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

at all. Lars drew it against him, he bunched it against his chest: the exulting, the ape, the heaving, the hurling!

“Give it back.”

She ground toward him, she was fit and fleet—she twisted the plastic bag to pry it free of him. They crushed the papers between them: her tongue snapped, he drove off the hole of her turbulent mouth—she spat. He thought of her poor crumpled breasts. He was steady now, The Messiah was in his arms, he would not let her take it away. Her spittle was on his cheek. He raised one leg—the leg was heavy, it had a weight—and kicked Adela to the floor.

He saw her head near his victorious shoes; her hands were on her breasts. He was a colossus staring down.

“There’s only me. There isn’t any son. You’re a schemer, you’re a thief. You’ll say anything.”

How distant and small, how Lilliputian, this fury of hers! Her head, far below, a dead bird. Then in a sudden spiraling of pure flight, as elastic as the rising up of a bird, she jumped her haunches into a squat and flew up to beat at the white bag—it slipped from him, she had it in her fist; and escaped. Escaped.

A mistake, a mistake! She was gone, she was away. The door vibrated on its hinges. Violence like a burning; the door still rocking. Or else it was his bones in their long shiver. The broken beans of his shaking. How he had crushed her breasts, how he had crumpled his father’s brain. That cradling of The Messiah: good God, hadn’t he held it in his arms? It had possessed, for one holy hour, his house; his bed; his quilt. He ought to have been on his knees to it; she had warned him. He might have knelt there—gazing—before the caves and grottoes of his quilt.

And not one word taken. Not one word. Not a glimpse. He had been as near to it as to the apparition of his father’s eye. The Messiah in his arms, and lost again!

He ran through the passage and outdoors to the sidewalk; she was not there. The pavement was empty. She was nowhere in the street. Whatever direction he looked—he whirled and whirled in the cold air—she was not there. She had turned a corner; she was out of sight. He knew nothing about her: only that he had made her his prey, because of The Messiah. A snatch of panic no bigger than a ragged inch caught him then: it seemed to him Adela was a churning angel. The white bag was flying beside her into the niche behind the wall. Beguiled, he watched her set it down on the leather chair with the cracked leg; she was delivering The Messiah. She left it there for him and vanished. He understood it was the business of angels to vanish.

When he put his head into the angle of the little secret hallway, the leather chair was in its place, with nothing on it but the diurnal dust.

11

it was still only noon. The bright perished day hung before him. He walked out to the clamor of the Morgontörn, where the secretaries were eating sandwiches of cold meat and boiled egg. In the book department the stewpot had not yet gathered. Lars plucked up a volume, medium-thick, from the piles of review copies stacked against the baseboards. A neat small black mouse-pellet was lodged in the binding, so he put it down again and chose another. This turned out to be much thicker. It was the newest novel by the prolific Ann-Charlott Almgren, a name he knew—it was considerably celebrated—though he had never read her, not even her famous Nytt och Gammalt. He inserted his thumb between the pages somewhere among the middle chapters to catch the smell of the thing. It promised to touch on lust, deceit, ambition, and death, and looked good enough for his purpose.

He had a purpose. Gunnar’s cubicle was vacant; so was Anders’s. He decided on Gunnar’s and commenced. The novel was called Illusion. He admired the plot, which was founded on the principle of ambush. A kind and modest elderly spinster—a self-taught painter—falls in love with a ne’er-do-well, a beautiful and clever young man. She has declined to show her paintings because she believes them to be of no merit. The young man is the first to see them; she has never had the courage to reveal them to anyone before. But the young man recognizes at once that she is a hidden genius. He agrees to marry her if she will consent to a deception: he will claim the paintings as his own and give them to the world. The scheme is a grand success; the marriage is happy. The seeming painter is taken up by the fashionable and honored everywhere. But by then the new husband, awash in charm and glory, has attached himself to a seductive young woman, the very art critic whose lavish commendations have elevated his reputation. The self-effacing elderly wife, discovering the liaison…et cetera, et cetera. The book weighed in Lars’s hands; it weighed him down. It was as heavy as loss. (And The Messiah in his arms—light, ah how light!)

An hour and a half to read. Finished. Half an hour more: his review over and done with. (“Composed.” Spat out.) Another hour: bungling and bumbling on Gunnar’s hostile machine. Painful, a plunge into needles. Then it was three o’clock. The stewpot was beginning to straggle in with its perilous shards of laughter; but Lars knocked on Nilsson’s office door and offered to wait—he stood there mute and patient—while Nilsson looked over his pages.

“Well, well, well,” Nilsson said. “What do you think of that? My my my. Very nice. This is very nice, Lars. It’s something new for you.” And he said: “You’re going to work out. I always knew you would. I’ve always had confidence in you, Lars. Not that I haven’t felt alone in