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

hotly—like a man half-blinded, who can descry only the flat light, not the characters on a page. Or he had swallowed it down like a priest, the priest of some passionate sect, for whom scripture is subordinate to the hour of sacral access. Awe consumes any brand that ignites it: was it the true Messiah he had taken in, or only the Walpurgisnacht caravan of his private menagerie trekking across his poor fevered brainpan?

“He’s in your hands. The author of The Messiah.”

“I told you, I’ve quit. I’m finished. He’s not mine. I can’t hold on to him. My hands,” he said, turning them over to show her his white palms, “are empty.”

“No, no, think! Think how you’ve got the means.”

“You’ve got that column,” Adela said abruptly. “You write those reviews. You’ve got Mondays.”

“You can let them know,” Dr. Eklund said. “You can deliver up some stupendous thing. You can explain.”

“You can be useful,” Heidi said. “If you’re shrewd about it. If you want to restore to the world what belongs to the world. If you believe in it yourself.”

The world, the world—they all three spoke of the world. What speechifiers! They were mad for the world. They had something in mind for the world. The world had put them in perfect agreement. Lars in his newest bewilderment felt how he was marveling at it: the sulphurous tail of some underlying unanimity. To what did it attach itself?

Dr. Eklund’s matches—the same smothered crash of spark after spark, every match in concert with every other, all designed to light a recalcitrant fire in the great man’s pipe.

Toll of a gong, small and sharp. Adela clattering the brass amphora down at last.

“You can take the manuscript if you like,” she offered—it was Dr. Eklund’s rawest stage voice—“even before it’s translated. To show it. That it exists. Translation’s the least of it—you can show it at your paper if you want.”

How he wanted to knock her down!

“She’ll let you take it now, you know,” said Dr. Eklund, approving.

“There’s no question she’ll let you take it. You’re the one to do it.” Heidi’s web was loosening more and more—she was sliding from placating to out-and-out importuning. “It’s just what Dr. Eklund said—you’re the only one in Stockholm who can. You’ve got the reputation for it. It’s what people expect—you’re an introducer, you pave the way. An usher—you’re the only one who dares or cares. You’ve brought in all those difficult creatures—all those Central Europeans we’ve always got on order! Those Czechs and Poles! Yugoslavians and Hungarians! You’ve made everyone notice. Mr. Hemlig and Mr. Fiskyngel, for instance—they rely on you to alert them. You wake them up. You shake them up. You make them see.”

It was a speech, a declamation—her mouth was tumultuous: her old woman’s disorderly gold teeth. She was imploring him. There was something he was intended for. A quaver had entered her nostrils.

Dr. Eklund, meanwhile, was nodding his big face up and down, cheering her on like a human baton. “Difficult creatures!” he said admiringly. “You were born to it, Mr. Andemening. Granted it’s elusive—what work of art isn’t? But you’ve absorbed it. We’ve allowed you to absorb it. You’ve had our silence. What we need from you now is some word. A judgment. Is it worthy? Is it beautiful? Will you embrace it? We need to have your sounding.”

“We need to have your column,” Adela said. Did Adela too have her “we”? They all three had a “we”—the same one. They adhered. They were a cabal; a family. His column! His unread and sequestered Mondays—she was ridiculing him. Yet he understood she was not. It came to him—incompletely, slowly, stupidly—that they were, the three of them, in some logical alliance: they had a common principle. Clearly they intended him for something. He was a pipe they were all three attempting to kindle. What was smoldering in this place was not so much a lie as a latency. It was their private idea. What they wanted from him was his own day of the week. Monday was the whole purpose of his standing just where he was standing. He was standing a foot from Heidi’s little back-room table—on which Adela, with the ringing of some weighty doubloon, had half a minute ago settled The Messiah in its brass vessel. For the sake of Monday he had been given Dr. Eklund’s key. For the sake of Monday Adela had invaded his flat. For the sake of Monday he had been made to come and go, and then to stay.

He saw everything exactly. They had done everything to lure him into believing The Messiah was false, in order to persuade him it was genuine. They had sent him Adela with her story, to mock the fraudulent son with the fraudulent daughter. An artificial sister! Family mockery. He had fallen among players; among plotters.

“Dr. Eklund,” he charged—he was breathing like a runner—“why do you say you’re Dr. Eklund?”

“He isn’t anyone else,” Heidi said. “Who else should he be?”

“Someone who fits the name.”

“We poor wanderers with our pitiful accents, yes?” Dr. Eklund said.

“It’s fakery.”

“In Rome do as the Romans.” Dr. Eklund pulled vainly on his pipe, meditating. “In this country they are so shy with foreigners. It goes much better not to contradict the feelings of a shy people.”

“Refugee impostor,” Lars shot out.

“Lars, Lars,” Heidi begged.

Dr. Eklund placidly lit another match. “A name is such a little thing. A ribbon. A modest pennant. A harmless decoration. I myself was born Eckstein.”

The ape in Lars’s chest sprang awake with an electric shudder and hurled itself across his ribs. Harmless! How hard it was to breathe, to breathe in and out! There was, however, illumination. He saw everything exactly. He said the chosen syllables to himself: Lazarus Baruch. Lars Andemening.

“I made up my name. I made up my father.”

His father out of libraries, his name out of dictionaries.

“Dr. Eklund knows all this. You can’t mind that I told him your theory of paternity? You’re the one who told