The Gift of Asher Lev

  After the Closing Service the Rebbe sounded the shofar, a single long clarion blast, and Yom Kippur was over.

  The day before, in the early afternoon, I had telephoned Aunt Leah, Cousin Nahum, and Cousin Yonkel and asked them to forgive me for whatever pain I had inflicted on them during the year. Aunt Leah and Cousin Nahum said simply, “I forgive you.” Cousin Yonkel said he would forgive me, but only because Jewish law required it, and he hung up. In the synagogue, thin, dry, and quivering with rage, he looked at me out of cold slitted eyes, then turned his back. Cousin Nahum shook his head and shrugged and rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

  On the way back from the synagogue after the Yom Kippur Closing Service, Avrumel said to me, “The Rebbe really knows how to blow shofar. Will you teach me to blow shofar, Papa?”

  I told him I was not good at it.

  “Your grandfather blows shofar very well,” my mother said.

  “He will be happy to teach you.”

  “Grandfather?” Avrumel said. “Will you?”

  “It will be my joy,” my father said. He and Avrumel walked on ahead together through the night streets.

  On the terrace the next morning, I did a watercolor of the Rebbe sounding the shofar. I did it mostly in white and showed it to everyone during supper that evening.

  “I like it better than your drawings,” my mother said. “Your drawings I don’t understand.”

  “Why did you make the Rebbe’s eyes white?” Avrumel asked. “The Rebbe’s eyes aren’t white.”

  “Papa sees them as white,” Rocheleh said. “He feels them as white. When will you understand that?”

  “What else is white in the picture?” I asked Avrumel.

  “The Rebbe’s tallis,” Rocheleh said.

  “Your name is Avrumel?” I asked.

  “The Rebbe’s beard,” Avrumel said. “The siddur in front of the Rebbe. The air all around the Rebbe. The sun coming through the windows.”

  “And who is in all these?”

  He thought for a moment. “The Master of the Universe?”

  Devorah and Rocheleh were looking at Avrumel. My parents were looking at me.

  “You like the picture?” I said to Avrumel.

  “Ah, yes, Papa!”

  “It’s yours.”

  “Papa!” He looked radiant.

  “For your collection.”

  He was suddenly in my lap, hugging and kissing me. Then he went out of the kitchen, taking the watercolor with him.

  “A nice gift,” my father said, smiling.

  Later, I looked into Avrumel’s room. He sat at his desk, doing homework, his red hair covered by his dark velvet skullcap. The Shimshon doll was on his bed. Someone, probably Devorah, had carefully tacked the drawing to the corkboard over his desk, piercing only the farthest edges of the corners, which would easily be covered later by the frame. I looked at Avrumel and at my water-color of the Rebbe. He was not aware of me standing in the doorway, watching him.

  In our room that night Devorah said to me, “It is a very beautiful watercolor you gave Avrumel.”

  I stared at the picture of the Rebbe on the wall over the desk and said nothing.

  “Are you sure we cannot stay the year, Asher?”

  “I want to go home, Dev. This isn’t home.”

  “Your parents, the children.”

  “I’ve already got the plane tickets. The Sunday after Simchas Torah.”

  She nodded sadly. “The children are happy in the yeshiva here.”

  “They’ll be happy in the yeshiva in Nice.”

  “One year, Asher. Only one year.”

  “It’s not one year, Dev. Ten days became five months. It’s not only one year.”

  Her eyes widened. “Asher …”

  “We’re all going home after Simchas Torah. Two and a half more weeks, and home.”

  She sighed. “You are a strange and stubborn man sometimes, my husband. I do not like you too much when you become this way. It is as if ice enters your soul.”

  “I’m afraid of this place, Dev.”

  “Afraid of your own parents’ home?”

  “This place will consume me.”

  “I do not understand—”

  “I need it as a place to return to, but not to live in.”

  “Asher …”

  “We’re going home, Dev.”

  She sighed and shook her head.

  The next day I went over to the art supply store and bought a small case of oil paints, some brushes, a bottle of turpenoid, and a pad of canvas paper. On the terrace, using the card table as an easel of sorts, I began to sketch from memory, with washes of oil diluted in turpenoid, some of the canvases in my Uncle Yitzchok’s art collection: the Cézanne, Matisse, Renoir, Bonnard. From time to time I referred to the drawings I had recently made of the canvases during my visit to the warehouse. Then I made an oil sketch of Avrumel. There was no one in the house. It took a while for the paintings to dry. I put them into my valise and did not show them to anyone.

  I was putting the card table back when the phone rang. A voice on the other end, deep and authoritative, said, “I would like to speak with Asher Lev.”

  “This is Asher Lev.”

  “Sholom aleichem. This is Rav Yaakov Reisner. I am on the Rebbe’s staff.”

  “Aleichem sholom.”

  “The Rebbe would like you to meet with him.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. At eleven o’clock.”

  “All right.”

  “Please be on time.” He hung up.

  A few minutes before eleven that night, I came out of my parents’ house and walked along the street to the home of the Rebbe. I went past the tall dark-bearded men who stood on the porch. My father took me into the Rebbe’s office and stepped out and closed the door.

  The Rebbe sat behind the desk, a small figure in a dark suit and a dark hat. He beckoned to me and indicated the chair in front of the desk. I sat down, feeling his eyes upon me.

  “You are well?” he asked softly.

  “I thank God.”

  “And your family?”

  “Thank God, all are well.”

  “Your exhibition of new work is opening soon, I am told.”

  “Only of drawings, yes.”

  “I wish you much success.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are returning to France?”

  “Yes, Rebbe.”

  “To work?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need not return.”

  “I feel I must, Rebbe.”

  “An exile need not last forever, Asher Lev.”

  “Wherever I live, it is exile. Even here. But I cannot live here.”

  “Your family will return with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are certain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well.” He sat very still behind the desk. There was a pause. He stirred faintly. “There is never an end to our work. It is not given to us to complete it. Who completes his work? That is the way of the world, Asher. Only the Master of the Universe completed His work. And it is said that even the Master of the Universe needs humankind in order truly to complete the Creation. Without man, what is God? And without God, what is man? Everyone needs the help of someone to complete the work of Creation that is never truly completed. Everyone. An artist, a Rebbe, everyone.”

  He sat gazing at me from behind the desk. The house was silent. I felt his eyes upon me; they seemed without pupils, burning, white. I closed my eyes a moment and when I opened them he was no longer there, the Spaniard was there in the Rebbe’s chair, staring at me out of eyes that smoldered like torches, and then the Rebbe was there and then again the Spaniard, like two transparencies vying for the same space on a white screen. I heard the Rebbe talking to me and closed my eyes and opened them and saw him clearly.

  “You will be with us for Simchas Torah?” he asked. “With God’s help, yes.”

  “And Avrumel?”

  ?
??He will be with me, God willing.”

  “Good,” he murmured. “I give you and your family my blessing, Asher Lev.”

  I walked in the darkness beneath trees that were turning color now, leaves beginning to fall in the autumn air. Someone was walking behind me and when I turned it was only a fluttering shadow in the darkness and I knew it was the Spaniard, but when I turned again it was the shadow of the Rebbe, walking beneath the trees upon fallen leaves.

  The Rebbe was in the synagogue for the festival of Succos. More Ladover had flown in after Yom Kippur, and it seemed the walls of the synagogue would burst outward from the crush of people and I heard there were fistfights among some of the men jockeying for space and seats. My father and I had built a succah on the back terrace of my parents’ home, and the children and Devorah decorated it with dried fruit and drawings. Avrumel drew a picture of his Shimshon doll dancing with a Torah scroll, and Devorah mounted it with tacks on one of the walls. Rocheleh made half a dozen large white cardboard cutouts of Torah scrolls, which Devorah suspended with strings from the roof of the succah.

  We ate in the succah. Guests joined us for some of our dinner meals: a professor of philosophy from Columbia University; a congressman from Washington; a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project; an artist from Safed who painted castles, clouds, mystical animals, and Hebrew quotations, and whose work was selling well and on occasion even appeared on postcards and calendars made in Israel; a professor of biology from the Sorbonne; a vice-consul from the foreign ministry of Israel. In the course of a conversation around the table, the Safed artist said he had been to the gallery and had seen the show of my new drawings.

  “Absolutely I do not like them. They gave me nightmares. What do you hope to accomplish with such work?”

  “I don’t hope to accomplish anything. I just do it.”

  He said he didn’t understand what I was talking about. The conversation went on to another subject.

  Four days later, on the eve of Simchas Torah, the festival that celebrates the close of the yearly Torah-reading cycle, I went with my father and Avrumel to the synagogue. The crowd in front of the building was so thick it reminded me of the day not so long before when I had emerged from the subway station into a boiling sea of anguished Ladover Hasidim made frantic by the news of the Rebbe’s sudden illness. And I remembered, too, the crowd on the parkway nearly half a year earlier for Uncle Yitzchok’s funeral. The crowd parted for my father, and I walked behind him, carrying Avrumel.

  We entered the synagogue. All the benches and stands had been removed. The floor was bare, save for the bimah and the masses of men milling about. I caught glimpses of Cousin Yonkel and Cousin Nahum. My aunt was no doubt upstairs in the women’s section. She had said little to me since my return from France in early July and greeted me with hesitant nods the few times I had met her on the streets of the neighborhood.

  The Rebbe entered the synagogue from the door near the Ark, accompanied by the two tall dark-bearded men. A moment later, the Evening Service commenced.

  The voices of more than three thousand people rose and fell in rhythmed sound. My mother and Devorah were above us, behind wooden screens, in the women’s section. And Rocheleh. I worried it might be too congested and too airless up there for Rocheleh; she had begun wheezing and sweating during the Kol Nidre Service on the night of Yom Kippur—the pupils of her eyes tiny, her nostrils flared when breathing in, her lips pursed when breathing out—and Devorah took her from the women’s section and got her a cup of water and walked home with her and helped her through postural drainage and put her to bed. But Rocheleh would not stay away from the Simchas Torah celebration; all her school friends were there; if she felt the onset of an attack, she would go outside immediately. Rocheleh.

  Avrumel stood between me and my father, praying from a book he held in his hands and swaying slightly back and forth. He was dressed in a dark suit and wore a white shirt, a dark tie, and a dark cap. He looked like a man in miniature.

  It was warm in the synagogue, the air heating from the press of bodies. An undulating mass of dark-garbed, dark-hatted men, praying. The Ark was opened, and two men began to remove the Torah scrolls and hand them to those whose names were called out by one of the elders. The crowd stood still, waiting, a low hum of conversation vibrating the air. Behind me someone was talking about the stock market. Someone else was lamenting the fluctuations of the American dollar in European markets. I thought I heard my name mentioned, but I did not turn around. Avrumel, perched on my shoulder now, watched in fascination. He had been to Simchas Torah celebrations before, in Nice; but the crowd there was small. He was waving a small paper flag garishly decorated with amateurish drawings of Torah scrolls.

  “How goes it, Avrumel?” I asked him.

  “It goes well, Papa,” he said happily from over my head.

  The first of the circuits around the bimah began, led by my father, who had put on a prayer shawl. I heard his strong nasal voice above the murmur of the crowd, chanting the traditional prayer. “O Lord, deliver us! O Lord, let us prosper! O Lord, answer us on the day we call!”

  Someone began a Ladover melody. The crowd swelled with song. The men carrying the Torah scrolls danced and sang. I watched my father dancing with the scroll he held in his arms. His eyes were closed; his head, covered by the edge of the shawl, was raised. He danced in rapid movements, and I was astonished at his agility. The dancing went on for a long time, and then the scrolls were transferred to another group of men, and another circuit began, and then another and another. My father stood next to me now, Avrumel on my shoulders, in the front row of the tumultuous crowd around the bimah. At one point the dancers went weaving through the crowd and took the Torah scrolls out to the street and danced there awhile and then returned to the synagogue and gave the scrolls to yet another group of men. All the while, the Rebbe, garbed in a white robe, sat in his tall-backed cushioned chair inside his small enclosure, watching, clapping his hands from time to time, nodding. On either side of him stood one of the tall dark-bearded men. It was hot in the synagogue and I was sweating and singing and then someone was offering me a Torah scroll and Avrumel was lifted off my shoulders by my father and I danced with the scroll. Somewhere close by I saw Cousin Yonkel dancing with a scroll, but he would not look at me. I held the scroll as something precious to me, a living being with whose soul I was forever bound, this Sacred Scroll, this Word, this Fire of God, this Source for my own creation, this velvet-encased Fountain of All Life which I now clasped in a passionate embrace. I danced with the Torah for a long time, following the line of dancers through the steamy air of the synagogue and out into the chill tumultuous street and back into the synagogue and then reluctantly yielding the scroll to a huge dark-bearded man, who hungrily scooped it up and swept away with it in his arms. The singing and dancing grew, swelled, dance after dance; now the children doing a dance of their own, Avrumel among them; now the white-bearded elders dancing, their arms clasping each other’s shoulders, my father among them; now all the others dancing, I among them, and standing beside me, clasping my shoulder, was Cousin Nahum, and we danced and he smiled at me and I felt him squeeze my shoulder, but afterward his brother, Cousin Yonkel, came over, and they walked away together.

  The crowd milled about in a momentary pause. Then a silence fell upon the synagogue. I turned to where all were looking and saw that the Rebbe had left the enclosure. He wore a tallis over his white robe and a white skullcap, and he carried a miniature Torah scroll encased in white velvet. A large area was being cleared on the floor by a phalanx of dark-bearded men. Inside that area, a wide uneven circle, the Rebbe began a slow dance. He moved with infinite care, his head entirely concealed by the tallis, his feet making tiny steps back and forth and sideways: an uncanny mystical dance with the Torah and the Master of the Universe, while all watched in enraptured silence. Then he raised an arm, and the synagogue exploded into a Ladover chant, and feet stamped, and the Rebbe’s arm moved back and forth s
lowly over his head, the wrist arching, circling, the other arm holding firmly the small Torah. How could so old and frail a man dance like that? The floor vibrated to the thunderous stamping; the huge chandelier swayed. The Rebbe lowered his arm and there was immediate silence, and he danced very slowly across the floor in the silence and came to where my father stood, next to me, and reached out for him, and my father joined him, and they danced together gently, as if in slow motion, the Rebbe’s left arm now holding the Torah, his right arm upon my father’s shoulder. The crowd clapped its hands and beat the floor with its feet. I saw bearded faces nodding and eyes staring and mouths open, as if in some kind of anticipation, and then the Rebbe seemed to be leading my father toward the edge of the circle, toward where I stood, with Avrumel on my shoulders, and there they remained, slowly dancing in front of me and Avrumel, and I felt eyes upon me, the clapping and the stamping now deafening—and then the Rebbe raised his head very slightly and I could see his eyes in the shadows of the tallis, and I stood there looking at his eyes, deep burning white eyes in the white shadows of the tallis, and I saw my father looking at me and then at the Rebbe, and I felt all the eyes in the crowd looking at me and all the eyes of all the generations of Ladover looking at me and the voice of the mythic ancestor I had not heard in years suddenly loud in my ears, uttering sounds that were not words, and I reached up and lifted Avrumel over my head and handed him to my father—and I felt the noise in the synagogue abruptly cease, waves of silence begin from those near me and spread beyond to the walls and the ceiling as my father and the Rebbe moved away from me in a slow dance, Avrumel in my father’s arms, clinging to my father with one arm and waving his paper flag with the other, the three of them dancing away from me and suddenly the noise returning to the synagogue in a deafening surge of sound and I thought the floor would crack and the walls give way—and I stood there listening to the sounds of an infinite hope and watching my Avrumel in the arms of my father, the two of them dancing with the Rebbe and the small white-garbed scroll of the Torah. I do not know how long that dance continued, because I backed slowly away from it and through the crowd and out of the synagogue and felt suddenly the cold night air icy on the tears on my face and a hand reached out from the crowd on the street and grasped mine and it was Jacob Kahn and we walked away from the crowd and beneath the trees of the torn-up parkway, and that is all I remember about that night, that is all I remember.