My mother said to me one day during Succos, “Asher, do you think you could move in with your Uncle Yitzchok if I went with your father to Europe?”
I stared at her and was afraid.
“Your father needs me. I was here when you needed me. Now your father needs me.”
“This year?”
“No. Next year.”
“I don’t want to live a whole year with Uncle Yitzchok.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We’ll talk about it,” she said. “You are not the only member of this family with special needs.”
My father returned to Europe in the second week of October and I resumed my journeys to Jacob Kahn’s studio.
I came into the kitchen one night in November and found my mother staring at the table.
“Mama?”
She looked up at me.
“Is anything wrong, Mama?”
“No. I was—remembering.” Her voice sounded strange.
“Remembering?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Just—remembering.”
Another night, I found her standing alongside her table in the living room, gazing out the window at the dark street. The table was piled high with her books and papers.
“Mama?”
She did not respond.
“Mama?”
“Yes, Aryeh,” she said softly. “Of course. I’m coming.”
“Mama, are you all right?”
She turned then, startled. “Asher,” she murmured. “Asher.” She seemed small and frail and I thought she had been crying.
One Shabbos night in December, we sat together at the dinner table and after a pause during zemiros she began to hum my father’s melody to Yoh Ribbon Olom. Her eyes were closed. She hummed softly. I had the feeling she was not aware of what she was doing. She opened her eyes and smiled faintly. Then she looked quickly around. She seemed surprised to find herself with me. She began another melody. I joined her and we sang together.
She said to me a few nights later, “You’re out so late, Asher. What do you do in the library so late?”
“I study.”
“For school?”
“No. For Jacob Kahn.”
She looked at me in surprise.
“Art history. Reproductions. It’s very important, Mama.”
“Can’t you bring the books home, Asher?”
“A lot of them are reference books, Mama.”
“It’s very lonely here at night, Asher.”
At breakfast one morning in January, my mother said to me, “I finished my dissertation, Asher. The university is asking me about my plans for next year. Shall I tell them I’ll be in New York?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
She sighed softly and was quiet.
I heard her in the living room late that night talking to herself in strained whispers. I had wakened from a dream about my mythic ancestor. I had not dreamed about him for a while now. He had made up for his absence. My heart pounded from the dream. I felt the blood in my head. I lay rigid in my bed, and then heard my mother in the living room. She was whispering words I could not understand. Then I recognized the sounds of the words. She was whispering in Russian. I lay in my bed and did not know if I was more terrified by the dream or by my mother’s whispers. After a while, she stopped. I heard her slippered feet come through the hall. Then she went into her room.
I could not sleep. I turned on the light and went to the bathroom. I came back to the room and sat at the desk and could not draw. I went back to my bed. Faint light framed my window by the time I was able to sleep.
Jacob Kahn watched me work on a painting in his studio that Sunday afternoon, and after a while he said angrily, “What are you doing? Stop it. You are making a mess. Where is the unity of form? The colors do not hold together. Wipe it out and start again.”
I put the brushes down.
“What is the matter with you today? Are you ill?”
“No.”
He looked at the canvas. “What were you painting?”
“My mother.”
He looked at me. “You are not ready yet to move away from representational form. You think such painting is a joke?”
I felt my face go hot. “No,” I heard myself say. “I never thought it was a joke.”
“I am sorry,” he said quickly. “That was a foolish thing to ask. I apologize. Now, pick up your brushes and start again. You are making a painting. I do not care what your painting is about. First it must be a painting. Straighten out your feelings inside yourself and make a painting. Or go home and take a shower and go to sleep.”
I wiped the face from the canvas. But I could not do anything else. I could not even paint a line.
“I don’t know what I want to say. I don’t know how I feel.”
“Go home, Asher Lev. We all have impossible days.”
My mother said to me sometime during the week, “Asher, why don’t you want to live with your Uncle Yitzchok?”
“I don’t.”
“Why?”
“I just don’t.”
“You’re not being nice,” she said. “You’re behaving like a child.”
“A summer is all right. But not a whole year.”
“Once you would have been delighted for our permission to live with your Uncle Yitzchok.”
I did not say anything.
“I have to make a decision in the next few weeks, Asher. The university has begun hiring staff for the coming year.”
“I don’t want to be alone, Mama.”
“I know,” she said. “But it may be time for you to concern yourself with what others want, Asher. You are not the only person with needs in this world.”
I could not sleep that night. The next night, I slept and dreamed of my mythic ancestor, who came thundering through dark primal forests of tall moist trees, shouting at me in a voice that splintered the words into long slivers of metal. I woke and remained awake the rest of the night.
The next morning, I fell asleep over my Gemorra in class and was awakened by the teacher’s heavy hand on my shoulder. He was a short round man with a dark beard and glittering dark eyes and he was considerably less indulgent toward me than my other teachers had been.
“Rembrandt sleeps,” I heard him say in Yiddish. “The whole world must hold its breath while Rembrandt sleeps.”
Soft laughter moved through the classroom. Eyes fastened upon the teacher. I had been the butt of their laughter for years now; I was still unaccustomed to it.
The teacher glared down at me. “Listen, Rembrandt Lev.” There was loud laughter. “In my class, no one sleeps. You have to sleep, go home. In my class, we study Torah. We do not study how to sleep. If you fall asleep again in my class, I will make life bitter for you. Do I make myself clear? Are my words simple enough for you to understand? If you fall asleep and make people say sha sha, I will make your life bitter like gall gall.”
There was a slowly widening ripple of laughter as the explanation of the play on the name Chagall was whispered through the room. The teacher turned and walked up the aisle to his desk.
That was the day someone slipped a note into my Gemorra during the lunch recess. I found it when I returned to my desk. It was written in ink on white paper and printed in block letters:
Modigliani, Pascin, and Soutine
Worked in ochres and ultramarine.
Soutine lived in strife;
Pascin took his life;
And Modigliani used drugs for cuisine.
I looked up from my seat in the back row of the room. I felt the blood in my face and head. I looked carefully through the room. The teacher’s voice droned dully over a passage Gemorra. A few seats in front of me to my right, I saw a student’s head begin slowly to turn in my direction. I looked quickly down at the poem. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the smile spread quickly across the pimply face. I could almost hear the high piercin
g voice: “Here comes Asher Picasso Lev, the destroyer of Torah. Make way for goy Lev. Hey, Asher, do you draw dirty pictures, too? Draw a dirty picture for the mashpia. Draw me, Asher Lev. No, draw me, Asher Lev. Draw me. Draw me.”
I folded the note and put it into one of my pockets. I could see the block letters and the words. Soutine lived in strife; Pascin took his life … I saw those words all the rest of that day in school and was still seeing them that night as I lay in my bed trying to fall asleep.
The next day, there was another note in my Gemorra:
Asher Lev
Won’t go to Heav;
To Hell he’ll go
Far down below.
That night, I found myself seated at my desk, shaking with rage. I sat in front of a blank sheet of drawing paper and felt the rage like a wild torrent inside me. I had never felt such rage before; I wanted to kill him, to beat him and smash him and kill him, so I would never again have to see his pimply face or hear his piercing voice. I drew a line on the paper. Then I drew circles and points and whorls. I drew more lines. I looked at the paper. It was meaningless and absurd and very bad. I threw it away.
My mother said to me on Saturday night, “I will be back late. Don’t wait up for me.”
“Is the meeting about Russian Jews, Mama?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to talk to the Rebbe about next year?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want you to go away, Mama.”
“I know what you don’t want. Good night, Asher.”
I worked a long time on a canvas in Jacob Kahn’s studio the next day. I avoided recognizable forms. He came over to me and peered at the canvas.
“It is interesting,” he said. “But it is a failure.”
I put my brushes down.
“Your feelings about your mother are producing terrible art. Paint still-lifes for a while. Do some self-portraits. You are making a mess with these other efforts.”
He was merciless over failure. The subway ride back home that night was a torment.
The next day, I found another copy of the first poem in my Gemorra: “Modigliani, Pascin, and Soutine …” And two days later I found: “Asher Lev/Won’t go to Heav …”
My mother was at a meeting that night and I was alone in the apartment. I wandered through the silent rooms, stopping for a moment to gaze through the living-room window at the parkway outside. The street had begun to feel quietly hostile to me, as if resentful of my journeys away from it and of the alien skills I brought back each time I returned. The metal lampposts felt cold to my eyes; the light they cast seemed filled with darkening mists. The trees swayed in a winter wind, their naked branches black in the night and strangely insubstantial. I saw it then, quite suddenly, and knew what I would do. One second there had been nothing, and then there was the idea. I did not understand what had happened to bring on the idea. I went away from the window and came into my room. Sitting at my desk, I drew with a pen, working slowly, calmly, and with ease, the segment from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment of the boat beached on the Styx and Charon striking at his doomed passengers with an oar, forcing them onto the shores of torment and hell. I drew much of it from memory, but I wanted to be as accurate as I could, so I checked it repeatedly against a reproduction in a book I had purchased on Michelangelo. I drew the writhing twisting tormented bodies spilling from the boat. I drew the terror on the faces of the dead and the damned. I made all the faces his face, pimply, scrawny—eyes bulging, mouths open, shrieking in horror. I exaggerated the talons and painted ears of Charon; I darkened his face, bringing out the whites of his raging eyes. I folded the drawing and went to bed.
The next day, on my way out of the classroom for the noon recess, I slipped the drawing into his Gemorra. I saw the sudden stiffening of his shoulders when he found it. I saw him stare at it. I saw him turn to look at me, then stop. He crumpled the drawing. But he did not throw it away. He put it into a pocket.
That night, I drew a segment from the Last Judgment of a man being pulled headlong into hell by serpentine demons. I drew his face on the man and put the drawing into his Gemorra the next day.
He said nothing to me about the drawings. But he began to avoid me. His thin face would fill with dread whenever he caught me looking at him. I had the feeling he regarded me now as evil and malevolent, as a demonic and contaminating spawn of the Other Side.
I did not attempt another painting of my mother that Sunday. Instead I did a painting of the boy in my class at the moment he saw the first drawing I had slipped into his Gemorra. Jacob Kahn called the painting evil and excellent.
Two days later, my mother told me she would be going to Europe at the end of June and would remain there throughout the coming year. I was to live with my Uncle Yitzchok, or I could come with her to Europe and live in Vienna.
“Asher, look at me,” she said, in response to my pleas. “How many of me do you see?”
I did not answer.
“You see only one. There is only one of me. I can be in only one place at a time. Your father needs me. Do you understand? And I want to spend the year with your father. I don’t want to talk about it any more. The Rebbe approved of the decision. Your father will remain in Europe and I will join him at the end of June.”
“Papa will not come back for Pesach?”
“No.”
She became angry when I continued to plead that she stay. Pink spots colored her high cheekbones. Her voice became strident. She called me a child. She said that half a dozen children would not have made more demands on her than I had. Now it was time for my father. He needed her. Did I understand that? He needed her. He was exhausted from his work and he wanted her to be with him. If I wanted her, too, I would have to come to Vienna.
She stormed angrily from the room.
I talked to Jacob Kahn.
“Yes,” he said. “I know all about it. Your mother called me.”
“I don’t want to live with my uncle.”
“Why not?”
“He’s loud and fat and rich.”
“There is nothing wrong with being rich. It is the rich who buy paintings. It is when you are bought by the rich that you will know you are a successful artist.”
“He’s a boor.”
“You will have to grow accustomed to it. The world will indulge you just so long, Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.”
The mashpia called me into his office during the first week of April. The Rebbe wanted to see me, alone.
For the second time in my life, I climbed the flight of stairs in the Ladover building and went along the hallway to the waiting room. This time, the room was crowded. I was there almost an hour before Rav Mendel Dorochoff took me into the Rebbe’s office.
The Rebbe sat quietly behind the bare desk. His eyes were dark. Outside the arched window, the street glittered in the April night.
“Sit down, Asher. There, yes, sit down. It has been a while since I have seen you. But I have been kept informed. Yes. They tell me the world will hear of you one day as an artist.”
I was quiet.
“I have you in my mind and heart, Asher Lev. I pray to the Master of the Universe that the world will one day also hear of you as a Jew. Do you understand my words? Jacob Kahn will make of you an artist. But only you will make of yourself a Jew.”
I was quiet.
There was a long silence. The street throbbed faintly beneath its dark canvas of night.
“Asher Lev.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“Your mother has told you of my decision.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“It is necessary for your father and mother to be together now. For your father’s health and for your father’s work. You will live with your uncle and continue to study with Jacob Kahn.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“You will behave toward your uncle and aunt as you would toward your father and mother. They have accepted the respons
ibility of caring for you.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
Outside the window, the street vibrated softly, menacingly, in the black night.
“Asher Lev.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“You are entering the world of the Other Side. Be careful. I knew your grandfather. I knew your mother before you were born. I remember you as a child. I remember your mother’s illness. Your family is very precious to me. I have looked upon you as a son. I have you and your parents constantly in my mind and heart. Be careful of the Other Side, Asher Lev.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“I give you my blessings and my good wishes for a kosher and joyous Pesach.”
I went quickly along the hallway and down the stairs and out into the dark street. It was cold. The street was cold. I saw a cobblestone square and a dilapidated building and trees. I saw a young man drawing figures in the dust of the square, using a stick and drawing in one continuous line the contours of hens and horses and birds. Steep narrow streets led from the square. The square was warm. Sunlight fell across the trees and the old building and the young man gazing at the hens and horses and birds in the dust out of burning dark eyes.
My street was cold now in the April night. I felt it cold against my face as I turned in to the apartment house where I lived. I felt it cold all through the first two days of Passover. Then I journeyed to galleries in Manhattan and was on streets filled with color and form. My father was not home. I had no school until the end of the festival. I used the intermediate days of the festival to wander along streets warmer than my own.
I wandered into Anna Schaeffer’s gallery. It was a large modern gallery, taking up the entire fourth floor of a tall building in the Seventies along Madison Avenue. I came out of the elevator and saw her sitting behind an ornate intricately carved desk at the far end of the gallery to my left. She saw me and motioned me over to her. She seemed delighted.
The gallery was crowded. There was a sculpture show that had received excellent notices and was attracting a great deal of attention. There were people at the desk. But she talked to me alone in a back room stacked with canvases and sculptures. Yes, she knew exactly how I was getting along. Did I know Jacob Kahn was having a show in late October? I didn’t know. Did I know he would be spending the summer in Provincetown, painting, and that he would take me with him? I didn’t know.