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

was money they wanted. Why should I pay you? she said. For what? It can’t be worth two zlotys. She told them it wasn’t a will in there, it was nothing at all, no one could figure out what it was. The husband looked in the box and shifted the papers and sniffed the dampness and said, No, it isn’t a will, it isn’t a legacy, nothing like that. It’s Jew-prayers, what the Żydki pray, it’s hexes and curses. So it turned out that the people who had bought the house were glad to go all the way back to Drohobycz without getting paid for the box, at least they were safe from the hexes, and the woman said to her husband, How do you know it’s what the Żydki pray? Mother of God, he said, I tried to read it, it’s all a jumble, it’s the way they pray. And also the letters on the top, The Messiah, it’s the Jews cursing Our Lord. Get rid of it, the husband said. But it’s good paper, she said, thick and strong, I’ll find some use for it, so after she walked out in the rain one time, she stuffed some of the sheets into her shoes. To keep the shape. And she told her lady, the lady she worked for, whose husband was Tosiek Glowko, my mother’s special friend, a Party official, high up in the Party, she told the lady that back in her old house in Drohobycz there was a box of prayers, what the Jews pray, buried under the floor in the cellar, and the people who bought the house wanted to get money out of her just for returning it; but she wasn’t a fool, it wasn’t her box to begin with, it was only scribbles in there—real prayers, even what the Jews pray, come in prayerbooks. The lady said, Then maybe it’s actually not prayers, and the woman said, My husband thinks the same, he says what the Jews pray is hexes and curses, and besides it’s scribbled all over with Our Lord’s name, in mockery. The lady recounted all this to her husband, Tosiek Glowko, my mother’s special friend—she was laughing at these mysterious papers her maid was keeping in a funny box dug up out of the ground. It’s how they behave out there in those country towns, outlanders, hicks, they don’t understand the world; the woman had this box for years in the cellar of her shack in Drohobycz, ever since the middle of the war; it’s something the Jews left. Tosiek Glowko said, Drohobycz? Because he knew that was where my mother grew up, my mother grew up in Drohobycz and went to school there. But for my mother it wasn’t a hick town, in her eyes it was a little Vienna. And then the woman scrubbed the kitchen wall, and Tosiek Glowko said to my mother, Oh my poor wife, her maid dropped dead right at her feet, she had a stroke in my poor wife’s kitchen, we had to call the police—and do you know, this old woman is from your own town, she’s from Drohobycz?

“You see,” she finished, “that’s how it went.” She reached out over the quilt to gather in his father’s strewn and confounded words. He watched her pile up the sheets and pat them and tap them, until she had constructed a neat rectangular stack. It struck Lars that there was an idiocy in this sudden tidying-up: he almost laughed. It was as if the order of the pages didn’t matter to her in the least. The progenitrix of chaos. She stared across at him. “Now do you see how it went? My mother heard about the manuscript—”

“From her lover. The man high up in the Party.”

“—and I got on the bus and rode across Warsaw and found the old man and took away all the papers there were.”

“He let you? The woman’s husband? The widower,” he corrected.

“Well, there he was, running around and collecting whatever he could put his hands on, wherever his wife had stuck them. In the oven, can you imagine? Three sheets in the oven. And six in those shoes. He let me look everywhere. By then there wasn’t any box. The box was gone.”

“But why you?” Lars urged. “Why would he give them to you?”

“He would have given them to anyone. He would have burned them in the trash. I got there in time to save them from the trash. He was afraid.” She sent out a pale little smile, perilously edged. “He thought she’d died from the curse, don’t you see? Because the curse had been dug up. Because when he told her to get rid of the papers she didn’t obey.”

It came to him then that he didn’t believe a word. What an invention! The best inventions are those with the most substantial particulars. A fabricator. Or else a cunning inheritor, a spinner of old fables: buried vessels, spells, incantations, magical instant dyings. Or else simply crazed. Adela! This name of terror lifted straight out of his father’s spectral scenery. I could not tell whether these pictures were implanted in my mind by Adela’s tales or whether I had witnessed them myself…. Perhaps in our treachery there was secret approval of the victorious Adela to whom we dimly ascribed some commission and assignment from forces of a higher order…. Adela, warm from sleep and with unkempt hair, was grinding coffee in a mill which she pressed to her white bosom, imparting her warmth to the broken beans.

Crazed. A grinder of broken beans.

He accused, “You’ve mixed up all the pages.”

“It makes no difference. You can shuffle them however you like. It has the same effect no matter what. You’ll see for yourself when you begin.”

“Begin what? I’m not beginning anything.” He asked, “Why do you call yourself Adela?”

“It’s my name.”

“It’s from Cinnamon Shops. From Sanatorium. Is that why you took it?”

“I didn’t take it. People don’t give themselves their