My Name Is Asher Lev Read Online Free Page A

it?” she said quietly. “It is forbidden? Yes?”
    “Yes,” her sister said.
    “But there are scars everywhere,” my mother said. “And who will hold my pennies?” She stared out the window at the afternoon sunlight on the trees below. “Who will tell me about the fox and the fish? Yaakov, you had to go? You left it unfinished. Who said you had to go?”
    Then she lapsed into silence and would say nothing more.
    Her sister stared at her, open-mouthed. Then she turned her head away and shuddered.
    That night, alone in my room, I drew my Aunt Leah. I drew her in the shape of a fish being eaten by a fox.
    “What did the doctor say?” I asked my father the next evening as he was helping me out of my clothes.
    “To have patience.”
    “Will my mama get well?”
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “It will take a long time.”
    “Will you send me to live with Tante Leah?”
    “No. We’ll think of something else. Now let me hear your Krias Shema, Asher.”
    The weeks passed. The visitors ceased coming.
    In the first week of March, my father began to take me with him to his office. He worked at a desk in the Ladover headquarters building a block and a half from where we lived. The building was a three-story house of tawny stone, with Gothic windows and a flagstone front porch with a whitestone railing. It contained offices, meeting rooms, a room with about a dozen mimeograph machines, two suites of rooms for the editorial offices of the various Ladover publications, and a small press in the basement. Men came and went all day long. They sat behind desks, met in conference rooms, rushed along corridors, talked frenetically, sometimes quietly, sometimes in loud voices. All the men were bearded and wore dark skullcaps and dark suits with white shirts and dark ties. No women worked inside that building; secretarial work was done by men.
    On the second floor of the house, in an apartment facing the parkway, lived the Rebbe and his wife. To the left of the entrance hall beyond the carved wooden doors that led into the house was a carpeted wooden staircase. There was endless two-waytraffic up and down that staircase: men with and without beards; young men and old men; men who were obviously poor and men who were clearly affluent; men who were Jews and men who, it seemed to me, were not; and an occasional woman. Twice during those weeks, I saw a tall gray-haired man in a black beret climb the stairs and turn into the second-floor hallway. I noticed his hands; they were huge, rough, and calloused. I wanted to climb those stairs, too, but my father had told me never to go beyond the first floor of the building. I would wander through the first floor of the building alone, trying not to get in anyone’s way. People knew I was Aryeh Lev’s son; they patted my head, pinched my cheek, smiled, nodded indulgently at my drawings—I took my pad and crayons with me every day—and fed me cookies and milk.
    My father’s office was the third along the corridor to the right of the entrance hall. It was a small office, with white walls, a dark-brown linoleum on the floor, and a window that looked out onto the parkway. There were filing cabinets along the wall opposite the desk. The walls were bare, except for a large framed photograph of the Rebbe that hung near the window. My father’s desk was old and scarred and seemed a relic of ancient academies of learning. It was cluttered with piles of paper and copies of
Time, Newsweek
, and the
New York Times.
Often he sat tipped dangerously back in his swivel chair, his feet on the desk, his small velvet skullcap pushed forward across his red hair onto his forehead. He would sit reading a newspaper or a magazine and I would worry that he would fall over backward, but he never did.
    There were two telephones on the desk. Frequently he would talk into one or the other of them and write as he talked. Sometimes one of the men from another office would come in and sit on the edge of the desk and speak