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

“I’m not like you.” She stopped. “I’m not.”

Again he gave her his impartial stare. “Dr. Eklund’s not imaginary, no. That’s the pity of it. I used to think he was.”

“Neither is my mother. My mother’s in Grenoble, with a new husband. I told you all that.”

“It was a story.”

“Some of it wasn’t.”

“Some of it! And after all this time you’re ready to unscramble it? The whole cast of characters?”

A gargantuan rumble obscured the last words. The child, awakened by his own vibration, drew up his legs, churned, and appeared to drop back into sleep. Two tracks of tears wandered down his chin—it was like the little stem of an acorn—and onto Elsa Vaz’s sleeve: the hard-breathing nostrils wept, the fat lids watered.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

“You shouldn’t. Now that I see what you’ve come for.”

“You don’t see.”

“A grand sorting-out. That high Party official, was he made up?”

“He was my mother’s friend. I told you that. Tosiek Glowko.”

“And the old widow with the box, and the old widower in Warsaw, and the shoes, and those papers in the oven, and the man with the long black coat—”

She looked at him; she was immobile. Even the pupils of her eyes stood stock-still. You could throw a pebble at them and they wouldn’t twitch. “You don’t know anything about Drohobycz. Nothing. Nothing about Warsaw. It’s all appetite to you—it’s what you want it to be—you don’t have any inkling about those places.”

“I was born there. I’m a refugee.”

“It doesn’t matter how many times you say that, you still don’t know where you were born. A fairy tale. You picked yourself a make-believe father out of a book. Who else does a thing like that—”

His steadiness faltered; he blinked: his own eye stung by that other eye. It was not so much a recollection as a smarting, a burning. That other eye would no longer submit to his summoning, even on the palest brink of memory. The truth was he could not call it back. When he tried to visualize it, what he saw was a very small mound of ash, irregularly round, no higher than a thumbnail. The gray cinders might have passed for a little heap of Elsa Vaz’s hair.

“Tell me,” he said, “is there a father for this boy somewhere? Or is he going to have to figure one out for himself?”

“His father is in Brazil.”

“Brazil? Not Antwerp? He’s escaped the family business?”

“Divorced” was what he thought he heard her say—the child’s sick snore swelled up again and washed over it—but it might have been something else. It might have been “Forced,” or “Lost,” or “Crushed,” or something similarly stretched out of her strangely middle-throated sound. It might have been anything at all; the moment passed; once more the child settled back.

Lars said resolutely, “You’re the worst. You named yourself out of a book, I didn’t do that. You swiped Adela, you dressed up in a name, you masqueraded—”

“Mrs. Eklund thought it would attract you. She wanted you to be interested.”

“Mrs. Eklund. And the pupil, the schoolgirl? Copulation with a child! With one of his own pupils! That wasn’t Mrs. Eklund’s! That was yours, wasn’t it—copulation with a child, wasn’t that your idea? Heidi wouldn’t think of that! I don’t give her credit for that one.”

“Give her credit if you like.” She lowered her head. “I came to say you were abused.”

“Used,” he corrected.

“She injured you.”

“And not Dr. Eklund? Dr. Eklund with his wonderful magnifying glass? Sherlock Holmes crossed with P. T. Barnum?”

“Not my father, no.”

“Your father,” he said vengefully.

“He injured you only a little.”

“Thank you, only a little. I’m grateful.”

“You injured him more. He isn’t recovered. He’ll never recover. You don’t know what you did. That’s why I’m here,” she said. “I came to tell you what you did.”

“What I did! I knocked out his handiwork. I suppose a thing like that can take an expert two or three months? Then it’s all right, he can just go ahead and put together another one.”

She said again, “You don’t know what you did. You didn’t know then and you don’t know now.”

“Well, if I knew, I’d be the expert, wouldn’t I? I imagine it needs the right kind of ink, and the right kind of pen, and the right kind of paper, and the right kind of gullibility. I imagine he can get those things. And useful sorts of manuscripts—stray letters, smuggled correspondence—to model the handwriting on, that’s the first. And after that a good storyteller like yourself—a natural Thespian I’d call you—and plenty of mishandling in the way that wrinkles up paper to make it age in a hurry, comings and goings in bags and jugs and maybe even shoes and ovens, and dunking in puddles—all that’s technical, I don’t know how it’s done. But mainly it’s having the right story that counts—it’s the story, isn’t it?”

“You literary parasites.” She was all thick scorn; the boy stirred in her arms. She was a madonna of contempt. “Revenge and illusion, illusion and revenge! You think everything is imagination. There’s more to the world than just imagination.”

“Money,” Lars suggested. “Isn’t that what the family business is for?”

The boy shuddered; he was all at once awake. Heavily he lifted his acorn chin and looked sidelong around the cubicle. In the darkness of the doorway, upright on its haunches, a khaki mouse squatted. It was trembling all over. Its ears wavered; its whiskers shook; it held up its little paws like the hands of a child.

The boy cried out: a long shriek, and slipped to the floor.

“I’ve got to take him away.”

“You shouldn’t have brought him. A sick kid like that.”

“What do you know about it?” The thickness of her scorn.

He felt she was right. It struck him—he thought of Karin’s thrown-out paint set, Karin herself stolen away to America—it struck him that he had exchanged his daughter’s hot life for a heap of gray ash. Illusion, illusion! And money. Wasn’t he himself alive because of a mercenary traveler’s family