by Chaim Potok
We stopped briefly at Toulon and started up again. I sat gazing at the Mediterranean world where I now lived—sunlit pastel-colored houses, palm trees, wave-lapped pebbled beaches, earth-red cliffs hugging the shoreline, sailboats, motorboats, yachts, stone jetties, the masts of hundreds of moored boats looking like the pikes of a medieval army, and overhead a sky so clear and blue and of such surpassing loveliness as to be simultaneously a joy and an ache.
We are in Antibes. The train runs parallel to the beach, and there are high waves. A motorcyclist in shorts, sneakers, and a crash helmet speeds along on the road between the tracks and the beach. The train stops in Antibes. I look out the window and think of the night-fishing painting by the Spaniard. I once studied it with Jacob Kahn. The train begins to move.
I sit back in my seat. There is Nice in the distance, blue and dreamlike, a jetliner coming in on its long slow gliding approach to the airport, and way out to sea tall banks of brilliant white clouds, and the long length of curving beach, and signs reading SIESTA and TOP FUN. I put my drawing pad back into my attaché case.
We enter Nice and are soon in the station. It is late afternoon.
I climb out of the train with my bags and take a deep breath of the hot, humid, sea-scented air. A porter appears. I follow him along the platform and up the escalator and through the crowded terminal. There are tourists everywhere. A middle-aged suntanned woman hurries past me, cradling a small dog in one arm and holding in the other a plastic bag on which is a picture of a beautiful dark-haired woman and the words, white against black, JE SUIS BIEN DANS MA VILLE. The porter finds a taxi, and I give the driver my Saint-Paul address.
The driver is an Arab. He maneuvers the taxi smoothly along the crowded boulevard. There are bathers on the beaches and in the water. On the sidewalks and along the curbs, puddles of water reflect the palm trees and the sky. Pastel-colored hotels line the boulevard and face out to the sea. Later, with the night, the hotel lights and beachfront lamps will come on, the perfect curve of the coastline will blaze like a fiery necklace, and the fabled nightlife of Nice will begin. I almost never go to Nice at night.
The driver winds along the crowded autoroute to Cagnes-sur-Mer and then on the fast road to Vence and Saint-Paul. We drive through the toll booths and onto the four-lane highway, and then beyond the traffic circle to a two-lane road and more hills and another circle and a valley to the right and a group of young cyclists. Was I from around here? the driver asked. We were going to my home, I said. I’d been away a few months. Was I originally from France? he asked. From the United States, I said. But living in France the past twenty years. Anything special going on in Nice these days? He said there was a storm here yesterday that knocked down trees and power lines. He said I looked like a decent sort of fellow, and some indecent things were going on. I said what sort of indecent things, and he said the hotel owners were organizing a secret list of those who had left town without paying their hotel bills. They were going to keep them out of Nice. He said he had a cousin who drove a taxi in New York. You could never get away with anything like that in New York. But this was France. You could get away with it in France. It was a plain case of discrimination against Arabs. Had I been here for the national elections? No? This Le Pen was a fascist, and it wouldn’t be surprising if someone took a shot at him one day. He said I wouldn’t believe the kinds of people who rode in his taxi: Mafia people, drug pushers, whores, pimps. He said he had a younger brother who was going to play the trumpet in the jazz festival at Cimiez. He said the drivers from Belgium were idiots who didn’t know what a steering wheel was. He went past the Restaurant les Oliviers and almost missed the turn that led to the house.
He pulled into the gravel driveway and helped me with the large bag. He was olive-skinned, unshaven, and had a dark mustache. I asked him where he was from, and he said Beirut. I paid him, and he drove off.
I opened the gate with my key, carried my bags through, left them on the gravel path, and pushed the gate closed. It was heavy and clanged into place and clicked loudly shut. A hot wind blew through the white pines that lined the path. I brought my bags to the end of the path and left them there and walked to the building that was my studio and unlocked the metal door and let myself inside.
Hot still musky dim air, heavy-scented with linseed oil and pigments. I stand very still and breathe deeply. It is an intoxication, a celestial wine, this air. Everything untouched, as I left it, my own clutter and disorder, the chaos of my making. There is the green chair near the door, where Rocheleh once sat. I thought I hoped I prayed, Papa. I draw open the opaque overhead blinds, and sunlight filters through the translucent glass ceiling bricks and falls upon the disarray of brushes, paints, knickknacks, boxes, tools, sketches, drawings—all of it scattered on half a dozen worktables mounted on trestles. On a wall hangs a large photograph of Picasso taken when he was in his mid-eighties, robust, smiling, his eyes jet black, piercing, alert. Below the photograph is a reproduction of the Spaniard’s Guernica. Against the opposite wall, catching the light, stands a huge umber-washed canvas. Nearby is where Avrumel would pose. I look again at the green chair. There is where Avrumel would sit with his Shimshon doll, silently watching me work.
I close and lock the studio door and pick up my bags and cross the brick-paved courtyard. The garden looks lovely. Brilliant oleander and nasturtium, the pink and orange petals catching the light of the sun. Trumpet-shaped red and orange blossoms in abundance on the vine near the entrance to the house. New ageratum and marigolds. Everything neat and trim and clean. As if I have merely been away on a shopping trip to Nice for art supplies and meat and bread, and Devorah is inside with Rocheleh and Avrumel.
I let myself into the house.
The air is warm and musty. I open the kitchen windows. The curtains, the old wooden table and chairs. Like friends, these furnishings. I’ll call Max and John and let them know I’m back. I’ll call Devorah and let her know I’m here. In the morning I’ll go to the post office and see about the mail. Then I’ll walk up to Jacob Kahn’s grave.
I go through the dining room, and there is the picture of the Rebbe on the wall between the windows and amid the many paintings of my own collection. I carry my bags up the winding staircase. Passing Avrumel’s room, I glance inside, and there is his old Shimshon doll on his bed where he left it months ago. I am home.
BOOK THREE
6
The bedroom is dim with stagnant air. I open windows and shutters and stand awhile, gazing at the village and the valley.
The air vibrates with light. Late-afternoon sunlight brushes a brilliant pink across the village wall. All through the green valley are clusters of small red-tiled houses. The sea is a faraway sliver of polished metal that joins the pale-blue sky along a vague line of horizon.
When we first moved into the house, Devorah would sit for hours looking at the light on the village and the valley. She could not get enough of the light.
I unpacked and left the Rilke volume on my night table. Using the bedroom phone, I called Max and was told by his caretaker that he was at a party in Nice. “Welcome, Monsieur Lev,” the caretaker said. “We missed you. The wife and children are well? Monsieur will find everything in good order. I have seen to it myself.” He was a retired customs agent, and he ran Max’s domain with a nineteenth-century sense of service to people and property.
I called John Dorman. Holding the phone in my hand and listening to it ring, I looked out the rear bedroom window and could see the red-tiled roof of his house. Maybe he’d gone to the party with Max; he did that sometimes. More likely, he was in a drunken stupor. I hung up the phone.
Later, I walked up the road to the village and the café at the foot of the wall and sat on the terrace beneath the awnings and the ancient trees. It was cool here, and crowded. Waiters sauntered over to welcome me back and ask about Devorah and the children. The owner came out and shook my hand. Tourists stared. The waiters knew what to bring me for supper. I ate quickly, watching some of
the men of the village at their bowling game on the red clay earth of the playing field outside the café.
Afterward I walked through the village to the cemetery and stood outside the open gate with the dark metal cross over the entrance and gazed across the lines of tombstones at the marble tomb of Chagall. The sun touched the crests of the nearby hills and sent long shadows into the cemetery. Crowded with old and new tombs and studded with tall cypresses, the cemetery stood hushed in the approaching twilight, its host of crosses clear and sharp in the bronze sheen of the sunset. After a while I walked back to the house and sat on the terrace, watching the night come, with the lights of the valley like motionless fireflies in the advancing darkness. I fell asleep in the chair on the terrace and slept a long time and was awakened by the racketing noise of a motorbike on the road. The air was soft, cool, scented with flowers. I went inside.
It was nearly midnight. Sitting on my bed and looking out at the lights of the village, I picked up the phone. It was answered by Devorah on the second ring. She sounded as if she were on the bed beside me.
The family, thank God, was well, she said. She had talked with Rocheleh by phone before Shabbos. She liked the camp very much. How was my father? Did I have a good Shabbos? Was the house all right? How were Max and John? She had gone rowing in Prospect Park with my mother and Avrumel. It was very hot in New York. My mother was fine. She was right there.
“Asher? Are you well?”
“Yes.”
“Your father?”
“He’s in Israel, rounding up votes. We had a good Shabbos together in the yeshiva.”
“I’m glad, Asher. Devorah and I are having a fine time being together. It is like finding a daughter.”
“Has anybody heard anything more from Cousin Yonkel?”
“Nahum told me after shul yesterday that your Cousin Yonkel is going to try to have you removed as trustee. He is going to take you to court.”
“Can he do that?”
“I don’t know, Asher. It saddens me that there is such a fight in the family.”
“It saddens me, too. I don’t know what to do about it. Is Avrumel around?”
“Here he is.”
“Papa?” The high voice, breathless. I imagine the red hair, the freckled face.
“How are you, my son?”
“I am fine, Papa. We went rowing today. I helped Mama row.”
“That’s great.”
“And guess what, Papa.”
“What?”
“When Grandfather comes back from Israel, he will take me with him to his office on Sundays. Grandfather says I can maybe even see the Rebbe.”
I was quiet.
“And I play baseball in the camp. Every day. Where are you, Papa?”
“At home.”
“Did you find Shimshon?”
“Yes.”
“Will you bring him back with you?”
“Sure.”
“Here’s Mama.”
Devorah came back on. “I miss you, my husband. Did you get everything done in Paris that you needed to do?”
“Yes.”
“I am really having a wonderful time with your mother.”
“How is the book coming along?”
“Very well, thank God. It’s quiet here now. A good place for writing.”
“Take care of yourself, my wife.”
“Goodbye, Asher. Travel well.”
In the silence that followed, a motorbike moved laboriously along the road like a truculent mosquito. The village stood on its hill, bathed in the nighttime glow of halogens. I thought I saw Jacob Kahn in the window of a village home, gazing out at me. After a while I fell asleep.
The village bells woke me, clanging sweetly in the morning air. I lay in my bed and felt the sounds softly against my ears. Soon the bells fell silent; the bedroom began to fill with a strangely foreboding stillness. I felt the stillness all through the house, and after a while I got up and dressed. I prayed the Morning Service and walked up the hill in the morning sunlight to the café for breakfast. It was early; the storekeepers were washing down the streets in front of their shops, and there were only a few people in the café. One of the waiters came over, a short round man in his fifties who had once been a painter, and we talked for a while about the forthcoming Léger exhibition in the Fondation Maeght outside the village. He had it on the best authority: it would be formidable. A new look at Léger from his very early days to just before his death. He himself was not one of the great admirers of Léger. But it would be a formidable exhibition.
Afterward I went to the post office and mailed a tubular package to the widow of Lucien Lacamp in Paris. It contained the drawing of the girl drawing I had made the day before on the train. There were other postal matters to settle. The line behind me grew long. Finally I was outside the post office in the shade of a green pine. Two gendarmes stood talking on the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy across the street. There were cars and motorbikes on the road, and the streets were beginning to receive the first waves of tourists. I walked out of the village to the sculpture at the road juncture and turned right and started up the steeply climbing road to the Fondation Maeght.
Up the climbing road in sunlight that is bright and warm now and on past the Fondation Maeght to the gravel road with the wrought-iron gate and the two sculptures in polished white marble—a mother and child and the trumpeting Gabriel—on the grass inside. The voice of the housekeeper, a woman from a nearby village, answers my ring. It comes through the black metal box mounted in the stone pillar to the right of the gate. “Ah, Monsieur Lev, welcome back, welcome back. How good to hear your voice. Ah, no, I am sorry; Madame is away today.” The gate slides open, and I step through. A moment later, it slides shut.
I walk along the curving path bordered by lantana and rose of Sharon and mandarin trees and up the grassy lawn to the knoll and the lone cypress and the grave of Jacob Kahn. The pale-gray marble slab, flat on the grassy earth, glistens in the sunlight, giving off sparkles of light as if inlaid with precious stones. The inscription on its polished surface reads:
JACOB KAHN 1884–1983
The pale-brown stucco-and-wood house lies beyond the garden and terrace where he would sit with Tanya and listen to the wind. It was the one clear sense left him toward the end, his hearing, and he would sit with his head inclined toward the wind and say there were subtleties to the mistral and the sirocco that one hears only when there are no other senses to distract one, faint nuances that reminded him of certain color patterns he had seen in Matisse at one point and on occasion in that madman Soutine and often in the work of the Spaniard. It moved differently through the white pines and the apple trees, a surge of cadmium red in one and a subtle earth green in the other, and in the slender leaves of the olive tree a wash of cerulean blue like a cool, caressing hand. Among the silver-barked cherry trees the wind played in a flow of dark purple, and it was bright yellow in the juniper hedge and orange among the marguerite. He was so old, so brittle, and a dry fetid odor rose from him, and he needed his Indian blanket—the one I had bought him as a gift during a trip to Arizona—he needed it even in the sunlight.
Tanya always sat nearby on the terrace, reading another of her novels in Russian. Émigrés and old friends brought them to her: recently released Jews; Russian writers; diplomats on trips to the West. She was more than fifteen years younger than her husband, a woman of striking appearance, high cheekbones, silver hair drawn back into a bun, dark-eyed, aristocratic. Before the Russian Revolution her family had been wealthy Odessa merchants with connections everywhere. She would read as Jacob Kahn and I talked.
“What are you doing these days, Asher Lev?” he would ask each time I saw him, and I saw him often in those years, two or three times a week. I was a son in their home; sometimes Devorah would come along and bring Rocheleh.
“This and that,” I would answer, and we would talk technical matters for a while.
It was difficult for him to speak for long periods of
time in any one language. He would move from English to Yiddish to French to Russian. At first, the language he used would be appropriate to the years of his life he was describing to me: an account of his early life in Russia would be told in Yiddish; his years in Montmartre with Picasso would be recounted in French; his years in America were relayed in English; to Tanya he often spoke Russian, which I did not understand. Then he began to move from one language to another within sentences, and there seemed no clear connection between subject and word. His talk was layered with language as his canvases were with paint.
“I do nothing any longer,” he said to me once. “I hear Chagall is still able to paint. But I do nothing. The eyes do not see. The legs will not stand. The hands refuse to work. Only the ears are still able to hear. No matter. I have done what I was put here to do. I have a right to my fatigue. It is an earned fatigue.”
He sat—the blanket with its dance of Indian colors and forms tight around him—with the sun on his astonishingly withered face, the walrus mustache sagging and the dry white hair loose and uncombed on his skeletal head and the brownish blotches on his pale pink skin and the hooded eyes shiny with the watery glaze of age.
He said to me another time, “Do you remember when the Rebbe first brought us together? I had no hope it would succeed. You could draw, yes. You had an eye. But many can draw. It is not a rare gift. And you were such a child. Thirteen years old, and a naïve child. I think the Rebbe expected you to fail. I wonder if the Rebbe does not regret having brought us together. Have you ever considered that, Asher Lev?”
“I have, yes.”
