The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 4: Trips: 1972-73

by Robert Silverberg

  “There is no survival of consciousness after death,” I said stubbornly.

  “A year ago I would have agreed with you. But who am I if I am not the spirit of Joseph Avneri? How can you account for me any other way? Dear God, do you think I want to believe this, Shimon? You know what a scoffer I was. But it’s real.”

  “Perhaps I’m having a very vivid hallucination.”

  “Call the others, then. If ten people have the same hallucination, is it still a hallucination? Be reasonable, Shimon! Here I stand before you, telling you things that only I could know, and you deny that I am—”

  “Be reasonable?” I said. “Where does reason enter into this? Do you expect me to believe in ghosts, Joseph, in wandering demons, in dybbuks? Am I some superstition-ridden peasant out of the Polish woods? Is this the Middle Ages?”

  “You called me Joseph,” he said quietly.

  “I can hardly call you Seul when you speak in that voice.”

  “Then you believe in me!”

  “No.”

  “Look, Shimon, did you ever know a bigger sceptic than Joseph Avneri? I had no use for the Torah, I said Moses was fictional, I plowed the fields on Yom Kippur, I laughed in God’s nonexistent face. What is life, I said? And I answered: a mere accident, a transient biological phenomenon. Yet here I am. I remember the moment of my death. For a full year I’ve wandered this world, bodiless, perceiving things, unable to communicate. And today I find myself cast into this creature’s body, and I know myself for a dybbuk. If I believe, Shimon, how can you dare disbelieve? In the name of our friendship, have faith in what I tell you!”

  “You have actually become a dybbuk?”

  “I have become a dybbuk,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Very well, Joseph. You’re a dybbuk. It’s madness but I believe.” I stared in astonishment at the Kunivar. Did I believe? Did I believe that I believed? How could I not believe? There was no other way for the voice of Joseph Avneri to be coming from the throat of a Kunivar. Sweat streamed down my body. I was face to face with the impossible, and all my philosophy was shattered. Anything was possible now. God might appear as a burning bush. The sun might stand still. No, I told myself. Believe only one irrational thing at a time, Shimon. Evidently there are dybbuks; well, then, there are dybbuks. But everything else pertaining to the Invisible World remains unreal until it manifests itself.

  I said, “Why do you think this has happened to you?”

  “It could only be as a punishment.”

  “For what, Joseph?”

  “My experiments. You knew I was doing research into the Kunivaru metabolism, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, certainly. But—”

  “Did you know I performed surgical experiments on live Kunivaru in our hospital? That I used patients, without informing them or anyone else, in studies of a forbidden kind? It was vivisection, Shimon.”

  “What?”

  “There were things I needed to know, and there was only one way I could discover them. The hunger for knowledge led me into sin. I told myself that these creatures were ill, that they would shortly die anyway, and that it might benefit everyone if I opened them while they still lived, you see? Besides, they weren’t human beings, Shimon, they were only animals, very intelligent animals, true, but still only—”

  “No, Joseph. I can believe in dybbuks more readily than I can believe this. You, doing such a thing? My calm rational friend, my scientist, my wise one?” I shuddered and stepped a few paces back from him. “Auschwitz!” I cried. “Buchenwald! Dachau! Do those names mean anything to you? ‘They weren’t human beings,’ the Nazi surgeon said. ‘They were only Jews, and our need for scientific knowledge is such that—’ That was only three hundred years ago, Joseph. And you, a Jew, a Jew of all people, to—”

  “I know, Shimon, I know. Spare me the lecture. I sinned terribly, and for my sins I’ve been given this grotesque body, this gross, hideous, heavy body, these four legs which I can hardly coordinate, this crooked spine, this foul hot furry pelt. I still don’t believe in a God, Shimon, but I think I believe in some sort of compensating force that balances accounts in this universe, and the account has been balanced for me, oh, yes, Shimon! I’ve had six hours of terror and loathing today such as I never dreamed could be experienced. To enter this body, to fry in this heat, to wander these hills trapped in such a mass of flesh, to feel myself being bombarded with the sensory perceptions of a being so alien—it’s been hell, I tell you that without exaggeration. I would have died of shock in the first ten minutes if I didn’t already happen to be dead. Only now, seeing you, talking to you, do I begin to get control of myself. Help me, Shimon.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get me out of here. This is torment. I’m a dead man; I’m entitled to rest the way the other dead ones rest. Free me, Shimon.”

  “How?”

  “How? How? Do I know? Am I an expert on dybbuks? Must I direct my own exorcism? If you knew what an effort it is simply to hold this body upright, to make its tongue form Hebrew words, to say things in a way you’ll understand—” Suddenly the Kunivar sagged to his knees, a slow, complex folding process that reminded me of the manner in which the camels of Old Earth lowered themselves to the ground. The alien creature began to sputter and moan and wave his arms about; foam appeared on his wide rubbery lips. “God in Heaven, Shimon,” Joseph cried, “set me free!”

  I called for my son Yigal and he came running swiftly from the far side of the fields, a lean healthy boy, only eleven years old but already long-legged, strong-bodied. Without going into details, I indicated the suffering Kunivar and told Yigal to get help from the kibbutz. A few minutes later he came back leading seven or eight men—Abrasha, Itzhak, Uri, Nahum, and some others. It took the full strength of all of us to lift the Kunivar into the hopper of a harvesting machine and transport him to our hospital. Two of the doctors—Moshe Shiloah and someone else—began to examine the stricken alien, and I sent Yigal to the Kunivaru village to tell the chief that Seul had collapsed in our fields.

  The doctors quickly diagnosed the problem as a case of heat prostration. They were discussing the sort of injection the Kunivar should receive when Joseph Avneri, breaking a silence that had lasted since Seul had fallen, announced his presence within the Kunivar’s body. Uri and Nahum had remained in the hospital room with me; not wanting this craziness to become general knowledge in the kibbutz, I took them outside and told them to forget whatever ravings they had heard. When I returned, the doctors were busy with their preparations and Joseph was patiently explaining to them that he was a dybbuk who had involuntarily taken possession of the Kunivar. “The heat has driven the poor creature insane,” Moshe Shiloah murmured, and rammed a huge needle into one of Seul’s thighs.

  “Make them listen to me,” Joseph said.

  “You know that voice,” I told the doctors. “Something very unusual has happened here.”

  But they were no more willing to believe in dybbuks than they were in rivers that flow uphill. Joseph continued to protest, and the doctors continued methodically to fill Seul’s body with sedatives and restoratives and other potions. Even when Joseph began to speak of last year’s kibbutz gossip—who had been sleeping with whom behind whose back, who had illicitly been peddling goods from the community storehouse to the Kunivaru—they paid no attention. It was as though they had so much difficulty believing that a Kunivar could speak Hebrew that they were unable to make sense out of what he was saying, and took Joseph’s words to be Seul’s delirium. Suddenly Joseph raised his voice for the first time, calling out in a loud, angry tone, “You, Moshe Shiloah! Aboard the Ark I found you in bed with the wife of Teviah Kohn, remember? Would a Kunivar have known such a thing?”

  Moshe Shiloah gasped, reddened, and dropped his hypodermic. The other doctor was nearly as astonished.

  “What is this?” Moshe Shiloah asked. “How can this be?”

  “Deny me now!” Joseph roared. “Can you deny me?”

 
The doctors faced the same problems of acceptance that I had had, that Joseph himself had grappled with. We were all of us rational men in this kibbutz, and the supernatural had no place in our lives. But there was no arguing the phenomenon away. There was the voice of Joseph Avneri emerging from the throat of Seul the Kunivar, and the voice was saying things that only Joseph would have said, and Joseph had been dead more than a year. Call it a dybbuk, call it hallucination, call it anything: Joseph’s presence could not be ignored.

  Locking the door, Moshe Shiloah said to me, “We must deal with this somehow.”

  Tensely we discussed the situation. It was, we agreed, a delicate and difficult matter. Joseph, raging and tortured, demanded to be exorcised and allowed to sleep the sleep of the dead; unless we placated him, he would make us all suffer. In his pain, in his fury, he might say anything, he might reveal everything he knew about our private lives; a dead man is beyond all of society’s rules of common decency. We could not expose ourselves to that. But what could we do about him? Chain him in an outbuilding and hide him in solitary confinement? Hardly. Unhappy Joseph deserved better of us than that; and there was Seul to consider, poor supplanted Seul, the dybbuk’s unwilling host. We could not keep a Kunivar in the kibbutz, imprisoned or free, even if his body did house the spirit of one of our own people, nor could we let the shell of Seul go back to the Kunivaru village with Joseph as a furious passenger trapped inside. What to do? Separate soul from body, somehow: restore Seul to wholeness and send Joseph to the limbo of the dead. But how? There was nothing in the standard pharmacopoeia about dybbuks. What to do? What to do?

  I sent for Shmarya Asch and Yakov Ben-Zion, who headed the kibbutz council that month, and for Shlomo Feig, our rabbi, a shrewd and sturdy man, very unorthodox in his Orthodoxy, almost as secular as the rest of us. They questioned Joseph Avneri extensively, and he told them the whole tale, his scandalous secret experiments, his postmortem year as a wandering spirit, his sudden painful incarnation within Seul. At length Shmarya Asch turned to Moshe Shiloah and snapped, “There must be some therapy for such a case.”

  “I know of none.”

  “This is schizophrenia,” said Shmarya Asch in his firm, dogmatic way. “There are cures for schizophrenia. There are drugs, there are electric shock treatments, there are—you know these things better than I, Moshe.”

  “This is not schizophrenia,” Moshe Shiloah retorted. “This is a case of demonic possession. I have no training in treating such maladies.”

  “Demonic possession?” Shmarya bellowed. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Peace, peace, all of you,” Shlomo Feig said, as everyone began to shout at once. The rabbi’s voice cut sharply through the tumult and silenced us all. He was a man of great strength, physical as well as moral, to whom the entire kibbutz inevitably turned for guidance although there was virtually no one among us who observed the major rites of Judaism. He said, “I find this as hard to comprehend as any of you. But the evidence triumphs over my skepticism. How can we deny that Joseph Avneri has returned as a dybbuk? Moshe, you know no way of causing this intruder to leave the Kunivar’s body?”

  “None,” said Moshe Shiloah.

  “Maybe the Kunivaru themselves know a way,” Yakov Ben-Zion suggested.

  “Exactly,” said the rabbi. “My next point. These Kunivaru are a primitive folk. They live closer to the world of magic and witchcraft, of demons and spirits, than we do whose minds are schooled in the habits of reason. Perhaps such cases of possession occur often among them. Perhaps they have techniques for driving out unwanted spirits. Let us turn to them, and let them cure their own.”

  Before long Yigal arrived, bringing with him six Kunivaru, including Gyaymar, the village chief. They wholly filled the little hospital room, bustling around in it like a delegation of huge furry centaurs; I was oppressed by the acrid smell of so many of them in one small space, and although they had always been friendly to us, never raising an objection when we appeared as refugees to settle on their planet, I felt fear of them now as I had never felt before. Clustering about Seul, they asked questions of him in their own supple language, and when Joseph Avneri replied in Hebrew they whispered things to each other unintelligible to us. Then, unexpectedly, the voice of Seul broke through, speaking in halting spastic monosyllables that revealed the terrible shock his nervous system must have received; then the alien faded and Joseph Avneri spoke once more with the Kunivar’s lips, begging forgiveness, asking for release.

  Turning to Gyaymar, Shlomo Feig said, “Have such things happened on this world before?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” the chief replied. “Many times. When one of us dies having a guilty soul, repose is denied, and the spirit may undergo strange migrations before forgiveness comes. What was the nature of this man’s sin?”

  “It would be difficult to explain to one who is not Jewish,” said the rabbi hastily, glancing away. “The important question is whether you have a means of undoing what has befallen the unfortunate Seul, whose sufferings we all lament.”

  “We have a means, yes,” said Gyaymar the chief.

  The six Kunivaru hoisted Seul to their shoulders and carried him from the kibbutz; we were told that we might accompany them if we cared to do so. I went along, and Moshe Shiloah, and Shmarya Asch, and Yakov Ben-Zion, and the rabbi, and perhaps some others. The Kunivaru took their comrade not to their village but to a meadow several kilometers to the east, down in the direction of the place where the Hassidim lived. Not long after the Landing the Kunivaru had let us know that the meadow was sacred to them, and none of us had ever entered it.

  It was a lovely place, green and moist, a gently sloping basin crisscrossed by a dozen cool little streams. Depositing Seul beside one of the streams, the Kunivaru went off into the woods bordering the meadow to gather firewood and herbs. We remained close by Seul. “This will do no good,” Joseph Avneri muttered more than once. “A waste of time, a foolish expense of energy.” Three of the Kunivaru started to build a bonfire. Two sat nearby, shredding the herbs, making heaps of leaves, stems, roots. Gradually more of their kind appeared until the meadow was filled with them; it seemed that the whole village, some four hundred Kunivaru, was turning out to watch or to participate in the rite. Many of them carried musical instruments, trumpets and drums, rattles and clappers, lyres, lutes, small harps, percussive boards, wooden flutes, everything intricate and fanciful of design; we had not suspected such cultural complexity. The priests—I assume they were priests, Kunivaru of stature and dignity—wore ornate ceremonial helmets and heavy golden mantles of sea-beast fur. The ordinary townsfolk carried ribbons and streamers, bits of bright fabric, polished mirrors of stone, and other ornamental devices. When he saw how elaborate a function it was going to be, Moshe Shiloah, an amateur anthropologist at heart, ran back to the kibbutz to fetch camera and recorder. He returned, breathless, just as the rite commenced.

  And a glorious rite it was: incense, a grandly blazing bonfire, the pungent fragrance of freshly picked herbs, some heavy-footed quasi-orgiastic dancing, and a choir punching out harsh, sharp-edged arhythmic melodies. Gyaymar and the high priest of the village performed an elegant antiphonal chant, uttering long curling intertwining melismas and sprinkling Seul with a sweet-smelling pink fluid out of a baroquely carved wooden censer. Never have I beheld such stirring pageantry. But Joseph’s gloomy prediction was correct; it was all entirely useless. Two hours of intensive exorcism had no effect. When the ceremony ended—the ultimate punctuation marks were five terrible shouts from the high priest—the dybbuk remained firmly in possession of Seul. “You have not conquered me,” Joseph declared in a bleak tone.

  Gyaymar said, “It seems we have no power to command an Earthborn soul.”

  “What will we do now?” demanded Yakov Ben-Zion of no one in particular. “Our science and their witchcraft both fail.”

  Joseph Avneri pointed toward the east, toward the village of the Hassidim, and murmured something indistinct.

  “No
!” cried Rabbi Shlomo Feig, who stood closest to the dybbuk at that moment.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “It was nothing,” the rabbi said. “It was foolishness. The long ceremony has left him fatigued, and his mind wanders. Pay no attention.”

  I moved nearer to my old friend. “Tell me, Joseph.”

  “I said,” the dybbuk replied slowly, “that perhaps we should send for the Baal Shem.”

  “Foolishness!” said Shlomo Feig, and spat.

  “Why this anger?” Shmarya Asch wanted to know. “You, Rabbi Shlomo, you were one of the first to advocate employing Kunivaru sorcerers in this business. You gladly bring in alien witch doctors, Rabbi, and grow angry when someone suggests that your fellow Jew be given a chance to drive out the demon? Be consistent, Shlomo!”

  Rabbi Shlomo’s strong face grew mottled with rage. It was strange to see this calm, even-tempered man becoming so excited. “I will have nothing to do with Hassidim!” he exclaimed.

  “I think this is a matter of professional rivalries,” Moshe Shiloah commented.

  The rabbi said, “To give recognition to all that is most superstitious in Judaism, to all that is most irrational and grotesque and outmoded and medieval? No! No!”

  “But dybbuks are irrational and grotesque and outmoded and medieval,” said Joseph Avneri. “Who better to exorcise one than a rabbi whose soul is still rooted in ancient beliefs?”

  “I forbid this!” Shlomo Feig sputtered. “If the Baal Shem is summoned I will—I will—”