The Gift of Asher Lev

  Later, as we were clearing the table, I found myself alone in the kitchen for a moment with my mother, and I asked her where my father had picked up the idea of playing riddle games with children; he had never done that with me.

  “He saw your Uncle Yitzchok, of blessed memory, doing it with Nahum’s children. Isn’t it a fine idea?”

  I agreed that it was a fine idea.

  The food, the wine, the singing, and the late hour had a wondrous narcotizing effect upon Rocheleh and Avrumel, who were yawning halfway through the Grace After Meals and asleep soon afterward. I sat with Devorah and my parents in the living room, and we talked about Uncle Yitzchok. My father told stories about his cheerfulness, his goodheartedness, his devotion to the Rebbe and the movement, his optimism about the future. Uncle Yitzchok was certain the redemption would come soon. Wonders and miracles awaited us. The Messiah was coming, speedily, at any moment. For Uncle Yitzchok, the future of the Ladover movement was joyous and golden. For me right now, it looked like a good idea to use the immediate future for sleep. And, indeed, my father was soon asleep in his armchair, his skullcap slightly askew. My mother woke him, and they went off to their room.

  Devorah and I sat alone in the living room. “It feels good here,” she said, after a moment.

  I was quiet.

  “The children love it here. There is community here.”

  I said nothing.

  “Hello. Are you there? Is anybody there?”

  “A crazy artist is here,” I said.

  “And here sits his wife, trying to talk to him.”

  “I went for a walk today and saw where I grew up.”

  “Ah, yes? And how did you feel about it?”

  “I felt so-so. Somewhere between nothing and forlorn. I felt ready to go home.”

  “Poor Asher. You don’t like Crown Heights?”

  “No. And Crown Heights doesn’t especially like me.”

  “I don’t like Paris.”

  “I love Paris. But I didn’t grow up there. I didn’t lose my parents there. I didn’t spend age four to six in a sealed apartment there. So what do I know? Right?”

  “Yes. Correct. What do you know about Paris?”

  “Exactly what you know about Crown Heights. So let’s go back to Saint-Paul. We both agree about Saint-Paul. Yes?”

  “How did we survive our childhoods, my husband?”

  “We were helped by a merciful God.”

  “Yes? I wish He had been a little more merciful. I wish He had been a little more merciful toward my father and my mother, toward my aunts and uncles, toward my—”

  “Dev.”

  “Just a little more merciful.”

  “We should go to bed.”

  “She sang beautifully, our Rocheleh. Didn’t she sing beautifully?”

  “Yes.”

  “My father sang beautifully. He was a tenor. I never told you? Yes. Once he taught me a Christian song. In case I would ever have to hide in the countryside with the peasants, I would be able to fool the Nazi soldiers. ‘Je me croyais au Paradis,’ she sang softly, ‘entre les bras de Jésus Christ.’ Would you ever believe that my father taught me that? A Ladover Hasid. He learned it from a farmer he did business with. I heard him tell my mother he would go to his death proudly as a Jew, but he wanted his children to survive the war and build a future. Well, he died. Isn’t it a lovely Christian song? How old was I when he taught it to me? Three or four. More than forty-five years ago. I still remember it. A kind of goyishe Krias Shema. My father told me to memorize it because my life might depend on it. But I never had to use it. Oh, yes, God is merciful.”

  I went over to where she was sitting and helped her to her feet. I walked with her to our room and helped her out of her clothes and into her nightgown. She seemed dazed, half asleep, and kept singing the French song about the arms of Jesus. Then she came suddenly fully awake and stared about her, startled, and remained awake long enough to wash up and brush her teeth. She climbed into my bed and dropped off into sleep as if drugged.

  The desk light was on. An automatic timer would soon turn it off, for we do not tamper with electricity on Shabbos. I got into my pajamas and washed up and sat at the desk reviewing the Torah portion of the week, as I did always on Friday night. After a while the desk light went off. By the dim glow of the night light I climbed into Devorah’s bed and was quickly asleep.

  She woke me in the middle of the night. Through sleep I felt my blanket and sheet being pulled back and, half awake, I felt her slip into the bed beside me and, fully awake, I felt all her warmth and nakedness and the ferocity with which she clung to me. I loved her so much, my Devorah; her arms tight around my neck and her legs against my thighs. “Hold me, Asher. Tight, tight. Yes! Tell me God has a plan. Tell me. Come into me, my husband. Oh, my Asher. Oh, my husband. Oh!”

  The Rebbe entered the synagogue the next morning during the Shacharis Service. He entered through the door near the Ark, helped by two tall dark-bearded men. They all wore their prayer shawls. Near the Ark was the Rebbe’s tall-backed chair with the stand before it, both inside a small area bounded by a low wooden wall decorated with arabesques of wood. The wall was about the height of a tall man’s knees and had a wooden gate set in it that swung in and out. The Rebbe wore his tallis over his head and the tall men left him sitting in his chair and took seats in the front row of the synagogue.

  The synagogue was crowded. I sat between my father and my cousins in the front row. The sounds of more than a thousand men and women praying set up a rhythmic, murmurous humming. The Rebbe sat with his head covered by his tallis; even his beard lay concealed beneath the white-and-black-striped fringed cloth. The elderly man leading the service took the congregation through the Shema and the Silent Devotion and the Kedushoh.

  As the leader of the service continued chanting aloud the public repetition of the Silent Devotion after the Kedushoh, a gray-bearded man came over and handed me a small card on which was printed in Hebrew the word maftir. He did not even glance at me as he gave me the card, but walked quickly away, affording me no opportunity to refuse. I slipped the card into a pocket of my suit jacket.

  A few minutes later, the Ark was opened, a Torah scroll was removed, and the Ark was closed. The Torah scroll was brought to the podium in the center of the synagogue, beneath the huge brass chandelier. The Torah reading began.

  Years ago, on a trip to the United States, I had prayed one Monday morning in a synagogue outside the town of Spring Valley, New York. They gave me the honor of being the third man called to the Torah during the reading. I approached the podium and stood before the sacred scroll and was about to make the blessing when I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned, and a tall, thin bearded presence slipped between me and the podium. He had on his tallis and tefillin, and he stood between me and the scroll and shook his head at me and pointed to the scroll and shook his head once again. He was in his early thirties, his eyes dark, his face set in rigid lines, determined. I reached forward to touch my tallis to the scroll and make the blessing, and he brushed my hand away and pushed hard between me and the podium and would not let me move around him to make the blessing. The men standing at the podium stared at him in astonishment but did nothing. With my face flaming and my heart pounding, I backed away from the podium and returned to my seat. I could feel my knees weaken and the anger rise inside myself. “Our rabbi is a fool,” one of the congregants, an elderly man, said to me afterward. “For us it is an honor to have you here. For him it is a desecration. We apologize to you. What do they teach them in yeshivas nowadays? Where do they learn to behave that way?”

  I was being called to the Torah in the Ladover synagogue. I heard my name. “Rise, Asher son of Rav Aryeh, maftir.”

  I walked to the podium and made the blessing. A white-bearded man chanted the Torah portion. I made the second blessing. The Torah scroll was raised and removed from the podium. I stood alone at the podium, aware of the silence in the synagogue as I read the portion from o
ne of the prophetic books. I could see out of the sides of my eyes the white stillness that was the Rebbe inside his tallis. I came to the closing verse of the reading, and a chorus of voices joined me in the final words. I chanted the concluding blessings and, with the echoing “Amen” of the congregation in my ears, turned to leave the podium, when a flash of light, a movement, caught my eye. I looked across the distance between the podium and the Ark and saw the Rebbe’s hand, only the hand, the wrist and the fingers protruding from the fringe of the tallis, beckoning to me. Then it withdrew into the mound of white.

  Everyone in the synagogue saw that beckoning hand.

  A silence settled upon the synagogue, an absence of sound that had about it a physical density. I walked quickly through that silence, feeling myself pushing through strangely thickened air, and climbed the short steps to the area of the Ark and went through the low wooden gate. The hand moved out again from under the tallis and I grasped it, felt its cool dry papery smoothness, its age—and found myself looking into the eyes of the Rebbe, dark-socketed gray eyes that were like soft clear pools and that would certainly go on and on beyond the lives of all of us there. He clasped my hand and put his other hand over mine and, holding my hand in both of his, leaned toward me and spoke in Yiddish, in a barely audible voice. “May your strength be straight, Asher Lev. I wish to speak with you about some matter after the week of mourning. Someone will call you.” Then he released my hand and withdrew into his tallis.

  I returned to my seat in a silence that was the holding of a thousand breaths.

  My father sat looking at the prayer book on his stand, his face without expression. Cousin Nahum and Cousin Yonkel gaped at me in astonishment and disbelief.

  The service continued. Immediately after the Musaf Kedushoh, the Rebbe left the synagogue, together with the two dark-bearded men. The final Mourner’s Kaddish was said, and the service came to an end.

  My father embraced me and wished me a good Shabbos. Cousin Nahum pumped my hand. Cousin Yonkel managed a parched smile that barely concealed the incredulity still on his pinched face: his painter cousin invited into the sacred space near the Rebbe, and the Rebbe taking that painter’s contaminated hand and clasping it! The whole world was upside down!

  I was caught up in the crowd leaving the synagogue. People I did not know murmured Shabbos greetings and shook my hand. On the street in front of the synagogue people kept coming over to me and shaking my hand. Devorah and the children were near the police car that was parked at the curb. I moved toward them through the crowd. Rocheleh looked lovely in the red coat my mother had bought her during the week; Avrumel stood in stiff discomfort in his new dark suit and dark cap. My parents stood near Devorah. Children stared at me as I went past. I felt as I did at one of my openings: unveiled, paraded, displayed; the whispers, the glances, the stares. I shouldered my way through the crowd and greeted my mother and Devorah and the children.

  “My papa talked with the Rebbe!” Avrumel promptly informed the policeman who sat behind the open window on the curb side of the patrol car.

  The policeman gave him an indulgent smile.

  We started home.

  “What did the Rebbe say to you?” Rocheleh asked.

  “The Rebbe said he wanted to talk to me.”

  The glance that passed between my mother and my father was not lost upon me.

  “About what?” Rocheleh asked. “The Rebbe didn’t say.”

  The children walked on ahead with my parents.

  “What do you think it means, Asher?” Devorah asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  We walked on awhile. “Was I terrible last night?” she asked.

  “You were wonderful last night.”

  “I mean about the song.”

  “What song was that?”

  “You know what song. The goyishe song.”

  “I only remember the together-time song. It was beautiful.”

  She smiled joyfully.

  “It was my Island of Poetry,” I said.

  “What was?”

  “Last night. Birth through the fingertips.”

  She turned crimson. “You are awful.”

  “And you are beautiful.”

  “There’s a demon in you, Asher Lev.”

  “That’s hardly news.”

  “I love that demon.”

  “That’s news.”

  “We should not be talking this way on Shabbos.”

  “If not Shabbos, then when?”

  She laughed delightedly. We walked on together behind my parents and the children.

  • • •

  After the long Shabbos meal we all slept for a while, and then Devorah and I and the children went on a walk through the neighborhood. Avrumel brought along his new Shimshon doll. I showed them the apartment house where I grew up and the streets where I used to play and the parkway benches I would sit on, drawing the old people who sat with their faces toward the sunlight and the children skipping past me and the young Ladover couples with their many babies.

  “Did you ever draw the black people, Papa?” Rocheleh asked, and I said yes, sometimes, but I drew the Ladover more often here and the black people more often when I was in South Africa or wandering through the streets of Manhattan.

  “Why are there so many black people in America?” Avrumel wanted to know.

  “They were brought here to be slaves,” I said.

  He looked confused.

  “Like we were in Egypt,” Rocheleh explained.

  He gazed up and down at the many blacks on the street. “They are still slaves?”

  “No,” Devorah said. “They were freed a long time ago.”

  “Did Hashem give them the Torah?”

  “No,” Rocheleh said. “Hashem gave the Torah only to us.”

  It was a warm and sunny afternoon. The streets were filled with strollers. A black youth sauntered past, a huge radio on his shoulder, blaring. Rocheleh and Avrumel watched him go by. “Why is the music so loud?” Avrumel asked.

  “They like it loud,” I said. “Like we do at weddings and on Simchas Torah. Come on, let’s walk to the museum.”

  I showed them the façades of the museum and the library, and they stared in awe at the vast traffic circle with its statuary and arches.

  “Now I know why you like Paris,” Devorah said to me. “You grew up with a boulevard in your neighborhood.”

  Then we walked along Prospect Park to the lake where my mother and I used to go rowing; to the zoo, with the lions and tigers and elephants and monkeys; then back to the botanical gardens, which would soon be nearly as explosive with color as the Renoir garden hanging in my Uncle Yitzchok’s study.

  Avrumel held my hand with one of his hands and the Shimshon doll with the other. From time to time, he turned to the rag doll and engaged it in intimate conversation. “This is the lake where my papa used to row with his mama. This is the library where my papa used to take out books.” Rocheleh kept on with a barrage of questions. Where had her papa bought his first oil colors? When had her papa gone to the museum for the first time? What kinds of pictures were in the museum? Had her papa been permitted to see the nudes? She was a Ladover, our Rocheleh, but she was also French and the daughter of Asher Lev. She knew about nudes. Max Lobe had a large collection of nudes. There were paintings of nudes on the walls of our home in Saint-Paul and reproductions in books written about me.

  Unusual for Avrumel, he was actually listening this time to his sister’s conversation. “Nudes?” he said. “That means the paintings of women without clothes?”

  “That is correct,” Devorah said, glancing around the street, which was crowded with passersby.

  “Papa paints nudes,” Avrumel announced to no one in particular.

  “Yes,” Devorah said. “But it is not necessary to go around shouting it to everyone.”

  “He’s such a child,” Rocheleh said. Were the Ladover upset when her papa painted nudes? she wanted to know. Somehow she had never thought to
ask me that before.

  Yes, they were upset.

  Why did her papa paint them?

  Because her papa was an artist.

  “This is Shabbos talk?” Devorah asked. “Nudes?”

  “Nudes,” Avrumel chanted. “Nudes.”

  An elderly Ladover couple, approaching us, glanced curiously at Avrumel, and went on.

  “Avrumel,” I said. “If you don’t stop that, there will be no more posing for me.”

  “Yes posing.”

  “When are you going to grow up?” Rocheleh asked him.

  “When the Messiah comes,” he said. He had turned irascible, a sure sign of fatigue. The walk had wearied him. He mumbled something to the Shimshon doll. Then he said, loudly, “When I grow up I am going to be an artist like my papa.”

  “God forbid,” said Devorah.

  I looked at her. The words had come out impulsively. We laughed.

  “I am going to be an artist and paint nudes,” Avrumel said.

  “Whatever God wishes you to be, you will be,” I said.

  “An artist,” Avrumel insisted loudly.

  “All right, let it be an artist.”

  That mollified him. He let us walk tranquilly the rest of the way home.