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

Heidi swept on. “You think a letter dated 1934 grows on trees? You think pieces of a memoir about a dinner conversation in Warsaw in 1936 can be picked up in the street? Just like that? Lars, please, let me ask you—left to yourself, what would you have come up with? Left to yourself, that’s the point! I’ll tell you what—you would have come up with the only scrap you did come up with! An American review from the Morgontörn’s trash barrel, that’s what.” The black eyebrows were wobbling like rocking-horse manes. “No, no, it’s not so simple. You dreamers would like it to be simple, you would like everything to turn on the issue of literary passion. I suppose Warsaw releases its valuables just like that? Or maybe it’s only a matter of telephoning long-distance to a dealer in Drohobycz, ha! You’re a baby, you don’t understand the world. You think the world is made of literature. You think reality is a piece of paper.”

What was it she was telling him? It was something to do with Dr. Eklund. Somehow it was about Dr. Eklund—which couldn’t be, in any case, his right name. Dr. Eklund wasn’t a Swede. Was he even a doctor? Was he, with his weedy pungencies, a sea captain in earnest? He got things out—people and things. He got things in—things and people. A smoother of obstinacies. When Dr. Eklund was said to be in Copenhagen, or on his hospital rounds, or asleep in the flat, did it mean he was actually in Budapest? Had he really—four years after the publication of Cinnamon Shops, in a summertime Paris already darkening toward war—had he really seen Lars’s father?

Lars had no father. No father ever again. He was giving his father up—to the probabilities, if not to the facts. There were no facts. Beyond the shooting there was nothing at all. Only the turbulence of desire, the merciless boil of a saving chimerical eye. The eye of deliverance. Of redemption. It had burst out over the little cave of Lars’s quilt like the wheel of a sun. A fiery hoop. A roaring egg. An intelligence. A devouring certainty. Gone; erased; wiped out. Heidi didn’t appear to be at all unsettled by these whirlwind blanks: it didn’t touch her that Lars had thrown off his claim to the author of The Messiah, that he was willing now to withdraw to nothingness, that he was no one’s son, that he had no father; that he was undone. It didn’t touch her, either way. She had never believed in his case; it didn’t matter to her that he was tearing up his case then and there. It didn’t seem to please her.

“I’m stopping, Mrs. Eklund,” he said. “It’s over. I’m quitting.”

“What’s over? What are you quitting?”

“I told you. I don’t have a father.”

“Did you ever have a father? I never thought you did.”

“Adam, the father of us all,” Dr. Eklund said.

“No more Warsaw items. No letters, no memoirs, no photographs, no drawings, no proverbs, no quotations—I won’t be bothering you,” Lars said.

“Not at all a bother,” Dr. Eklund said. “More in the way of business.”

“Dr. Eklund is always so much concerned with anything to do with the shop,” Heidi said.

“My father has nothing to do with the shop.”

“Your ex-father. Shouldn’t you be saying your ex-father?”

“Take my word that I’m finished.”

“Really finished?”

“It’s the end.”

“Oh, but we don’t quit,” she countered.

We? Who was “we”? It was, Lars considered, a new “we.” Now it included Dr. Eklund.

“Dr. Eklund,” she pointed out, “has had a certain interest in accumulating these items.”

“These evidences,” Dr. Eklund suggested.

“These evidences. That’s why he agreed to see Adela. He’s worn out—just look how worn out the poor man is. But he agreed to see her anyhow, and you know why?”

“Why?” asked Dr. Eklund. Raillery, or was he hurrying her on?

“Because he sympathizes. He knows how you’re consumed by all this. He understands you, Lars.”

“Comprehends. Penetrates,” Dr. Eklund offered. “The attraction—the seduction, the magnetism—of a sublime text. This is a feeling I myself admit to.”

“Dr. Eklund is so to speak your psychological twin.”

“Now don’t go too far,” Dr. Eklund said. “I don’t propose to be in this gentleman’s category. There’s no one else just like him. Not in Stockholm, no.”

“My category? What category is that?”

“Usefulness,” Heidi said, covering it over with her joking little bark.

A single wild church bell. If not a church bell, then a kind of gong.

“Good God, what is it?” Heidi burst out. “I told her just to knock—did she break the glass? She broke it!”

Dr. Eklund sprang up—he wasn’t at all tired; he was robust and acrobatic, more of a sea captain than ever—and sprinted across the length of the shop to the door, darting in and out of the blocks of shelves like an oversized rat in a tunnel.

Heidi reached up to switch on the lights; the shop looked suddenly open for business.

“You nearly broke my glass!”

“Well, but I didn’t.” Adela rubbed her foot in the slide-marks across the vestibule. “I slipped in the snow with this thing. Right against the door. It’s started coming down again.”

“Look at your shoes,” Heidi said. “You’ll leak all over my floors. The boy mopped only an hour ago.”

Adela was bareheaded; Lars knew why. Her hair was sprinkled with snow-beads. She was not carrying the white plastic bag. Her arms were pressed around the belly of a round brass jug; a sort of amphora. It was either a very large flower vase or a very modest umbrella stand. The open mouth of it had been shielded from the weather by a plastic shower cap.

“No hat? In the snow you should wear a hat,” Dr. Eklund reprimanded. It was, Lars noted, a version of Heidi’s whimsicality; it was part of his being histrionic. And what if this woman clutching a barrel, or an urn, or whatever it was, did or didn’t wear a hat? Dr. Eklund was too suddenly intimate; he was ready instantly to