The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  Lars was quiet: it was as if the foreign ape had calmed itself, and was now swinging tranquilly in his breast. He was relieved. He sank down under her flow. Did he believe any of it? It made him think of Heidi’s fence, Heidi with her arms flung out just this way, insisting and insisting.

  “That box”—her arms passed over his quilt, over the twisted papers—“well, it’s gone. Lost. I looked everywhere for it. In every closet and cabinet of that flat. The husband let me look, he didn’t care. He was in a hurry to get rid of every bit of it. That’s how I found the pages in the shoes—looking for the box.” And went on, then, with the cadence of it, the mad consecutive-ness: how the box was carried to Warsaw by the people who had bought the woman’s house, how when they showed her the box she was outraged—it was money they wanted. Why should I pay you? she said. For what? It can’t be worth two zlotys. She told them it wasn’t a will in there, it was nothing at all, no one could figure out what it was. The husband looked in the box and shifted the papers and sniffed the dampness and said, No, it isn’t a will, it isn’t a legacy, nothing like that. It’s Jew-prayers, what the Żydki pray, it’s hexes and curses. So it turned out that the people who had bought the house were glad to go all the way back to Drohobycz without getting paid for the box, at least they were safe from the hexes, and the woman said to her husband, How do you know it’s what the Żydki pray? Mother of God, he said, I tried to read it, it’s all a jumble, it’s the way they pray. And also the letters on the top, The Messiah, it’s the Jews cursing Our Lord. Get rid of it, the husband said. But it’s good paper, she said, thick and strong, I’ll find some use for it, so after she walked out in the rain one time, she stuffed some of the sheets into her shoes. To keep the shape. And she told her lady, the lady she worked for, whose husband was Tosiek Glowko, my mother’s special friend, a Party official, high up in the Party, she told the lady that back in her old house in Drohobycz there was a box of prayers, what the Jews pray, buried under the floor in the cellar, and the people who bought the house wanted to get money out of her just for returning it; but she wasn’t a fool, it wasn’t her box to begin with, it was only scribbles in there—real prayers, even what the Jews pray, come in prayerbooks. The lady said, Then maybe it’s actually not prayers, and the woman said, My husband thinks the same, he says what the Jews pray is hexes and curses, and besides it’s scribbled all over with Our Lord’s name, in mockery. The lady recounted all this to her husband, Tosiek Glowko, my mother’s special friend—she was laughing at these mysterious papers her maid was keeping in a funny box dug up out of the ground. It’s how they behave out there in those country towns, outlanders, hicks, they don’t understand the world; the woman had this box for years in the cellar of her shack in Drohobycz, ever since the middle of the war; it’s something the Jews left. Tosiek Glowko said, Drohobycz? Because he knew that was where my mother grew up, my mother grew up in Drohobycz and went to school there. But for my mother it wasn’t a hick town, in her eyes it was a little Vienna. And then the woman scrubbed the kitchen wall, and Tosiek Glowko said to my mother, oh my poor wife, her maid dropped dead right at her feet, she had a stroke in my poor wife’s kitchen, we had to call the police—and do you know, this old woman is from your own town, she’s from Drohobycz?

  “You see,” she finished, “that’s how it went.” She reached out over the quilt to gather in his father’s strewn and confounded words. He watched her pile up the sheets and pat them and tap them, until she had constructed a neat rectangular stack. It struck Lars that there was an idiocy in this sudden tidying-up: he almost laughed. It was as if the order of the pages didn’t matter to her in the least. The progenitrix of chaos. She stared across at him. “Now do you see how it went? My mother heard about the manuscript—”

  “From her lover. The man high up in the Party.”

  “—and I got on the bus and rode across Warsaw and found the old man and took away all the papers there were.”

  “He let you? The woman’s husband? The widower,” he corrected.

  “Well, there he was, running around and collecting whatever he could put his hands on, wherever his wife had stuck them. In the oven, can you imagine? Three sheets in the oven. And six in those shoes. He let me look everywhere. By then there wasn’t any box. The box was gone.”

  “But why you?” Lars urged. “Why would he give them to you?”

  “He would have given them to anyone. He would have burned them in the trash. I got there in time to save them from the trash. He was afraid.” She sent out a pale little smile, perilously edged. “He thought she’d died from the curse, don’t you see? Because the curse had been dug up. Because when he told her to get rid of the papers she didn’t obey.”

  It came to him then that he didn’t believe a word. What an invention! The best inventions are those with the most substantial particulars. A fabricator. Or else a cunning inheritor, a spinner of old fables: buried vessels, spells, incantations, magical instant dyings. Or else simply crazed. Adela! This name of terror lifted straight out of his father’s spectral scenery. I could not tell whether these pictures were implanted in my mind by Adela’s tales or whether I had witnessed them myself . . . Perhaps in our treachery there was secret approval of the victorious Adela to whom we dimly ascribed some commission and assignment from forces of a higher order . . . Adela, warm from sleep and with unkempt hair, was grinding coffee in a mill which she pressed to her white bosom, imparting her warmth to the broken beans.

  Crazed. A grinder of broken beans.

  He accused, “You’ve mixed up all the pages.”

  “It makes no difference. You can shuffle them however you like. It has the same effect no matter what. You’ll see for yourself when you begin.”

  “Begin what? I’m not beginning anything.” He asked, “Why do you call yourself Adela?”

  “It’s my name.”

  “It’s from Cinnamon Shops. From Sanatorium. Is that why you took it?”

  “I didn’t take it. People don’t give themselves their own names, do they? My father picked it. He told my mother to call me Adela. This was before I was born, when they knew she was pregnant. Then he was shot in the wild action, you’ve heard of the wild action? My mother ran to Brazil, she got out, even then. She could do it, she’s crafty that way. Even then.”

  An electric jolt: the ape was hurled. “Your father—” Lars stood in his little space, between the table and the bed. The light was still brilliant, a great unholy glare: her head against it looked inky-dark. He could not see her eyes with the morning’s brilliance in his own. “It’s only a story,” he said. He did not say: Your mother’s a cloud, your father’s a fog. “Don’t go spreading such a thing—you’ll only do yourself damage. It isn’t possible. A figment. A lie.”

  “Mrs. Eklund said you’d carry on.” But she faltered—he saw what her trouble was. There was a word and she was refusing it. She was resisting. “She said you’d act as if, as if—” She plucked up the white beret and came to stand with her face close to his. “As if you owned every syllable. Every syllable he ever put down.”

  The breath of her voice streamed into his nostrils. Her voice was hot. How free she seemed, how like a bedouin!

  “If that old fellow in Warsaw let you take away the manuscript—just like that—”

  “Priest,” Adela threw out. “That’s what she said. You act like a priest!”

  “—then the other version isn’t so.”

  “There isn’t any other version. It’s only what I’ve told you.”

  “Mrs. Eklund’s version. The one she got from you—that The Messiah was waiting for you to come up and pick it up. There it was, in Warsaw. In Drohobycz. Under the ground. Under the arm of the man with the coat. God knows where it was! Loitering there—decades—waiting for you to turn up, all the way from Brazil! It was being saved, that’s the point. For the daughter.” He wanted to be raucous, he wanted to jeer; instead he found himself raveled in a simple-minded knot of a cough. “The daughter! They were keep
ing it for you.”

  “They weren’t. It wasn’t being saved.”

  “No one else could have gotten hold of it. Only the daughter.” He ended, “That’s Mrs. Eklund’s version.”

  “I never told her any of that.”

  “You never told her you’re the daughter—”

  “I did. I am.” She gave him a look of fire. “A priest is just what’s needed. You’d be on your knees, wouldn’t you? On your knees to every word. You’d think you were anointed.”

  “There can’t be a daughter,” Lars said.

  “You won’t do it. I can see that. You won’t. You’re exactly the one to do it, but you won’t.”

  “Mrs. Eklund’s going to introduce you to her Polish Princess, wait and see. The Princess translates a thousand times better than I can. Ask Mrs. Eklund.” He was perfectly serene: he was certain that the ape, exhausted at last, had foolishly dropped off. He said, “There’s no logic in the daughter business, is there? You can’t make it come out right. It won’t come out.”

  She fixed him, eye to eye. Two vertical trenches like his own. “He was my mother’s art teacher. In the high school in Drohobycz. She was fifteen years old. She modeled for his drawings.”

  His drawings! A mistake, a mistake!

  Those photographs. Heidi had misled him. Or else he had misled Heidi. They had misled each other. They had misconceived. They had not known how to imagine. The photographs had arrested them; had held them. The photographs had held their heads like a pincers! Their heads, pinched together, side by side, peering into the faces in the circle of women. Always the circle of women. He, the author of The Messiah, the only male; the central figure; ringed round by women. Heidi testing those faces, scrutinizing, reconnoitering: together they had fallen into the eyes and mouths of these women. Not one of them was the lover. Not one. They had never thought of a child. They had never imagined a pupil. One of his pupils!

  Adela said, “He used to take her home. He invented different costumes for her. He asked her to pose, to playact. You can see yourself if you want. You can look her up.”

  “Look her up?”

  “In the illustrations. She’s there in most of them. A little man in a top hat, with a giant dog. A boy with big buttons. A fellow in riding boots. A woman in high heels wearing a coat with a fur collar. All of those. Sometimes she’s naked.”

  A pupil. The high school. Smeared with provincial paste and paint. The drawings! That triangular little jaw, those unearthly eyes, those tapered small torsos; dwindling little feet and toes. A child!

  “The pregnancy frightened him,” she announced.

  “Where are you going? You can’t—” He took desolate note of it: she was packing up. “Stop it, what are you doing? You haven’t let me see—” Now she was shoving the stack of papers—creased and assaulted—back into the white plastic bag.

  “She loved him more than he loved her. He was afraid to be connected to anyone. In the end,” she flung back, “there was the wild action, so it didn’t matter.”

  A stride like a pounce. Another; she was at the door.

  “Don’t take it away. You haven’t let me have a look. I haven’t seen it. Wait!” he pleaded. “I haven’t told you my side.”

  “I know your side. You don’t care. If you cared you would do it, you would work at putting it in the world.”

  “No, no, it’s something else. Mrs. Eklund didn’t tell you—”

  “I’ve contradicted something she said? All right, then you’ve shown me what you think. You think she can’t be relied on.”

  “I haven’t shown you anything. You don’t know anything.”

  He tore at her like a drunkard and snatched the bag from her grip.

  “Give that back.”

  “It’s mine,” he said.

  “Give it back.”

  “He’s my father. I’m his son!”

  The foetal ape was awake, unfurled, raging; huge. The Messiah was light, light; it was not heavy at all. Lars drew it against him, he bunched it against his chest: the exulting, the ape, the heaving, the hurling!

  “Give it back.”

  She ground toward him, she was fit and fleet—she twisted the plastic bag to pry it free of him. They crushed the papers between them: her tongue snapped, he drove off the hole of her turbulent mouth—she spat. He thought of her poor crumpled breasts. He was steady now, The Messiah was in his arms, he would not let her take it away. Her spittle was on his cheek. He raised one leg—the leg was heavy, it had a weight—and kicked Adela to the floor.

  He saw her head near his victorious shoes; her hands were on her breasts. He was a colossus staring down.

  “There’s only me. There isn’t any son. You’re a schemer, you’re a thief. You’ll say anything.”

  How distant and small, how Lilliputian, this fury of hers! Her head, far below, a dead bird. Then in a sudden spiraling of pure flight, as elastic as the rising up of a bird, she jumped her haunches into a squat and flew up to beat at the white bag—it slipped from him, she had it in her fist; and escaped. Escaped.

  A mistake, a mistake! She was gone, she was away. The door vibrated on its hinges. Violence like a burning; the door still rocking. Or else it was his bones in their long shiver. The broken beans of his shaking. How he had crushed her breasts, how he had crumpled his father’s brain. That cradling of The Messiah: good God, hadn’t he held it in his arms? It had possessed, for one holy hour, his house; his bed; his quilt. He ought to have been on his knees to it; she had warned him. He might have knelt there—gazing—before the caves and grottoes of his quilt.

  And not one word taken. Not one word. Not a glimpse. He had been as near to it as to the apparition of his father’s eye. The Messiah in his arms, and lost again!

  He ran through the passage and outdoors to the sidewalk; she was not there. The pavement was empty. She was nowhere in the street. Whatever direction he looked—he whirled and whirled in the cold air—she was not there. She had turned a corner; she was out of sight. He knew nothing about her: only that he made her his prey, because of The Messiah. A snatch of panic no bigger than a ragged inch caught him then: it seemed to him Adela was a churning angel. The white bag was flying beside her into the niche behind the wall. Beguiled, he watched her set it down on the leather chair with the cracked leg; she was delivering The Messiah. She left it there for him and vanished. He understood it was the business of angels to vanish.

  When he put his head into the angle of the little secret hallway, the leather chair was in its place, with nothing on it but the diurnal dust.

  11

  IT WAS STILL ONLY noon. The bright perished day hung before him. He walked out to the clamor of the Morgontörn, where the secretaries were eating sandwiches of cold meat and boiled egg. In the book department the stewpot had not yet gathered. Lars plucked up a volume, medium-thick, from the piles of review copies stacked against the base-boards. A neat small black mouse-pellet was lodged in the binding, so he put it down again and chose another. This turned out to be much thicker. It was the newest novel by the prolific Ann-Charlott Almgren, a name he knew—it was considerably celebrated—though he had never read her, not even her famous Nytt och Gammalt. He inserted his thumb between the pages somewhere among the middle chapters to catch the smell of the thing. It promised to touch on lust, deceit, ambition, and death, and looked good enough for his purpose.

  He had a purpose. Gunnar’s cubicle was vacant; so was Anders’s. He decided on Gunnar’s and commenced. The novel was called Illusion. He admired the plot, which was founded on the principle of ambush. A kind and modest elderly spinster—a self-taught painter—falls in love with a ne’er-do-well, a beautiful and clever young man. She has declined to show her paintings because she believes them to be of no merit. The young man is the first to see them; she has never had the courage to reveal them to anyone before. But the young man recognizes at once that she is a hidden genius. He agrees to marry her if she will consent to a deception: he will claim the paintings a
s his own and give them to the world. The scheme is a grand success; the marriage is happy. The seeming painter is taken up by the fashionable and honored everywhere. But by then the new husband, awash in charm and glory, has attached himself to a seductive young woman, the very art critic whose lavish commendations have elevated his reputation. The self-effacing elderly wife, discovering the liaison . . . et cetera, et cetera. The book weighed in Lars’s hands; it weighed him down. It was as heavy as loss. (And The Messiah in his arms—light, ah how light!)

  An hour and a half to read. Finished. Half an hour more: his review over and done with. (“Composed.” Spat out.) Another hour: bungling and bumbling on Gunnar’s hostile machine. Painful, a plunge into needles. Then it was three o’clock. The stewpot was beginning to straggle in with its perilous shards of laughter; but Lars knocked on Nilsson’s office door and offered to wait—he stood there mute and patient—while Nilsson looked over his page.

  “Well, well, well,” Nilsson said. “What do you think of that? My my my. Very nice. This is very nice, Lars. It’s something new for you.” And he said: “You’re going to work out. I always knew you would. I’ve always had confidence in you, Lars. Not that I haven’t felt alone in it, believe me. But it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if you started giving Friday a run for its money, what do you think of that?” And he said: “Keep it up, Lars. Give me two months of this kind of work and I’ll get you your own cubicle, how about it?” And he said: “Just don’t relapse. No more Broch, no more Canetti; a little Kundera goes a long way. I imagine you had to get Central Europe out of your system—I told them you’d shuck it off in the end.” And he said: “Lars, listen! You’re going to work out.”

  Lars sidled around the margins of the stewpot—it never noticed him at all—and gravitated toward home and bed. “Those crocodiles,” he thought he heard Nilsson say. Or was it “Those cormorants”? Impossible to tell from such a distance—Lars was under his quilt. Over which, lightly—lightly and aloft!—The Messiah had skimmed. His eyes leaked, his nostrils were in commotion. A convulsion of fatigue. Yesterday’s missing nap; the migrations of displaced sleep. A mesmerizing cloud. He slept, in order to wake to his father’s eye.