The professor shakes her head. “Where do any of our interests come from? Where does your interest in children’s books come from?”
Greta says, “They always seemed the books that were most important to me. The ones that mattered. When I was a kid, and when I grew. I was like Dahl’s Matilda . . . . Were your family great readers?”
“Not really . . . . I say that, it was a long time ago that they died. Were killed. I should say.”
“All your family died at the same time? Was this in the war?”
“No, dear. We were evacuees, in the war. This was in a train crash, several years after. I was not there.”
“Just like in Lewis’s Narnia books,” says Greta, and immediately feels like a fool, and an insensitive fool. “I’m sorry. That was a terrible thing to say, wasn’t it?”
“Was it, dear?”
Greta can feel herself blushing, and she says, “It’s just I remember that sequence so vividly. In The Last Battle. Where you learn there was a train crash on the way back to school, and everyone was killed. Except for Susan, of course.”
The professor says, “More tea, dear?” and Greta knows that she should leave the subject, but she says, “You know, that used to make me so angry.”
“What did, dear?”
“Susan. All the other kids go off to Paradise, and Susan can’t go. She’s no longer a friend of Narnia because she’s too fond of lipsticks and nylons and invitations to parties. I even talked to my English teacher about it, about the problem of Susan, when I was twelve.”
She’ll leave the subject now, talk about the role of children’s fiction in creating the belief systems we adopt as adults, but the professor says, “And tell me, dear, what did your teacher say?”
“She said that even though Susan had refused Paradise then, she still had time while she lived to repent.”
“Repent what?”
“Not believing, I suppose. And the sin of Eve.”
The professor cuts herself a slice of chocolate cake. She seems to be remembering. And then she says, “I doubt there was much opportunity for nylons and lipsticks after her family was killed. There certainly wasn’t for me. A little money—less than one might imagine—from her parents’ estate, to lodge and feed her. No luxuries . . . ”
“There must have been something else wrong with Susan,” says the young journalist, “something they didn’t tell us. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been damned like that—denied the Heaven of further up and further in. I mean, all the people she had ever cared for had gone on to their reward, in a world of magic and waterfalls and joy. And she was left behind.”
“I don’t know about the girl in the books,” says the professor, “but remaining behind would also have meant that she was available to identify her brothers’ and her little sister’s bodies. There were a lot of people dead in that crash. I was taken to a nearby school—it was the first day of term, and they had taken the bodies there. My older brother looked okay. Like he was asleep. The other two were a bit messier.”
“I suppose Susan would have seen their bodies, and thought, they’re on holidays now. The perfect school holidays. Romping in meadows with talking animals, world without end.”
“She might have done. I only remember thinking what a great deal of damage a train can do, when it hits another train, to the people who were traveling inside. I suppose you’ve never had to identify a body, dear?”
“No.”
“That’s a blessing. I remember looking at them and thinking, What if I’m wrong, what if it’s not him after all? My younger brother was decapitated, you know. A god who would punish me for liking nylons and parties by making me walk through that school dining room, with the flies, to identify Ed, well . . . he’s enjoying himself a bit too much, isn’t he? Like a cat, getting the last ounce of enjoyment out of a mouse. Or a gram of enjoyment, I suppose it must be these days. I don’t know, really.”
She trails off. And then, after some time, she says, “I’m sorry dear. I don’t think I can do any more of this today. Perhaps if your editor gives me a ring, we can set a time to finish our conversation.”
Greta nods and says of course, and knows in her heart, with a peculiar finality, that they will talk no more.
That night, the professor climbs the stairs of her house, slowly, painstakingly, floor by floor. She takes sheets and blankets from the airing cupboard, and makes up a bed in the spare bedroom, at the back. It is empty but for a wartime austerity dressing table, with a mirror and drawers, an oak bed, and a dusty applewood wardrobe, which contains only coathangers and a cardboard box. She places a vase on the dressing table, containing purple rhododendron flowers, sticky and vulgar.
She takes from the box in the wardrobe a plastic shopping bag containing four old photographic albums. Then she climbs into the bed that was hers as a child, and lies there between the sheets, looking at the black-and-white photographs, and the sepia photographs, and the handful of unconvincing color photographs. She looks at her brothers, and her sister, and her parents, and she wonders how they could have been that young, how anybody could have been that young.
After a while she notices that there are several children’s books beside the bed, which puzzles her slightly, because she does not believe she keeps books on the bedside table in that room. Nor, she decides, does she usually have a bedside table there. On the top of the pile is an old paperback book—it must be more than forty years old: the price on the cover is in shillings. It shows a lion, and two girls twining a daisy chain into its mane.
The professor’s lips prickle with shock. And only then does she understand that she is dreaming, for she does not keep those books in the house. Beneath the paperback is a hardback, in its jacket, of a book that, in her dream, she has always wanted to read: Mary Poppins Brings in the Dawn, which P. L. Travers had never written while alive.
She picks it up and opens it to the middle, and reads the story waiting for her: Jane and Michael follow Mary Poppins on her day off, to Heaven, and they meet the boy Jesus, who is still slightly scared of Mary Poppins because she was once his nanny, and the Holy Ghost, who complains that he has not been able to get his sheet properly white since Mary Poppins left, and God the Father, who says, “There’s no making her do anything. Not her. She’s Mary Poppins.”
“But you’re God,” said Jane. “You created everybody and everything. They have to do what you say.”
“Not her,” said God the Father once again, and he scratched his golden beard flecked with white. “I didn’t create her. She’s Mary Poppins.”
And the professor stirs in her sleep, and afterward dreams that she is reading her own obituary. It has been a good life, she thinks, as she reads it, discovering her history laid out in black and white. Everyone is there. Even the people she had forgotten.
Greta sleeps beside her boyfriend, in a small flat in Camden, and she, too, is dreaming.
In the dream, the lion and the witch come down the hill together.
She is standing on the battlefield, holding her sister’s hand. She looks up at the golden lion, and the burning amber of his eyes. “He’s not a tame lion, is he?” she whispers to her sister, and they shiver.
The witch looks at them all, then she turns to the lion, and says, coldly, “I am satisfied with the terms of our agreement. You take the girls: for myself, I shall have the boys.”
She understands what must have happened, and she runs, but the beast is upon her before she has covered a dozen paces.
The lion eats all of her except her head, in her dream. He leaves the head, and one of her hands, just as a housecat leaves the parts of a mouse it has no desire for, for later, or as a gift.
She wishes that he had eaten her head, then she would not have had to look. Dead eyelids cannot be closed, and she stares, unflinching, at the twisted thing her brothers have become. The great beast eats her little sister more slowly, and, it seems to her, with more relish and pleasure than it had eaten her; but then, her little sister had
always been its favorite.
The witch removes her white robes, revealing a body no less white, with high, small breasts, and nipples so dark they are almost black. The witch lies back upon the grass, spreads her legs. Beneath her body, the grass becomes rimed with frost. “Now,” she says.
The lion licks her white cleft with its pink tongue, until she can take no more of it, and she pulls its huge mouth to hers, and wraps her icy legs into its golden fur . . . .
Being dead, the eyes in the head on the grass cannot look away. Being dead, they miss nothing.
And when the two of them are done, sweaty and sticky and sated, only then does the lion amble over to the head on the grass and devour it in its huge mouth, crunching her skull in its powerful jaws, and it is then, only then, that she wakes.
Her heart is pounding. She tries to wake her boyfriend, but he snores and grunts and will not be roused.
It’s true, Greta thinks, irrationally, in the darkness. She grew up. She carried on. She didn’t die.
She imagines the professor, waking in the night and listening to the noises coming from the old applewood wardrobe in the corner: to the rustlings of all these gliding ghosts, which might be mistaken for the scurries of mice or rats, to the padding of enormous velvet paws, and the distant, dangerous music of a hunting horn.
She knows she is being ridiculous, although she will not be surprised when she reads of the professor’s demise. Death comes in the night, she thinks, before she returns to sleep. Like a lion.
The white witch rides naked on the lion’s golden back. Its muzzle is spotted with fresh, scarlet blood. Then the vast pinkness of its tongue wipes around its face, and once more it is perfectly clean.
Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel
Peter S. Beagle
My Uncle Chaim, who was a painter, was working in his studio—as he did on every day except Shabbos—when the blue angel showed up. I was there.
I was usually there most afternoons, dropping in on my way home from Fiorello LaGuardia Elementary School. I was what they call a “latchkey kid,” these days. My parents both worked and traveled full-time, and Uncle Chaim’s studio had been my home base and my real playground since I was small. I was shy and uncomfortable with other children. Uncle Chaim didn’t have any kids, and didn’t know much about them, so he talked to me like an adult when he talked at all, which suited me perfectly. I looked through his paintings and drawings, tried some of my own, and ate Chinese food with him in silent companionship, when he remembered that we should probably eat. Sometimes I fell asleep on the cot. And when his friends—who were mostly painters like himself—dropped in to visit, I withdrew into my favorite corner and listened to their talk, and understood what I understood. Until the blue angel came.
It was very sudden: one moment I was looking through a couple of the comic books Uncle Chaim kept around for me, while he was trying to catch the highlight on the tendons under his model’s chin, and the next moment there was this angel standing before him, actually posing, with her arms spread out and her great wings taking up almost half the studio. She was not blue herself—a light beige would be closer—but she wore a blue robe that managed to look at once graceful and grand, with a white undergarment glimmering beneath. Her face, half-shadowed by a loose hood, looked disapproving.
I dropped the comic book and stared. No, I gaped, there’s a difference. Uncle Chaim said to her, “I can’t see my model. If you wouldn’t mind moving just a bit?” He was grumpy when he was working, but never rude.
“I am your model,” the angel said. “From this day forth, you will paint no one but me.”
“I don’t work on commission,” Uncle Chaim answered. “I used to, but you have to put up with too many aggravating rich people. Now I just paint what I paint, take it to the gallery. Easier on my stomach, you know?”
His model, the wife of a fellow painter, said, “Chaim, who are you talking to?”
“Nobody, nobody, Ruthie. Just myself, same way your Jules does when he’s working. Old guys get like that.” To the angel, in a lower voice, he said, “Also, whatever you’re doing to the light, could you not? I got some great shadows going right now.” For a celestial brightness was swelling in the grubby little warehouse district studio, illuminating the warped floor boards, the wrinkled tubes of colors scattered everywhere, the canvases stacked and propped in the corners, along with several ancient rickety easels. It scared me, but not Uncle Chaim. He said. “So you’re an angel, fine, that’s terrific. Now give me back my shadows.”
The room darkened obediently. “Thank you. Now about moving . . . ” He made a brushing-away gesture with the hand holding the little glass of Scotch.
The model said, “Chaim, you’re worrying me.”
“What, I’m seventy-six years old, I’m not entitled to a hallucination now and then? I’m seeing an angel, you’re not—this is no big deal. I just want it should move out of the way, let me work.” The angel, in response, spread her wings even wider, and Uncle Chaim snapped, “Oh, for God’s sake, shoo!”
“It is for God’s sake that I am here,” the angel announced majestically. “The Lord—Yahweh—I Am That I Am—has sent me down to be your muse.” She inclined her head a trifle, by way of accepting the worship and wonder she expected.
From Uncle Chaim, she didn’t get it, unless very nearly dropping his glass of Scotch counts as a compliment. “A muse?” he snorted. “I don’t need a muse—I got models!”
“That’s it,” Ruthie said. “I’m calling Jules, I’ll make him come over and sit with you.” She put on her coat, picked up her purse, and headed for the door, saying over her shoulder, “Same time Thursday? If you’re still here?”
“I got more models than I know what to do with,” Uncle Chaim told the blue angel. “Men, women, old, young—even a cat, there’s one lady always brings her cat, what am I going to do?” He heard the door slam, realized that Ruthie was gone, and sighed irritably, taking a larger swallow of whiskey than he usually allowed himself. “Now she’s upset, she thinks she’s my mother anyway, she’ll send Jules with chicken soup and an enema.” He narrowed his eyes at the angel. “And what’s this, how I’m only going to be painting you from now on? Like Velázquez stuck painting royal Hapsburg imbeciles over and over? Some hope you’ve got! Listen, you go back and tell,”—he hesitated just a trifle—”tell whoever sent you that Chaim Malakoff is too old not to paint what he likes, when he likes, and for who he likes. You got all that? We’re clear?”
It was surely no way to speak to an angel; but as Uncle Chaim used to warn me about everyone from neighborhood bullies to my fourth-grade teacher, who hit people, “You give the bastards an inch, they’ll walk all over you. From me they get bupkes, nichevo, nothing. Not an inch.” I got beaten up more than once in those days, saying that to the wrong people.
And the blue angel was definitely one of them. The entire room suddenly filled with her: with the wings spreading higher than the ceiling, wider than the walls, yet somehow not touching so much as a stick of charcoal; with the aroma almost too impossibly haunting to be borne; with the vast, unutterable beauty that a thousand medieval and Renaissance artists had somehow not gone mad (for the most part) trying to ambush on canvas or trap in stone. In that moment, Uncle Chaim confided later, he didn’t know whether to pity or envy Muslims their ancient ban on depictions of the human body.
“I thought maybe I should kneel, what would it hurt? But then I thought, what would it hurt? It’d hurt my left knee, the one had the arthritis twenty years, that’s what it would hurt.” So he only shrugged a little and told her, “I could manage a sitting on Monday. Somebody cancelled, I got the whole morning free.”
“Now,” the angel said. Her air of distinct disapproval had become one of authority. The difference was slight but notable.
“Now,” Uncle Chaim mimicked her. “All right, already—Ruthie left early, so why not?” He moved the unfinished portrait over to another easel, and carefully selected a blank canv
as from several propped against a wall. “I got to clean off a couple of brushes here, we’ll start. You want to take off that thing, whatever, on your head?” Even I knew perfectly well that it was a halo, but Uncle Chaim always told me that you had to start with people as you meant to go on.
“You will require a larger surface,” the angel instructed him. “I am not to be represented in miniature.”
Uncle Chaim raised one eyebrow (an ability I envied him to the point of practicing—futilely—in the bathroom mirror for hours, until my parents banged on the door, certain I was up to the worst kind of no good). “No, huh? Good enough for the Persians, good enough for Holbein and Hilliard and Sam Cooper, but not for you? So okay, so we’ll try this one . . . ” Rummaging in a corner, he fetched out his biggest canvas, dusted it off, eyed it critically—”Don’t even remember what I’m doing with anything this size, must have been saving it for you”—and finally set it up on the empty easel, turning it away from the angel. “Okay, Malakoff’s rules. Nobody—nobody—looks at my painting till I’m done. Not angels, not Adonai, not my nephew over there in the corner, that’s David, Duvidl—not even my wife. Nobody. Understood?”
The angel nodded, almost imperceptibly. With surprising meekness, she asked, “Where shall I sit?”
“Not a lot of choices,” Uncle Chaim grunted, lifting a brush from a jar of turpentine. “Over there’s okay, where Ruthie was sitting—or maybe by the big window. The window would be good, we’ve lost the shadows already. Take the red chair, I’ll fix the color later.”
But sitting down is not a natural act for an angel: they stand or they fly; check any Renaissance painting. The great wings inevitably get crumpled, the halo always winds up distinctly askew; and there is simply no way, even for Uncle Chaim, to ask an angel to cross her legs or to hook one over the arm of the chair. In the end they compromised, and the blue angel rose up to pose in the window, holding herself there effortlessly, with her wings not stirring at all. Uncle Chaim, settling in to work—brushes cleaned and Scotch replenished—could not refrain from remarking, “I always imagined you guys sort of hovered. Like hummingbirds.”
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 27
