My Name Is Asher Lev (27 page)

She went back to her reading. I sat gazing across the dunes at the rushing surf.

Jacob Kahn came out onto the porch from the house. He brought with him the odors of turpentine and oil colors. He wore shorts and sandals, and there was paint on his arms and chest and white hair and on the shorts and sandals. He looked somber.

“That went well. I am satisfied. I will hate it in the morning but now I am satisfied. My little Hasid is still fasting?”

I nodded.

“I will wash up and we will take a walk. Do you have strength for a walk?”

“Yes.”

He went back into the house and came out a few minutes later, wearing clean shorts and a light shirt.

“There is paint on your mustache,” his wife said.

“Yes? We will let it remain for a while. A testament to a day of good work. Come, Asher.”

We left his wife on the porch reading, and started across the dunes. The sand was hot. I felt it shifting and sliding beneath my sandals, felt it on my feet and between my toes. Along the edge of the beach lay scattered remnants of the night: beer cans, bits of paper, a prophylactic. Jacob Kahn left his sandals on the beach and walked along the surf and I walked beside him, keeping my feet out of the water. The sun burned overhead; I felt it burning my face and arms.

“You are fasting for the destruction of the Temple?” Jacob Kahn said.

“Yes.”

“And for the death of the six million?”

“I’ve been thinking of the six million. Yes.”

“My father used to fast. I could never understand the point to it. I fasted a few times when I was young. But when I came to Paris I stopped because it meant nothing to me. It meant nothing to me when I lived in Berlin in the twenties and again in Paris in the thirties. I have had long discussions with the Rebbe about fasting. I have lost the faculty of appreciating such an act of faith.” He stopped walking and stared out across the ocean. “Sometimes I think all that water is blood. It is a strange feeling.” He was silent. The wind blew through his white hair. I saw the flecks of paint on his face, luminous in the sun. He crouched down along the edge of the surf where the sand was
moist but untouched now by the encroaching film of water. His hands gathered sand into a small mound. I watched his fingers begin to work on the moist sand. “It pleases me that you have chosen not to abandon things that are meaningful to you. I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.” His fingers were shaping the sand, working swiftly, molding. I saw a face come to life. I saw eyes and a nose and lips. It was his own face. He was sculpting a self-portrait out of the sand along the edge of the foaming surf. The sightless eyes stared out across the water. He rose slowly to his feet and gazed down at the face. “I would like not to die too soon. There are many things I still want to do. I would like to live beyond eighty. Monet did it. Renoir did it. Picasso will do it. Nothing will stop that Spanish genius from reaching eighty. I will bet even Chagall will do it. In Paris, we sometimes thought Chagall would not reach forty. Yes, I would like to live beyond eighty.” He looked at me and shook his head. “Asher Lev, sometimes I find your presence a little—upsetting. You carry with you too much of my own past. Come. Walk with me along the beach. We will look at your Hopper sunlight on the houses. You will contemplate God and I will contemplate futility.” He smiled wryly. “I do not enjoy myself when I am like this. But mere is nothing to be done. It is in my nature to be this way from time to time.”

We walked along the surf and then on up across the hot dunes. We walked in silence, and overhead the gulls circled and called in the hot afternoon sky. We came through the scrub brush and looked at the sunlight on the houses.

“I cannot do it,” I heard him say. “No one can do it.” He gazed wide-eyed at the blinding sunlight. “Even Monet could not do it. And he had the greatest eye of all.” He turned and stared back down across the dunes at the beach and the distant mound of moist sand that wore his face. “My blood-offering,” he murmured. “But it will not help.”

We walked back to the house.

He went to bed early that night and in the morning he would not rise.

“He is in a mood,” his wife said calmly. “Once in a while, he has a mood.”

She would not let me see him.

I painted alone on the porch of the house. I painted his face in the sand with the surf tearing at it.

His wife came out onto the porch and gazed at the painting.

“Once in a while, he remembers the sculptures he left behind in Paris when we ran from the Nazis. They melted it all down. Ten years of sculpture.” She looked at me. “You are very good. A good painter and a good person. Be careful. The world is not nice to good people.”

She sat down on a chair and opened a book.

He would not come out of his room all that day.

The next morning, a car pulled up to the house and a tall brown-haired man stepped out and came toward the porch. Tanya Kahn greeted him and introduced us. He looked at the painting I was working on, then looked at me. I knew his name; I had seen his paintings in museums. He went into the house.

Four more painters came over that day, one of them from as far away as Woods Hole. The others were all in Provincetown for the summer. I knew their names.

Shortly before noon the next day, a cab stopped at the house and Anna Schaeffer hurried inside. She greeted me briefly and went off with Tanya Kahn. They were gone a long time. The cab waited near the house.

I stood on the porch watching the gulls. Had there been birds on the trees along my street? Had I ever seen them wheeling and circling? I could not remember.

Behind me, a door opened and closed softly. I turned.

“Are you having a good summer?” Anna Schaeffer asked.

“Yes.”

“I am glad.”

“Will he be all right?”

“Yes. It passes. But it is unpleasant while he has it. He is like a light that is dying. It takes a few days. You are doing good work this summer?”

“I think so.”

“Jacob Kahn reports to me that he is satisfied. Now I must take that cab back to Hyannis and see if there is a flight to New York. Goodbye, Asher Lev. Be especially kind to your teacher. He is filled with memories of unpleasant things these days.”

She went off in the cab. Tanya Kahn came onto the porch.

“He is better. Anna has a way of helping him.” She sat down on a chair and opened her book. “He has always come out of it. Of course, there is the chance he may not. One learns to live with fear.”

He came out onto the porch that evening and watched the sky grow dark. Then he went inside. Later, as I passed his studio on the way to my room, I saw he had turned on a set of floodlights and was painting, stripped to the waist, a huge canvas toned in a wash of burnt sienna. He was painting in a frenzy, filling the surface with crimson and black forms. I watched him for a while, then went up to my room.

In the morning, we painted together. We did not talk about the past three days. When we went down to the beach before noon to swim, I saw him staring at the sand beyond the curving line of surf. The sand was damp and smooth. He went into the water and swam a long time far away from the shore. Then he came out of the water and stood next to me, dripping, his white hair wild and wet, droplets of water clinging to his mustache.

“I will make it past eighty,” he said, “if I can keep from thinking too much about the past. That was a good swim for an impossible old man of seventy-three.”

We walked back together across the dunes to the house.

The following week, I received a letter from my mother.
She was well. My father was working very hard. She urged me to take care of myself and not to forget that I was a Jew. She sent her good wishes to Jacob Kahn.

The letter was postmarked Zurich. The previous letters I had received from her had been postmarked Vienna, Paris, and Bucharest.

Often that summer, I lay in my bed trying to sleep and found myself thinking of my parents. I would see them gazing out train windows at misty hills and dark mountains and tiny villages set in green valleys. I would see them on the boulevards of great cities, walking together, my father tall and bearded, dressed in his neat dark clothes, my mother short, slight, her eyes warm and alive to the sounds around her, the two of them together, my father’s head inclined toward her, listening to her words. I wondered what they talked about during all those days of travel. Russian Jews? The yeshivos my father was bringing to life? Their strange son? My father’s certainty of the trouble I would one day bring upon them? I would lie awake in the night, seeing them together, and finally I would sleep, and sometimes there would be dreams.

One day in the third week of August, Jacob Kahn took me to Hyannis and we spent part of the day visiting galleries. Two days later, we drove to Boston to see a Cubist exhibit. All the way back in the car, Jacob Kahn talked about the exhibit and about the Cubists he had known in Paris before the First World War.

“We changed the eyes of the world, Asher Lev. Picasso and Braque with painting and Jacob Kahn with sculpture. Picasso was frightening. We met and talked, all of us, and thought of this or that idea. Picasso would go back to his studio and in a few hours he had it all worked out on a canvas. He is a genius. He can use up a lifetime of ideas of an ordinary good painter in a few weeks. People used to hide their canvases from him. There is something demonic about such a gift, Asher Lev. Demonic or
divine, I do not know which. Giotto, Michelangelo, Picasso. It will be three hundred years before the world assimilates what has happened to art as a result of Picasso and the Cubists.” He smiled delightedly. “Ah, the stories I can tell.”

“You are an old gossip,” his wife said, looking up. She had been sitting beside him on the front seat, reading.

“Yes,” he said. “I love gossip. It is one of my more delicious weaknesses.”

A few days later, he drove me to the Provincetown docks and let me out. I wandered along the waterfront, sketching the boats and the gulls and the boys diving and swimming. I watched them diving and swimming and I sketched their young bodies in the sunlight. Then I stopped sketching for a while and stood at the end of a long wooden pier and watched them in the water, swimming smoothly with the liquid ease of fish. I envied them their freedom. I went from the pier and walked slowly along the streets of the town, narrow crowded streets filled with cafés and restaurants and souvenir shops. I came into a small aquarium and watched sharks swim about behind thick glass. I sketched the twisting of their bodies and the hideousness of their mouths. People gathered around me, and there were murmurs of awe. Here is my gift, I thought. Publicly displayed. I drew without hesitation. I thought I heard someone applaud; I could not be certain. I saw a young boy of about eight leaning forward, watching. I signed one of the drawings, dated it, tore it from the sketchbook, and gave it to him. His eyes went wide. There was a soft ripple of laughter and approval.

I came out into the sunlight and walked the streets. Sometime during the walking, I saw myself in the window of a restaurant and stared indifferently at my face and realized my sidecurls were behind my ears. I turned away and continued along the street. I went up a side street and sketched the faces of old women on the porches of small wooden houses. I sketched
the faces of old men, wrinkled leathery faces, the faces of fishermen who knew intimately a kind of universe far from the street where I had grown up. Here on a street of Provincetown fishing families, I sketched people I had never known before but with whom I felt a strange kinship. We all lived together on the same quicksilvery water and sand. I sketched their faces and gave some of the sketches away and was rewarded with grateful smiles.

Later that day, Jacob Kahn picked me up in front of the gallery where we had met the man he had called a whore. He looked at my face.

“You had a good day?” he asked quietly.

I showed him the sketches. He glanced through them and nodded.

“You had a good day,” he said.

“I am going to be an artist,” I said. “I am going to be a great artist.”

“You have been an artist for a long time, Asher Lev.”

We drove together through the town.

Early one morning at the end of August, a truck came up to the house. We loaded the paintings of the summer into the back and closed and locked the doors. We stood on the porch and watched the truck drive off.

“He is a careful driver,” Jacob Kahn said. “I have used him before.”

I did not say anything.

Later, we swam together and then I sat at the edge of the line of surf and made a sculpture of my face out of wet sand. Jacob Kahn watched me.

“It is very good,” he said when I was done.

We swam again, and when we came out of the water the face had crumbled into a pile of soggy sand, dissolved by the surf. We stared at it and I looked at Jacob Kahn.

“No,” he said. “I will not be ill again. I will never make it to eighty if I indulge myself too much with that illness.”

But I saw that face of sand in my sleep that night, and I woke and went to the window and stared out at the dunes and thought I heard soft mocking laughter float toward me from the dark water beyond.

Two days later, we drove back to New York and my summer of water and sand came to an end.

    I was attending the Ladover yeshiva high school. I asked to see the registrar.

He was a short thin man with a dark beard and a bald head. He wore rimless spectacles and a small dark skullcap. He looked up from behind his neat desk.

“Yes?”

“I did not ask to take French.”

“And?”

“Someone put French on my class card.”

“Yes?”

“I do not want to take French. What do I need with French?”

He adjusted the spectacles delicately on the bridge of his thin nose. “Asher Lev, you will take French. You will take four years of French. And you will earn for yourself excellent marks in French. The Rebbe specifically requested that we make certain you study French.”

I stared at him.

“Is there anything else?”

“No.”

“Then good day, Asher Lev.”

On Rosh Hashonoh, I sat in the synagogue and prayed. The prayer shawls and white garments flooded the synagogue with light; there was white light everywhere, on the chairs and benches, near the podium where the reader chanted the prayers,
near the Ark where the Rebbe sat praying, quietly, alone, faintly luminous against the dark wood of the wall. We stood, and the Rebbe sounded the shofar. The sounds filled the large synagogue, the air vibrating invisibly as the piercing notes caught up with one another and echoed from distant corners. I looked at the bundles of prayers on the podium in front of the Rebbe. Somewhere in those bundles, there were prayers for my mother and father and for Jacob Kahn. I hoped the Ribbono Shel Olom would listen more seriously to my prayers for my parents and Jacob Kahn than He had to my father’s prayers for me.

On Yom Kippur, I wept when I remembered my father’s weeping over the martyrdom of the ten sages. On Succos, I marched in the synagogue procession with the lulov and esrog my uncle had purchased for me. On Simchas Torah, I danced with a Torah scroll—and there on the edge of the crowd of thousands that always came to watch our joy on that day was Jacob Kahn. I pulled him into the line and we held the Torah together and danced. His small dark skullcap was as awkward on his head as was the grasp of his fingers upon the Torah. But we held it together and we danced.

I continued going to him on Sunday afternoons. I continued painting and drawing, and now I did some sculpting, too. I studied Gemorra. I studied Hasidus. I studied French.

The opening of Jacob Kahn’s show took place on a Sunday afternoon in late October. It was a lavish black-tie affair with drinks and food. The gallery was crowded. The sculptures had been carefully positioned along the floor and walls. In form and line and texture, in the way they utilized the space within and around them, they were clear and awesome indicators of a powerful and visionary aesthetic. He had transformed forever the nature of sculpting as Picasso had transformed forever the nature of painting.

One of the sculptures consisted of two heads facing in the same direction. One head was Jacob Kahn’s; the other was mine.
They were identical to the heads we had sculpted out of wet sand along the edge of the clutching surf. Now they were in bronze. The small red label on the base of the sculpture indicated it had already been purchased.

I moved through the gallery, listening. It seemed an intelligent crowd. I heard much talk about Picasso and Cubism and Henry Moore. Most of the painters I had met over the months in his studio were there. At one point during the afternoon, I found myself next to Anna Schaeffer. She wore a gown and her face was flushed with excitement.

“It is a grand success,” she cried exuberantly. “You have no idea what I went through to get him to agree to a show. You will not give me such trouble, Asher Lev, will you? I could not take such heartache from both of you. Look. Look around. It is a magnificent day.”

She turned to greet someone and I moved away. I saw Jacob Kahn near a wall, dressed in a dark suit and dark bow tie, surrounded by a dense crowd, and looking stiff and uncomfortable. His wife stood beside him, smiling and talking calmly to a woman in diamonds but looking as if she would rather be reading one of her Russian or French books. Somehow I managed to make my way up to them.

“Asher,” Tanya Kahn said. “You are looking fine.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “It’s a great show.”

“Yes?” Jacob Kahn said.

“You don’t think so?”

“I wish I had Picasso’s gall and could stay away from these things. They destroy me. A few more of these and I will never make it to eighty.”

“You will make it to ninety,” Tanya Kahn said calmly.

“I wish I had that Spaniard’s gall. Instead I have a Jewish heart. I would not want to hurt Anna.”

“I like the two heads,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Very much.”

“I like them, too,” he said.

“Who bought them?”

He shrugged and would not respond.

I moved through the crowd and stood next to Anna Schaeffer.

“I saw you with Jacob,” she said. “Is he suffering terribly?”

“He says he is.”

“Poor man. He does this to please me. He wishes he had Picasso’s contempt for such things. Yes. How I know that old man.”

“Who bought the two heads?”

“Which?”

I told her.

“Ah,” she said.

“Who bought them?”

She told me. I stared at her. She smiled faintly.

“They are among his collectors. They have a number of his pieces. It is a beautiful sculpture. He made it when he returned after the summer.” She looked at me. “He has developed an affection for you, Asher Lev.”

I did not say anything.

When I left the gallery later that afternoon, it was still crowded. On the subway ride home, I thought about the sculpture of the two heads and wondered where they would put it. In a library? In a garden? In a living room? What would the eyes stare at? Ornate drapery? Marble? Books in leather bindings? Rare flowers? It was a queer feeling to know that a likeness of my head would soon be in the home of one of the wealthiest families in America.

The reviews of the show were uniformly appreciative and filled with praise. I read in one of the newspapers that the entire show had sold out at the opening. The next time I saw
Jacob Kahn, I congratulated him on that. He looked bereaved.

The weeks went by. I continued traveling to Jacob Kahn. The room in which I lived became crowded with drawings and canvases.

My uncle came into the room, one night early in December, and stood in the doorway watching me work on a painting of my memory of Mrs. Rackover. She had gone to live with a married daughter in Detroit after my mother left for Europe, and had died of a heart attack on a downtown Detroit street in late November while shopping for a gift for a new grandson. He stood in the doorway a long time, watching me paint. Then he cleared his throat softly.

“Am I disturbing you?”

“No.”

“It is a good painting.”

“Thank you.”

“Asher. Goldie and I were talking. Look at your room. It is crowded and small.”

“It’s a good room.”

“We will fix up the attic for you.”

I stopped painting and looked at him.

“It is a whole floor. No one uses it. We will fix it up and you will have more room.”

Carpenters came. Painters came. A month later, the whole family—my uncle, my aunt, their four children—helped me move upstairs. When it was done, my uncle surveyed the attic, chewed thoughtfully on his cigar, and said, “Now you are a painter. When someone writes the history of Asher Lev, he will say his uncle fixed him up with his first real studio.
This
is a studio. Not the closets you had until now. It will take you five years to fill up this studio.”

I did a painting of him and his family and gave it to them for Hanukkah. He framed it and put it on a wall of the living
room. He called it his “authentic Lev” and kept talking about the fortune it would be worth one day.

The attic room was large, with a high sloping roof and a tall window that looked out onto an old maple. I could barely see the street through the thick tangle of branches.

I worked and slept in that room. I did not think it would take me five years to fill it.

Between semesters, Jacob Kahn took me by train to a Van Gogh exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We talked about the Post-Impressionists and the Nabis and the Fauves. We talked about Gauguin and Matisse and Vlaminck. We came back in a snowstorm that delayed the train and got us into New York more than two hours late. I called my uncle from the station. He answered the phone and I heard his voice tremble. He was relieved to hear from me and grateful that I had thought to call.

Early in February, Jacob Kahn sent a plaster piece out for casting in bronze. When it came back, I saw it was a sculpture of the two of us dancing with a Torah. I had not seen him sculpt it. He put it in a corner of the studio. One day, I looked for it and it was no longer there.

“Tanya likes it,” he said. “I took it home.”

I asked him once if they had any children. They had had a daughter, he said. She had died of influenza in Paris at the age of four.

He came to the Ladover farbrengen in the second week of February. We were commemorating the day that the Rebbe’s father removed himself from this world. The synagogue was filled with thousands of people. The men sat at the tables. The students stood on benches around the walls. There were benches along the area in front of the Ark. Elders and guests of honor sat on those benches. I saw two Jewish novelists on one of those benches. And I saw Jacob Kahn, thick-shouldered, the dark beret covering his white hair. The Rebbe sat on a cushioned
chair at a table in front of a microphone. He wore a dark caftan and an ordinary dark hat. He spoke for a few minutes in Yiddish about the need for a true Torah education for Jewish children. He quoted from the Gemorra and the Midrash and the Zohar. The huge crowd was hushed, listening. His words came clearly through the microphone. Those same words were being transmitted by telephonic hookup to every Ladover community in the world—to England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Israel, South America, North Africa, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and perhaps elsewhere as well. I wondered if my parents were now listening to the Rebbe. It was a suddenly warm feeling to think that the three of us might be listening to the Rebbe together.

When the Rebbe was done talking, someone began a song. There was rhythmic singing. Little paper cups of vodka were held up to be blessed by a nod of the Rebbe’s head before being drunk. Then the singing stopped and the Rebbe spoke again—about the importance of the sanctity of the Jewish family. There was more singing. I looked up at the benches behind the Rebbe and saw that Jacob Kahn was no longer there. A moment later, I felt a tug at my sleeve.

“Come outside with me, Asher,” Jacob Kahn said.

I followed behind him as he moved slowly through the dense crowd.

Outside on the street, the air was cold and sharp with the feeling of coming snow. We stood on the sidewalk away from the crowd near the doors. There were two police cars at the curb and four patrolmen on the sidewalk in front of the building.

“Fifteen years ago, there was nothing here,” Jacob Kahn said, gazing at the synagogue and at the headquarters building alongside it. “The house was here. I think a doctor or a dentist owned it. But none of this was here.” He gestured toward the crowd. “He is a good man, our Rebbe.” He looked at me. “I will
be going to Europe for a month. I was called two days ago and thought I would tell you tonight rather than telephone. I leave tomorrow night.”

I shivered in the wind.

“In Zurich, they are planning a retrospective for a good friend. They are asking for advice. That will take a week. Then I will go to Italy. There is some marble I want to look at.”

I was quiet.

“Asher Lev, it will only be for a month. Your world has not come to an end because Jacob Kahn is going on a trip. You may use the studio anytime you wish. There is a new piece of wood I had brought in today that you might want to use.”

I did not say anything.

“It is not in my nature to make long farewells. Goodbye, Asher Lev.” He shook my hand and walked away quickly beneath the winter trees.

I did not go back inside. I walked home and went to bed.

I took the subway to his studio the following Sunday afternoon. But I found the silent enormity of the room intolerable. After an hour, I closed it up and went home.

I did not return to his studio. Instead I worked in my attic room. I painted him swimming in the ocean. I painted him sculpting in the sand. I painted him walking with his wife. I painted the two of us painting together at the edge of the dunes. I painted him painting a huge canvas stripped to the waist. The room began to look cluttered with drawings and canvases. No, I would not need five years to fill this room.

He returned in March, one month after he had gone. He called me. It had been a fine trip. Italy especially had been admirable. Italy was always admirable. Especially Florence.

“I met your parents in Zurich. They are well and send you their love. You know they will be back for Pesach. Will I see you Sunday?”