The Gift of Asher Lev (44 page)

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.

He did not appear in the synagogue. After the Evening Service I walked back alone in the darkness beneath a waning moon that sparkled like shards of glass on the black surface of the lake. A man came toward me on the path, bearded, in his twenties. He said, “Ah, the air is good here,” and wished me a good week. Another stood on the path, gazing up at the sky, and, as I went slowly past him, murmured, “‘The heavens tell of the glory of God.’”

I stopped near him a moment in the darkness beneath the arc of stars and stood looking up at the sky. I imagined my father striding among the stars, filling the Little Dipper. Images from childhood. I walked back to the cottage.

Devorah was in the kitchen with my mother. Wasn’t Avrumel with me? I said he hadn’t been in the synagogue, I thought he would be home by now. Devorah said he wasn’t home. I said he might be walking along the lake and went out to find him.

The lake was silent and dark. Yellow lights shone in the homes
along the opposite shore. Lake and woods and star-filled sky formed a single continuous darkness. I could not make out anyone along the shore. Passing the rear of the Rebbe’s cottage, I heard voices and looked at the screened-in deck and saw the Rebbe in the recliner, wearing a dark suit and tie and an ordinary dark hat. In the wicker chair beside him sat Avrumel. A tall dark-bearded man stood on the top step of the wooden stairway that led from the deck to the beach, his back to the screen door.

Avrumel and the Rebbe were talking in French. I could not make out clearly what they were saying.

The man on the stairs saw me and stood very still as I approached.

“I am Asher Lev, the boy’s father.”

The voices on the deck were suddenly silent.

“I know who you are,” the man on the stoop said.

“Papa?” I heard Avrumel say. Then, “That is my papa!”

The Rebbe said in Yiddish, “Come inside.”

The dark-bearded man opened the screen door, and I went up the stairs and onto the deck. The Rebbe beckoned to me. The yellow lights of an overhead fixture shone dimly on his dark clothes and gave his aged face a pale luminosity.

“A good week to you, Asher Lev.”

“A good week, Rebbe.”

“I came to say good Shabbos to the Rebbe, Papa,” Avrumel said. “You’ve been here all this time?”

“The child said to me his father was Asher Lev,” the Rebbe said, “and I asked him to come inside. He is a bright child.”

“My grandfather told me I could come with him to his office and sometimes I might see the Rebbe,” Avrumel said.

“God heard your grandfather’s words and hurried to make them come true,” said the Rebbe. “How are you, Asher?”

“I am well, thank God.”

“How was your journey? You did what you had to do?”

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“You were with your father in Paris.” It was a statement, not a question. My father called the Rebbe daily from wherever he was. The Rebbe knew every detail of my father’s work.

“Yes, Rebbe.”

“And in Saint-Paul, everything was in order?”

“Yes.”

“The matter of the art collection has become unpleasant. You know of it?”

“About my cousin and the lawsuit? Yes. I’m told there isn’t anything he can really do.”

“He has made of this a great desecration of the Name of God. The Other Side has taken hold of him.”

Near the door, the dark-bearded man stirred and was still.

The Rebbe brushed his hand across Avrumel’s cheek. “The child tells me that in Saint-Paul there are two people he loves. Who are these people?”

“Devorah’s cousin, Max Lobe, who is an artist. And an elderly American writer named John Dorman.”

“The child also tells me that he loves to sit and watch his father paint, but that his father does not paint any more.”