My Name Is Asher Lev Read Online Free Page B

quietly with my father. I heard the word “Russia” often in those conversations.
    My father spoke English, Yiddish, or Hebrew into the phones. But the second week I was in his office I heard him use a language I did not recognize. On our way back to the apartment for lunch, I asked him what language it had been.
    “That was French, Asher,” he said.
    “I never heard my papa speak French before.”
    “I use it when I need it, Asher. I don’t need it around the house.”
    “Does Mama speak French?”
    “No, Asher.”
    “Did you learn French in Europe, Papa?”
    “I learned it in America. The Rebbe asked me to study it.”
    “Didn’t the Frenchman on the phone know Yiddish, Papa?”
    “The Frenchman on the phone wasn’t a Jew.”
    “What did my papa speak to him about?”
    “You are full of questions today, Asher. Now I have a question. Your papa also has questions sometimes. Here is my question. Do you think Mrs. Rackover made chocolate pudding for dessert? You wanted chocolate pudding.”
    Mrs. Rackover had not made chocolate pudding.
    Even when my father used the languages I understood, it was often not clear to me what he was saying. Calls seemed to come to him from all over the country. He would listen and write. He would talk into the phone about train and boat schedules, about this person flying here and that person sailing there, about one community in New Jersey that did not have enough prayer books, another community in Boston that needed school-books, a third community in Chicago whose building had been vandalized. At the end of a day behind that desk, he would be tired and a dark look would fill his eyes.
    “I’m not made for this,” he would say. “I need people. I hate sitting with telephones.”
    He would walk home with me in brooding silence.
    One day, he spent almost an entire morning on the telephonearranging to move two Ladover families from somewhere in France to the United States.
    “Why are they moving, Papa?” I asked him on the way home to lunch.
    “To be near the Rebbe.”
    “What is the State Department, Papa?”
    He told me.
    “Why did you talk to that man in the State Department?”
    “He’s the man who is helping the families to come to America.”
    “How is he helping?”
    “Asher, you’ve asked enough questions. Now it’s my turn. Are you ready? Do you think Mrs. Rackover finally made chocolate pudding for dessert?”
    Mrs. Rackover had indeed made chocolate pudding for dessert. My absence from the apartment had begun to mellow her.
    Late one afternoon toward the end of March, I sat in my father’s office drawing the trees I could see through his window. One of the telephones rang. My father put down his pen, picked up the receiver, and listened for a moment. I looked at his face and stopped drawing.
    Lines of anger were forming around his eyes and along his forehead. Two sharp furrows appeared above the bridge of his nose between his eyes. His lips became rigid. He gripped the phone so tightly I could see the knuckles of his hand go white. He listened for a long time. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice of cold rage. He used a language I had never heard before. He spoke briefly, listened again for a length of time, spoke again briefly, then hung up. He sat at the desk for a moment, staring at the phone. He wrote something on a piece of paper, read over what he had written, made some corrections, then picked up the paper and went quickly from the office.
    I sat there alone. One of the phones rang. Then the secondphone rang. The first stopped ringing. The second continued. The ringing sounded suddenly piercing and thunderous inside that little office. I went out and spent the rest of the day on the flagstone porch, drawing the street.
    On the way home, I asked my father what language he had spoken.
    “When?”
    “When you were angry, Papa.”
    “Russian,” he said.
    “You were very angry, Papa.”
    “Yes.”
    “Did the man hurt you?”
    “No, Asher. He