The Gift of Asher Lev

  He did not appear in the synagogue. After the Evening Service I walked back alone in the darkness beneath a waning moon that sparkled like shards of glass on the black surface of the lake. A man came toward me on the path, bearded, in his twenties. He said, “Ah, the air is good here,” and wished me a good week. Another stood on the path, gazing up at the sky, and, as I went slowly past him, murmured, “‘The heavens tell of the glory of God.’”

  I stopped near him a moment in the darkness beneath the arc of stars and stood looking up at the sky. I imagined my father striding among the stars, filling the Little Dipper. Images from childhood. I walked back to the cottage.

  Devorah was in the kitchen with my mother. Wasn’t Avrumel with me? I said he hadn’t been in the synagogue, I thought he would be home by now. Devorah said he wasn’t home. I said he might be walking along the lake and went out to find him.

  The lake was silent and dark. Yellow lights shone in the homes along the opposite shore. Lake and woods and star-filled sky formed a single continuous darkness. I could not make out anyone along the shore. Passing the rear of the Rebbe’s cottage, I heard voices and looked at the screened-in deck and saw the Rebbe in the recliner, wearing a dark suit and tie and an ordinary dark hat. In the wicker chair beside him sat Avrumel. A tall dark-bearded man stood on the top step of the wooden stairway that led from the deck to the beach, his back to the screen door.

  Avrumel and the Rebbe were talking in French. I could not make out clearly what they were saying.

  The man on the stairs saw me and stood very still as I approached.

  “I am Asher Lev, the boy’s father.”

  The voices on the deck were suddenly silent.

  “I know who you are,” the man on the stoop said.

  “Papa?” I heard Avrumel say. Then, “That is my papa!”

  The Rebbe said in Yiddish, “Come inside.”

  The dark-bearded man opened the screen door, and I went up the stairs and onto the deck. The Rebbe beckoned to me. The yellow lights of an overhead fixture shone dimly on his dark clothes and gave his aged face a pale luminosity.

  “A good week to you, Asher Lev.”

  “A good week, Rebbe.”

  “I came to say good Shabbos to the Rebbe, Papa,” Avrumel said. “You’ve been here all this time?”

  “The child said to me his father was Asher Lev,” the Rebbe said, “and I asked him to come inside. He is a bright child.”

  “My grandfather told me I could come with him to his office and sometimes I might see the Rebbe,” Avrumel said.

  “God heard your grandfather’s words and hurried to make them come true,” said the Rebbe. “How are you, Asher?”

  “I am well, thank God.”

  “How was your journey? You did what you had to do?”

  “Yes, Rebbe.”

  “You were with your father in Paris.” It was a statement, not a question. My father called the Rebbe daily from wherever he was. The Rebbe knew every detail of my father’s work.

  “Yes, Rebbe.”

  “And in Saint-Paul, everything was in order?”

  “Yes.”

  “The matter of the art collection has become unpleasant. You know of it?”

  “About my cousin and the lawsuit? Yes. I’m told there isn’t anything he can really do.”

  “He has made of this a great desecration of the Name of God. The Other Side has taken hold of him.”

  Near the door, the dark-bearded man stirred and was still.

  The Rebbe brushed his hand across Avrumel’s cheek. “The child tells me that in Saint-Paul there are two people he loves. Who are these people?”

  “Devorah’s cousin, Max Lobe, who is an artist. And an elderly American writer named John Dorman.”

  “The child also tells me that he loves to sit and watch his father paint, but that his father does not paint any more.”

  “My papa draws a lot,” Avrumel said in his high, eager voice.

  “If I remember correctly, we have talked of this before,” the Rebbe said. “Jacob Kahn had such troubles. All have such troubles, such indecisions and waverings. Even, sometimes, a Rebbe.”

  The man near the door took a small step toward us, then, at a gesture from the Rebbe, stepped back and was still.

  “Asher,” the Rebbe said. “Listen to me carefully. Choices must be made very soon. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Rebbe.”

  He sighed and sat back in the recliner. I made out his eyes peering at me intently from the shadow cast by the brim of his hat. He beckoned me closer to him and I leaned forward and saw the old wrinkled brittleness of his flesh and thought of him when I was a child and felt my love for him. He was talking into my ear, almost whispering. I felt his breath moving against me, puffs of warm odorless air. “Asher Lev, listen to me. All the future of the Ladover depends upon three. When two of the three are gone, the third will save us. This you now understand with perfect clarity. I wish you a good week, and I give you and your son my blessing.”

  He closed his eyes and was still. The dark-bearded man approached and motioned us to leave.

  I went with Avrumel down the stairs and along the rim of the lake toward the cottage.

  “Is the Rebbe sick?” Avrumel asked.

  “The Rebbe is well,” I said. “But he is old.”

  “Will the Rebbe die soon?”

  “With the help of God, the Rebbe will live many, many more years. What did you and the Rebbe talk about?”

  “We talked about Rocheleh and you and Mama and Shimshon and what I learned in the yeshiva. And about baseball.”

  “Baseball?”

  “The Rebbe knows about baseball.” I laughed softly in the starlit darkness.

  “I told the Rebbe about Uncle Max’s pool and about the trips we take to Nice and to the mountains and how good the air is for Rocheleh and how nice the goyim are to us.”

  “What did the Rebbe say?”

  “Mostly the Rebbe listened.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He said I was smart and he saw something in me.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. He used a word I don’t remember.”

  We walked on together. The air was cool, sweet-smelling, redolent of honeysuckle. I heard the lake lapping softly against the rowboats tied to the dock.

  Later that night, when Devorah and I were alone in our room, I said, “What did you think of the drawings?”

  “I do not understand them. You have never made drawings like these before.”

  “Is there anything about them you like?”

  “I want to look at them again.”

  “Dev, did you see the Rebbe alone while I was away?” She looked surprised. “The Rebbe asked to see me, yes. He wanted to know where Avrumel would go to school next year.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That, with God’s help, he will go to the yeshiva in Nice.”

  “What did the Rebbe say?”

  “He gave me a blessing. We did not talk long. Asher, I am very tired.”

  “Let’s go to sleep,” I said.

  There was a fierce rainstorm during the night. Devorah woke and lay frightened in her bed. Flashes of lightning ripped through the sky. I went into Avrumel’s room. He was asleep, his arm around Shimshon. My mother came into the hallway, bareheaded and wearing her robe. Was Avrumel all right? I told her he was asleep and she returned to her room. From my bed the mountains were like bloated creatures rising toward the sky in the blue-white lightning. The rain fell upon the house and the lake with a fierce waterfall sound. I slept and woke to a dawn of sunlight and sparkling air. There were puddles of rain on the beach and silvery beads on the leaves in the woods. I dressed and went to the synagogue for the Morning Service.

  Left I took Avrumel and Devorah and my mother out on the lake in a rowboat. I showed Avrumel how to work one of the oars, but it was too much for him; he wearied of it quickly. I rowed slowly along the lake, remembering the ro
wing in Prospect Park as a child, my mother at the oars and me drawing. Young, so young. And white birds in the water. Had there ever really been such an Edenic time in our lives? I gave the oars to Devorah, and she rowed us awhile. Avrumel sat in the bow with Shimshon, trailing his hand in the water. My mother had her face to the sun, her eyes closed. Small birds skimmed the surface of the water and rose in soaring flocks. Many Ladover were swimming in the section of the lake where a wooden partition extended from the bathhouse on the beach deep into the water, separating men from women. Others were in boats on the lake; they hailed us as we went by. Devorah tired and I took the oars and rowed deep into the lake and there were little waves now and I could hear them against the gunwales. Rowing back, I looked over my shoulder from time to time to get my bearings, and once I saw the Rebbe standing behind the screen of the rear deck of his cottage, gazing out across the water, and when I looked again he was gone. In the afternoon we drove back to the city.

  The following Wednesday, my father returned from Israel and immediately closeted himself with his staff. I was with him in the synagogue Thursday morning and at home during supper, which he ate quickly: there was a meeting he had to attend. The next Monday he flew down to Washington and was gone two days. Then he was taken by car to Massachusetts to sec the Rebbe. He returned the next day.

  I felt weary watching him. He seemed indefatigable. During my walks with him to and from the synagogue, and as we all sat around the table for his hurried meals, he told us something of his work in Israel: the splinterings and maneuverings of the religious parties; the campaigns of the secular parties; the real possibility that the party of the Ladover—in Israel the Rebbe’s followers numbered in the many thousands—would win scats in the Knesset and the political power that came with that. He seemed ecstatic at the prospect of such power, the influence it would give the Ladover as the secularists devised strategies to form a coalition government, the bargaining and agreements that would inevitably follow with the secular parties that needed the Ladover votes, the ability the Ladover would then possess to push through the Rebbe’s policies: no return of the conquered territories; an emended Law of Return to exclude from automatic citizenship those Jews converted to Judaism by non-Orthodox rabbis; increased government funding for religious education. Much work needed to be done. He would be returning to Israel soon. Victory was a distinct possibility. The Rebbe and his followers would emerge triumphant.

  My father was seventy years old, and he talked with the ease and lightness of someone half his age about his journeys and his work, while my mother sat quietly, listening to him. I saw the same look in her eyes I had seen all the years of my growing up: the window-watching, night-haunting dread. But he saw only his work, his dream, the giving of himself to the Rebbe and the Master of the Universe. Devorah sat and listened and watched, and for the first time began to understand, I thought, what lay behind the crucifixion paintings.

  On the Sunday at the end of the first week of August, we all rode with my father to Kennedy Airport in a borrowed station wagon driven by Baruch Levinson. We waited in the King David Lounge of the El Al terminal for his flight to be called. The lounge was crowded, and I saw people glancing at me and my parents and whispering to one another. Devorah noticed that, too. Avrumel sat on my father’s lap, holding the Shimshon doll by a tattered arm.

  My father said to me, “The Rebbe told me that he and you and Avrumel had a long talk.”

  “The long talk was mostly with Avrumel,” I said.

  “The Rebbe told me he likes baseball,” Avrumel said.

  Devorah and my mother laughed. My father looked as if he wanted to ask Avrumel, “What else did the Rebbe tell you?” But that would have been somewhat unseemly in public and in front of me and Devorah—there was no telling what Avrumel might come out with—and my father chuckled and remained silent.

  A few minutes later, his flight was called.

  “Travel in good health and return in good health,” my mother said to him.

  Avrumel, his Mets baseball cap awry, his Shimshon doll momentarily abandoned on the leather armchair, clung to my father with both his arms and kissed him. “The Rebbe told me he sees greatness in you,” my father said to Avrumel, and kissed him in return.

  I shook his hand. How strong his fingers were! Like the sculptor’s grip of Jacob Kahn years ago. Devorah wished him a safe journey. He went out the door of the lounge, tall and broad-shouldered, carrying his attaché case and limping slightly, towering above most of the others there. We watched him go, all the years of separations trailing behind him like some dark and stubborn cloud.

  The drive back home was through Sunday-night summer traffic. For a while we crawled along the Grand Central Parkway and the Interboro Parkway. Then Baruch Levinson left the Interboro and drove along rutted roads through garbage-littered streets and destroyed neighborhoods. Avrumel fell asleep on my mother’s lap. I sat in the front seat, looking at the rancid streets and thinking of the sunlight on the green valley and Max Lobe and John Dorman and our closed home in Saint-Paul.

  My father remained in Israel until close to the end of August. He did not write; but every day he phoned his office and someone from the office would call us and ask to speak with my mother. If my mother was not home, the man on the phone would call back. Early every Friday morning my father would call and talk with my mother. He was well. The work was progressing. How was Avrumel? How was Rocheleh? How were Devorah and Asher? Always in that order. The Arab uprising? God would help. How was the weather in Israel? Hot, very hot. And in Brooklyn? The same. Very hot.

  My mother would put down the phone after talking with my father and sit for a moment, her eyes closed, wispy ghosts of past nightmares clinging to her like visible mist. Afterward she and Devorah would go off somewhere and talk.

  I grew up in New York, sometimes suffering the heat of its summers, but I do not remember anything like the heat of that summer, the summer of 1988. Humid heat and no rain, week after week: the asphalt on the streets soft with it; the air dense and insect-ridden with it; my skin wet with it; Devorah’s face flushed with it; the house sultry with it. There was no air-conditioning in my parents’ home, and the window fans stirred futilely the swampy air. I wandered through the city in a daze, often losing track of time. I met with Douglas Schaeffer about my show of drawings, which he had scheduled for the fall; I met with lawyers about the attempts of my Cousin Yonkel to have me removed or enjoined as trustee of his father’s art collection.

  I went to museums and galleries. I saw old artist friends in their Greenwich Village lofts; rode the subway trains; breathed the fetid tunnel air that blew through the stations; went for walks along Brooklyn Parkway, watching men at work over the hot, torn roadbed and thinking often of Saint-Paul, and the terrace of the café in the shadows of the trees, and the ramparts of the village wall, and the graves of Jacob Kahn and Marc Chagall, and Max Lobe painting his lined-up canvases, and John Dorman alone in his house with his memories and whiskey bottles, and the red-tiled Cubist houses set among the green fields and cypresses of the long valley and climbing to the hills and the sea.

  Early every weekday morning Avrumel went off to his day camp, and late every afternoon he came home. When I had been away in France, Devorah would go with him mornings and, afternoons, bring him home. After my father left, I took to walking Avrumel to the bus pickup station in front of the yeshiva, and then to meeting him there in the afternoon. We would leave a few minutes before eight, which was soon after I returned from the Morning Service in the synagogue. He carried with him only a little bag with a light sweater and his bathing suit and towel. He wore tan-colored shorts, a Ladover day camp T-shirt, sneakers over socks, and his Mets baseball cap. Shimshon he always left in his room on his bed. Reclining on the pillow, the torn and tattered doll looked oddly enough as if it were in command of that room, a sort of drowsing royal personage waiting to be awakened and served. At odd moments of the day, if I was home, I would poke my head into the room to see
if it had somehow moved from its place on the bed, if it needed something, if it had a request. This strange behavior, I told myself, gave me something to do, broke up long empty stretches of time, was the result of the heat, came about because I was feeling myself confined, entombed. One day, alone in the house, I heard myself talking to the doll. “How would you do it? A half year here, a half year there? A year at a time? And what of the loneliness?” I felt the blood in my head and a loud buzzing in my ears. Flies seemed to be circling before my eyes. I fled from the room.

  Later, sitting on the terrace, I made a drawing of the doll. Then I made a drawing of the Spaniard holding the doll. I liked neither drawing and destroyed them both. I went out for a walk and watched the construction along the parkway.

  Douglas Schaeffer said to me, during one of my visits to the gallery, “You look awful, dear boy. What good are you going to be to anyone if you become ill? Why don’t you go off to the country for a while? This is a simply terrible summer to be in the city.”

  I told him Avrumel was in a day camp, my father was in Israel, my mother was in a perpetual state of panic over his safety and wanted to be near JFK Airport in case, God forbid, anything happened to him and she needed to get over there fast, and Devorah was busy giving little talks to women’s groups all over the city about the Ladover movement’s attitude toward feminism.

  “But what does all that have to do with you, dear boy? I am talking about you. Why don’t you get away?”

  I shrugged. Where would I go? Off alone to the cottage in Massachusetts? And do what? Talk to whom? Eat where?

  He shook his head sadly, touched his bow tie, smoothed his hair, and returned to the subject of my show. After his initial comments about the drawings—the look that flooded his eyes when he first saw them, unusual for him: he had his mother’s laconic self-control and was sparse with praise; it was simply assumed by him, as it had been by his mother, that the artists of the Schaeffer Gallery were among the finest working today—after his first brief comments, we talked only business: catalogue, invitations, critics, curators, collectors, prices, advertising, taxes, hanging days: the clanking apparatus of the art world. I chose one of the drawings and told him we would show it but not sell it; I wanted it to go to the widow of Lucien Lacamp. He made a note of this in his book.