The Gift of Asher Lev (48 page)

How weary he looks, strangely subdued, his T-shirt and shorts grimy, his sneakers mud-caked, his baseball cap battered. We walk together, he beside me, tense, his eyes to the ground.

“How was your day in camp?”

“It was all right, Papa.”

He is in a hurry, eager to get off the street. Unusual for him. Always he stops to look at the progress of the construction, the machinery, the new holes cut into the earth. Or something else catches his attention: the slow advance of an aged person across the width of the parkway; the faint rumble of the subway beneath our feet; a jetliner sailing by overhead; a booming radio in the hands of a lithely moving black teenager.

“Why are you in such a rush?”

“Want to talk to Shimshon.”

“Did something happen in camp today?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Something happened. What was it?”

“Nothing, Papa.”

“Avrumel.”

“A boy in my group was hurt.”

“Badly?”

“He fell with his mouth on a rock.”

A sudden sensation of ice on the backs of my knees. “Is he all right?”

“They called an ambulance and took him away.”

“How did it happen?”

“We were playing baseball.”

“Who was it?”

He gives me a name I do not recognize. “He is one of my friends. We all said a chapter of Psalms for him. There was a lot of blood.”

I put my arm around his thin shoulders. He feels deeply; too hard, perhaps. I want to hold him. At such moments he senses the edge of the blade that from time to time pierces the fabric, enabling
us to catch a fiery glimpse of the Other Side, its black and boiling nothingness.

“Why did God do that to him?”

Another riddle. “I don’t know.”

“I will ask Grandfather when he returns.”

“Grandfather may not know, either.”

“Then I will ask the Rebbe.”

Nearly six years old. A frenzy of feeling.

“There was blood on the rock and the grass and all over the counselor.” He keeps his eyes on the ground. “I will ask the Rebbe. Will we see the Rebbe again soon?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want to talk with Shimshon, Papa. Can we go faster?”

We walk home quickly together. I get him a fresh T-shirt and shorts. As I throw the soiled clothes into the hamper, I see the caked blood in the dirt and grime and feel again the stiletto thrusts of coldness on the backs of my legs.

The house is quiet. We are home alone. I bring him a glass of milk and his favorite cookies. Later, I glance in the door of his room and see him sitting on the floor, talking softly to Shimshon. He tells Shimshon about the accident and listens for a moment. He nods and asks how such a thing could happen, and leans forward, listening. I do not hear Shimshon’s reply.

The heat continued into the next week: blazing rainless days, black swamp-air nights. A sulfurous haze settled over the city. On Monday I took the subway into Manhattan to see Douglas Schaeffer about the show and sensed everyone close to the edge, saw people talking to themselves on the streets. Douglas told me that three of my collectors had begun a bidding war on two of the drawings. A most pleasant way to begin the show, he said.

Afterward I came out of the gallery and walked through the sun and shade of Fifty-seventh Street and saw a show of small-scale canvases by the Spaniard, and a show of drawings by Jackson Pollock, one of them, the half man-half beast in the colored
Psychoanalytic Drawing,
looking as if it had stepped right out of the
Guernica.
There was a show of splendid unsettling drawings by
Philip Guston: allegories of pessimism and doubt—old shoes, piles of junk, light bulbs, hooded men. In a show of drawings by Richard Diebenkorn, I marveled at the skill with which the artist put pieces together as in the most intricate of puzzles to achieve fragile balanced works. At the Pace Gallery, I stood a long time before a barely readable drawing by Malcolm Morley—tremulous, quivering lines—called
Ghost Drawing of the Barcelona Cathedral.

I came out of the Pace into the sunlight. A block from the gallery, an old man with a dirty white beard lay very still in the middle of the sidewalk. He was dressed in torn brown trousers and a grimy shirt. A policeman and two uniformed men from a rescue squad were working over him. A small, silent crowd had formed. I stood amid the crowd and reached into a pocket for my drawing pad and made a swift sketch of the fallen man. His face was blackened with dirt above the line of his beard; his eyes kept darting about, wide with terror. That look of terror seemed to rise from him and hover in the poisonous air of the street, and from time to time I saw it in the crowded subway I rode back to my parents’ home.

Rocheleh returned from her camp that day. How lovely she looked: two months away and suddenly grown, the beginnings of womanhood touching her fragile being. She bubbled over with stories about the camp: a canoe trip along the Delaware; overnight cookouts in the woods; the friends she had made. The young woman who had been her division head was the daughter of the Bonrover Rebbe in Borough Park, a Brooklyn neighborhood crowded with Hasidic sects, not all of them friendly toward the Ladover Hasidim, whom they considered too hospitable toward modernism, too eager to evangelize, too quick to use the media, too adept at the trappings of contemporary communication, and therefore probably too prone to produce an Asher Lev. That young woman had been like a mother to her a week ago, Rocheleh said. During a sports competition, Rocheleh had participated in a swimming race, which she lost; immediately afterward she suffered a mild asthma attack, so mild the infirmary elected not to call us about it. The division head was with her all the time. Avrumel listened to his sister’s stories, pretended not to be interested, and held whispered conversations with Shimshon. Rocheleh spent a
good part of her first evening home talking quietly with Devorah, and afterward Devorah told me, “Our daughter is grown,” and there were tears in her eyes.

Later that night, I was sitting at my desk with the drawing pad open, and Devorah was in her bed, reading, when someone tapped on our door. It was my mother. She was in her housedress; a kerchief covered her head. The Rebbe’s office had just called, she said. My father was returning the following day from Israel.

The next afternoon, a hot windy dust-blown day, Baruch Levinson brought him in from the airport, and I stood in the doorway of the house with Devorah and Rocheleh and watched my mother and Avrumel hurry along the cement walk to the car, this one new and gleaming. My parents exchanged greetings but did not embrace, and Avrumel sprang forward and was suddenly in my father’s arms, hugging and kissing him, and my father held him and, singing a Ladover melody, did a little dance with him right there on the sidewalk in front of the house and in the presence of neighbors who had come out to greet him. I glanced at Devorah, and she caught my eyes and looked at me a moment, troubled, and looked away. Baruch Levinson brought my father’s bags into the house, said to me cheerfully, “Have a nice day,” got into the car, and drove off.

We ate supper quickly and my father went to his office and returned after Devorah and I had gone to bed. I did not hear him come in. The next day he left for his office directly from the synagogue. I took the subway to the warehouse in lower Manhattan where Douglas Schaeffer had stored my uncle’s art collection.

In a large, clean, brightly lit, temperature-controlled room, I stood looking at the canvases and drawings and prints arranged for me against white walls by white-garbed workers. The books he had collected were there, too, as were the magazines, scholarly monographs, articles, and notices of my openings through the years. There was my first carborundum print, the one I had worked on with Jacob Kahn in Paris nearly twenty years before and of which the bon à tirer was now in the collection of the widow of Lucien Lacamp, who had written to Douglas Schaeffer, informing him she intended to hold on to it and telling him how astonished and full of thanks she was for the kindness of Asher Lev. All I could think
of when Douglas told me about the letter the previous morning was Lucien climbing the stairs to my apartment with the artist’s proofs of my first carborundum print and Lucien helping me carry Rocheleh through the rainstorm to the hospital and Lucien blown to pieces by the bomb in the restaurant on the Rue des Rosiers.

I stood there in front of Uncle Yitzchok’s art collection and was lost in the wonder of it, its loveliness pressing against my eyes and filling me with joy so I suddenly wanted to do a dance about the room, its radiance touching my eyes and mind and coursing down to my hands so I felt I needed to do something with my fingers, and I opened my drawing pad and turned to a fresh page and stood there, sketching forms and noting color patterns, and turned to another page and then another. Then I was lost inside the exquisite otherness of it, journeying like a smooth-moving runner, feeling the twists and turns of its forms and the warmth and coolness of its colors. I copied the structures of the Cézanne and the Matisse and the Renoir and the Bonnard, stood and copied, working my way swiftly through the best pieces of the collection; and finally a workman came in to tell me they needed to put the pieces back, they would be closing in an hour. I stared at him, dazed, not remembering for a long moment where I was. Afterward I left the warehouse and stood a long time in the sunlight and heat, nearly overcome by the abrupt transition from the cool silent loveliness in the storage facilities to the gasoline-smelling din of the street. I took a subway home.

During supper that night, my father asked if we would like to spend the Labor Day weekend in the cottage in the Berkshires; he needed to see the Rebbe, Grandmother needed a vacation, and Asher looked like a few days in the mountains wouldn’t hurt him. Early Thursday morning Baruch Levinson showed up with an expensive-looking station wagon and loaded us inside. Rocheleh and Avrumel sat in the jump seat in the back, with the luggage, and sang Ladover camp songs about the power of Torah, the victory of the armies of God, the coming redemption of the Jewish people and the world, and the wisdom and saintliness of the Rebbe. My father talked about his work in Israel and his certainty that the religious party supported by the Rebbe would be a major force in the formation of the new coalition government after the November
elections. I asked him whom he thought the Ladover Hasidim would vote for in the American elections, and he said the Rebbe would advise his people to vote for George Bush for President. That meant more than ninety percent of voting Ladover would cast their ballots for George Bush. “We are for family values. We are very happy with the policies of President Reagan.” Devorah said she did not like Dukakis; in France he would be regarded as a weak man, full of self-doubt and uncertain convictions. My mother said all the women she knew were against the Democratic Party’s position on abortion and would vote for George Bush. Baruch Levinson, steering us along the crowded highways, said everyone in his yeshiva thought Jesse Jackson was an anti-Semite and all were fearful of his influence if the Democrats won the presidency. “Who will you vote for, Asher?” my mother asked me; she knew I voted by absentee ballot. I said I had not yet made up my mind. Avrumel wanted to know why the Rebbe did not run for the presidency. I said in order to be President of the United States you had to be born in America, and the Rebbe had been born in Russia. Rocheleh said even if the Rebbe could be President he would never give up being the Rebbe of the Ladover Hasidim; it was the most important position in the world: the Rebbe was helping to bring the Messiah. Sometime during the trip my father asked me if I had given any thought to my uncle’s art collection now that Cousin Yonkel had abandoned any further attempts to oust me as its trustee. I said I was giving it a lot of thought and had not yet made up my mind what to do with it.

There was heavy traffic all the way up to the Berkshires: a tedium of encumbered driving. We arrived in the late afternoon and unloaded the car. My father went immediately to meet with the Rebbe.

The colony is crowded; it feels as if most of the Ladover of Crown Heights are here for the weekend. The paths teem with dark-garbed men and long-sleeved kerchiefed women and baby carriages. Children scamper about in the woods and splash in the lake. Men and women swim separately on opposite sides of the high wooden wall. Our side of the lake is crowded with rowboats.
Along the distant shore, small, elegant-looking sailboats glide across the water like white-winged birds. The air is warm. Occasional winds blow across the lake from the mountains, carrying the scents of pine trees and water and verdant earth.

On Friday morning I stand in the sunlight on the beach and watch my mother and Devorah in a rowboat, Devorah rowing, and see Rocheleh and Avrumel swimming, and I think of the Spaniard’s painting
Night Fishing at Antibes.
The last time I thought of that painting I was on the train in Antibes, weeks ago that had been, the day I drew the girl drawing. Why am I suddenly thinking of the Spaniard? My right hand quivers, and I look at my fingers. I have never understood what moves these fingers. An otherness enters them from some realm of power, some restive willful source that showers mysteries upon us just as it sends fearful, raging thunderstorms, as it did last night. We all stood on the back porch of the cottage and watched the storm in the mountains, lightning spearing down out of tumultuous black clouds, and I heard Avrumel recite the appropriate blessing and I asked him where he had learned it, I could not remember teaching it to him, and he said he had learned it in camp early in the summer from the boy who had fallen on the rock: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, whose strength and might fill the world.”

I watch my father coming up the path to the cottage, returning from his meeting with the Rebbe. He walks briskly. People greet him. He stops to talk with an elderly man and peers into a carriage being pushed by a pregnant young woman. He looks at such moments like an American politician hustling for votes. It is good to see him like that, so human, so ordinary. He goes into the cottage. The sun is hot. Devorah waves at me from the rowboat and I wave back. A young man, bearded and dark-garbed, comes hurrying over to me. The Rebbe would like to see me. Now? Yes. Would I please come? I walk quickly alongside him to the Rebbe’s cottage.