The Gift of Asher Lev (46 page)

Afterward I took the elevator down and walked through the cool marble lobby and the glass front door into the inferno of the Manhattan summer.

I meet with lawyers in large offices furnished with polished mahogany desks and tables. They talk in low voices. Expensive art hangs on the walls: Dubuffet, Dufy, Chagall, Coignard, Papart. I listen to terminology I barely understand. Probate petition. Combined verification. Oath and designation. Oath of trustee. Valuation process. Liquidity problems. Douglas Schaeffer’s lawyer is present. I sign papers. My uncle’s lawyer tells me he has heard I am going to have a show in New York in the fall. How could he have heard that so soon? Perhaps from one of the secretaries in the gallery. Perhaps he and Douglas belong to the same club. New York is a big city, but the successful travel in small circles and learn
quickly what wares each plans to offer as a grab for a share of the city’s wealth. Everything is in order, my uncle’s lawyer tells me. My Cousin Yonkel has tried again to enjoin me from touching the collection and has failed. I may now do with it as I wish, provided I adhere to the basic stipulation of the will: all profits are to go to the Ladover organization.

Douglas Schaeffer’s attorney accompanies me down to the burning street. I thank him for his help.

He asks me what I plan to do with the collection, and I tell him I don’t know.

“That’s a great deal of money, if you sell it. Douglas and I would like to handle it for you.”

“Of course.”

“Good luck with the show.” He offers me a moist hand and walks off into the crowd on the street.

The heat is stifling. Sunlight strikes the sidewalks and streets. Traffic barely moves. Gasoline fumes choke the hot and humid air. I stand there sweating in my fisherman’s cap and Ladover T-shirt.
BRING MOSHIACH NOW
, the T-shirt says in black letters against a red background. It is the shirt that Avrumel often wears to his day camp, but many sizes larger, and now on the street it is the object of curious stares and indulgent smiles. Earlier, the lawyers had looked at it and kept their faces blank.

I take the subway uptown and get out and walk along Broadway and down a side street past the building that once housed Jacob Kahn’s studio. An elderly black doorman stands inside the air-conditioned lobby, gazing out the glass door at the melting street. Not the same doorman who was there before. I go down the slope of the park to the stone parapet that overlooks the highway and the river. The surface of the water is slate gray and smooth, and seems to be swallowing all the sunlight falling upon it. I think of the night boats on the Seine and the light-flooding halogens and Jacob Kahn looking out the window of his apartment on the Quai Voltaire. A hot wind blows across the river and the waves of the wind are washed in red and I hear Jacob Kahn say do not concern yourself that others will not understand you the drawings are a beginning I see how you achieve the texturing of the carborundum process by using charcoal and a pencil the rhythms come from the
very paper itself, and I stand there looking out at the blistering sunlight on the dark surface of the river. In strange slow motion I see cars on the highway and people on the grass beneath the trees and children in the nearby playground. The many times I have been to this place during my years of travel to the studio of Jacob Kahn! It seems askew today; strangely out of focus; familiar and unfamiliar; uncanny. I feel suddenly cold.

A solitary bird screeches high above the river, and I turn, startled, and see it soaring into the sky, a large glistening white bird, swiftly flying and gone.

I take the subway home.

We visit Rocheleh in her camp in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. It is parents’ day. The grounds and bungalows and buildings bulge with visitors. The lawns are jammed with cars. Baruch Levinson has brought us up—me, Devorah, my mother, Avrumel—in another of his borrowed cars. Rocheleh is tanned, exuberant. She shows us around the camp. She has been away about a month and seems to have grown a year. We enter her bungalow: beds neatly made, clothes carefully arranged. On her shelf I see a large slim illustrated book called
Superstuff
and notice that it is published by the American Lung Association for children with asthma. Rocheleh says one of her bunkmates, who has asthma, loaned it to her. Devorah and I leaf through it: information on what to do in case of an attack; how to discover one’s asthma triggers; how to iron the title of the book onto your T-shirt; a board game called “Breathe Easy.” And riddles. Why do you sometimes feel like a frog when you get asthma? You think you’re going to croak. What happens to an elephant with asthma when it stands in the rain? It gets wet. How do you give medicine to an asthmatic gorilla? Ve-e-e-ry carefully.

We meet Rocheleh’s counselor—the daughter of a Ladover elder—and her junior counselor and new friends. We see the playing fields, the lake, the synagogue, the mess hall. Beneath the veneer put on for the visitors, there is about the place an unkempt East European look, like the desultory appearance of many of the Hasidic stores in Crown Heights. But no one really cares. Western
neatness counts for little in this world of the spirit. The children appear healthy. They are studying Torah. They look happy. My mother is repeatedly congratulated by parents for the success of the camp; the Ladover camp program was conceived by my parents years ago. She is regarded by many with awe, like a queen.

In the late afternoon Rocheleh walks with us over rolling grassy fields to the car. I cannot get over how splendid she looks. Her thin body has begun to change: arms and legs filling out; chest no longer flat; her long skinny neck suddenly not birdlike but now lending her a supple grace. Devorah cannot take her eyes off Rocheleh’s luminous face.

“I miss Uncle Max and Uncle John,” Rocheleh tells us.

“They send you their love,” I say.

“But I’m happy to be here.”

“Do you play baseball?” Avrumel wants to know.

“Of course we play baseball.”

“The Rebbe likes baseball. He told me so.”

Rocheleh looks at him.

“The Rebbe said I have greatness in me,” Avrumel says. Rocheleh rolls her eyes. My mother smiles. Devorah looks embarrassed.

“Did the Rebbe say you have humility?” I ask him. “Asher,” Devorah says.

Departing cars are rolling off the fields and heading for the dirt road out of the camp. “We have to go,” I said.

“I miss you, Papa,” Rocheleh says. I kiss her. She is warm and soft. I smell the sun on her. Rocheleh.

“Grandfather asked especially that I send you his love,” my mother says.

“Take care of yourself,” Devorah tells her. “Don’t forget to take your medicine.”

“Mama, I am not a child.”

“The Rebbe asked me if I wanted to study in the yeshiva next year,” Avrumel says to Rocheleh. “The yeshiva in Brooklyn.”

We all look at him. Red hair, baseball cap, tan shorts, Ladover T-shirt, Shimshon doll. Avrumel.

“What did you answer?” I hear myself ask.

“I said I like the yeshiva in Brooklyn, but Shimshon wants to go to the yeshiva in Nice.”

“Shimshon is wise,” I say. “We really have to go.”

It was a long ride back to Brooklyn.

Devorah still needs light to fall asleep. The sliding door is left slightly ajar to let in whatever air the night will offer us, and the light attracts insects. They crash and dive against the screen door. In the mornings I wake drenched. Because of the heat, Devorah and I have very few together-times.

During the day the street bakes in the heat. The lawn beyond the terrace is turning brown. The sycamore droops. It is early afternoon. The air is thick with insects that seek out the shade, where they sail about in swarms at the mouth and eyes, forcing me into the sunlight on the terrace. I sit on the terrace in a stupor and hear the door slide open behind me. Devorah emerges and asks if I will come inside, she wants to talk to me; it is too hot to talk on the terrace in the sun.

We are alone in the house. Avrumel is in day camp. My mother is at a meeting with the Rebbe’s staff.

We go into the living room. Devorah wears a pale-yellow summer dress and a pink cotton kerchief over her graying hair. Her oval features are moist with heat. In one of the small windows a fan hums, stirring the dormant air. My father refuses to put in air-conditioning. It is a luxury, he says. Better to give the money to the poor. Outside the large picture window the street looks deserted. Shards of stark-white sunlight break through the motionless maples and sycamores, dappling the sidewalk. A car passes slowly along the street, stirring dust, leaving fumes in its wake. I feel my shirt clinging to my body, and the sweat under my velvet skullcap.

Devorah wants to know why I keep wearing T-shirts. There is a strange edge to her soft voice. Her delicately boned hands are restless.

“What’s wrong with these T-shirts?”

“There are nicer shirts in your drawer.”

“For whom should I be wearing nicer shirts? In Saint-Paul I wear nicer shirts?”

“This isn’t Saint-Paul, Asher. A grown man shouldn’t go around in T-shirts that announce the Messiah.”

“The announcement is only for children?”

“It’s not seemly.”

“What isn’t, Dev? The T-shirt or the announcement?”

“Will he come sooner because you wear this T-shirt?”

I watch her nervous eyes, the movement of her hands. There is fear in her mouth. She nervously scratches a knee. How fragile she seems—and yet what nightmares she manages somehow to overcome! Surely those years in that sealed apartment were in a real sense an ordeal by torture for her and Max and his family. An Austrian philosopher named Jean Améry, tortured by the Gestapo because of his activity with the Belgian resistance and then deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew, wrote that anyone who has been tortured remains forever tortured and can never again be at ease in the world. One’s faith in humanity is broken and can never be acquired again. Devorah tried to reacquire it by going to the Sorbonne for a degree in literature; by writing children’s stories; by marrying me and having children of her own; by making Max Lobe and John Dorman part of her family; by embracing my parents and the Ladover; by hungering to uncover the Divine Plan that had taken her from entombment in Paris to Asher Lev to Saint-Paul to the heart of the Ladover world in Brooklyn. It isn’t my shirt that is on her mind now.

“You don’t really want to talk to me about T-shirts, Dev. What’s wrong?”

“It came over me a few minutes ago that I wanted to see your drawings again. But I couldn’t find them.”

“Douglas is having them photographed for the catalogue.”

“It occurred to me that Avrumel is in almost every one of them. Isn’t it strange how you can look at a drawing and not really see it, and then go away from it for a while and see it very clearly.”

“That happens often.”

“I realized it on the way back from the camp last Sunday. I fell into a kind of half-sleep in the car and began to see your drawings.
Very clearly. Avrumel is in nearly all of them. It is not just my imagination, Asher, is it? Avrumel is on a bridge in Paris, looking at a gendarme; he is on a sidewalk, looking at a homeless woman; he is in a museum, talking with Picasso; he is in a print shop, watching you work with Max on a print; he is in the Louvre, watching you drawing; he is on a train, watching twin girls reading and drawing; he is on our terrace, watching Jameel water the flowers.”

“There are no figures in those drawings, Dev.”

She gives me a hard, nervous look. “Asher Lev, I am your wife. I gave birth to your children. I have deciphered your drawings and paintings in the past, and I do it now again. I had a good teacher: you. I am not talking about what you tell the world. I am talking about what you are telling yourself. I can read your drawings, my husband, though your language gets more and more difficult, and these took me a longer time than usual. It is a new syntax, isn’t it? A new iconography. But I can read it.”

“I am not aware of Avrumel anywhere in those drawings, Dev. You’re seeing something in a piece of art that isn’t really in it. It’s not an uncommon occurrence. There’s even a name for it. The Stendhal syndrome. The French writer Stendhal visited Florence, I think it was in
1817,
and saw the frescoes in the Church of Santa Croce, and suddenly he felt his heart begin to beat irregularly and—”

“Asher Lev, there are times when you are infuriating. I am talking to you about our son, and you are telling me about art in Florence.”

“Avrumel is not in those drawings, Dev.”

“I am not talking about his face, Asher. I
feel
him in those drawings. Why is he there?”

“Dev, I am telling you, those drawings have nothing to do with Avrumel.”

I feel her eyes on my face: searing. I know she cannot hear the pounding of my heart or see the flashing hues that float before my eyes. She shakes her head and closes her eyes a moment.

“I don’t understand it, then,” I hear her murmur. “They are an enigma to me, all those drawings. That makes me very sad, Asher.”

She sits limply in the armchair, disconsolate, her face sagging. I feel my heart turn over. But I say nothing. She dabs at her mouth
and forehead with a handkerchief and then rises and goes out of the room.

I sit very still, bathed in the torrent of sweat that suddenly begins to pour from me. I feel weak in every bone and muscle of my body and cannot move, and I see with astonishment the trembling of my fingers and hear clearly the loud and stormy beating of my heart.

The sky is white. I look at it through the leaves of the sycamore on the back lawn and am reminded of the huge primed canvas in my studio in Saint-Paul, white as summer lightning, before I covered it with an umber wash. White is fearful to gaze upon for too long: it is the color of shrouds; it is all-color, the prism fused, undifferentiated, linked wave to wave and particle to particle. The sky is white the afternoon my mother comes out onto the terrace and asks to talk to me. I close the copy of the proofs of the catalogue to the show that I have been going through, looking for typographical errors and for the presence of Avrumel.