Uncle Chaim And Aunt Rifke And The Angel

For himself, he was grateful that the angel proved capable of holding a pose indefinitely, without complaining, asking for a break, or needing the toilet. What he found distracting was her steadily emerging interest in talking and asking questions. As requested, her expression never changed and her lips hardly moved; indeed, there were times when he would have sworn he was hearing her only in his mind. Enough of her queries had to do with his work, with how he did what he was doing, that he finally demanded point-blank, 'All those angels, seraphs, cherubim, centuries of them — all those Virgins and Assumptions and whatnot — and you've never once been painted? Not one time?'

'I have never set foot on earth before,' the angel confessed. 'Not until I was sent to you.'

'Sent to me. Directly. Special Delivery, Chaim Shlomovitch Malakoff — one angel, totally inexperienced at modeling. Or anything else, got anything to do with human life.' The angel nodded, somewhat shyly. Uncle Chaim spoke only one word. 'Why?'

'I am only eleven thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two years old,' the angel said, with a slight but distinct suggestion of resentment in her voice. 'No one tells me a thing.'

Uncle Chaim was silent for some time, squinting at her face from different angles and distances, even closing one eye from time to time. Finally he grumbled, more than half to himself, 'I got a very bad feeling that we're both supposed to learn something from this. Bad, bad feeling.' He filled the little glass for the first time that day, and went back to work.

But if there was to be any learning involved in their near-daily meetings in the studio, it appeared to be entirely on her part. She was ravenously curious about human life on the blue-green ball of damp dirt that she had observed so distantly for so long, and her constant questioning reminded a weary Uncle Chaim — as he informed me more than once — of me at the age of four. Except that an angel cannot be bought off, even temporarily, with strawberry ice cream, or threatened with loss of a bedtime story if she can't learn to take 'I don't know!' for an answer. At times he pretended not to hear her; on other occasions, he would make up some patently ridiculous explanation that a grandchild would have laughed to scorn, but that the angel took so seriously that he was guiltily certain he was bound to be struck by lightning. Only the lightning never came, and the tactic usually did buy him a few moments' peace — until the next question.

Once he said to her, in some desperation, 'You're an angel, you're supposed to know everything about human beings. Listen, I'll take you out to Bleecker, McDougal, Washington Square, you can look at the books, magazines, TV, the classes, the beads and crystals . . . it's all about how to get in touch with angels. Real ones, real angels, never mind that stuff about the angel inside you. Everybody wants some of that angel wisdom, and they want it bad, and they want it right now. We'll take an afternoon off, I'll show you.'

The blue angel said simply, 'The streets and the shops have nothing to show me, nothing to teach. You do.'

'No,' Uncle Chaim said. 'No, no, no, no no. I'm a painter — that's all, that's it, that's what I know. Painting. But you, you sit at the right hand of God—'

'He doesn't have hands,' the angel interrupted. 'And nobody exactly sits—'

'The point I'm making, you're the one who ought to be answering questions. About the universe, and about Darwin, and how everything really happened, and what is it with God and shellfish, and the whole business with the milk and the meat—those kinds of questions. I mean, I should be asking them, I know that, only I'm working right now.'

It was almost impossible to judge the angel's emotions from the expressions of her chillingly beautiful porcelain face; but as far as Uncle Chaim could tell, she looked sad. She said, 'I also am what I am. We angels — as you call us — we are messengers, minions, lackeys, knowing only what we are told, what we are ordered to do. A few of the Oldest, the ones who were there at the Beginning — Michael, Gabriel, Raphael— they have names, thoughts, histories, choices, powers. The rest of us, we tremble, we hide when we see them passing by. We think, if those are angels, we must be something else altogether, but we can never find a better word for ourselves.'

She looked straight at Uncle Chaim — he noticed in some surprise that in a certain light her eyes were not nearly as blue as he had been painting them, but closer to a dark sea-green — and he looked away from an anguish that he had never seen before, and did not know how to paint. He said, 'So okay, you're a low-class angel, a heavenly grunt, like they say now. So how come they picked you to be my muse? Got to mean something, no? Right?'

The angel did not answer his question, nor did she speak much for the rest of the day. Uncle Chaim posed her in several positions, but the unwonted sadness in her eyes depressed him past even Laphroaig's ability to ameliorate. He quit work early, allowing the angel — as he would never have permitted Aunt Rifke or me — to potter around the studio, putting it to rights according to her inexpert notions, organizing brushes, oils, watercolors, pastels and pencils, fixatives, rolls of canvas, bottles of tempera and turpentine, even dusty chunks of rabbit skin glue, according to size. As he told his friend Jules Sidelsky, meeting for their traditional weekly lunch at a Ukrainian restaurant on Second Avenue, where the two of them spoke only Russian, 'Maybe God could figure where things are anymore. Me, I just shut my eyes and pray.'

Jules was large and fat, like Diego Rivera, and I thought of him as a sort of uncle too, because he and Ruthie always remembered my birthday, just like Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke. Jules did not believe in angels, but he knew that Uncle Chaim didn't necessarily believe in them either, just because he had one in his studio every day. He asked seriously, 'That helps? The praying?' Uncle Chaim gave him a look, and Jules dropped the subject. 'So what's she like? I mean, as a model? You like painting her?'

Uncle Chaim held his hand out, palm down, and wobbled it gently from side to side. 'What's not to like? She'll hold any pose absolutely forever — you could leave her all night, morning I guarantee she wouldn't have moved a muscle. No whining, no bellyaching — listen, she'd make Cinderella look like the witch in that movie, the green one. In my life I never worked with anybody gave me less tsuris.'

'So what's with—?' and Jules mimicked his fluttering hand. 'I'm waiting for the but, Chaim.'

Uncle Chaim was still for a while, neither answering nor appearing to notice the steaming varyniki that the waitress had just set down before him. Finally he grumbled, 'She's an angel, what can I tell you? Go reason with an angel.' He found himself vaguely angry with Jules, for no reason that made any sense. He went on, 'She's got it in her head she's supposed to be my muse. It's not the most comfortable thing sometimes, all right?'

Perhaps due to their shared childhood on Tenth Avenue, Jules did not laugh, but it was plainly a near thing. He said, mildly enough, 'Matisse had muses. Rodin, up to here with muses. Picasso about had to give them serial numbers — I think he married them just to keep them straight in his head. You, me . . . I don't see it, Chaim. We're not muse types, you know? Never were, not in all our lives. Also, Rifke would kill you dead. Deader.'

'What, I don't know that? Anyway, it's not what you're thinking.' He grinned suddenly, in spite of himself. 'She's not that kind of girl, you ought to be ashamed. It's just she wants to help, to inspire, that's what muses do. I don't mind her messing around with my mess in the studio — I mean, yeah, I mind it, but I can live with it. But the other day—' he paused briefly, taking a long breath—'the other day she wanted to give me a haircut. A haircut. It's all right, go ahead.'

For Jules was definitely laughing this time, spluttering tea through his nose, so that he turned a bright cerise as other diners stared at them. 'A haircut,' he managed to get out, when he could speak at all clearly. 'An angel gave you a haircut.'

'No, she didn't give me a haircut,' Uncle Chaim snapped back crossly. 'She wanted to, she offered — and then, when I said no, thanks, after awhile she said she could play music for me while I worked. I usually have the news on, and she doesn't like it, I can tell. Well, it wouldn't make much sense to her, would it? Hardly does to me anymore.'

'So she's going to be posing and playing music? What, on her harp? That's true, the harp business?'

'No, she just said she could command the music. The way they do with coffee.' Jules stared at him. 'Well, I don't know — I guess it's like some heavenly Muzak or something. Anyway, I told her no, and I'm sorry I told you anything. Eat, forget it, okay?'

But Jules was not to be put off so easily. He dug down into his galushki poltavski for a little time, and then looked up and said with his mouth full, 'Tell me one thing, then I'll drop it.