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

side by side under the daffodil and slid onto her cot: her face had thickened; her lids had thickened. “You should wait for the verdict,” she murmured.

“There isn’t any verdict. There’s only what’s really there,” Adela said from the floor.

The magnifying glass hovered; wandered left, wandered right. Dr. Eklund continued to hum—two bars and silence; three bars and silence. The bits of it suggested something between a lullaby and a sea chanty; it made Lars dimly restive, skittish. His little fear—he remembered it. It was trickling back, old, unaccountable, recognizable. And here was Dr. Eklund provoking it, pricking it alive again: Dr. Eklund with his pirate’s fingers and their glittering rings, pinching page after page of the lost Messiah, and the great lens circling.

“No question. No question at all,” Dr. Eklund pronounced. “Observe, observe. The capitals. As specifiable as a fingerprint. You won’t find another W in the world like this fellow’s. You won’t find another T. What we have here”—he held the magnifier aloft, like a bishop’s crook—“is entirely genuine. Authentic, I guarantee it. It is what it purports to be. I have no doubt of it. I would stake everything on it. The original.”

Heidi, drowsy, the threads of her white bangs weaving like the smoke from Dr. Eklund’s pipe, purred languidly from her cot: “A forgery. It could be a very good forgery. Olle, you know how clever a forger can be,” and shut her eyes.

Adela sat like a doll, a foot away from the brass amphora, immobile, braced against the leg of the table. Adela is fast asleep, her mouth half open, her face relaxed and absent; hut her closed lids are transparent, and on their thin parchment the night is writing its pact with the devil, half text, half picture, full of erasures, corrections, and scribbles.

“My good woman,” Dr. Eklund urged, “no forger on earth can duplicate these shepherd’s crooks. However expert. Not the most inspired master, believe me! Here is a letter, to a certain Tadeusz Breza, written by our author, and here is this sheet. A sheet unfortunately much abused, but observe. The lineaments identical. You can see how the longer-armed characters breathe through a type of sporule, exceptionally gauzy. And these commas, with their tails coughed off! Who could impersonate such a mannerism? A scrimshaw of the nervous system. These devious ropes of the nerves themselves. The ink is very close. The paper not identical, but very close. Of that period, no doubt of Warsaw manufacture, possibly Lvov…”

Adela did not stir. Heidi did not stir. These women were apathetic; lethargic. Probably it was what they had expected. They had known all along. They had believed all along. The verdict had only exhausted them; it was by now—so long awaited—a kind of soporific. Even Dr. Eklund did not appear to be aroused.

But there on the table lay the scattered Messiah. Retrieved. The original. The Messiah, spread out in its curiously rapturous Polish for anyone’s bare blink. The original! Recovered; resurrected; redeemed. Lars, looking with all his strength, felt his own ordinary pupil consumed by a conflagration in the socket. As if copulating with an angel whose wings were on fire.

13

always afterward—after the letters had collapsed to char and flakes of ash—Lars regretted this animal urgency that swept him through the scrambled pages of The Messiah. Dr. Eklund was willing enough to concentrate on his pipe while Lars tore through those layers of ruined papers. The two women—Heidi dazed on her cot, Adela quiescent on the floor—seemed suspended. They waited. You could not hear them breathe. It was as if they had given up oxygen; or else had suppressed the predilection for it.

Meanwhile Lars fell into the text with the force of a man who throws himself against a glass wall. He crashed through it to the other side, and what was there? Baroque arches and niches, intricately hedged byways of a language so incised, so bleeding—a touch could set off a hundred slicing blades—that it could catch a traveler anywhere along the way with this knife or that prong. Lars did not resist or hide; he let his flesh rip. Nothing detained him, nothing slowed him down. The terrible speed of his hunger, chewing through hook and blade, tongue and voice, of the true Messiah! Rapacity, gluttony!

Always afterward Lars remembered the rising of his lamentation. It was as if he had been accumulating remorse even as he fled through passage after passage. He could not contain what he met; he could not keep it. Amnesia descended with the opacity of a dropped hood. What he took he lost. And instantly grieved, because he could not keep it.

Adela was not there. The servant girl, sinister, elusive, brutal, who lurked in corridors and attics, in Cinnamon Shops, in Sanatorium—she was nowhere in The Messiah. This made Lars glad: a revenge against the self-important living Adela who leaned like a puppet against the leg of the table. The Messiah had annihilated her name.

Still, what Adela had told him was true: the order of the pages did not matter. These poor battered sheets were erratically paginated, some not numbered at all, and one eddying flowed into another; there were sequences and consequences, parallels and paradoxes, however you shuffled them. Lars thought of those mountain ranges growing out of the chasm of the world, along the bottommost spine of the sea, so platonically dark and deep that even the scuttling blindfish swim away, toward higher water—but within this overturned spittoon of an abyss are crisscrossing rivers, whirlpools twisting their foaming necks, multiple streams braiding upward, cascades sprouting rivulets like hairs, and a thousand shoots and sprays bombarding the oceanscape’s peaks. So it was with the intelligence of The Messiah’s order and number and scheme of succession: everything voluminously overlapping, everything simultaneous and multiform.

But this understanding applied only to a consciousness of system. The Messiah was a waterless tract. No cloud, no mist, no fog; no well and no bucket; neither ocean nor