We Never Talk About My Brother

by Peter S. Beagle

  One winter afternoon, having come tired, and stayed late, I was half-asleep on a padded rocker in a far corner when I heard Uncle Chaim saying, “You ever think that maybe we might both be dead, you and me?”

  “We angels do not die,” the blue angel responded. “It is not in us to die.”

  “I told you, lift your chin,” Uncle Chaim grunted. “Well, it’s built into us, believe me, it’s mostly what we do from day one.” He looked up at her from the easel. “But I’m trying to get you into a painting, and I’ll never be able to do it, but it doesn’t matter, got to keep trying. The head a little bit to the left—no, that’s too much, I said a little.” He put down his brush and walked over to the angel, taking her chin in his hand. He said, “And you... whatever you’re after, you’re not going to get that right, either, are you? So it’s like we’re stuck here together—and if we were dead, maybe this is hell. Would we know? You ever think about things like that?”

  “No.” The angel said nothing further for a long time, and I was dozing off again when I heard her speak. “You would not speak so lightly of hell if you had seen it. I have seen it. It is not what you think.”

  “Nu?” Uncle Chaim’s voice could raise an eyebrow itself. “So what’s it like?”

  “Cold.” The words were almost inaudible. “So cold... so lonely... so empty. God is not there... no one is there. No one, no one, no one... no one....”

  It was that voice, that other voice that I had heard once before, and I have never again been as frightened as I was by the murmuring terror in her words. I actually grabbed my books and got up to leave, already framing some sort of gotta-go to Uncle Chaim, but just then Aunt Rifke walked into the studio for the first time, with Rabbi Shulevitz trailing behind her, so I stayed where I was. I don’t know a thing about ten-year- olds today; but in those times one of the major functions of adults was to supply drama and mystery to our lives, and we took such things where we found them.

  Rabbi Stuart Shulevitz was the nearest thing my family had to an actual regular rabbi. He was Reform, of course, which meant that he had no beard, played the guitar, performed Bat Mitzvahs and interfaith marriages, invited local priests and imams to lead the Passover ritual, and put up perpetually with all the jokes told, even by his own congregation, about young, beardless, terminally tolerant Reform rabbis. Uncle Chaim, who allowed Aunt Rifke to drag him to shul twice a year, on the High Holidays, regarded him as being somewhere between a mild head cold and mouse droppings in the pantry. But Aunt Rifke always defended Rabbi Shulevitz, saying, “He’s smarter than he looks, and anyway he can’t help being blond. Also, he smells good.”

  Uncle Chaim and I had to concede the point. Rabbi Shulevitz’s immediate predecessor, a huge, hairy, bespectacled man from Riga, had smelled mainly of rancid hair oil and cheap peach schnapps. And he couldn’t sing “Red River Valley,” either.

  Aunt Rifke was generally a placid-appearing, hamishe sort of woman, but now her plump face was set in lines that would have told even an angel that she meant business. The blue angel froze in position in a different way than she usually held still as required by the pose. Her strange eyes seemed almost to change their shape, widening in the center and somehow lifting at the corners, as though to echo her wings. She stood at near-attention, silently regarding Aunt Rifke and the rabbi.

  Uncle Chaim never stopped painting. Over his shoulder he said, “Rifke, what do you want? I’ll be home when I’m home.”

  “So who’s rushing you?” Aunt Rifke snapped back. “We didn’t come about you. We came the rabbi should take a look at your model here.” The word burst from her mouth trailing blue smoke.

  “What look? I’m working, I’m going to lose the light in ten, fifteen minutes. Sorry, Rabbi, I got no time. Come back next week, you could say a barucha for the whole studio. Goodbye, Rifke.”

  But my eyes were on the Rabbi, and on the angel, as he slowly approached her, paying no heed to the quarreling voices of Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke. Blond or not, “Red River Valley” or not, he was still magic in my sight, the official representative of a power as real as my disbelief. On the other hand, the angel could fly. The Chassidic wonder rebbes of my parents’ Eastern Europe could fly up to heaven and share the Shabbos meal with God, when they chose. Reform rabbis couldn’t fly.

  As Rabbi Shulevitz neared her, the blue angel became larger and more stately, and there was now a certain menacing aspect to her divine radiance, which set me shrinking into a corner, half-concealed by a dusty drape. But the rabbi came on.

  “Come no closer,” the angel warned him. Her voice sounded deeper, and slightly distorted, like a phonograph record when the Victrola hasn’t been wound tight enough. “It is not for mortals to lay hands on the Lord’s servant and messenger.”

  “I’m not touching you,” Rabbi Shulevitz answered mildly. “I just want to look in your eyes. An angel can’t object to that, surely.”

  “The full blaze of an angel’s eyes would leave you ashes, impudent man.” Even I could hear the undertone of anxiety in her voice.

  “That is foolishness.” The rabbi’s tone continued gentle, almost playful. “My friend Chaim paints your eyes full of compassion, of sorrow for the world and all its creatures, every one. Only turn those eyes to me for a minute, for a very little minute, where’s the harm?”

  Obediently he stayed where he was, taking off his hat to reveal the black yarmulke underneath. Behind him, Aunt Rifke made as though to take Uncle Chaim’s arm, but he shrugged her away, never taking his own eyes from Rabbi Shulevitz and the blue angel. His face was very pale. The glass of Scotch in his left hand, plainly as forgotten as the brush in his right, was beginning to slosh over the rim with his trembling, and I was distracted with fascination, waiting for him to drop it. So I wasn’t quite present, you might say, when the rabbi’s eyes looked into the eyes of the blue angel.

  But I heard the rabbi gasp, and I saw him stagger backwards a couple of steps, with his arm up in front of his eyes. And I saw the angel turning away, instantly; the whole encounter can’t have lasted more than five seconds, if that much. And if Rabbi Shulevitz looked stunned and frightened—which he did—there is no word that I know to describe the expression on the angel’s face. No words.

  Rabbi Shulevitz spoke to Aunt Rifke in Hebrew, which I didn’t know, and she answered him in swift, fierce Yiddish, which I did, but only insofar as it pertained to things my parents felt were best kept hidden from me, such as money problems, family gossip and sex. So I missed most of her words, but I caught anyway three of them. One was shofar, which is the ram’s horn blown at sundown on the High Holidays, and about which I already knew two good dirty jokes. The second was minyan, the number of adult Jews needed to form a prayer circle on special occasions. Reform minyanim include women, which Aunt Rifke always told me I’d come to appreciate in a couple of years. She was right.

  The third word was dybbuk.

  I knew the word, and I didn’t know it. If you’d asked me its meaning, I would have answered that it meant some kind of bogey, like the Invisible Man, or just maybe the Mummy. But I learned the real meaning fast, because Rabbi Shulevitz had taken off his glasses and was wiping his forehead, and whispering, “No. No. Ich vershtaye nicht....”

  Uncle Chaim was complaining, “What the hell is this? See now, we’ve lost the light already, I told you.” No one—me included—was paying any attention.

  Aunt Rifke—who was never entirely sure that Rabbi Shulevitz really understood Yiddish—burst into English. “It’s a dybbuk, what’s not to understand? There’s a dybbuk in that woman, you’ve got to get rid of it! You get a minyan together, right now, you get rid of it! Exorcise!” Why on earth did she want the rabbi to start doing pushups or jumping- jacks in this moment? I was still puzzling over that when he said, “That woman, as you call her, is an angel. You cannot... Rifke, you do not exorcise an angel.” He was trembling—I could see that—but his voice was steady and firm.

  “You do when it’s possessed!”
Aunt Rifke looked utterly exasperated with everybody. “I don’t know how it could happen, but Chaim’s angel’s got a dybbuk in her—” she whirled on her husband—“which is why she makes you just keep painting her and painting her, day and night. You finish—really finish, it’s done, over—she might have to go back out where it’s not so nice for a dybbuk, you know about that? Look at her!” and she pointed an orange-nailed finger straight in the blue angel’s face. “She hears me, she knows what I’m talking about. You know what I’m talking, don’t you, Miss Angel? Or I should say, Mister Dybbuk? You tell me, okay?”

  I had never seen Aunt Rifke like this; she might have been possessed herself. Rabbi Shulevitz was trying to calm her, while Uncle Chaim fumed at the intruders disturbing his model. To my eyes, the angel looked more than disturbed—she looked as terrified as a cat I’d seen backed against a railing by a couple of dogs, strays, with no one to call them away from tearing her to pieces. I was anxious for her, but much more so for my aunt and uncle, truly expecting them to be struck by lightning, or turned to salt, or something on that order. I was scared for the rabbi as well, but I figured he could take care of himself. Maybe even with Aunt Rifke.

  “A dybbuk cannot possibly possess an angel,” the rabbi was saying. “Believe me, I majored in Ashkenazic folklore—wrote my thesis on Lilith, as a matter of fact—and there are no accounts, no legends, not so much as a single bubbemeise of such a thing. Dybbuks are wandering spirits, some of them good, some malicious, but all houseless in the universe. They cannot enter heaven, and Gehenna won’t have them, so they take refuge within the first human being they can reach, like any parasite. But an angel? Inconceivable, take my word. Inconceivable.”

  “In the mind of God,” the blue angel said, “nothing is inconceivable.”

  Strangely, we hardly heard her; she had almost been forgotten in the dispute over her possession. But her voice was that other voice—I could see Uncle Chaim’s eyes widen as he caught the difference. That voice said now, “She is right. I am a dybbuk.”

  In the sudden absolute silence, Aunt Rifke, serenely complacent, said, “Told you.”

  I heard myself say, “Is she bad? I thought she was an angel.”

  Uncle Chaim said impatiently, “What? She’s a model.”

  Rabbi Shulevitz put his glasses back on, his eyes soft with pity behind the heavy lenses. I expected him to point at the angel, like Aunt Rifke, and thunder out stern and stately Hebrew maledictions, but he only said, “Poor thing, poor thing. Poor creature.”

  Through the angel’s mouth, the dybbuk said, “Rabbi, go away. Let me alone, let me be. I am warning you.”

  I could not take my eyes off her. I don’t know whether I was more fascinated by what she was saying, and the adults’ having to deal with its mystery, or by the fact that all the time I had known her as Uncle Chaim’s winged and haloed model, someone else was using her the way I played with my little puppet theatre at home—moving her, making up things for her to say, perhaps even putting her away at night when the studio was empty. Already it was as though I had never heard her strange, shy voice asking a child’s endless questions about the world, but only this grownup voice, speaking to Rabbi Shulevitz Rabbi. “You cannot force me to leave her.”

  “I don’t want to force you to do anything,” the rabbi said gently. “I want to help you.”

  I wish I had never heard the laughter that answered him. I was too young to hear something like that, if anyone could ever be old enough. I cried out and doubled up around myself, hugging my stomach, although what I felt was worse than the worst bellyache I had ever wakened with in the night. Aunt Rifke came and put her arms around me, trying to soothe me, murmuring, half in English, half in Yiddish, “Shh, shh, it’s all right, der rebbe will make it all right. He’s helping the angel, he’s getting rid of that thing inside her, like a doctor. Wait, wait, you’ll see, it’ll be all right.” But I went on crying, because I had been visited by a monstrous grief not my own, and I was only ten.

  The dybbuk said, “If you wish to help me, rabbi, leave me alone. I will not go into the dark again.”

  Rabbi Shulevitz wiped his forehead. He asked, his tone still gentle and wondering, “What did you do to become... what you are? Do you remember?”

  The dybbuk did not answer him for a long time. Nobody spoke, except for Uncle Chaim muttering unhappily to himself, “Who needs this? Try to get your work done, it turns into a ferkockte party. Who needs it?” Aunt Rifke shushed him, but she reached for his arm, and this time he let her take it.

  The rabbi said, “You are a Jew.”

  “I was. Now I am nothing.”

  “No, you are still a Jew. You must know that we do not practice exorcism, not as others do. We heal, we try to heal both the person possessed and the one possessing. But you must tell me what you have done. Why you cannot find peace.”

  The change in Rabbi Shulevitz astonished me as much as the difference between Uncle Chaim’s blue angel and the spirit that inhabited her and spoke through her. He didn’t even look like the crewcut, blue-eyed, guitar-playing, basketball-playing (well, he tried) college-student-dressing young man whose idea of a good time was getting people to sit in a circle and sing “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” or “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” together. There was a power of his own inhabiting him, and clearly the dybbuk recognized it. It said slowly, “You cannot help me. You cannot heal.”

  “Well, we don’t know that, do we?” Rabbi Shulevitz said brightly. “So, a bargain. You tell me what holds you here, and I will tell you, honestly, what I can do for you. Honestly.”

  Again the dybbuk was slow to reply. Aunt Rifke said hotly, “What is this? What help? We’re here to expel, to get rid of a demon that’s taken over one of God’s angels, if that’s what she really is, and enchanted my husband so it’s all he can paint, all he can think about painting. Who’s talking about helping a demon?”

  “The rabbi is,” I said, and they all turned as though they’d forgotten I was there. I gulped and stumbled along, feeling like I might throw up. I said, “I don’t think it’s a demon, but even if it is, it’s given Uncle Chaim a chance to paint a real angel, and everybody loves the paintings, and they buy them, which we wouldn’t have had them to sell if the—the thing—hadn’t made her stay in Uncle Chaim’s studio.” I ran out of breath, gas, and show-business ambitions all at pretty much the same time, and sat down, grateful that I had neither puked nor started to cry. I was still grandly capable of both back then.

  Aunt Rifke looked at me in a way I didn’t recall her ever doing before. She didn’t say anything, but her arm tightened around me. Rabbi Shulevitz said quietly, “Thank you, David.” He turned back to face the angel. In the same voice, he said, “Please. Tell me.”

  When the dybbuk spoke again, the words came one by one—two by two, at most. “A girl... There was a girl... a young woman....”

  “Ai, how not?” Aunt Rifke’s sigh was resigned, but not angry or mocking, just as Uncle Chaim’s. “Shah, Rifkela” was a neither a dismissal nor an order. The rabbi, in turn, gestured them to silence.

  “She wanted us to marry,” the dybbuk said. “I did too. But there was time. There was a world... there was my work... there were things to see... to taste and smell and do and be.... It could wait a little. She could wait....”

  “Uh-huh. Of course. You could die waiting around for some damn man!”

  “Shah, Rifkela!”

  “But this one did not wait around,” Rabbi Shulevitz said to the dybbuk. “She did not wait for you, am I right?”

  “She married another man,” came the reply, and it seemed to my ten-year-old imagination that every tortured syllable came away tinged with blood. “They had been married for two years when he beat her to death.”

  It was my Uncle Chaim who gasped in shock. I don’t think anyone else made a sound.

  The dybbuk said, “She sent me a message. I came as fast as I could. I did come,” though no one had challenged his statement
. “But it was too late.”

  This time we were the ones who did not speak for a long time. Rabbi Shulevitz finally asked, “What did you do?”

  “I looked for him. I meant to kill him, but he killed himself before I found him. So I was too late again.”

  “What happened then?” That was me, once more to my own surprise. “When you didn’t get to kill him?”

  “I lived. I wanted to die, but I lived.”

  From Aunt Rifke—how not? “You ever got married?”

  “No. I lived alone, and I grew old and died. That is all.”

  “Excuse me, but that is not all.” The rabbi’s voice had suddenly, startlingly, turned probing, almost harsh. “That is only the beginning.”

  Everyone looked at him. The rabbi said, “So, after you died, what did happen? Where did you go?”

  There was no answer. Rabbi Shulevitz repeated the question. The dybbuk responded finally, “You have said it yourself. Houseless in the universe I am, and how should it be otherwise? The woman I loved died because I did not love her enough—what greater sin is there than that? Even her murderer had the courage to atone, but I dared not offer my own life in payment for hers. I chose to live, and living on has been my punishment, in death as well as in life. To wander back and forth in a cold you cannot know, shunned by heaven, scorned by purgatory... do you wonder that I sought shelter where I could, even in an angel? God himself would have to come and cast me out again, Rabbi—you never can.”

  I became aware that my aunt and uncle had drawn close around me, as though expecting something dangerous and possibly explosive to happen. Rabbi Shulevitz took off his glasses again, ran his hand through his crewcut, stared at the glasses as though he had never seen them before, and put them back on.

  “You are right,” he said to the dybbuk. “I’m a rabbi, not a rebbe—no Solomonic wisdom, no magical powers, just a degree from a second-class seminary in Metuchen, New Jersey. You wouldn’t know it.” He drew a deep breath and moved a few steps closer to the blue angel. He said, “But this gornisht rabbi knows anyway that you would never have been allowed this refuge if God had not taken pity on you. You must know this, surely?” The dybbuk did not answer. Rabbi Shulevitz said, “And if God pities you, might you not have a little pity on yourself? A little forgiveness?”