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 i
f 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?”
“Forgiveness….” Now it was the dybbuk who whispered. “Forgiveness may be God’s business. It is not mine.”
“Forgiveness is everyone’s business. Even the dead. On this earth or under it, there is no peace without forgiveness.” The rabbi reached out then, to touch the blue angel comfortingly. She did not react, but he winced and drew his hand back instantly, blowing hard on his fingers, hitting them against his leg. Even I could see that they had turned white with cold.
“You need not fear for her,” the dybbuk said. “Angels feel neither cold nor heat. You have touched where I have been.”
Rabbi Shulevitz shook his head. He said, “I touched you. I touched your shame and your grief—as raw today, I know, as on the day your love died. But the cold… the cold is yours. The loneliness, the endless guilt over what you should have done, the endless turning to and fro in empty darkness… none of that comes from God. You must believe me, my friend.” He paused, still flexing his frozen fingers. “And you must come forth from God’s angel now. For her sake and your own.”
The dybbuk did not respond. Aunt Rifke said, far more sympathetically than she had before, “You need a minyan, I could make some calls. We’d be careful, we wouldn’t hurt it.”
Uncle Chaim looked from her to the rabbi, then back to the blue angel. He opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t.
The rabbi said, “You have suffered enough at your own hands. It is time for you to surrender your pain.” When there was still no reply, he asked, “Are you afraid to be without it? Is that your real fear?”
“It has been my only friend!” the dybbuk answered at last. “Even God cannot understand what I have done so well as my pain does. Without the pain, there is only me.”
“There is heaven,” Rabbi Shulevitz said. “Heaven is waiting for you. Heaven has been waiting a long, long time.”
“I am waiting for me!” It burst out of the dybbuk in a long wail of purest terror, the kind you only hear from small children trapped in a nightmare. “You want me to abandon the one sanctuary I have ever found, where I can huddle warm in the consciousness of an angel and sometimes—for a little—even forget the thing I am. You want me to be naked to myself again, and I am telling you no, not ever, not ever, not ever. Do what you must, Rabbi, and I will do the only thing I can.” It paused, and then added, somewhat stiffly, “Thank you for your efforts. You are a good man.”
Rabbi Shulevitz looked genuinely embarrassed. He also looked weary, frustrated and older than he had been when he first recognized the possession of Uncle Chaim’s angel. Looking vaguely around at us, he said, “I don’t know—maybe it will take a minyan. I don’t want to, but we can’t just….” His voice trailed away sadly, too defeated even to finish the sentence.
Or maybe he didn’t finish because that was when I stepped forward, pulling away from my aunt and uncle, and said, “He can come with me, if he wants. He can come and live in me. Like with the angel.”
Uncle Chaim said, “What?” and Aunt Rifke said, “No!” and Rabbi Shulevitz said, “David!” He turned and grabbed me by the shoulders, and I could feel him wanting to shake me, but he didn’t. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. He said, “David, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “He’s scared, he’s so scared. I know about scared.”
Aunt Rifke crouched down beside me, peering hard into my face. “David, you’re ten years old, you’re a little boy. This one, he could be a thousand years, he’s been hiding from God in an angel’s body. How could you know what he’s feeling?”
I said, “Aunt Rifke, I go to school. I wake up every morning, and right away I think about the boys waiting to beat me up because I’m small, or because I’m Jewish, or because they just don’t like my face, the way I look at them. Every day I want to stay home and read, and listen to the radio, and play my All-Star Baseball game, but I get dressed and I eat breakfast, and I walk to school. And ev
ery day I have to think how I’m going to get through recess, get through gym class, get home without running into Jay Taffer, George DiLucca. Billy Kronish. I know all about not wanting to go outside.”
Nobody said anything. The rabbi tried several times, but it was Uncle Chaim who finally said loudly, “I got to teach you to box. A little Archie Moore, a little Willie Pep, we’ll take care of those mamzers.” He looked ready to give me my first lesson right there.
When the dybbuk spoke again, its voice was somehow different: quiet, slow, wondering. It said, “Boy, you would do that?” I didn’t speak, but I nodded.
Aunt Rifke said, “Your mother would kill me! She’s hated me since I married Chaim.”
The dybbuk said, “Boy, if I come… outside, I cannot go back. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
But I was shaking. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have someone living inside me, like a baby, or a tapeworm. I was fascinated by tapeworms that year. Only this would be a spirit, not an actual physical thing—that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? It might even be company, in a way, almost like being a comic-book superhero and having a secret identity. I wondered whether the angel had even known the dybbuk was in her, as quiet as he had been until he spoke to Rabbi Shulevitz. Who, at the moment, was repeating over and over, “No, I can’t permit this. This is wrong, this can’t be allowed. No.” He began to mutter prayers in Hebrew.
Aunt Rifke was saying, “I don’t care, I’m calling some people from the shul, I’m getting some people down here right away!” Uncle Chaim was gripping my shoulder so hard it hurt, but he didn’t say anything. But there was really no one in the room except the dybbuk and me. When I think about it, when I remember, that’s all I see.
I remember being thirsty, terribly thirsty, because my throat and my mouth were so dry. I pulled away from Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke, and I moved past Rabbi Shulevitz, and I croaked out to the dybbuk, “Come on, then. You can come out of the angel, it’s safe, it’s okay.” I remember thinking that it was like trying to talk a cat down out of a tree, and I almost giggled.