The Gift of Asher Lev (26 page)

Some days later, Devorah and I and my parents went to the school and saw Rocheleh perform in a play about the prophetess Devorah. Pale-faced, garbed in a flowing saffron robe, and without her too-large glasses, she spoke her lines in a clear, high, penetrating voice, and dominated the stage and the auditorium. “Who is that?” I heard someone behind me ask during the lengthy applause at the end. “She is the daughter of Asher Lev,” was the answer. “Asher Lev, the painter?” “Yes.” “I don’t believe it. Such a lovely child from such a wicked man.” I saw Devorah’s face stiffen, but she did not turn around.

The festival of Shavuos came and went. The air was warm and fragrant with flowers. The Rebbe was present in the synagogue both days of the festival, and spoke on the first day about the Revelation on Mount Sinai and the Torah as our permanent heritage and the importance of continuity, and I had the impression as he spoke that he was looking at me, but I could not be certain.

I walked around a lot and made many drawings, but I showed the drawings to no one, not even to Devorah. There were more calls from the lawyers, and much talk about the Internal Revenue Service and their appraisers, and complete silence from my cousins, who no longer spoke to me and shunned me when they saw me on the street or in the synagogue.

The summer drew near. Devorah was buying clothes for the
children. Their closets and dressers filled with clothes, and it began to look as though they had lived in this house all their young lives. She and my mother were together often. With my mother’s help, Devorah bought herself dresses and two lovely wigs, both in chestnut brown, the original color of her hair, one a short, softly waved coif, the other a brush cut. Often I saw her on the terrace, deep in conversation with my father and mother. She seemed finally to be filling the space left when her parents were torn away from her that July day in Paris.

One morning I took the subway to Manhattan and walked in sun and shade to the tall building that housed Douglas Schaeffer’s gallery. He greeted me warmly. I told him I would be leaving for Europe soon and gave him three drawing pads for safekeeping.

“The printer should have the bon à tirer of that print,” he said. “You remember you asked me about that?”

I remembered, and thanked him.

He began looking through the pads. I asked him if certain of his artists who lived in Paris would be at home for the summer; I would like to see them when I got there. He seemed not to have heard me. I repeated the question. He glanced up from the pads, annoyed, and said, “Please, dear boy. Please.” It was as if the drawings were no longer mine and I was now an intruder. I went out of the office.

Standing before the elevator, I heard the gallery door open and close behind me, and I turned and there was Douglas Schaeffer.

“We will show them in the fall,” he said.

I said I wanted to think about it.

“Dear boy, you can think about it all you wish, but we will show them in the fall. Give my best wishes to Max.” He went back into the gallery.

A week later, I said goodbye to my parents and Devorah and kissed Rocheleh and Avrumel. Devorah, accustomed to my comings and goings, seemed to be treating this as merely another of my journeys from our home in Saint-Paul. “Your papa will be back in two weeks,” she said to the children. “Wish him a safe journey.” My father took my hand in his firm grip and reminded me again that he would be in Paris on Thursday and we would spend Shabbos together at the Ladover yeshiva. “Travel in good health,”
he said. My mother embraced me and kissed me. “Have a safe journey, my son,” she murmured, her face warm against mine.

I climbed into the taxi. They all stood in the doorway, waving at me. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the street was quiet. The taxi turned into Brooklyn Parkway, and after a while we were riding through a neighborhood of broken streets and shattered buildings and then along the Interborough Parkway, past the exit to the cemetery where my Uncle Yitzchok lay buried and onto the Grand Central Parkway to the airport.

The airport was crowded with tourists. There were lines everywhere. The plane left two hours late.

I spent much of the trip rereading Rilke’s letters on Cézanne, and drawing. I read Cézanne’s words about his life in the little town of Aix: “Ça va mal…. C’est effrayante la vie!” And I read this:

… artistic perception had to overcome itself to the point of realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting,
is,
and shares the truth of its being with everything else that exists. Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

And Cézanne, in the last letter he wrote, laments his poor health, and adds: “Je continue donc mes études.”

To his last days, he continued learning. I fell asleep reading the book.

BOOK TWO

3

The airliner descended through rough air and dense clouds and landed on a wet runway in a gray and gritty dawn. At a newsstand inside the terminal I saw the headline in
Le Figaro:
AIRBUS: L’ACCIDENT INEXPLIQUE
. An Airbus had gone down during an air show in France: three dead, about fifty hurt. Inexpliqué.

A taxi took me through nearly empty early-morning streets. I saw shopkeepers sweeping down the sidewalks. Traffic was light all the way to the hotel. A weary receptionist registered me; a sleepy bellhop took me up in the elevator.

My Paris is resonant with private memories: the roundup and the sealed apartment; painting the crucifixion canvases; marrying Devorah, the wedding small and simple, with Max and my parents and some friends; Rocheleh born; Lucien Lacamp climbing the stairs to our Rue des Rosiers apartment; Jacob Kahn suddenly here from New York; my show last winter and Paris at its worst: arrogant and dismissive, pouncing. They had been right to scorn. Too much art, too little heart. The Paris of Asher Lev.

I lay down on the bed for a few minutes of rest, and when I woke it was noon and there was sunlight. I washed and unpacked and made some phone calls. Waiting for one of the calls to go through, I fell asleep with the phone in my hand. I slept again and woke hours later, with the sun now a huge motionless orange-red disk in the cloud-studded western sky and the lingering twilight embracing the city like a tender lover.

I sit for a time on the narrow ornamented balcony of my hotel room and gaze across gabled rooftops and tall chimney pots at the
stationary sun. A summer twilight seems never-ending here, like a suspension of duration; darkness glides across the sky with the silken slowness of an infinitely languid tide. I sit with the drawing pad on my lap, looking at air dove-gray with fumes from the interminable traffic below and the early-evening streets crowded with tourists and the vast spread of the city beneath the slowly paling sky. Abruptly I am on the street in front of the hotel, with no memory of how I got there, and I set out along the Rue de Beaune to the river.

At the Restaurant Voltaire I turn right and walk parallel to the river, past elegant old apartment houses and the terraces of cafés. There are many people on the streets, and the cafés are crowded. I cross the river on the Pont des Arts, the long buildings of the Louvre to my left. Hot, water-scented winds blow across the dark-surfaced river. I turn left and walk on slowly and go past the Pont Royal. From time to time I stop to gaze over the stone parapet at the river walk below, with its occasional strollers and lovers and the houseboats moored for the night. Along its banks the river is scummy with a greenish-brown detritus of waterlogged scraps of paper, bottles, crushed cigarette packs, plastic containers. It is nearly dark when I start across the Pont de la Concorde and notice the gendarme standing alone in the middle of the bridge.

Armed with a machine pistol, wearing the peaked cap, with the dark-blue trousers of his uniform smartly rolled over the tops of his polished boots, he seems more sculpture than man, a modern equivalent of the equestrian statue of Henri IV near the Pont Neuf. As I walk past him, a light spattering of rain sweeps suddenly across the bridge. A second gendarme stands at the end of the bridge. I turn into the Quai Anatole France and see three others. They are all armed with machine pistols, and they stand very still, like statuary resonant with contained violence. The words of the Rebbe in his office that night. What? All around us is chaos, the world needs a center. Across the road from the bridge, the stone façade of a huge building is bathed in soft amber light and bears the words
ASSEMBLEE NATIONALE.

The light rain ends, leaving a film of water on the street. I walk beneath the trees to the Pont Royal and cross to the Quai Voltaire. There are few pedestrians and automobiles now on this street. I
sense someone behind me. I walk on, and there is still someone behind me. I hear a low, sustained whistling, and I turn and see a short, stocky, bald-headed man in a sweatshirt and baggy trousers and sandals. He steps smoothly into the shadows of a tree and is gone.

An emblazoned tourist boat appears suddenly on the river, its cyclopean prow light and upper-deck halogens cutting huge swaths of light out of the night. A blare of musical instruments, horns of some kind, rises from somewhere on the street. It stops, then begins again, horns climbing in unison to a crescendo, as if heralding the advent of royalty. Half a dozen people have stopped at the parapet near the Pont Royal, and I go over and look down.

Along the river, on a stone bank that looks like an ancient quai, stand five men and two women. A flight of stone stairs leads from the street to the quai. The river runs dark and silent alongside the stones. Stairs and quai are lit by electric lamps. The men and women stand in a semicircle in the light, holding large curved antique-looking trumpets. They put the trumpets to their lips, and once again a resonating flourish of ascending horn tones rises from the quai and ends abruptly on a sustained high note. It seems a rehearsal for some medieval pageant. I wonder what contemporary personage merits such a greeting and in what sort of craft he or she will arrive at the quai.

The Pont Royal affords a clearer view of the quai than the parapet along the street. I walk onto the bridge and stand at the stone railing and gaze down at the musicians. They stand inside their circle of light, and the river and the night run dark all around them. I feel the presence of someone behind me, and I turn but see no one.

Light-spangled tourist boats glide beneath the bridge. The left bank is dark in the distance and lighted to high noon where the boats turn their floodlights upon the stone façades of the seventeenth-century apartment houses and the awnings of elegant restaurants and hotels. I search for certain windows in the whitestone building over the Restaurant Voltaire where Jacob Kahn lived before moving to the south of France. I imagine him standing there, looking out at the river and the Louvre. Over the right bank, river birds wheel in and out of the darkness, wings flashing silvery
white in the boat lights. Distant streaks of lightning play over the city, splintering the darkness and flickering through the undersides of swollen clouds. A fine rain begins to fall. On the quai below, the trumpet players stand looking up at the sky. Tourist boats keep gliding along the water beneath me. I walk off the bridge and go past the Restaurant Voltaire and along the Rue de Beaune.

The street is dark and deserted. The rain begins to fall hard. All along the narrow street, doorways are closed and shops and restaurants are shuttered. There are no lowered awnings or open courtyards. All is sealed to the outside. I walk quickly in the rain, and then the rain is suddenly torrential, and I run in the dark through the pelting summer storm along streets deep with rivulets and between cars parked on the sidewalks and see the rain coursing through the gutters and falling in silvery streaks through the haloes cast by streetlamps. I enter the hotel and stand dripping in the lobby.

The night clerk shakes his head and clicks his tongue sympathetically and hands me my key. I hear a distant clap of thunder. Inside the elevator I watch the rain drip from my clothes and shoes to form puddles at my feet.