My Name Is Asher Lev (6 page)

The rain continued all afternoon. I wandered about the building, spent a while drawing the trees in the rain from the window in my father’s office, then stood in the doorway watching the rain fall into the puddles on the flagstone floor of the porch. It was a steady rain and it fell with soft sounds against the stone and the street. After a while, I watched from inside the rain and no longer knew I was watching.

My father found me like that in the doorway. We walked home together. My mother was asleep. We ate supper alone. It continued to rain.

Later, I stood alone at the window of our living room and looked between the slats at the street. The asphalt glittered darkly in the rain. The rain cut through the circles of light around the tops of the lampposts, cold silvery diagonals against the warm yellow-white arcs of brightness. The street seemed to be crying.

My father came into the room.

“It’s late, Asher.”

“A few more minutes, Papa. Please.”

He stood beside me. I watched the rain falling against the gleaming blackness of the street.

“I made a drawing of Reb Krinsky, Papa. But I don’t like it.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Come to bed now, Asher.”

The lights came on in the living room. My mother stood in the doorway. The suddenness of the lights in the dark room
stung my eyes. My mother had on a pale-blue bathrobe and slippers. Her short dark hair was uncovered and in disarray.

“Why do you stand in the dark?” she asked softly.

My father looked at her for a moment. “We were talking,” he said.

She came slowly into the room, hugging the robe to herself.

“You slept all day, Rivkeh,” my father said. “Are you hungry?”

“I’m not hungry. How are you, Asher?”

“I’m all right, Mama.”

“You look pale. Are they taking care of you?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“You should not let yourself get sick, Asher. Why are we standing? Please, let’s sit down.”

I sat with my father on the sofa. My mother sat facing us on one of the easy chairs. She put her hands on her lap. Wisps of dark hair lay across her forehead. But her eyes seemed clear.

“I must talk to you, Aryeh,” she said quietly.

“Asher should go to bed.”

“It concerns Asher, too.”

My father was quiet. From somewhere along the parkway came the sound of an automobile horn.

“Aryeh,” my mother said. “My brother’s work is unfinished.”

My father looked at her wearily and said nothing.

“I want to finish my brother’s work.”

My father’s mouth slowly fell open.

“Aryeh, don’t deprive me of this.” There was urgency in her voice. “Please.”

My father stared at her and said nothing.

“Aryeh, it’s wrong for my brother’s work to remain unfinished. I want to complete his work. In September, Asher will
enter the yeshiva. Mrs. Rackover will be here when I can’t be home.” She was silent a moment. Then she said, with a quality in her voice that two people have when they speak an intimate language only they understand, “Aryeh, you’ll be able to travel again.”

My father slowly rubbed the side of his face.

“Please, Aryeh. Do you know what it’s like for something to be incomplete?”

My father looked at her and said nothing.

“Yes,” she murmured. “You know what it’s like.”

“Rivkeh, we should talk about this another time.”

“Another time? Why another time? Will another time make a difference, Aryeh?”

My father was quiet.

“It’s wrong for this also to be incomplete,” my mother said. “It would be a victory for the sitra achra.”

“Rivkeh, you’re a mother. There’s a child to raise.”

“I’m also a sister and a wife,” she said. They looked at each other then in silence. After a moment, my mother said, “Aryeh, please let me call the college tomorrow.”

“Wait until Tuesday.”

“Why?”

“I ask you to wait.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll wait.” Then she said, “You’re going to talk to the Rebbe?”

“Yes.”

I saw the darkness return suddenly to her eyes. “The Rebbe will never permit me to do it.” She pulled the bathrobe tightly to her as if she were cold. Then her voice became harsh and malevolent. “The Rebbe killed my brother.”

I stared at her in horror. The blood drained from my father’s face.

“The Rebbe sent him on a journey and he was killed.”

“Rivkeh, please, please,” my father murmured. His voice trembled. He said in Yiddish, “Master of the Universe.”

“My brother would not have been killed if the Rebbe had not told him to travel.”

“Enough,” my father said, getting to his feet. “Asher, come with me. We’ll talk more later, Rivkeh.”

“But his work shouldn’t be incomplete. The sitra achra would love his work to remain incomplete. Explain that to the Rebbe, Aryeh.”

“Asher, come with me, do you hear?”

“Yes, by all means, put the boy to bed. Look how pale he is. Is he getting his vitamins? Do you get your vitamins, Asher? I think I’ll go to bed now, too. I’m very tired.” She rose abruptly to her feet, hugging the robe tightly to her small body. “Good night. Please, Aryeh. Please. Explain it to the Rebbe.”

She went quickly from the room.

My father stood near his chair and stared down at the floor. He kept rubbing the side of his face.

“Papa?”

He went on rubbing his face and staring at the floor.

“Papa? Will Mama go to school and not be home?”

He did not respond.

“Papa, I’m very scared. Papa?”

He held me to him then, tightly. My face was against his beard. I had my eyes wide open and I saw the skin of his face and the red strands of individual hairs and the pink corners of his eyes. He smelled of warmth; an odor of strength and warmth came from him. He carried me to my room and helped me get into my pajamas. He sat on the edge of my bed.

I said to him, “How could Mama say those things about the Rebbe?”

My father said nothing. He looked tormented. Then, abruptly, he got to his feet, said good night, and went from the room. He had forgotten to ask me to say the Krias Shema.

*    *    *

I remember that night very clearly, the texture of its darkness, the echoing resonance of its sounds. I lay in my bed in the enveloping night and felt myself one with all the vast and endless arc of the universe, felt myself as raw flesh connected to near and distant pain. “The Rebbe killed my brother,” I heard my mother say—and it was as if the words came hurtling through the black face of the universe, searing words, demonic words, from the sitra achra, the Other Side, from the region of blackness that spawned horror and evil and the stone hell that enclosed the light.

Sometime in the night, I came out of my bedroom and went through the hallway to the window of the living room. The rain had stopped. A huge three-quarter moon hung in a clear sky and cast a bluish light across the buildings and the parkway below. The night was still. The sky was a tranquil counterpoint to private fears.

I returned to my room. There was the drawing of the Russian Jew, barely visible on my desk. I looked at it and for a long moment felt it as a wedge into the darkness, a light encasing the shell. Uncle Yitzchok had liked one of my drawings. I would work again on the drawing of the Russian Jew. I would learn to draw my feelings of ice and darkness and a street crying. There was nothing I could not do.

Then I was back in my bed and the darkness returned and with it the memories and horror of the night. To draw, to make lines and shapes on pieces of paper, was a futile indulgence in the face of such immutable darkness, a foolishness I would certainly leave behind when I entered the world beyond the window of our living room. Yes, my uncle had a strange sense of humor. The Russian Jew would remain unfinished; the land of ice and darkness, the street crying in the rain—all of it would remain the fantasy of a child. I would grow up.

I lay in my bed in the darkness of the night, praying to grow up.

    The Rebbe gave his permission.

That September, I entered the Ladover yeshiva, my mother entered Brooklyn College, and my father resumed his journeys for the Rebbe.

I had stopped drawing.

    My teachers were gentle; my classmates were as friendly and as cruel as are classmates everywhere. I was treated with special care, for I was the son of Aryeh Lev, one of the Rebbe’s emissaries who was often not home and whose absence had to be counteracted by teachers; I was also the son of Rivkeh Lev, one of the very few Ladover women the Rebbe had permitted to attend college and one who had recovered from a serious illness and whose life on occasion gave every appearance of remaining in tenuous balance between darkness and light.

I remember little of my first years in school. I cannot remember the color of the classroom walls or the shapes of the windows. I do remember that each room had a framed picture of the Rebbe on the wall near the blackboard. It was a photograph of the Rebbe’s face. The Rebbe wore an ordinary dark hat. He seemed to be looking at us all the time. After a while, that picture began to appear in my dreams—though I do not remember ever seeing him inside the school during those years.

We saw a great deal of the mashpia, Rav Yosef Cutler, the one responsible for the development of our souls, and whose task it was to teach us the doctrines of Ladover Hasidism. He was a tall dark-bearded man, with white hands, dreamy eyes, and a soft voice. He came into our classroom once a week and talked to us about the importance of holiness and righteousness.
He told us stories about the Rebbe and the Rebbe’s father and grandfather. He told us about the hardships and sacrifices of Ladover Jews who maintained their Yiddishkeit despite Communist persecution. His height and dark beard reminded me vaguely of my thunderous mythic ancestor; his dreamy eyes and soft voice made me think sometimes of my grandfather, the scholar-recluse who had mysteriously turned into a journeying Hasid.

The school was in an old four-story red brick building adjacent to the headquarters building of the Ladover movement. I attended that school from eight-thirty in the morning to four-thirty in the afternoon. We were taught religious subjects in Yiddish and secular subjects in English. All our religious teachers were Ladover Jews; the secular teachers were either Ladover Jews or Gentiles. There were no non-observant Jews in our school.

I did no drawing at all during those early years of school, save for indifferent smears of finger paint for art projects the class undertook to help celebrate festivals. The gift lay buried.

I remember that sometime during my first year in school my mother asked me why I had stopped drawing.

I shrugged a shoulder.

“Is that an answer, Asher?”

“I don’t feel like it any more, Mama.”

“Why don’t you feel like it, Asher?”

“I don’t know.”

“You are really very good at drawing.”

“I hate it,” I said. “It’s a waste. It’s from the sitra achra. Like Stalin.”

She paled a little and said nothing more.

My father never mentioned it at all. To him, it had been another of the slowly disappearing ills of my childhood, like measles, mumps, and chronic tonsillitis.

*    *    *

In the summers, we lived in a private bungalow colony in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. It was a small Hasidic colony on the shore of a small lake. The bungalows were a few yards from a sandy beach. My father worked during the week and came up with the other husbands for weekends. Often on Shabbos afternoons, I would see my parents walking along the beach or beneath the tall trees in the nearby pine grove: my father wearing a white shirt and dark trousers, a small dark velvet skullcap on his head, his face surrounded by the red of his hair and beard; my mother wearing a long-sleeved summer dress or a light long-sleeved blouse and white or pale-blue skirt. They never swam. Sometimes they went rowing alone. I would see them on the lake early Sunday mornings when the air was still cool from the night, my father sitting in the center of the boat and facing my mother, leaning toward her as they spoke. Alongside my mother he seemed very tall, and he always inclined his head toward her when they talked.

I played with a few of the Hasidic boys who were my age. Often I wandered about alone. On occasion, my mother and I would walk together and talk about summer things: the sun on the lake, the way grass grew, the insects at night, the heat of the day, the mountain cold of the night. She asked me often why I had stopped drawing. I gave her shrug-of-the-shoulder answers.

She seemed happy during those summers, and I was glad to be near her. But there were odd moments when the dead look returned to her eyes—in the middle of a conversation about butterflies, during a walk beneath the tall pine trees, crossing a graveled country road, watching a bird in flight—and I would want to be far from her then.

We would return to the city at the end of August, and in September I would go to my yeshiva and my mother would
resume college. She was no longer a light-hearted elder sister. She had become instead an efficient organizer of the temporal traffic that governed our lives. I was never permitted to stray from the time spectrum laid out for me: rise at a certain time, leave for school at a certain time, return at a certain time. My father’s travel schedules were carefully worked out. His trips during those years were brief local journeys. He went no farther than Boston or Washington. If a change in schedule occurred while he was traveling, he telephoned my mother the very first chance he had.

We needed to make maximum use of our time, my mother kept saying. We could each of us accomplish a great deal if we arranged our schedules carefully and made maximum use of our time.

But on occasion I had the feeling there was more to it than that. Once I returned late from school after a wandering detour along Kingston Avenue. My mother met me at the door to our apartment and screamed at me. I did not recognize her then. Her small body trembled with rage. It seemed to me that my minor detour had upset nothing, especially as I had no homework that day. But I did not detour again for a long time.

After supper, she would help Mrs. Rackover do the dishes. Then she would wash the top of the kitchen table. Afterward she would bring in her textbooks and notebooks and arrange them neatly in front of her on the table. Often she hummed a Yiddish tune. She sat down at the table and went to work. She would sit at that table for hours. It seemed to me often then that the kitchen was not a kitchen at all, that the cabinets were library shelves, the dishes were books, the counters were stands for journals, the sink was a librarian’s desk, the room was a laboratory of the mind.

I could not disturb her while she studied. I did my own schoolwork in my room. When I was done, I would move very quietly about the apartment. The silence of libraries and
archives filled the rooms. She would come in to hear my Krias Shema. Then she would return to the kitchen and her books. There was no more walking in autumn winds; there was no more running through snowdrifts; there was no more rowing in Prospect Park. And there was no more drawing. The gift seemed dead.

    My father had resumed his journeys for the Rebbe the same month that my mother had entered college. He retained his office, but his main task now lay not with telephones but with travel. He seemed a different person. He glowed with new life. His first trip was to a small Ladover community near Tom’s River, in New Jersey. He brought them supplies for the High Holidays and the Rebbe’s blessing. His next trip was to Baltimore, where he participated as the Rebbe’s personal representative in the cornerstone ceremony for a new Ladover synagogue and community center. Then he traveled to Philadelphia, Newark, Providence, Boston, and Washington. I lost interest in his journeys. Each journey became for me another day when he was gone from the apartment.

When he did not travel, he worked in his office. At night, he often sat in the living room, reading
Time, Newsweek
, the
New York Times
, Yiddish journals and newspapers. He would sit slouched on the sofa, the magazines and newspapers scattered around him, his slippered feet on the coffee table, a small dark skullcap on his head, his fingers slowly combing his long red beard.

He searched constantly through his newspapers and magazines for news about the Jews of Russia. He seemed more connected to the Jews of Russia than to the Jews of our own street.

On Shabbos, he never read anything except the writings of the Rebbe or of past leaders of Ladover Hasidism. Often he studied the Talmud tractate
Sanhedrin.

He came home one evening during my second year in school and told my mother that he had been moved to an office on the second floor. His face was luminous inside its frame of red hair. I saw a flicker of alarm invade my mother’s eyes. But it vanished swiftly.

I measured time during those years by my tests, by the holidays and festivals, by the events in the lives of people around me. Rosh Hashonoh, Yom Kippur, Succos, Simchas Torah, Hanukkah, Purim, Pesach, the many Ladover celebrations—that was the cycle of my year. On occasion, I heard of the death of a near or distant member of our group. One winter, someone in our apartment building became ill and was taken to a hospital and I never saw him again. My Aunt Leah gave birth to her fifth child, a daughter. My Uncle Yitzchok bought the empty store next to his jewelry store, had the adjoining wall knocked down, and doubled his already successful business. Yudel Krinsky took a job in the stationery store on Kingston Avenue three doors away from my uncle. The store was one of two owned by a Ladover who ran the other, larger store himself in Flatbush. Yudel Krinsky lost his thin pinched look, put on weight, and grew a thick dark beard streaked with gray. He still wore the kaskett. He still glanced nervously around him from time to time. I liked Yudel Krinsky. It was to his stationery store that I detoured the day I came home late and was screamed at by my mother.

Our Crown Heights Ladover community grew quickly during those years. Almost every Shabbos, I saw new faces in the synagogue. They were coming from Western Europe and from those parts of Eastern Europe that still permitted people to leave. Very few came from Russia.

    On a Friday in the summer of 1952, my father came up to the bungalow colony from a trip to Washington. I was on the
beach, tossing pebbles into the water, when I saw the cab drive up the main road and turn in to our driveway. I saw my father in the cab and ran up the grassy slope to the front of the bungalow. There I stopped and watched my father. He was getting out of the cab, slowly and with care, as if he were in pain. My mother came out of the bungalow and went toward him. He paid the driver. The cab left. My father stood in the driveway, his suitcase next to him, his dark hat tilted back on his head, his dark suit rumpled. He looked moodily around. He seemed dazed.

“Aryeh,” my mother said, coming toward him.

“Rivkeh,” my father murmured. “They shot the writers.”

My mother stopped. Her small body stiffened. Her mouth fell open.

“We just found out. Those who didn’t die in prison were taken out and shot.” He rubbed the side of his beard and looked around, still seeming dazed. “I can’t remember traveling here.”

“Aryeh, come inside,” my mother said.

“It’s the work of the sitra achra,” my father murmured. “Why am I here?”

“Aryeh, please.”

“I shouldn’t be here, Rivkeh. I should be there.”

“Aryeh.”

He looked at her. “They were shot, Rivkeh. Shot. Just like that. A life is nothing to them. Nothing. Ribbono Shel Olom, who’s going to be left?”

“Aryeh, I’m in the middle of making Shabbos.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. Then he looked at her again. “Yes,” he murmured. “Shabbos.” He picked up the suitcase. They went into the bungalow.

I stood near the corner of the bungalow, staring at the closed screen door. They had not even noticed me. I went back down to the lake and tossed stones into the water.

My parents were together a great deal that weekend. My
father looked tormented. I was afraid to talk to him. He seemed to need my mother’s presence.

I heard him say to my mother that Shabbos afternoon, “They kill people the way people kill mosquitoes. What kind of human being kills another human being that way? To kill a human being is to kill also the children and children’s children that might have come from him down through all the generations.”

My mother murmured something I could not hear. They were standing near the lake and I was a little away from them along the shore.

“I cannot reconcile myself to it, Rivkeh,” I heard him say. “I can’t do it.”

Again my mother murmured something I could not hear.

“Rivkeh, please,” I heard my father say. “I’m not made for sitting still. And my father’s work is also incomplete.” He rubbed the side of his beard. “They’re dying, Rivkeh. Why am I here? Do you know how much work has to be done in Europe?”

I saw my mother looking up at him. She brushed her fingers across his eyes. Then she moved toward him and he held her, his arms around her thin shoulders. She looked so small and frail in his huge embrace. Her eyes were concealed behind his beard, but I saw her holding him tightly. Then he noticed me. He released her. She glanced at him, then at me. They walked slowly away, talking softly. I stood at the edge of the lake and tossed stones into the water.