The Gift of Asher Lev (17 page)

After a while, I left the bench and started back up the hilly street toward Broadway. Afternoon sunlight shone on the gleaming façade of Jacob Kahn’s old building. The uniformed doorman looked at me as I went past him. The street seemed oddly disquieting, its shaded areas queerly angled, its noises muted: a Chirico street of uncanny shadows and dreams.

I took the subway back to Brooklyn. The sun was pale when I came out of the ground onto the parkway. I walked up Kingston Avenue and turned the corner into the street where my parents lived and saw immediately the flashing lights of the police car.
The car stood in front of my parents’ home. A small crowd of neighbors had collected on the sidewalk. The lurid red and blue revolving lights of the police car reflected off their anxious faces. I heard the crackle of the police radio as I went quickly through the crowd.

The front door was open. Two uniformed policemen stood in the entrance hall with Devorah and my parents. Avrumel was near my father, clutching his Shimshon doll.

“Rocheleh hasn’t come back from school,” Devorah said when she saw me. Her eyes blinked nervously, and she looked ashen.

Rocheleh had sent Avrumel home with one of her classmates and had gone off somewhere alone. Devorah had called classmates, teachers, friends, acquaintances. Rocheleh was more than two hours late.

The policemen stood by, listening to Devorah talking to me in French. One of the policemen politely interrupted and asked Devorah for a description of Rocheleh. Hair. Eyes. Clothes. Distinguishing marks. Had there been a quarrel at home before she went off to school? Had she ever done anything like this before? Had she been in a fight with anyone in school?

“What did she tell Avrumel?” I asked Devorah in English.

“To go home with one of her classmates, who lives on this block.”

“She didn’t say anything about where she was going?”

“No. We’ve been through this, Asher.”

My parents stood very quietly near the wall mirror. I saw my mother close her eyes and her lips move. My father did not put a supporting arm around her; they never held one another in someone else’s presence.

“Does she have her medication with her?” I asked.

“Of course,” Devorah responded.

“What medication is that?” one of the policemen asked.

“For asthma,” I said.

He made a note in his pad. “Could that be disorienting?”

“No.”

“We ought to call this in and get it to the hospitals,” the second policeman said to his partner.

I felt the back of my neck go cold and a sudden chilling weakness in my legs.

“I have already telephoned the hospitals,” my father said. “No child of her description was brought into emergency today.”

“We’ll do it anyway,” the first policeman said. He went out. Through the open door I saw the crowd on the sidewalk and the police car and the flashing lights on the faces and on the trunks and branches of the trees.

“There are many cars with our people going through the entire neighborhood,” my father said to me in Yiddish. “With God’s help, she will be found.” His face pale, his eyes dark with dread, his white hair in some disarray beneath his velvet skullcap, my father wore his fear visibly but with reserve.

“Exactly like her father,” my mother said. She was trying to lighten the fear, and failing: her voice too high, her eyes wide and darting. “He went off on his own. Long walks, came home late, worried me sick. I would stand at the window, waiting. Exactly like her father.”

“The gendarmes will find Rocheleh,” Avrumel said in French to his Shimshon doll. “Wait and see.”

A girl about Rocheleh’s age came through the crowd and walked up to the house. She stood in the doorway: wide, dark, frightened eyes; long pale face; dark braided hair; high gray stockings.

“Rocheleh isn’t home yet?” she asked in Yiddish.

“No,” Devorah said. “We are very worried.”

I recognized the girl, had seen her playing with Rocheleh on the terrace. “Sarah, what did Rocheleh say to you?”

“She said to walk Avrumel home and bring him to the front door.”

“That’s all?”

“She said to tell her mother that she would be home soon.”

“In which direction did she go?”

“I don’t know. She told me this in the schoolyard.”

“Did anything happen in school today? Was there a fight?”

Her lower lip trembled. She was nearly in tears. “I don’t know about any fight.” She said she had to go home for supper and went out the door.

“Master of the Universe,” I heard my mother say in Hebrew.
Her eyes were mirrors of the memories of all her own waiting—for my father, for me. The past had suddenly been returned to her by her grandchild.

The policeman was standing on the sidewalk and talking into the radio transmitter. The red and blue car lights rotated and flashed across his face and uniform. He seemed a character in a grisly crime movie, the sort that Ladover Hasidim would never permit themselves to see. A car came slowly along the street, its emergency signals blinking. The policeman looked at the car. It stopped behind the police car, but I could not see who was in it because of the crowd. Avrumel loudly asked my father if the Master of the Universe would soon find his sister. I saw my father lift him and hold him and Shimshon in his arms. The policeman who had made the radio call was walking back through the crowd. There was a man with him I thought I recognized. It was a moment before I remembered he had met us at the airport in his car and brought us to my parents’ home. He walked with his hat tilted back jauntily, a smile on his face. The two men came out of the crowd, and between them walked Rocheleh, carrying her briefcase. She seemed calm and poised, unperturbed by the crowd around her.

“Hello, Asher Lev,” the man said. “I bring you your daughter.”

“Rocheleh is home!” Avrumel shouted happily in French to Shimshon from his perch in my father’s arms.

“Where was she?” I asked.

“On the parkway, walking home. She is a very bright girl.”

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome. A mitzvah on my patrol night.”

“Thank God,” my mother said.

“You did well, Binyomin,” said my father. “I thank you.”

The man bowed slightly toward my father. Devorah was with Rocheleh.

“Where were you?” Devorah asked. “Do you know what time it is?”

“In the library,” Rocheleh said, gazing at the crowd and the police.

“The library at the beginning of the parkway?” I asked.

“Where you took us, Papa.”

“Rocheleh, this is New York, not Saint-Paul. You do not go for long walks here by yourself. Couldn’t you call us when you saw it was late?”

“I used up all my money on the copying machine. I had to borrow twenty cents from the librarian.”

We were talking in French. The two policemen stood listening patiently. I told them where Rocheleh had been.

“The library,” one of them echoed.

“The Grand Army Plaza library?” the other asked. They looked at each other. “Are you all right?” the first policeman asked her. “No one hurt you or bothered you in any way?”

“I am very well, thank you,” Rocheleh said.

“Sorry about this,” I said.

“Glad it ended this way,” the second policeman said. “Got a kid of my own this age.”

“We are very grateful to you,” my father said.

“Doing our job,” the first policeman said.

They went out of the house. My mother closed the front door on the street and the crowd.

We stood there in the entrance hall, looking at Rocheleh.

“I am very sorry for causing you all to worry about me,” Rocheleh said.

“Why didn’t you tell Sarah you were going to the library?” Devorah asked her.

“I was afraid she would say it was too far away and wouldn’t take Avrumel home. You didn’t have to call the police. I am not a child.” She then announced that she was very hungry and was going to her room to put away her books and wash up for supper.

“Call your friend Sarah and tell her you’re alive,” I said. “And next time you’re out late somewhere, use the telephone first and then the copier or whatever. That’s why God let us invent the telephone. So we could save each other heartache.”

Avrumel followed his sister out of the entrance hall.

A few minutes later, I passed by Rocheleh’s room and asked her what she had been looking for in the library.

“I put it on my bulletin board, Papa.”

My mother was calling us in to supper, and I did not stop to see
where Rocheleh was pointing. After supper, I looked into her room and saw tacked to the cork bulletin board over her desk half a dozen clear photocopies of my two crucifixion paintings.

She had made one copy of each of the paintings, one enlargement of my face, one of my father’s, and two enlargements of the face of my mother. The photocopies, each eight and a half by eleven in size, were arranged in three vertical rows and took up the entire surface of the bulletin board.

She was bent over her desk, writing.

“Rocheleh, can I disturb you?”

She looked up, squinting at me slightly through her glasses.

“Why did you bring these home?” I pointed to the photocopies on the bulletin board.

“Because I needed to.”

“Do you know what they are?”

“They are copies of my papa’s paintings about the way the god of the goyim died.”

“You know about the crucifixion?”

“Of course. I am not a child, Papa.”

“Who are they for?”

“They are for my English teacher.”

“Your English teacher asked you to write something about my crucifixion paintings?”

“She asked us to write two hundred words about what our fathers do. I am writing about my father, who is an artist.”

“Where did you find the reproductions you copied?”

“In a book about my papa in the library.”

“They let you into the adult section?”

“I didn’t ask to take the book out, Papa. I found it by myself and made copies of the pictures.”

“What are you going to say about them?”

“That’s what I’m writing now. I’m writing that my papa made those pictures because he is an artist. The book says you made them because there is no Jewish image that expresses suffering. I don’t understand what that means. Why did you put Grandmother’s face in the painting?”

“It’s very complicated. One day, when you’re older, I’ll explain it to you.”

“I am going to write what you just said. Is that what Grandfather looked like before his beard became white?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s you when you were a boy?”

“I’m a little older there than a boy. Rocheleh, listen, I don’t think you ought to keep them up there on your wall like that. If your grandparents see them, they will be very upset.”

“I’ll take them down as soon as I finish writing. It helps me when I can see all of them together like that. I don’t like the paintings, Papa. They give me a bad feeling.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe you’ll feel differently about them one day. Will you remember to take them down when you’re done?”

“Yes.”

I went along the hallway and looked into Avrumel’s room. He was asleep, curled up in a corner of his bed, the new Shimshon doll on the pillow beside him. Tacked to his bulletin board was the pencil drawing I had made of the old Shimshon doll we had left behind in Saint-Paul.

I said to Devorah later in our room, “Wait till she finds the ones I painted of you after the wedding. She missed those in the book.”

Devorah’s face turned crimson. “You will please tell her I did not pose for those paintings. They are entirely from your memory and imagination.”

“She won’t believe me.”

“Sometimes, my husband, I think you enjoy being wicked.”

“Only when I’m with my wife at certain hours of the night.”

“Did you ever think such a thing might happen when you made those paintings?”

“No. But even if I had, I would have painted them anyway. When I paint, I think of the truth of the painting. I try never to think of the consequences.”

“Some truths are best left buried, Asher.”

“Then God should not have given me this talent. I’m going to bed.”

My father said to me as we walked to the synagogue early the
next morning, “Your mother could not sleep last night. She kept remembering how you would come back late from school.”

“Rocheleh won’t do that again.”

“She went to the library to do research?”

“Yes.”

“On what?”

“On her father, the artist.”

“I did not know there is a book about you.”

“More than one.”

“What is she writing about?”

“The crucifixions.”

He stared at me a moment and shook his head. “There is no end to how your work pursues us.” I said nothing.

“‘A mistake once implanted cannot be eradicated,’ “he quoted in Aramaic from the Talmud. “All these years, and I still do not understand why you do what you do. Does it satisfy you to do those things? Does it make you happy?”

“I’ve never known of a serious artist who was happy. Except maybe Rubens.”

“Then why do you do it, Asher?”

“I don’t know. I do it. Why do you work for the Rebbe?”

“For the sake of heaven.”

“Maybe I do it for the sake of earth.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s another way to get to the truth.”

“Your crucifixions and those other paintings you have made are a way to the truth?”

“If there wasn’t something true about my work, do you think people would bother with it? Someone told me there are sixty thousand working artists in Paris alone. Sixty thousand. Critics, artists, curators—why do they bother with my work? Why do they bother with
me?”

“Who are those people, Asher? They are goyim. What do they have to do with us?”

“Do you think goyim are fools? Is that what you’re saying?”

“They are not fools, Asher. But their way is not our way. They have nothing to do with us.”

During breakfast, I said to Rocheleh, “Did you finish your composition?”

She nodded.

“You look very pretty. I like the bow in your hair.”

“Grandmother bought it for me.”

My mother smiled. “A small gift.”