured that Avrumel will follow? Because my father is too old and no one knows how many years he has left? And his death, God forbid, without immediate automatic succession would give rise to dissension? Is that it, Uncle Yitzchok? You want Avrumel? You want me to give him to the Rebbe so the Ladover can continue to conquer the Jewish world? Send him to live with my parents? Have him attend the Ladover schools in New York? Prepare him for his future role as king when the time comes for him to take my father’s place? Aryeh Lev, Rebbe. Avrumel Lev, future Rebbe. And skip over Asher Lev, artist and troubler, who is no more fit to be a Rebbe than he is to be a lawyer or a shoemaker. Is that it? We were suddenly inside a long tunnel, hurtling through a sheath of darkness enveloped in the tumultuous noise of our motion and then abruptly bursting forth into sunlight and a spreading city of tall apartment houses and crowded streets and warehouses and soccer fields and suddenly another tunnel and then sunlight and a sign that read
A VOTRE SERVICE
and through a station, Marseille Blancard, and a range of mountains up ahead and a warehouse
with an enormous sign,
ALARM SERVICE
, the train now curving back on itself so I could see the first cars.

We stopped briefly at Toulon and started up again. I sat gazing at the Mediterranean world where I now lived—sunlit pastel-colored houses, palm trees, wave-lapped pebbled beaches, earth-red cliffs hugging the shoreline, sailboats, motorboats, yachts, stone jetties, the masts of hundreds of moored boats looking like the pikes of a medieval army, and overhead a sky so clear and blue and of such surpassing loveliness as to be simultaneously a joy and an ache.

We are in Antibes. The train runs parallel to the beach, and there are high waves. A motorcyclist in shorts, sneakers, and a crash helmet speeds along on the road between the tracks and the beach. The train stops in Antibes. I look out the window and think of the night-fishing painting by the Spaniard. I once studied it with Jacob Kahn. The train begins to move.

I sit back in my seat. There is Nice in the distance, blue and dreamlike, a jetliner coming in on its long slow gliding approach to the airport, and way out to sea tall banks of brilliant white clouds, and the long length of curving beach, and signs reading
SIESTA
and
TOP FUN
. I put my drawing pad back into my attaché case.

We enter Nice and are soon in the station. It is late afternoon.

I climb out of the train with my bags and take a deep breath of the hot, humid, sea-scented air. A porter appears. I follow him along the platform and up the escalator and through the crowded terminal. There are tourists everywhere. A middle-aged suntanned woman hurries past me, cradling a small dog in one arm and holding in the other a plastic bag on which is a picture of a beautiful dark-haired woman and the words, white against black,
JE SUIS BIEN DANS MA VILLE
. The porter finds a taxi, and I give the driver my Saint-Paul address.

The driver is an Arab. He maneuvers the taxi smoothly along the crowded boulevard. There are bathers on the beaches and in the water. On the sidewalks and along the curbs, puddles of water reflect the palm trees and the sky. Pastel-colored hotels line the
boulevard and face out to the sea. Later, with the night, the hotel lights and beachfront lamps will come on, the perfect curve of the coastline will blaze like a fiery necklace, and the fabled nightlife of Nice will begin. I almost never go to Nice at night.

The driver winds along the crowded autoroute to Cagnes-sur-Mer and then on the fast road to Vence and Saint-Paul. We drive through the toll booths and onto the four-lane highway, and then beyond the traffic circle to a two-lane road and more hills and another circle and a valley to the right and a group of young cyclists. Was I from around here? the driver asked. We were going to my home, I said. I’d been away a few months. Was I originally from France? he asked. From the United States, I said. But living in France the past twenty years. Anything special going on in Nice these days? He said there was a storm here yesterday that knocked down trees and power lines. He said I looked like a decent sort of fellow, and some indecent things were going on. I said what sort of indecent things, and he said the hotel owners were organizing a secret list of those who had left town without paying their hotel bills. They were going to keep them out of Nice. He said he had a cousin who drove a taxi in New York. You could never get away with anything like that in New York. But this was France. You could get away with it in France. It was a plain case of discrimination against Arabs. Had I been here for the national elections? No? This Le Pen was a fascist, and it wouldn’t be surprising if someone took a shot at him one day. He said I wouldn’t believe the kinds of people who rode in his taxi: Mafia people, drug pushers, whores, pimps. He said he had a younger brother who was going to play the trumpet in the jazz festival at Cimiez. He said the drivers from Belgium were idiots who didn’t know what a steering wheel was. He went past the Restaurant les Oliviers and almost missed the turn that led to the house.

He pulled into the gravel driveway and helped me with the large bag. He was olive-skinned, unshaven, and had a dark mustache. I asked him where he was from, and he said Beirut. I paid him, and he drove off.

I opened the gate with my key, carried my bags through, left them on the gravel path, and pushed the gate closed. It was heavy and clanged into place and clicked loudly shut. A hot wind blew
through the white pines that lined the path. I brought my bags to the end of the path and left them there and walked to the building that was my studio and unlocked the metal door and let myself inside.

Hot still musky dim air, heavy-scented with linseed oil and pigments. I stand very still and breathe deeply. It is an intoxication, a celestial wine, this air. Everything untouched, as I left it, my own clutter and disorder, the chaos of my making. There is the green chair near the door, where Rocheleh once sat. I thought I hoped I prayed, Papa. I draw open the opaque overhead blinds, and sunlight filters through the translucent glass ceiling bricks and falls upon the disarray of brushes, paints, knickknacks, boxes, tools, sketches, drawings—all of it scattered on half a dozen worktables mounted on trestles. On a wall hangs a large photograph of Picasso taken when he was in his mid-eighties, robust, smiling, his eyes jet black, piercing, alert. Below the photograph is a reproduction of the Spaniard’s
Guernica.
Against the opposite wall, catching the light, stands a huge umber-washed canvas. Nearby is where Avrumel would pose. I look again at the green chair. There is where Avrumel would sit with his Shimshon doll, silently watching me work.

I close and lock the studio door and pick up my bags and cross the brick-paved courtyard. The garden looks lovely. Brilliant oleander and nasturtium, the pink and orange petals catching the light of the sun. Trumpet-shaped red and orange blossoms in abundance on the vine near the entrance to the house. New ageratum and marigolds. Everything neat and trim and clean. As if I have merely been away on a shopping trip to Nice for art supplies and meat and bread, and Devorah is inside with Rocheleh and Avrumel.

I let myself into the house.

The air is warm and musty. I open the kitchen windows. The curtains, the old wooden table and chairs. Like friends, these furnishings. I’ll call Max and John and let them know I’m back. I’ll call Devorah and let her know I’m here. In the morning I’ll go to the post office and see about the mail. Then I’ll walk up to Jacob Kahn’s grave.

I go through the dining room, and there is the picture of the
Rebbe on the wall between the windows and amid the many paintings of my own collection. I carry my bags up the winding staircase. Passing Avrumel’s room, I glance inside, and there is his old Shimshon doll on his bed where he left it months ago. I am home.

BOOK THREE

6

The bedroom is dim with stagnant air. I open windows and shutters and stand awhile, gazing at the village and the valley.

The air vibrates with light. Late-afternoon sunlight brushes a brilliant pink across the village wall. All through the green valley are clusters of small red-tiled houses. The sea is a faraway sliver of polished metal that joins the pale-blue sky along a vague line of horizon.

When we first moved into the house, Devorah would sit for hours looking at the light on the village and the valley. She could not get enough of the light.

I unpacked and left the Rilke volume on my night table. Using the bedroom phone, I called Max and was told by his caretaker that he was at a party in Nice. “Welcome, Monsieur Lev,” the caretaker said. “We missed you. The wife and children are well? Monsieur will find everything in good order. I have seen to it myself.” He was a retired customs agent, and he ran Max’s domain with a nineteenth-century sense of service to people and property.

I called John Dorman. Holding the phone in my hand and listening to it ring, I looked out the rear bedroom window and could see the red-tiled roof of his house. Maybe he’d gone to the party with Max; he did that sometimes. More likely, he was in a drunken stupor. I hung up the phone.

Later, I walked up the road to the village and the café at the foot of the wall and sat on the terrace beneath the awnings and the ancient trees. It was cool here, and crowded. Waiters sauntered
over to welcome me back and ask about Devorah and the children. The owner came out and shook my hand. Tourists stared. The waiters knew what to bring me for supper. I ate quickly, watching some of the men of the village at their bowling game on the red clay earth of the playing field outside the café.