The Gift of Asher Lev (8 page)

I sat between my father and Cousin Nahum. My two women cousins looked uncomfortable with me in the room. The table, large and round, was arrayed with smoked fishes, bagels, cream cheese, fruit juice, coffee.

“How are you, Asher?” Cousin Nahum asked. “We haven’t had a chance to talk.”

“Asher, have something to eat,” my aunt said gently.

“How’s the paint business?” Cousin Yonkel asked. He was younger, taller, and thinner than his brother, had an untrimmed dark beard, an angry mouth, and glittering dark eyes that had long ago found the answers to the world’s difficult questions.

“Yonkel, it’s too early in the morning for your jokes,” Cousin Nahum said.

“Did you hear the Jackie Mason line?” Cousin Yonkel said. “It took Michelangelo twenty years to paint the Sistine ceiling. Did you know that? Twenty years. Jackie Mason says his brother-in-law could do it in two days.”

“Yonkel,” one of the sisters said. “This is not a good time for jokes.”

“It’s a funny line,” Yonkel said.

“Yonkel,” my father said quietly.

That stopped him. He gazed down at the table and ate in silence.

“We read about the exhibition in Paris,” Cousin Nahum said.

I looked at him and did not respond.

“We may not like what you paint, Asher, but we also don’t like it when you’re hurt.”

“Speak for yourself,” Cousin Yonkel said.

“Yonkel,” Aunt Leah said. “For your father’s sake, let there be peace.”

Yonkel lapsed back into dour silence.

“Asher,” Cousin Nahum said. “Can you stick around awhile?”

“Sure.”

“I want to show you something.”

I saw Cousin Yonkel raise his eyes and stare at his brother. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s not your affair,” Nahum said.

“What do you mean, it’s not my affair. Are you the only son in this family?”

Cousin Nahum looked at my aunt. “Mama?”

“In this matter, Nahum decides,” Aunt Leah said. “That was the wish of your father.”

I looked around the table. It was clear to me that I was the only one there who did not understand what was happening.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Finish your breakfast,” my father said quietly. “Nahum will explain it to you later.”

“All I want to do is show you something,” Cousin Nahum said.

“Asher, how are the children?” Aunt Leah asked.

“They’re fine. Avrumel is running a little fever.”

“Rocheleh starts in our yeshiva today,” my father said.

“Really?” my aunt said. “What a good idea!”

“It was Rivkeh’s idea,” said my father.

“Bring them over later, Asher,” said my aunt.

“She is a very smart girl, our Rocheleh,” my father said. “Her English is excellent.”

“How can a child of Asher Lev’s not be smart?” Cousin Yonkel said.

“For God’s sake, Yonkel,” Cousin Nahum said. “Asher is a guest in our house. How often do we see him? Ease up a little on the sunny disposition.”

Cousin Yonkel returned to his gloomy silence and his food.

We finished breakfast and quietly said the Grace After Meals. My aunt and her daughters began to clear the table. My father and Cousin Yonkel returned to the living room.

“Asher, come upstairs with me,” Cousin Nahum said.

I followed him through the dining room and the hallway and up the stairs. He walked slowly and seemed to have difficulty breathing, and I wondered if he might have something wrong with his heart. One flight of carpeted stairs, and he was wheezing and sweating. It occurred to me that I didn’t know where he lived. A private house? An apartment? I didn’t know where any of my four cousins lived. I had never even met their wives, husbands, or children.

I followed him along the second-floor hallway to the door of my uncle’s study. He fished in his pocket, brought out a key ring, selected a key, and opened the door.

“My father said you’d appreciate this.”

We stepped inside. The door closed smoothly and soundlessly behind us.

I had been in my uncle’s study many times when I lived in this house. Now I could barely make out the furniture and the walls for the dimness. Heavy drapes lay across the windows. The air in the room was fresh. I heard a faint humming sound as from some muffled machine.

“I’ll get the drapes,” Cousin Nahum said, and crossed the room to the windows.

Morning sunlight entered the room as the drapes were slid aside. The room was entirely different now from when I was last inside it, more than twenty years before. I saw an ornately carved desk, a tall-backed dark leather chair, a dark leather recliner, a lavish Oriental carpet with a floral and bestiary design, a large dark wood door near the door to the room, and, on the dark-paneled walls—
paintings.
Three large paintings. The easily recognizable styles leaped out at me. I felt myself stunned by the shock of their utterly unaccountable presence in this house.

“My God!” I heard myself say.

On the walls were a Matisse landscape of the south of France done nearly in the full spectrum of Matisse’s palette: cadmium red, purple red, emerald green, Prussian blue, cobalt blue, ultramarine, cadmium yellow, ochre, burnt sienna, black, zinc white; a Cézanne oil on canvas of Mont Sainte Victoire seen through and over a line of tall leaning cypresses; and a shimmering Renoir of a garden made when he lived in Cagnes, a few kilometers from my home.

I was finding it difficult to breathe.

“Neat, eh?” Cousin Nahum said. “You like them?”

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing here.”

“Yonkel hates them.”

“Yonkel is a barbarian.”

“He thinks in this matter Papa was the barbarian.”

“These are magnificent paintings.”

“I’ll tell you the truth: I don’t know anything about art. To me it’s all the same, this painting, that painting. Someone told Papa that art was a good investment, so he invested in it like he invested in stocks.”

“Who advised him?”

“A dealer from Chicago. A Ladover sympathizer. He knew my grandfather, Mama’s father, may he rest in peace.”

“Smart man.”

“Who? The dealer? Papa?”

“Both.”

“They’re worth a lot of money?”

“Money! There are great human souls in those paintings.”

He gazed at the walls. “I see souls in Torah and in the commandments, not in paintings. Are they worth money, Asher?”

“Are you serious? There’s a fortune on those walls.”

“There is? Well, that may make Yonkel a little happier. I don’t know the first thing about it. It reminds me of a friend of mine, not a Ladover but an observer of the commandments, who collects rare wine, even though we’re forbidden to drink goyishe wine. I asked him once why he collects wine that he can’t drink, and he told me it was for an investment. Wine for an investment! Can you believe it? I don’t understand it. Wait a minute. I’ll show you something else. Come on.”

He drew the drapes and led me back into the hallway and locked the door. “You’ll remember this. It’s where you worked when you lived with us.”

I followed him to the doorway that led to the attic. He opened it with a different key from the one he had used on the door to the study. The narrow stairway led up into deep shadows. He flicked a switch on a panel just inside the door, and a burst of light flooded the stairs and the area overhead. The wooden stairs, raw and
scarred when I had worked there, were now thickly carpeted.
I
followed him up into the attic.

The air was cool and fresh. When I had worked there, the attic, redolent of my oil paints, was often sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter. The room, nearly as large as the entire expanse of the house, had been bare, its wooden floor naked, its ceiling beams exposed, its single tall window facing the trees on the street outside and always open to the light. Now the floor was covered with rich carpeting; heavy drapes concealed the window; and along the walls were deep floor-to-ceiling metal racks filled with canvases, drawings, and prints.

Cousin Nahum pulled out drawings and held them to the light. He showed me a harlequin drawing by Picasso, dated
1919;
a drawing of Virginia Haggard by Chagall, with his signature—”Marc”—under the words
Pour Virginia mon amour,
and dated Vence,
1952;
a painting by Magritte of a man gazing at an image of himself in the forehead of another man, whose features were identical to those of the first man; drawings and canvases by Chirico, Bonnard, Modigliani, Soutine. I watched him return a Soutine canvas to the rack, and then I asked him if he would let me look through the racks by myself, and he said sure, but we would have to go down soon, people would be coming into the house. In one of the racks I found oil paintings and prints by Reuven Rubin, Raphael Soyer, Bergner, Bak, Ardon, Bezem, Theo Tobiasse, Ben Shahn. In another were drawings and lithographs by modern masters; there was one by Picasso of a
Guernica
study that I had not known existed. A third rack was entirely filled with my own work—oils, drawings, pastels, prints. I went through that collection very quickly—Cousin Nahum was becoming impatient—and noticed that my uncle had acquired a copy of my first carborundum print, the one I had made in Paris with the help of Jacob Kahn during one of the early years of my exile. His copy was numbered 7
/20.
All the copies of that print were in museums and private collections; none had entered the market in over ten years.

I saw no nudes anywhere in Uncle Yitzchok’s collection.

Cousin Nahum was telling me there would be other times for me to look at the art; we had to go back downstairs. I followed him down the narrow staircase. He turned off the lights and locked the
door. We went down to a living room crowded with dark-garbed men and kerchiefed women.

That was a long and wearying day, that first full day of mourning. I sat in the living room listening to Torah discussions and praise of my uncle and chatter about this one’s illness and that one’s children and sober talk about security problems in the neighborhood and the rash of recent street violence. A small crowd had gathered around my father, who listened and responded, and I noticed how silent people became when he spoke, how they leaned forward to catch his words. There was a soft electric intensity to his rhythmed speech, to the slight nasalities that accompanied some of his words, to the way his nostrils flared on occasion and his lips worked. Even seated he looked taller than anyone else in that room.

People seemed to be coming from everywhere. My mother’s sister, Aunt Leah Chayah, who had been unable to attend the funeral because her husband had undergone bypass surgery the day before, flew in from Boston. She was a short, robust woman in her late sixties or early seventies. Yes, the surgery was successful. The miracles they can do today. We have to thank the Master of the Universe. She sat quivering and talking to my father and to my uncle’s family. My mother was teaching a class at the university and would come in the late afternoon. There were people from Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Miami, Albany, Tucson, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle. I met the art dealer who had helped my uncle put together his collection, a cheerful, round-faced man named Abraham Vorman, who wore a pale-blue suit, pink shirt, light-green tie, earth-brown shoes, and a dark-red Alpine hat with a yellow feather in its band. I wondered who advised him on his clothes: he looked like a Fauvist painting. “Honored, Mr. Lev. Truly honored. Too bad for me you have a dealer, or we could talk serious business. Douglas Schaeffer treats you well? Ah, too bad. Anytime you are looking for greener fields, anytime.”

The head of the Ladover movement on the West Coast showed up and was introduced to me by Cousin Nahum. “Rav Yosef Kroner. Asher Lev.” He was a short, intense, dark-visaged, dark-bearded man about my age, with darkly gleaming eyes and a frosty
smile. “You are Asher Lev? The trouble you make for us!” Later, I saw him talking in the hallway to a group of younger Ladover men and heard him utter the words
meridoh bemalchus
—a term meaning “rebellion against the kingdom”—spitting them out with a venomous anger that left me chilled even though I had no idea what he was talking about.

The front door opened, and in came Shaul Lasker, who was head of the Ladover yeshiva in Paris. Short, chunky, jovial, his brown beard going gray. He greeted me somberly. “A tragic loss, for you, for all of us. Without your uncle there would be no yeshiva in Paris, nothing in Milan or Nice.” Wasn’t I supposed to be in Paris next week? Yes, working on a print with Max Lobe. He remembered Max Lobe. The artist, Devorah’s cousin, the one who had introduced me to Devorah. He and Devorah had spent the last two years of the war in a sealed apartment in Paris, hiding from the police. Yes, he remembered Max Lobe. “Call me when you get to Paris, Asher.” He went over to my father, and my father saw him, and I saw Shaul Lasker bow slightly to my father and sit down next to him.

During the Afternoon Service, the ninety-two-year-old man sat far away from me; in his place sat a scraggly-bearded young man, who murmured a brief word of consolation and was otherwise silent.

My mother arrived and began to prepare supper. The house emptied of visitors. My father sat reading the Book of Job. For a while I studied some passages in one of the works written by the Rebbe’s grandfather, which were in my uncle’s collection of sacred books in the bookcase near the entrance to the living room. I put the book back on the shelf, scanned the titles, and took down another book by the Rebbe’s grandfather, a volume on riddles. It was written in Hebrew, as was the previous book I had looked at, and the opening words caught my eye:

Even the most unlearned of men knows that the truly important matters of life are those for which we have no words. Yet we must speak of them. We speak, as it were, around them, under them, through them, but not directly of them. Perhaps the Master of the Universe thought it best not to give us those words, for
to possess them is to comprehend the awesome mysteries of creation and death, and such comprehension might well make life impossible for us. Hence in His infinite wisdom and compassion the Master of the Universe gave us the obscure riddle rather than the revealing word. Thus we should give thanks to Him and bless His name.