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

place in it. What was he to be henceforth, if he was not to be his father’s son? And she, the daughter, this falsehood of a daughter? The author of The Messiah was nobody’s father now. What Lars had given up! A capitulation; he had surrendered to the false daughter’s tale. He had no solid tale of his own to set against it; only this rush of blood. Hers was as probable as anything else in the wilderness of Europe forty years ago. These stories had their plausibility. Lars had—what did he have? His old certainty, grown out of him like a fingernail. He chopped it off. He stood there stripped of verisimilitude. Was she nobody’s daughter? Then he, so much the more, was nobody’s son.

How hard it was to breathe, to breathe in and out, without illumination! Everything quenched, snuffed, suffocated. Surrendered. The light that rode forth like a horn, as though a huge saddle had been flung over the flanks of the universe, a saddle with its fiery horn of light, riding out from his father’s fixed eye…Dissolved. It had let itself die. It would not return.

The smell of roasting flame: Dr. Eklund striking still another match—match after match—to rekindle his smothered pipe.

The women went on contending. It was a quarrel; it was not a quarrel. It might have been the pretense of a quarrel. Marionettes. Heidi’s back room rife with plots, cabals—why was he thinking that? A stage frenzy: willed, directed, cued. Adela wanted him to go. Heidi wanted him to stay.

Dr. Eklund was indifferent. “Let the fellow go, let the fellow stay. If the text is valid—that’s the proper question.”

Adela said bitterly, “He thinks it belongs to him.”

“Now, now,” Dr. Eklund said.

“He takes things. You heard him! He’s got my hat.”

Their two voices were just the same. A family sound. The smoky air had becalmed itself. Nothing spontaneous rose in that space. Dr. Eklund propped his lit pipe on his saucer. Then he pushed cup, saucer, and pipe aside. The brass amphora—it had no handles; it was no more than a dented old pot—stretched its archaic shape up from the middle of the little table. From the pocket of his vest Dr. Eklund drew out, by its big black stem, a large round magnifying glass and placed it next to cup, saucer, and pipe.

“Smart!” Heidi said, tapping her knuckles against the pot, making it ring. “To think of bringing that. With the snow coming down.”

“So. The Solomonic moment. Then let us examine our dubious author.”

With both hands Dr. Eklund took hold of the brass amphora and raised it above the table. There it was, high up, traveling at a decent steady speed—a torpedo; a whale with its mouth wide; a chalice. Midway he tipped it over, until the mouth hung upside down, vomiting disorder, chaos: a shower of ragged white wings, a jumbled armada of white sails. A hundred sheets spiraled out—crumpled, splotched, speckled, aged. What had littered Lars’s quilt that morning came tumbling now out of Ali Baba’s jar.

“Smart!” Heidi said again. “Keeping everything dry!”

Dr. Eklund clanged down the emptied-out amphora. It hit the floor with the reverberating note of a cymbal, and rolled on its side toward Dr. Eklund’s feet. It was plain that Dr. Eklund—sorcery!—had instantly understood what to do with this peculiar vessel. He had seen that it was there to be turned upside down and emptied out.

Lars looked over at Adela. She had moved to crouch beside Dr. Eklund—she was picking up the runaway sheets that had fallen to the floor. She was picking them up and putting them on the table, with the others. That wounded handwriting—buried, beaten, bruised, drowned. She lifted each stray page, one by one. She had carried them to Heidi’s shop in that tall metal trophy-cup: Hebe the cupbearer, messenger, deliverer. He knew her as nothing else. He wanted to cry, Ulrika, Birgitta! Not one but two wives! And a child, lost, stolen! Himself now without even that paintbox. The last trace expunged. Erased. And Adela? Had she had a life prior to bags and jars? A woman his own age, graying like himself. She was not his sister; he had no sister, he had no father, he had no inkling of his mother’s name. He had named himself, in secret: Lazarus Baruch. Who was to tell him otherwise, who was to deny him these twinings and entanglings? And, through dictionary divinations and cabalistic displacements: Lars Andemening. Who was there to prevent it? He had an orphan’s terrifying freedom to choose. He could become whatever he wished; no one could prohibit it, he could choose his own history. He could choose and he could relinquish. He was horribly, horribly free.

And she? Adela? Was there a husband behind the scenes? Had she left a trail of some kind? Did she have a child? A father?

Dr. Eklund did not hurry. His magnifying glass hovered pitilessly. He seemed to be studying one word at a time; or else one letter of one word. Again he burrowed inside his vest pocket. A document inside an envelope. He was comparing the inky loops of the document with the inky loops—broken, beaten, hidden—that had flown out of the brass amphora.

“It recurs,” Dr. Eklund said. “Observe how it recurs. The telltale spur. This omnipresent hook. A shepherd’s crook. Or a bishop’s.”

“Dr. Eklund,” Heidi said, “is a holographic authority. A world authority. People summon him for verification from all over. He goes all over Europe. He’s been to South America. They call on him everywhere.”

Dr. Eklund reached for his pipe, inserted it between his lips, and sucked. “Soon we will strike,” he said, “on the truth.”

A wail came loose in Lars. The foetal ape that lived alongside his inmost belly-organs snapped itself alert; it lurched. “The truth!” he said. “Malice, it’s malice! With a schoolgirl, his own pupil! As if such a man—such a man—would copulate with a child!”

Dr. Eklund began a scanty fragment of hum. Heidi took off her slippers and put them