The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (ereader for comics .txt) 📗

was obliged to stay to the bitter end. For dinner she mainly scrambled eggs mixed with onion. Lars peeled and chopped the onions on a board on the tiny table. He wept drearily. It was the fumes that set him off, but the tears derived from reasons of the heart. He was grateful: Heidi had fallen into his condition alongside him, a companion, a fellow collector of his father’s fate, a kind of partner. She was already intimate with his father’s books—no great feat, she said, since the man’s whole canon, after all, consisted of two lone volumes.

“Three,” Lars said. “Don’t forget The Messiah.”

“Not if it’s lost. It doesn’t exist. You can’t count what doesn’t exist.”

“But if we’re speaking of everything he wrote—”

“It doesn’t matter what he wrote. The only thing that matters is what’s here to be read.”

“The manuscript might have survived somehow. Nobody knows what happened to it.”

“If it disappeared it was destroyed.”

“Or else it wasn’t destroyed. It might be hidden. When the Nazis came he gave it away for safekeeping.”

“And even if he did give it away it evaporated. It doesn’t exist,” Heidi said again. “Whoever had it was hauled off. You’re always expecting what isn’t there to be there.” She opened out derisive palms: small callused squares that had, by now, a familiar way of accusing him. She thought him a master of the insubstantial: a fantasist. Often enough she threw out at him her special taunt: “Hauch,” she liked to say—his ideas were no more than a breath of air; she did not regard them.

It was the shooting that drew her. The shooting; the murder. Shot in the streets! Lars suspected that Heidi cared more for his father’s death than for his father’s tales, where savagely crafty nouns and verbs were set on a crooked road to take on engorgements and transmogrifications: a bicycle ascends into the zodiac, rooms in houses are misplaced, wallpaper hisses, the calendar acquires a thirteenth month. Losses, metamorphoses, degradations. In one of the stories the father turns into a pincered crab; the mother boils it and serves it to the family on a dish. Heidi shouldered all that aside: it was the catastrophe of fact she wanted, Lars’s father gunned down in the gutters of Drohobycz along with two hundred and thirty other Jews. A Thursday in 1942, as it happened: the nineteenth of November. Lars’s father was bringing home a loaf of bread.

They settled in to their night’s work: the recitation of scraps. By now they had gathered up every shred and grain; still, their stock was small. Heidi had discovered on her own shelves—misplaced behind Tuwim the poet—Lars’s father’s translation of Kafka’s The Trial. Lars was less pleased with this than she had expected. He complained that he didn’t care for his father in the role of the dummy on Franz Kafka’s lap; it was his father’s own voice he was after. But when Heidi somehow finagled from a dealer she was acquainted with a brittle browning copy of the Warsaw weekly in which “The Comet” had first appeared, Lars felt an onion-sting of joy. His nose moistened. It was like coming on a missing pair of gloves—how it warmed his hands! The look of Polish had begun finally to fit his eye-sockets without estrangement, and it was the weight in his heated hands of that dog-eared rust-speckled journal, dated fifty years back, that made him forgive the Princess for casting him out. He didn’t need her; he was on his own. He read—he could read!—how the father in “The Comet” thrusts a microscope into a chimney shaft and examines the starlight that has infiltrated into the sooty darkness: the star is composed of a human brain with an embryo sunk inside. Heidi was indifferent to the notion of a homunculus in the sky. She told Lars it was all madness. Images in magnetic batches. She scolded him for turning his father into some sort of ceremonial mystification; there was a smoldering cultishness in all of it. His father’s tales—animism, sacrifice, mortification, repugnance! Everything abnormal, everything wild.

Still, Heidi stuck by him; she wasn’t throwing him out, like the Princess. Heidi appeared to be as absorbed in their little stock as he was: together they combed through the letters, one by one, taking turns reading them out. With their heads close they gazed into the photographs. Lars’s young father was always the central figure, the only male, ringed round by women. Lars memorized each woman’s face. One of these might easily be the face of his father’s lover—any one of them. Any one of them might be Lars’s own mother. Heidi disagreed: Lars’s father—they knew this from the letters—was too withdrawn, too isolated, too obsessive, to have gone casually into a woman’s bed. And the women themselves: these faces: they were too worldly, too lightly content, too exterior, to belong to someone who might become Lars’s father’s lover. His lover must be elsewhere, in a secret place beyond the photos. She would need to be a poet. There were so many letters written to literary women. Romana Halpern? No. Zofia Nalkowska? No. Deborah Vogel? No. All these candidates were, for this and that good reason, wrong. Besides, there was the fact of Jozefina: the Catholic fiancée, still alive. An old woman. Well into her eighties, perhaps, living in London.

“You should go over there,” Heidi said, “and find out her side of the story. Before it’s too late.”

“What do I need London for? We know her side. She wanted to settle in Warsaw after the wedding. She even spoke of Paris. And he wouldn’t budge out of Drohobycz. Stuck. Paralyzed.”

“She’s a living witness to the man. She could tell you things. She could tell you why the wedding didn’t come off. You should talk to her.”

Lars said grimly, “She was his enemy.”

“She loved him more than he loved her—he said so himself! As if we didn’t read exactly that letter less than a week ago! As if I hadn’t broken