The Gift of Asher Lev

by Chaim Potok

  At the Restaurant Voltaire I turn right and walk parallel to the river, past elegant old apartment houses and the terraces of cafés. There are many people on the streets, and the cafés are crowded. I cross the river on the Pont des Arts, the long buildings of the Louvre to my left. Hot, water-scented winds blow across the dark-surfaced river. I turn left and walk on slowly and go past the Pont Royal. From time to time I stop to gaze over the stone parapet at the river walk below, with its occasional strollers and lovers and the houseboats moored for the night. Along its banks the river is scummy with a greenish-brown detritus of waterlogged scraps of paper, bottles, crushed cigarette packs, plastic containers. It is nearly dark when I start across the Pont de la Concorde and notice the gendarme standing alone in the middle of the bridge.

  Armed with a machine pistol, wearing the peaked cap, with the dark-blue trousers of his uniform smartly rolled over the tops of his polished boots, he seems more sculpture than man, a modern equivalent of the equestrian statue of Henri IV near the Pont Neuf. As I walk past him, a light spattering of rain sweeps suddenly across the bridge. A second gendarme stands at the end of the bridge. I turn into the Quai Anatole France and see three others. They are all armed with machine pistols, and they stand very still, like statuary resonant with contained violence. The words of the Rebbe in his office that night. What? All around us is chaos, the world needs a center. Across the road from the bridge, the stone façade of a huge building is bathed in soft amber light and bears the words ASSEMBLEE NATIONALE.

  The light rain ends, leaving a film of water on the street. I walk beneath the trees to the Pont Royal and cross to the Quai Voltaire. There are few pedestrians and automobiles now on this street. I sense someone behind me. I walk on, and there is still someone behind me. I hear a low, sustained whistling, and I turn and see a short, stocky, bald-headed man in a sweatshirt and baggy trousers and sandals. He steps smoothly into the shadows of a tree and is gone.

  An emblazoned tourist boat appears suddenly on the river, its cyclopean prow light and upper-deck halogens cutting huge swaths of light out of the night. A blare of musical instruments, horns of some kind, rises from somewhere on the street. It stops, then begins again, horns climbing in unison to a crescendo, as if heralding the advent of royalty. Half a dozen people have stopped at the parapet near the Pont Royal, and I go over and look down.

  Along the river, on a stone bank that looks like an ancient quai, stand five men and two women. A flight of stone stairs leads from the street to the quai. The river runs dark and silent alongside the stones. Stairs and quai are lit by electric lamps. The men and women stand in a semicircle in the light, holding large curved antique-looking trumpets. They put the trumpets to their lips, and once again a resonating flourish of ascending horn tones rises from the quai and ends abruptly on a sustained high note. It seems a rehearsal for some medieval pageant. I wonder what contemporary personage merits such a greeting and in what sort of craft he or she will arrive at the quai.

  The Pont Royal affords a clearer view of the quai than the parapet along the street. I walk onto the bridge and stand at the stone railing and gaze down at the musicians. They stand inside their circle of light, and the river and the night run dark all around them. I feel the presence of someone behind me, and I turn but see no one.

  Light-spangled tourist boats glide beneath the bridge. The left bank is dark in the distance and lighted to high noon where the boats turn their floodlights upon the stone façades of the seventeenth-century apartment houses and the awnings of elegant restaurants and hotels. I search for certain windows in the whitestone building over the Restaurant Voltaire where Jacob Kahn lived before moving to the south of France. I imagine him standing there, looking out at the river and the Louvre. Over the right bank, river birds wheel in and out of the darkness, wings flashing silvery white in the boat lights. Distant streaks of lightning play over the city, splintering the darkness and flickering through the undersides of swollen clouds. A fine rain begins to fall. On the quai below, the trumpet players stand looking up at the sky. Tourist boats keep gliding along the water beneath me. I walk off the bridge and go past the Restaurant Voltaire and along the Rue de Beaune.

  The street is dark and deserted. The rain begins to fall hard. All along the narrow street, doorways are closed and shops and restaurants are shuttered. There are no lowered awnings or open courtyards. All is sealed to the outside. I walk quickly in the rain, and then the rain is suddenly torrential, and I run in the dark through the pelting summer storm along streets deep with rivulets and between cars parked on the sidewalks and see the rain coursing through the gutters and falling in silvery streaks through the haloes cast by streetlamps. I enter the hotel and stand dripping in the lobby.

  The night clerk shakes his head and clicks his tongue sympathetically and hands me my key. I hear a distant clap of thunder. Inside the elevator I watch the rain drip from my clothes and shoes to form puddles at my feet.

  In my room I get out of my wet clothes, towel myself dry, and put on pajamas. From the doorway to the balcony I watch the rain. It falls into the darkly reflecting mirrors of puddles on the glistening asphalt of the street. A motorcyclist speeds past the hotel in a blare of engine noise. The city is a wonderland of lights, resplendent and jeweled. Across from the hotel, the wide dark windows of the Maeght Gallery reflect the shifting colors of the street: the changing greens and reds of traffic lights; the whites and ambers of passing automobiles; the neon signs left on for the night: a blurry kaleidoscope of wet-night colors. In a distant apartment building a dark window suddenly fills with light, and a woman begins to remove her clothes. A man appears and draws the drapes. I stand in the doorway to the balcony, looking out at the rain and the night.

  The hotel stood next to a Catholic church and seminary. Church bells woke me. The bells seemed just the other side of my walls; I could feel the bed vibrating. After a while, the bells fell silent. In the stillness of my room they seemed to go on moments longer, echoing between the walls.

  I opened the balcony doors. Chill pearl-colored mist hung in the morning air. The rain had stopped, but the streets were still wet. Tires hissed on the asphalt. Dark-gray rain clouds lay across the city, rendering rooftops and chimney pots an impressionist blur. A police siren sounded distantly, rising, falling, rising, falling, abruptly silent. I washed and dressed and put on my tallis and tefillin to pray the Morning Service.

  I prayed slowly, trying to concentrate on the words. Two mornings ago with my father and raging cousins in the Ladover synagogue in Brooklyn; now in a hotel room in Paris. A week in Paris: visit the new Picasso Museum; go to the printer to work with Max; find the widow of Lucien Lacamp; Shabbos with my father in the yeshiva. Then Saint-Paul: a week to check the house and mail and spend time with Max and John. And back to Brooklyn. Why had I let the Rebbe talk me into this? Foolish. But how spurn the order of the Rebbe? Unthinkable. As soon blaspheme the Master of the Universe. How gaunt the Rebbe’s hand had appeared jutting out of his tallis and beckoning to me, beckoning. Three will save us, the third is our future. The Spaniard was good at riddles. Most of his life he painted riddles. I was done praying. On the street a car horn blared, receded. I removed my tefillin and tallis and started from the room, when the phone rang.

  I let it ring three times, my hand on the doorknob. The ringing echoed dully inside the room. I closed the door, went to the desk, and lifted the receiver.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Asher Lev?” a man’s voice said.

  “Yes.”

  “The notorious and legendary Asher Lev?”

  “Who is this?”

  “You don’t recognize my voice? It’s Shaul Lasker.”

  “Shaul!” He was the head of the Ladover yeshiva in Paris. I had seen him during the week of mourning for my uncle.

  “Sholom aleichem,” he said.

  “Aleichem sholom.”

  “How are you, Asher?”

  “All right, thank God.”

  �
�And the family?”

  “Thank God.”

  “Everyone is back in sunny Saint-Paul?”

  “Everyone is still in Brooklyn. The children are going to Ladover summer camps in the States.”

  “A smart move. You’re going back to Brooklyn?”

  “In a couple of weeks.”

  There was a slight pause. “You saw the Rebbe recently?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were alone with the Rebbe?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is the Rebbe?”

  “As well as can be expected, thank God.”

  “Does the Rebbe leave the house?”

  “Very rarely.”

  There was another pause. “What will be?” he asked quietly. “The Rebbe expects at any moment the final redemption.” He sighed. “Amen. You’ll be with us for Shabbos?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know your father will be here.”

  “Yes. Give my regards to your family.”

  I hung up the phone.

  The room was suddenly strangely silent. I sat there looking at the attaché case on the desk and the suitcase near the polished wood armoire and the disarray of the slept-in bed. For a long moment I felt a vague emptying sensation, and nothing in the room seemed to have anything to do with me: I was outside everything, looking. How crowded the room seemed. Its walls covered with pale-blue flowery paper. A blue carpet on the floor, a maroon easy chair in a corner. The ceiling off-white, stippled. The bed wide, the desk narrow. Against the wall across from the bed stood the antique armoire, its wood surface lacquered to a high sheen, thin cracks showing in the polish like fine hairs. On the wall over the bed, illumined by the pale light that came in through the balcony doors, hung a splendid reproduction of Women Bathing by Fragonard: the meticulous play of washes and impasto; the deliberate eroticism of the bare buttocks facing the viewer. I sat at the desk awhile, looking at the painting, then went out of the room.

  The elevator brought me down to the lobby. There were fresh flowers in the vase on the coffee table near the sofa: red, yellow, and blue petals in a field of lacy ferns. The clerk nodded to me as I left my key on the counter. I drank a glass of orange juice in the small restaurant bar and went out of the hotel.

  The morning was cool and gray. I walked toward the Métro. About fifty feet beyond the hotel, an old woman lay asleep on a stoop on the street. She wore a pale-blue cotton kerchief, a dark-red windbreaker, and navy-blue pants. The soles of her bare feet were blackened; her ankles were swollen. She slept on her left side, her sunken face turned toward the sidewalk, hands tucked under her cheek, knees drawn up. People went by and averted their gaze. I could see them looking at her and not seeing her. I stood there a long moment. The shriveled face. Like the Indian woman I had once drawn on the reservation in South Dakota. I went on past her toward the Métro.

  Graffiti scarred the walls of the Rue de Bac station: echoes of the recent national election. MITTERRAND DEHORS. The train rolled in smoothly with its startling absence of metal-on-metal noise. Inside the car, graffiti soiled the posters and direction maps: swirls of reds and blacks. The train was not crowded. It started up and was immediately inside the tunnel.

  Following the directions given me by the hotel concierge, I took the Balard line to the Concorde station, changed for a Château de Vincennes train, and got off at Bastille. I climbed up the stone stairs of the Bastille station and emerged into a boulevard of torn pavement, towering construction cranes, and thundering jackhammers. Crowds of pedestrians clogged the sidewalks; cars and buses jammed the streets. A reeking fog of diesel and gasoline fumes lay upon the boulevard. The air was heavy with impending rain. I looked around for street signs, crossed the boulevard, walked a block, and was lost.

  A smartly dressed middle-aged woman, cradling a tiny poodle in her arms, came toward me. I asked her if she knew where the Picasso Museum was. Her eyes, heavily lined and blue-shaded with makeup, stared past my head as if I were not there. She inclined her head slightly and murmured something to the poodle, caressing it with her free hand, and I smelled her perfume as she hurried past me.

  I stepped into a café. The chairs were on the tables, and a man was sweeping the floor. Two waiters stood against a wall, smoking and talking. I asked one of them if he knew where the Picasso Museum was. He pursed his lips and looked at the other waiter, who rolled his eyes and shook his head.

  Outside on the street, a thin, dark-haired, olive-skinned man standing behind piles of newspapers and magazines in a small kiosk directed me in Arabic-accented French to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. Weaving cautiously through the traffic, I crossed a wide street. On the boulevard I went past a jackhammer crew that was shredding a sidewalk. The noise struck me like blows to the head. A light rain began to fall.

  The street was lined with old cafés and inelegant shops. I went into an optician’s store. Behind the counter stood a middle-aged man. He wore a white smock and had thick black hair and wide, kindly eyes. I asked him if he knew the location of the Picasso Museum.

  He looked surprised. “Is there truly a Picasso Museum here?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I have never heard of it. I am so very sorry.”

  I went back out onto the boulevard.

  On a corner under the awning of a café stood a gendarme. “The third street to your left,” he said. “And then you go straight straight straight to the museum. You will see it.”

  I walked quickly in the light rain, hugging the windows of shops and the awnings of cafés, counted what I thought were three streets, and turned into a narrow cobblestone street called Rue des Minimes. After two blocks it led into a wider, perpendicular street named Rue de Turenne and vanished.

  I stood in the rain looking up and down the Rue de Turenne. It was deserted.

  I was lost in Paris.

  I thought to give it up and return to the hotel. But I wanted to see the Spaniard’s collection. More than three hundred paintings and sculptures, thirty sketchbooks, eighty-odd ceramics, sixteen hundred prints, fifteen hundred drawings. The government had collected it from his heirs in place of inheritance taxes and, in 1985, had put much of it up on the walls of a restored seventeenth-century hotel for all to see. I would see it if I could find it.

  A man had suddenly appeared on the street—from where? a doorway? an alley?—and now stood in the rain, peering into the window of a clothing store. He was old and bearded and wore a dark coat and suit and a wide-brimmed dark hat. He stood gazing into the store, the brim of his hat touching the window.

  I went over to him and said in French, “Excuse me, do you by any chance know where the Picasso Museum is located?”

  He took a small shying step away from me and went on looking at the display of suits, shirts, and ties in the window.

  I looked at him a moment. He went on gazing into the window. I said to him, this time in Yiddish, “Please excuse me.”

  Slowly he turned away from the window and fixed his eyes upon me. Dark, deeply wrinkled eyes and thick gray eyebrows and pale features above the line of white beard.

  “You know perhaps where the Picasso Museum is? I was told it is in this neighborhood.”

  He looked me up and down. His eyes paused briefly on my beard. “From where does a Jew come?” he asked in Yiddish.

  “From Saint-Paul-de-Vence.”

  His dark eyes narrowed. “Originally?”

  “Originally from Brooklyn.”

  “From where in Brooklyn?”

  “Crown Heights.”

  “You are a Ladover?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is a Ladover Hasid doing in Paris looking for the Picasso Museum?”

  “It’s a long story. Do you know where it is?”

  “Go to the corner and turn left and continue walking.”

  I thanked him and went on along the street in the rain. As I neared the corner, I turned and saw him standing in front of the clothing store, still looking at me.

  The museum, a beig
e-and-graystone building, was on the corner of Rue de Thorigny and Rue Parc Royal. About a dozen tourists stood around in the broad open cobblestone courtyard. I followed signs to a wing of the building, bought a ticket, and went back through the courtyard to the main entrance.

  A tall wide marble staircase rose in a straight majestic sweep beneath an ornately decorated ceiling. On the landing at the head of the stairs, entwined garlands, naked cherubs, and robed statuary of heroic proportions stood out in relief upon creamy white walls. I entered the first of the galleries.

  The room was large and richly lit, the ceiling tall. Paintings greeted me like old friends: I had seen them so many times before, in retrospectives, in reproductions. The Spaniard at work making his magic. There was the portrait of the young girl he painted when he was fourteen. There was Casagemas, a suicide, awaiting burial, the wound to the temple startlingly bluish and ugly. So that’s where that painting had been all these decades—in his own collection! And the self-portrait painted in 1901: wide weary eyes staring from pale features glazed with misery and fatigue. He was twenty years old when he painted that: the artist gazing darkly into the mirror of his future.

  I walked slowly through the first-floor galleries and down to the galleries on the ground level and down farther into the basement. Self-portraits; Cubist paintings; constructions; an oil painting of a seated woman done in the massive style of ancient Roman statuary; two women running on a beach; two hideously distorted figures engaged in the act of kissing; monstrous biomorphs at the edge of a sea; a crucifixion horrific with twisted forms placed on the canvas like the pieces of a puzzle; still lifes; bulls and matadors and gut-ripped horses; the power and mystery of the Minotaur; portraits of Olga, Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse; the sculptures of the goat and the man with the sheep; a painting in neoclassic style of two robust loincloth-clad youths on a wall by the sea, one of them playing the flute of Pan. Paintings of the artist’s son as Harlequin; the artist’s son as Pierrot; the artist’s son seated at a table, drawing; the artist and his wife and son at the edge of a sea.