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

Adela surrendered to what seemed to be her duty: “It doesn’t matter to him, he’ll say anything.” But she had grown as dull as an obedient child.

“The immersion. The concentration. What it took to put on those robes—the ascent! Admirable,” Dr. Eklund trumpeted. “For an ordinary Alter Eckstein to jump into Stockholm and start calling himself Olle Eklund—nothing. Purely nothing. There’s no nerve to it. I’ve never had a nervous hour over it. But you! Gilgul! Karma! Transmigration of an impassioned soul! Mr. Andemening,” he finished, “I’ll tell you what it makes you. Do you understand what it makes you? It makes you just our man.”

Heidi put in, “Because of Monday.”

“Two or three of those columns, that’s the way. Holy space. Fill it with the news. You’ve done exalted things there. The cognoscenti know what you’ve done, don’t think they’re not aware. You’ve got your little following—you’re just the one to make it happen.”

“I’m just the one to bring on The Messiah.” The sound of it was as flat as if someone had asked him the time.

“Isn’t that what you’ve lived for?” Heidi said.

“Fakery. I’ve lived for fakery.”

“But you’ve stopped. You’ve quit.”

“You haven’t. You said yourself you’re not quitting, Mrs. Eklund.”

“It’s a question of recognition. We’ve got the original, right here—you saw it. A long look, you can’t complain. What you can do for it! No one knows better than you. You had your hands on it.”

His transient little fear. His hands were hot. His fingers were heating up like the staves of a fence on fire.

“The Messiah went into the camps with its keeper.” Lars shook: the ape had him by the throat. “That’s all that could have happened, nothing else. The Messiah was burned up in those places. Behind those fences, in those ovens. It was burned, Mrs. Eklund, burned!”

“You don’t believe your own two eyes? You had it in your own two hands! You don’t believe Dr. Eklund? Dr. Eklund’s dealt with these situations all over, he’s done this sort of work in dozens of countries—”

“Dealt with them. I’ll bet he’s dealt with them. Where there’s fire there’s a match. Those hospital rounds. The Danish prima ballerina. A wheeler-dealer in shady manuscripts, that’s what it’s about.”

“You’re a baby, Lars. You don’t understand any of it.”

“Shady, well, well,” Dr. Eklund said. “It’s what you would call a little awning. Mrs. Eklund knows I don’t like it when she gives things away, so she rolls down this little awning.”

Dr. Eklund got up out of his chair and began to wander—he picked up the kettle from the stove, swung it to hear how much water was left in it, and put it back again. In this snug and narrow galley he was massively seaworthy—more like a ship than its captain. The daffodil lamp on its stalk might have been another pipe he was about to poke between his teeth. He had anyhow lost interest in his pipe; he was distracted; he had let it go out.

“Anything original—anything that’s a masterwork, you know—needs a little awning to begin with. If you want to talk about shady, I don’t deny there are transactions that can’t be negotiated in the noonday sun. Too much light rots the merchandise. On the other hand, after three or four decades in the shade a text becomes diffident. Bashful, you might say. Sometimes it takes persuasion to lure it out of hiding. It could be in francs or marks or rubles or kroner, whatever’s suitable. The texts don’t care. The money brightens them and they want to show how brave they are. Then their heads slide out. If only I had such money of my own.”

“There you are. You’ve heard it all,” Heidi said. “Now you can stop being a baby about these things. As if those Warsaw items got here out of the blue! If not for Dr. Eklund’s network—”

“No, no,” Dr. Eklund broke in. “In the beginning the blue is all there is. Everything comes out of the blue. Here’s The Messiah, out of the blue.” He clinked his rings against the brass amphora: what pealed out was the trill of an heirloom chime—the striking of some old family clock. “And this fine woman—this nervous noble handsome woman—now isn’t she out of the blue?”

He had taken Adela by the shoulders; it was ludicrous how he hunched down his own shoulders to put his long face in the way of hers. There was something curiously practiced in the exchange of light that passed between their pairs of eyes. The two foreheads closed brow to brow: the channel midway might have been harboring signals. Or else nothing more than the blinking crescents of Dr. Eklund’s lenses, throwing off reflections. His captain’s stare of ownership, his potent pirate’s touch—he had already released one half of her, and was stroking the side of her nose. No, inconceivable: he was lifting away a single hair that was intruding there. A peculiarly private act, like a cat that licks its own paw clean—there was a strain of habituation in it. Adela hardly minded; she barely noticed. She was intent on her mood: she was inured to this large-fingered mechanical caress; it appeared to toughen the resistant line of her lip. It was only her lip that was resisting; she was turning more and more docile. She resembled someone who has done her duty. They had been in combination before, Adela and Dr. Eklund—was such a thing possible? They had the accommodation of an old couple; it didn’t count that Dr. Eklund was surely three decades in advance in the sea of life. Something had been compounded between them: something more abrasive than mere familiarity. Had they once been lovers, had this been her duty, now far behind her? The man still liked the woman; the woman didn’t like the man. But she lent herself. She obeyed.

Her head pulled back; she was squirming herself loose. A resentful childish movement. A woman of forty, and she wriggled like a child. It put Lars