The Gift of Asher Lev

  He looked so small, his dark clothes so indistinct against the leather of the chair, that at first I could barely make out his face, the stark white beard and pale features and dark eyes. He seemed all face, luminous, suspended, unsubstantial, flesh so rarefied after all the decades of consecrated leadership that only the soul now showed. I stood gazing at him from across the room, and I saw him raise his hand and beckon to me, and I went up to the desk.

  He wore a dark suit and an ordinary dark hat. His eyes seemed to gather the dim light in the room; they glowed through the vague shadows cast by the brim of the hat. He pointed to a chair. “Sit down, Asher Lev.” His voice was faint, gentle. “It is a long time since I have seen you alone.”

  I took one of the chairs.

  “How is your wife?”

  “Thank God, my wife is well.”

  “How is your daughter? Her illness is controlled?”

  “Thank God, yes.”

  “And Avrumel? How is Avrumel?”

  “Thank God.”

  “And how are you, Asher Lev? The years have been good to you, yes?”

  “I thank the Almighty.”

  “The world hears from our Asher Lev. The world knows of our Asher Lev. Who has not heard of Asher Lev?”

  I was quiet.

  “I remember the first time you came to me, at the time of your bar mitzvah, when you met Jacob Kahn, of blessed memory. I remember you came to me later, when I asked you to study Russian. I remember when I sent you away because of your paintings. All those times I remember.”

  I said nothing.

  He leaned forward in his chair; the vaguest of movements, a shifting of shadows. “To send you away was a severe decree, a terrible thing. But it was better for everyone that you went from us.”

  The tremor that passed through me, like a shattering of myself, was so tumultuous I felt certain he had seen it. He gazed at me in silence. Then he closed his eyes and his head slowly fell forward upon his chest and I thought he had fallen asleep. I sat there, not knowing what to do. Interminable minutes passed. I had decided to go quietly to the door and leave, when I heard him say, his head still upon his chest, “Asher, I want to tell you something. It is important that you listen carefully to my words.” He raised his head and gazed at me unblinking from beneath the rim of the dark hat. “My father, of blessed memory, once said to me, on the verse in Genesis: ‘And He saw all that He did and behold it was good’—my father once said that the seeing of God is not like the seeing of man. Man sees only between the blinks of his eyes. He does not know what the world is like during the blinks. He sees the world in pieces, in fragments. But the Master of the Universe sees the world whole, unbroken. That world is good. Our seeing is broken, Asher Lev. Can we make it like the seeing of God? Is that possible?”

  He paused a moment, then went on. “Once I told this to Jacob Kahn, of blessed memory. Yes, these same words. And he said to me that an artist, too, must see the world whole, he must somehow learn to see during the blinks, he must see where no one else can see, he must see the connections, the betweennesses in the world. Even if the connections are ugly and evil, the artist must learn to see and record them. I said to Jacob Kahn that a Rebbe, too, must see the connections, and if a Rebbe truly sees, if he is able, through the goodness and mercy of the Master of the Universe, to see as the Master of the Universe Himself sees, then he will see that all is good. Jacob Kahn said to me, ‘It is the task of the artist to see. If what he sees is good, then fine. If not, then not.’ But all agree, Asher Lev, that it is the task of a Rebbe and of an artist to see, to look. That is understood?”

  I nodded, slowly.

  “It is understood?” the Rebbe asked again.

  “Yes,” I heard myself say, as if from a distance.

  “It is understood. Good. Very good. Then listen to me, Asher. There are things I am able to see that I cannot reveal to you. You must understand that what I will now ask of you comes from that seeing. Listen. I ask you not to return to France tomorrow. I ask you to remain here with us for another week or two. Stay with us. I am told you must go to Paris. I ask you not to go.”

  There was a long silence. I sat very still.

  He leaned forward slightly in his chair. “Asher Lev, I give you and your wife and your children my blessing.”

  With his right hand he made a slight gesture. Then he sat back in the chair and seemed to disappear into its shadows.

  I went silently from the room.

  The house was still. I poked my head into my father’s office, near the stairs. He was seated behind his desk. He looked up. I told him I was ready to leave. He said to go ahead, he still had work to do and the Rebbe would be seeing more people later tonight. I went past the two dark-bearded men on the porch and down the path to the sidewalk. I walked quickly in the light-speckled shadows beneath the trees.

  Devorah was at the desk in her nightgown, a writing pad open before her. She had removed her wig; the low-cut brown hair, with its wisps of gray, gave her white slender neck an oddly elongated appearance, like the necks of women in medieval French tapestries and manuscript illustrations. She turned and gazed at me over the top of her glasses.

  “I was becoming worried. You were with the Rebbe all this time? What did you talk about?”

  “The Rebbe asked us not to go home tomorrow but to stay on here awhile longer.”

  She removed her glasses and looked at me.

  “What do you think?”

  “It will make your parents happy.”

  “One week, Dev. At most, two.”

  “The children will be very happy. Did you notice how Avrumel has taken to your father? You will have to cable or phone Max.”

  “We’ll need to change the flight. I think we’d better ask for open reservations.” I looked over at the desk. “Are you working on your new book? It’s marvelous that you can write here. I haven’t drawn a thing except that picture of my uncle.”

  “Husband mine, what do you want from yourself? You have just been through a week of mourning.”

  “I am really tired. How does the Rebbe stay up the way he does? He was seeing someone else after me. What’s the story about, Dev?”

  “You look half asleep, Asher.”

  “Isn’t it a bedtime story?”

  She laughed softly. “Do you really want to hear about it now? All right. I had the idea that it might be wonderful if we could find a world where we could hold on forever to the good feelings we get from a story or a song, keep those feelings inside ourselves forever instead of having them only for fleeting moments. We hear a song or read a story, and the good feelings we get don’t remain inside us. We are either anticipating them, or we’ve had them and they’re gone. We never experience them as now. Do you know what I mean? I’m writing a story about a little girl who discovers a cave where there is a lasting now.”

  “What are you calling it?”

  “The Cave of Now.”

  “That’s clever. The Cave of Now. Boy, I am really tired, Dev.”

  “Then get undressed and come to bed.”

  “The Cave of Now. Very clever. Now or never. Now and forever. If not now, when?”

  She smiled patiently.

  “We’ll stay another week, Dev. Then we’ll go home. I don’t want this place to become my permanent now. I don’t live here any more. One week. At the most, two. That’s it. For the sake of peace in the family. Now I’m going to get washed.”

  I left her with her writing pad and her dreams of now and went into the bathroom.

  I wake and lie with my eyes open, staring into the dim halo cast by the night light. Devorah is asleep in her bed. I hear her quiet, liquid breathing. The room pulses softly, alive.

  Slowly, the door to the room opens, but no one enters. It opens wider. I raise myself on the bed and look below the level of the doorknob and see Avrumel, his hair disheveled. He leans against the doorpost, holding his Shimshon doll and staring into the room.

  “Nightmare, Papa,” I hear him
say, and he begins to cry.

  Devorah does not waken. I go to him and hold him to me, all the trembling warmth of him, his freckled face against my beard, and bring him back to his bed.

  “What did you dream?”

  “Don’t remember. Very frightened, Papa.” He holds the rag doll tightly against his chest.

  “Sha. Go back to sleep. Papa is here.”

  I stay with him until he sleeps. Then I return through the silent hallway to my room. Walking to my bed, I sense a stirring in the curtains before the wide glass door to the terrace and the back lawn. I open the curtains slightly and peer out.

  A full moon bathes the terrace in a bluish-white light. I see shadows near the mottled trunk and beneath the tall-branched tangle of the sycamore: flitting fields of darkness moving back and forth through the eerie pale wash of night light. I close the curtains and climb back into my bed. It is a long time before I am able to fall asleep.

  In the morning, during breakfast, Devorah and I told my parents and the children that we would be staying on awhile longer. My mother was overjoyed to the point of tears. Rocheleh said it was a good idea; it would give her a chance to finish something that had begun in her class. Avrumel, a look of triumph on his face, turned to Shimshon and said, “You see, I told you we would stay,” got down off his chair, climbed onto my father’s lap, and hugged him. My father gazed at me over the top of Avrumel’s head. His eyes were shiny and there was, deep inside them, a strange dark knowing look.

  2

  I descend the stone stairway into the Kingston Avenue subway station. Cool stale earth-smelling air blows stiffly along the stairwell. I have the odd, chilling sensation that I am joining Uncle Yitzchok, Jacob Kahn, Anna Schaeffer, and the Spaniard in their cold graves.

  I wait on the dimly lit crowded platform for the train to Manhattan. Then the thunderous passage through dark tunnels. The last time I was on a New York subway train, years ago, the walls seemed to twitch and shudder beneath the weight of the frenzied graffiti they bore; now the stark clean walls of the car glisten in the overhead lights.

  In Manhattan I climb up the crowded dirty stairs and out of the subway into thronged streets and towering angles of shadow and light. I wander along looking into galleries, at the art in windows and on walls. I see Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, figurative painting. Consummate technical skill. The Bouguereau Effect, someone called it. Art without risk. The art of the eighties. A leading critic recently labeled it Importance Art: big, incoherent, a studied flouting of taste, tacky application of paint, indifferent drawing, a repellent choice of colors, everyone aping a big brother. Galleries glittered like department stores. A carnival of sorts. Art as Mardi Gras. The ordinary was king. And the courtiers were: popularization, shallowness, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.

  I wished I were back in Saint-Paul. I would stay here a week, at most two. Something odd was happening in Brooklyn. I could feel it even in Manhattan, amid the towers and tumult and crowds and street people: a shadowy stirring by the Ladover; a drawing forward; a vague sense of myself being reeled in. I could not give it a coherent word or feeling. Something.

  I turned off the street and entered a tall building and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. I had last been here three years before, for the opening of a show. The critics had been kind, though I detected notes of hesitation. “Lev’s style borders on stylishness,” one had written. “On occasion it loses the deeper tones that satisfy our profoundest needs, and flirts dangerously with sentiment and melodrama.” I disregarded it at the time, and remembered it after the Paris show. A good critic. Sympathetic and understanding in the past. A warning sign. Unheeded.

  I stepped out of the elevator, onto a thickly carpeted floor, and found myself in front of a large sculpture of a female figure by Matisse. The languid flow of line from shoulder and torso to the rise of rounded thigh. A show of Matisse sculptures was in progress. About a dozen people wandered among the pieces. The soft flow of unhurried sensuality glowing in the light from overhead.

  Across from the elevator, at the far end of the gallery to my left, was the same large dark intricately carved desk once used by Anna Schaeffer. Behind it sat a blond-haired, beautiful woman, Douglas Schaeffer’s receptionist, talking into the telephone. She saw me and quickly concluded the conversation. Mr. Schaeffer was expecting me, she said. I went into the back office.

  Douglas Schaeffer sat behind a small, pale lacquered wood desk that had belonged to a French nobleman who had lost his head to the guillotine. Douglas was peering at papers on the desk through Benjamin Franklin glasses. On a long table behind him stood a computer, a fax machine, and a telephone in a transparent box through which intricate wiring, like a network of veins and arteries, was intriguingly visible. The walls were covered with the works of his artists. One of my smaller paintings was there: The Artist’s Son and His Samson. Dapper, of medium height, trim, dressed in a dark-blue blazer, gray trousers, a pale-blue shirt and red bow tie, with a light-green handkerchief in the breast pocket of the blazer, Douglas had about him the grace and old-world elegance of his mother. He was in his mid-forties and had Anna’s cool searching eyes. His smooth face was tanned; his straight light-brown hair was combed back and parted; his nails were manicured. The air in the room was faintly scented with his cologne.

  He looked up as I entered, came quickly around the desk, and took my proffered right hand in both his hands. “It is so good to see you, Asher. How are you? How are the children? Rocheleh is well?” It had taken him a while to learn how to pronounce the guttural in her name. “And Devorah? Sit down, dear boy, please. Sorry about your loss. Your only uncle. Sad. Very sad. Did you see the Matisses outside? They are splendid, aren’t they? What a noise the show is making, especially among the critics and scholars. When do you return to France?”

  He loved the atmospherics of high art: exhibitions, critics, scholars, the media, private collectors, museum and corporation curators. He was a Harvard graduate, with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He had gone on to Oxford for a master’s degree in art history, and had naturally and successfully taken over his mother’s gallery during her last illness, about ten years before. Three years back, he had opened branches of the gallery in Los Angeles and Tokyo, both now highly successful ventures. He had been the executor of Jacob Kahn’s estate. Three of the largest paintings in my last show had gone to museums; the fourth he had acquired for his own collection. It hung on a wall in his Upper East Side home. He possessed his mother’s genteel haughtiness and elegance of manner, and every time I saw him he reminded me of her and, by immediate association, of Jacob Kahn, my teacher and his mother’s closest friend.

  I told him I would be in Brooklyn with my family for another week or two. I told him it would be good for the children to get to know their grandparents; it would be especially good for Avrumel, who had taken a liking to his grandfather. Devorah and my mother were getting along fine. It made sense to stay on awhile longer. But as I said it, there seemed attached to the words an aura of darkness. Had my father known that the Rebbe would ask me to stay? Had he urged the Rebbe to ask me? That knowing look in my father’s eyes at breakfast this morning.

  “What about you, dear boy? What will you be doing?”

  I told him I would be taking long walks and from time to time resting amid the creations in my uncle’s collection.

  “What collection is that?”

  I proceeded to describe my Uncle Yitzchok’s art collection: the paintings that made up its cornerstone; the drawings; the prints; the Jewish artists; my own works; the magazine articles and monographs and vernissage announcements. As I went on, I saw him remove his glasses and place them in the pocket of his jacket behind the green handkerchief. He stared at me. When I was done, there was a pause. He touched his bow tie with a manicured finger and coughed lightly.

  “It seems an estimable collection.”

  “I would say so, yes.”

  “Isn’t it rather an odd thing for a man
like your uncle to have done?”

  “He started it as an investment. Then I think it became something he admired. He may even have come to love it.”

  “What will your uncle’s heirs do with it?”

  “Oh, they’ll sell it off. They can’t wait to get their hands on it. Especially one of my cousins, whose middle name is greed. They’ll open a dozen stores with the money they make from it.”

  “A shame, dear boy. If you are at all interested, I would be happy to handle part or all of the sales for your family.”

  “I’ll certainly suggest it to them. Doug, to change the subject, I wanted to ask you if any copies of my first Paris print have surfaced?”

  “The one you made with Jacob Kahn? Dear boy, no collector in his right mind would divest himself of that print. Not with your market the way it is now.”

  “I need a copy of it.”

  “Where are your artist’s proofs, Ash? Didn’t you receive artist’s proofs?”

  “They were in that truck that was robbed when we moved south.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember. Bad luck, that.”

  “I saw one in my uncle’s collection, and I suddenly remembered I had promised someone a copy years ago and forgotten completely about it. What do I do?”

  “Who was the printer? I forget.”

  I told him.

  “Well, write to him or call him and ask if he still has the bon à tirer. They usually save them, because sometimes they become valuable.” He was talking about the final test print, on which the artist writes “bon à tirer”—ready for the press—and signs his name. “I must say, dear boy, I cannot get over the news of your Hasidic uncle’s art collection. It is quite astonishing.”

  “My uncle’s family can’t get over it, either.”

  “I can imagine.” He regarded me closely. “You don’t look well, Ash. Are you recovered from Paris? How do you feel, really?”