The Gift of Asher Lev (32 page)

I closed the drawing pad and lay down on the bed. The quilted spread was soft against my back, the rounded pillow hard beneath my head. I covered my eyes with my hand. The museum swam into view, wet in the morning rain; and the old ladies in the butcher shop and the cleaver in the butcher’s hand; and Max Lobe brushing the violet-blue flame of the blowtorch across the surface of the metal plate and the large gallery across the street from the hotel with the Steinberg drawings and watercolors; and the quai in the rain and the gendarmes near the bridge and the lights of the tourist boats on the façades of the elegant old buildings. It all moved back and forth across my vision, slide upon slide, layered like transparent geological strata. Then I was drifting into sleep and someone was tapping on the wall. I was asleep, and the tapping moved to the door. I walked sleepily to the door, and it was one of the bellhops with a package. “Pardon, Monsieur Lev. Very sorry to disturb you. The concierge directed me to deliver this. The messenger said it was very urgent. Pardon. Good afternoon.”

The package was long and tubular. I opened it carefully and removed the protective sheets of tissue paper and pulled out what looked like a print and, suddenly fully awake, saw it was the bon à tirer from the printer.

I spread it out on the bed. The colors and forms leapt from it, the complementarles vibrating upon the surface, vying with the texturing for control of the picture plane. The words were in my handwriting in the space at the foot of the sheet of thick handmade paper:
bon à tirer.
Ready for the press. Approved by me for the final printing. I had signed and dated it: Asher Lev
17
February
1970.
The first print I had made in Paris after being sent away by the Rebbe—ordered away, exiled—from my Ladover world in Brooklyn because of the raging reactions to the crucifixion paintings. A twenty-copy run. Anna Schaeffer had said the price would have to be high if the print was to pay back the cost of the paper and the printing and return a profit. The price was outrageous, and
the entire print run swiftly vanished into museums and private collections—including, as I had recently discovered, the collection of my late Uncle Yitzchok. Ten years later, all my artist’s proofs of that print vanished, too—stolen from the moving van somewhere between Paris and Saint-Paul. Accounts of the theft made the papers. This was the print I later elaborated into the large oil painting
The Sacrifice of Isaac,
which my father abhors even more than he does the crucifixions, and which now hangs in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

I sat on the bed looking at the print and running my fingers over its densely textured surface. Jacob Kahn had come to Paris earlier that year,
1970,
at the invitation of the Ministry of Culture. The French wanted him to work on the walls and ceiling of one of their historic public buildings, a seventeenth-century Baroque Parisian edifice; give its vaulting interior the touch of an authentic twentieth-century master, one of the few remaining giants from the legendary School of Paris. While he waited for a government committee’s routine approval of his preliminary drawings, we worked together on the carborundum process.

Carborundum is a metallic powder that can be mixed with a resin and dripped onto a surface wet with that resin. It hardens to the consistency of metal and it retains ink. Jacob Kahn, then in his high eighties, white-haired, robust, the fingers of his hands callused with decades of sculpting yet strangely delicate when drawing or applying color, mixed and poured and talked about Picasso in the Bateau Lavoir, and about Braque and Picasso working together in the early Cubist days, and Matisse and the Fauves and “that crazy Lithuanian painter, Soutine, saved from destitution by that clever American doctor, Barnes.” He talked about Marc and Bella Chagall and what he thought really caused Bella Chagall’s sudden death in upstate New York. He talked about Dadaists and Surrealists and the coming of the Nazis to Paris and his flight south to Marseilles and across the Pyrenees to Spain and then the ocean voyage to New York. He had been told that French police brought the Gestapo to his studio. The Germans had melted down all his sculptures. Decades of labor gone into the fires. He had sworn he would never return to Paris. But how could he refuse such an invitation? Indeed, wasn’t it true that a nation, like a person, must
be given the opportunity to repent, else there would be no end to the cycle of human hate and suffering?

He talked about the carborundum process. A painter named Henri Goetz had discovered it some decades ago. Joan Miró and others used it. You worked in layers: the background, the drawing, the forward planes. Each had its own sheet, its own carborundum texturing, its own colors. The process yielded a remarkable variety of embossings and reliefs. Different thicknesses of carborundum resulted in different textures. Any material that was flat and held the resin could receive the carborundum. The paper that would receive the print was thick, each sheet handmade. “Some experiment with this for years before they can get it to work for them,” Jacob Kahn said, working the blowtorch, his grizzled features running with sweat. It was summer in Paris. We worked with printers standing around us, shaking their heads in disbelief. They murmured with delight as the paper took the ink and the carborundum texturing and emerged crosshatched, indented, ridged, undulating with life.

Then I worked on my print, with Jacob Kahn watching and guiding. “What I am not able to understand is why Picasso never discovered this,” he said to me one morning as I mixed and poured the powdery metal. “That Spaniard discovered and changed everything else. No, you do not want to lay it on so thickly there, Asher. It will unbalance the color dynamic. Be gentle with it. It is metal, but it must be treated gently and with patience.” How the art magazines had picked up on that—Jacob Kahn and Asher Lev working together in Paris on a recently discovered process for the making of prints! They had all thought Jacob Kahn would be dead by then. He had undergone major surgery in New York the year I was sent away by the Rebbe. “The Rebbe prayed for me and predicted I would recover,” Jacob Kahn told me one afternoon as we stood over a worktable at the printer’s. “I am giving all my artist’s proofs of this print to the Ladover. It will bring them a small fortune, and I will have repaid all my obligations to the Rebbe. Debts of that kind are too heavy to carry. What are you doing, Asher Lev? If you put it on that way, they will need to frame it in a box. You will need a thicker paper, and Anna will tell
us again about her outrageous costs. How are you finding life in Paris? It is not so easy to be a Jew here, is it? It is not Brooklyn.”

The designs were approved, and he completed the building and returned to America.

A year later, he was back in France with Tanya—to stay. “They make me feel welcome, the French. They give me space for my sculptures, walls and ceilings to paint, and churches to make stained-glass windows for. They hint they will build me a museum one day. How can I refuse? Besides, I find the art world of New York unendurable. There was passion in the time of the Abstract Expressionists. Now … now there is greed and—what is the word?—glitz. And chaos. If the chaos were hot, I could create in it. But this chaos is cold with the touch of money. Why should I remain in New York?”

They lived in Paris for four years, in the apartment overlooking the Seine and the Louvre, the night boats brushing their tall windows with halogenic gold. Devorah and I visited them often when he was not away somewhere working on a church. He did some fine work of his own during those years, in Paris and Petra Santa—three huge oil paintings in his easily recognizable style, and two monumental sculptures, one of which is in the sculpture garden of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. But the fire seemed to have gone out of him. Then he was sick again. Suddenly he needed warmth, he needed sunlight. “I do not want to die in the cold mists of Paris,” he said to me in the apartment on the morning of their move south to Saint-Paul. The large rooms were echoingly bare, the high walls starkly vacant. He looked shrunken, his eyes dark and brooding, his walrus mustache drooping over his dry lips. He turned away from me and stood gazing at the murky waters of the river. Along the Quai Voltaire, trees were turning green after a cruel winter. In a low boat that glided slowly beneath the bridges stood a young woman in a billowing yellow dress, hanging her laundry on the stern deck. Houseboats hugged the banks. An elderly couple sat on the deck of a moored barge, eating breakfast. Fishermen were playing their rods and lines along the banks, and book dealers were opening their stalls along the quais. “I want to die in Cézanne’s light,” he said, “and be buried under the sun. You
will come and visit me, will you not, my Asher? You will say a prayer over my grave?” He had died in the southern light and now lay buried beneath that sun.

I put tissue paper above and beneath the print, rolled it carefully, and inserted it in the tube. It was nearly five o’clock. I took the elevator down to the lobby and went out of the hotel.

The rain had turned to the sort of mist Jacob Kahn had moved south to avoid. The old woman lay on the stoop under the plastic cover. I walked toward the taxi station on the Boulevard Saint Germain.

The taxi took me into a neighborhood of torn-up streets. The driver, dark-skinned and unshaven, looked to be a recent arrival from North Africa or the Middle East. “It is not far from the monument,” I heard him say. I did not know which monument he meant. “This is very bad for taxis,” he added as we bounced along the rutted streets.

A Parisian late-afternoon summer rush hour. Darting cars, blaring motorcycles, buses, pedestrians, gendarmes, a miasma of exhaust fumes hanging in the humid air. Gazing out the window as we sat stalled in traffic, I saw a well-dressed middle-aged man sail serenely past us on a bicycle, retaining in the thrust of his chin and the tilt of his head a cool and urbane dignity. The taxi driver kept turning into the wrong streets. “This is a shit of a city,” I heard him mutter. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” His French began to yield to his Arabic as he struggled through the neighborhood’s one-way streets and broken pavement. Scrawled boldly on the blotched stone façade of a yellowish apartment house were the words
MITTERRAND DEHORS
. How many times had I seen those words? Mitterrand out. Election this fall in the United States. Election this fall in Israel. My father traveling to Israel because the Ladover are involved in politics there. And in the world of the Ladover? The next Rebbe would not be elected. The next Rebbe would be chosen. By a sign from the present Rebbe. The sign would have to be given soon. What would it be and how would it be given? I thought I knew what the Rebbe wanted. It terrified me.

The taxi came to a stop.

“Rue d’Aboukir,” the driver said. “There is the number.”

I paid him and climbed out of the taxi.

“Your package,” the driver called out.

I reached in, retrieved the tube, and thanked him. He drove away.

The street was a narrow, one-way, traffic-clogged tunnel lined with stores and old six-story apartment houses. I stood in front of the building that bore the address given me by the old woman in the butcher shop. The address was on the narrow streetside edge of a pale-gray marble wall that, together with a store window, formed an alleyway leading to a door. A naked mannequin gazed back at me through the section of the window that faced the street. Smooth and lovely curves and the vacant face and dead eyes. The two other mannequins in the window were fashionably clothed. I went down the alleyway and through the door and found myself inside a long corridor that led to a small courtyard open to the sky and another corridor and a flight of narrow winding wooden stairs. The air was cool and smelled of raw earth and mold. On the wall of the corridor beyond the courtyard were rows of mailboxes. Scrawled on a piece of paper and inserted into one of the plates so that it lay slightly askew was the name Lacamp.

They lived on the top floor. There were no elevators in these old houses. I began to climb the stairs.

The gloomy wooden stairway curved upward into shadows and creaked beneath my feet. On the final landing I stood awhile before the door, sweating, waiting for my breathing to ease. Once I had climbed five flights of stairs day after day and thought nothing of it. Often I had carried Rocheleh up those stairs. Once Lucien Lacamp had carried Rocheleh—

I heard voices beyond the door. A woman’s voice; a child’s voice.

I tapped on the door. Immediately the voice fell silent.

I waited. No one came to the door.

I tapped on the door again.

“Who is there?” a woman’s voice asked after a moment. She sounded frightened and seemed to be talking with her mouth against the door.

“Asher Lev. A friend of Lucien’s.”

There was silence. Barely audible sounds rose from the shadowy stairwell: a man’s voice, a child’s cry.

“Asher Lev,” I repeated. “From the Rue des Rosiers.”

“Asher Lev, the artist?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, yes? Is it truly you?”

“Yes.”

The door opened. She stood in the doorway, blinking nervously. She looked past me at the landing and the stairwell, as if fearful there might be others concealed in the shadows.

“I apologize for disturbing you.” I saw her peering at me myopically, suspiciously. “You don’t recognize me?”

She regarded me closely. “Ah, yes, I do, I do, of course. Yes.” She drew her housecoat tightly to her thin neck. She was a birdlike woman in her mid-forties, with sallow features, dry yellow hair, and darting eyes. A wide-eyed girl of seven or eight clung to her housecoat. “I remember you, of course. Come in, monsieur, come in, please.”

I stepped into the apartment. She closed and locked the door with exaggerated care. Her hands fluttered tremulously. “Please sit down. Please. A cup of tea? Coffee? A cold drink? No? Georgette, this is Monsieur Asher Lev, a friend of your papa’s. Now you will go and play quietly in the other room.”

The little girl gave her mother an imploring look.