The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (beginner reading books for adults TXT) 📕

“…its intuitive character,” Heidi finished. “Nincompoopery. 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 officer’s Jew and gunned him down. The S.S. man was said to be the Gestapo officer’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