The Gift of Asher Lev

by Chaim Potok

  “I have an excellent set of Rambam.”

  “Another time maybe.”

  “I am also a Ladover. But I have never been to Brooklyn. Not enough money for traveling. It is a dream of mine one day to go to Brooklyn and see the Rebbe. My father, may he rest in peace, knew the Rebbe when he lived in Paris during the war. You saw the Rebbe recently?”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes went very wide, and he seemed suddenly to come to attention. “And?”

  “The Rebbe, thank God, is well.”

  “He should live long and remain well. How are you called?”

  “It’s not important how I’m called.”

  “Go in good health.”

  “Thank you.”

  The bell tinkled as I opened the door and died abruptly as the door swung shut behind me.

  Cool air brushed my burning face. Asher Lev, convert. A new wrinkle. I had not heard that one before. That was how some rid themselves of certain problems. In my sealed world, a problem person who crossed over to the outside was briefly mourned and soon forgotten: an enemy all knew how to handle. They stood away from such a person. But a problem person who chose for whatever reason to remain inside became a feared and troubling liability, and ultimately a demonic presence. They didn’t know how to relate to you, because you were inside and outside simultaneously; you blurred the lines of separation; they didn’t know what to tell their children. Asher Lev, convert. Asher Lev, troubler. The air felt glacial on my hot and raging flesh.

  I walked quickly past the restaurant, crossed the street, and entered the kosher butcher shop. The bell over the entrance sounded loudly as I opened and again as I closed the door.

  The shop was clean. Beige tile walls glistened in the ceiling fluorescents. The floor was covered with sawdust. Long hooks and saws hung from overhead metal rods. The cool air smelled of raw meat. A tall, big-bellied, heavy-shouldered man stood at a counter over a long slab of meat, a gleaming cleaver in his hand. He had a graying beard and wore a dark hat. A long, blood-splattered white apron covered his shirt and trousers. A second bearded man, thin and tall and also wearing a white apron, was weighing ground meat on a sheet of waxed paper on a scale. The tiny curling threads of red meat glinted oddly in the bright light. In a corner near the huge wooden door to the walk-in refrigerator, a young aproned Asiatic man sat on a stool, flicking feathers from slain chickens into a tall green plastic garbage can.

  There were three customers in the shop, all of them women, two of them elderly. The third, a thin, gray-eyed woman in her late forties or early fifties, with high cheekbones and oval features, looked startlingly like Devorah. All wore wigs.

  I went over to the man at the scale.

  “Excuse me,” I said in Yiddish. “Maybe you can help me.” He peered at me nearsightedly from across the counter. “I need information about someone in the neighborhood.”

  “You are from around here?”

  “I used to live over the café.”

  “Yes? I don’t remember you. You used to buy here?”

  “We moved away before you opened the shop.”

  “Aha. Where do you live?” He had turned and was looking at the scale.

  “In Saint-Paul.”

  “Saint-Paul-de-Vence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very nice.” He removed the ground meat from the scale, placed it on the counter, and put on the scale a sheet of waxed paper containing lamb chops. “Saint-Paul. Sunshine. The Riviera. Very nice. There are Jews in Saint-Paul?”

  “Not many. Listen, the wife and children of Lucien Lacamp, who used to live upstairs—where do they live now?”

  “I have no idea,” the man said, peering at the scale. “You are an acquaintance?”

  “I am a friend.”

  “They are no longer upstairs?” one of the elderly women asked the man at the scale.

  “Which Lucien Lacamp?” asked the second of the elderly women.

  “How many Lucien Lacamps do you know?” the first one asked.

  “This is the Lucien who worked in the restaurant?” asked the second woman.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Wait,” said the man at the scale, looking at me closely. “This is one of those killed in the explosion?”

  “The same one.”

  They all stood there in silence, regarding me intently. The man with the cleaver paused with the instrument in midair and stood gazing at me.

  “You should ask Mrs. Levy,” said the second woman. “She is wise and knows everything that goes on in this neighborhood.”

  “Who is Mrs. Levy? Where does she live?”

  “I am Mrs. Levy,” the second woman said. “You should ask me.”

  I stared at her. There was an odd glint to her eyes, a strange tightness to her false-toothed smile. Her wig was slightly askew.

  The bearded man at the counter put down the cleaver and proceeded to use a saw on cartilage and bone. The one at the scale removed the lamb chops and began to wrap up the ground meat.

  “Mrs. Levy,” I said. “Where do the wife and two children of Lucien Lacamp live?”

  “Wife and one child. The older child died.”

  “I am sorry to hear that.”

  “She had the asthma. They live now on the Rue d’Aboukir in the Second Arrondissement.” She gave me the number of the house.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I am in your debt.”

  “When you see Mrs. Lacamp, tell her Mrs. Levy sends warm greetings. The old woman with the bad heart. Tell her. She will remember.”

  “I will tell her.”

  I went out of the shop through the sound of the overhead bell and stood on the sidewalk a moment, taking deep breaths. At a storefront snack bar across the street I bought iced tea in a can. I walked toward the Métro, sipping the tea. Weak light shone from a milky sun. The streets were crowded. Inside the Métro, on the wide and crowded platform, I felt myself suddenly jostled, and I turned and saw a short, squat, bald man in a long gray coat and gray scarf and dark beret. The train suddenly entered the station. I rode to the Rue de Bac station and walked to the hotel past the barefoot old woman, who was still asleep on the stoop in the street.

  In my room, weary to near-exhaustion, I slept for more than an hour and woke thinking Devorah was next to me. “Come into me, my husband,” I heard her say, and I held her and loved her and was at peace—until the sudden clanging of the church bells jolted me awake. I lay a moment, dazed and disoriented, thinking I was home in Saint-Paul, listening to the tolling of the village bell.

  In the bathroom I splashed water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror. The outline of my face traced with my finger into the mist covering the mirror in the bathroom in my parents’ home: small, doll-like, long erased now. After the death of Apollinaire, the Spaniard had hated mirrors. He would not render the face they revealed. He hated mirrors, he hated death, he hated women. How could so much vindictive hatred, so much crude sensuality and vain egoism, be the source of such a torrent of awesome primal creativity? No, not entirely true. Sensitive, too. And generous. And a man of meager needs. Gilot should not have the final word on him. Besides, I knew of two or three great contemporary Talmudists with that kind of complex and contradiction-faceted being: cruel and generous, benevolent and pitiless. See how good I am being to you today, Spaniard. Chagall would not have been so kind.

  I took the elevator down, left my key with the clerk, and went out of the hotel.

  It was late afternoon. Air and sky were an oppressive and unrelieved gray. Traffic streamed through the streets; tourists crowded the sidewalks. The old woman, now awake, sat on her stoop, talking to her blackened feet and throwing furious glances at passersby.

  I crossed the wide street to the Galerie Maeght and entered to the tinkling of the overhead bell. The owner of the gallery was in the Côte d’Azur for the week. I did not recognize the blond-haired young woman who sat behind the desk, reading a fashion magazine. She glanced up. Her eyes, picture-logged from the pho
tographs in the magazine, barely focused upon me. She gave me a vague smile and returned to her reading.

  On the walls of the two large rooms of the gallery were drawings and watercolors by Saul Steinberg. It was cool and pleasant in the gallery. I was the only visitor. The art hung challengingly on the walls, inviting inspection. Curious cats, grinning crocodiles, hapless men. Gamblers, terrorists, dancing couples. Gaudy cars, vacant landscapes, Cubist cities. From white rectangle to white rectangle, his line traced a journey through the absurdities and emptiness of modern life. Sharp observation, exaggeration, wit, a blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality. Ambiguous, troubling, unfathomable. Riddle after riddle. Draftsmanship devoid of sentiment. The passionate Spaniard and the dispassionate Rumanian—both in one day. The gifts of Paris.

  I bought a catalogue from the blond-haired young woman behind the desk and asked for the price of the watercolor of the figure on the precipice. She told me, and I said I would buy it. She began to make out the papers, and when I gave her my name she looked up at me, startled. I paid for the painting and gave her the Saint-Paul address for shipping. Afterward I walked over to a nearby café to get something to eat.

  On the balcony of my hotel room, I sit with my drawing pad propped on a knee and draw the faces of the living and the dead. I draw the face of the old woman on the stoop in the street, the dark vacant eyes and thin bloodless mouth and pointed nose, all her features like a foreshadowing of death; and the faces of two people, a man and a woman, walking past her: the flicker of shame, like the shame on the faces of those who were the first to liberate the death camps and stared at the unutterable horror and then stood looking at the ground at their feet and the sky overhead, and were possessed suddenly of a profound humiliation at belonging to a species capable of such unspeakable acts—and then the masks falling into place, for shame is among the most unendurable of sentiments. The mask of the old woman’s face, and the masklike faces of those who go past her. I draw the faces of blacks and whites in Brooklyn passing one another on the streets, staring through and around and past each other, their faces like masks, each bodiless to the other. I draw the raging face of my Cousin Yonkel, and then the emptiness he turns upon me, the bloodless mask of a face concealing a dark torrent of fury and contempt. I draw the face of the woman with the poodle, a face painted and rouged to camouflage the fearful dawning of old age, the death-in-life face of one contemptuous of the needy stranger. I draw the face of the old Jew as I asked him in French about the Picasso Museum: cold, sealed, vacant, a mask—concealing what? fear of the stranger? contempt for any seeker of a museum of art? I draw the face of the Spaniard, cold with disdain and suddenly empty of all expression, a grotesque mask, as he talks of death. I draw the expressionless face of the butcher with the cleaver and the masklike face of the Asiatic man plucking feathers from dead chickens. Then I draw the face of Lucien Lacamp, squarish, stolid, bones and angles, straight nose, cool eyes, close-cropped hair, a soldier’s lean face; Lucien Lacamp, a parachutist in the French Foreign Legion, wounded by a Russian mortar shell fired by Berbers in a skirmish near Oran, the fragments leaving him with cratered legs and a deep gouge between his shoulder blades about one inch to the left of his spinal column; Lucien Lacamp helping me put in the racks I needed for my prints, building my stretchers, stretching my big canvases, playing with Rocheleh, carrying the artist’s proofs of my first carborundum print back from the printer and up the stairs. The forms baffled him. “I do not understand it,” he kept saying, looking at the print. “It is an enigma. Such shapes do not exist. But the colors. Ah, the colors. They are formidable, the colors.” And I draw his face dead amid the smoldering rubble of the restaurant explosion. Lucien Lacamp. One of the righteous of the Gentiles. I draw the face of Jacob Kahn, the smile he wears as he says, “Only the French could have given the Spaniard a museum like that,” and the dark, poignant sadness in his eyes as he adds, “Even the Spaniard lost it a number of times. Chagall lost it. I lost it.” I draw him in his final moments of life in his home near Saint-Paul, and again in his first moments of death. The withered grayish-green face gone completely slack. Jacob Kahn, my teacher, my master. Then I draw the face of Anna Schaeffer; she gazes at me coolly, regally, from the drawing pad. “What are they doing to you in Brooklyn?” she says. “Brooklyn is making mud of your mind.” She had little patience for the vacuous world of the philistine, and no comprehension of the subtle texturing of religious consciousness. She saw in both those worlds—the bourgeois and the religious—bigotry, small-mindedness, the clawing of the benighted; greed for money and zealousness for God. She loved her artists and their art, her collectors and curators and art connoisseurs. “Do not disappoint me, Asher,” I hear her say from the page of my drawing pad. I draw her during her last days in her apartment in New York. I draw her in her hospital bed. I draw her in her open coffin—something I would never have seen in my Brooklyn world, where such funerals are forbidden.

  Above the rooftops of the city the day has slowly waned. By its final light I draw a picture of Devorah: the pale slender face, the curve of shoulder and breast, the roundness of thigh and leg. I draw her with Rocheleh. I draw her with Avrumel. I draw Avrumel hugging his rag doll, Shimshon. “How goes it, Avrumel?” “It goes well, Papa.” I draw Devorah in her bed in Saint-Paul, the arching of her neck, the wide-open eyes, her tongue moist on her lips as she holds me in the final moments of one of our together-times. She calls it that on occasion: together-time. “Together-time tonight, Asher,” she would sometimes whisper to me in the presence of the children. The Spaniard was not the only one who could draw good erotica—though I always concealed mine and rarely showed it even to Devorah. I am not a Neanderthal troll; but neither am I a bloodless angel.

  It is dark. The city hums and throbs with its streams of traffic and nocturnal lights. I pray the Evening Service and lie in my bed and feel inside the room the heavy presence of the living and the dead. I finally fall asleep, imagining Devorah beside me, her arms gently encircling my neck in the warm and rocking embrace of a together-time.

  4

  I woke from turbulent sleep to the banging and clanging of the bells. Troubled by dreams I could not remember, I dressed and prayed the Morning Service. I had something to eat at a café across the street from the hotel. At the table next to mine a middle-aged German couple sat talking in low voices about the Airbus accident and the train disaster at the Gare de Lyon. I went back upstairs to my room to use the bathroom and for the address book in my attaché case. I was looking through the address book when the phone rang.

  The operator said it was a person-to-person call for Asher Lev from the United States. I said I would take the call, and thought, Something must be very wrong for Devorah to be calling me at three o’clock in the morning.

  “One moment, please,” the operator said.

  “Hello,” a man’s voice said in English. “Is this Asher Lev?”

  “Yes.”

  “Asher Lev, the artist?”

  “Yes.” Was there another Asher Lev? “Asher Lev, the Rebbe wishes to speak with you.”

  The Rebbe! At three o’clock in the morning! When did he sleep?

  I waited, my heart hammering. I was seated at the desk, and found myself staring at the drawing I had made the night before of Devorah in her bed in Saint-Paul. I couldn’t remember having left the drawing pad open when I had gone out earlier. Still waiting, I flipped the pages. The Spaniard. Jacob Kahn. Anna Schaeffer. Devorah and Rocheleh. Avrumel and his Shimshon doll. Devorah and I in a together-time. I closed the pad.

  “Asher Lev.” I heard the voice, distant, tremulous.

  “Yes, Rebbe.”

  “You are well?”

  “Thank God, yes.”

  “Your wife and children are well. Your parents are well.”

  “Thank you, Rebbe.”

  “Asher, I speak to you as if you were here before me. I see you clearly. Distance is an illusion if one trusts in the Holy One, blessed be He. You underst
and?”

  “Yes, Rebbe.”

  “I want to tell you something. Listen to me. You are now on a journey. We are told that when Jacob set out to journey from Beersheba to Haran, he stopped at a certain place for the night and had a dream. What did he dream? A stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it. Some were going from the earth to the heaven, others from the heaven to the earth. The great Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudlikov once said that this comes to teach us the following. A man does not always remain at the same stage. He is always ascending or descending. When he reaches the lop, he must concern himself with the probability that he will fall. When he reaches the bottom, he must strive once again to climb to the top. That is the nature of man. When the soul of a man is in its darkest night, he must strive constantly for new light. When one thinks there is only an end, that is when one must struggle for the new beginning. This is true, Asher Lev, not only for the individual but also for the community. I wish you a safe journey up the ladder, Asher. Do you understand me?”

  I did not respond.

  “Asher, do you understand my words?”

  “Yes, Rebbe.”

  “I wish that your journey will be to a light not only for yourself but for all of us. I wish that it will be a journey for the sake of heaven. I give you my blessing, Asher Lev.”

  The line went dead.

  I hung up the phone.

  For some minutes afterward I sat at the desk, staring down at the phone and the drawing pad. There was a strange tingling sensation in the tips of my fingers. The sounds of traffic came distantly through the closed doors of the balcony. Finally I locked my drawing pad in my attaché case, put the attaché case in the armoire, and took the elevator down to the lobby. I walked quickly in the gauzy mist of the Paris morning to the Métro.

  Narrow cobblestone streets encumbered with traffic and tight with sidewalk cafés. Flower stands, fish stands, meat hanging raw and bloodied from hooks in butcher shop windows, sides of sheep, cuts of pork, rows of plucked, pink-skinned chickens. The warm and inviting aromas of food from the cafés mixing with the hot and repellent stench of diesel exhaust from the trucks. A dirt-blackened man sits on the sidewalk, propped against an apartment house wall, with a coal-black dog asleep beside him. On the man’s lap is a sign that reads NOUS AVONS FAIM AIDEZ-NOUS. Cracked and peeling seventeenth-century apartment houses, their gray and yellow outer walls misshapen and bulging, lean precariously toward one another over the streets as if on the point of collapse.