The Gift of Asher Lev

  “I think of that often these days. Because soon you will be my future.”

  “Enough.”

  “Oh, do not think it was all done out of the goodness of my heart, Asher Lev. Artists are not kind. Artists are selfish and calculating. If you had only a talent for drawing, it would have ended quickly. But you possessed the capacity for rage. Even the Rebbe could not see the anger in you. I saw those demons. They were the source for your art. I saw that right away, during the first weeks we were together. I gave you years of my life because I saw in you my future.”

  “You are talking too much,” Tanya said to him, raising her eyes from her book. “You should rest.”

  He said something to her in Russian, and she shook her head.

  “She wants me to rest,” he said to me in his hoarse, throaty voice. “What for? I have already had more time alive than most people who have ever lived. I will talk with my student, who is my future.”

  Tanya responded to him in Russian, and he laughed and coughed and wrapped the Indian blanket tighter around himself. He was so gaunt, there was so little of him inside the blanket, that the folds and ridges of wool seemed to be wrapped around bones and air. I sat in a short-sleeved sport shirt and khaki pants and sandals and my fisherman’s cap. He turned to me. “You know what she said? ‘It is your funeral.’ How right she is, my Tanya! Will you say a prayer for me, Asher? I do not believe in God, you know. But a prayer cannot hurt. Oh, yes, he is a clever man, the Rebbe.”

  Another time he asked me, “Do you ever go back there? To Brooklyn?”

  I shook my head. I had not told him about that phone call.

  “Not at all?”

  “I went back once.”

  “It is all over between you and Brooklyn?”

  I said nothing.

  He nodded soberly. “You do not answer. That is called ambivalence. I am glad you save it for Brooklyn and do not put it into your art. Ambivalence in art is like piss in coffee.”

  “Kahn,” Tanya said, looking up from her book. “Old age should not become an excuse for vulgarity.”

  He ignored her. “They will not let you alone, you know. Wait. A time will come and you will need them or they will need you. They will make demands. When they need you, they will call you. What will you do then, Asher Lev?”

  “It will depend upon what they want.”

  “You think so? My father, you know, was a Ladover, a follower of the Rebbe’s father. I remember my father singing and dancing in our little synagogue in Kiev, frightened of the Communist bastards all around us. Me, I believed in nothing except my art. Still, when they called on me—” He broke off and stared into the late-afternoon sunlight.

  “When was that?”

  “Long ago.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I took you on as my student, Asher Lev.” He turned his eyes upon me. A wan smile played over his dry lips. “It is difficult to say no to them. They touch something deep, very deep. They deal in eternity, the roots of the soul.”

  “They are charlatans,” Tanya said. “They take advantage of one’s natural feelings of self-doubt and guilt. You will excuse me, Asher. I do not number you among them.”

  “Our Asher is among them and not among them. Is that not right, Asher?”

  I was quiet.

  “Listen to his silence, Tanya. He does not answer. The silence is a mark of his ambivalence. Look at him. Ambivalence covers him like a mist. Oh, they will call on you one day, Asher Lev. One does not require an overabundance of wisdom to foresee that. I know the Rebbe from our days together in Paris. Yes, yes, sooner or later demands will be made.”

  Devorah asked me once, on our way back from one of our evening visits, “Why do you see him so often? Most of the time when you’re with him he sleeps.”

  “He’s my teacher,” I said.

  “But you rarely talk now.”

  “I don’t need words to talk with him.”

  “Was he really so close to Picasso and the others?” Earlier Jacob Kahn had talked ramblingly of the Bateau Lavoir days.

  “He was in some ways Picasso’s equal and in other ways his student. What Picasso was to painting, Jacob Kahn was to sculpture.”

  “What does he mean when he says you are his future?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was silent. We walked on down the hill and past the sculpture and onto the main road. She took my arm. “We won’t talk about it, my husband. Some burdens are best borne in silence.”

  Jacob Kahn said to me one afternoon, “Do you think about women?”

  “Often,” I said. “Devorah, Rocheleh.”

  He laughed dryly. “I have been remarkably faithful for an artist, considering what has come my way.” I saw Tanya look up from her book. “And now, the older I get, the more I think about them. I always believed it would be the other way around. How life surprises you. Have you seen the Spaniard’s 347 Suite? An astonishment. What he could no longer do with his penis he did with his pen.”

  “Kahn,” Tanya said in a mildly scolding tone. “You talk like a schoolboy or a dirty-minded old man.”

  “I was at the museum in Antibes yesterday,” I said. “How he treated his women!”

  “Flowers need to be fertilized,” he said in Yiddish, and added in French, “To create a rose, one needs shit.”

  “Kahn,” Tanya said.

  “Women were his demons, his shit.”

  “You are embarrassing our guest.”

  “Our guest is forty years old, Tanya. Our guest knows about demons. What are your demons, Asher Lev?”

  I walked over to him one afternoon and the housekeeper’s voice over the black box sounded faint and strained and as I came up the walk the gardener gave me a sidelong appealing glance. A red Peugeot was parked in the driveway near the garage, and I knew the doctor was there. Tanya sat in an armchair in the spacious living room, her large brown eyes uncharacteristically fearful, but all of her carefully composed. He had been sitting in the garden, she told me, and had suddenly lost consciousness. One of the servants had carried him upstairs to the bedroom. Tanya had called the doctor. We waited together in the living room. The walls of the house were covered with his private collection: a small museum of modern art. After a while the doctor appeared, a dapper man in his fifties, gray mustache, gray hair, kind eyes behind rimless glasses. Failure of the heart. Congestion of the lungs. Madame must make the necessary preparations. In the meantime, there was the remote possibility of temporary recovery. One could not be certain. Madame surely understands. It is not given to us to be on this earth forever. And at such an advanced age, the congestion, the weakness of the heart … Madame will call if any change is observed.

  I sat with him in the dim light of the bedroom. His hand lay lightly on mine, dry, cold, pallid. Death gazed dully from his features; its bloodless mask was upon him. Once he had hacked at marble and wood, his hammer and chisel ringing clear and loud, the chips flying, muscles and veins bulging in his arms and neck, sweat streaming down his face. Now there seemed nothing beneath the blanket. He looked unsubstantial, wraithlike.

  He opened his eyes. “Asher Lev.”

  “The doctor says you should not talk.”

  He coughed and murmured something in Russian. Tanya, seated beside me, responded softly. He said to me in Yiddish, “Say a chapter of Psalms for me, Asher. It cannot hurt.” I recited a Psalm from memory. He closed his eyes and lay breathing shallowly, stirring from time to time. Pencils of reddish light filtered into the room through slits in the shutters. He was talking in Russian, calling out. Then he lay quietly and said in French, “Do you see them sometimes, our teachers, our friends, our enemies?”

  “Sometimes,” I said in French.

  “The Spaniard I see often. We have long talks. There were many good things about him, if he was your friend…. But he was a devil.” He said in Yiddish, “You are a devil, Asher Lev. A pencil or a brush in your hand, and you are a devil. Do not let your work become too easy for yo
u. You are like the Spaniard. You need demons in order to remain a devil. These eyes see it.”

  “He no longer knows what he is saying,” Tanya Kahn said in English.

  “I am now very tired,” Jacob Kahn murmured in Yiddish. “I have earned my rest.”

  He lay still, his breath coming in short, shallow wheezes.

  Tanya called me early the following morning. Jacob Kahn had died a short while before. The doctor had just left. Arrangements had to be made. Had Jacob talked with me about arrangements?

  I spoke with her briefly and hung up the phone. Devorah was awake in her bed, her face pale. She was in her seventh month of pregnancy with Avrumel. I said in Hebrew the verse from the Book of Job, recited when one learns of a death. “‘The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.’ “And I wept.

  The authorities had made an exception and had granted permission for Jacob Kahn to be buried on his own property: the only cemetery in Saint-Paul was Christian; the Jewish cemetery in Nice was too far away. Picasso lay buried on his own property. And, after all, this was Jacob Kahn. The windows of great French cathedrals shimmered with his luminous colors and forms. His sculptures adorned public places in a dozen European cities.

  It was a large funeral. The minister of culture flew down from Paris. The mayor of Nice was there, along with the mayors of Saint-Paul and Vence. Jacob and Tanya Kahn had no living children. Four distant relatives were present, none of whom I had ever met before. There were many painters, sculptors, writers, and people from the village. I heard French, English, Russian, Italian, Spanish, German. There were curators, dealers, printmakers, radio reporters, television crews, journalists. Chairs were set up on the terrace. The brief service was conducted by the young rabbi from the small Ladover synagogue in Nice. I delivered the eulogy, and I do not remember what I said, though I remember having to stop a few times to take deep breaths. I was one of the six pallbearers who brought the coffin to the knoll. It felt strangely light, as if the body had already begun its dissolution. It was a hot morning, hazy with a tentative sun. A sirocco blew in from the sea, and I could hear it in the cypress. Can you hear it, maître? The wind in the tall climbing tree. My voice said, “‘You who dwell in the shelter of the Most High …’ “I stood between Tanya and the young rabbi and gazed into the open grave, the raw earth gaping, the coffin lowered, the people hushed. “‘I will be with him in distress; I will rescue him and make him honored; I will let him live to ripe old age, and show him My salvation.’ “I shoveled earth onto the coffin and heard it strike with loud hollow sounds. All the inside of me felt raw, empty, a numbing ache. I turned away.

  Tanya lived alone in that huge house. Everywhere were his sculptures and paintings. I saw her often. She lived in her books and memories. “I am the widow of a great man. There are not many of us around, you know. We are a special breed. I miss him terribly, though I would not want him to remain alive as he was in his final months. You must not stop your visits, Asher. The servants have been instructed to let you in whether I am home or not. Do not look so sad. Our Jacob Kahn lived a long and worthwhile life. What more can this world give us?”

  I visited frequently. I would join her in the garden. Sometimes Devorah and the children came with me. Once we brought Avrumel over alone—Rocheleh was in school—and Tanya let him go into Jacob Kahn’s studio. He was, I think, about two years old. Surprisingly, the dusky air of the studio was still tinged with the cold smell of chipped stone. Avrumel stood amid the blocks of raw marble, the sculpted figures, the huge paintings, the tools and worktables and clutter, his little mouth and eyes rounded with awe.

  Jacob Kahn bequeathed his estate to Tanya. He left me a small bronze sculpture of the two of us dancing together with a Torah scroll. He had made it when I was his student. He came to see me once during the festival of Simchas Torah, and we danced together among the tumultuous crowds in the street outside the Ladover synagogue. I put the sculpture on a pedestal in our living room, beneath the picture of the Rebbe.

  I continued to visit. I would stand at the grave and recite chapters from the Book of Psalms. I spoke often with Tanya. This past spring, a few weeks after my Paris show, she called and asked me to come over. I climbed the hill and rang the bell and spoke into the black box.

  We sat in the large light-filled living room, surrounded by Jacob Kahn’s sculptures and paintings. He seemed to hover in the air. I felt his presence and imagined his eyes, his grizzled features, his walrus mustache. I heard his voice.

  “How do you feel, Asher?” Tanya asked gently.

  “I can’t remember when I’ve felt worse, though I’m sure I have.”

  “How is Devorah?”

  “She worries about me.”

  “And the children?”

  “I thank the Almighty, they are well.”

  “I have read all the newspapers and journals.”

  I said nothing.

  “What will you do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I recall Jacob Kahn saying often that one should never take too seriously one’s critics. Critics are among those an artist must teach.”

  “It’s possible that I have nothing more to say.”

  “Asher Lev, that is nonsense.”

  “If an artist has nothing more to say, he should quit. Good critics are almost always cruel, but they are rarely stupid. And those who write about my work are among the best.”

  “Kahn once said to me that an artist does not create art for the critics but for himself.” She had taken to quoting her husband, a tendency, I had read somewhere, of the widows of great men. “For whom do you create, Asher?”

  “It’s not a bad idea to listen to the good critics.”

  “You have been severely hurt, Asher. That is all the more reason for you to continue.”

  I was quiet.

  He seemed everywhere in that spacious room, filling its corners, radiant among the dancing motes in the shafts of light coming through the large windows. Outside was the garden and the terrace and the lawn with some of his large sculptures, and beyond was the knoll and the lone cypress and the grave.

  Tanya Kahn leaned toward me. “Listen to me, Asher. After we fled Paris and the Germans melted down all the sculptures in his studio, he was in despair. He could not work. It was a darkness that drained from him every drop of his energy. You used to see him that way, but only on occasion. When we came to America he was that way for nearly a year. He would say to me again and again, ‘The salt has gone out of the soup. Stone is no longer stone. Blue is no longer blue. Red is no longer red. Yellow is no longer yellow. It is all the color of an open grave.’ Then he went to see your Rebbe. And he began to work again.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What did the Rebbe tell him?”

  “I have no idea. I asked him once, and he would not tell me. I never asked him again. Can I bring you a cup of coffee or tea, Asher? It is April, but it is still quite chilly. It is true, this is a darkness that can be conquered. It is inconceivable to me that Asher Lev will be defeated by his critics, great as they may be.”

  Two days later, my mother called to tell me Uncle Yitzchok was dead.

  Now I stand on the knoll before the grave of Jacob Kahn, the cypress tall against the blue morning sky and the wind warm on my face. It is the only sense left me, I hear him say. There are colors in the wind, Asher Lev. Find your demons again and return to your work. Colors wait for you in the wind. Things were too comfortable for you. An artist needs a broken world in order to have pieces to shape into art. Isn’t that right, Asher Lev? Comfort is death to art. Asher Lev, artist. Asher Lev, troubler. Asher Lev, my future. His voice weaves through the wind, and I add to it the words of the psalmist. “‘Protect me, O God, for I seek refuge in You. I say to the Lord, You are my benefactor; there is no one above You….’ “The wind is red and black in the trembling cypress.

  I walk back down the steep road past the t
urnoff to the Fondation Maeght and then to the towering modernist sculpture at the juncture with the main road. Cars are parked all up and down the road, and the road is crowded with tourists. A green-and-white Mercedes tour bus goes by in a cloud of diesel fumes; curious faces peer at me through tinted windows. Near Max’s house a dog comes loping out of some roadside shrubbery; large and black and sleek, it sniffs at my heels and follows me for a while, then turns and ambles off in the direction of the village.

  Passing the gate to Max’s house, I see Jameel, the Arab gardener, working inside on the fruit trees, and Max’s cream-colored Peugeot under the green plastic awning alongside his studio. I catch brilliant glimpses of the pool through the shrubbery and the trees: a still mirror of water reflecting the warm blue of the sky. How they love that pool, Avrumel and Rocheleh! Avrumel in the pool, his white skin flashing, his red hair catching the sunlight. His skin needed frequent applications of sunscreen lotion; he burned easily. Rocheleh was good in the water, sure strokes of her thin arms, smooth kicking of the pale legs, her long light-brown hair trailing after her like some living creature. The water was fine exercise for her, but she was not able to swim quickly for too long; her breathing would become labored. The water on their faces and dripping from their hair and swimsuits, making little puddles where they sat in the sunlight beside the pool. And Devorah, wearing a light summer dress, sometimes nearby under one of Max’s shade umbrellas. She never went into the pool unless she was entirely by herself or with me.

  Through the front gate I see Jameel moving among the lemon trees. Max is probably inside the studio now, working. Easels and canvases lined up like soldiers, Max naked to the waist as he moves among them, laying on colors. He is really a fine painter; never seems to have much difficulty getting started, locating and entering his precise arena of creativity. His colors are lush, sensuous; he deserves his success.

  I walk on a few feet and turn left into the side road that branches off from the highway. The back of Max’s property is directly across the side road from our front gate. I let myself in and walk slowly in the hot sunlight along the gravel path to the house. Inside, I open windows and shutters and let air and sunlight invade the mustiness. I wander through the rooms. Here Devorah sat nursing Avrumel. Here Rocheleh played with her puzzles. Here I conceived the idea for a certain painting. Here my father and I sat and talked. Here John Dorman told me about his and his wife’s many years with the Communist Party in New York. Here Avrumel got too close to the back of the electrician and, as the electrician turned to move away from the floor socket, his screw-driver struck Avrumel’s eye. The blood and the pain. He nearly lost the eye.