“They’re offensive to people like me, Asher. I’m asking you why you have to paint that way.”
“Because I’m an artist.”
“Asher, look at me. I’m not a fool. I speak to senators and governors. I sit behind a desk that helps the Rebbe to run almost half the Ladover machinery in the world. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s in political science. Explain it to me so that I can understand it. Why do you have to paint and display nudes?”
“Because I’m part of a tradition, Papa. Mastery of the art form of the nude is very important to that tradition. Every important artist who ever lived drew or painted the nude.”
“Art is a tradition.”
“Yes.”
“I understand. But why is the nude so important in this tradition?”
“Because it has always been part of that tradition.”
“Who began it?”
“The Greeks.”
“Ah,” he said. “The Greeks. Our old friends, the Greeks. All right, Asher. I can understand a little better now why you paint nudes. Why do you display them?”
“I don’t want to sit in a room painting for myself. I want to communicate what I do. And I want critics to know I can do it.”
“Even if it offends people?”
“Everything offends someone.”
“Even if it offends your father?”
I did not respond.
“There is such a matter as respect for your father. That’s also a tradition.”
“I respect you, Papa. But I can’t respect your aesthetic blindness.”
“Aesthetic blindness? Do you hear, Rivkeh? Aesthetic blindness.” My mother looked slowly from my father to me, then back to my father. “An interesting concept. Aesthetic blindness. And what about moral blindness, Asher?”
“I’m not hurting anybody, Papa.”
“One day you will, Asher. This will lead you to the sitra achra.”
“No.”
“Asher, if you had a choice between aesthetic blindness and moral blindness, which would you choose?”
I said nothing.
“I’m warning you, Asher. One day you’ll hurt someone with this kind of attitude. And then you’ll be doing the work of the sitra achra.”
You’re hurting me now with your attitude, I thought. But I remained silent.
“I’ll bring in the dessert,” my mother said quietly.
“Not yet, Rivkeh. Let’s sing some more zemiros first. Nudes and Greeks are not Shabbos talk. Let’s sing zemiros and bring the Shabbos back to the table.”
He said to me a few days later, “I’ve been reading what the critics are writing about your last exhibition. I pride myself that I understand the English language. But I don’t understand what your critics are talking about.”
“It’s a technical language, Papa. Doesn’t political science have a technical language?”
He asked me to explain some of the concepts. We talked for a long time about the two-dimensional surface of the canvas, about illusion, depth, planar structure, points, areas, lines, dispersive and progressive shapes, surface control, color separation, values, contrasts, accents, matrix. I began to lose him somewhere around planar structure, and by surface control it was hopeless. He listened attentively to what I was saying. But there was nothing in his intellectual or emotional equipment to which he could connect my words. He possessed no frames of reference for such concepts. He could not even ask intelligent questions. My world of aesthetics was as bewildering to him as his insatiable need for travel was to me.
We spent days discussing those concepts and came slowly to understand how futile it all was. He stopped talking to me about my painting. In the weeks that followed, he began to react to my presence in the apartment with a brooding silence.
My mother said to me one day in April, “Is Jacob Kahn well?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“You haven’t been going to see him.”
“No.”
“Will you see him again soon?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked at me. I thought I heard her sigh.
I was in the living room one night that week when I heard my father’s voice come from their bedroom. “I’ve tried, Rivkeh. But it’s impossible. What do you want from me?”
I stared out the window at the street. There were young leaves on the trees. But the street seemed colder and darker now than it had ever been before. I turned away from the window and from the bleak parkway below.
Florence is a gift, Jacob Kahn had said.
In the first week of May, my father flew to Chicago for the Rebbe. It was his first lengthy trip since he and my mother had returned from Europe. Ten days later, he flew to Denver.
My mother stood gazing out the window of the living room. “You know, I thought I had gotten used to it. How many windows have I waited at? But I’m not used to it at all.”
“Mama?”
“Yes, Asher.”
“I want to go to Europe this summer. After I graduate.”
She turned slowly from the window to look at me. Her face was pale and her eyes were dark.
“To Europe?” she said softly.
“I think it’s very important to me that I go to Europe now.”
She turned back to the window and was silent a long time. Then she said very quietly, “It’s strange, Asher, how a person can do something for half a lifetime and still not get used to it. I thought I was used to it. But I was fooling myself.”
I talked to my father when he returned from Denver very late that night.
“It’s a fine idea.” He seemed elated. “Where will you go?”
“To Florence.”
“We can give you the names of people to see in Florence. It’s a fine idea. Isn’t it a fine idea, Rivkeh?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I would also go to Rome and Paris.”
“We can give you the names of people in Rome and Paris, too. Remember the Levis in Rome, Rivkeh?”
“Yes.”
“Remember they took us to that hill and the man there tried to sell us statues because he thought I was Greek Orthodox?”
“I remember.”
“I’ll make a list of all the places where you can eat without worry. And I’ll give you the names of people you can call. Europe is something I happen to know about. Isn’t that right, Rivkeh?”
“Yes, Aryeh.”
Florence is a gift, Jacob Kahn had said.
Thirteen
I remember the river and the shadows of the bridges on the dark surface of the water. The river ran dark even in sunlight, except along its deep banks where the reflections of the stone walls and houses were the color of summer sand and rippled faintly in the lazy flow of water. In a little more than a year, that river would rage and flood the city and destroy things so precious to me that I would weep into the silent mornings of Paris. But that summer the river was gentle, a dark cool benign presence beneath the hot Florentine sun, and I would cross it in the morning to enter the old city and cross it again in the evenings to return to the room where I lived.
The room was on the third floor of a four-story hotel that stood along the southern bank of the river. It had a bed, a chair, a table, and a washroom. The window looked across the river and the city to the hill villages and mountains beyond. In the early mornings, with the city still cool from the night, I would come from the hotel and walk along narrow streets to the house of an old woman whose name my father had given me. There, in a room filled with the furniture of a time long before I was born, I would eat the breakfast she prepared for me. She was in her seventies, a widow, from a Leghorn family dating back five hundred years. During the war, she had been concealed in the hills by Florentines and Sienese. Her husband had been killed in the German retreat. Now she lived alone with her furniture and her memories and an Italian translation of the Book of Psalms which she was forever reading. I ate her breakfasts and suppers. Lunch consisted of iced tea or a Coke from a paper cup in a sh
op or café in the city.
After breakfast, I would walk across a stone bridge into the old city and go through shaded narrow streets heavy with tourists and traffic and lined with shops. All through the month of July, I walked the streets of that city. From a Berlitz grammar, I taught myself tourist Italian. Walking through Renaissance streets and squares, feeling against my feet the stone stairways and battlements of the Palazzo Vecchio and the Bargello, feeling against my face the cool damp faintly musty interiors of the Santa Croce and the Santa Trinità, gazing at the fresco of the Last Judgment on the Duomo and at the chancel beneath the huge dome where one Medici was wounded and another was killed—walking and tasting the sudden sun and shade of its streets, the dimness of its churches, the wealth of its galleries, the echoing savagery of its palaces and squares, I learned of the city’s beauty and blood, of the Ghibellines and Guelphs, of the Pitti, the Strozzi, the Pazzi and the Medici, of Savonarola, of Dante and Machiavelli, of Giotto and da Vinci and Raphael and Michelangelo. Florence was a gift.
In the late afternoons, I would go back across the river along the covered Ponte Vecchio and gaze into the gold- and silversmith shops and watch the faces of merchants and shoppers and feel the coolness of the air beneath the roof of the bridge. I would walk the narrow streets to the house of the old woman and eat my supper and return to my room on the third floor of the hotel. From the window, I would watch the evening and the night come slowly across the city; watch the golden hue of the sun over the hills; watch the hills change hues and go slowly misty and soft; watch the darkness come into the sky and the lights of the city come to life in the slow falling of night. Those hours by that window in the evenings were of a loveliness I have never again felt in my life—hours in a Renaissance city lived by a man born in a Brooklyn street, a man wearing a red beard and ritual fringes and a fisherman’s cap.
I went to the Piazza del Duomo often in those weeks to see the Michelangelo Pietà and the Vasari fresco and the Ghiberti East Doors of the baptistery. I carried my sketchbook and drawing pencils wherever I went, but I remember that the first time I saw the Michelangelo Pietà in the Duomo I could not draw it. It was the fifth day of July. I stared at its Romanesque and Gothic contours, at the twisted arm and bent head, at the circle formed by Jesus and the two Marys, at the vertical of Nicodemus—I stared at the geometry of the stone and felt the stone luminous with strange suffering and sorrow. I was an observant Jew, yet that block of stone moved through me like a cry, like the call of seagulls over morning surf, like—like the echoing blasts of the shofar sounded by the Rebbe. I do not mean to blaspheme. My frames of reference have been formed by the life I have lived. I do not know how a devout Christian reacts to that Pietà. I was only able to relate it to elements in my own lived past. I stared at it. I walked slowly around it. I do not remember how long I was there that first time. When I came back out into the brightness of the crowded square, I was astonished to discover that my eyes were wet.
I returned the next day and studied it again. Then I began to draw it. I drew its rhomboid contour. I drew each of its four people separately. I drew the heads separately. I drew the twisted arm. People stood behind me, watching. A long time later, I stopped drawing and walked back through the cool interior of the cathedral and out into the hot sun-flooded square.
In the square, between the cathedral and the baptistery, there was a traffic safety zone, a small island surrounded by a river of buses and cars. Often a man would stand in that safety zone feeding the pigeons of the square. He was an old man with a lined face and shrunken gums. He wore torn baggy trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. He stood in the island with his arms outstretched, palms turned upward. There was birdseed in his palms and the pigeons flocked to him, using him as they would a telephone pole or a tree, sitting on his arms and shoulders and waiting for a chance at the seed. He stood very still, smiling toothlessly, and tourists would snap his picture and drop a coin into the small cardboard box at his feet.
I came out of the Duomo that day after having spent hours drawing the Pietà, and there was the man with the pigeons on his arms. I watched him for a while, then opened my sketchbook and began to draw him. He reminded me vaguely of the fishermen of Provincetown. I felt people watching. I drew him quickly. “Hey, he’s good,” I heard someone say. When I was done, I closed the sketchbook and walked away.
I returned to the Duomo the following day, but the man with the pigeons was not there. I went into the cathedral and was there the rest of the morning, drawing the Pietà. When I came out of the cathedral, the square was hot with sunlight, and the man was there again, his arms covered with pigeons. I watched him for a while, then had some iced tea and began walking through the streets.
I walked to the Accademia. It was a long walk and I stopped often on the way and drew the people and the streets of the city. Inside the Accademia, I walked slowly through the long tapestry-lined hall to the David. I stared at it and after a moment I walked away and leaned against a wall.
I did not draw it. I leaned against the wall and looked at it, then walked close to it and looked at it, then walked slowly around it. It stood bathed in the sunlight that poured down upon it through the dome overhead, a white marble giant that dominated the space around it and was its own frozen dimension. I looked and I did not draw, and finally I came away and went into the street.
I began to walk quickly. I came to a narrow street and rested for a while in the shade of stone houses. The street was crowded. I felt tired. I walked a while longer, then took a cab back to my room. I lay down on the bed in my clothes and slept. After about an hour, I woke feeling hot and faintly dizzy. I washed my face in cold water and went back outside. I walked across the Ponte Vecchio and wandered about the city. I went past the Uffizi and found it had closed at four o’clock. It was almost six. I went quickly back across the bridge to the house of the old woman. She served me supper, then sat in an old leather chair reading from her Book of Psalms. I watched her for a while, then did a rapid drawing of her. She did not see me.
The next day, I drew her again. I drew her looking younger this time, sitting with the Book of Psalms on her lap. In my room, I looked closely at the drawing and found it vaguely resembled my mother. I stared at the drawing, then tore it from my sketchbook and threw it away.