The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  “That’s exactly the question Dr. Eklund’s going to settle,” Heidi said placatingly. It was as if she was being launched—was it by invisible confluences, was it by Dr. Eklund himself, was it really by the thought of the police?—on a peacekeeping mission. “You don’t have to worry about Lars. He’s had a crisis and it’s done with.”

  Adela blew out a ferocious breath. “An assault! Oh yes, done with—I told him everything and he knocked me down.”

  “Because you weren’t letting me have a look.”

  “A look?” said Dr. Eklund. “A look at what?”

  “The Messiah. She ran off with it in that bag.”

  “He tried to steal it.”

  “You should have let him have a look,” Dr. Eklund said severely.

  “You should have let him,” Heidi said. “It wasn’t fair. Anyhow he’ll apologize, you’ll see. Lars, you’ll apologize, won’t you?”

  “Never mind,” Dr. Eklund muttered; the whimsicality was drained out. “It gets late for our business. If she doesn’t want him, he should go away.”

  Lars said, “Where’s that bag? You don’t have that bag with you.”

  “I don’t have my hat,” Adela mocked.

  “Why doesn’t he go?” Dr. Eklund said, fidgeting with another match.

  It was remarkable: Dr. Eklund’s voice—the habit of emphasis, the hard little undulation in go—was exactly Adela’s. The sea captain and Adela were from a far part of the world—the same part. The same modulations, the same eruptions and lavalike descent of the vowels. It was clear they had once been neighbors, Dr. Eklund and Adela. And yet Adela was somehow a provocation. Dr. Eklund the sympathizer, Dr. Eklund the psychological twin—now here was Dr. Eklund trying to throw Lars out. The change had arrived with Adela. It was as if a warning vibration had been set off, some sudden machine or subtle alarm Lars could detect the hum of—in the background, behind the shelves, out of sight.

  It made Heidi his unexpected advocate. “He has the right to stay, why shouldn’t he stay?” She was accommodatingly soft, she was amiable, she was all at once mollifying; she meant to take his part. “He cares about what’s in that manuscript more than anyone alive. It’s his mania,” she said, naming it like an awful contagion. “It’s what he concentrates on. I can’t claim he’s ever knocked me down to get at it. Not actually, not in my bones. But talk of assault! I’m the one who can testify to that! He’s gone after my brain, and isn’t that worse? He’s made me pick at all his leavings. I’ve had to chew over whatever he’s chewed. Such people get born, God knows how or to whom, to compensate for what isn’t there. They pour the strangest things into the void. Like sand into a sack.”

  Mild babble: she kept on with it. She said she had become his slave, he had enslaved her to his concentration, to his obsession. His mind was no better than any other single-product manufacturing contraption. He had fettered her to it, he had fettered himself, and at the same time he was uncontrollable, he couldn’t be restrained. He was one of the century’s casualties, in his own way a victim. He took on everyone’s loss; everyone’s foolish grief. Foolish because unstinting. Rescue was the only thought he kept in his head—he was arrogant about it, he was steady, he wanted to salvage every scrap of paper all over Europe. Europe’s savior! His head was full of Europe—all those obscure languages in all those shadowy places where there had been all those shootings—in the streets, in the forests. He had attached himself to the leavings of tyranny, tragedy, confusion.

  “There’s no one else like him,” she finished. “Not anywhere. It’s just what Dr. Eklund says—a category of his own.”

  Through all this Adela was flaunting a crooked caustic smile. “All right, a madam. You called him priest and you meant madam. Then why on earth would you send me to him? You sent me there!”

  Heidi twisted her stout little torso. “You wanted a translator.”

  “You knew he wouldn’t do it. And you sent me!”

  “Well, I thought he should have a look.”

  “The priest should have a look? Or the savior should? Or just the madam? Mrs. Eklund, he never considered translating. You knew that. Don’t tell me you didn’t! That’s why I didn’t let him have a look.”

  “No, no,” Heidi protested, “you’re not following. The way he went after Polish—didn’t I see for myself how he went after Polish? He swallowed it right down. He’s after what’s primary—”

  “He tells stupendous lies.”

  “What he wants is the original of things. It’s what I said, it’s just what I told you. He’s a priest of the original—isn’t that what I told you?”

  She was his advocate, she was taking his part. It was a sort of play. He was in a theater. Lars felt himself shut out. Behind a curtained proscenium—but the curtain was sealed against him—some unintelligible drama raged. Even as onlooker he had no rational place in it. What was he to be henceforth, if he was not to be his father’s son? And she, the daughter, this falsehood of a daughter? The author of The Messiah was nobody’s father now. What Lars had given up! A capitulation; he had surrendered to the false daughter’s tale. He had no solid tale of his own to set against it; only this rush of blood. Hers was as probable as anything else in the wilderness of Europe forty years ago. These stories had their plausibility. Lars had—what did he have? His old certainty, grown out of him a fingernail. He chopped it off. He stood there stripped of verisimilitude. Was she nobody’s daughter? Then he, so much the more, was nobody’s son. How hard it was to breathe, to breathe in and out, without illumination! Everything quenched, snuffed, suffocated. Surrendered. The light that rode forth like a horn, as though a huge saddle had been flung over the flanks of the universe, a saddle with its fiery horn of light, riding out from his father’s fixed eye . . . Dissolved. It had let itself die. It would not return.

  The smell of roasting flame: Dr. Eklund striking still another match—match after match—to rekindle his smothered pipe.

  The women went on contending. It was a quarrel; it was not a quarrel. It might have been the pretense of a quarrel. Marionettes. Heidi’s back room rife with plots, cabals—why was he thinking that? A stage frenzy: willed, directed, cued. Adela wanted him to go. Heidi wanted him to stay.

  Dr. Eklund was indifferent. “Let the fellow go, let the fellow stay. If the text is valid—that’s the proper question.”

  Adela said bitterly, “He thinks it belongs to him.”

  “Now, now,” Dr. Eklund said.

  “He takes things. You heard him! He’s got my hat.”

  Their two voices were just the same. A family sound. The smoky air had becalmed itself. Nothing spontaneous rose in that space. Dr. Eklund propped his lit pipe on his saucer. Then he pushed cup, saucer, and pipe aside. The brass amphora—it had no handles; it was no more than a dented old pot—stretched its archaic shape up from the middle of the little table. From the pocket of his vest Dr. Eklund drew out, by its big black stem, a large round magnifying glass and placed it next to cup, saucer, and pipe.

  “Smart!” Heidi said, tapping her knuckles against the pot, making it ring. “To think of bringing that. With the snow coming down.”

  “So. The Solomonic moment. Then let us examine our dubious author.”

  With both hands Dr. Eklund took hold of the brass amphora and raised it above the table. There it was, high up, travelling at a decent steady speed—a torpedo; a whale with its mouth wide; a chalice. Midway he tipped it over, until the mouth hung upside down, vomiting disorder, chaos: a shower of ragged white wings, a jumbled armada of white sails. A hundred sheets spiraled out—crumpled, splotched, speckled, aged. What had littered Lars’s quilt that morning came tumbling now out of Ali Baba’s jar. “Smart!” Heidi said again. “Keeping everything dry!” Dr. Eklund clanged down the emptied-out amphora. It hit the floor with the reverberating note of a cymbal, and rolled on its side toward Dr. Eklund’s feet. It was plain that Dr. Eklund—sorcery!—had instantly understood what to do with this peculiar vessel. He had seen that it w
as there to be turned upside down and emptied out.

  Lars looked over at Adela. She had moved to crouch beside Dr. Eklund—she was picking up the runaway sheets that had fallen to the floor. She was picking them up and putting them on the table, with the others. That wounded handwriting—buried, beaten, bruised, drowned. She lifted each stray page one by one. She had carried them to Heidi’s shop in that tall metal trophy-cup: Hebe the cup-bearer, messenger, deliverer. He knew her as nothing else. He wanted to cry, Ulrika, Birgitta! Not one but two wives! And a child, lost, stolen! Himself now without even that paintbox. The last trace expunged. Erased. And Adela? Had she had a life prior to bags and jars? A woman his own age, graying like himself. She was not his sister; he had no sister, he had no father, he had no inkling of his mother’s name. He had named himself, in secret: Lazarus Baruch. Who was to tell him otherwise, who was to deny him these twinings and entanglings? And, through dictionary divinations and cabalistic displacements: Lars Andemening. Who was there to prevent it? He had an orphan’s terrifying freedom to choose. He could become whatever he wished; no one could prohibit it, he could choose his own history. He could choose and he could relinquish. He was horribly, horribly free.

  And she? Adela? Was there a husband behind the scenes? Had she left a trail of some kind? Did she have a child? A father?

  Dr. Eklund did not hurry. His magnifying glass hovered pitilessly. He seemed to be studying one word at a time; or else one letter of one word. Again he burrowed inside his vest pocket. A document inside an envelope. He was comparing the inky loops of the document with the inky loops—broken, beaten, hidden—that had flown out of the brass amphora.

  “It recurs,” Dr. Eklund said. “Observe how it recurs. The telltale spur. This omnipresent hook. A shepherd’s crook. Or a bishop’s.”

  “Dr. Eklund,” Heidi said, “is a holographic authority. A world authority. People summon him for verification from all over. He goes all over Europe. He’s been to South America. They call on him everywhere.”

  Dr. Eklund reached for his pipe, inserted it between his lips, and sucked. “Soon we will strike,” he said, “on the truth.”

  A wail came loose in Lars. The foetal ape that lived alongside his inmost belly-organs snapped itself alert; it lurched. “The truth!” he said. “Malice, it’s malice! With a schoolgirl, his own pupil! As if such a man—such a man—would copulate with a child!”

  Dr. Eklund began a scanty fragment of hum. Heidi took off her slippers and put them side by side under the daffodil and slid onto her cot: her face had thickened; her lids had thickened. “You should wait for the verdict,” she murmured.

  “There isn’t any verdict. There’s only what’s really there,” Adela said from the floor.

  The magnifying glass hovered; wandered left, wandered right. Dr. Eklund continued to hum—two bars and silence; three bars and silence. The bits of it suggested something between lullaby and a sea shanty; it made Lars dimly restive, skittish. His little fear—he remembered it. It was trickling back, old, unaccountable, recognizable. And here was Dr. Eklund provoking it, pricking it alive again: Dr. Eklund with his pirate’s finger and their glittering rings, pinching page after page of the lost Messiah, and the great lens circling.

  “No question. No question at all,” Dr. Eklund pronounced. “Observe, observe. The capitals. As specif able as a fingerprint. You won’t find W in the world like this fellow’s. You won’t find another T. What we have here”—he held the magnifier aloft, like a bishop’s crook—“is entirely genuine. Authentic, I guarantee it. It is what it purports to be. I have no doubt of it. I would stake everything on it. The original.”

  Heidi, drowsy, the threads of her white bangs weaving like the smoke from Dr. Eklund’s pipe, purred languidly from her cot: “A forgery. It could be a very good forgery. Olle, you know how clever a forger can be,” and shut her eyes.

  Adela sat like a doll, a foot away from the brass amphora immobile, braced against the leg of the table. Adela is fast asleep, her mouth half open, her face relaxed and absent; but her closed lids are transparent, and on their parchment the night is writing its pact with the devil, half text, half picture, fun of erasures, corrections, and scribbles.

  “My good woman,” Dr. Eklund urged, “no forger on earth can duplicate these shepherd’s crooks. However expert. Not the most inspired master, believe me! Here is a letter, to a certain Tadeusz Breza, written by our author, and here is this sheet. Sheet unfortunately much abused, but observe. The lineamen identical. You can see how the longer-armed characters breathe through a type of sporule, exceptionally gauzy. And these commas, with their tails coughed off! Who could impersonate such a mannerism? A scrimshaw of the nervous system. These devious ropes of the nerves themselves. The ink is very close. The paper not identical, but very close. Of that period, no doubt of Warsaw manufacture, possibly Lvov . . .”

  Adela did not stir. Heidi did not stir. These women were apathetic; lethargic. Probably it was what they had expected. They had known all along. They had believed all along. The verdict had only exhausted them; it was by now—so long awaited—a kind of soporific. Even Dr. Eklund did not appear to be aroused.

  But there on the table lay the scattered Messiah. Retrieved. The original. The Messiah, spread out in its curiously rapturous Polish for anyone’s bare blink. The original! Recovered; resurrected; redeemed. Lars, looking with all his strength, felt his own ordinary pupil consumed by a conflagration in the socket. As if copulating with an angel whose wings were on fire.

  13

  ALWAYS AFTERWARD—AFTER THE letters had collapsed to char and flakes of ash—Lars regretted this animal urgency that swept him through the scrambled pages of The Messiah. Dr. Eklund was willing enough to concentrate on his pipe while Lars tore through those layers of ruined papers. The two women—Heidi dazed on her cot, Adela quiescent on the floor—seemed suspended. They waited. You could not hear them breathe. It was as if they had given up oxygen; or else had suppressed the predilection for it.

  Meanwhile Lars fell into the text with the force of a man who throws himself against a glass wall. He crashed through it to the other side, and what was there? Baroque arches and niches, intricately hedged byways of a language so incised, so bleeding—a touch could set off a hundred slicing blades—that it could catch a traveler anywhere along the way with this knife or that prong. Lars did not resist or hide; he let his flesh rip. Nothing detained him, nothing slowed him down. The terrible speed of his hunger, chewing through hook and blade, tongue and voice, of the true Messiah! Rapacity, gluttony!

  Always afterward Lars remembered the rising of his lamentation. It was as if he had been accumulating remorse even as he fled through passage after passage. He could not contain what he met; he could not keep it. Amnesia descended with the opacity of a dropped hood. What he took he lost. And instantly grieved, because he could not keep it.

  Adela was not there. The servant girl, sinister, elusive, brutal, who lurked in corridors and attics, in Cinnamon Shops, in Sanatorium—she was nowhere in The Messiah. This made Lars glad: a revenge against the self-important living Adela who leaned like a puppet against the leg of the table. The Messiah had annihilated her name.

  Still, what Adela had told him was true: the order of the pages did not matter. These poor battered sheets were erratically paginated, some not numbered at all, and one eddying f owed into another; there were sequences and consequences, parallels and paradoxes, however you shuffled them. Lars thought of those mountain ranges growing out of the chasm of the world, along the bottommost spine of the sea, so platonically dark and deep that even the scuttling blindfish swim away, toward higher water—but within this overturned spittoon of an abyss are criss-crossing rivers, whirlpools twisting their foaming necks, multiple streams braiding upward, cascades sprouting rivulets like hairs, and a thousand shoots and sprays bombarding the oceanscape’s peaks. So it was with the intelligence of The Messiah’s order and number and scheme of succession: everything voluminously overlapping, everyt
hing simultaneous and multiform.

  But this understanding applied only to a consciousness of system. The Messiah was a waterless tract. No cloud, no mist, no fog; no well and no bucket; neither ocean nor droplet; no dribble or drizzle or trickle. No ichor, godly or ungodly, of any kind. It was desert-dry all through. It was equally bare of any dust of sky—no planet, no star, no galaxy, no heaven, no blue, no infinity—and this was odd, because The Messiah, insofar as it could be determined to be “about” anything (and Lars, amnesiac, afterward forgot almost all of it), was about creation and redemption. It was a work of cosmogony and entelechy. Like everything else spilled out of the preternaturally cornucopia eye of the genie whom Lars had only that morning dreamed of as his own father, The Messiah had its “locality,” its place, its inch, its spot of tiny ground. The universe of The Messiah was Drohobycz, a town in Galicia.

  Adela was not in it. Yet it was not quite right to say Adela was not in it. She was there, but not alive, and unnamed. At first she appeared as a bald rag doll left on a shelf—the scalp however, was porcelain, and the lids could snap open and shut. On another page this same flexible doll was transmuted into rigidity: now she was a tailor’s dummy, canvas over bent wire. Elsewhere she had become one of those Mesopotamian priestly statues carved out of stone only for the sake of their terrifying smiles. Finally Lars took in that she had turned, with full purity of intent, into an idol. Her eyes were conventional green jewels. This idol, made of some artificial dead matter, was never called Adela, and did not in any way hint at being Adela. Though Lars could not claim that Adela was anywhere in the text, he recognized her all the same.

  Drohobycz was now wholly peopled (but this word was unsuitable) by idols. Some were plump Buddhas in lotus position unable to walk or move. They were carried on litters by miniature Egyptian figurines, several dozen for each litter. Others were mammoth Easter Island heads. Another was the monolatrous Ikhnaton, with his disease-deformed face and limbs, himself elevated to an idol. A great many were in the shape of large stone birds—falcons, eagles, vultures, hawks, oversized crows hewn out of black marble. Each of these idols was considered to be a great and powerful god or goddess, able to control the present and future of Drohobycz, and especially the past. There was one rather modest idol—it had the form of the owner of a dry-goods shop—who could alter the last hundred years of the history of Drohobycz simply by the manipulation of a certain series of trouser buttons cleverly sewn into the flap of its caftan.