The Gift of Asher Lev (43 page)

As I was leaving the customs area, two men in dark suits approached me and flashed badges. One asked was I carrying more than five thousand dollars in cash. I said no. The other said would
I show them what was in the pockets of my jacket. There was nothing in the pockets of my jacket except two drawing pads, some pens, and my wallet with my passport, my credit cards, and one hundred dollars. They looked briefly at the drawings and returned the pads. They were very polite and seemed vaguely disappointed. They told me to go on, and I went through the exit doors, carrying the bag, the attaché case, and the Shimshon doll.

A dense but orderly mass of people stood outside the doors. I began to move through the crowd. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I looked into the blue eyes of a tall blond-bearded young man. He had on a dark suit, a tieless white shirt, open at the collar, and a dark hat.

“Asher Lev?”

I nodded.

“Sholom aleichem. My name is Baruch Levinson.”

“Aleichem sholom, Baruch Levinson.”

“The Rebbe’s office asked me to pick you up. It’s an honor for me. Come.”

He took the large bag. I followed him through the crowd and out the door into blazing sunlight and steaming air. Holding the Shimshon doll, I waited for him on the crowded traffic island. Children went by and looked at me with the doll in my hands. I put the doll on top of the valise but was afraid someone might snatch it, and after a minute or two I picked it up and held it. Baruch Levinson pulled up in an old two-door car, and we loaded the bags and drove out of the airport.

“How was your flight?”

“Fine.”

He slipped expertly into the dense and rushing traffic of the Van Wyck Expressway.

“Where were you, if I may ask?” I told him.

“Is Paris as nice as everyone says?”

“It’s an unusual city.”

“I’d love to go there. But who has the money? A wife, five kids. It eats up everything. Were you gone long?”

“About ten days. You’re not from Brooklyn.”

“You can tell from the accent? I try to hide it, but it comes out.
I grew up in Chicago. We just moved here to be close to the Rebbe and so I could study in the yeshiva.”

“You saw the Rebbe recently?”

“The Rebbe is in the country.”

“What do you mean, the country?”

“The mountains. In the yeshiva we heard the Rebbe’s doctor said he shouldn’t stay in the city because of the heat. Everyone is predicting this will be a terrible summer.”

The traffic moved smoothly along the Belt Parkway past the exits to the beaches. There was no air-conditioning in the car, and the windows were wide open. Hot, moist air blew stiffly into my nostrils the smells of baking asphalt and gasoline fumes. We slid beneath the massive, rising girders of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Avrumel is in the Ladover day camp on the other side of this bridge, somewhere on Staten Island. Baruch Levinson turned off the parkway at the Prospect Park exit.

“What is the doll you’re carrying, if I may ask?”

“It belongs to my son. He forgot it.”

“You bought it in France?”

“It was a gift. You can get them in Crown Heights.”

“It’s cute. I think I’ll get one for my son.”

He turned into the street skirting Prospect Park. Traffic was heavy. Heat shimmer rose from the car engine when we stopped for lights. People sat on stoops in undershirts or stripped to the waist and moved slowly in the heat.

“There was an article in yesterday’s
Times
about you and your uncle’s art collection.”

I said nothing.

Baruch Levinson drove past the library and turned into Brooklyn Parkway.

“I read some articles about you once. I took a course in modern art where I went to college, the University of Chicago. You know, Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, Newman, Avery, Gottlieb, Motherwell, all those guys. I still remember the names. Good course. Some women, too. And some contemporary artists, you know, people working today. We did a couple of your paintings and some prints, talked about them in class, slides and stuff, you know.”

“Which paintings?”

“Which paintings? Let me see if I remember. Yeah, the crucifixion ones and
The Sacrifice of Isaac.
I like your stuff. I hope you don’t mind me talking like this. If it’s, you know, embarrassing, I’ll shut up.”

“You majored in fine art?”

“Yeah. I thought I’d be a painter, you know? Then I met this Ladover guy in Chicago, and he turned me on to Ladover ideas and things, and here I am, born again, you might say, a ba’al teshuva, back to my roots. I really like your work. So did the professor teaching the course.”

“Thank you.”

Brooklyn Parkway was still torn up. Long stretches of the road had been stripped of asphalt, leaving a washboard surface. Here and there the innards of the broad street lay exposed: sewage pipes, telephone cable, electrical lines, raw red clayey earth. Huge construction equipment obstructed traffic. Road barriers funneled traffic through temporary cattle-chute lanes. We drove past the Ladover yeshiva. There was the usual small crowd in front of the synagogue, people milling about, coming and going. The car turned into the street where my parents lived and stopped in front of the house. There was my Uncle Yitzchok’s house, its blinds drawn.

Baruch Levinson unloaded the bags. I said I would bring them in myself. He shook my hand. “An honor to help you, Mr. Lev.” He drove off.

I started up the path to the house. The air was hot. I was halfway up the path when the front door opened and Devorah came rushing out. She wore a yellow summer dress, an apron, and a pale-orange kerchief, and she looked as if she had lived in this house all her life.

“You look lovely, my wife. Brooklyn agrees with you.”

“It feels good to be here, Asher.”

“Max and John and Tanya send you their love and want me to bring you all home.”

Devorah stands near the sliding glass door of our room, watching me unpack. She seems to have put on a little weight, there is
high color on her face, her eyes are bright, the gray irises sparkling—or is it a trick of the afternoon light? She is telling me what has happened during my time away. Avrumel loves the day camp, though he gets into fights now and then with one of the boys in his group. Rocheleh telephoned the other day to say that she had been given the part of Moses’ sister in a play about the early life of Moses. My mother was busy on her book and right now was at a meeting with the Rebbe’s staff. Yes, the Rebbe would be away all summer. Doctor’s orders. He was up at the Ladover community in the mountains.

“How do you call it? In Massa … ?”

“Massachusetts.”

“Yes. And how are you, Asher? How was your trip?”

I tell her about the trip: the visit to the Picasso Museum; working with Max on the carborundum print; Lucien’s widow; the Shabbos in the yeshiva; the few days back home in Saint-Paul.

“When is my father returning from Israel?” I ask.

“We don’t know. Mama will be back soon from her meeting. Maybe she’ll bring news.”

Mama. She says it in the most natural way. I cannot recall her using that word before in connection with my mother. She said “your mother” whenever she talked to me about her, and avoided calling her anything when she spoke directly to her. I was away ten days. Now, Mama.

“Mama and I thought it would be a good idea to spend the weekend in the country,” she says.

“What about Avrumel and the day camp?”

“It won’t hurt him to miss a day.”

I shut the valise and open the attaché case. “You might want to look at these.” I hand her the three large-sized drawing pads. She stands there holding them close to her.

“One of the men from the yeshiva will drive us up in the morning.”

“Fine.”

“I missed you, my husband.”

“And I you, Dev.”

“I enjoyed being with your mother. But I missed you very much.” I move to her. She puts the drawing pads on the desk. I hold her
and kiss her. She clings to me, faintly trembling. The house is not air-conditioned, and her face is moist with heat. Small wrinkles seem to have invaded the corners of her eyes. She puts her hands on my face and I feel her fingers in my beard. Devorah. A sealed apartment in her childhood and a two-year brush with the Angel of Death and her family gone and Max her only solace and an artist for a husband and children’s books for her fantasy life and a hunger to create families wherever she lives and now a new family for her in Brooklyn.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Asher?”

“Sure.”

On the way to the kitchen I leave the old Shimshon doll on Avrumel’s bed, propped up on the pillow next to the new Shimshon doll. Side by side, old and new, one doll appears exhausted and frayed, a worn mirror image of the other. I sit in the kitchen drinking coffee with Devorah and talk to her about Max and John.

I am on the terrace outside our room, dozing in the late-afternoon sunlight. I slip in and out of a troubled sleep as sounds drift through the stifling air: a child’s high voice; a man complaining in Yiddish about the heat; the leaves of the sycamore stirred by an occasional hot breeze; the music of George Gershwin on a radio somewhere; a Hebrew song about the armies of God.

A noise wakes me, the sound of the sliding door being quickly opened. I hear “Papa!” and Avrumel is suddenly all over me. “My papa is back!” He climbs onto the recliner, and I hold him. He wears a baseball cap and shorts and a T-shirt and his freckled face is tanned and he smells of sunlight and chlorinated water—the pool he swims in.

“How are you, Avrumel?”

“Ça va bien, Papa!”

It is so good to hold his lithe strong vibrant little form. My son.

“I am learning to play the baseball,” he says, his freckled face close to mine.

“Uncle Max and Uncle John send you their love.”

“Thank you, Papa. We are going to the country tomorrow. It is a long ride. Grandmother says maybe we will see the Rebbe.”

He leaves, and I am alone again on the terrace, still feeling his presence and hearing his high eager laughing voice, and I close my eyes and he is still there, and I open my eyes and he is really there, all over me again, holding his old Shimshon doll, his face radiant.

“I thank my papa for bringing me Shimshon!” And he plants a kiss on my face and runs off, holding the rag doll to him, the doll looking as if Avrumel’s joyously enthusiastic clutching will squeeze the stuffing from it.

I lie back on the recliner and close my eyes. The ground yaws and I feel myself on the Airbus, reading Camille Pissarro’s letters. I hear repeated distant ringing, and then silence. A moment later the door to the terrace slides open. Someone wants me on the telephone, Devorah says. I get out of the recliner, and as I walk through our room I notice that on my bed is the new Shimshon doll Devorah bought Avrumel to replace the old one he forgot. It lies propped against my pillow, no longer needed, abandoned.

The voice on the telephone sounded deep and nasal. “Is this Asher Lev?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be with us for Shabbos?”

“What?”

“I understand you will be here for Shabbos.”

“Who is this?”

“I’m sorry. My name is Yehuda Birkov. I’m on the Rebbe’s staff. You’ll be with us in the mountains for Shabbos?”

“Yes.”

“The Rebbe would like to talk to you. Right after Shabbos.”

I said nothing.

“Hello?”

“All right. Yes.”

“Be well.” He hung up.

I was lying on my bed on top of the spread and next to the Shimshon doll, when I heard my mother calling from the entrance hallway. “Hello! I’m home! Is Asher back?”

I got up, and the doll fell to the floor. I picked it up and put it on a chair and went out into the hallway. My mother kissed me
and said it was good to see me back safely; she was happy I had decided to return today rather than Sunday. How was my father? Did he look all right when we were together in Paris?

“I worry about your father. It is not pleasant now in Israel.”

“Is Papa anywhere near the demonstrations?”

“I almost never know exactly where your father is when he travels. I am going to change into something comfortable, and then we will have supper. It is good to see you again, my son. Doesn’t Devorah look wonderful? She has put on weight, and there is color in her face. You see, even in Brooklyn one can get sunlight and air. And Avrumel! Did you see how tan he is?”

We ate supper together in the kitchen, and afterward I went for a walk with Devorah and Avrumel. Then I was very sleepy. I got into pajamas and stood before the mirror in the bathroom and heard myself say in Hebrew, “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, Master of the Universe, who revives the dead,” and I had no idea why I said it.

I climbed into my bed and was immediately asleep.

Sometime during the night, I woke and felt Devorah in bed beside me, whispering. I held her to me with love, I held her to me with tenderness. She clung to me with a strange ferocity and I heard her say in French, “I love you, my husband. God brought you to me. I love you.”

In the morning Devorah and I and my mother were at the table when Avrumel entered the kitchen, his baseball cap on his head, his old Shimshon doll tucked firmly under an arm.

“Sit down and I’ll make you an orange juice,” I said to him. I squeezed a fresh orange into a glass, put in a teaspoon of sugar, and filled the glass with cold water.

“That’s the way Grandfather makes it,” Avrumel said.

“Drink it,” I said. “All the vitamins will go out of it if you let it stand too long.”

Baruch Levinson, the blond-bearded Chicagoan who had driven me in from the airport, showed up about an hour after breakfast in a newer, roomier car—one that was, he said, more appropriate for the women and a long drive. He had borrowed it from a friend.
He would remain in the colony with another friend over Shabbos and bring us back on Sunday afternoon.

The roads out of Manhattan were dismal with traffic. Jet-lagged, fatigued, my head more in Paris and Saint-Paul than on a crowded highway with my family, I sat next to Baruch Levinson in a fog of discomfort, slipping in and out of dazed sleep, waking in fits and starts to new roads and countrysides, as if I were moving through discontinuous corridors of time. I heard dimly the conversation in the back seat, where my mother and Devorah sat, with Avrumel between Devorah and the door behind Baruch Levinson, who kept humming Ladover melodies as he drove. On the Taconic the traffic thinned, and he went hurtling along the highway. Once I woke with a start from hallucinatory sleep and saw an old European car draw alongside us, the Spaniard in the back seat, smoking a cigarette. He rolled down his window and looked at me. I felt his eyes scourge my face. The car sped past us. I was suddenly bathed in sweat, my heart thundering. After a while I fell again into a half-sleep and saw Jacob Kahn walking quickly across the dunes in front of his summer home in Provincetown and on into the waves, his head of thick white hair flashing in the sunlight.