by Paula Guran
“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 every 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.
I never saw him actually leave the blue angel. I don’t think anyone did. He was simply standing right in front of me, tall enough that I had to look up to meet his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t a thousand years old, but Aunt Rifke hadn’t missed by much. It wasn’t his clothes that told me – he wore a white turban that looked almost square, a dark red vest sort of thing and white trousers, under a gray robe that came all the way to the ground – it was the eyes. If blackness is the absence of light, then those were the blackest eyes I’ll ever see, because there was no light in those eyes, and no smallest possibility of light ever. You couldn’t call them sad: sad at least knows what joy is, and grieves at being exiled from joy. However old he really was, those eyes were a thousand years past sad.
“Sephardi,” Rabbi Shulevitz murmured. “Of course he’d be Sephardi.”
Aunt Rifke said, “You can see through him. Right through.”
In fact he seemed to come and go: near-solid one moment, cobweb and smoke the next. His face was lean and dark, and must have been a proud face once. Now it was just weary, unspeakably weary – even a ten-year-old could see that. The lines down his cheeks and around the eyes and mouth made me think of desert pictures I’d seen, where the earth gets so dry that it pulls apart, cracks and pulls away from itself. He looked like that.
But he smiled at me. No, he smiled into me, and just as I’ve never seen eyes like his again, I’ve never seen a smile as beautiful. Maybe it couldn’t reach his eyes, but it must have reached mine, because I can still see it. He said softly, “Thank you. You are a kind boy. I promise you, I will not take up much room.”
I braced myself. The only invasive procedures I’d had any experience with then were my twice-monthly allergy shots and the time our doctor had to lance an infected finger that had swollen to twice its size. Would possession be anything like that? Would it make a difference if you were sort of inviting the possession, not being ambushed and taken over, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers? I didn’t mean to close my eyes, but I did.
Then I heard the voice of the blue angel.
“There is no need.” It sounded like the voice I knew, but the breath in it was different – I don’t know how else to put it. I could say it sounded stronger, or clearer, or maybe more musical; but it was the breath, the free breath. Or maybe that isn’t right either, I can’t tell you – I’m not even certain whether angels breathe, and I knew an angel once. There it is.
“Manassa, there is no need,” she said again. I turned to look at her then, when she called the dybbuk by his name, and she was smiling herself, for the first time. It wasn’t like his; it was a faraway smile at something I couldn’t see, but it was real, and I heard Uncle Chaim catch his breath. To no one in particular, he said, “Now she smiles. Never once, I could never once get her to smile.”
“Listen,” the blue angel said. I didn’t hear anything but my uncle grumbling, and Rabbi Shulevitz’s continued Hebrew prayers. But the dybbuk – Manassa – lifted his head, and the endlessly black eyes widened, just a little.
The angel said again, “Listen,” and this time I did hear something, and so did everyone else. It was music, definitely music, but too faint with distance for me to make anything out of it. But Aunt Rifke, who loved more kinds of music than you’d think, put her hand to her mouth and whispered, “Oh.”
“Manassa, listen,” the angel said for the third time, and the two of them looked at each other as the music grew stronger and clearer. I can’t describe it properly: it wasn’t harps and psalteries – whatever a psaltery is, maybe you use it singing psalms – and it wasn’t a choir of soaring heavenly voices, either. It was almost a little scary, the way you feel when you hear the wild geese passing over in the autumn night. It made me think of that poem of Tennys
on’s, with that line about “the horns of Elfland faintly blowing”. We’d been studying it in school.
“It is your welcome, Manassa,” the blue angel said. “The gates are open for you. They were always open.”
But the dybbuk backed away, suddenly whimpering. “I cannot! I am afraid! They will see!”
The angel took his hand. “They see now, as they saw you then. Come with me, I will take you there.”
The dybbuk looked around, just this side of panicking. He even tugged a bit at the blue angel’s hand, but she would not let him go. Finally he sighed very deeply – Lord, you could feel the dust of the tombs in that sigh, and the wind between the stars – and nodded to her. He said, “I will go with you.”
The blue angel turned to look at all of us, but mostly at Uncle Chaim. She said to him, “You are a better painter than I was a muse. And you taught me a great deal about other things than painting. I will tell Rembrandt.”
Aunt Rifke said, a little hesitantly, “I was maybe rude. I’m sorry.” The angel smiled at her.
Rabbi Shulevitz said, “Only when I saw you did I realize that I had never believed in angels.”
“Continue not to,” the angel replied. “We rather prefer it, to tell you the truth. We work better that way.”
Then she and the dybbuk both looked at me, and I didn’t feel even ten years old; more like four or so. I threw my arms around Aunt Rifke and buried my face in her skirt. She patted my head – at least I guess it was her, I didn’t actually see her. I heard the blue angel say in Yiddish, “Sei gesund, Chaim’s Duvidl. You were always courteous to me. Be well.”
I looked up in time to meet the old, old eyes of the dybbuk. He said, “In a thousand years, no one has ever offered me freely what you did.” He said something else, too, but it wasn’t in either Hebrew or Yiddish, and I didn’t understand.
The blue angel spread her splendid, shimmering wings one last time, filling the studio, as, for a moment, the mean winter sky outside seemed to flare with a sunset hope that could not have been. Then she and Manassa, the dybbuk, were gone, vanished instantly, which makes me think that the wings aren’t really for flying. I don’t know what other purpose they could serve, except they did seem somehow to enfold us all and hold us close. But maybe they’re just really decorative. I’ll never know now.
Uncle Chaim blew out his breath in one long, exasperated sigh. He said to Aunt Rifke, “I never did get her right. You know that.”
I was trying to hear the music, but Aunt Rifke was busy hugging me, and kissing me all over my face, and telling me not ever, ever to do such a thing again, what was I thinking? But she smiled up at Uncle Chaim and answered him, “Well, she got you right, that’s what matters.” Uncle Chaim blinked at her. Aunt Rifke said, “She’s probably telling Rembrandt about you right now. Maybe Vermeer, too.”
“You think so?” Uncle Chaim looked doubtful at first, but then he shrugged and began to smile himself. “Could be.”
I asked Rabbi Shulevitz, “He said something to me, the dybbuk, just at the end. I didn’t understand.”
The rabbi put his arm around me. “He was speaking in old Ladino, the language of the Sephardim. He said, ‘I will not forget you.’” His smile was a little shaky, and I could feel him trembling himself, with everything over. “I think you have a friend in heaven, David. Extraordinary Duvidl.”
The music was gone. We stood together in the studio, and although there were four of us, it felt as empty as the winter street beyond the window where the blue angel had posed so often. A taxi took the corner too fast, and almost hit a truck; a cloud bank was pearly with the moon’s muffled light. A group of young women crossed the street, singing. I could feel everyone wanting to move away, but nobody did, and nobody spoke, until Uncle Chaim finally said, “Rabbi, you got time for a sitting tomorrow? Don’t wear that suit.”
Demon
Joyce Carol Oates
The spawn of evil were once just that: the offspring of demons. The twentieth century brought variations on the theme: alien-sired kiddies like those of the film The Village of the Damned (1961) or the sociopathic child exemplified in The Bad Seed (1955). Pundits claimed such representations reflected the societal fear that post-war parents were losing control of both their children and their culture. Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and, more emphatically, the film (1968) based on it, brought back the old-fashioned Satan-impregnated heroine in updated gothic trappings. The Omen (1976, remade in 2003) and its sequels reintroduced modern audiences to a variation: the changeling child with Devil daddy. Joyce Carol Oates gives us a riveting, if ambiguous, tale that may or may not involve supernatural sperm.
Demon-child. Kicked in the womb so his mother doubled over in pain. Nursing tugged and tore at her young breasts. Wailed through the night. Puked, shat. Refused to eat. No he was loving, mad with love. Of Mama. (Though fearful of Da.) Curling burrowing pushing his head into Mama’s arms, against Mama’s warm fleshy body. Starving for love, food. Starving for what he could not know yet to name: God’s grace, salvation.
Sign of Satan: flamey-red ugly-pimply birthmark snake-shaped. On his underjaw, coiled below his ear. Almost you can’t see it. A little boy he’s teased by neighbor girls, hulking, big girls with titties and laughing-wet eyes. Demon! demon! Look it, sign of the demon!
Those years passing in a fever-dream. Or maybe never passed. Mama prayed over him, hugged and slapped. Shook his skinny shoulders so his head flew. The minister prayed over him. Deliver us from evil and he was good, he was delivered from evil. Except at school his eyes misting over, couldn’t see the blackboard. Sullen and nasty-mouthed the teacher called him. Not like the other children.
If not like the other children, then like who? what?
Those years. As in a stalled city bus, exhaust pouring out the rear. The stink of it everywhere. Your hair, eyes. Clothes. Same view through the same flyspecked windows. Year after year the battered-tin diner, the vacant lot high with weeds and rubble and the path worn through it slantwise where children ran shouting above the river. Broken pavement littered like confetti from a parade long past.
Or maybe it was the edge of something vast, infinite. You could never come to the end of. Wavering and blinding in blasts of light. Desert, maybe. Red Desert where demons dance, swirl in the hot winds. Never seen a desert except pictures, a name on a map. And in his head.
Demon-child they whispered of him. But no, he was loving, mad with love. Too small, too short. Stunted legs. His head too big for his spindly shoulders. His strange waxy-pale moon-shaped face, almond eyes beautiful in shadowed sockets, small wet mouth perpetually sucking inward. As if to keep the bad words, words of filth and damnation, safely inside.
The sign of Satan coiled on his underjaw began to fade. Like his adolescent skin eruptions. Blood drawn gradually back into tissue, capillaries.
Not a demon-child but a pure good anxious loving child someone betrayed by squeezing him from her womb before he was ready.
Not a demon-child but for years he rode wild thunderous razor-hooved black stallions by night and by day. Furious galloping on sidewalks, in asphalt playgrounds. Through the school corridors trampling all in his way. Furious tearing hooves, froth-flecked nostrils, bared teeth. God’s wrath, the black stallion rearing, whinnying. I destroy all in my path. Beware!
Not a demon-child but he’d torched the school, rows of stores, woodframe houses in the neighborhood. How many times the smelly bed where Mama and Da hid from him. And no one knew.
This January morning bright and windy and he’s staring at the face floating in a mirror. Dirty mirror in a public lavatory, Trailways Bus Station. Where at last the demon has been released. For it is the New Year. The shifting of the Earth’s axis. For to be away from what is familiar, like walking on a sharp-slanted floor, allows something other in. Or the something other has been inside you all along and until now you do not know.
In his right eyeball a speck of dirt? dust? blood?
Scared, he kn
ows right away. Knows even before he sees: sign of Satan. In the yellowish-white of his eyeball. Not the coiled little snake but the five-sided star: pentagram.
He knows, he’s been warned. Five-sided star: pentagram.
It’s there, in his eye. Tries to rub it out with his fist.
Backs away terrified and gagging and he’s running out of the fluorescent-bright lavatory and through the bus station where eyes trail after him curious, bemused, pitying, annoyed. He’s a familiar sight here though no one knows his name. Runs home, about three miles. His mother knows there’s trouble, has he lied about taking his medicine? hiding the pill under his tongue? Yes but God knows you can’t oversee every minute with one like him. Yes but your love wears thin like the lead backing of a cheap mirror corroding the glass. Yes but you have prayed, you have prayed and prayed and cursed the words echoing not upward to God but downward as in an empty well.
Twenty-six years old, shaved head glinting blue. Luminous shining eyes women in the street call beautiful. In the neighborhood he’s known by his first name. Sweet guy but strange, excitable. A habit of twitching his shoulders like he’s shrugging free of somebody’s grip.
Fast as you run somebody runs faster!
In the house that’s a semi-detached rowhouse on Mill Street he’s not listening to his angry mother asking why is he home so early, has a job in a building supply yard so why isn’t he there? Pushes past the old woman and into the bathroom, shuts the door and there in the mirror oh God it’s there: the five-sided star, pentagram. Sign of Satan. Embedded deep in his right eyeball, just below the dilated iris.
No! No! God help!
Goes wild, rubs with both fists, pokes with fingers. He’s weeping, shouting. Beats at himself, fists and nails. His sister now pounding on the door what is it? what’s wrong? and Mama’s voice loud and frightened. It’s happened, he thinks. His first clear thought. Happened. Like a stone sinking so calm. Because hasn’t he always known the prayers did no good, on your knees bowing your head inviting Jesus into your heart does no good. The sign of the demon would return, absorbed into his blood but must one day re-emerge.