The Gift of Asher Lev Read online

  The silent crowd in the entrance hall parted for my father. “Coats on the second floor, first room to the left of the stairs,” someone said in a near-whisper. I took my parents’ coats, and they continued on through the crowd into the living room. I climbed the stairs.

  The house gleamed with the opulence of its owners: thickly carpeted floors and stairs; richly textured wallpaper with floral designs; expensively framed prints by contemporary Jewish artists on the walls of the second-floor hallway: Agam, Nachshon, Bezem, Bergner, Ardon, Bak, Rubin, Ticho, Moreh. How curious, all that art. The only art on the walls of this house during all the years of my growing up in this neighborhood had been calendar reproductions of medieval Hebrew manuscripts, pictures of the Rebbe, and my own work.

  The room to the left of the stairs was small but tastefully furnished. Coats lay everywhere: on the bed, chairs, desk. This room had once been mine, but when I lived in it the furniture was plainer, more in keeping with my uncle’s then modest earnings. How I had worked! The cascades of color and form; the images that had possessed me: I would gaze at them inside myself, watching them grow from the empty point of their beginnings, from the void of nonbeing, to amorphous, shapeless lumps, and then simmer slowly into a molded nucleus of life, fragile, tender, frightened, incomplete. That constant wide-eyed looking at the shapes inside myself. That strange sense of being possessed by the Other. What a fearful and exquisite and frenzied time that had been—here in this room and in the attic overhead!

  I put my parents’ coats on a chair and started out of the room, then noticed the mezuzah at about eye level on the doorpost: the small filigreed silver container with the Hebrew letter shin boldly on top like a silver crown, and the parchment within visible through the tiny glass window set in the opening cut out of the decorous front. Standing in the hallway, I saw mezuzahs on the other doorposts as well: at the rooms once occupied by my cousins, and at my aunt’s and uncle’s bedroom, and at my uncle’s study near the—

  I looked carefully. The door next to the master bedroom led to my uncle’s study. It was closed, and there was no mezuzah on the doorpost. The door to the narrow stairway that led up to the attic was also closed and had no mezuzah. I remembered clearly the mezuzah on its doorpost when I had lived in this house: a plain, unadorned metal container. I looked again at the door to my uncle’s study and at the naked doorpost. I started back downstairs.

  The silent crowd now extended halfway up the stairwell. I moved slowly through the press of bodies down the stairs and into the hallway and the living room.

  Wooden folding chairs had been set up in rows in the center of the room and were now filled mostly with bearded, dark-garbed elders. I stood against a narrow section of wall near the wide picture window that looked out on the front lawn and the street. Most of the wall to my right was taken up by a fireplace and a mirror. The wall to my left was the entrance to the room. The only entirely unobstructed wall in the room was the one across from me. In front of it, on low stools, sat my Aunt Leah and my four cousins. Corpulent and normally as cheerful as my Uncle Yitzchok, Aunt Leah now wore on her fleshy features a look of stunned bewilderment. The two daughters sat to her left; the sons, to her right. They were all eating the ritual meal that traditionally follows a funeral.

  The wall contained two large reproductions of micrographic drawings—lines formed of minute Hebrew letters. Both were from a Pentateuch printed in Germany in the thirteenth century. One drawing showed Aaron tending the lamps of the Tabernacle during the period of the Israelites’ desert wandering. The second depicted the binding of Isaac: Abraham, his arm raised high, was about to slaughter his son.

  Between the two drawings was a large, ornately framed oil painting of the Rebbe.

  The painting was based on a photograph; the Rebbe did not sit for oil paintings. It showed the Rebbe seated at a table, his right hand raised in greeting, his left hand resting on a white cloth. His beard was white. He wore a dark suit and a dark hat. His eyes were-sharp, clear: eyes that looked. The Rebbe in the painting was twenty years younger than the Rebbe in the synagogue. I glanced away and saw my parents seated together, deep in conversation with a white-bearded man; my mother was doing most of the talking. Looking again at the picture of the Rebbe, I see it shimmering faintly in the too-warm air. A trick of lights and shadows brings a rush of life to the face: the eyes flame; the hand moves slowly, beckoning. I look quickly away.

  My aunt and cousins complete their meal. The dishes and low tables are removed. Someone announces that the Afternoon Service is about to begin. My mother and aunt and the half-dozen or so other women in the room rise and leave, for the service cannot begin if there are women in the room with the men. One of my cousins leads the service. He stands in front of the picture of the Rebbe, praying softly. The Rebbe gazes out from the picture, scrutinizing me, looking.

  The service was over. People began to leave. New people entered. The air buzzed with movement and subdued conversation. I took a chair next to an old man and watched people going over to my aunt and cousins and murmuring the words of consolation. Yesterday at this time Devorah and I and the children had just come off the Airbus. Two days before, the air blue and warm and fragrant with spring, she and I were sitting on our terrace with Max Lobe and John Dorman, drinking good cognac and talking about the differences between writing and painting, and the future of painting, and the aimlessness of postmodernism. I sat now in the hot and crowded living room of my Aunt Leah’s house, thinking of my Uncle Yitzchok.

  “Reconcile yourself to your son,” he had once told my father. “He cannot help what he does.”

  “Only an animal cannot help what he does,” was my father’s response.

  My mother had returned and was seated again next to my father. They were deep in conversation with two white-bearded men, who were listening intently to my mother. The old man who had been sitting silently beside me stirred and turned to me with an abrupt motion. I had the impression he had suddenly made up his mind about something.

  “You are Asher Lev?” he asked. His voice was low, quavery. Beneath the brim of his worn dark hat a network of furrows lay weblike across his forehead. Lines of tiny wrinkles crisscrossed the pouches below the deeply socketed watery eyes. The pale flesh of his face above the line of long untrimmed beard was like brittle old paper.

  I told him yes, I was Asher Lev. “The son of Rav Aryeh Lev?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have heard about you.”

  I wondered what he had heard, but did not ask him.

  “Where does Asher Lev live these days?”

  “In the south of France.”

  “There are Jews in the south of France?”

  “We have a fine community in Nice.”

  “Ah, yes. Of course. The yeshiva was built by your father.” He paused briefly, glancing over at my parents. “He is a great man, your father. So was your uncle, may his memory be for a blessing. Great men. Good men. God gives, God takes away. That is the way the world is.” He nodded and closed his eyes and was still. I thought he had fallen asleep. But after a moment he stirred and gazed at me, his eyes moist and lustrous with the high sheen of age. “Tell me, Asher Lev, you knew Jacob Kahn?”

  “He was my teacher in art.”

  “I knew his father. A learned man. He was my teacher in Torah. We were among those who came to America with the Rebbe during the war against Hitler, may his name and memory be erased. Jacob Kahn also lived for a time in the south of France. You knew him there?”

  “Yes. We lived near the same village.”

  “Tell me. Before he died, Jacob Kahn became a Torah Jew? He returned to Yiddishkeit?”

  I shook my head.

  His aged face took on a look of profound grief. “It hurts the heart,” he murmured. “What children sometimes do. How old are you, Asher Lev?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “Forty-five. How young. Do you know how old I am?”

  “No.”

  “Take a guess.”r />
  “Eighty.”

  “Ninety-two. Yes. You look surprised. Ninety-two. What these eyes have seen. When you live in this world for ninety-two years, you see a lot.” He shook his head sadly. “It hurts me to hear that Jacob Kahn did not return to Torah.” He looked away and closed his eyes.

  The room was becoming crowded. I gave my chair to an elderly woman and made my way into the thronged hallway and then into the dining room, where a few women stood about, talking quietly. There on the wall above the heavy mahogany buffet was the oil painting I had made of my uncle and his family when I lived with them—a gift for renovating the attic and turning it into my first studio. It hung in a baroque frame that was much too opulent for its facile realist genre; I had painted it in straightforward fashion, thinking my uncle and his family would have little appreciation for the ambiguous and mystifying flourishes of a modernist style. How they had loved it! My uncle proudly called it his first “authentic Lev” and boasted about the money it would one day be worth. There he was, in the picture, rotund, dark-bearded, smiling, a small dark skullcap on his head, the cigar in his hand, his wife beside him, the children to their right and left. Uncle Yitzchok. Dead and in the earth. Together with Yudel Krinsky. And Jacob Kahn. And Anna Schaeffer. May their memories be for a blessing.

  I came back out into the hallway and glanced into the living room. A small crowd had assembled around my father and was listening absorbedly to something he was saying. I saw through the open door the quiet, milling crowd on the porch and the lawn. The stairway was clear, and I climbed it to the second floor.

  I walked quickly along the empty, carpeted hallway. The doors to my old room and my cousins’ rooms were open. I stopped at the door to my uncle’s study and tried the knob. The door was locked. There had been a mezuzah on its doorpost once, but even the marks of its nails were now gone. I went back along the length of the hallway to the door beyond the stairway that led up to the attic. It, too, was locked, with no sign on its doorpost of the mezuzah that had once been there.

  A riddle. What can be put into a room that will so profane it that the mezuzah should be removed from its doorpost?

  I went back downstairs to the living room. My mother was ready to leave to prepare supper; my father would remain awhile longer. It was late afternoon. I would return for the Evening Service.

  The crowd in and around the house had thinned. I stood with my mother before Aunt Leah and my cousins and spoke the words of consolation.

  My two female cousins averted their eyes and shied away from me, as though fearful of contamination. One of the male cousins assumed an air of bravado. “How you doing, Asher? Long time no see.” The other gave me a look of contempt.

  “He loved you,” Aunt Leah said to me through her tears. “He thought the world of you.”

  My cousins avoided looking at her.

  “When are you going back?” my aunt asked. “Will I get a chance to see the children?”

  “Asher is returning after the week of mourning,” my mother said.

  “I’ll ask Devorah to bring the children over,” I said. “Only one week?” my aunt said.

  The girl cousins looked relieved. The male cousins were not paying attention to the conversation.

  “It’s a shame Asher cannot stay longer,” my mother said.

  “How he loved you, Asher,” my aunt said. “He would never say it, but I know he loved you.”

  I went back upstairs and got our coats. The second-floor hallway was silent, deserted. Downstairs, I helped my mother with her coat and looked into the living room and saw my father talking quietly to a group of elderly men, one of them the ninety-two-year-old man who had sat beside me earlier. I came out of the house with my mother and breathed deeply the cool early-spring air.

  My father stayed in the house of mourning after the Evening Service, and I waited for him. The living room was never without a crowd. Many non-Ladover people came: city politicians; the district representative to the statehouse; the local Republican committeeman; men and women who worked for my uncle in his many stores. Two Japanese men showed up, stayed awhile, offered their condolences, and left. The art dealer I had seen in the synagogue earlier that day suddenly appeared, a trim, dapper man in his late sixties, nattily garbed, silver hair combed smoothly back, a pale-blue handkerchief in the breast pocket of his expensive dark-blue suit. We had met briefly here and there in the past at parties and openings, and shortly after Anna Schaeffer died, he had made an attempt to prize me away from her gallery. How was the Blue Coast, and what was I doing these days? he asked, with both the accent and the studied politeness of a Central European. I asked him how he had known my uncle. Oh, he had sold him a-print now and then, this piece, that piece. He seemed disinclined to let the conversation go beyond the conventional banalities. To my aunt and cousins he expressed his condolences in low, courtly tones. A moment later, he was gone.

  I gave up my chair to an elderly woman and went out to the crowded hallway and then up the stairs to the second floor. The Bak print beckoned, and I looked at it with care: two huge keys set in a hilly boulder-strewn green landscape through which meanders a stream that reflects the clear blue light of a cloudless sky. One of the keys, huge, antique, of the sort one sees on a castle ring, stands on its head; the other reclines upon a rock. The distant blue sky is penetrated by shimmering white light shaped like a huge keyhole.

  Near the door to my uncle’s study was a Moreh print. Over a landscape devastated by torrential waters in which helplessly bob humans, animals, rodents, boats, birds, and trees, a robed figure hangs suspended in the air, attached to a stake that is connected at its foot to a wheel. The Hebrew words above the center are from the Book of Psalms. “Out of the depths I call you, O Lord. O Lord, listen to my cry….”

  The figure, a bearded old man, hangs from the stake, arms extended, feet crossed: the position of one crucified.

  My uncle’s study was to the left of the Moreh print. I tried the knob again. The door was locked. I started back down the stairs. Behind me, vague sounds moved through the hallway: air fluttering; feet sliding softly upon the carpeting; a distant whistling. Cold winds touched the back of my neck. I turned.

  The hallway was empty.

  I stood there a moment, listening.

  Then I went back downstairs to the living room. My father was ready to leave. We walked home together.

  Later, we sat in the kitchen over cups of coffee. My mother was in her study, grading examination papers, and Devorah was with Rocheleh. Avrumel, suffering jet lag and a low-grade fever, was asleep.

  My father sat in his shirtsleeves, collar open, gazing somberly into space. His velvet skullcap lay like a dark crown on his thick white hair. Even in grief there was an aura of stateliness to him: his demeanor controlled, faintly majestic and imperial. He ran his fingers slowly through the vigorous white hair of his beard and drank from his cup.

  The cup was from a set of six—all fired in earthen colors strewn with drawings of parakeets—he had brought back with him once from a trip to Australia. The house contained other, less frivolous tokens of his travels: an eighteenth-century Haggadah published in Warsaw and discovered by my father in a secondhand bookstore on some back street in Munich; a battered seventeenth-century Havdalah spice box rescued by my father from an attic in Vienna; a nineteenth-century white silk Shabbos chalah cover found amid a pile of rags in the basement of a home in Prague, the Hebrew word shabbos exquisitely sewn into the silk with multicolored threads; a filigreed seventeenth-century silver pointer used by Torah readers, which my father had acquired from a high government official on one of his trips to South Africa. He didn’t know how the pointer had fallen into the official’s hands, but, as he had put it to me earlier that day while showing me around the house, “Such an object does not belong in the hands of such a person.”

  Here and there on the walls of the house were reproductions of medieval illuminated Hebrew manuscripts, gifts from my uncle over the years. There was also an
unusual micrographie drawing of the Rebbe’s great-grandfather. The most prominent picture hung in the living room: a large, ornately framed color photograph of the Rebbe taken about twenty years ago—around the time he had sent me away from the Ladover community in Brooklyn because of my crucifixion paintings.

  My father put down his cup. “Do you want some more coffee, Asher?”

  I told him if I had any more coffee, I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  “You have trouble sleeping? Your mother cannot sleep. Four hours, and she is up. Does Devorah still need a light?”

  “She can fall asleep with a night light now.”

  “A night light. We have one in the house somewhere. Remind me later, and I’ll get it for you. Rocheleh looks frail. While you are here, you should let a doctor examine her. I can arrange it so the Rebbe’s own doctor will do it. He is at Mount Sinai.”

  “Rocheleh has been seen by specialists in Paris, Lyons, and Nice. Everything is under control.”

  “It can’t hurt for her to be seen by an American doctor.”

  “What difference will it make? There’s no cure for asthma.”

  “Every day something new is discovered.”

  “If anything is discovered, her French doctor will know about it. I don’t want her upset by new examinations.”

  “As you wish, Asher. You are her father. Devorah asked me today if I knew where she could purchase a Shimshon doll for Avrumel. I told her to ask your mother. There are stores all over the neighborhood that sell toys and dolls. This is, thank God, a neighborhood filled with children. Where did you get a Shimshon doll?”