The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  They settled in to their night’s work: the recitation of scraps. By now they had gathered up every shred and grain; still, their stock was small. Heidi had discovered on her own shelves—misplaced behind Tuwim the poet—Lars’s father’s translation of Kafka’s The Trial. Lars was less pleased with this than she had expected. He complained that he didn’t care for his father in the role of the dummy on Franz Kafka’s lap; it was his father’s own voice he was after. But when Heidi somehow finagled from a dealer she was acquainted with a brittle browning copy of the Warsaw weekly in which “The Comet” had first appeared, Lars felt an onion-sting of joy. His nose moistened. It was like coming on a missing pair of gloves—how it warmed his hands! The look of Polish had begun finally to fit his eye-sockets without estrangement, and it was the weight in his heated hands of that dog-eared rust-speckled journal, dated fifty years back, that made him forgive the Princess for casting him out. He didn’t need her; he was on his own. He read—he could read!—how the father in “The Comet” thrusts a microscope into a chimney shaft and examines the starlight that has infiltrated into the sooty darkness: the star is composed of a human brain with an embryo sunk inside. Heidi was indifferent to the notion of a homunculus in the sky. She told Lars it was all madness. Images in magnetic batches. She scolded him for turning his father into some sort of ceremonial mystification; there was a smoldering cultishness in all of it. His father’s tales—animism, sacrifice, mortification, repugnance! Everything abnormal, everything wild.

  Still, Heidi stuck by him; she wasn’t throwing him out, like the Princess. Heidi appeared to be as absorbed in their little stock as he was: together they combed through the letters, one by one, taking turns reading them out. With their heads close they gazed into the photographs. Lars’s young father was always the central figure, the only male, ringed round by women. Lars memorized each woman’s face. One of these might easily be the face of his father’s lover—any one of them. Any one of them might be Lars’s own mother. Heidi disagreed: Lars’s father—they knew this from the letters—was too withdrawn, too isolated, too obsessive, to have gone casually into a woman’s bed. And the women themselves: these faces: they were too worldly, too lightly content, too exterior, to belong to someone who might become Lars’s father’s lover. His lover must be elsewhere, in a secret place beyond the photos. She would need to be a poet. There were so many letters written to literary women. Romana Halpern? No. Zofia Nalkowska? No. Deborah Vogel? No. All these candidates were, for this and that good reason, wrong. Besides, there was the fact of Jozefina: the Catholic fiancée, still alive. An old woman. Well into her eighties, perhaps, living in London.

  “You should go over there,” Heidi said, “and find out her side of the story. Before it’s too late.”

  “What do I need London for? We know her side. She wanted to settle in Warsaw after the wedding. She even spoke of Paris. And he wouldn’t budge out of Drohobycz. Stuck. Paralyzed.”

  “She’s a living witness to the man. She could tell you things. She could tell you why the wedding didn’t come off. You should talk to her.”

  Lars said grimly, “She was his enemy.”

  “She loved him more than he loved her—he said so himself! As if we didn’t read exactly that letter less than a week ago! As if I hadn’t broken my head getting hold of that letter!”

  “She wanted him to be normal,” Lars said.

  They went back and forth in this way, on every point, piecing things out, quarreling. Tracings, leavings, enigmatic vestiges—over each tendril they had their calculations and speculations and probings and puzzlings. Drohobycz itself a puzzle: a place recorded on the map of Poland only in the tiniest print. It was hardly there at all. To push through into the scenery and substance of Drohobycz was like entering a pinhole. The hasidim of the neighborhood—gone. Lars’s father’s father’s shop—a drygoods business—gone. Nothing left; not a ribbon, not a thimble. Between Drohobycz and Lars’s father there had occurred a mutual digestion. Street by street, house by house, shop by shop, Lars’s father had swallowed Drohobycz whole; Drohobycz was now inside every tale. And Drohobycz had swallowed Lars’s father also: a drab salary, a job he despised, a band of relatives to support—paralyzed, stuck, how was it possible to leave? Lars’s father was a gargoyle on the flank of Drohobycz, a mole on its inmost sinew. Once he traveled to Warsaw. Once he traveled to Lvov. Once he even went as far as Paris! But in the end he came home to be digested. All those weighty names Heidi recited out of the letters, poets and painters and philosophers and novelists, sometimes two or three in the same person—Stanislaus Witkiewicz, for instance, famously nicknamed Witkacy—what kind of living ghost did they think they were addressing, a high school teacher of arts and crafts, smeared with provincial paste and paint? Underground, immobile, cut off. Jozefina wanted him baptized after their engagement. He refused, but offered a concession: he would forsake the world of the Jews. His family had anyhow always kept their distance from the teeming outlandish hasidim in their long black coats. He was a Pole: he had already thrown himself on the unyielding breast of mother Poland, and nestled into the underside of her tongue. If he had ever sipped a word or two of Yiddish out of the air, it did not ride his spittle or his pen.

  These were their accumulations and incidentals. They understood how little they had. They folded and unfolded the layers of Lars’s father’s thin life—it grew thinner yet. They had scratched out of Drohobycz all there was to scratch, and out of the poor fiancée the same. They were, they saw, nearly finished—it was squeezing milk from a stone to hope for more. The rest was quotations, excerpts, recitations. Vyings. Heidi had traced down a handwritten memoir: an account of a dinner party at which Lars’s father and his fiancée are guests. Lars’s father eats without emitting a syllable, mute; meanwhile the elegant Jozefina is animated, talkative. The bride chirps, the bridegroom is dumb. The memoirist thinks to herself: There will be no bread from this flour. An old proverb, and prophetic: no marriage followed. And one night Lars telephoned from the Morgontörn to announce the recovery, from Anders’s trash basket, of an American review. An American review! An amazement. Both books are reviewed. In America they call Cinnamon Shops by another name: The Street of Crocodiles, after one of the most horrifying of the tales. The second book is called in English Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass—an endless train of hissings. The lost third one isn’t mentioned. “He’s reached across finally,” Lars said, agitated, “he’s passed beyond little Europe.” He promised to bring the review to Heidi’s shop within the hour, to lay it, so to speak, at her feet. It seemed to him that hers was the only brain in Stockholm able to value such an offering. But when he arrived the black mustaches were wobbling: she was all victory and spite. She flashed at him an out-of-the-way periodical.

  “Look what’s here! A letter! A new one. Published for the first time.” There was an engine in her breathing; she was pumping out elation. “He’s writing in 1934. Eight years before the shooting. Listen to this! I need a companion. I need a kindred spirit close by me. I long for an acknowledgment of the inner world whose existence I postulate. And you think you can come in here bragging about finding an American review! What’s a review? Nothing. Listen! I would like to lay my burden on someone else’s shoulder for a moment. I need a partner in discovery—”

  Lars said hoarsely, “Where did you get all that?”

  “I keep my eye out. I have my sources. If there’s something that hasn’t come home to roost, leave it to me to dig it up.”

  “He means me,” Lars said. “I’m the one he means.”

  “Please. So much and no farther. This is years before you were born.”

  “You don’t understand him. You don’t know. He’s thinking of the future. A laying-on of hands. He’s thinking ahead.”

  “He’s thinking of a woman,” Heidi said. “It’s a woman he wants. A partner in discovery—that’s a wife, isn’t it?”

  “A son. An acknowledgment of the inner world—it can’t be a wi
fe. He keeps his privacy, it’s not a wife he wants. He never had a wife. He can give up Jozefina, but not solitude. Solitude is just the thing he won’t give up. The burden is sent ahead—a signal through the genes. The partner in discovery is the next generation.”

  Heidi struck off a click of exasperation. “If he isn’t looking for a woman, why else are there all those letters to women?”

  “Ha!” Lars said; he felt the advantage shift. He could outthink her; he would make her pay for belittling the American review. “The life of a recluse—nobody comes in or out of the house, except through letters. He lives on correspondence. People leave him alone. The mitigation of solitude without the bother of human flesh.”

  “Your mother,” Heidi tossed back, “wasn’t a piece of paper.”

  “My father turned everything into paper.” He took in a brief preparatory pinch of air. “Reality is as thin as paper—”

  “Don’t spout that again. I know what it’s going to be. It’s what you always—”

  “Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks . . .”

  “. . . its intuitive character,” Heidi finished. “Nincom-poopery. Standing things on their head. What’s real is real.”

  She fell back into her chair under the daffodil; she had the sleepy look he often thought to be secretive. He was conscious once again of having bested her. It had become a contest between them—a contest of assimilation and disclosure. She had, for a while, pulled up equal with him, shoulder to shoulder; she was right there beside him. She comprehended, she engulfed, she devoured. She had things—she had facts, she had everything he had; she knew and kept it all. And in the end she was no more than an onlooker. It wasn’t fair: even when she pulled up equal she wasn’t equal; she could never be equal, because the author of Cinnamon Shops, the author of Sanatorium, the author of the vanished Messiah, wasn’t her father. Lars had to be, in the nature of it, ahead—always, always; he was his father’s son.

  She punished him for it by orphaning him; again and again she led him back to the shooting. She came to it by a dozen routes. Each time it was a surprise, an ambush. She could begin anywhere, and still she would smash Lars into Thursday, that Thursday, the Thursday of the shooting: Thursday the nineteenth of November. They discovered—Heidi’s research—that the terrible day had a name among the Jews of Drohobycz: Black Thursday. And the hunt itself, the hunt for Jews in the streets, was called “the wild action.” No matter how wary Lars tried to be, Heidi was canny enough to catch him up in the wild action. Her snares were ingenious. Had Lars been mooning once more over the missing Messiah? It ended in the wild action; in a camp; in murder. It was known that Lars’s father had handed over the manuscript—to whom? when?—for its preservation. What had become of The Messiah and its keeper? Was its keeper man or woman, neighbor or stranger? Killed in the wild action, on Black Thursday? Or else deported, gassed. The corpse thrown into the oven; smoke up the chimney. And The Messiah? If its keeper was shot in the street, was The Messiah scattered loose in the gutter, to be chewed over by dogs, to rot in the urine of cats? Or was The Messiah shut up in an old dresser in a house in Drohobycz until this day? Or put out with the trash thirty-five years ago? Or left tangled between its keeper’s coat and shoes in the mountain of coats and shoes behind a fence in the place of death?

  Whatever they touched on, Heidi rattled her links—everything belonged to the shooting. Everything was connected to the shooting. Were they leafing through Lars’s father’s drawings? They were sure to run into the wild action; the wild action was irresistible. The drawings were unearthly enough on their own—dwarfish, askew, psychological, symbolical. Abnormal. The drawings, what were they? Frozen panic. Wildness transfixed. Lars’s father himself, in a letter to Witkacy, spoke of them as predestined images, ready and waiting for us at the very beginning of life. There was one of a top-hatted gentleman who has just walked out of an arbor into town; an importuning thick-necked beast in a business suit—a dog of some kind—is resting a heavy paw on the gentleman’s elbow, urging, entreating. Some distance off, hidden among trees, a man stands watching, his whole head swallowed by leafiness. This picture had attracted the taste of a certain Gestapo officer. On account of the drawings he undertook to become the artist’s “protector.” The Gestapo officer gave Lars’s father a special pass out of the ghetto—they had set up a little ghetto in Drohobycz—to the Aryan side of town. There was bread on that side, so off Lars’s father went. It was the day of the wild action, the S.S. out suddenly in swarms; even so, Lars’s father was not shot randomly. An S.S. man recognized him as the Gestapo of cer’s Jew and gunned him down. The S.S. man was said to be the Gestapo of cer’s “rival.” Rival in what? Rival for what?

  “You make everything come out in the same place,” Lars complained. “The wrong place. That’s not how it’s supposed to go. You get me off the track. You make me lose the thread.”

  “The thread? The thread? What’s this thread? What’s this track?”

  “My father’s books. His sentences.”

  “Nouns and verbs! You think that’s what it’s about, nouns and verbs? Sentences! Subjects! Predicates! Pieces of paper!”

  “Language. Literature. My father’s”—he let out a sigh no wider than a filament—“genius.”

  “Go knock at the door of the Academy and tell them to let your father in.”

  “They’d have given him the Prize if he’d lived.”

  “Well, maybe there’s still a chance. Maybe they’ll change the rules and start giving it to skeletons.”

  A shock: she could see straight through to the skeleton. Without warning he understood how it was that Heidi could make him afraid. Skeletons. Everyone who walked by her. All her refugee customers. Probably even that Turkish boy—she abused him, she barked at him. Not to mention Lars’s ex-tutor, the phony Princess, who was plump enough. And what of Dr. Eklund? Dr. Eklund, turning beside her in bed in the rushings of the night—the big connubial bed of their flat—did she drill clear through to the xylophone of the ribs? And the tall infantile graying head of Lars Andemening: no more than a clean skull when she stared across at him with her sleepy sidewise mouth?

  He shouted, “Maybe you like it that they shot him dead in the streets! Maybe you have affectionate feelings for the S.S.! Nostalgia for the Gestapo!”

  His head felt all skull. He watched her stand up, straining from the chair: an old woman.

  “Prove you’re your father’s son,” she commanded. “Why don’t you prove it? I don’t say prove he’s a genius. I don’t say prove his nouns and verbs. I say prove he’s your father.”

  “I know his voice. I know his mind.” A pressure of telling rose in him. He wanted to tell her that he knew his father’s eye; but he did not.

  “Why don’t you pick Kafka to be the son of? Then people would have some recognition. They’d be impressed. They’d look around at you.”

  “I know who my father is. I know him inside out. I know more than anyone.”

  “You know him inside out,” she sang. “You’ve collected him, you’re a collector!”

  “Sometimes,” Lars said slowly, “his words come out of my mouth.”

  “You’re a reviewer! You write reviews! Nobody gets the Nobel Prize for writing on Mondays!”

  Very slowly he began to tell. A stone lay on his tongue; but he began. “When I wake up,” he said heavily, “I can see my father’s eye. It seems to be my eye, but it’s his. As if he lets me have his own eye to look through.”

  “You want to resurrect him. You want to be him.” She did not soften. “Mimicry. Posing in a mirror. What’s the point of it? What will it bring you? You throw out your life.”

  “And your life?” The stone fell away. “If you think there’s no point, how come you’re in it? You’re in it as much as I am. More. You’ve found all the best things. The letters. Everything from Warsaw. If it’s not worth my while, how is it worth yours?”

  “When Dr. Eklund’s away it passes the time.” S
he sank back under the lamp; she lifted her hand and switched it off. “Dr. Eklund warned me long ago against sleeping in daylight. It induces hallucinations. Poor Lars, you’re a visionary. There’s no use to it. If I didn’t have my shop to keep me on my toes, I’d nap in the afternoon like you.”

  The last syllables swam into black space. A trickle of light from the street drifted through the mullioned door.

  Lars came and hunched himself on the floor beside her.

  “Do you want coffee?” she suddenly asked him.

  “No.”

  “Take some vodka.”

  “No.”

  “Then you’d better go home. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I’m not coming back,” he said.

  A fragment of laughter scraped the darkness.

  Lars said, “No, it’s finished. What I get from you is mockery. Enough.”

  “You want to be taken on faith.”

  “Trust. I want trust.”

  “Vapor and smoke. Stories, letters—they’re all someone’s hallucination. How do you know you weren’t born right here in Stockholm? An infant, smuggled! It’s only a story. You don’t know anything for sure. Your mother’s a cloud, your father’s a fog. There’s nothing reliable in any of it.”

  “Except the shooting. You believe in that.”

  “Death’s reliable.”

  She was all at once discomposed; she flung out her hands. The gesture of an oracle. He was astonished—she was surrendering her own old landscape, she was taking her turn. It was her life—the life before—she was giving him, out of the blue: the life before Dr. Eklund. She pressed it out in the swoop of two or three lines—her arms a line in the black air, the fence a row of black lines. It appeared before him in the dark with the clarified simplicity of a charcoal drawing—a predestined image. He followed the black lines, he traced her, there at the fence, heaving lumps over it to the shadows on the other side: as a young woman she had lived, she said, in a village not far from one of those camps, and crept at night as often as she could without detection to throw food over the fence. It was like a cage in there, crammed with dying beasts. She heard their scratchings, clawings, mufflings, muzzlings; they were all shadows; they were afraid to come near. She heard them tear into the paper wrappings; then they stuffed the wrappings into their sleeves, into their shoes; she heard them gulp and chew. Occasionally they vomited, or exploded, with cries like muzzled beasts, into floods of diarrhoea; she made out all this in the blind night by the sound and the pestilential smell. Often she heard shooting; there was no sense to the shooting, she could not tell where or why, it had no direction. Sometimes it seemed to come from between her own feet. And immediately after the war she picked up the daffodil lamp, only that, and a few old books, and traveled north across the border, leaving Germany behind. She would never go back. If she had a family there she did not mention it. In Stockholm she found Dr. Eklund and married him.