The Gift of Asher Lev

  The little girl gave her mother an imploring look.

  “Georgette,” her mother said.

  The girl left.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “Of course, I remember. The artist with the big paintings.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Always the paintings have to go out through the balcony doors because the stairway is not large enough for them. Lucien makes jokes about that. Asher Lev of the balcony paintings, he used to say.”

  “He would attach them to ropes and lower them carefully to me in the street. Once or twice you watched him do it.”

  “Ah, yes. I remember. He said you were a little crazy. Always drawing and painting, painting and drawing. He said you were a kind man, not like some other artists he knew.”

  We were sitting in worn rattan chairs in a small and dingy room that was a living room, dining room, and kitchen. The kitchen section lay behind three thick unpainted wooden beams that seemed to be holding up the ceiling. The floor and walls were bare. The low ceiling buckled slightly in the area of the kitchen, where it received the heat of an ancient two-burner stove. Through the open doorway near my chair I caught a glimpse of the adjoining room: two narrow beds, bare floor, bare walls, a dresser, a mirror, a chair. The little girl sat on the floor, playing with a rag doll. Tall doors with thin dirty curtains and unwashed panes led out to a narrow balcony on which were two black metal chairs, a metal table, and pots of dry earth containing the rotted stalks of long-vanished flowers. Across the street stood yellow stone houses: grill-work on the windows and narrow balconies; dormer windows projecting from sloping blue-painted roofs; TV antennas and chimney pots protruding into the milky sky. Devorah and I and Rocheleh had lived in a similar apartment on the Rue des Rosiers, but with carpets on the floors and the Danish furniture Devorah favored and paintings on the walls—hers the Paparts and Coignards and Lobes; mine the Lipchitz and Henry Moore and Jacob Kahn drawings and work of my own and the paintings of young Parisian artists I had begun to collect. The apartment had a room for Rocheleh and one additional room, where I worked; Devorah and I slept in an alcove behind the studio. In the spring and summer, each time Lucien and I needed to lower one of my paintings to the street, a path would have to be cleared through the balcony garden of pansies, geraniums, daffodils, and marigolds cultivated by Devorah.

  “Your Lucien was a very good man. I trusted him.”

  “Others have said the same thing. I loved him. But God chose to take him away. I remember you wrote to me when it happened. He was working in the café, bringing someone an espresso—and poof! We aren’t Jews, you know. The bomb was meant for Jews. But God chose to take him away.”

  “What do you do now?”

  “I wait on tables in a restaurant. I remember when you moved from the Rue des Rosiers. You live now in the south?”

  “Near Saint-Paul.”

  “Saint-Paul-de-Vence?”

  “Yes.”

  “It must be nice in the south. How is your daughter?”

  “She is well, thank you. We also have a son.”

  “A son. How nice. Thanks to God. A son.”

  “I heard only yesterday about your older daughter. I am deeply sorry. May God give you comfort.”

  Her nearsighted blue eyes misted over. The thin, sallow features of her squat face—the flat nose, the small, bow-shaped mouth—seemed to melt. She wiped at her eyes with the palms of her hands and smoothed her lap. “Poor child. What could God have had against her? An innocent child. Pneumonia, the doctor said.”

  “Not asthma?”

  “Ah, no. She had not the asthma. Pneumonia. One day she is alive and laughing. The next day she is sick. And the day after she is dead and gone to God. Poof! Just like that. Lucien is with her now. I have one daughter, and he has the other. It is the will of God.”

  Through the open doors of the balcony I could hear the sounds of the evening traffic below.

  “We visit their graves. It is a comfort. My little Georgette and I, we speak to them, we bring them flowers, we pray. You are a religious man. You know that is a great comfort.”

  A comfort. Uncle Yitzchok. Jacob Kahn. A comfort.

  “He was a good soldier, a good Frenchman, a good husband. Not like the others. You know what I mean? He did not chase women or come home drunk. But God took him away.”

  You had to take him away? He wasn’t a Jew. The bomb was not meant for him. It was a mistake You made, wasn’t it? How? A half-blind, half-dead clerk would not make such a mistake. Lucien. Once I woke in the cold of a winter night to odd sounds in the Rue des Rosiers apartment—deeply drawn gasping breaths—and thought I was dreaming and went back to sleep. In the morning it occurred to me to ask Rocheleh if she had had a bad dream, and she said no, she woke and couldn’t catch her breath for a minute because the air was so cold. They turned the heat down in the building after eleven at night. I gave Rocheleh another blanket. In the evening about ten days later, Lucien was putting in a new bank of deep-angled shelves in my studio, and I was working on a series of drawings that would later become the basis for my print and painting The Deceit of Rebekah, and Devorah was wading through a pile of children’s books and was at the moment reading, if I remember correctly, Le voyage à la recherche du temps by Lucie Ledoux—or was that published later?—when I hear the sounds of someone gasping and choking and find Rocheleh on the floor near her bed, where she has been playing with her doll; she lies there arched, rigid, clutching her throat, her eyes wide with terror, her face a bluish white. I ask her if she has swallowed anything, and she manages to shake her head no. Devorah has come rushing into the room by then and Lucien is putting Rocheleh on her bed and Devorah is calling for a taxi but it is pouring outside and she cannot get through to the taxi company, the line is busy. She tries another and another. They are all busy. Rocheleh is gasping for air, strangling. Devorah begins to phone for an ambulance. Lucien says we should not wait for an ambulance, he has seen this sort of shallow breathing before, we should bring her immediately to the hospital. I pick her up and hold her to me, her grating breaths like a metal saw scraping at the back of my neck and the roots of my teeth, and throw Devorah’s raincoat over her, and Lucien accompanies me as I carry her down the five flights of stairs and out into the rain-soaked street, and he takes her from me and runs with her, and I follow, rivulets of rain coursing through the cobble-stones, our shoes splashing through the deep puddles, rain in our mouths and eyes, and all the time the stiff, arched little body and the choking sounds. She may have the asthma, the doctor in the hospital said. There were forms to fill out. Where did I live? the nurse at the receiving desk wanted to know. Was I a citizen of France? A permanent resident? What kind of medical insurance did I have? And Lucien on the bench in the waiting room, wet, patient, soldierly, unwilling to leave me alone in case I needed help with the doctor, the nurse, the intricacies of French hospitals, the paperwork, the despair that suddenly settled upon me. One minute well, the next minute ill. One minute alive, the next minute dead. Lucien. Uncle Yitzchok. Poof! A fourth-level bureaucrat on the take could do better at running things. Master of the Universe, why are they so angry at me for the art I make? You are the cruelest artist of all!

  Then the weeks of tests. Frightened little Rocheleh and dread-filled Devorah. Chest X-rays, sinus X-rays, pulmonary function study, allergy tests. The nights in the apartment now like the sealed apartment during the war, Devorah and I often awake and waiting for sounds, from inside the apartment now, from Rocheleh. Wheezing, coughing up mucus, waking and asking us to open the window, she needed air. It turned out that she was allergic to cigarette smoke; Devorah immediately stopped smoking. She was allergic to her rag doll; we got rid of it; she wept bitterly. She was allergic to cheese and aspirin. She was allergic to oil paints, the chalk of pastels, the dust of charcoal. I rented a two-room apartment in our building, two floors below ours. Lucien helped me move my studio.

  Lucien. One of the righteous Gentiles of the world.

  I took
a deep breath of the stagnant air in the apartment, and I said to his widow, “Your husband was a good man. When I came to Paris I was a stranger in your country. Even though I had lived and worked here before, I had never truly gotten to know your country and its ways, because I believed I would soon return home to New York. But then I came here to live, and I met your husband and we became friends. He was a help to me, and I was made desolate by his death. He was not a Jew, but he died the death of many Jews. Once your husband helped me carry copies of my first print up the stairs of our building. And once he helped me carry my daughter to the hospital in an emergency. Surely he told you of that incident. I could not repay him for that second kindness because he was a proud and religious man, and I would not insult him with an offer of payment for an act of mercy. But for the first kindness, the carrying of the print, for that I had promised him a picture, and with all that happens in life, I had forgotten my promise and did not give it to him. I was reminded of that while in New York recently, and it weighs heavily upon me.”

  The widow of Lucien Lacamp sits listening to me, her eyes wide and soft and intent, her small mouth slightly open.

  “I have brought you a picture,” I tell her. “It is of much value. You can make use of it now or later, as you wish. What you must know about the picture is this: the longer you wait with it in your possession, the greater will be its value. If the picture is worth this and this now”—I quote an amount of money—”it will be worth possibly ten times that in about ten years, when your daughter will be ready for university.”

  Her face fills with astonishment.

  “Inside the tube with the picture is the name of a man in New York. He is called Douglas Schaeffer. He is a great dealer in art. He is the one you must get in touch with whenever you decide to make use of this picture. He will tell you what to do. If you change your address, you must notify this man. From time to time I will send you an additional picture, so that soon you will have a collection of pictures. Perhaps you will want to go to the library and take out a book or two about art and how to care for such a collection. Here is an envelope with some money so that you can have the picture in the tube properly framed. The best place to put a picture is on a wall. Pictures require walls in order to breathe and remain alive. I wish you and your daughter a good life. I will remember always the great kindness of your husband.”

  I stood. She got quickly to her feet. She looked dazed.

  “I must go. I would like to say goodbye to your daughter.”

  “Of course,” she said, and called, “Georgette, come here.”

  The girl came hesitantly into the room and reached for her mother’s hand.

  “Monsieur Lev wishes to say goodbye to you.”

  “Goodbye, Georgette. I am sorry you lost your big sister. My people in New York have a great leader, and if he were here now, I am sure he would give you and your mother a blessing for a long and healthy life.”

  I stood in the doorway to the apartment.

  “Treat the pictures as though they are living beings. They will grow together with you and your daughter. Goodbye, Madame Lacamp. Goodbye, Georgette.”

  I walked down the poorly lit creaking wooden stairway and through the courtyard to the street. It was drizzling. The twilight air was gray and dim. A taxi pulled up, and I climbed in and gave the driver the name of my hotel.

  • • •

  I draw the face of Lucien’s wife. I draw the face of the daughter, Georgette. I draw the face of Rocheleh. I draw the face of Avrumel. He went on a long walk with your father. I draw the face of Devorah. Your father says he’ll take him to his office now and then. Again I draw the face of Avrumel.

  Avrumel in my father’s office. The Rebbe’s office close by. One day he follows my father into the Rebbe’s office. Or my father says, “I must see the Rebbe about a matter, come with me, I don’t want to leave you alone.” And the door is opened and the Rebbe sits at his desk in the hushed room that is softly lit by the chandelier rescued from a Ladover synagogue destroyed during the civil war in Russia that followed the October 1917 Revolution. My father approaches the desk. Avrumel hangs back near the door, awed, wishing for the comforting presence of his Shimshon doll, which my father urged him to leave at home so it would not be lost or forgotten. Now he wishes for the hand of his mother, the presence of his father. Ça va, Avrumel.

  The Rebbe becomes aware of Avrumel’s presence and raises his arm in a beckoning gesture.

  “Come closer,” the Rebbe says. “Come here to me, Avrumel.”

  Avrumel, fearful, does not move.

  “Avrumel,” my father says gently. “The Rebbe is talking to you.”

  “Avrumel,” I hear myself say. “When the Rebbe calls you, you must go to him. Go over to the Rebbe.”

  Avrumel moves toward the small dark-garbed figure behind the desk, his little heart beating so loudly he is fearful it can be heard like a drum in the room.

  “Here,” the Rebbe says. “Stand next to me. A fine-looking boy. Your grandfather tells me you like riddles. Yes?”

  Avrumel nods uncertainly. Up close, the age of the Rebbe strikes him profoundly. He has never been so close to anyone so old: even Uncle John, John Dorman, who is the oldest person he knows, is not so old. The long flow of silver-white beard. The eyes gray, clear. The skin above the beard and around the eyes webbed with a million tiny connecting lines. Wisps of white hair cascading from below the dark hat and across the dark lustrous front of the satin caftan.

  The Rebbe reaches out and gently pulls Avrumel close to him. “One day, when I have more time, I will tell you some riddles. Your grandfather informs me you are going to our day camp. What do you do in the day camp?”

  “I play.”

  “What do you play?”

  “Games.”

  “What games?”

  “Running games. Jumping games. Baseball.”

  “You like baseball?”

  “Yes. I like to hit the ball.”

  “Very nice. And what else do you do?”

  “We study. We listen to stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Stories about the Patriarchs. Stories about Rebbes. Stories about the Messiah.”

  “What stories do you hear about Rebbes?”

  “The story about the Rebbe who couldn’t sleep if there was money in his pockets and he always gave the money to the poor every night before going to bed. And the story of the Rebbe who wouldn’t talk for twenty years. And the story of the Rebbe who loved orphans, and when he died, he was buried with music at his funeral.”

  The Rebbe glances at my father, who is behind Avrumel. Their eyes lock briefly. Then he turns again to Avrumel. “Do you have a favorite story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is it?”

  “It’s about an artist named Hersheleh Kutin.”

  “Yes? Tell us.”

  “Hersheleh Kutin was a great artist. He did paintings for rich people. But he didn’t live like a rich person. People didn’t like him because he wouldn’t give money to charity. Some people hated him. When he died, no one cried for him. But the week he died, the poor people of the town went to the butcher and the baker for their food for Shabbos—and they were very surprised. For years the butcher and the baker were giving the poor people meat and bread for free. Now they suddenly stopped. Because Hersheleh Kutin, the artist, was paying for it secretly, and now he was dead. And the people were sorry they had said bad things about him. My papa told me the story.”

  The Rebbe gazes intently at Avrumel. My father runs his hand over his beard and is very still.

  “What class will you go to after the summer?” the Rebbe asks after a moment.

  “I will begin first grade, God willing,” says Avrumel proudly.

  The Rebbe nods slowly. He glances at my father, then looks again at Avrumel. “You like it here with us in Brooklyn?”

  “Yes, I like it. But I won’t like it when it gets cold and it snows. We don’t have snow in Fra
nce where we live. Cold and snow are very bad for Rocheleh.”

  “Where I grew up in Russia, we had snow nine months of the year,” the Rebbe says. It is very rare for the Rebbe to talk of his childhood in Russia. My father stirs slightly and runs his fingers through his beard.

  “My mama says she doesn’t like snow because it reminds her of the winters in Paris during the big war when she had to stay locked up in an apartment with her Cousin Max.”

  The Rebbe gazes a long time at Avrumel, nodding, his dark hat moving slowly up and down.

  “I think I will tell you a riddle,” says the Rebbe. “I just reminded myself of one, and I think I have a little time. Would you like to hear a riddle?”

  “Yes,” says Avrumel eagerly.

  “An old Jew was once walking along a road to a city, when the road suddenly divided and went in two different directions. There was a little boy standing at the side of the road, and the old Jew asked him which road he should take. The boy said, ‘This road is very short but also very long. The other is very long but also very short.’ And then the little boy ran off, leaving the old Jew all alone. What do you think the boy meant, and which road should the old Jew take to the city?”

  There is a brief silence.

  “The long road that is short,” Avrumel says.

  Another silence follows. The Rebbe and my father are both looking at Avrumel. “Tell me why,” the Rebbe asks.

  “Because the short road that is long can lead him to a river or a mountain, and the man may not be able to cross even though the road is short. But the long road will bring him to the city even though it is long. And because of that, it is really short. My papa once told me that a long way that is sure is better than a short way that is not.”

  Now I gaze at them: the Rebbe, my father, my son. The Rebbe seated at his desk, Avrumel standing beside him, my father behind Avrumel. They form a tableau of arrested time. I have them before my eyes. I have drawn them on the page in my pad.