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

mind.” A pressure of telling rose in him. He wanted to tell her that he knew his father’s eye; but he did not.

“Why don’t you pick Kafka to be the son of? Then people would have some recognition. They’d be impressed. They’d look around at you.”

“I know who my father is. I know him inside out. I know more than anyone.”

“You know him inside out,” she sang. “You’ve collected him, you’re a collector!”

“Sometimes,” Lars said slowly, “his words come out of my mouth.”

“You’re a reviewer! You write reviews! Nobody gets the Nobel Prize for writing on Mondays!”

Very slowly he began to tell. A stone lay on his tongue; but he began. “When I wake up,” he said heavily, “I can see my father’s eye. It seems to be my eye, but it’s his. As if he lets me have his own eye to look through.”

“You want to resurrect him. You want to be him.” She did not soften. “Mimicry. Posing in a mirror. What’s the point of it? What will it bring you? You throw out your life.”

“And your life?” The stone fell away. “If you think there’s no point, how come you’re in it? You’re in it as much as I am. More. You’ve found all the best things. The letters. Everything from Warsaw. If it’s not worth my while, how is it worth yours?”

“When Dr. Eklund’s away it passes the time.” She sank back under the lamp; she lifted her hand and switched it off. “Dr. Eklund warned me long ago against sleeping in daylight. It induces hallucinations. Poor Lars, you’re a visionary. There’s no use to it. If I didn’t have my shop to keep me on my toes, I’d nap in the afternoon like you.”

The last syllables swam into black space. A trickle of light from the street drifted through the mullioned door.

Lars came and hunched himself on the floor beside her.

“Do you want coffee?” she suddenly asked him.

“No.”

“Take some vodka.”

“No.”

“Then you’d better go home. It’s the middle of the night.”

“I’m not coming back,” he said.

A fragment of laughter scraped the darkness.

Lars said, “No, it’s finished. What I get from you is mockery. Enough.”

“You want to be taken on faith.”

“Trust. I want trust.”

“Vapor and smoke. Stories, letters—they’re all someone’s hallucination. How do you know you weren’t born right here in Stockholm? An infant, smuggled! It’s only a story. You don’t know anything for sure. Your mother’s a cloud, your father’s a fog. There’s nothing reliable in any of it.”

“Except the shooting. You believe in that.”

“Death’s reliable.”

She was all at once discomposed; she flung out her hands. The gesture of an oracle. He was astonished—she was surrendering her own old landscape, she was taking her turn. It was her life—the life before—she was giving him, out of the blue: the life before Dr. Eklund. She pressed it out in the swoop of two or three lines—her arms a line in the black air, the fence a row of black lines. It appeared before him in the dark with the clarified simplicity of a charcoal drawing—a predestined image. He followed the black lines, he traced her, there at the fence, heaving lumps over it to the shadows on the other side: as a young woman she had lived, she said, in a village not far from one of those camps, and crept at night as often as she could without detection to throw food over the fence. It was like a cage in there, crammed with dying beasts. She heard their scratchings, clawings, mufflings, muzzlings; they were all shadows; they were afraid to come near. She heard them tear into the paper wrappings; then they stuffed the wrappings into their sleeves, into their shoes; she heard them gulp and chew. Occasionally they vomited, or exploded, with cries like muzzled beasts, into floods of diarrhoea; she made out all this in the blind night by the sound and the pestilential smell. Often she heard shooting; there was no sense to the shooting, she could not tell where or why, it had no direction. Sometimes it seemed to come from between her own feet. And immediately after the war she picked up the daffodil lamp, only that, and a few old books, and traveled north across the border, leaving Germany behind. She would never go back. If she had a family there she did not mention it. In Stockholm she found Dr. Eklund and married him.

He had never seen her so excited. Something had provoked her. Her cheeks were drawn down—puffs of weighted dough; abruptly she had the look of a bulldog. He did not believe her; she was a liar. She wanted not to be what she had been before. It was more intuition than suspicion that he did not believe her: she knew too much about that fence—the other side of it, among the shadows. She knew what they did with the bits of paper—how they squashed every scrap inside their rags to make a lining against the cold, how they padded their shoes with it against the sores. She had strangely intimate views—they were like summonings—about the hunger and the vomiting and the bursting of the bowels. She summoned these with a votive memory. She summoned too well, too potently, too acutely: the night space beyond the fence could not account for so deep a summoning. He supposed she was one of them, but hidden—one of the shadows inside.

“You’re a refugee,” he said. “A survivor. Like me.”

“Like you? You don’t know what you are! Safe in Stockholm your whole life! You don’t know who you are!” She let out that same unconfined newfangled laughter: doglike. “You’ll say you’re anything at all!”

“You were behind that fence. On the inside.”

“The outside. I heard the shooting.”

“You want to conceal it. You’re afraid of being found out.”

“Oh yes, a Marrano. Like your idea of the Queen, poor woman!”

“You don’t want to admit it. You want to be rid of it. Your name,” he accused—he had spied it written in one of