Then I found I could no longer paint and I walked the winter streets of the city and felt its coldness. There was snow and rain and the city lay bleak and spent beneath the dark skies. I wandered through museums and galleries. I walked the winding streets of Montmartre and peered through the misty windows of its shops and restaurants. I walked up the mountain of steps to the Sacré-Coeur and wandered through its awesome dimness. I remember that during all this walking and wandering letters went back and forth between me and my parents and between me and Anna Schaeffer. My father had fallen and hurt his leg, but was well now. Jacob Kahn’s show had been very well received. My uncle was fine. Yudel Krinsky was fine. It was all vague. Even the walking and wandering was vague. I could not paint.
The rains ended. There were days of blue and warming air. One day, I sat in a café over a warm Coke around the corner from the Sacré-Coeur and found myself drawing the contour of the Duomo Pietà on the red tablecloth. I looked at it and paid for the Coke and returned to the apartment.
I sat at my table in the apartment and drew the Pietà again, leaving the faces blank. I drew it a third time and made the two Marys into bearded males and made the central figure into one of the Marys. Then I drew the central figure of Jesus, alone, head bent and arm twisted, alone, unsupported. Then I left the apartment and went down the narrow stairs and came out onto the street. I walked beneath the trees of the boulevard and was astonished to discover tiny green buds on the branches. Was the winter gone? Was it spring?
I returned to the apartment and sat at the table and thought of the David and its spatial and temporal shift. I looked at the painting of the old man with the pigeons that stood against a wall. And it was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be no other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way.
The preliminary drawings came easily then. After a while, I put them away. It was Passover, and I rested.
On a warm spring day, with the sun streaming through the tall window and leaves now on the chestnut trees of the boulevard, I started the painting. I sketched it in charcoal on the huge canvas, drawing the long vertical of the center strip of wood in the living-room window of our Brooklyn apartment and the slanted horizontal of the bottom of our Venetian blind as it used to lie stuck a little below the top frame. I drew my mother behind those two lines, her right hand resting upon the upper right side of the window, her left hand against the frame over her head, her eyes directly behind the vertical line but burning through it. I drew the houses of our street and the slanting lines of the blind and the verticals and horizontals of near and distant telephone poles. Then I went away from it and came back the next day and reworked some of the geometry of its forms. Then I painted it—in ochres and grays, in dark smoky alizarins, in tones of Prussian and cobalt blue. I worked a long time on my mother’s eyes and face. I had used a siccative. The paint dried quickly. I took the canvas down and put it against a wall. I felt vaguely unclean, as if I had betrayed a friend.
The following day, I put a fresh canvas on the easel. It was a small canvas and I thought I would fill it quickly. But I found I could not paint. I stood and stared at the canvas. I put the charcoal stick away and tried to do a drawing on paper. I could not draw. I came out of the house and walked down the cobblestone street to the boulevard. Girls in summer dresses walked beneath the trees. I returned to the apartment and looked at the blank canvas. I found I was sweating. I felt the sweat on my forehead and back. I removed the clean canvas from the easel and put the large canvas of my mother in its place. Then I looked a very long time at the painting and knew it was incomplete. It was a good painting but it was incomplete. The telephone poles were only distant reminders of the brutal reality of a crucifix. The painting did not say fully what I had wanted to say; it did not reflect fully the anguish and torment I had wanted to put into it. Within myself, a warning voice spoke soundlessly of fraud.
I had brought something incomplete into the world. Now I felt its incompleteness. “Can you understand what it means for something to be incomplete?” my mother had once asked me. I understood, I understood.
I turned away from the painting and walked to the yeshiva. I had supper and prayed the evening service. I returned to the apartment. Children played on the cobblestone street below my window. I stared at the painting and felt cold with dread. Then I went to bed and lay awake in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the street through my open window: a quarrel, a distant cough, a passing car, the cry of a child—all of it filtered through my feeling of cold dread. I slept very little. In the morning, I woke and prayed and knew what had to be done.
Yes, I could have decided not to do it. Who would have known? Would it have made a difference to anyone in the world that I had felt a sense of incompleteness about a painting? Who would have cared about my silent cry of fraud? Only Jacob Kahn, and perhaps one or two others, might have sensed its incompleteness. And even they could never have known how incomplete it truly was, for by itself it was a good painting. Only I would have known.
But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence.
I stretched a canvas identical in size to the painting now on the easel. I put the painting against a wall and put the fresh canvas in its place. With charcoal, I drew the frame of the living-room window of our Brooklyn apartment. I drew the strip of wood that divided the window and the slanting bottom of the Venetian blind a few inches from the top of the window. On top—not behind this time, but on top—of the window I drew my mother in her housecoat, with her arms extended along the horizontal of the blind, her wrists tied to it with the cords of the blind, her legs tied at the ankles to the vertical of the inner frame with another section of the cord of the blind. I arched her body and twisted her head. I drew my father standing to her right, dressed in a hat and coat and carrying an attaché case. I drew myself standing to her left, dressed in paint-spattered clothes and a fisherman’s cap and holding a palette and a long spearlike brush. I exaggerated the size of the palette and balanced it by exaggerating the size of my father’s attaché case. We were looking at my mother and at each other. I split my mother’s head into balanced segments, one looking at me, one looking at my father, one looking upward. The torment, the tearing anguish I felt in her, I put into her mouth, into the twisting curve of her head, the arching of her slight body, the clenching of her small fists, the taut downward pointing of her thin legs. I sprayed fixative on the charcoal and began to put on the colors, working with the same range of hues I had utilized in the previous painting—ochres, grays, alizarin, Prussian and cobalt blue—and adding tones of burnt sienna and cadmium red medium for my hair and beard. I painted swiftly in a strange nerveless frenzy of energy. For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting—an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.
I do not remember how long it took me to do that painting. But on a day of summer rain that cooled the s
treets and ran in streams across my window, the painting was finally completed. I looked at it and saw it was a good painting. I left it on the easel and went to the yeshiva in the rain and had supper and prayed. Then I walked through the streets of the city and felt the rain on my face and remembered how I had once watched the rain of another street through windows that seemed so distant now and that I suddenly wanted to see once again.
A few days later, I thought I would destroy the paintings. I had done them; that was enough. They did not have to remain alive. But I could not destroy them. I began to paint in a delirium of unceasing energy. All through that summer, I painted my hidden memories of our street. Sometime during that summer, Avraham Cutler introduced me to a family and I returned the greetings of a girl with short dark-brown hair and brown eyes. Later, there were more greetings. Someone once said that there are things about which one ought to write a great deal or nothing at all. About those greetings, I choose to write nothing at all.
Looking old and elegant and rich, Anna Schaeffer showed up at the apartment one fall day on one of her European talent hunts.
She gazed a long time at the two large paintings.
“They are crucifixions,” she said very quietly.
I said nothing.
“Asher Lev,” she murmured. “Asher Lev.” That was all she seemed able to say. She stared at the paintings. A long time later, she looked at me and said, “They are both great paintings.” Then she added, “This one is truer than the other,” and pointed to the second of the two canvases.
I was quiet.
She looked again at the paintings. Then she said, “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you come back to America for the show?”
“Yes.”
We were quiet then, gazing together at the paintings.
“How is Jacob Kahn?” I said.
“He is working to reach ninety.” After a moment, she said, “Where is the beret I sent you?”
“In a drawer.”
“You should wear it.”
“No.”
“All right,” she said gently. “Now, please, you will go outside and take a very long walk.”
We shook hands. I walked for hours through narrow streets and along wide boulevards. When I returned, the paintings were gone. I looked out the window of the room that was my studio, and I wept.
She wrote me a few weeks later and told me that all the paintings had arrived safely. She had scheduled the show for February. Would I object if she called the two large paintings Brooklyn Crucifixion I and Brooklyn Crucifixion II? She needed titles for the catalogue. I wrote back saying the titles were appropriate.
The weeks passed. The leaves fell from the trees. The city turned cold and dark. I walked the streets. I returned to the Bateau Lavoir. I visited galleries and museums. I spent hours with the girl and her family. I wandered about with a sense of dread and oncoming horror.
In the last week of January, I flew to New York and arrived at night in a snowstorm five days before the opening of my show.
Fourteen
I had given my parents only vague information about my travel plans, for I had not wanted my mother to be concerned or to meet me at the airport. I took a cab to the house. Standing on the street in the snow, I looked up at our living-room window. It was dark.
I rode the elevator to the third floor and let myself into our apartment. I went through the apartment, turning on lights—the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, my parents’ bedroom, my own room. The beds were covered with spreads. The refrigerator hummed softly. The apartment was neat and clean and faintly resonant with its own silence.
I brought my bag into my room. I went out into the hallway and opened the closet. My father’s black leather bag always stood on the top shelf when he was not traveling. Now it was gone. I hung up my coat and put my fisherman’s cap on the shelf. There were empty wooden clothes hangers on the rod. I brushed against them. They made soft clicking sounds in the silence.
I came back into my room and stood near the doorway. The room looked very small now. A closet, my Uncle Yitzchok had once called it. The paint-it-yourself chair and desk and dresser seemed almost toys. I unpacked and put away my clothes. I wondered where my mother was. At a staff meeting with the Rebbe? Visiting friends? I stood at my window and looked out at the falling snow. It drifted thickly downward across the dark houses of the street. I saw the snow-covered garbage cans in the back yard below. I stood at the window a long time, watching the snow. Then I turned and looked slowly around my room—the small chair and desk and dresser; the wooden bed, with its green-and-brown cotton spread; the wine-colored linoleum on the floor. The room had been painted since I had left it a year and a half ago. The holes made by tacks that had once held reproductions were now filled. The walls were smooth and white and bare. They glistened in the overhead light set in the same frosted-glass ceiling fixture that had always hung from the ceiling. Had I really lived so much of my life in this tiny room?
I looked at my watch. It was almost eleven-thirty. I remembered I had left the lights burning in my parents’ bedroom. I went along the hallway and past the kitchen and came into their room. The large double bed stood against the wall to my right, covered with its pale-blue woolen spread. My father’s dark-wood desk was against the wall to my left. It was cluttered with his papers and books and with old copies of Time and Newsweek. A few framed needleworks of flowers and birds hung from the white walls. On top of my mother’s dark-wood dresser were photographs of her sister Leah’s family. There were no photographs on my father’s dresser. The dark floral rug had been recently cleaned; it gave off a faint acrid odor. I smelled the odor of the rug. I looked at the bed and remembered the odor of my mother’s illness. I remembered her lying beneath the green quilt, looking shrunken and dead. Here are the birds and flowers, Mama. I made the world pretty, Mama. I’m making my mama well. I had once thought that there was power in a drawing, that the lines and shapes came through my hand from the Master of the Universe, that a drawing could better the world, make it pretty, make my mother happy, make her well. Aren’t you well now, Mama? I’ll make more birds and flowers for you, Mama. I had thought the power came in the night from the Master of the Universe through the angels that guarded me in my sleep. May Michael be at my right hand; Gabriel at my left; before me, Uriel; behind me, Raphael. I looked at the double bed and thought I saw my father there, his red beard sticking over the top of the green quilt. I turned off the lights and came into the kitchen. I stared at the table. It was clean. I thought I saw it covered with books. But it was clean and bare. There was no milk in the refrigerator. I turned off the light and went through the hallway into the living room.
There was my mother’s desk against the wall near the window. There were the bookcases near the desk. There was the window covered with the Venetian blind. There was my mother standing at the window, gazing out at the street. There was my mother on top of the window, her hands bound to the bottom of the raised blind, her legs bound to the middle strip of wood that divided the window into its two tall rectangles. There was my father; there was—
I turned off the lights and went through the hallway to my room. I sat on my bed and felt the coldness inside myself and the pounding of the blood in my head. I looked at my watch. It was almost midnight. After a moment, I got off the bed and went to the phone stand in the hallway. I looked up a number and dialed. The ringing went on a long time before it was answered.
“Yes? Yes?” His voice was sleepy and annoyed.
“Rav Dorochoff?”
“Yes? Who is this?” He spoke in Yiddish.
“Asher Lev.”
There was silence.
“Rav Dorochoff?”
“Asher Lev,” he said, no longer sleepy. “You surprised me. From where are you calling?”
“The apartment.”
“You are home?”
“Yes. I am sorry to disturb you so late at night. Where are my p
arents?”
“Ah,” he said. “Yes. Your parents did not tell me you were coming home today.”
“They did not know.”
“Your parents are at the University of Chicago.”
I was quiet.
“Asher?”
“Yes.”
“There is a conference on religion and campus problems. Your parents are participating. They are returning tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Asher Lev, welcome back.” He said it warmly. “The Rebbe will be pleased to learn that you have returned.”
I hung up the phone and stood in the hallway staring at the white walls. Then I went into my room and got into pajamas. I looked at the section of wall near my pillow where I had once unknowingly drawn my mythic ancestor. The drawing was painted over, gone. I turned off the lights and lay in bed. The bed felt small and uncomfortable. Let me lie down in peace and let me rise up again in peace. Let not my thoughts trouble me, nor evil dreams, nor evil fancies, but let my rest be perfect before Thee.
I did not sleep well. Once I woke in the night and thought I heard my mother singing a Yiddish melody in a strange soft voice.
I came out of the apartment house very early the following morning. The air was gray and cold. The street lights were still on. The snow had stopped falling during the night. Sections of the parkway were solidly drifted over. I walked carefully in paths made by others who had gone before me. The parkway was silent, ghostly, a bleak landscape of buried cars and dark houses and weary snow-laden trees.