The Gift of Asher Lev

by Chaim Potok

  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.

  I leafed through the book. It was a thin volume, printed on rag paper in small print around the turn of the century in the Russian town of Ladov, the original seat of the Ladover Hasidim. I read some of the riddles. “One I don’t know, the second I don’t see, the third I don’t remember: death, age, and birth. You are in me, and I am in you: the soul. Faceless in a face mask: riddle.” I read on for a while, but the ideas began to become very complex, and I lost the chain of thought and put the book away. Then Devorah came over with the children. Avrumel showed me his new Shimshon doll, and I gave it a big hug. He seemed a bit wary of it, treating it more as a new acquaintance than as an old friend. We all sat around the dining-room table, eating supper. I kept looking at the painting I had made of my uncle’s family and thinking of the paintings in the study and the attic. Aunt Leah, delighted by the children, asked Rocheleh to describe her first day in the yeshiva. Rocheleh studied her for a moment and then delivered, in her French-accented English, a detailed and lengthy account of her school day—her reactions to her teachers, her classmates, her subjects. Aunt Leah was charmed. My parents beamed.

  “Never ask Rocheleh a question unless you really want the whole answer,” I said. “Avrumel, on the other hand, is a very different proposition. How are you feeling, my son?”

  “Ça va, Papa,” Avrumel said, his lisp somewhat aggravated by this company of strangers. “Walk with Papa?”

  “Get well and we’ll go for a walk.”

  “Avrumel is cured,” Devorah said.

  “What did he have?”

  “The most common malady known to man. Fever.”

  Later that night, I walked with my father along the stretch of cement that separated the two homes. The air was cold. I asked him if he knew about Uncle Yitzchok’s art collection.

  “Of course I knew.” There was an edge to his voice. “The yeshivas my brother helped me build are more important than the art he collected. The money should have gone to us rather than to his fancy Chicago art dealer. It is a mystery to me, the money and energy he put into that collection.”

  Rocheleh was asleep when we came into the house, but Avrumel was bouncing on his bed. “He’s waiting for Godot,” Devorah said wearily.

  I kissed him and covered him with his blanket and listened to him lisp his way through the Krias Shema. The new Shimshon doll lay on the pillow next to his head.

  “Walk with Papa?” he said, half asleep.

  “Tomorrow when you come back from school.”

  “Thchool,” he said, his tongue working.

  “School,” I said. “School.”

  In our room, lying in her bed, the lights on, Devorah said, sleepily, “I will ask you if anything interesting happened today, but only if you promise not to become angry when I fall asleep in the middle of your answer.”

  “Let’s both fall asleep.” I was getting out of my clothes. “What did you do today?”

  “Today was Avrumel day. In the morning we went on an expedition for a Shimshon doll, and after lunch he slept and I read a book of poetry I found in your mother’s library. Good poetry. Browning. ‘The Melon-Seller’ and things like that.”

  “That must have been nice.”

  “It was very nice. Until I remembered a story Max once told me about a place called the Island of Poetry. One of the many stories he told me during the two years in the apartment. The Island of Poetry. All these years I forgot it, and I remembered it today.”

  “What’s the Island of Poetry?”

  “Its people dream a lot and don’t talk very much. They conceive their infants in their heads and give birth to their children through their fingers. Yes, their fingers. Many of the children are monsters, but the people don’t cast them away; they feed them with a special nourishing meat called ‘esteem.’ When one of the islanders dies, he is embalmed. Trumpets are blown at his funeral. There is no politics on the island. The people spend all their time wandering like lonely clouds along the shore, watching the waves, or sitting near streams, writing poetry. That is the Island of Poetry. I am very sleepy—but, see, I am still awake. Was it terribly boring? You shouldn’t ask me a question, Asher, unless you are prepared for the whole answer.”

  “Max Lobe told you that story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did he get it from?”

  “I don’t know. A book, I suppose. Wasn’t it strange that I remembered it today? Oh, I am falling asleep.”

  “Good night, Dev. When We get back, we ought to do something about Avrumel’s lisp.”

  “Your mother told me you used to lisp.”

  “Really? I don’t remember that.”

  “Nobody remembers lisping. Do you remember wetting your bed?”

  “Remember to remind me to tell you about my uncle’s art collection.”

  “God is merciful in what He sometimes lets us forget.”

  The apartment has been dark forever in the past, and I know it will remain dark for all the future. The people in it are asleep: some snore; one moans. An icy wind strikes the closed shutters. Outside, the cobblestone street is empty of pedestrians and traffic; only the occasional sounds of steel-jacketed boots echo through the darkness. From the cold plaster wall, as I put my ear to it, comes the cry of an infant, muffled, rising and falling and rising again, a distant stridency—suddenly gone. The wooden floor is cold and hard, and when I put my ear to it, it makes strange sounds, an eerie sighing, a groaning, as if it can no longer bear our weight. Water rushes through pipes; a bedspring creaks; a woman softly laughs. Barely the dimmest of light comes through the shutters when the sun rises; by it, Max sits against the wall of the living room, drawing, and I lie on the floor, dreaming of skies and clouds and the soaring of birds and the orange-red trumpet vines on the side wall of the country house I once saw in a picture. On cloudy days no light at all comes through the shutters, and we barely know when to eat and when to sleep. Sometimes my body is so heavy I am turned to stone; sometimes I am so thin and light I am able to slip thro
ugh the slits of the shutters and float about outside on the wind high above the stolen streets. But I know that I will be in this room for all my life and beyond, forever and ever and ever, and beyond even that. I know that with absolute certainty. Knowing it, knowing it fully, and feeling and tasting that cold knowing of it, absolutely and fully, I climb steeply from the dream and lie staring into the light of the room I share with Devorah in my parents’ home.

  The house is silent.

  Devorah is asleep in her bed, her face tranquil in the light of the lamp on the night table. I listen to the soft snifflings and gurglings of the air that passes in and out of her nostrils. She lies on her right side, facing me, her hands under her cheek, her short hair curling out from the pillow beneath her head. All the tender suffering softness of her beneath the blanket and sheet on the bed.

  I have dreamed that dream before, the dream of Devorah’s life in Paris during the war. I have never painted it; it is not my life or my dream. It happens on occasion when you are married a long time: you dream the nightmares of the person you love.

  The morning was cold. A steady rain fell through the trees. Cars moved cautiously along the dark street, headlights on and wipers working. On the way to my uncle’s house I asked my father if the Rebbe would visit during the week of mourning.

  “The Rebbe rarely goes out.”

  “He came out for the funeral.”

  “A tribute to my brother. The Rebbe goes out on a Shabbos sometimes. The holidays.”

  “Does anyone ever talk about the future?”

  “That is ail we ever talk about, Asher.”

  “I mean the future after the Rebbe.”

  His face emptied of expression, locked. I felt the sudden icy silence that surrounded him. After a brief moment, he said, “We do not talk about such matters, Asher. The Rebbe expects that any day the final redemption will come.”

  “The Rebbe has no children.”

  Again, the locking out of expression, the iciness, as if I were treading on forbidden ground. “That is what I mean, Asher. Would God leave the Rebbe without children unless the final redemption was certain? The final redemption will come in the Rebbe’s time. An end to the exile. An end to suffering for all our people and for all the world. Any day now, Asher. The Rebbe is certain of it. That is the reason we work the way we do. Everything we do, every Jew we bring close to Torah, brings the redemption closer to us. We do not talk about after. There is no after.”

  His voice was low, tense; the voice of certainty, finality, faith. We walked through the rain to my uncle’s house.

  Inside, two dozen men had already assembled for the Morning Service. Shaul Lasker of Paris and Yosef Kroner of the West Coast were there, in tallis and tefillin. Many more regional directors and heads of Ladover yeshivas would be arriving today and tomorrow, my father had told me. The regard all had for my uncle; the honor they now paid him. It had been decided that all would remain through the weekend, for meetings with my father and the Rebbe after the week of mourning came to an end. They had plenty to talk about: budgets; fund-raising; where to open new yeshivas; which universities should be targeted for future Ladover campus houses; what regions in the world needed circumcisers and ritual slaughterers; the implications of glasnost for the Ladover Hasidim in the Soviet Union.

  Cousin Yonkel led the service in a manner so dull and dry the words seemed to be coming from him after a lengthy journey through a barren wilderness. How had my cheerful Uncle Yitzchok raised so arid a soul as my Cousin Yonkel? Another riddle.

  Yosef Kroner sauntered over to me after the service. Close up, his beaked and surly features gave him the appearance of what I have always imagined to be the look of those birds of prey the Torah forbids us to eat.

  “Good morning, Lev.”

  “Good morning.”

  “You are well known on the West Coast. People write about you and talk about you. A producer told me recently he is considering making a movie of your life.”

  “I’m not dead yet. Why would he want to make a movie of my life?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he thinks it’s interesting and people will pay money to see it.”

  I put my folded tallis into its velvet bag. The tallis had been my father’s gift to me when I married Devorah. Its silver edging became caught in the zipper, and I had to move the zipper back and forth a few times to work it loose.

  “On the West Coast people wonder if you are still a Ladover Hasid.”

  I looked at him and did not respond.

  “People keep asking me, ‘Is Asher Lev really a Ladover?’”

  “And what do you tell them?”

  “I tell them that as far as I know he still is. That confuses them, because they know what you paint.”

  “I regret the confusion.”

  “It’s nice to be an artist and not have to worry about what people think.”

  “That’s right. That’s why I became an artist. So I wouldn’t have to worry about what people think. You hit the nail right on the head, Kroner.”

  “It isn’t funny, Lev. You don’t have to live with it day after day. It’s an embarrassment.”

  “I regret the embarrassment. And I am not being funny. I genuinely regret it.”

  He stared at me for a moment out of wary, distrustful eyes, then turned abruptly and walked away.

  I went into the kitchen. My aunt had not come down for the service; she was not feeling well. We sat around the table, eating in silence, my father gazing through the window at the rain falling on the ailanthus and azaleas on the rear lawn. Wisps of mist curled across the low bushes and young spring grass. I thought of the garden in the Renoir painting on the wall in my uncle’s study, the lavish and sensuous play of luxuriant colors, soft, so soft, as if brushed on by feathers, like the creamy pinks and whites on the breasts and thighs and buttocks of his nudes; brushing them and brushing them, feeling them upon his fingertips through the bristles and the wood, the copious and sumptuous softness of them, the—

  Someone was talking to me. “Hello, Asher. Hello! Where are you?”

  “Asher goes off like that sometimes,” I heard my father say, as if from a distance. “You have to get used to it.”

  “With all due respect, I’m only his cousin.” It was Yonkel talking. “I don’t have to get used to it. Asher, are you there?”

  I drew painfully back from the Renoir.

  “What do you think of Papa’s art collection?” His sour look and crabby tone made what he thought of it exceedingly clear.

  “It’s a magnificent collection, Yonkel. Actually, it’s three collections. The Jewish work, the modern masters, and my own work. Very cleverly done.”

  “You want to know what I think? I think it’s a desecration of the name of God.”

  “Oh, stop it, Yonkel,” Cousin Nahum said. “What do you know about it?”

  “And you? You know a lot about art?”

  “I know at least to ask questions.”

  “I don’t need to ask questions about art. I say that it’s an outright desecration of the name of God. It’s idol worship, that’s what it is!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Yonkel! Enough!”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Let me talk my mind! This is family. If a man can’t talk among his own family, where then? Tell me. Where?”

  “Let Yonkel talk, Nahum,” my father said.

  “For years I couldn’t sleep in this house because of that collection. Images and idols in my house. I can’t sleep now. I lie awake thinking of those pictures.”

  “It’s art,” I said. “It’s not Satan or the Angel of Death.”

  “That goyishe art in this house!”

  “A lot of it is by Jews.”

  “Goyishe Jews! Including your own stuff, Asher, if I may say it. That’s how I feel! I’m sorry. It comes from my heart.” His lips trembled inside the blackness of his beard. “A spirit must have entered my father when he decided to buy such things.”

  My father’s face darkened.
But he remained silent.

  “I promise you this,” Cousin Yonkel said. “The first chance we get, we will sell it.”

  No one around the table—neither his brother, nor his sisters, nor my father—said anything.

  “My father was a kind man,” Cousin Yonkel said. “A good man. I loved him. But in this matter, he was wrong.”

  He rose from the table and shuffled in his slippered feet out through the dining room and into the hallway, angry, bowed, carrying on his narrow shoulders all the melancholy my cheerful uncle had tried all his life to stave off.

  I asked Cousin Nahum if he would mind my going upstairs to have another look at the collection.

  “Why should I mind? If you can’t look at it, who can? Take the keys.”

  I went up the stairs and along the second-floor hallway. The door to Cousin Yonkel’s room was partly open, and I saw him lying on his bed in his stockinged feet, his hand over his eyes, his long dark beard spread upon his thin chest. I thought I heard him reciting quietly verses from the Book of Psalms—no doubt to ward off the evil spirits he felt were emanating from his father’s art collection.

  Quietly, I opened the door to my uncle’s study, stepped inside, and closed the door behind me. I had noticed, the day before, the panel with two mercury switches near the door. They glowed softly in the darkness. I flipped one of the switches and nothing happened. I flipped the other. Ceiling spotlights fell upon the three large paintings on the walls. The colors glowed, luminous, breathing. I stood there and stared at the paintings. Then I noticed thin ribbons of light leaking through the edges of the large door near the door to the study. I tried the knob; it was locked. One of the keys on the ring Cousin Nahum had given me opened it.

  I stepped into a large storeroom lined with shelves. The air was cool, faintly musty; the air of library stacks. One of the shelves contained orderly piles of magazines, art journals in English and French, and art newsletters. There was a ragged pile of announcements and invitations to openings of exhibitions I had had over the years, in New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Geneva, Brussels, Venice, Nice, Rome, Tel Aviv, Berlin. Along the other shelves were dozens of cardboard boxes, neatly arranged and labeled. I opened two of them and hastily went through their contents: articles in English and French on some of the works I had seen yesterday in my uncle’s collection; a study of Cézanne’s evolving style; an account of some of the major works by Matisse and where they belonged in the body of his oeuvre. There was a lengthy article in French on facture and passage. Another was a study of Picasso’s early contributions to texturing. Articles in English and French dealt with Chagall, Renoir, Bonnard. A monograph in English compared the crucifixion paintings of Asher Lev, Brooklyn Crucifixion I and Brooklyn Crucifixion II, with the White Crucifixion of Chagall. In the box with the article on Picasso’s use of texturing was a lengthy description, taken from a French art magazine, of the carborundum printmaking technique used by Jacob Kahn and his protégé, Asher Lev. Under that was a description of a drawing made by Picasso when he was twenty-five: a crucifixion.