An alleyway overarched by a yellow stone building brings me to a small bare inner courtyard and a short flight of iron stairs. At the end of the iron landing is a heavy wooden door that opens smoothly to my push.
I am inside an enormous, high-ceilinged room. Drawing tables, chairs, printing presses, stacked cans of color, tall piles of paper, laden drying racks. Men and women in stained aprons, hands blackened with ink, are working the presses. An entire wall is covered with decades of old lithographs, some so well known they are used as decorative tiles for bathrooms. Two of my prints are on that wall. Along the adjoining wall stands a ponderous cutting machine operated by a man who feeds it stacks of thick cardboard, which it guillotines with thudding sounds. At the tables, draftsmen are bent over opaque plates and color transparencies. In a far corner of the room, another flight of stairs leads up into darkness. Crossing the room, I see the workers looking at me, and I acknowledge their greetings with a wave of my hand. I climb to the landing at the top of the stairs, push open the heavy iron door, and step inside. The door swings closed behind me with a loud clanging noise.
About half a dozen men are standing at a long, cluttered table. Max Lobe, in protective goggles, is bent over a thin, flat sheet of metal, a lighted blowtorch in one hand, a scraper in the other. The noise of the closing door startles them, and they turn. Max Lobe cuts off the flame and removes his goggles.
“Asher Lev!” he calls out. “It is you, my friend!”
He puts down the scraper and the blowtorch and hurries toward me.
“Hello, Max,” I say.
He embraces me and kisses my cheeks. He is short, roundish, robust. I smell his cologne. “How are you, Asher? You are so late, I almost despaired. Come see what I am doing. I am still unable to give it the shape I wish. How is my Devorah? And the children? You must tell me what I am doing wrong. The truth. Do not waste our time being gentle. Be like your Jacob Kahn. Here, stand here.”
I move through the room, shaking hands with the others as I approach the table. One of the printers, a genial young man with shell-rimmed glasses and ink-smeared hands, offers me his elbow instead, and I shake it and we laugh. A tall, thin young man is introduced to me as a poet. He wears round silver-framed glasses. A wispy blond beard covers his long, pale face. His hand is limp, his fingers moist.
“Enchanted,” he murmurs. “An honor to meet you.”
Max is wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt and sharply pressed light-blue trousers. His round, smooth face and bald head glisten in the overhead lights. The printers have moved off discreetly and are talking among themselves. Max smooths his brush mustache with a stubby finger. “I am not happy with it; it does not sing. The texture is not quite right, but I am afraid if I play with it more it will cause the paper to crack. The first proof is on the wall there. Tell me what you think, my friend. The truth, as always.”
On the white wall beyond a lithographic press gleaming beneath a fluorescent lamp is a print. Against a smoky background of blue and purple grays, bold strokes of black and red hover over an indistinct smear of ochres that vaguely resembles a cloud in which are suspended blurred numbers painted in primary colors. The thick paper is densely textured; it swells and dips and bulges; ridges and valleys lie beneath the fields of color; splashes of viridian and cobalt blue streak the surface; a thin swath of cadmium red gashes the upper-right-hand corner like a brief cry of danger.
“What do you think?” Max asks. His anxiety is as gray and tangible as the rain now falling on the rooftops outside the tall windows of the print shop.
“It is formidable.”
He laughs uneasily. “You sound better when you say that than most Frenchmen I know. But I see in your eyes that there is something wrong. Tell me what you think about the red in the corner.”
“The blacks and reds are a Clavé combination.” He blinks and says nothing.
“And the Clavé combination, striking as it is, is borrowed from Picasso.”
“Dead, he still haunts us all, that Spaniard,” Max says, with some bitterness. “Can you imagine him still alive?”
“Yes, I can. I do, often.”
He stands gazing at the print, his thick shoulders sagging. “One has to be as good as you are, my friend, in order to endure him. I am not that good. I can live without such kings.”
“To get back to the work,” I say, indicating the print on the wall. “One should not use blacks and reds without giving them a center that attaches to black and red. Certainly the texturing should have a center.”
“I tried to build it up, but it cracks the paper.”
“Possibly it isn’t necessary to build it higher, but to play a variation on what you have already done. Right now it’s like the six days of creation without a focus. Maybe you ought to consider doing this.”
We return to the metal plate on the table. The printers stand in a tight quiet knot, watching us out of the corners of their eyes. Max and I talk for some while in the technical language of art—linear accents, surface patterns, passage, movement patterns, multiple centers of interest, distribution of space, bridging tension points, space and surface control, techniques of texturing, color movement, graphic balance. Max puts on his goggles, strikes a match, and touches the flame to the blowtorch. The torch spurts into life with a hard popping sound. I talk to him quietly as he works the carborundum over the surface of the plate, softening it with the flame, then spreading, smoothing, leveling, gouging, pitting, raising, lowering, streaking—so the thick paper will be alive with a textured surface that is a unity with its colors and forms. We work together a long time, and we are deep in it, lost in the working of it, and then Max has caught it and I can sense him moving into it alone, his face moist with concentration, and I step back and watch him for a while, and there is much pleasure in that for me. I find myself at a long table before a large sheet of empty drawing paper, and I motion to one of the printers and he quickly brings me a box of charcoal sticks, a bottle of India ink, and a reed pen, and I stand there suddenly drawing and very soon there is a sliding away of the time span between thinking and drawing and I feel the warm sensation of self-transparency as the charcoal and the pen move across the surface of the paper. I am drawing variations of the number three: one double curve floats alone; another interlocks with a third; a fourth wears an ordinary dark hat; a fifth leans against a sixth, which is tall and stalwart. Variant forms, the ink flowing from the pen as if from a brush and shaping often surprising marks, and quickly drying into a range of subtle textures and values. And the center a face swiftly drawn and molded in charcoal, the face of Avrumel, and a child’s hand, barely visible, clutching a Shimshon doll. I look at the drawing and it is done, and I sign it and date it and put down the stick of charcoal and step away from the table—and bump into one of the printers. He apologizes softly, profusely. On the pale face of the poet, who stands beside him, is a look of rapture. His eyes are wide and round behind his round silver-framed glasses. They have all been standing bunched behind me, watching. Max has been watching me, his blowtorch still spurting flame, his goggles on the table near the metal plate. Avrumel, I hear myself silently calling. Avrumel. And he replies, Here I am, Papa, and I hear his eager laugh. A vast and overwhelming sadness takes possession of me.
Max turns off the blowtorch and puts it down. His face is pale and moist. “Enough for now,” he says in a faintly tremulous voice. He seems troubled. “We will pull another proof after lunch.” He gazes at my drawing. In his eyes are conflicting emotions: admiration, awe, dejection, envy. “How do you do that?” he murmurs. “I have seen you do it a hundred times. How? It is … incredible.”
Outside the tall windows of the print shop the gray rain falls steadily on the rooftops and the chimney pots of the city.
“You were very helpful, my good friend,” Max says. “I thank you.”
“How long will you be in Paris?”
“I fly back this evening if there is no strike. I try not to stay too long in Paris. It reminds m
e too much of gendarmes and sealed apartments.” He looks at my drawing and slowly shakes his head. “I have no idea what it means, yet it touches me…. You are having a problem with little Avrumel?”
I do not respond.
“What is it? You are concealing something from Max Lobe?” Still I am silent.
He says, after a moment, “My friend, if I can help you with something …”
Everyone in the shop is silent. We hear the rain on the windows. For some reason I suddenly recall the horn players on the quai and the gendarme on the bridge and Jacob Kahn in his apartment overlooking the Louvre and the riverboats.
“There is mystic significance to the number three?” asks the poet in a hushed tone.
“I don’t know,” I reply.
“Of course,” he murmurs after a moment. “I understand.” He gazes at the drawing. “I understand perfectly.”
I go over to the sink in the corner near the table and wash my hands. The white porcelain is smeared and stained with ink. The soap foams on my hands. I wash off the soap and dry my hands with a paper towel. Stains remain on the fingers of my right hand and along the edge of my left hand where I brushed across the paper for shading.
Max is inviting everyone to lunch. The printers are washing their hands. The poet says to me, “Where do you live now?”
“Saint-Paul.”
“Ah, yes? Saint-Paul-de-Vence?”
“They call it Saint-Paul now. The village fathers don’t want the world to think they belong to Vence.”
We leave the printer’s shop and walk along the narrow street. The rain has eased.
“You have a family?” the poet asks me.
“A wife, a daughter, and a son.”
“Ah, how nice. I myself do not believe in marriage. An unhappy marriage results in quarrels that drain away one’s creative energies. And a happy marriage results in laziness and a fear of disequilibrium. I believe that without disequilibrium there is no genuine art. Excuse me for asking, but are you truly a member of this group of—how are they called?—Hasidim?”
“Yes.”
“How interesting! I read about it in Le Monde, in an article that appeared during your recent show in Paris.” I said nothing.
“May one ask if Asher Lev is working on something new?”
“At the moment, no. I am between things.”
“I understand,” he says. “I understand perfectly.”
We stop at the entrance to the restaurant. I shake hands with the printers and the poet, and they go inside. Max lingers in the doorway.
“You cannot join us?”
“You know I can’t eat in here.”
“Where do you eat?”
“I have an arrangement with a café near the hotel.”
“There is a kosher café near your hotel?”
“The owner provides for me. I repay him with a print or a drawing.”
“That is a wise restaurateur. Like the owner of the Colombe d’Or. Yes. Very wise. Goodbye, my friend. John Dorman looks forward to your company once again. He is not well. You are staying only for a week after next Sunday? Too bad. You leave for ten days and are gone, it seems, forever. When I see you, you will tell me everything that is going on in Brooklyn. I should have gone to that funeral in your place. Me they would have sent back immediately.”
“We’ll talk next week, Max.”
“What are you doing with that drawing? Shall I bring it down with me?”
“I’m giving it to André. I need the bon à tirer of an old print. An exchange.”
“Which print?”
I told him.
“You are exchanging that drawing for a bon à tirer? You really are not well, my friend.”
“I’m repaying an old debt, Max.”
We shake hands, and I walk along the busy streets in the light rain. On the crowded nearby boulevard I stand waiting at a covered taxi station. Empty taxis come along and go by without stopping. The drivers do not even glance at me but sit behind their wheels, staring straight ahead. Are they all off duty? I wait a long time in the light rain. A taxi pulls up for a red light. I go over to the driver and through the partially open window ask him if he’s free. He is olive-skinned, unshaven, thickly muscled, and wears a tight dark shirt and dark pants. He wants to know which arrondissement, and I tell him, “Eighteen.” He motions with his head, and I jump into the back of the cab as the light changes.
I will not enter that apartment house again; enough to see it now from the outside. A pilgrimage of sorts to the dark core of the Other Side. A gray cement building, one of four on the block, each seven stories high. Narrow streets, paved now, cobblestoned when Max and Devorah lived here for the two years of their tomb-time, as Devorah once bitterly labeled it. Rue Gustave Rouanet on one side, Rue du Ruisseau on the other. A school on the street opposite the entrance to the building. A church on the corner diagonally across the street from Devorah’s room. Housewives and children. Stores and shops and the heavy stir of traffic.
I have been inside the building once, with Devorah. Narrow entranceway, long dimly lit corridors, slow rattling elevator. We did not go up to the apartment. Who lives there now? Do they know what once took place within those walls? Imagine if every apartment and home had its history written on its doorposts. An unendurable notion. Max has never been back here, not once, since the day he left Paris. He says very little about that tomb-time. Nor has he ever drawn or painted it. Max and his decorative bursts of color. His swirling reds and blacks and floating clouds and rectangles and upside-down letters and numbers. Max says he paints to celebrate life. But you can only be a true celebratory modernist if, like Matisse, Dufy, Chagall, you really mean it. Max paints to conceal the terror of his tomb-time, and his lightheartedness is seen by the discerning as drawn too taut, with minute cracks showing here and there; an unconvincing and derivative decorativeness. He is a fine colorist, and very popular; important collectors have him on their walls. But he is not in museums, and that embitters him. I tell him often that he should paint the darkness he feels, not the false light that he covers it with. “You paint it,” he responds. “You are a specialist in darkness.” I tell him, “I didn’t live through it.” He says, “We all lived through it, everyone; all of humanity lived through it. Was Picasso in Guernica? Did Guido Reni see with his own eyes the slaughter of little children in Bethlehem?”
On the July day of the roundup, Devorah came home from playing with a friend in the schoolyard and noticed cars and trucks parked up and down the street. But it meant nothing to her. She was four years old.
They lived on the third floor. Inside the front door she pushed the button for the temporary light. The entrance hallway was silent and deserted, and this, too, meant nothing to her. The door to the apartment was open, and from the corridor she saw the two gendarmes and the two men in ordinary clothes, and her parents in the living room stuffing things into suitcases. She was about to call out, “Mama!” when her mother spotted her in the doorway and shouted in a voice that jolted her like an electric charge, “What are you doing here? What do you want? There is nothing for you to see here! This is not a circus or a zoo! Go home to your parents!” The voice was a wall of energy; it had a force of will that bent her response to it. Her mother stared at her with raging features; her father had his back to her and did not turn. The men looked at her and at each other. She whirled and fled.
She fled to the next-door corner apartment house of her Cousin Max. Fearful of the slow elevator, she raced up the stairs to her relatives’ apartment—just in time to be scooped up by them as they were fleeing the apartment before the arrival of the gendarmes. The concierge, an elderly man, a Gentile, rushed them to an empty apartment on the seventh floor. There they waited in dread—Max, his parents, and little Devorah—until the concierge returned to tell them that the police had arrived, found them gone, sealed their apartment, and left. He and Max’s father then conferred in low voices in a corner. Devorah went to a window to look out at the street; per
haps she could see her parents. Max’s mother quickly pulled her away. She began to cry, softly. Max, ten years older than Devorah, tried to comfort her in his awkwardly gallant way. Everything would be all right. He was sure she could stay with them. He would protect her.
Later that night the concierge led them back downstairs through the eerily silent corridors and stairwell, took off the wax seals and the wire placed on their apartment door by the gendarmes, quickly removed the mezuzah from the doorway with the claws of a hammer and handed it to Max’s father—who subsequently lost it; it was never found—and closed the door behind them. A few days later, a man from the French resistance brought them food.
Five small rooms. The dimmest of electric lights. Who paid their very low electric bill? They never found out. No heat. Two bitter winters. Metal shutters fastened across the windows, angled downward so they could see only slitted views of the street. For two years no glimpse of the sky.
Late one morning, about a year after the roundup, cars and trucks filled with German soldiers suddenly appeared at the corners, sealing the street, and they knew it was over, someone had betrayed them. They waited in terror for the knocks on the door. But it was only the German commandant of Paris coming to be photographed distributing oranges to French children in the nearby school. And one night American bombers struck at the nearby railroad yard and lit the sky to high noon, and two blocks away a row of houses disappeared beneath an errant cluster of bombs, and they felt the walls of the apartment shaking and the windows rattling and plaster falling from the ceiling, and she cried again and Max held her awkwardly to him, patting her shoulder, soothing her with promises of his dauntless protection. Darkness and terror for two years until August 1944, when the great bell of Notre-Dame peals the liberation of the city. Crowds in the street, shouts, distant gunfire. Devorah and Max open the door to the apartment and do not wait for the elevator. They race down the stairs together, he holding her little hand—she is six years old—and burst out onto the street, the air warm and the sky cloudy, and feel their eyes pierced and blinded by the hazy late-afternoon light.