The Gift of Asher Lev

by Chaim Potok

  “You’ll make a lot of people very angry.”

  “I am not concerned with those people. They like us only when we are powerless and merely colorful. But when we make our rightful bid for power, then they begin to hate us. It is not for them to tell us whether we are or are not entitled to a stake in the game of power. Our power is, after all, for the sake of heaven.”

  He follows me into a side street off the boulevard. “Where are we going?”

  “I want to look at something.”

  We continue up the steep cobblestone street. It is lined with old apartment houses. The sidewalks are narrow. I stop in front of a five-story building with tall windows and balconies and a beige façade stained dark beneath its eaves and around its drainpipes. There are flowers on the balcony of the fifth-floor apartment and curtains on the windows. Who lives there now? Do they know what once took place within those walls? The street, bathed in afternoon sunlight, dozes in summer languor.

  “Do you see the apartment on the fifth floor? Yes, that one. That’s where I painted the crucifixions.”

  My father gazes upward, and his face hardens. He stands very still, looking up at the windows of the apartment. A small black dog lopes past us and heads down the street toward the boulevard. A lovely young woman goes by, dressed in brightly colored loose-fitting summer clothes, wheeling an infant in a carriage and leaving in her wake a whiff of scented air. My father stands staring up at the fifth floor of the building. He seems to be trying to penetrate the wall and uncover the demonic forces concealed in the apartment, the powers of darkness that moved me to so malevolent an act of creation. And I … I am so flooded with memories of that time of anguish, suddenly so keenly aware of long-forgotten instances of hesitation and decision: the texturing here; the brush-stroke modulations there; the laying down of color fields; the balancing of forms; the fearful chances; the nightmarish dares; the smell of my armpit sweat; the sheer exhausting terror and joy of it all—that I am irrevocably convinced I will never again be able to embark upon another such act of creation.

  “Anna Schaeffer asked me to take a long walk. Later she told me she had to have the paintings taken out through the balcony. They were too large for the staircase and the front door.”

  He looks at me somberly and shakes his head. “I want you to know that I try to understand you, Asher. It is very difficult.”

  “Well, at least Avrumel won’t be an artist. He has no talent for it.”

  “Avrumel has other talents.”

  “Devorah tells me you’ll take him into your office with you on Sundays.”

  “Why not? He enjoys watching people come and go. It will give Devorah and your mother more time to be together.”

  “Will Avrumel be able to meet the Rebbe?”

  “Of course. Why not? It was the Rebbe who suggested that Avrumel might like to spend time with me in the office.”

  We stand there awhile longer, looking up at the apartment. Then we go back down the street and turn into the boulevard. We walk along together.

  “Thank you for the time you spent with us in Brooklyn,” my father says. “Your mother and I got to know Devorah and the children. We are grateful to you, Asher. I am only sorry it had to be my brother’s death that brought us together. Who knows? Perhaps it is the will of God.”

  Perhaps there is a plan, Devorah says from somewhere in the summer wind around us. Asher, do you think there is a plan?

  In front of the yeshiva building is the police car with the two gendarmes inside. They watch us.

  “People tell me I am wise,” my father murmurs, gazing down at the sidewalk near his feet. “But about this”—his arms describe an encircling gesture that takes in the two of us—”and about your art I have no wisdom at all.”

  He embraces me briefly, then steps back and turns and walks quickly away in the shadows of the trees.

  Half a block down the boulevard there is a wooden bench, empty in the sunlight. I walk over to it and sit down. Dappled sunlight filters erratically through the trees. The sun casts a long flat broken shadow of me at my feet, and I sit gazing at it. I close my eyes and, a moment later, open them. The boulevard is suddenly filled with dark-garbed Ladover Hasidim on their way to the synagogue and the Rebbe. I feel myself begin to shiver, and I close and open my eyes. A motorcycle roars by on the nearly deserted boulevard, its helmeted rider bent forward into the warm wind.

  I walk back to the yeshiva in the shadows of the trees.

  Alone in my room after the Evening Service, I lay awake in the small room, the air still and dark. Whispers of boulevard traffic drifted in through the open window. After a long while I fell asleep.

  There came a faint tapping on the door. I thought it a half-dream and sought to sink deeper into sleep. The sounds persisted: the tip of a finger striking a low tap tap tap on the wooden door. In the darkness I crossed from the bed to the door and saw dimly silhouetted against the night light in the hallway the figure of my Uncle Yitzchok in his dark suit and dark hat, rotund and cheerful and chewing on a long cigar. “A good week to you, Asher,” he said. “May we come in? I bring you an honored guest.”

  I stepped back and opened my eyes wide and found myself in my pajamas in bed. A crushing weight of terror moved suddenly upon me. I reached over and turned on the desk light. The attaché case on the desk and the picture of the Rebbe on the wall and the room in shadows beyond. I went to the bathroom and climbed back into bed and snapped off the light.

  I heard the soft sounds of slippered feet on the floor. Then, silence.

  There was someone in the room, sitting at the desk, watching me.

  A long and tremulous sigh came out of the darkness and, a moment later, the gentlest of voices.

  “How I wish … How I wish … Asher …” The voice faded.

  It was the Rebbe! The Rebbe was in this closed and narrow room, sitting at the desk in the darkness! I knew then, with all the certainty born of my childhood years of listening to wonder tales, that the Rebbe had just made a miracle journey, a kfitzas haderech—he had traversed three thousand miles in a single stride, using the mysterious powers given a Rebbe by the Master of the Universe to venture across vast disunces effortlessly in the wink of an eye.

  I lay very still, trembling, my eyes closed.

  “You are well, my Asher?”

  “I am tired, Rebbe.”

  “I watched you all this week in Paris. Your work with Max Lobe, the woman and her child, the artist you went to see, your comings and goings. How can you not be tired?”

  “It’s not that kind of tired, Rebbe.”

  “Fatigue is from the Other Side, Asher. It sunders our partnership with the Master of the Universe and prevents us from participating in the daily act of creation. It is food for the Angel of Death, this melancholy, this hopelessness.”

  I was quiet.

  “Listen to me, my Asher. There may be much time or little time. In such matters I am not prescient. Certain decisions must be made quickly, else all the work of our hands may, God forbid, come to nothing. Fatigue is a wall to climb, not an emptiness in which to wallow. You are wise, Asher Lev. Slowly you begin to unravel the riddle. Your answer may save us and return you to your work.”

  I trembled and was still.

  “It is frightening, my Asher. Of course. How precious your son is to you. But you will consider it. If I am called to the True World and this matter is still not resolved, I will go to my grave with sorrow.”

  “God forbid!” came another voice from the darkness.

  “Uncle Yitzchok?”

  “Yes, Asher.”

  “Did you hear?”

  “Of course, I heard.”

  “Asher,” the Rebbe said. “It is sometimes possible for a man to acquire all of the world to come by means of a single act in this world. Consider that, my Asher. You will redeem all that you have done and all that you are yet to do.”

  I was quiet.

  “You will return home for the summer. It is likely I will giv
e the sign sometime after the summer, during the holy days or the festivals. You and your family should remain with us until after the festivals. Consider my words carefully, Asher. There is not much time.

  I said nothing.

  “We must return now, Reb Yitzchok. We are away too long. The power of the miracle journey must not be abused.”

  There were soft rustling sounds, a quiet shuffling of feet, an emptying of the air, and sudden patches of deepest blackness inside the darkness. And silence.

  I was alone in the room.

  I lay very still in the silence, listening. The room was quiet; it seemed sealed off from the noises of the world. I turned on the desk light. There was the attaché case and, on the wall above it, the picture of the Rebbe. I went again to the bathroom, climbed back into bed, and turned off the light. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

  The next day, after the Morning Service in the yeshiva synagogue, I said goodbye to my father and Shaul, packed my bags, and took a taxi to the Gare de Lyon. It was raining hard. A sweating, gray-haired porter looked at my ticket and brought me to the proper track. I boarded the fast train to Nice.

  The train begins a slow glide out of the Gare de Lyon, slips through railroad yards, picking up speed, and slides smoothly past houses with red-tiled roofs and graystone walls. The rain falls in a sudden torrent, and people scurry for cover. Automobile wipers arc frantically; the tops of tall buildings vanish into the mist. I lean back in my seat and close my eyes and immediately see the little room in the yeshiva and sense the presence of the Rebbe and my uncle in the darkness. The rhythms of the train lull me to sleep. I wake, dazed. It is still raining. We are an hour out of Paris, rocketing on the nonstop run to Lyons.

  The car is about half full. Orange-and-brown seats, dark-green carpeting, indirect lighting, wide double-paned windows, orange curtains. All of it glistens, new-looking. Smooth, silken, gently undulating motion on welded tracks running through cultivated fields, and red-roofed farmhouses in the distance, and villages, trees, power lines, and a flat line of horizon below a vast milk-white sky.

  I sit alone in the row of single seats to the right of the carpeted aisle. Across the aisle, and two seats forward, are two girls and, opposite them, a woman, handsome, well dressed, in her early forties. The girls, about eleven or twelve, are identical twins. One is reading; the other is bent over a pad on the table between the facing seats, drawing. They are blond-haired and wear red-and-white-striped shirts and dark-gray jeans, with pink bows in their hair. The woman is watching intently the drawing coming slowly to life on the table.

  Outside my window drenched fields flash by, then a glistening highway. There is a sudden blurring run through a small station, trees, ponds, villages with stone houses and tiled roofs. The train slows and enters Lyons and glides to a stop in the station. A few passengers enter the car through the sliding end doors. The girl continues drawing. Small stubby fingers, wide blue eyes, creamy white face, freckled nose, hair pulled back tight on her forehead, tongue pushing against her cheeks and lips, the way Max works, as if the energy from the fingers were being echoed by the actions of the mouth.

  The train is moving again, soundlessly, through railroad yards and past trains laden with factory-new automobiles and on past tall smoking chimneys and tarpaulin-covered freight trains and clusters of villages on distant hills. I fall asleep and wake with a trembling start and find myself staring at a wet six-lane highway and an enormous smooth-surfaced lake that mirrors the gray sky and at a canyonlike gouge in the stony earth that is a quarry studded with cranes and earth-moving trucks and then, a moment later, a billboard with the words HOTEL MERCURE. There are dense woods right up to the tracks and then far-off hills and soaring thunderheads limned with shafts of silver light and a road sign that reads VIENNE and a dark narrow curving river and rain suddenly slanting hard against the window.

  The twin who is the reader gets down from her seat and goes along the aisle and through the automatic sliding doors to the ladies’ room. I have my drawing pad open on the small drop table in front of me, and I begin to draw the remaining twin, who still sits opposite the woman, drawing. I draw her sitting in her seat drawing.

  Once, soon after we settled into the house in Saint-Paul, Rocheleh came silently into my studio and sat in the soft green chair near the door, watching me draw. I saw her enter and sit in the chair, and then I was deep inside the work and forgot she was there until I heard the choking breaths and looked toward where she was sitting and saw her bathed in the beams of muted sunlight, her face bluish white, her hands to her throat, her eyes wide open and terrified.

  Afterward she said she had thought it would be different in Saint-Paul, somehow the air in the studio would be cleaner than the air in the studio in Paris, and I said I had deep inside me thought that, too, else I would not have permitted her to remain in the studio that long. I thought I hoped I prayed, Papa. I prayed to the Master of the Universe. Why didn’t He answer me? Why did we move to Saint-Paul if I can’t come into your studio here, either? Avrumel would come in and sit down and watch me work. He would sit against the wall, hugging his Shimshon doll, beneath the color reproductions of Manet’s Olympia, Delacroix’s The Massacre at Chios, and Madman by Géricault. Once he asked me why there was no picture of the Rebbe in the studio. I told him that in my studio I was with myself alone and with no one except myself telling me what was right and what was wrong. He said, “Not even Mama?” and I said, “Not even the Master of the Universe.” He was four at the time and did not understand what I was saying. Avrumel. He came in often afterward, clutching his Shimshon doll, sitting quietly, watching me work. He seemed with his repeated presence to be trying to make up for what he knew was Rocheleh’s inability to enter her father’s studio and watch him paint.

  I was drawing the girl drawing. The second girl returned to her seat and resumed reading. Passengers went along the aisle toward the café car up ahead and returned with trays of food. The automatic doors kept sliding silently open and shut. It was still raining heavily, and clouds touched the tops of the trees. We hurtled into a notch between two hills, and I could hear us inside the tunnel of our own sound. A station flashed by, platforms and signs suddenly tilting toward me and gone.

  I got up to go to the bathroom. The sliding doors would not open. I moved back and forth and sideways until my foot found the contact beneath the carpet. The doors opened silently. In the café car I ordered a green salad and a cold drink. The car was crowded. I ate off a paper plate with plastic utensils, standing at a window table and looking out at the landscape. We sped alongside a lake and through fields and near a village and then a field on fire, white smoke rising in the rain, and a grimy old stone house with cracked graystone walls and a red-tiled roof and broken windows through which I glimpsed dark interiors.

  I returned to my car. The sliding doors opened and closed without difficulty. I sat in my seat, watching the girl drawing.

  A conductor came quickly up the aisle, anticipating the automatic opening of the doors, and the doors would not open and he nearly ran into them. He did a little dance in front of the doors, searching for the contact. They slid slowly open. He reached up and did something to the top of the right door and then went on through to the next car. The doors remained open. Stiff gusts of sultry air blew into the car, bearing the hot scents of sodden fertilized fields. The girls looked up and wrinkled their noses. The woman shook her head and laughed. Small stations kept rushing by. There was a river and hills terraced with vineyards and, along a macadam road, an Esso service station. I fell asleep and woke and saw, as in a speeded-up motion picture, train stations—Donzère and Pierrelatte—and fields of corn and a huge green-and-gold expanse of tall sunflowers, and without thinking I reached up and touched my ear. The train slowed and stopped in Avignon.

  The twin girls and the woman collected their luggage and left the car. I saw them met on the platform by a tall flaxen-haired man in his forties and an elderly couple. They all looked neat and decen
t and untroubled. I thought of the Spaniard and his brothel painting and began to draw from memory the faces of the whores. But I was tired, and besides this was not the Avignon of that painting. The station was long and wide, with glassed-in waiting areas and platforms with high arched roofs and the pipe supports showing. Devorah’s parents were taken to a train station that July and sent out of Paris to Auschwitz and Budy. There must be a plan, my husband. The train started up and a sign glided by: 200F LA NUIT CENTRE VILLE TOUT COMPRIS. I fell asleep again.

  Through sleep I sensed the train slowing as it took a long curving length of track that tilted it steeply to the left. I opened my eyes to an expanse of brilliant blue water. In the distance was a curving shoreline and glistening white houses and boats. The train picked up speed and shot through Debeaux. I saw an old cemetery with a wrought-iron fence and weather-worn leaning tombstones. Uncle Yitzchok, was that really you last night in my room with the Rebbe? What do you want with Avrumel? You want me to give him up so the Ladover will be assured of continuity and leadership deep into the next century? The Rebbe will not transfer the mantle of leadership to my father, even though he merits it, unless he is assured that Avrumel will follow? Because my father is too old and no one knows how many years he has left? And his death, God forbid, without immediate automatic succession would give rise to dissension? Is that it, Uncle Yitzchok? You want Avrumel? You want me to give him to the Rebbe so the Ladover can continue to conquer the Jewish world? Send him to live with my parents? Have him attend the Ladover schools in New York? Prepare him for his future role as king when the time comes for him to take my father’s place? Aryeh Lev, Rebbe. Avrumel Lev, future Rebbe. And skip over Asher Lev, artist and troubler, who is no more fit to be a Rebbe than he is to be a lawyer or a shoemaker. Is that it? We were suddenly inside a long tunnel, hurtling through a sheath of darkness enveloped in the tumultuous noise of our motion and then abruptly bursting forth into sunlight and a spreading city of tall apartment houses and crowded streets and warehouses and soccer fields and suddenly another tunnel and then sunlight and a sign that read A VOTRE SERVICE and through a station, Marseille Blancard, and a range of mountains up ahead and a warehouse with an enormous sign, ALARM SERVICE, the train now curving back on itself so I could see the first cars.