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

droplet; no dribble or drizzle or trickle. No ichor, godly or ungodly, of any kind. It was desert-dry all through. It was equally bare of any dust of sky—no planet, no star, no galaxy, no heaven, no blue, no infinity—and this was odd, because The Messiah, insofar as it could be determined to be “about” anything (and Lars, amnesiac, afterward forgot almost all of it), was about creation and redemption. It was a work of cosmogony and entelechy. Like everything else spilled out of the preternaturally cornucopian eye of the genie whom Lars had only that morning dreamed of as his own father, The Messiah had its “locality,” its place, its inch, its spot of tiny ground. The universe of The Messiah was Drohobycz, a town in Galicia.

Adela was not in it. Yet it was not quite right to say Adela was not in it. She was there, but not alive, and unnamed. At first she appeared as a bald rag doll left on a shelf—the scalp, however, was porcelain, and the lids could snap open and shut. On another page this same flexible doll was transmuted into rigidity: now she was a tailor’s dummy, canvas over bent wires. Elsewhere she had become one of those Mesopotamian priestly statues carved out of stone only for the sake of their terrifying smiles. Finally Lars took in that she had turned, with full purity of intent, into an idol. Her eyes were conventional green jewels. This idol, made of some artificial dead matter, was never called Adela, and did not in any way hint at being Adela. Though Lars could not claim that Adela was anywhere in the text, he recognized her all the same.

Drohobycz was now wholly peopled (but this word was unsuitable) by idols. Some were plump Buddhas in lotus position, unable to walk or move. They were carried on litters by miniature Egyptian figurines, several dozen for each litter. Others were mammoth Easter Island heads. Another was the monolatrous Ikhnaton, with his disease-deformed face and limbs, himself elevated to an idol. A great many were in the shape of large stone birds—falcons, eagles, vultures, hawks, oversized crows hewn out of black marble. Each of these idols was considered to be a great and powerful god or goddess, able to control the present and future of Drohobycz, and especially the past. There was one rather modest idol—it had the form of the owner of a drygoods shop—who could alter the last hundred years of the history of Drohobycz simply by the manipulation of a certain series of trouser buttons cleverly sewn into the flap of its caftan.

No human beings remained in Drohobycz; only hundreds and hundreds of idols. A few were contemptibly crude and ill-constructed, but most represented the inspired toil of armies of ingenious artisans, and there was actually a handful of master-works. The streets and shops were packed and milling with all these remarkable totems of wood, stone, pottery, silver and gold. Since there were no human beings to worship them, there was some confusion about their purpose. The more diffident among them, accordingly, undertook to adore the more aggressive; but at first this was not very typical. Each was accustomed to being regarded as sublime, each was expecting at any moment to discover a woman on her knees, a child bringing a basket of offerings, men in sacerdotal garments burning incense, or sacrificing a ram or even another human being; but there were no longer any human beings anywhere in Drohobycz. They had all gone on long, fatiguing journeys to other cities. All the former shopkeepers, for instance, were visiting their shopkeeper-cousins in Warsaw and Budapest. The high school teachers were touring the museums of Paris. Several would-be fiancées were languishing in London. The rest of the population was variously scattered, and could be rounded up, if need be, in Prague or Stockholm or Moscow or even as far away as New York, Montreal, and Tel Aviv.

The idols of Drohobycz were relatively passive and had no idea of how to go about rounding up their worshipers. It never occurred to any of them to do more than wander in and out of the town park, shuffle through the empty shops, and wait. It was as if every former inhabitant of Drohobycz had converted to atheism and fled. Religion had dried up in the churches as well as in the post office and the schools and the public library. And this was a pity, because the idols had never before been more beautifully polished, painted, and decorated than they were during their sojourn in Drohobycz. They were, to tell the truth, almost too enchanting, too seductive—which is probably why they started to bow to one another, and at length even to sacrifice to one another.

More and more frequently there were sacrificial bonfires all over Drohobycz. The taller and stronger idols began seizing the smaller and lesser idols and casting them into the flames. Bright-torsoed gods, and in particular the little Near Eastern goddesses with their fragile budding breasts and their necklaces fitted out with bits of mirror-burnished copper strung together on serpent-skin thongs, and occasionally even an exquisite miniature Venus-copy no bigger than a finger, were being chopped up or melted down to gratify the iron maw of some huge lazy Moloch. Day and night honeyed swirls of hot incense and the acrid smoky smell of roasting metal circled over Drohobycz.

The town was on fire, idols burning up idols in a frenzy of mutual adoration.

Then—matter-of-factly, with no fanfare—the Messiah arrived. (And almost immediately fell to pieces.)

His origin…no. You could not say “his” origin, or “her” origin, though the Messiah’s description didn’t quite justify an “it,” either. Still, the neuter will have to suffice. The Messiah was alive, organic, palpitating with wild motion and disturbance—yet not like a robot, not like a machine. It was as if a fundamental internal member had set out to live on its own in the great world—a spleen, say, or a pancreas, or