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

“She wanted him to be normal,” Lars said.

They went back and forth in this way, on every point, piecing things out, quarreling. Tracings, leavings, enigmatic vestiges—over each tendril they had their calculations and speculations and probings and puzzlings. Drohobycz itself a puzzle: a place recorded on the map of Poland only in the tiniest print. It was hardly there at all. To push through into the scenery and substance of Drohobycz was like entering a pinhole. The hasidim of the neighborhood—gone. Lars’s father’s father’s shop—a drygoods business—gone. Nothing left; not a ribbon, not a thimble. Between Drohobycz and Lars’s father there had occurred a mutual digestion. Street by street, house by house, shop by shop, Lars’s father had swallowed Drohobycz whole; Drohobycz was now inside every tale. And Drohobycz had swallowed Lars’s father also: a drab salary, a job he despised, a band of relatives to support—paralyzed, stuck, how was it possible to leave? Lars’s father was a gargoyle on the flank of Drohobycz, a mole on its inmost sinew. Once he traveled to Warsaw. Once he traveled to Lvov. Once he even went as far as Paris! But in the end he came home to be digested. All those weighty names Heidi recited out of the letters, poets and painters and philosophers and novelists, sometimes two or three in the same person—Stanislaus Witkiewicz, for instance, famously nicknamed Witkacy—what kind of living ghost did they think they were addressing, a high school teacher of arts and crafts, smeared with provincial paste and paint? Underground, immobile, cut off. Jozefina wanted him baptized after their engagement. He refused, but offered a concession: he would forsake the world of the Jews. His family had anyhow always kept their distance from the teeming outlandish hasidim in their long black coats. He was a Pole: he had already thrown himself on the unyielding breast of mother Poland, and nestled into the underside of her tongue. If he had ever sipped a word or two of Yiddish out of the air, it did not ride his spittle or his pen.

These were their accumulations and incidentals. They understood how little they had. They folded and unfolded the layers of Lars’s father’s thin life—it grew thinner yet. They had scratched out of Drohobycz all there was to scratch, and out of the poor fiancée the same. They were, they saw, nearly finished—it was squeezing milk from a stone to hope for more. The rest was quotations, excerpts, recitations. Vyings. Heidi had traced down a handwritten memoir: an account of a dinner party at which Lars’s father and his fiancée are guests. Lars’s father eats without emitting a syllable, mute; meanwhile the elegant Jozefina is animated, talkative. The bride chirps, the bridegroom is dumb. The memoirist thinks to herself: There will be no bread from this flour. An old proverb, and prophetic: no marriage followed. And one night Lars telephoned from the Morgontörn to announce the recovery, from Anders’s trash basket, of an American review. An American review! An amazement. Both books are reviewed. In America they call Cinnamon Shops by another name: The Street of Crocodiles, after one of the most horrifying of the tales. The second book is called in English Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass—an endless train of hissings. The lost third one isn’t mentioned. “He’s reached across finally,” Lars said, agitated, “he’s passed beyond little Europe.” He promised to bring the review to Heidi’s shop within the hour, to lay it, so to speak, at her feet. It seemed to him that hers was the only brain in Stockholm able to value such an offering. But when he arrived the black mustaches were wobbling: she was all victory and spite. She flashed at him an out-of-the-way periodical.

“Look what’s here! A letter! A new one. Published for the first time.” There was an engine in her breathing; she was pumping out elation. “He’s writing in 1934. Eight years before the shooting. Listen to this! I need a companion. 1 need a kindred spirit close by me. I long for an acknowledgment of the inner world whose existence I postulate. And you think you can come in here bragging about finding an American review! What’s a review? Nothing. Listen! I would like to lay my burden on someone else’s shoulder for a moment. I need a partner in discovery—”

Lars said hoarsely, “Where did you get all that?”

“I keep my eye out. I have my sources. If there’s something that hasn’t come home to roost, leave it to me to dig it up.”

“He means me,” Lars said. “I’m the one he means.”

“Please. So much and no farther. This is years before you were born.”

“You don’t understand him. You don’t know. He’s thinking of the future. A laying-on of hands. He’s thinking ahead.”

“He’s thinking of a woman,” Heidi said. “It’s a woman he wants. A partner in discovery—that’s a wife, isn’t it?”

“A son. An acknowledgment of the inner world—it can’t be a wife. He keeps his privacy, it’s not a wife he wants. He never had a wife. He can give up Jozefina, but not solitude. Solitude is just the thing he won’t give up. The burden is sent ahead—a signal through the genes. The partner in discovery is the next generation.”

Heidi struck off a click of exasperation. “If he isn’t looking for a woman, why else are there all those letters to women?”

“Ha!” Lars said; he felt the advantage shift. He could outthink her; he would make her pay for belittling the American review. “The life of a recluse—nobody comes in or out of the house, except through letters. He lives on correspondence. People leave him alone. The mitigation of solitude without the bother of human flesh.”

“Your mother,” Heidi tossed back, “wasn’t a piece of paper.”

“My father turned everything into paper.” He took in a brief preparatory pinch of air. “Reality is as thin as paper—”

“Don’t spout that again. I know what it’s going to be. It’s what you always—”

“Reality