by Chaim Potok
“Mama and I thought it would be a good idea to spend the weekend in the country,” she says.
“What about Avrumel and the day camp?”
“It won’t hurt him to miss a day.”
I shut the valise and open the attaché case. “You might want to look at these.” I hand her the three large-sized drawing pads. She stands there holding them close to her.
“One of the men from the yeshiva will drive us up in the morning.”
“Fine.”
“I missed you, my husband.”
“And I you, Dev.”
“I enjoyed being with your mother. But I missed you very much.” I move to her. She puts the drawing pads on the desk. I hold her and kiss her. She clings to me, faintly trembling. The house is not air-conditioned, and her face is moist with heat. Small wrinkles seem to have invaded the corners of her eyes. She puts her hands on my face and I feel her fingers in my beard. Devorah. A sealed apartment in her childhood and a two-year brush with the Angel of Death and her family gone and Max her only solace and an artist for a husband and children’s books for her fantasy life and a hunger to create families wherever she lives and now a new family for her in Brooklyn.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, Asher?”
“Sure.”
On the way to the kitchen I leave the old Shimshon doll on Avrumel’s bed, propped up on the pillow next to the new Shimshon doll. Side by side, old and new, one doll appears exhausted and frayed, a worn mirror image of the other. I sit in the kitchen drinking coffee with Devorah and talk to her about Max and John.
I am on the terrace outside our room, dozing in the late-afternoon sunlight. I slip in and out of a troubled sleep as sounds drift through the stifling air: a child’s high voice; a man complaining in Yiddish about the heat; the leaves of the sycamore stirred by an occasional hot breeze; the music of George Gershwin on a radio somewhere; a Hebrew song about the armies of God.
A noise wakes me, the sound of the sliding door being quickly opened. I hear “Papa!” and Avrumel is suddenly all over me. “My papa is back!” He climbs onto the recliner, and I hold him. He wears a baseball cap and shorts and a T-shirt and his freckled face is tanned and he smells of sunlight and chlorinated water—the pool he swims in.
“How are you, Avrumel?”
“Ça va bien, Papa!”
It is so good to hold his lithe strong vibrant little form. My son.
“I am learning to play the baseball,” he says, his freckled face close to mine.
“Uncle Max and Uncle John send you their love.”
“Thank you, Papa. We are going to the country tomorrow. It is a long ride. Grandmother says maybe we will see the Rebbe.”
He leaves, and I am alone again on the terrace, still feeling his presence and hearing his high eager laughing voice, and I close my eyes and he is still there, and I open my eyes and he is really there, all over me again, holding his old Shimshon doll, his face radiant.
“I thank my papa for bringing me Shimshon!” And he plants a kiss on my face and runs off, holding the rag doll to him, the doll looking as if Avrumel’s joyously enthusiastic clutching will squeeze the stuffing from it.
I lie back on the recliner and close my eyes. The ground yaws and I feel myself on the Airbus, reading Camille Pissarro’s letters. I hear repeated distant ringing, and then silence. A moment later the door to the terrace slides open. Someone wants me on the telephone, Devorah says. I get out of the recliner, and as I walk through our room I notice that on my bed is the new Shimshon doll Devorah bought Avrumel to replace the old one he forgot. It lies propped against my pillow, no longer needed, abandoned.
The voice on the telephone sounded deep and nasal. “Is this Asher Lev?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be with us for Shabbos?”
“What?”
“I understand you will be here for Shabbos.”
“Who is this?”
“I’m sorry. My name is Yehuda Birkov. I’m on the Rebbe’s staff. You’ll be with us in the mountains for Shabbos?”
“Yes.”
“The Rebbe would like to talk to you. Right after Shabbos.”
I said nothing.
“Hello?”
“All right. Yes.”
“Be well.” He hung up.
I was lying on my bed on top of the spread and next to the Shimshon doll, when I heard my mother calling from the entrance hallway. “Hello! I’m home! Is Asher back?”
I got up, and the doll fell to the floor. I picked it up and put it on a chair and went out into the hallway. My mother kissed me and said it was good to see me back safely; she was happy I had decided to return today rather than Sunday. How was my father? Did he look all right when we were together in Paris?
“I worry about your father. It is not pleasant now in Israel.”
“Is Papa anywhere near the demonstrations?”
“I almost never know exactly where your father is when he travels. I am going to change into something comfortable, and then we will have supper. It is good to see you again, my son. Doesn’t Devorah look wonderful? She has put on weight, and there is color in her face. You see, even in Brooklyn one can get sunlight and air. And Avrumel! Did you see how tan he is?”
We ate supper together in the kitchen, and afterward I went for a walk with Devorah and Avrumel. Then I was very sleepy. I got into pajamas and stood before the mirror in the bathroom and heard myself say in Hebrew, “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, Master of the Universe, who revives the dead,” and I had no idea why I said it.
I climbed into my bed and was immediately asleep.
Sometime during the night, I woke and felt Devorah in bed beside me, whispering. I held her to me with love, I held her to me with tenderness. She clung to me with a strange ferocity and I heard her say in French, “I love you, my husband. God brought you to me. I love you.”
In the morning Devorah and I and my mother were at the table when Avrumel entered the kitchen, his baseball cap on his head, his old Shimshon doll tucked firmly under an arm.
“Sit down and I’ll make you an orange juice,” I said to him. I squeezed a fresh orange into a glass, put in a teaspoon of sugar, and filled the glass with cold water.
“That’s the way Grandfather makes it,” Avrumel said.
“Drink it,” I said. “All the vitamins will go out of it if you let it stand too long.”
Baruch Levinson, the blond-bearded Chicagoan who had driven me in from the airport, showed up about an hour after breakfast in a newer, roomier car—one that was, he said, more appropriate for the women and a long drive. He had borrowed it from a friend. He would remain in the colony with another friend over Shabbos and bring us back on Sunday afternoon.
The roads out of Manhattan were dismal with traffic. Jet-lagged, fatigued, my head more in Paris and Saint-Paul than on a crowded highway with my family, I sat next to Baruch Levinson in a fog of discomfort, slipping in and out of dazed sleep, waking in fits and starts to new roads and countrysides, as if I were moving through discontinuous corridors of time. I heard dimly the conversation in the back seat, where my mother and Devorah sat, with Avrumel between Devorah and the door behind Baruch Levinson, who kept humming Ladover melodies as he drove. On the Taconic the traffic thinned, and he went hurtling along the highway. Once I woke with a start from hallucinatory sleep and saw an old European car draw alongside us, the Spaniard in the back seat, smoking a cigarette. He rolled down his window and looked at me. I felt his eyes scourge my face. The car sped past us. I was suddenly bathed in sweat, my heart thundering. After a while I fell again into a half-sleep and saw Jacob Kahn walking quickly across the dunes in front of his summer home in Provincetown and on into the waves, his head of thick white hair flashing in the sunlight.
We stopped at a roadside restaurant for some drinks and to use the bathrooms. I went with Avrumel into the men’s room. He stood at a low urinal in his shorts and Ladover day camp T-shirt and his Mets baseball cap. The bathroom was
crowded. A thick-chested, huge-muscled, bearded man in jeans and a teamsters cap took the urinal beside him. He glanced at Avrumel.
“How you doing, young feller?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“Mets ain’t doing too well this year.”
“God will help them.”
The man looked startled. He chuckled. “You bet He will!” He shook himself down and went away.
Outside, we stood on the hot tarmac in the blinding sunlight, drinking Cokes and waiting for Devorah and my mother.
“Papa, will we be there soon?”
“Another hour or so.”
“It is a long trip.”
“America is a big country, Avrumel.”
“Bigger than France?”
“Much bigger.”
“I like America.”
“What do you like about it?”
“That I am with my grandfather and my grandmother.”
“What else?”
“I like the day camp and the yeshiva and that we live near the Rebbe. I like baseball and the pool.”
“There’s more to America than baseball, Avrumel. There are many poor people and people who sleep on the streets, and there is terrible crime.”
“If I go to school in the yeshiva here, will I learn about America?”
I stared at him, and before I could respond, my mother and Devorah came out of the restaurant. They wore light long-sleeved summer dresses and sunglasses, and their heads were covered with kerchiefs. They looked strikingly like mother and daughter.
We walked through the parking lot to the car. The lot was crowded. Shimmering waves rose from the baking asphalt. Avrumel and I walked a few feet behind Devorah and my mother.
“Avrumel, who talked to you about going to the yeshiva in America next year?”
“Grandmother.”
Baruch Levinson sat behind the wheel of the car. The motor was running and the air conditioner was on. We climbed inside.
“Ready to roll?” he asked cheerfully.
My parents’ cottage was in a private Ladover summer colony in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. The colony stood along a sandy beach on the western rim of a lake. There was a dense wood of oak and pine and white birch behind the colony, and off in the distance beyond the lake were green hills and tall trees and wide fire lanes running along the slopes to the crests and looking like the raked side lanes of Brooklyn Parkway. All the cottages, save that of the Rebbe, were identical bungalow-like, one-story structures: white clapboard exteriors, red-shingled roofs. Cement walks wound among them to their front doors. Some of the cottages had small flower beds in front. The Rebbe’s dwelling, set a distance from the others, was the size of two cottages and had a front porch and a rear raised screened-in deck. The synagogue, too, was the size of two cottages, and it stood about fifty feet from the house of the Rebbe. A tall oak shielded the Rebbe’s large cottage from the afternoon sun.
In the summer weekdays the colony was crowded with women and children; husbands, working in the city, would come up for Shabbos. Now women and children stood watching as we pulled up to our cottage. They murmured words of greeting to my mother and Devorah. Baruch Levinson, sweating, helped us with our bags, wished us a good Shabbos, and drove off. Avrumel went down toward the lake.
Devorah wandered slowly through the cottage, looking at the furniture, the small kitchen, the bedrooms. The air had a moist, earthen, cavelike smell. Always, when entering a new place—a store, a house, an apartment, a room—she moved with caution, giving the impression of deep interest in her surroundings but actually looking for windows and doors through which light might come. She gazed out our bedroom window at the lake. I could see Avrumel on the beach, talking to some boys his age.
In the early evening I went with Avrumel to the synagogue for the Shabbos Service. The Rebbe did not appear. Some of the children apparently knew Avrumel from the yeshiva and the day camp, and they clustered around him after the service. Later, I walked back with him to the cottage under a jet-black sky jeweled with stars. The air was cool. I used to walk with my mother beneath that sky. She knew many of the constellations and would try to point them out to me—the Bear, the Swan, Orion—but I only learned to make out the Big Dipper. There it was now in that vast star-laden sky, and I stopped and looked up at it and felt myself seized at that moment by an immense and nameless dread. The sky slowly turned. I became light-headed, dizzy.
“Papa?” Avrumel said.
The Big Dipper wheeled toward me, its stars blazing. It would scoop me into itself.
Avrumel tugged at my arm. “Is my papa all right?”
I looked at him. He wore his Shabbos clothes: a shirt, a tie, a dark-blue summer suit. A black velvet skullcap covered his red hair.
“The Big Dipper contains all the evil deeds that people do during the day,” my mother had once told me. “And during the night it spills those deeds into a special place in the heavens, the Place of Evil Deeds. But there is also the Little Dipper, and that contains all the good deeds. The good deeds are fewer, but they weigh more in the eyes of the Master of the Universe. The Little Dipper spills the good deeds into the Place of Good Deeds. Blessings come to the world when the good deeds outweigh the evil.”
I was very young when she told me that. I had not thought to ask her what might happen if the evil deeds ever outweighed the good ones.
She told me all that about the Big and Little Dippers on one of the many nights when we were up here alone and my father was in Europe on a journey for the Rebbe. “Your father is trying to give a balance to the world, Asher. He is trying to fill the Little Dipper with good deeds, fill it to the top, so it will outweigh the evil deeds in the Big Dipper.” I remember thinking it was an awesome task for one man, all that balancing and outweighing of the good over the bad, and my father seemed to me at that moment a being of heroic dimensions, one altogether beyond the normal and the human, a celestial creature moving with ease among the stars, gathering the good deeds of mankind and pouring them into the Little Dipper. I knew I would be frightened by his presence when he returned to earth.
Later, we sat around the table in the cottage, the four of us, and ate the Shabbos meal and sang zemiros. At times during the meal my mother fell silent. She would sit with her eyes wide open, staring, as if a lever had been pulled inside her, sealing off her feelings. Her face sagged; the light went out of her eyes. I knew those moments: sudden retreats into herself as she thought of my father journeying for the Rebbe. She looked old, limp, doll-like: all her features intact but the life gone from them. Apparently Devorah now recognized those moments, too; she knew to bring my mother back with a gentle remark about a current event, a quote from something the Rebbe had said, an observation about the children. During the meal, they would talk for long periods of time, just the two of them, as I sat by, watching or talking with Avrumel. I thought I might make a painting of them one day. I would have to do it from memory. My mother would not sit for it. When I was young she would let me draw her often, but I had not been near her with a pencil and drawing pad since the day she saw the crucifixion paintings. How would I capture her face in those moments of withdrawal? There was something in her face then: a strange flickering in the otherwise dead eyes. Some sort of odd life in the midst of emotional death. How would I render that? We were chanting the Grace After Meals, Avrumel swaying back and forth in his chair, saying the words loudly, as if he had known them from birth. There I was, in the midst of the Grace After Meals—thinking of how to do a painting of my mother! Truly a desecration of the Shabbos. I abandoned the painting and concentrated on the words.
The Rebbe did not come to the synagogue the next morning. It was a warm, sun-filled day, the sky clear and blue. The placid lake darkly mirrored the sky. After the service many walked past the Rebbe’s cottage, men, women, and children, walking in silence, and there were glances, but nothing was said, and people wished one another a good Shabbos and went off to the afternoon meal.
I fell
asleep after the meal and woke and saw Devorah under a tree near the edge of the beach, looking through my drawing pads. My mother was somewhere with friends. I found Avrumel on the beach with some of his classmates and asked him if he wanted to go for a walk, and we went into the woods behind the colony and I showed him where I had played as a child and had skimmed stones across the surface of the lake and where my mother and I used to go rowing and the clearing in the woods where I would play alone. Beyond the stand of white birch were lines of oak and pine and silver spruce, and one of the oaks had an enormous low branch, and often I would climb up and lie on it and gaze through the canopy of leaves and branches and imagine myself becoming weightless and rising from the leaden pull of the earth through the leaves to the light beyond. Rising and flying free from the weight of the world. I told Avrumel that, and he looked at the branch and the tangle of leaves overhead and said he didn’t want to climb onto the branch, he was afraid he would fall off. I said he was too young yet to climb trees, but one day he might find it was an exciting thing to do.
We left the clearing and started back through the woods, skirting the houses, and as we passed the back of the Rebbe’s cottage, I saw the Rebbe on the screened-in deck. He was sitting in a recliner. Nearby stood a dark-bearded man, staring out through the screen at the lake. The few boats on the water were from the private homes on the far side of the lake. Distant summer sounds drifted toward me: birds, voices, the lapping of water, the whispery rustling of leaves. There was the languorous feeling of the slowing of the world.
I lingered behind and Avrumel continued on alone and went into the cottage. I looked across the lawn to the tree under which Devorah sat. Two of my drawing pads were on the grass at her feet. She was looking through the third.
I went into the cottage and fell asleep on my bed. Devorah woke me about an hour later and asked me if I knew where Avrumel was. I said he was probably playing with his friends and I would see him in the synagogue for the Afternoon Service. I washed my hands and face, and left.
