My Name Is Asher Lev

  Then I found I could no longer paint and I walked the winter streets of the city and felt its coldness. There was snow and rain and the city lay bleak and spent beneath the dark skies. I wandered through museums and galleries. I walked the winding streets of Montmartre and peered through the misty windows of its shops and restaurants. I walked up the mountain of steps to the Sacré-Coeur and wandered through its awesome dimness. I remember that during all this walking and wandering letters went back and forth between me and my parents and between me and Anna Schaeffer. My father had fallen and hurt his leg, but was well now. Jacob Kahn’s show had been very well received. My uncle was fine. Yudel Krinsky was fine. It was all vague. Even the walking and wandering was vague. I could not paint.

  The rains ended. There were days of blue and warming air. One day, I sat in a café over a warm Coke around the corner from the Sacré-Coeur and found myself drawing the contour of the Duomo Pietà on the red tablecloth. I looked at it and paid for the Coke and returned to the apartment.

  I sat at my table in the apartment and drew the Pietà again, leaving the faces blank. I drew it a third time and made the two Marys into bearded males and made the central figure into one of the Marys. Then I drew the central figure of Jesus, alone, head bent and arm twisted, alone, unsupported. Then I left the apartment and went down the narrow stairs and came out onto the street. I walked beneath the trees of the boulevard and was astonished to discover tiny green buds on the branches. Was the winter gone? Was it spring?

  I returned to the apartment and sat at the table and thought of the David and its spatial and temporal shift. I looked at the painting of the old man with the pigeons that stood against a wall. And it was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be no other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way.

  The preliminary drawings came easily then. After a while, I put them away. It was Passover, and I rested.

  On a warm spring day, with the sun streaming through the tall window and leaves now on the chestnut trees of the boulevard, I started the painting. I sketched it in charcoal on the huge canvas, drawing the long vertical of the center strip of wood in the living-room window of our Brooklyn apartment and the slanted horizontal of the bottom of our Venetian blind as it used to lie stuck a little below the top frame. I drew my mother behind those two lines, her right hand resting upon the upper right side of the window, her left hand against the frame over her head, her eyes directly behind the vertical line but burning thr