The Gift of Asher Lev (41 page)

“John? This is Asher Lev.”

“Who?”

“Asher Lev.”

“Don’t know any Asher Lev. Goodbye.”

“How are you feeling?”

“If I’m on the phone, I must be okay. Hey, is this really Asher Lev?”

“Yes.”

“Sonofabitch. Your people have damn strange burial customs, Lev.”

“Didn’t you get my letter?”

“Must’ve got it if you sent it. Having a little trouble remembering things. Is the missus with you?”

“No.”

“The kids?”

“I came back alone.”

“Sonofabitch. You should’ve stayed and sent back the missus and the kids. Too quiet here without them. You going to be around awhile? Damn strange burial customs you people have. Two months to put someone away. Suggest you tip off the
National Geographic.”

He hung up.

A moment after I put down the phone, it rang. I picked it up and heard Max’s soft voice. “Hello, my friend. How are you? Come over later and I will have Claudine serve us a nice lunch on
the terrace. How did you come down? The train, yes? Clever. The strike is delaying the flights. I waited two hours in the Paris airport. A misery. I must return to my work. I am—how do you say it?—cooking with the gas.”

I hang up the phone and lie back on the bed. The beds, the dressers, the mirrors, the carpets, the chairs, the beamed ceiling, the stippled white walls, the windows and the view of the valley and the village. Everything is the same and everything is different. Before we left, I saw Brooklyn distantly through the shimmering world of Saint-Paul. Now everything in Saint-Paul is coated by the months in Brooklyn. I close my eyes and see Avrumel walking with my father up the steep road that leads past the Fondation Maeght to Jacob Kahn’s home. I see Rocheleh and my mother climbing the narrow medieval streets of the village. I see Devorah and my mother sitting on the lounge chairs alongside Max’s pool. I see my father talking to Max about the future. “Without the future there is no present,” my father is saying. “Without the future there can be no hope for redemption, and without hope for redemption there is nothing. A man must plan for the future.” Max smiles politely. That is the sort of talk, he once told me, he used to get from his own father. “They talk about redeeming the world for the future,” Max said. “I have more modest goals. I wish only to redeem a canvas for today.”

The sunlight coming through the window has angled and is now on my eyes. I peer into its golden world, see the lazy motions of the motes: dust specks flashing in sunlit life. I get up from the bed and stand in front of my dresser mirror. Asher Lev. I am tempted to make another outline drawing of myself, perhaps with one of Avrumel’s crayons, leave behind in the mirror a ragged doll-like dwarfed image of Asher Lev. Instead, I leave the house and cross through the baking sunlight and the cool swaths of shade to my studio.

The large closed room is silent. Its smells, intoxicating to me, are deadly to Rocheleh. Master of the Universe, how You run Your world. To me You give this gift so I cannot live without the scents in which the gift finds life; to Rocheleh You give a curse so she cannot go anywhere near those scents. If there is wisdom here, it escapes me. Unless You wish to show irrevocably that the gift is
mine alone; that there is no future for it in my family; that it begins and ends with Asher Lev. Is that it? Asher Lev, artist. Asher Lev, troubler. Asher Lev, dead end.

I stand in the silence of the sunlit studio and look around at the cluttered worktables and walls and splattered floor and at the huge empty canvas still waiting for me, at the brushes lying idle and the pigments and turpentine and oils left abandoned where I had placed them before the Paris show—everything stopped as in a snapshot; as Devorah had once described to me her own and her parents’ lives: suddenly halted one July day in
1942:
frozen in memory: her mother shouting at her to get out and go home, this wasn’t a circus or a zoo: stopped and frozen and gone, all her early childhood, all the possibilities of love and family: halted, aborted. Paris is noted for beginnings and endings. Read any history book.

Abruptly the studio is tomblike, its odors stifling. I go out the heavy metal door, close and lock it, leave through the front gate, and cross the road to the rear gate of Max’s home. The gate clicks open. I walk past the caretaker’s cottage and the large spread of vegetable garden toward the studio and hear Max call to me from the terrace.

“Asher, over here. How are you, my friend? Come and sit down. Claudine has made for us one of her miracles.”

Claudine emerges from the house. She is a trim, redheaded middle-aged woman from one of the nearby mountain villages. She carries a wooden bowl filled with salad. She greets me and says how good it is to see Monsieur again and Monsieur has lost weight and how are Madame and the lovely children. She goes back into the house.

Max and I sit alone at the table beneath the shade umbrella. The pool shimmers in the sunlight. All around its flagstone border is a riot of flowers bounded by shrubs and trees. I can see the edge of my property, a small stand of willows, jutting above the shrubs beyond the pool to my left, and beyond that the valley, deep green in the early-afternoon sun, and the rise of the hills that lead to the sea.

“The print turned out splendidly,” Max says. He wears tan shorts, a red-and-white-checkered short-sleeved shirt open to the second button, and brown loafers with no socks. A delicate gold
chain encircles his plump neck. The fringe of gray hair around his bald head is trimmed and combed. His gray mustache lies neatly groomed upon his upper lip. “You were of enormous help to me, my friend. I cannot understand how I know you all these years and have never before asked you to show me the carborundum process. I saved for you the first copy after the bon à tirer. It will be my gift to you.”

“Thank you, Max.”

“It is an astonishment to me that the stone will press against the paper in such a manner and will produce such lovely textures and not destroy the paper. Please eat. Claudine is right; you have lost weight. What is troubling you, Asher? Tell me what happened in Brooklyn.”

We sit on his terrace alongside his pool, eating the meal served by Claudine. Across the calm surface of the pool flies a humming-bird, halting in midair and hovering, drinking from the water, then swiftly flying off. I hear the traffic on the road: motorbikes, tourist buses, cars. What can I tell him? I say something about Devorah and the children wishing to stay on beyond the week of mourning because they wanted to be with my parents, they liked the community, the children wanted to spend the summer in Ladover camps, Devorah enjoyed being with my mother.

“And you, my friend. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You enjoy New York?”

“I can take it or leave it.”

“Were you able to work?”

“I did some drawing.”

“It is—how long?—about four months since you have made a painting.”

“One need not work all the time, Max.”

“It depends upon the reason one is not working, does it not? Have an orange, my friend. They are from my own trees, and they are excellent. Did I tell you I will be leaving in two weeks for Stockholm? Yes. They are giving me an opening. A very fine gallery. And then Oslo. Splendid people. Have some of these grapes. They are very good.”

We finish our lunch and Max goes off to his studio and I sit
alone by the pool, gazing into the water and watching a dragonfly sail lazily over the surface, fragile wings beating silkenly in the hot afternoon air. After a while, I leave through the rear gate and cross the road and go into the house. It is the heat of the day. A nap is called for. But I cannot sleep.

I am inside my studio later that afternoon, staring at the large, empty, umber-washed canvas, when someone rings the bell on the front gate. Through the gate telephone I ask who it is. “John Dorman,” a voice says. I push the button for the front gate and open the studio door and stand in the sunlight, waiting for him. He walks up the path between the cypress trees in his shuffling loose-limbed gait. He wears baggy tan trousers, a frayed short-sleeved white shirt, and sandals. He is tall, and his head is topped by a dry strawlike mat of thinning uncombed white hair. A green plastic eyeshade throws a viridian shadow across the upper part of his face. We shake hands.

“Came over to see if it was really you. How you doing?”

“I’m all right. Come inside out of this heat.”

“You’ve lost weight, and there’s more gray in your beard. What did they do to you in Brooklyn?”

He enters the studio and I close the door. He stands amid the clutter, looking around. His pale eyes take in everything, pausing for a long moment over the large empty canvas and then moving on to the tables and walls.

“You were gone a long time, Lev.” A tone of reproach edges his phlegmy voice. His skin is flushed. A faint odor of whiskey rises from him. “Missed you all. Strange way to bury someone.” He keeps looking around, avoiding my eyes. “Do any work in New York?”

“Drawings.”

“You got them here?”

“I left them with Doug. I’ve got some Paris drawings.”

I bring one of the pads over to him, and he sits down in the green chair Avrumel uses when he is inside the studio and begins to leaf through the pages. I stand in front of the huge umber-smeared
canvas. The canvas is an ocean, dark and heaving, and I dread entering it because it runs with treacherous currents. The tips of my fingers tingle with a sensation of numbing cold. I put my hands under my armpits. Cold fingers in the summer in southern France! John returns the drawing pad.

“Damn good. This one here—are they trumpeters?—first-rate. Your work scares the hell out of me, you know that? Why do your people put up with you? Instead of asking you to stay longer, they should want to throw you out sooner.”

I do not respond. We stand there together awhile, looking at the canvas.

“How’s the writing, John?”

“Coming along.”

He has published nothing since
Dream of a Gifted Child,
one of the great novels of the thirties. He writes every day and puts everything into a black metal box in his bedroom. He came to Paris with his wife after the Second World War, and when she died he moved to Saint-Paul. He drinks steadily and is often ill. I know very little about him. He is shy and gentle and the children love him and call him Uncle John. Once, during a mild drunk, he told me he stopped publishing because he had lost two worlds: his neighborhood, from which his family moved when he was twelve, and the Communist Party, with which he broke after the Hitler-Stalin pact. I remember Avrumel was sitting on his lap and staring up at him when he told me that. Afterward Avrumel asked me, why did Uncle John have tears in his eyes when he talked to me?

Later, I walk with John to the front gate and he says, without looking at me, “Quiet here as the tomb without the missus and the kids. You tell her.” Sunlight shines through the eyeshade and throws a green shadow across his large sad face. “Tell her to come back and bring the kids. Tell her that, Lev.”

He goes out the gate and along the road and onto the gravel path toward his house. There is much traffic along the road. I return to the studio and sit in the green chair, looking through the drawings. I remove from the pad the drawing of the trumpeters, spray it with fixative, put tissue paper under and over it, carefully roll it up, and insert it into a mailing tube. I address the tube to the widow of
Lucien Lacamp and walk in the afternoon heat to the village post office and mail it off. I walk back through crowds of tourists to the house.

The next day I busy myself with correspondence: commissions, collectors, museum curators, an inquiry from a European dealer asking that I authenticate a print bearing my signature. I walk through and around the house, checking the plumbing. The house, built before the French Revolution, stands on an acre of land five minutes by foot from Saint-Paul. Max found it after Devorah wrote him about an especially bad asthma attack suffered by Rocheleh. “Sunlight, Asher,” Devorah murmured. “Sunlight.” Phone calls, letters, photographs, real-estate documents, architectural plans journeyed back and forth between our apartment on the Rue des Rosiers and Max’s home in Saint-Paul. I flew down to see it and described it to Devorah. Max oversaw the renovations. “The house will perhaps help to erase the memory of the years in the sealed apartment, yes?” Max said to me once over the phone in the course of a conversation about carpenters and plumbers. There was little chance it would do that; but it was nice to think that it might.

The house had borne up well under our two-month absence.

That afternoon Claudine went shopping in the village and came over to the house and used our pots and dishes and utensils to prepare supper, as she had been taught to do by Devorah. John and Max joined me on the terrace. Afterward we went over to Max’s house and sat near the pool and watched the sun set. There were glasses and a bottle of Dewar’s Scotch on the table. A reddish dusk spread across the valley. The sky paled and emptied of light. The road lamps came on: beads of light winding through the valley and climbing the hillsides to the distant crests, winking in the darkness like stars. Musky scents rose from the valley, carried by the night breeze. We sat there some while, silent in the darkness. Max went into the house and turned on the underwater lights. A soft blue-white glow spread outward from the pool and shone upon the flagstones and the flowers and the undersides of the motionless leaves. From nearby came the rhythmic pulsing of cicadas and the
deep monotonous thrum of frogs. Max and John, faintly brushed by the lights, seemed ghostly and unsubstantial.

I asked Max if he would be doing much traveling in the fall. He said he would probably be going to Japan for openings of his shows in Tokyo and Kyoto. “And there is a possibility I will also go to China. Yes, China. Imagine. I did not even know the Chinese cared for Western art. Now they are interested in the art of Max Lobe.”

John drank from his glass and said he hated traveling; he had done more than his share of traveling when he was young. He and his wife running around to clandestine Party meetings; secret passwords; covert operations; organizing workers; dodging the goons hired by owners to break strikes. “We almost got ourselves killed a few times. Only time I ever had all to myself was when I took seven months off to write the novel.”