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

own names, do they? My father picked it. He told my mother to call me Adela. This was before I was born, when they knew she was pregnant. Then he was shot in the wild action, you’ve heard of the wild action? My mother ran to Brazil, she got out, even then. She could do it, she’s crafty that way. Even then.”

An electric jolt: the ape was hurled. “Your father—” Lars stood in his little space, between the table and the bed. The light was still brilliant, a great unholy glare: her head against it looked inky-dark. He could not see her eyes with the morning’s brilliance in his own. “It’s only a story,” he said. He did not say: Your mother’s a cloud, your father’s a fog. “Don’t go spreading such a thing—you’ll only do yourself damage. It isn’t possible. A figment. A lie.”

“Mrs. Eklund said you’d carry on.” But she faltered—he saw what her trouble was. There was a word and she was refusing it. She was resisting. “She said you’d act as if, as if—” She plucked up the white beret and came to stand with her face close to his. “As if you owned every syllable. Every syllable he ever put down.”

The breath of her voice steamed into his nostrils. Her voice was hot. How free she seemed, how like a bedouin!

“If that old fellow in Warsaw let you take away the manuscript—just like that—”

“Priest,” Adela threw out. “That’s what she said. You act like a priest!”

“—then the other version isn’t so.”

“There isn’t any other version. It’s only what I’ve told you.”

“Mrs. Eklund’s version. The one she got from you—that The Messiah was waiting for you to come and pick it up. There it was, in Warsaw. In Drohobycz. Under the ground. Under the arm of the man with the coat. God knows where it was! Loitering there—decades—waiting for you to turn up, all the way from Brazil! It was being saved, that’s the point. For the daughter.” He wanted to be raucous, he wanted to jeer; instead he found himself raveled in a simple-minded knot of a cough. “The daughter! They were keeping it for you.”

“They weren’t. It wasn’t being saved.”

“No one else could have gotten hold of it. Only the daughter.” He ended, “That’s Mrs. Eklund’s version.”

“I never told her any of that.”

“You never told her you’re the daughter—”

“I did. I am.” She gave him a look of fire. “A priest is just what’s needed. You’d be on your knees, wouldn’t you? On your knees to every word. You’d think you were anointed.”

“There can’t be a daughter,” Lars said.

“You won’t do it. I can see that. You won’t. You’re exactly the one to do it, but you won’t.”

“Mrs. Eklund’s going to introduce you to her Polish Princess, wait and see. The Princess translates a thousand times better than I can. Ask Mrs. Eklund.” He was perfectly serene: he was certain that the ape, exhausted at last, had foolishly dropped off. He said, “There’s no logic in the daughter business, is there? You can’t make it come out right. It won’t come out.”

She fixed him, eye to eye. Two vertical trenches like his own. “He was my mother’s art teacher. In the high school in Drohobycz. She was fifteen years old. She modeled for his drawings.”

His drawings! A mistake, a mistake!

Those photographs. Heidi had misled him. Or else he had misled Heidi. They had misled each other. They had misconceived. They had not known how to imagine. The photographs had arrested them; had held them. The photographs had held their heads like a pincers! Their heads, pinched together, side by side, peering into the faces in the circle of women. Always the circle of women. He, the author of The Messiah, the only male; the central figure; ringed round by women. Heidi testing those faces, scrutinizing, reconnoitering: together they had fallen into the eyes and mouths of these women. Not one of them was the lover. Not one. They had never thought of a child. They had never imagined a pupil. One of his pupils!

Adela said, “He used to take her home. He invented different costumes for her. He asked her to pose, to playact. You can see yourself if you want. You can look her up.”

“Look her up?”

“In the illustrations. She’s there in most of them. A little man in a top hat, with a giant dog. A boy with big buttons. A fellow in riding boots. A woman in high heels wearing a coat with a fur collar. All of those. Sometimes she’s naked.”

A pupil. The high school. Smeared with provincial paste and paint. The drawings! That triangular little jaw, those unearthly eyes, those tapered small torsos; dwindling little feet and toes. A child!

“The pregnancy frightened him,” she announced.

“Where are you going? You can’t—” He took desolate note of it: she was packing up. “Stop it, what are you doing? You haven’t let me see—” Now she was shoving the stack of papers—creased and assaulted—back into the white plastic bag.

“She loved him more than he loved her. He was afraid to be connected to anyone. In the end,” she flung back, “there was the wild action, so it didn’t matter.”

A stride like a pounce. Another; she was at the door.

“Don’t take it away. You haven’t let me have a look. I haven’t seen it. Wait!” he pleaded. “I haven’t told you my side.”

“I know your side. You don’t care. If you cared you would do it, you would work at putting it in the world.”

“No, no, it’s something else. Mrs. Eklund didn’t tell you—”

“I’ve contradicted something she said? All right, then you’ve shown me what you think. You think she can’t be relied on.”

“I haven’t shown you anything. You don’t know anything.”

He tore at her like a drunkard and snatched the bag from her grip.

“Give that back.”

“It’s mine,” he said.

“Give it back.”

“He’s my father. I’m his son!”

The foetal ape was awake, unfurled, raging; huge. The Messiah was light, light; it was not heavy