The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  No human beings remained in Drohobycz; only hundreds and hundreds of idols. A few were contemptibly crude and ill-constructed, but most represented the inspired toil of armies of ingenious artisans, and there was actually a handful of masterworks. The streets and shops were packed and milling with all these remarkable totems of wood, stone, pottery, silver and gold. Since there were no human beings to worship them, there was some confusion about their purpose. The more diffident among them, accordingly, undertook to adore the more aggressive; but at first this was not very typical. Each was accustomed to being regarded as sublime, each was expecting at any moment to discover a woman on her knees, a child bringing a basket of offerings, men in sacerdotal garments burning incense, or sacrificing a ram or even another human being; but there were no longer any human beings anywhere in Drohobycz. They had all gone on long, fatiguing journeys to other cities. All the former shopkeepers, for instance, were visiting their shopkeeper-cousins in Warsaw and Budapest. The high school teachers were touring the museums of Paris. Several would-be fiancées were languishing in London. The rest of the population was variously scattered, and could be rounded up, if need be, in Prague or Stockholm or Moscow or even as far away as New York, Montreal, and Tel Aviv.

  The idols of Drohobycz were relatively passive and had no idea of how to go about rounding up their worshippers. It never occurred to any of them to do more than wander in and out of the town park, shuffle through the empty shops, and wait. It was as if every former inhabitant of Drohobycz had converted to atheism and fled. Religion had dried up in the churches as well as in the post office and the schools and the public library. And this was a pity, because the idols had never before been more beautifully polished, painted, and decorated than they were during their sojourn in Drohobycz. They were, to tell the truth, almost too enchanting, too seductive—which is probably why they started to bow to one another, and at length even to sacrifice to one another.

  More and more frequently there were sacrificial bonfires all over Drohobycz. The taller and stronger idols began seizing the smaller and lesser idols and casting them into the flames. Bright-torsoed gods, and in particular the little Near Eastern goddesses with their fragile budding breasts and their necklaces fitted out with bits of mirror-burnished copper strung together on serpent-skin thongs, and occasionally even an exquisite miniature Venus-copy no bigger than a finger, were being chopped up or melted down to gratify the iron maw of some huge lazy Moloch. Day and night honeyed swirls of hot incense and the acrid smoky smell of roasting metal circled over Drohobycz.

  The town was on fire, idols burning up idols in a frenzy of mutual adoration.

  Then—matter-of-factly, with no fanfare—the Messiah arrived. (And almost immediately fell to pieces.)

  His origin . . . no. You could not say “his” origin, or “her” origin, though the Messiah’s description didn’t quite justify an “it,” either. Still, the neuter will have to suffice. The Messiah was alive, organic, palpitating with wild motion and disturbance—yet not like a robot, not like a machine. It was as if a fundamental internal member had set out to live on its own in the great world—a spleen, say, or a pancreas, or a bowel, or a brain. But this is only by way of hint and suggestiveness, not analogy or example. The Messiah’s origin—or, at least, the roost it was reputed to have climbed out of—was the cellar of, of all places, the Drohobycz synagogue. A very old man had once lived down there for as long as anyone could remember. Generations knew that Moses the Righteous One, as he was called, slept on the mammoth bundle of hay that was both his merchandise and his shop. He was a vender of hay, and also a famous saint. Beggars came streaming to his cavern, and he sent them away with whatever he had in his pockets. Lately the cellar was, of course, vacant.

  The idols believed that Moses the Righteous One’s hay was somehow stuffed into the inmost composition of the Messiah, like a scarecrow. This was false. More than anything else, the Messiah (Lars noted) resembled a book—The Book, in fact, that in one of the tales in Sanatorium pod Klepsydra had been likened to a huge cabbage rose: the petals, one by one, eyelid under eyelid, all blind, velvety, and dreamy. This Book had also been set forth as a postulate; and again as the authentic Book, the holy original, however degraded and humiliated at present. In appearance it seemed to be fabricated of various commonplace inanimate materials, none of them costly or in any way precious—cotton, cardboard, glue, thread, and not a wisp of hay anywhere. Its locomotion was dimly frightening, but also somewhat hobbled and limited: it had several hundred winglike sails that tossed themselves either clockwise or counterclockwise, like the arms of a windmill. But these numerous “arms” were, rather, more nearly flippers—altogether flat, freckled all over with inky markings, and reminiscent, surely, of turning pages. The flippers did indeed have the moist texture of petals, however, and their peculiar tattoos certainly put one in mind of some postulate recorded in an archaic signification—a type of cuneiform, perhaps, though it was impossible to say what this unreadable text might be proposing as thesis or axiom. When examined with extreme attention—better yet, when scrutinized through a magnifying glass (the author’s assertion; there were no human eyes on the scene to do this)—the inky markings showed themselves to be infinitely tiny and brilliantly worked drawings of these same idols that had taken hold of the town of Drohobycz. It was now clear that Drohobycz had been invaded by the characters of an unknown alphabet.

  Meanwhile the structure itself, its stippled flippers continually revolving, sending out a grand ululation of wind, creaked with its own ancientness, about to break down, cave in, or simply fly apart—when, out of the caldron of that great wind, a small bird was suddenly flung up; it carried in its beak a single strand of dried hay.

  It was a birth. The Messiah had given birth to a bird, and the moment the bird flew living out of the relentlessly wheeling contrivance that had been the Messiah, the thing—or organism—collapsed with the noise of vast crashings and crushings, cardboard like stone, cotton like bone, granite petal on brazen postulate: degraded and humiliated. The keen little bird, toiling, thrashed from idol to idol, exerting its fragile wing-muscles, and touching every idol with its bit of hay. And then there rose up out of Drohobycz the sound of lamentation and elegy, as the bonfires were extinguished, and the idols were dissolved into sparks by the tiny wand of hay flicked here and there by the poor thrashing bird, until the town was desolate, empty streets and empty shops and empty houses, and the flecks of sparks fading to ash.

  The human beings—gone; the idols—gone; only this small beating bird born of an organism called the Messiah, and dim wails dying . . .

  14

  THERE WAS, LARS SAW, a lie in the room.

  “You didn’t come for a translator,” he told Adela. “It wasn’t that. Even if I could.”

  “Even if you could.” Dr. Eklund busied himself gathering up the pages of The Messiah. He reached his bulky sea captain’s arm down to the floor after the brass amphora; his sleeve, swinging on its own, gave Adela’s ear a quick slap. “You see? There you have it, miss. In my judgment there’s no doubt, and I say it again—none. The hand of the artist.”

  “The hand,” Heidi echoed, “of the artist.” It seemed to Lars he was in the kitchen of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, when the trance is broken and all the pots begin to boil again. It was as if Heidi had switched herself back on. And what was it, after all, that had put these women into trance?

  Adela—bounced out of somnolence—had snatched the sheets from Dr. Eklund and was stuffing them, in bunches, back into the brass amphora.

  “No, my dear, this is not the way. You are mishandling matter valuable in the extreme—”

  “Immensely valuable. Immensely, immensely,” Heidi said.

  “Don’t tell me that. I’m the one who found them! I’m the one they belong to. I’m the daughter of the man who wrote them.”

  Heidi threw out her doglike laugh.

  “This man’s papers belong to the world,” Dr. Eklund said.

>   “He said”—Adela shot her arrow at Lars—“they belong to him.”

  “Please. No rancor. The question is what is to be done. A decision, yes? We must come to a decision.”

  So Dr. Eklund too had a “we.”

  “I’m out of it,” Lars said.

  “Oh, you’re in it. Lars, you’re definitely in it,” Heidi argued.

  “Look how you’re involved!”

  “If he kept my key,” Dr. Eklund said.

  “If he kept my hat,” Adela said.

  How alike their two voices were!

  Lars scoffed: “She said she was looking for a translator.”

  “Translation is the least of it,” Heidi said. “Stockholm’s swarming with Polish translators.”

  “The Princess.”

  “Better than that.”

  “Dr. Eklund, then.”

  “I told you, he has more important things.”

  Match after failed match; Dr. Eklund was tending his pipe again. “This work,” he announced, “will live to enter every language on the planet.”

  “The planet?” Heidi said. “Put the planet aside, Olle, and think of Stockholm.”

  “Yes, start with Stockholm,” Adela said.

  Dr. Eklund intervened: “My dear Adela—Adela? Is it Adela?”

  “Adela,” Heidi said.

  “Undoubtedly you bring us this manuscript with a history attached. A story, yes? This fellow doesn’t believe it, I see that. Undoubtedly there is a story, and why shouldn’t we believe it? No manuscript sans story, yes? And this one in particular. If you told me the story I promise you I would believe it. But whatever the story, whatever the history, whatever your attachment or devotion—”

  “She says she’s the daughter,” Heidi remarked: detached.

  “—now is the time to relinquish it.”

  “Look at Lars! He’s relinquished everything,” Heidi said.

  “For the sake of the world,” Dr. Eklund said—an actor’s fourish.

  “For the sake of the world!” Adela said. “He’ll say anything. He’s admitted he’s a liar. He had to, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. And when I told him how I got the manuscript—well, he collapsed, that’s all. He had to.”

  All this was true; Lars was silent.

  “Poor Lars,” Heidi said. She did not defend him now. “But now that you’ve had a look at it?” And waited.

  She waited; Lars understood why. She meant him—in the wake of his great wish—to tell what he thought. He had got his great wish. He had stormed the precincts of The Messiah. Heidi more than anyone—no; Heidi alone, only Heidi!—knew the secret furnace of his will; she had called it his concentration, his mania. She was the old partner of his desire; of his intuition. She alone could fathom how it must be for him to flood his eyes with that text—that very text—the thing itself, the words, the syllables, the letters! The letters left their drifting after-images on his retinas. But he could not take in those figurines—it was as if the Polish had escaped him. Lost. What was in The Messiah? Lost! Chips of dream.

  It was nearly as if he had stumbled into someone else’s dream. Whose? Was it Adela’s? Heidi’s? These women in trance: he had dreamed their dream. He could not remember what he had read five minutes ago. A perplexity. Amulets, a contraption, a bird . . . fragments of some vagrant insubstantiality, folklorish remnants; a passage of oxygen-deprivation perhaps. It had receded, whatever it was—he retained nothing, nothing lingered: only the faintest tremor of some strenuous force. Mute imprint of noise—a city falling, crumbling, his own moans, relentless lamentation. Sound of shooting. Amnesia Lost. Nothing remained.

  Lamentation remained. Elegy after great pain. That despoiling, withdrawing light, a lightning-explosion. As though—for an inch of time—he had penetrated into the entrails, the inmost anatomy, of that eye. Whoever had dipped into the ink that covered the pages of The Messiah had dipped into the vitreous gelatin of that sufficing eye.

  Dr. Eklund held up a hand. His rings blazed their sea-chest glints. “What is necessary, what we must decide before anything else, is the heralding, you see? The annunciation.”

  “People have to be made to believe it. No one’s going to believe it, that’s the thing,” Heidi said.

  Dr. Eklund shone: his fingers, his buttons, his bald crown, his big glowing face with its bright lenses. “The good news must be given out. That The Messiah is here. Uncovered. Found. That it exists.”

  “People have to be told it exists,” Heidi pressed. “If it is not believed in, it might as well not exist.”

  “That sounds like God,” Lars said. He was bewildered. There was a lie in the room—some entanglement, a cat’s cradle gone wild, and Dr. Eklund’s coruscating rings and spectacles enmeshed in the strings. Lars could not tell whether the knots were worsening or unraveling. Across from him Adela stood, the brass amphora in her arms; The Messiah was in it. It made him think of a mummy in a case, or else a round baby.

  He watched her circle the little back-room space with her burden. Dr. Eklund had tried to make her give it up. Heidi has tried. She would not so much as set it down.

  “Let the world have it!” she said. “Oh yes! Well, how is the world going to know? Who’s going to believe it?”

  It troubled Lars that Adela said only what the others said. Even while resisting them, she used Heidi’s words; she used Dr. Eklund’s.

  “You believe it. You to begin with,” Heidi told her. “After all, don’t we begin with you? You came to find out for yourself. You came to consult. Anyone can palm off anything on anybody if they’ve got a good enough story.”

  “My dear woman, this masterwork? This beautiful text of genius, this holy art? It could no more pass for spurious than”—Dr. Eklund sent his reconnoitering look straight over to Lars—“than the true Creator of the Universe could pass for a philosopher’s idea.”

  “All the same,” Heidi said, “people have to be made to believe in it.”

  Lars hesitated; he considered. “I told them at the Morgontörn,” he said finally. “I mentioned it over there.”

  “Aha! Bravo!” Dr. Eklund cried.

  Adela said sourly, “You were premature.”

  Heidi asked: “You told them at your paper? About The Messiah?”

  “I told them it was found.”

  “But you didn’t know—”

  “I told them anyway. I told Nilsson—he runs the book section.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He didn’t believe me. No one did. I didn’t believe it then myself. It was a sort of daydream.”

  “You see how he’ll say anything to anyone,” Adela said.

  “But now! Lars! You’ve had your look. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. The original, nicht wahr? Here it is, safe in a jar. In a jar, God help us. Like one of those Dead Sea things—”

  “Those were clay. I have to protect what’s mine,” Adela said.

  “All your life you’ve waited for it. You’ve persisted.” Heidi extended her sheeplike head. He saw how old and earnest she was—decaying, pleading, wounded. That fence. The shooting. She wanted him to tell what he thought. “The Messiah exists, you’ve taken it in. Now it’s in your power.”

  “My power? I have no power.” How pointless she was: The Messiah was in Adela’s power; or, at least, in her grip. As for him, he had taken in something, yes—something too quickly, something too hotly—like a man half-blinded, who can descry only the flat light, not the characters on a page. Or he had swallowed it down like a priest, the priest of some passionate sect, for whom scripture is subordinate to the hour of sacral access. Awe consumes any brand that ignites it: was it the true Messiah he had taken in, or only the Walpurgisnacht caravan of his private menagerie trekking across his poor fevered brain-pan?

  “He’s in your hands. The author of The Messiah.”

  “I told you, I’ve quit. I’m finished. He’s not mine. I can’t hold on to him. My hands,” he said, turning them over to show her his white palms, “are
empty.”

  “No, no, think! Think how you’ve got the means.”

  “You’ve got that column,” Adela said abruptly. “You write those reviews. You’ve got Mondays.”

  “You can let them know,” Dr. Eklund said. “You can deliver up some stupendous thing. You can explain.”

  “You can be useful,” Heidi said. “If you’re shrewd about it. If you want to restore to the world what belongs to the world. If you believe in it yourself.”

  The World, the world—they all three spoke of the world. What speechifiers! They were mad for the world. They had something in mind for the world. The world had put them in perfect agreement. Lars in his newest bewilderment felt how he was marveling at it: the sulphurous tail of some underlying unanimity. To what did it attach itself?

  Dr. Eklund’s matches—the same smothered crash of spark after spark, every match in concert with every other, all designed to light a recalcitrant fire in the great man’s pipe.

  Toll of a gong, small and sharp. Adela clattering the brass amphora down at last.

  “You can take the manuscript if you like,” she offered—it was Dr. Eklund’s rawest stage voice—“even before it’s translated. To show it. That it exists. Translation’s the least of it—you can show it at your paper if you want.”

  How he wanted to knock her down!

  “She’ll let you take it now, you know,” said Dr. Eklund, approving.

  “There’s no question she’ll let you take it. You’re the one to do it.” Heidi’s web was loosening more and more—she was sliding from placating to out-and-out importuning. “It’s just what Dr. Eklund said—you’re the only one in Stockholm who can. You’ve got the reputation for it. It’s what people expect—you’re an introducer, you pave the way. An usher—you’re the only one who dares or cares. You’ve brought in all those difficult creatures—all those Central Europeans we’ve always got on order! Those Czechs and Poles! Yugoslavians and Hungarians! You’ve made everyone notice. Mr. Hemlig and Mr. Fiskyngel, for instance—they rely on you to alert them. You wake them up. You shake them up. You make them see.”