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

Dr. Eklund intervened: “My dear Adela—Adela? Is it Adela?”

“Adela,” Heidi said.

“Undoubtedly you bring us this manuscript with a history attached. A story, yes? This fellow doesn’t believe it, I see that. Undoubtedly there is a story, and why shouldn’t we believe it? No manuscript sans story, yes? And this one in particular. If you told me the story I promise you I would believe it. But whatever the story, whatever the history, whatever your attachment or devotion—”

“She says she’s the daughter,” Heidi remarked: detached.

“—now is the time to relinquish it.”

“Look at Lars! He’s relinquished everything,” Heidi said.

“For the sake of the world,” Dr. Eklund said—an actor’s flourish.

“For the sake of the world!” Adela said. “He’ll say anything. He’s admitted he’s a liar. He had to, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. And when I told him how I got the manuscript—well, he collapsed, that’s all. He had to.”

All this was true; Lars was silent.

“Poor Lars,” Heidi said. She did not defend him now. “But now that you’ve had a look at it?” And waited.

She waited; Lars understood why. She meant him—in the wake of his great wish—to tell what he thought. He had got his great wish. He had stormed the precincts of The Messiah. Heidi more than anyone—no; Heidi alone, only Heidi!—knew the secret furnace of his will; she had called it his concentration, his mania. She was the old partner of his desire; of his intuition. She alone could fathom how it must be for him to flood his eyes with that text—that very text—the thing itself, the words, the syllables, the letters! The letters left their drifting afterimages on his retinas. But he could not take in those figurines—it was as if the Polish had escaped him. Lost. What was in The Messiah? Lost! Chips of dream.

It was nearly as if he had stumbled into someone else’s dream. Whose? Was it Adela’s? Heidi’s? These women in trance: he had dreamed their dream. He could not remember what he had read five minutes ago. A perplexity. Amulets, a contraption, a bird…fragments of some vagrant insubstantiality, folklorish remnants; a passage of oxygen-deprivation perhaps. It had receded, whatever it was—he retained nothing, nothing lingered: only the faintest tremor of some strenuous force. Mute imprint of noise—a city falling, crumbling, his own moans, relentless lamentation. Sound of shooting. Amnesia. Lost. Nothing remained.

Lamentation remained. Elegy after great pain. That despoiling, withdrawing light, a lightning-explosion. As though—for an inch of time—he had penetrated into the entrails, the inmost anatomy, of that eye. Whoever had dipped into the ink that covered the pages of The Messiah had dipped into the vitreous gelatin of that sufficing eye.

Dr. Eklund held up a hand. His rings blazed their sea-chest glints. “What is necessary, what we must decide before anything else, is the heralding, you see? The annunciation.”

“People have to be made to believe it. No one’s going to believe it, that’s the thing,” Heidi said.

Dr. Eklund shone: his fingers, his buttons, his bald crown, his big glowing face with its bright lenses. “The good news must be given out. That The Messiah is here. Uncovered. Found. That it exists.”

“People have to be told it exists,” Heidi pressed. “If it’s not believed in, it might as well not exist.”

“That sounds like God,” Lars said. He was bewildered. There was a lie in the room—some entanglement, a cat’s cradle gone wild, and Dr. Eklund’s coruscating rings and spectacles enmeshed in the strings. Lars could not tell whether the knots were worsening or unraveling. Across from him Adela stood, the brass amphora in her arms; The Messiah was in it. It made him think of a mummy in a case, or else a round baby.

He watched her circle the little back-room space with her burden. Dr. Eklund had tried to make her give it up. Heidi had tried. She would not so much as set it down.

“Let the world have it!” she said. “Oh yes! Well, how is the world going to know? Who’s going to believe it?”

It troubled Lars that Adela said only what the others said. Even while resisting them, she used Heidi’s words; she used Dr. Eklund’s.

“You believe it. You to begin with,” Heidi told her. “After all, don’t we begin with you? You came to find out for yourself. You came to consult. Anyone can palm off anything on anybody if they’ve got a good enough story.”

“My dear woman, this masterwork? This beautiful text of genius, this holy art? It could no more pass for spurious than”—Dr. Eklund sent his reconnoitering look straight over to Lars—“than the true Creator of the Universe could pass for a philosopher’s idea.”

“All the same,” Heidi said, “people have to be made to believe in it.”

Lars hesitated; he considered. “I told them at the Morgontörn,” he said finally. “I mentioned it over there.”

“Aha! Bravo!” Dr. Eklund cried.

Adela said sourly, “You were premature.”

Heidi asked: “You told them at your paper? About The Messiah?”

“I told them it was found.”

“But you didn’t know—”

“I told them anyway. I told Nilsson—he runs the book section.”

“And what did he say?”

“He didn’t believe me. No one did. I didn’t believe it then myself. It was a sort of daydream.”

“You see how he’ll say anything to anyone,” Adela said.

“But now! Lars! You’ve had your look. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. The original, nicht wahr? Here it is, safe in a jar. In a jar, God help us. Like one of those Dead Sea things—”

“Those were clay. I have to protect what’s mine,” Adela said.

“All your life you’ve waited for it. You’ve persisted.” Heidi extended her sheeplike head. He saw how old and earnest she was—decaying, pleading, wounded. That fence. The shooting. She wanted him to tell what he thought. “The Messiah exists, you’ve taken it in. Now it’s in your power.”

“My power? I have no power.” How pointless she was: The Messiah was in Adela’s power; or, at least, in her grip. As for him, he had taken in something, yes—something too quickly, something too