The Gift of Asher Lev (6 page)

I gave up my chair to an elderly woman and went out to the crowded hallway and then up the stairs to the second floor. The Bak print beckoned, and I looked at it with care: two huge keys set in a hilly boulder-strewn green landscape through which meanders a stream that reflects the clear blue light of a cloudless sky. One of the keys, huge, antique, of the sort one sees on a castle ring, stands on its head; the other reclines upon a rock. The distant blue sky is penetrated by shimmering white light shaped like a huge keyhole.

Near the door to my uncle’s study was a Moreh print. Over a landscape devastated by torrential waters in which helplessly bob humans, animals, rodents, boats, birds, and trees, a robed figure hangs suspended in the air, attached to a stake that is connected at its foot to a wheel. The Hebrew words above the center are from the Book of Psalms. “Out of the depths I call you, O Lord. O Lord, listen to my cry….”

The figure, a bearded old man, hangs from the stake, arms extended, feet crossed: the position of one crucified.

My uncle’s study was to the left of the Moreh print. I tried the knob again. The door was locked. I started back down the stairs. Behind me, vague sounds moved through the hallway: air fluttering; feet sliding softly upon the carpeting; a distant whistling. Cold winds touched the back of my neck. I turned.

The hallway was empty.

I stood there a moment, listening.

Then I went back downstairs to the living room. My father was ready to leave. We walked home together.

Later, we sat in the kitchen over cups of coffee. My mother was in her study, grading examination papers, and Devorah was with Rocheleh. Avrumel, suffering jet lag and a low-grade fever, was asleep.

My father sat in his shirtsleeves, collar open, gazing somberly into space. His velvet skullcap lay like a dark crown on his thick
white hair. Even in grief there was an aura of stateliness to him: his demeanor controlled, faintly majestic and imperial. He ran his fingers slowly through the vigorous white hair of his beard and drank from his cup.

The cup was from a set of six—all fired in earthen colors strewn with drawings of parakeets—he had brought back with him once from a trip to Australia. The house contained other, less frivolous tokens of his travels: an eighteenth-century Haggadah published in Warsaw and discovered by my father in a secondhand bookstore on some back street in Munich; a battered seventeenth-century Havdalah spice box rescued by my father from an attic in Vienna; a nineteenth-century white silk Shabbos chalah cover found amid a pile of rags in the basement of a home in Prague, the Hebrew word
shabbos
exquisitely sewn into the silk with multicolored threads; a filigreed seventeenth-century silver pointer used by Torah readers, which my father had acquired from a high government official on one of his trips to South Africa. He didn’t know how the pointer had fallen into the official’s hands, but, as he had put it to me earlier that day while showing me around the house, “Such an object does not belong in the hands of such a person.”

Here and there on the walls of the house were reproductions of medieval illuminated Hebrew manuscripts, gifts from my uncle over the years. There was also an unusual micrographie drawing of the Rebbe’s great-grandfather. The most prominent picture hung in the living room: a large, ornately framed color photograph of the Rebbe taken about twenty years ago—around the time he had sent me away from the Ladover community in Brooklyn because of my crucifixion paintings.

My father put down his cup. “Do you want some more coffee, Asher?”

I told him if I had any more coffee, I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

“You have trouble sleeping? Your mother cannot sleep. Four hours, and she is up. Does Devorah still need a light?”

“She can fall asleep with a night light now.”

“A night light. We have one in the house somewhere. Remind me later, and I’ll get it for you. Rocheleh looks frail. While you are here, you should let a doctor examine her. I can arrange it so the Rebbe’s own doctor will do it. He is at Mount Sinai.”

“Rocheleh has been seen by specialists in Paris, Lyons, and Nice. Everything is under control.”

“It can’t hurt for her to be seen by an American doctor.”

“What difference will it make? There’s no cure for asthma.”

“Every day something new is discovered.”

“If anything is discovered, her French doctor will know about it. I don’t want her upset by new examinations.”

“As you wish, Asher. You are her father. Devorah asked me today if I knew where she could purchase a Shimshon doll for Avrumel. I told her to ask your mother. There are stores all over the neighborhood that sell toys and dolls. This is, thank God, a neighborhood filled with children. Where did you get a Shimshon doll?”

“John Dorman got it for Avrumel in a store in Nice. Avrumel thinks he was born with it.”

“John Dorman is the writer who lives next to you?”

“You met him. We were over at his house the last time you were in Saint-Paul. A man in his seventies, reddish face, white hair.”

“The man who drinks.”

“He has a drinking problem, yes. The novel he published in the late thirties is a classic.”

“You told me he no longer writes.”

“He writes, but he doesn’t publish.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. He says he lost his beginnings. His first world, he calls it. He lost his first world. Also, he was with the Communist Party for a while, and left when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler.”

“I remember we talked about communism. He seemed to me a lonely man, a person without a community.” He paused a moment, looking at me. “And you, Asher? Are you all right?”

I was quiet.

He leaned toward me. “Asher?”

“There are problems.”

“What happened in Paris? Your mother and I heard about the exhibition.”

“The show sold out. But the critics hated what I did. They were … nasty.”

“Sold out? You mean everything was sold?”

“Yes.”

“How many paintings were in the exhibition?”

“Eighteen.”

There was a pause. “The critics are important, Asher?”

“The important critics are important. They tell you what you already know and are afraid to admit. I’m repeating myself, and that’s not good.”

“I know less than nothing about art, Asher, but it seems to me that Max Lobe repeats himself.”

“Max Lobe is a fine artist, but he’s not an important one. Everyone loves Max, but the critics don’t pay much attention to him. They pay a lot of attention to me because they know who my teacher was and what I’ve been doing all these years, and they’re warning me to consider where I’m going. Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m another John Dorman.”

“John Dorman is a good friend?”

“He’s a very dear friend. To me and to Devorah.”

“A drunkard is your dear friend?”

“He’s an alcoholic. He can’t help what he does.”

“Asher, an animal cannot help what it does. A human being is able to control himself if he wills it.”

“I think we’ve been through this conversation before.”

“That is God’s gift to us. It is what separates us from the animals. Our minds and our will.”

“John Dorman’s mind is pickled in alcohol, and his will isn’t strong enough for him to stop. He’s not an immoral person. He’s sick.”

“That is very sad, Asher.”

“It certainly is. It’s the great American success story.”

“Success? Where is the success? It is a tragedy.”

He shook his head and drank from his cup. The irony was lost on him. Someone once told me the Japanese have no sense of the ironic. Tell a Japanese on a rainy day that the weather is just great, and he will look at you in bewilderment. Perhaps one should not affect the ironic mode in the presence of one who has just buried a beloved brother. Was there anything in the Talmud or in Hasidic teachings on that? Do not be ironic in the presence of death. When
else, if not then? I was feeling tired and light-headed. The too-long day. Jet lag. The prints in my uncle’s home. The locked doors. The doorposts without mezuzahs. The doorways in my parents’ home had mezuzahs on them. That was the way you did it in a traditional Jewish home: you obeyed the biblical commandment “And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.” Every door, except the door to the bathroom, had its own mezuzah, its own little case with the small rolled-up scroll of parchment bearing on one side the first two paragraphs of the “Hear O Israel” from the Book of Deuteronomy, carefully rendered by a scribe, and on the other side the Hebrew word
Shadai,
one of the sacred names of God. Devorah had bought mezuzahs for the front doors of Max Lobe’s house and John Dorman’s house, and we had all made a ceremony of putting them up. Mezuzahs are sacred; they are believed to possess power. Some years ago, after a bus disaster in Israel, one of the Hasidic Rebbes in Brooklyn announced that children had been killed because the mezuzahs in their town had not been checked in a long time and some were probably spoiled, the writing worn after too many years. The acrimony, the verbal attacks against that Rebbe by so many other Jews, that had followed that announcement! But the Rebbe had stood by his statement. And now, two doors without mezuzahs in my uncle’s home. Did my father know?

“I like the art Uncle Yitzchok has in his house.”

“Art?”

“Bak, Agam, Ardon, Moreh. All the others. Very nice. I had no idea Uncle Yitzchok was interested in art.”

“He was interested,” my father said, looking down at his cup and indicating by his tone that he himself was not at all interested in talking about it. He had not the vaguest notion about art. He was a graduate of Brooklyn College, where he had majored in political science, had a master’s degree in political science from New York University, read widely, subscribed to magazines and journals—the house was strewn with current and back issues of the
New York Review of Books, Commentary, National Review, Time,
the
New Republic, Foreign Affairs, France Today, Soviet Life,
and other, more technical publications in his field. A sophisticated man—yet blind to the world of art: Greek, Roman, African, Asian,
Christian, secular, Jewish; it made little difference to him. The boundary of his artistic appreciation was the kitsch of a calendar scene: Abraham at the Covenant; Isaac on the altar about to be slaughtered; Moses at the parting of the sea; Miriam and the women dancing; Moses on Mount Sinai. The vast, rich, nuanced, exhilarating, disturbing, iconoclastic world of modern and contemporary art was locked to him.

“I read an article on Picasso a little while ago,” he said now, looking up from his cup of coffee. “He was not a nice man.”

“That’s right, he certainly wasn’t a nice man.”

“You admire Picasso?”

“Do we admire Maimonides? It’ll take the world of art three hundred years to absorb the work of Picasso.”

He was shocked. “You compare Picasso to Maimonides?”

“Niceness and greatness are two very different qualities.”

“Not in Yiddishkeit, Asher. Not among Hasidim. What a person does is what he is.”

“Not in art.”

“A man can be a murderer and still be regarded as a great artist?”

“A man can be a good doctor and not be nice.”

“Would you put Rocheleh into the hands of a physician who is a cruel person? You live in a world where a man like Picasso is your king. What a strange world you are in, Asher.”

“Picasso has been dead for fifteen years. No one is king in art today.”

“It is not a world I thought my son would belong to.”

He lapsed into silence. We sat quietly. He stared a long time into his cup. Then he looked at me and shook his head. “I am sorry, Asher. I spoke out of anger. This is a difficult time for me. My brother’s death. I cannot reconcile myself to it.”

I was quiet.

“So much depended upon him. He was my—my support. His sons are not as generous as he was. Especially Yonkel. Very angry and very greedy.”

“If the Rebbe tells him—”

“The Rebbe is old, Asher. The Rebbe is tired. Not everyone listens all the time to the Rebbe.”

I scared at him.

“There are times,” he murmured, “when I think that—” He stopped and took a deep breath and shook himself. He looked wearily around the room, blinking. The kitchen gleamed. Hidden sources of energy fed its appliances: the refrigerator, the two ovens, the microwave, the two dishwashers. “Enough,” he said. “That is the work of the sitra achra. It enters you and wants you to wallow in sadness and self-pity so your work cannot be done. Enough. All will be well, with the help of God. Yes, Asher? All will be well.”

He fell silent. The refrigerator hummed into life, its soft pulsing filling the kitchen.

“Asher, you are certain you cannot remain for a while after the week of mourning?” It seemed an effort on his part to ask that: entreaty was for him an utterly uncharacteristic act.

“I have to be in Paris next week. I promised Max I would work with him on a print.”

“You cannot change the appointment?”

“Printers are involved. We’ve reserved time and a press. Max says he needs my help. It has to do with a new process he wants me to teach him.”

“You will teach Max Lobe? He is fifteen years older than you.”

“I learned the technique from Jacob Kahn. It’s a complicated process.”

“You have been with us only once in twenty years, Asher.”

The phone call returned frighteningly to mind. That cold hollow satanic voice. “I have my own life now,” I said.

“All right, Asher. As you wish.”

The refrigerator hummed in the brittle silence.

There were footsteps in the hallway. My mother entered the kitchen, wearing a pale-blue housecoat. From beneath the edges of her yellow kerchief protruded an occasional curl of her short-cropped silver hair.

“Forgive me for interrupting. I came in for a cup of coffee.”

“Rivkeh, Avrumel forgot his Shimshon doll in Saint-Paul. Asher wants to know if there is anyplace nearby where we can get him a new one,” my father said.

“I already told Devorah about a store on Kingston Avenue. We will go there tomorrow.”