My Name Is Asher Lev Read Online Free

and birds off in the distance. The bird in the nest had large round black eyes.
    I stood alongside the bed and watched my mother’s slow breathing.
    “Mama,” I said.
    Her eyes fluttered faintly but remained closed.
    “Mama,” I said again.
    Her hands moved then, and she turned her head toward me and opened her eyes.
    I held up the drawing. She gazed at it blankly.
    “Here are the birds and flowers, Mama.”
    She blinked her eyes.
    “I made the world pretty, Mama.”
    She turned her head away and closed her eyes.
    “Mama, aren’t you well now?”
    She did not move.
    “But I made the world pretty, Mama.”
    Still she did not move.
    “I’ll make more birds and flowers for you, Mama.”
    Behind me someone came quickly into the room. I felt a hand on my shoulder.
    “What are you doing?” Mrs. Rackover whispered fiercely in Yiddish.
    “I made a drawing for my mama. I’m making my mama well.”
    “Come away from here.” Her fleshy face quivered. She seemed frightened my mother would wake.
    “My mama asked me to make a drawing.”
    “Come away, I said.” She turned me forcefully around. I felt her pushing me out of the room. “What kind of boy disturbsa sick mother? I am surprised at you. A good boy does not do such a thing.” She sent me to my room.
    I sat on my bed and stared at the drawing. Then I was frightened in a dark and trembling way I had never known before. I went to my desk. A long time afterward, Mrs. Rackover called me to lunch. I found myself in front of a drawing filled with black and red swirls and gray eyes and dead birds.
        Relatives and friends came to visit my mother. Often my mother would refuse to see them. Sometimes she would let my father persuade her to join a group of visitors in the living room. She would sit in one of the easy chairs, looking small and fragile, and say nothing. There would be awkward silences, feeble attempts at conversation, and more silences. In those moments, my mother seemed a ghostly spectator, hollow, without a core to her being.
    Her older sister, a short robust woman in her early thirties, came in one day from Boston, where she lived with her husband and four children. She sat with my mother in our living room.
    “Rivkeh, you have a husband and a son. How can you neglect them? You have a responsibility.”
    My father was in the room at the time. There were other relatives there, too, but I do not remember who they were.
    “Look at the boy,” my mother’s sister said. “Look at him. He’s dirty. How can you let him be so dirty?”
    “Asher is always dirty,” my father said. “Even after he’s bathed he’s dirty.”
    “He should not be left alone. How can you leave a little boy alone?”
    “He is not left alone.”
    “A boy left with a housekeeper all day is alone. A boy without children to play with is alone.”
    My father said nothing.
    “You should send him to your kindergarten.”
    “Asher doesn’t want to go to the kindergarten.”
    “Then he should come and live with me,” my mother’s sister said. “We have a big house. There are four children. A boy Asher’s age should not be by himself all the time.”
    “Asher likes being by himself.”
    “It isn’t healthy. It leaves scars. You don’t want to leave scars on the boy. Let him live with me.”
    There was a brief pause. I felt myself shivering inside.
    “Let me think about it,” my father said.
    My mother had been staring blankly at her sister and saying nothing.
    “It’s wrong, Rivkeh,” her sister said. “The boy will have scars.” Then she said, “Rivkeh, it is forbidden to mourn in this way.”
    My mother was very still.
    “Rivkeh, the Torah forbids it.”
    My mother sighed. Her frail body seemed to shrink even more in the large chair.
    “Papa and Mama would have forbidden it,” her sister said.
    My mother said nothing.
    “Rivkeh,” her sister said. “He was my brother, too.”
    A dark light flickered in my mother’s sunken eyes. “The Torah forbids