My Name Is Asher Lev

  We were together for a while after supper in our living room. I sat on the sofa, watching her gaze out the window at the street. I had begun in recent weeks to be conscious of the lines and planes not only of her face but of her body as well. It seemed astonishing to me that so small a frame could have borne me and not at all surprising that it appeared incapable of bearing once again. She seemed sad and bowed, as if an enormous heaviness had been thrust upon her. Outside, there was still sunlight on the tops of the buildings and trees. A faint glow fell upon the upper part of our window. Reflecting downward, the glow was caught by the contour of her delicately boned features, giving them a pale golden luminosity. She seemed very beautiful to me then, in all her sadness and frailty and tenacious strength. I looked at her, holding the picture of her in my mind. I closed my eyes and, starting with the top of her forehead, began to draw her from memory inside my head. When I grew uncertain over a line, I opened my eyes and memorized the line and closed my eyes and continued drawing. I had the lines of her face and body fixed in my mind before the twilight turned to night.

  I said to her before I fell asleep that night, “Why do you let Papa travel so much?”

  “Let him?” She did not understand.

  “Why don’t you ask Papa to stop?”

  “It’s your father’s life, Asher. How can I ask him to stop?”

  My father returned from Washington late that night. It had been a good trip and he was in a jubilant mood at breakfast the following morning. He and my mother talked about the Russian desk in the State Department, but I did not understand what they said. After breakfast, the three of us walked together along the parkway. It was a warm blue day. My father continued to talk about his Washington trip. I could not remember when I had last seen him so happy. I looked at the morning sunlight on the leaves of the trees. My mother and father were talking earnestly together. Then they were laughing. I watched them talking and laughing. My father went into the Ladover building to his office and my mother went along the parkway with her books. I came into my school. Immediately after school I went home.

  My father returned from his office a few minutes after my mother came back from college. I heard them talking quietly together in the kitchen. Then they went into their bedroom. They were in the bedroom a very long time.

  Something had happened to my father between the time he had gone into his office and the time he had returned home. At the Shabbos table that evening, he was subdued. He kept glancing at me throughout the meal. Often he seemed on the threshold of anger. He was sullen. He kept rubbing the side of his face. He sang zemiros with an intensity I had not heard from him since my mother’s illness. At one point during the meal, after a long silence in which he had sat staring moodily down at the table, he slowly raised his head and began to sing his father’s melody to Yoh Ribbon Olom. I heard the long sustained note with which he held the first word, and I felt a shiver move through me. All the months of my mother’s illness returned, all the pain and fear. My mother put her face in her hands. “Yoh Ribbon Olom,” my father sang. God, Master of the Universe, You are the King, the King of all kings. I found myself clutching my fork as if I were readying a weapon in my defense.

  I asked my mother, before I fell asleep, “What happened today, Mama?”

  She told me to say the Krias Shema, and went from my room.

  My father walked alone to the synagogue the next morning. When I came in, I saw him at his table, his tallis over his head.

  That morning, the Rebbe came into the synagogue at Borchu, then took his chair near the Ark. I prayed intently. After a while, I began to feel eyes upon me. But I would not look up. I felt eyes still upon me. I glanced through the synagogue. It was crowded. I scanned the area near the Ark and saw the Rebbe looking at me. He was looking at me across the expanse of the entire synagogue. I could see his dark eyes looking at me from below the fringe of the tallis that covered his head. I felt as if he were standing directly before me. I stared down at my prayer book. My face burned. My heart beat fiercely. After a long moment, I looked up. The Rebbe sat very still, praying. I could not see his face.

  My father was silent all through the Shabbos meal. He went back to the synagogue as soon as we were done eating. He had things on his mind, my mother told me. She was tired, she said. She went into her bedroom.

  That night, my parents went over to my Uncle Yitzchok’s house and I remained alone in the apartment. I wandered through the silent rooms. Then I took the tubes of oil colors out of my drawer and set the canvas board on my chair. I stood there, staring at the tubes and the brushes and the canvas. I wanted to paint but felt my mind and hands paralyzed. I could not touch the tubes of oil. I cringed at the thought of handling the brushes. I had stolen. I felt myself filled with horror. The gift had caused me to steal. I hated the gift. But I wanted to do the painting. I stood there unable to move. Finally, I went from the room and stood in front of our living-room window, staring down at the stream of night movement on the parkway and wishing I had never touched a pencil or a crayon, or met Yudel Krinsky, or seen a tube of oil color. The gift was making me ill and causing everyone around me to suffer—and I hated it, despised it, wanted to burn and destroy it, felt toward it a mountainous rage. I was suddenly very tired. A wearying darkness moved across my eyes. I returned to my room and put away the oil colors and the brushes and the canvas board. I lay in my bed. The apartment was dark. I heard my father singing Yoh Ribbon Olom. I saw my mother standing in front of the living-room window. I was painting my mother in front of the window but the colors would not come off the brush. The canvas remained white. I tried to put color onto the canvas but it remained clean and white. I hated it clean and white. I hurled the brush at it. The color splattered on the walls and floor. But the canvas remained clean and white.

  I fell asleep. Afterward it seemed to me I had slept a very long time.

  I remember going to Yudel Krinsky’s store that Monday and waiting for him to turn his back to me for a moment so I could slip the tubes and brushes back into place. I remember the mashpia talking to me in his office and asking me why I really did not want to go to Vienna. I remember talking and talking and finally saying I couldn’t talk any more and telling him about the canvas that wouldn’t take paint; as hard as I tried, it just wouldn’t take paint. I remember my father’s tormented look and the deepening darkness around my mother’s eyes. I remember someone asking me if I wanted to have a private talk with the Rebbe and that I screamed no, I hated the Rebbe, he was stealing my street from me, and then ran away and found myself beneath the trees of the parkway, looking at the dots of light made by the sun as it came through the leaves. I remember subdued conversations between my parents, the distant whispering of people in the synagogue, and the way my classmates shied away from me in school.

  Later, in the summer, I walked with my mother along the lake near our bungalow and she explained to me again and again the three choices the Rebbe had given my father. He could decide not to go to Europe and continue his present work in the United States; or he could go to Europe with my mother and leave me with my Uncle Yitzchok and his family; or he could go alone, leave my mother and me in America, and return periodically to be with us. The mashpia, my teachers, and the Rebbe had decided that I could not go to Vienna. That was what the Rebbe had told my father the Friday after his return from Washington. That was what my father and mother had gone to discuss with my Uncle Yitzchok that Saturday night.

  “We decided to leave you with your Uncle Yitzchok,” my mother explained patiently over and over again that summer. “Then we came home and found you and saw we could not give your Uncle Yitzchok such a responsibility. Do you understand, my Asher? Do you understand what we’re doing?”

  I walked with my mother and listened and did not understand. I drew very little that summer. The fatigue seemed overwhelming and relentless. I was unable to hold a pencil for too long. I slept a great deal. I kept telling my mother I understood.

  But I really began to
understand it the night in the airport that October when my father held me very close to him and kissed me. I felt his beard and lips on my cheek and smelled his warmth and strength. “Be well, Asher,” he murmured in Yiddish. “Only be well. Everything will be all right, my son. We are doing the work of the Master of the Universe.”

  Then he went off with my mother, and they talked alone for a few minutes.

  “Have a safe journey, my husband,” I heard my mother say. She was crying. My father waved at me. I saw him go through the glass doors, limping slightly, carrying his attaché case and a copy of the New York Times. Then he disappeared into the crowd of passengers.

  “Have a safe journey, my husband,” my mother kept saying as we stood near the doors. “Have a safe journey, my husband.”

  BOOK TWO

  Six

  That was an autumn of cold winds that stripped the leaves from the trees and blew them in clouds through the street. I would wake from dreams and hear the leaves against my window. On Shabbos afternoon, I would stand at the window of our living room and watch the trees rain leaves and the leaves swirl back and forth at the whim of traffic and wind. By November, the trees were almost bare. Solitary leaves clung to the branches as tenacious reminders of life. They fell and the trees stood naked on the street. It rained and the leaves lay rotting in the gutters. It snowed and the leaves were gone.

  I missed my father. He wrote often. In the weeks immediately after his departure, his letters came to us from Vienna. In January, we received letters from Zurich and Geneva. In February, we received letters from Paris. In March, we received letters from Bucharest. Then he wrote us again from Vienna; he missed us, he said; the work was difficult and endless, he said, but he had faith that the Ribbono Shel Olom would help him; he looked forward to being with us and with the Rebbe for Passover.

  I did not understand how much I truly missed him until the first Shabbos he was gone. My mother and I were alone in the apartment—my Uncle Yitzchok’s wife was ill and could not have us in their home—and the absence of my father’s zemiros was like an emptiness gouged out of the Shabbos by the Other Side.

  Strangers called us on the phone. They were people who had been in Europe, had come across my father in this or that city, and had promised to call his family when they returned to America. Some were businessmen. One was a professor who called us from Boston. Another was a physician who called us from Montreal. Twice we received calls from people in Washington, D.C. My father was well; he sent us his love; he was working hard and traveling a great deal. One of the callers from Washington wished us a happy Hanukkah and pronounced “Hanukkah” in a way that left me reasonably certain he was not a Jew.

  Sometimes at night, when I had said the Krias Shema and my mother was gone from my room, I would lie awake and try to imagine where my father was and what he was doing. I would see him journeying from city to city, limping through terminals, his face with its dark eyes and red beard framed in the windows of planes and trains as he sped across mountains and valleys, journeying to teach Torah and Hasidus, journeying to meetings about the Jews of Russia, journeying, endlessly journeying, as my mythic ancestor had once journeyed. I would think of him lonely and alone in the hostile enormity of Europe and feel horror at what I had done. I would say to myself then that all I needed to do was tell my mother, “I want to go to Vienna, Mama. I don’t want to be away from Papa.” That was all I needed to do. I would resolve to do it. First thing in the morning, I would do it. I would tell my mother at breakfast, “I want to go to Vienna, Mama. I don’t want to be away from Papa.” But I could not do it.

  I wished my father had not had to go to Europe. I wished the Ribbono Shel Olom could have arranged matters differently for my father. I missed him. In missing him, I began to draw him in all the places on the street I had never drawn him before.

  I remembered him walking Sunday mornings beneath the trees, reading the copy of the New York Times he had just bought, the thick paper held flat in his arms as one might hold a child. Sometimes I walked with him and marveled that he could read and avoid the trees and fireplugs and the cracks and juts in the sidewalk; or I watched him from the window of our living room and saw him coming toward the house, his hat tilted on the back of his head, his red beard a counterpoint to the darkness of his clothes.

  I said to him once, walking back with him from the candy store on a Sunday morning, “Does my papa read the whole newspaper? Look how big it is.”

  He smiled and said, “I read the news and the magazine and the section on books.”

  “Does my mama read the same parts as my papa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a part on drawing?” I asked. I was four years old then.

  “Yes. I don’t read that part.”

  “When I learn to read, I will read the part on drawing. I like drawing.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed.”

  I asked him once, “Papa, if you only read those parts of the newspaper, why must we buy the whole newspaper?”

  “That’s the way it’s sold, Asher.”

  “Does anyone read the whole newspaper?”

  “Yes. But most people read what interests them.”

  “What is this part called, Papa?” I could not quite make out the words. I was six at the time.

  “Sports,” he said.

  “You don’t read sports, Papa?”

  “It’s a foolish waste of precious time,” he said. Then he added in Yiddish, “It comes from the Other Side, Asher. Boxing, football … People are hurt. It must come from the Other Side.”

  I drew him sitting on the parkway bench in front of our apartment house. In the spring and early summer, and sometimes in the beginning weeks of autumn, he would sit on that bench with my mother on a festival afternoon. They would talk quietly together and I would scamper about. I was a child then and never really understood what they were saying. But I remembered their faces and gestures, the lowered eyes, the smiles, the light brushing of fingers across an arm or shoulder. I remembered those moments on that bench, and now I drew them.

  And I drew, too, the way my father once looked at a bird lying on its side against the curb near our house. It was Shabbos and we were on our way back from the synagogue.

  “Is it dead, Papa?” I was six and could not bring myself to look at it.

  “Yes,” I heard him say in a sad and distant way.

  “Why did it die?”

  “Everything that lives must die.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “You, too, Papa? And Mama?”

  “Yes.”

  “And me?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then he added in Yiddish, “But may it be only after you live a long and good life, my Asher.”

  I couldn’t grasp it. I forced myself to look at the bird. Everything alive would one day be as still as that bird?

  “Why?” I asked.

  “That’s the way the Ribbono Shel Olom made His world, Asher.”

  “Why?”

  “So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever is never precious.”

  “I’m frightened, Papa.”

  “Come. We’ll go home and have our Shabbos meal and sing zemiros to the Ribbono Shel Olom.”

  Sometimes on a festival afternoon, my father and I would climb the stairs to the top floor of our apartment house. Then we would go up the last flight of stairs and my father would push open the huge metal door and we would step out onto the roof. We would stand near the clotheslines and the brick chimney and stare out across the tops of trees and the roofs of houses at the distant sky and smoky haze of the city. We could barely see the trees of Prospect Park for the tall buildings, and we could not see the lake at all. But the traffic noise floated up to us muted by distance, and the wind felt cool and clean. There was the feeling of being away from the world, alone away from the world, and near the sky, somehow nearer even to the Ribbono Shel Olom.

  “It’s only a tast
e,” my father said once, looking out across the buildings and the trees. “But remember, Asher, some tastes remain a long time on the tongue. A taste of the Ribbono Shel Olom …”

  I was seven at the time. Now I remembered, and I drew that memory of my father on the roof.

  I drew him walking along the street with his friends, talking, arguing, gesticulating. I drew him raging at me once when I ran across the wide center lane of the parkway without waiting for the light to change. I drew him walking with my mother, tall, bending toward her as she spoke. I drew him in all the small and quiet ways I had never thought to draw him before. And it seemed to me that I was closer to him during those early months of his absence than at any other time of my life.

  The same week my father left for Vienna, my mother bought a small wooden table, placed it to the left of our living-room window, and made that her desk. The kitchen was too closed in, she said. She wanted to be able to look out the window.

  A few days later, she bought a little bookcase and put it near the table. The room remained our living room; but it also became her study.

  My father’s chair at the head of our living-room table remained unoccupied, as did his chair in our kitchen. But I thought it might not be wrong for my mother to use my father’s desk in their bedroom, and I asked her about it.

  “It belongs to your father,” she said.

  She had graduated from college and was working for a master’s degree now in Russian affairs. The kitchen was deserted, except for meals. The living room became the room in which we lived.

  She missed my father. I would sit with her sometimes in the evening and watch her studying, and I would see her put down her pen and raise her eyes to the window and look out at the street and the sky. Her warm brown eyes would be misty; her face wore a remembering look. I would think then, I want to go to Vienna, Mama. I don’t want to be away from Papa. But I could never bring myself to say it.