The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  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. “Dif cult 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 unreal 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 Adela.”

  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 hand 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 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. When there’s fire there’s a match. Those hospital rounds. The Danish prima ballerina. A wheeler-dealer in shady manuscripts, that 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 heir-loom 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 in mind of Karin’s small slippery body, sad years ago, ripping free of him; it had been Ulrika’s game to provoke Karin against him. Adela was pliant enough; it was only her lip that was hard. Her head, pulling back, was all at once new: he took in the graven trenches at the roots of her eyes, the white thistles speckled through her hair, the momentary glimmer of child—it was all new. She was not what she had been. He had imagined himself a looking-glass Adela; he had imagined her his sister. She was not his sister. A conspiratorial illusion. She was as unlike him as it was in the power of nature to contrive. She belonged to another line. His mother—that omission—was not her mother, whoever her mother might be. Whoever had fathered him had not fathered her.

  Then he saw—a wind flew through his brain—who had fathered her.

  Adela was released. Dr. Eklund had released her. She stood a little to the side of him. She was not willing to meet his look again.

  Heidi let herself down on her cot and sighed. “Can’t we come to an agreement? All you have to do is agree.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to agree to,” Lars said.

  “You do know. You know exactly.”

  “There’s money in it,” Adela said thinly; but this mildness and thinness held a fleeting brutality, like faint lightning far away.

  “The value of the sublime,” Dr. Eklund said.

  Their plausibly concocting voices—they might have been two urns of the same ancestry, shape for shape, turn for turn.

  “It wouldn’t be out of your own brain,” Heidi said. “It wouldn’t be like that eye—it’s something you could set straight out in the light. As solid as that jar.”

  “Again this eye. What is this eye?” Dr. Eklund asked.

  “Don’t talk about it,” Lars said roughly. “Didn’t I tell you it’s over and done with?”

  Adela hung back; she was very quiet. Lars noticed for the first time how her nose showed a narrow sharp bone. Dr. Eklund’s was different. The puny centerpiece of Dr. Eklund’s great spread-out face was a quick round spurt of tallow sliced through by two long slashes. So it wasn’t to be found there: the rest of the likeness. Then it might be somewhere else, it might be something altogether other—some way of starting or stopping this or that muscle. It wasn’t in their features—not nose or lip or eye. Lars didn’t know where it was. It was enough that he felt it, and not only in their voices. Of their voices he was certain.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “Keep away,” Adela said.

  But he had begun. He was driving toward her. It wasn’t the ape. The ape was dead; its carcass was a dead weight on his lung. It was himself now, it was the blast of his own force that drove him.

  “Oh yes, it’s true, I can see for myself it’s true, and I apologize.”

  “There!” said Heidi. “I told you he’d apologize!”

  “I didn’t think it was true, but now I see it is. It’s just the way you said it was. You’re the daughter.”

  “Don’t come near me,” Adela said.

  He raised his arm. He knew how terrible his arm was, high up—how he wanted to knock her down! How he wanted to stamp on her face, on the beautiful little bird-bone of her nose. How he wanted to trample on the dove-colored feathers of her hair!

  “You’re the daughter of the author of The Messiah, that’s who you are. And the author of The Messiah is Dr. Eklund.” An ugly noise went rattling against the brass amphora like a thrown coin: his old croak, or knot, or rasp, or whatever it was: the ape’s sprawling carcass cast loose. “It’s a forgery, isn’t it? Mrs. Eklund, it’s a forgery, admit it! It’s a forgery, and you want me to pass it off for you. To legitimate it. How easy it is, I’m just the one to do it! To pass it into the world, admit it!”

  “What a spiteful version you’ve got,” Heidi sent out from her cot; but she was appealing to Dr. Eklund.

  Lars turned on Adela: “Your version’s not the one.”

  “What do you know about Drohobycz? What’s Drohobycz to you?” Adela said in her new thin voice, with its distant dim flashes. His arm was high up. She was under his lifted arm. The daffodil spilled out its yellow syrup, and his arm shadowed her mouth and neck and chin; and hadn’t her own arms made darkness over his quilt, hadn’t she blotted out his father’s eye with her out-stretched arms?

  “Let the barbarian dare,” Dr. Eklund warned, “and the barbarian pays.”

  “I’m the barbarian? I’m the one who pays?” Lars yelled.

  “In the long run, if you’re willing”—but Heidi’s crooked golden mouth was plunged into her pillow—“it’s going to pay.”

  “I’ll show you what pays, I’ll show you”—and beat his arm through a descending gale, the fingers hooked, the fingers on fire, ready to pluck, sweeping past the blackening scorn of Adela’s lightning eyes—how he wanted to pluck them out, to dig them out with his fingernails, to pound on her rustling dovelike head, how he wanted to break her, to plunder her face, how she had toyed with him, how she had blotted out his father’s eye, how she had orphaned him, how she had mocked and nullified the author of The Messiah . . . It was a tiny stick he dived for instead: one of Dr. Eklund’s matches on the little back-room table, dropped near the base of the brass amphora.

  The first one was no good. The tip was charred; it was burned out. The table was littered with these tiny charred sticks. He found a clean unused one and struck it and threw it down the throat of the brass amphora and watched the steeple of fire rise straight out of it like the flame from an ogre’s nostril. The jar shook, it roared, it seemed to howl; it was as if an unholy beast were rocking in there, drubbing on the inside walls, howling out its dying.

  Adela was on the floor—flogged, crumpled, thrashed. He had not touched her even with the brush of his little finger. But her head was twisted round: the vertical trenches took on the bitter horizontal look of an equal sign. Her bird-bone nose streamed. “There’s your priest, you called him priest—”

  “Douse it, douse it!” Dr. Eklund commanded.

  But Heidi had already catapulted from her cot to the kettle on the stove, and was pouring water into the flaming neck of the brass amphora. The fire fought back and would not give way; the steeple spurted higher, the roaring gargled louder, the jar went on chattering and boiling, battering the little table, dancing across it like a demon. It danced to the edge of the table and crashed down an inch from the heap that was Adela.

  “My shop! The whole place may catch, my God!”

  “Move! Watch your hair! Out of the way!” With all the orderly brutishness of his captain’s shoe Dr. Eklund kicked at Adela to make her roll.

  She rolled and moaned.

  “Quiet, keep quiet, can’t you? Olle, fill it again, fill it,” and handed over the kettle to Dr. Eklund; meanwhile Heidi stamped on the big burned cabbage leaves that were creeping out of the brass amphora—curling black sheets with delicately crimped ruffs glowing red. A flood came shooing down through the smoke. “There, we’ve got it, fill it again—”

  The brass amphora had turned black at the lip: it wobble
d, sputtered, expired; it smoked and smoked. The rivers flying down its hot flanks steamed among cinders. The smoke rummaged.

  Heidi flailed at her eyes with a piece of her sleeve. “You’ve put us inside a chimney! Spiteful! Deranged!”

  Dr. Eklund said coldly: “Arson.”

  “You’ve sizzled us!”

  Adela murmured from the floor, “Didn’t I say he’d do anything—”

  “Fake,” Lars said.

  “And aren’t you the one who forged his father? Refuge impostor! The pot,” Heidi blazed at him, “calling the kettle black.”

  “Barbarian.” Dr. Eklund spat down on the blackened amphora: a sneeze of steam leaped up. “I could make that? I, I? A seraph made it! Idiocy—I could make that? Instinct’s the maker. Transfiguration, is this your belief? Conspiracy gives birth to masterwork? You had your look, you saw! You think what’s born sublime can be connived at? How? How, without that dead man’s genius? What is there to empower such an impersonation?” The smoke snatched him then; the sea captain was now a Chinese mandarin in the grip of an encrusted language moving through powerful forms; he fell into a long clamor of coughing. He coughed and whitened. “Do you think there is a magical eye that drops from heaven to inspire? Barbarian, where is such an eye?”

  “Mrs. Eklund,” Lars addressed her, “it isn’t just the shop, is it? There’s more to the family business than just the shop.” His feet churned through puddles, he felt himself drenched in smoke. “It isn’t only getting people in and getting people out—it’s not even a matter of taking people in, that’s the wonder. You took me in—you hooked me practically from the start. A pack of swindlers, I don’t care—that’s not the family business. You want to be in competition with God, that’s the thing.”