Uncle Chaim And Aunt Rifke And The Angel

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. '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 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