The Gift of Asher Lev

  Difficult. So why does he want us to stay? Maybe it’s easier for him with us here because this is his world. Maybe it’s easier now because we’re all older, tireder, closer to the gray time before the final darkness.

  Devorah put her head into the kitchen. “Godzilla wants his father,” she said. “And I want a cup of coffee.”

  I went into Avrumel’s room. “Go to sleep,” I said, “or I will never let you pose again for a painting.”

  “Yes pose,” he said, undaunted by the tired threat. He had posed once, had recognized himself in the result, thought it magical that he could somehow be present inside and outside himself simultaneously, and had posed three times more. Twice I had painted him with his Shimshon doll. On occasion he would slip silently into my studio and sit holding the Shimshon doll on his lap, watching me work, waiting to be painted.

  I kissed him. He smelled of warmth and fresh nightclothes and a bath and soap. He clung to me a moment, his red curls against my face. Then he let me cover him. A little more than halfway through his Krias Shema, he fell asleep.

  I went back into the kitchen. Devorah and my mother were at the table. I refilled my cup and joined them.

  My mother said, “I was telling Devorah about your Uncle Yitzchok’s art collection.”

  “When did he start it?”

  “Exactly when? I’m not sure. Perhaps your father knows. I think it may have been after your New York show, the show with the—with those paintings. He said to me once that he bought one of the paintings from that show.”

  “No, he didn’t. A museum bought both crucifixions.”

  “No, not one of those. He would not buy one of those. He bought another of the paintings in the show.”

  “I don’t remember that. I’m always told who buys my paintings.”

  “Someone bought it for him. He didn’t want you to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the show caused all the … trouble.”

  “Then why did he buy a painting?”

  “He was very proud of you and also ashamed of you, both at the same time.”

  I glanced at Devorah. She was looking down at the table, circling the rim of her cup with a long, slender finger.

  “A year after he bought it, someone—I think it was his lawyer or his accountant—offered him more than twice what he had paid for it. He said he began to realize that there was more to art than meets the eye. Those were his words, Asher. He got in touch with your Aunt Leah’s family friend, the dealer in Chicago, and started to collect art.”

  We sat in silence awhile, drinking our coffee and listening to the soft rhythmic noises of the kitchen. It had begun to rain again, and we could hear it on the windows.

  “Asher, what can I do to persuade you to stay on a little longer?” my mother asked.

  I looked at Devorah. She kept circling the rim of her cup with her finger.

  “Asher,” my mother said. “For the sake of peace in the family.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said. “You really believe it will bring peace? I’ll think about it. But it won’t bring peace.”

  In the bathroom I showered and toweled myself dry and gazed at the streaky outline of my face and shoulders that I had drawn in the mirror my first night here. The steam of the shower had brought it back: ghostly lines sliced into the vapor on the surface of the glass. I put my face and shoulders into the outline and stood there with the towel around my loins and my head and beard still wet. How the Spaniard hated mirrors! He saw his dying each time he looked in one. I brushed the towel brusquely across the steamed glass surface. The outline blurred and smeared and vanished.

  When Devorah entered our room a few minutes later I told her I did not want us to change our plans; we would be returning home on the Tuesday-night flight.

  “You will hurt your parents,” she said. Suddenly she looked her full fifty years, weary, leaden.

  “We’re going home,” I said. “I’ve had my turn here.”

  Her eyes blinked nervously. “I do not understand.”

  “They’re trying to suck me back in, and then they’ll kill whatever I’ve got left.”

  She looked stunned.

  “We’re going home, Dev. We came for my uncle’s funeral, not for mine.”

  The day dawned wet and disheartening. During the Morning Service the clouds broke and a pale sun emerged. After breakfast with my uncle’s family—Cousin Yonkel going on about being unable to sleep because he kept feeling the waves of contamination from his father’s art collection—I went out of the house and walked to the end of the street and turned up the avenue toward the parkway. I passed a fruit-and-vegetable store, the produce in open crates on the sidewalk and arranged colorfully inside; a large Hebrew bookstore, its windows crowded with books and toys and pictures of the Rebbe, its interior deep and tiered with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books in English and Hebrew for adults and children, stationery items, games, toys, T-shirts with Ladover mottoes—BRING MOSHIACH NOW; SAVE A JEW AND HEAL THE WORLD; KOSHER is IN—and nearly an entire wall filled with framed color pictures of the Rebbe in a variety of poses. Farther down I passed a real-estate storefront, a cosmetics store, an art-supplies and picture-framing shop, an all-night cafeteria. The street, bare of trees, lined mostly with two-story brick houses, and thick with pedestrians and Friday-morning traffic, wore a tired look; its better days were long behind it. Beyond the small neighborhood of the Ladover, the side streets were home for urban poor and drifted off into griminess and decay.

  I turned into Brooklyn Parkway. It lay raw and exposed in the resurfacing project, manhole covers projecting above the brown-red earth, noisy construction machines impeding traffic. Boys in skullcaps and ritual fringes, girls in coats and long stockings, rushed to school. Sunlight slanted between the tall red-brick and whitestone apartment buildings and shone like a limpid orange-red wash upon the cracked cement squares of the sidewalks, the leafless trees, the dark asphalt. A boy went past me, ten or eleven years old, red hair, dangling earlocks, thin pale features, a dark velvet skullcap on his head, hurrying along, bent slightly forward—and the years all seemed to turn to glass, all their blurring opacity miraculously gone, and I could see through them with shocking clarity, and I had to restrain myself from asking him if he had been born with a gift for drawing pictures.

  On a corner stood the apartment house where I had been raised: five stories, red brick, wide cement walk leading to the double entrance doors. The living room facing the parkway and the trees; the window where we waited for each other to return home, where our eyes smarted with the watching and waiting and our hearts beat with dread at the dark memory of my uncle’s—my mother’s older brother’s—early death while on a mission for the Rebbe; my mother waiting for my father to return from his missions for the Rebbe; and my father and I waiting for my mother to return from her graduate-school classes; and my mother waiting for me to return from my long painting sessions with Jacob Kahn. The Window of Waiting. Like the wait for the end of the exile, for the redemption, for the Messiah. Endless waiting. Who lived in that apartment now? Who slept in my room? Were they Ladover Hasidim? I hadn’t asked my parents. I didn’t want to know.

  A block and a half from where we had lived stood the Ladover headquarters building: three stories, tawny stone façade, leaded stained-glass windows bordered with whitestone in a Gothic style, flagstone front porch with a whitestone railing. A wide cement walk led from the street through a low red-brick wall to the wooden entrance door. Always parked in front of the building was a police patrol car with two cops inside. No one here worried about terrorist bombs the way we did in Paris. No one here was blown up in a synagogue or a Jewish restaurant. Paris and Lucien La-camp, and the restaurant across from where we had once lived on the Rue des Rosiers. The bomb must have shattered all the front windows of the apartment, spraying glass into the rooms. If not for Rocheleh, we would still have been in that apartment. But we were in Saint-Paul by then. Who was living in that apartment when t
he bomb went off? I had never asked. I didn’t want to know.

  I turned off the street and went up the cement walk and entered the headquarters building.

  Off the entrance hall, a wide flight of wooden stairs climbed to a well-lit second floor. To the right and left of the hall ran corridors that led to warrenlike offices, many behind half walls topped with glass partitions. The doors to the offices kept opening and closing. Men in dark suits and dark skullcaps and beards kept going in and out of the doors. They spoke to one another in Yiddish or English. I heard phones ringing and saw computers on desks everywhere. I walked slowly through the building. My father had worked here for years until he had become the Rebbe’s personal secretary. The Rebbe himself had lived in an apartment on the second floor and then had moved into the more comfortable home where he lived now. On the second floor I wandered past a television studio; and a room lined with telephones under which were the names, it seemed to me, of most of the big cities of the world; and a large tinted plate-glass window behind which was a room crowded with the boards, panels, tapes, and switches of a radio station. None of this had been here when I was growing up.

  A man in his late twenties emerged from the door to the radio station. He was stocky and red-bearded and wore a dark skullcap and a white shirt, the sleeves pushed up to just below the elbows. He started hurriedly along the corridor, spotted me, and stopped.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Thanks, no. I’m just looking.”

  He was looking, too—at me, his eyes narrowing. Baggy trousers, rumpled shirt and windbreaker, fisherman’s cap. Weary, bearded, and somewhat bedraggled. A street person looking for a handout, a bathroom, a place to sleep?

  “I’d be happy to help you. Are you looking for someone in particular?”

  “No. If I’m not supposed to be here, I’ll leave.”

  “Do I know you from somewhere? May I ask your name?”

  “Asher Lev.”

  He stood very still, looking at me. “Ah,” he said. “Well. Asher Lev. No problem. Please look around. I’ll be happy to show you the building myself.”

  “I know the building.”

  “Ah. Sure. Right. Well, good to meet you.”

  He went hurriedly into an office.

  By the time I was halfway down the staircase, office doors had opened along the corridors on the first floor and bearded men stood in doorways, staring at me. I went out of the building.

  Computers. Radio. Television. Books. Newspapers. Magazines. More than two hundred yeshivas all over the world. Synagogues everywhere. Campus houses. Liaisons with governments. Emissaries crisscrossing the planet, journeying, journeying—for Torah, for Ladover Hasidus, for the Rebbe, for the Master of the Universe. How had it happened? From one man fleeing Eastern Europe and France, the Nazis at his heels; from a few hundred followers in a neighborhood in Brooklyn—an empire! In Paris he had lived awhile with Devorah and her family; her father, of blessed memory, had been a follower of the Rebbe’s father and then of the Rebbe. She remembered the Rebbe, even though she was only four at the time. She told stories about him to Rocheleh; bedtime stories about the struggles of the Rebbe to save Jews, clandestine meetings, comings and goings in the night. She told them to Avrumel, heroic stories, tales of selflessness. A family saved here, a Jew saved there, false passports, exit visas, deceiving the French police, escaping from the Gestapo; fleeing, fleeing. To Brooklyn—where he rode the waves of the renaissance of American fundamentalism and built the Ladover movement into a worldwide evangelical Jewish movement, sending out its good word only to Jews: love one another; be proud of your Jewishness; light Shabbos candles; observe the commandment of family purity; put mezuzahs on your doorposts; recite the blessings over the palm frond and the citron; worship the Master of the Universe with wisdom and joy; support the Rebbe in his efforts to hasten the redemption. The Rebbe is the Rebbe not only of the Ladover but of all the Jews. The Rebbe prays not only for the Jews but also for the righteous among the Gentiles. The Rebbe is king. The Rebbe is the Messiah. The Rebbe is a gift from God to the world.

  John Dorman told me one evening as we sat over drinks on the terrace of Max’s home, “You’re in the middle of it, Lev. That’s why you can’t see it.” Max refilled his glass, and he went on talking. The Ladover success as a fundamentalist movement on America’s essentially secular soil was what kept it in the news, John said, put it on front pages of the New York Times, gave it full-page spreads in the religion section of Time, splashed it on the cover of New York magazine, made of it sufficient high-culture interest to warrant multipart treatment in The New Yorker. The movement was an American success story. That was why it could not easily detach itself from its most notorious son: Asher Lev. He was their perpetual dilemma, their Great Embarrassment. The movement prided itself, announced to all, that it was both profoundly traditional and part of the contemporary world. Any story about the Ladover invariably mentioned Asher Lev, the contemporary artist; any story about the iconoclastic Asher Lev unfailingly took note of his fundamentalist Ladover origins. They were inextricably linked. Ladover and Lev. Lev and Ladover. “It’s as plain as the yarmulka on your head, Lev,” John Dorman said, sipping his drink and looking out across the green valley at the walled village and the Cubist dwellings and the far range of hills. “You’re a pain in the ass to your own people. At the same time, you’re one of their most valuable assets. Ha, ha. Very sorry. I’m an old drunk, Lev, and Elizabethan wit is not my bag.”

  Walking through the neighborhood now, past the yeshiva, which Rocheleh and Avrumel were attending, past the Ladover synagogue, where my uncle’s funeral had taken place earlier that week, gazing at the people and the traffic, at this unkempt Crown Heights world, this miracle of a birth, I longed to be back home amid the flowered silences, the exquisite gardens, the scented air, the hills and valleys and sea of southern France. They had sent me into exile; exile had given me a new home. I was now in exile in Brooklyn.

  I walked slowly back to my Uncle Yitzchok’s house.

  Mourning is suspended on Shabbos. Sadness is forbidden on the Seventh Day.

  That evening, after my mother and Devorah and Rocheleh lit Shabbos candles, I walked with my father to the synagogue. During the service, Cousin Nahum and Cousin Yonkel stood and quietly recited the Mourner’s Kaddish. The Rebbe did not appear. Afterward we all walked back together in shadows cast by the streedamps and the trees. Cousin Yonkel seemed restive, unusually irritable even for him. I was growing weary of Cousin Yonkel.

  Later, in my parents’ home, we sat around a resplendent dining-room table and ate the first of the three Shabbos meals and talked and sang zemiros. My father enchanted Rocheleh with some intriguing riddles.

  “What is ‘riddle’?” Avrumel asked at one point, looking up from the chaos that was his meat plate.

  “C’est une énigme,” Devorah explained.

  “Énigme,” Avrumel repeated, tasting the new word; it did not clarify matters but offered some comfort by virtue of its being in his native tongue. He shoveled vegetables onto the table and into his mouth.

  “Look at you,” Devorah said. “You even eat like Godzilla.”

  “Never mind,” my mother said happily. “We have a new washer and dryer in the basement.”

  We ate and talked and sang, and there was an abundance of food and wine and brandies and liqueurs, and the light softened and filled with haloes. My mother began to talk about the book she was writing on the power structure of the Politburo: a sequel to her earlier volume on postrevolutionary Russian-American relations, which had been published about ten years before and had earned her scholarly applause and a full professorship at New York University. She had been in her mid-fifties then. She had come late to scholarship, worked long and grindingly at it while being a wife to a roving ambassador and a mother to a gifted and troublesome child. She had published a great deal over the years; lonely hours at home while my father was on journeys for the Rebbe had finally turned her away from the living-ro
om window to a pen, a typewriter, a computer. Her study, a small room adjoining the master bedroom, was crowded with file cabinets, boxes of cards, papers, the computer and printer, her desk, and two chairs. Most of her personal library was in her office at the university.

  How many hours a week did she spend on matters having to do with the Ladover? I asked her.

  “Many,” she said. “Two or three meetings, position papers for your father and the Rebbe. Many.”

  “Is the Rebbe at the meetings?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “We should not talk about such matters on Shabbos,” my father interrupted. “Shabbos is for the Master of the Universe and for Torah. Let’s sing more zemiros. Do you have a favorite, Rocheleh? Yes? Sing it for us.”

  She sang, in her high, tremulous voice, a song taught her by Devorah—a song Devorah’s father used to sing at the Shabbos table. “Mosai yovo hamoshiach,” she sang. “When will the Messiah come …” The candles flickered upon her pale, thin face, her head slightly upturned so the words and the melody could flow more easily from bronchial tubes that turned treacherous at times and sealed off her breathing. Devorah sat looking down at the table, containing herself, chewing her lower lip. Then my father joined Rocheleh in the song, and a moment later we were all singing it together. “Mosai yovo hamoshiach …” Then my father sang his father’s melody to Yoh Ribbon Olom, a melody I had heard only rarely from him—when his mother died; when my mother became ill—yet whose haunting tune remained fixed in remembrance, a poignant testimony of pain and faith and hope. Avrumel watched him for a long moment, awed, his mouth open; and then suddenly he was down off his chair and on my father’s lap, and my father held him gently as he sang. His voice had deepened with the years and had lost some of its quaver. His eyes closed, his upper body swaying back and forth on the chair, he sang softly, slowly. “… Ant hu malka, melech melech malchayoh …” He took in a tremulous breath. “Ovad gevurtaich vetimhayoh …” From the corners of his closed eyes, like glistening beads, tears fell slowly across the ridges of his cheeks, breaking into minute rivulets along the creased skin and vanishing inside the thicket of white beard. Avrumel stared at the tears and then reached up and brushed at them with his little fingers. I turned my head away and remembered how, in childhood, I had heard him sing that melody for the first time when his mother died, and I had later drawn him singing it; again and again, drawing my father singing his father’s melody.