We Never Talk About My Brother

by Peter S. Beagle

  “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 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 it be anything like that? Would it make a difference if you were sort of inviting the poss
ession, 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 they 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 Tennyson’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.”

  WE NEVER TALK ABOUT MY BROTHER

  The great songwriter Johnny Mercer insisted on sharing the royalties from “I Wanna Be Around to Pick Up the Pieces When Somebody Breaks Your Heart” with the Cincinnati department-store clerk who suggested the title to him, because he believed that the right title was at least half of a successful song.

  Titles really are that valuable, and good ones rarely come to me at all, let alone easily: so I pay attention when they do. The title for this story popped into my head while I was headed out from a hotel room in Austin, Texas, so I mentioned it to the fellow driving me to the World Fantasy Conference that was my reason for being there. He asked me what it was about, and I said “I think it might be about a satyr.”

  Turns out I was wrong.

  Therefore, since the world has still

  Much good, but much less good than ill,

  And while the sun and moon endure

  Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,

  I’d face it as a wise man would,

  And train for ill and not for good.

  —A. E. Housman

  Nobody does anymore, haven’t for years—well, that’s why you’re here, ain’t it, one of those “Where Are They Now” pieces of yours?—but it’s funny, when you think about it. I mean, even after what happened, and all this time, you’d think Willa and I—Willa’s my sister—you’d think we’d say at least Word One about him now and then. To each other, maybe not to anyone else. But we don’t, not ever, even now. Hell, my wife won’t talk about Esau, and she’d have more reason than most. Lucky you found me first—she’d have run you right on out of the house, and she could do it, too. Tell the truth, shame the devil, the only reason I’m sitting here talking to you at all is you having the mother wit to bring along that bottle of Blanton’s Single Barrel. Lord, I swear I cannot remember the last time I had any of that in the house.

  Mind if you record me? No, no, you go ahead on, get your little tape thing going, okay by me. Doesn’t make a bit of difference. You’re like to think I’m pretty crazy before we’re through, one way or another, but that don’t make any difference either.

  Well, okay then. Let’s get started.

  Last of the great TV anchormen, my brother, just as big as newsmen ever used to get. Not li
ke today—too many of them in the game, too much competition, all sort of, I don’t know, interchangeable. More and more folks getting the news on their computers, those little earphone gadgets, I don’t know what-all. It’s just different than it was. Way different. Confess I kind of like it.

  But back then, back then, Esau was just a little way south of a movie star. Couldn’t walk down the street, go out grocery shopping, he’d get jumped by a whole mob of his fans, his groupies. Couldn’t turn on the TV and not see him on half a dozen channels, broadcasting, or being interviewed, or being a special guest on some show or other. I mean everything from big political stuff to cooking shows, for heaven’s sake. My friend Buddy Andreason, we go fishing weekends, us and Kirby Rich, Buddy used to always tease me about it. Point to those little girls on the news, screaming and running after Esau for autographs, and he’d say, “Man, you could get yourself some of that so easy! Just tell them you’re his brother, you’ll introduce them—man, they’d be all over you! All over you!”

  No, it’s not a nickname, that was real. Esau Robbins. Right out of the Bible, the Old Testament, the guy who sold his birthright to his brother for a mess of pottage. Pottage is like soup or stew, something like that. Our Papa was a big Bible reader, and there was... I don’t know, there was stuff that was funny to him that wasn’t real funny to anyone else. Like naming me and Esau like he did.

  A lot easier to live with Jacob than a funny name like Esau, I guess—you know, when you’re a kid. But I wasn’t all that crazy about my name either, tell you the truth, which is why I went with Jake first time anybody ever called me that in school, never looked back. I mean, you think about it now. The Bible Esau’s the hunter, the fisherman, the outdoor guy—okay, maybe not the brightest fellow, not the most mannerly, maybe he cusses too much and spits his tobacco where he shouldn’t, but still. And Jacob’s the sneaky one, you know? Esau’s come home beat and hungry and thirsty, and Jacob tricks him—face it, Jacob tricks him right out of his inheritance, his whole future, and their mama helps him do it, and God thinks that’s righteous, a righteous act. Makes you wonder about some things, don’t it?