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

absorb her. There was a clownish anxiety in it. He was looking her over like a potential deckhand signing on for a voyage. He wasn’t sure she would do. He was ready to order, advise, interrogate.

Lars said, “I’ve got her hat in my house.”

Adela turned; Lars watched the startled tide rise in her face.

“It’s in my bed. Your hat.”

“You! This man, this insane man! It’s enough for one day! Why should he be here? Who asked him to come?” The two vertical trenches drew together like a pair of fence pickets. But it was more calculation than rage.

“No one asked him. He just turned up,” Heidi said.

“Because he had my key,” Dr. Eklund complained. “He took my key, that’s why.”

Adela clashed the brass amphora down on the little back-room table, an inch from Dr. Eklund’s cup. “He’ll say anything. He’ll do anything. The right thing would be to call the police.”

“Now that would be the wrong thing,” Dr. Eklund said.

“The police are for thieves, aren’t they?”

“Now, now. Hold on, please. A manuscript of dubious origin. We don’t yet know whether it is or it isn’t The Messiah.”

“That’s exactly the question Dr. Eklund’s going to settle,” Heidi said placatingly. It was as if she was being launched—was it by invisible confluences, was it by Dr. Eklund himself, was it really by the thought of the police?—on a peacekeeping mission. “You don’t have to worry about Lars. He’s had a crisis and it’s done with.”

Adela blew out a ferocious breath. “An assault! Oh yes, done with—I told him everything and he knocked me down.”

“Because you weren’t letting me have a look.”

“A look?” said Dr. Eklund. “A look at what?”

“The Messiah. She ran off with it in that bag.”

“He tried to steal it.”

“You should have let him have a look,” Dr. Eklund said severely.

“You should have let him,” Heidi said. “It wasn’t fair. Anyhow he’ll apologize, you’ll see. Lars, you’ll apologize, won’t you?”

“Never mind,” Dr. Eklund muttered; the whimsicality was drained out. “It gets late for our business. If she doesn’t want him, he should go away.”

Lars said, “Where’s that bag? You don’t have that bag with you.”

“I don’t have my hat,” Adela mocked.

“Why doesn’t he go?” Dr. Eklund said, fidgeting with another match.

It was remarkable: Dr. Eklund’s voice—the habit of emphasis, the hard little undulation in go—was exactly Adela’s. The sea captain and Adela were from some far part of the world—the same part. The same modulations, the same eruptions and lavalike descent of the vowels. It was clear they had once been neighbors, Dr. Eklund and Adela. And yet Adela was somehow a provocation. Dr. Eklund the sympathizer, Dr. Eklund the psychological twin—now here was Dr. Eklund trying to throw Lars out. The change had arrived with Adela. It was as if a warning vibration had been set off, some sudden machine or subtle alarm Lars could detect the hum of—in the background, behind the shelves, out of sight.

It made Heidi his unexpected advocate. “He has the right to stay, why shouldn’t he stay?” She was accommodatingly soft, she was amiable, she was all at once mollifying; she meant to take his part. “He cares about what’s in that manuscript more than anyone alive. It’s his mania,” she said, naming it like an awful contagion. “It’s what he concentrates on. I can’t claim he’s ever knocked me down to get at it. Not actually, not in my bones. But talk of assault! I’m the one who can testify to that! He’s gone after my brain, and isn’t that worse? He’s made me pick at all his leavings. I’ve had to chew over whatever he’s chewed. Such people get born, God knows how or to whom, to compensate for what isn’t there. They pour the strangest things into the void. Like sand into a sack.”

Mild babble: she kept on with it. She said she had become his slave, he had enslaved her to his concentration, to his obsession. His mind was no better than any other single-product manufacturing contraption. He had fettered her to it, he had fettered himself, and at the same time he was uncontrollable, he couldn’t be restrained. He was one of the century’s casualties, in his own way a victim. He took on everyone’s loss; everyone’s foolish grief. Foolish because unstinting. Rescue was the only thought he kept in his head—he was arrogant about it, he was steady, he wanted to salvage every scrap of paper all over Europe. Europe’s savior! His head was full of Europe—all those obscure languages in all those shadowy places where there had been all those shootings—in the streets, in the forests. He had attached himself to the leavings of tyranny, tragedy, confusion.

“There’s no one else like him,” she finished. “Not anywhere. It’s just what Dr. Eklund says—a category of his own.”

Through all this Adela was flaunting a crooked caustic smile. “All right, a madman. You called him priest and you meant madman. Then why on earth would you send me to him? You sent me there!”

Heidi twisted her stout little torso. “You wanted a translator.”

“You knew he wouldn’t do it. And you sent me!”

“Well, I thought he should have a look.”

“The priest should have a look? Or the savior should? Or just the madman? Mrs. Eklund, he never considered translating. You knew that. Don’t tell me you didn’t! That’s why I didn’t let him have a look.”

“No, no,” Heidi protested, “you’re not following. The way he went after Polish—didn’t I see for myself how he went after Polish? He swallowed it right down. He’s after what’s primary—”

“He tells stupendous lies.”

“What he wants is the original of things. It’s what I said, it’s just what I told you. He’s a priest of the original—isn’t that what I told you?”

She was his advocate, she was taking his part. It was a sort of play. He was in a theater. Lars felt himself shut out. Behind a curtained proscenium—but the curtain was sealed against him—some unintelligible drama raged. Even as onlooker he had no rational