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

a bowel, or a brain. But this is only by way of hint and suggestiveness, not analogy or example. The Messiah’s origin—or, at least, the roost it was reputed to have climbed out of—was the cellar of, of all places, the Drohobycz synagogue. A very old man had once lived down there for as long as anyone could remember. Generations knew that Moses the Righteous One, as he was called, slept on the mammoth bundle of hay that was both his merchandise and his shop. He was a vender of hay, and also a famous saint. Beggars came streaming to his cavern, and he sent them away with whatever he had in his pockets. Lately the cellar was, of course, vacant.

The idols believed that Moses the Righteous One’s hay was somehow stuffed into the inmost composition of the Messiah, like a scarecrow. This was false. More than anything else, the Messiah (Lars noted) resembled a book—The Book, in fact, that in one of the tales in Sanatorium pod Klepsydra had been likened to a huge cabbage rose: the petals, one by one, eyelid under eyelid, all blind, velvety, and dreamy. This Book had also been set forth as a postulate; and again as the authentic Book, the holy original, however degraded and humiliated at present. In appearance it seemed to be fabricated of various commonplace inanimate materials, none of them costly or in any way precious—cotton, cardboard, glue, thread, and not a wisp of hay anywhere. Its locomotion was dimly frightening, but also somewhat hobbled and limited: it had several hundred winglike sails that tossed themselves either clockwise or counterclockwise, like the arms of a windmill. But these numerous “arms” were, rather, more nearly flippers—altogether flat, freckled all over with inky markings, and reminiscent, surely, of turning pages. The flippers did indeed have the moist texture of petals, however, and their peculiar tattoos certainly put one in mind of some postulate recorded in an archaic signification—a type of cuneiform, perhaps, though it was impossible to say what this unreadable text might be proposing as thesis or axiom. When examined with extreme attention—better yet, when scrutinized through a magnifying glass (the author’s assertion; there were no human eyes on the scene to do this)—the inky markings showed themselves to be infinitely tiny and brilliantly worked drawings of these same idols that had taken hold of the town of Drohobycz. It was now clear that Drohobycz had been invaded by the characters of an unknown alphabet.

Meanwhile the structure itself, its stippled flippers continually revolving, sending out a grand ululation of wind, creaked with its own ancientness, about to break down, cave in, or simply fly apart—when, out of the caldron of that great wind, a small bird was suddenly flung up; it carried in its beak a single strand of dried hay.

It was a birth. The Messiah had given birth to a bird, and the moment the bird flew living out of the relentlessly wheeling contrivance that had been the Messiah, the thing—or organism—collapsed with the noise of vast crashings and crushings, cardboard like stone, cotton like bone, granite petal on brazen postulate: degraded and humiliated. The keen little bird, toiling, thrashed from idol to idol, exerting its fragile wing-muscles, and touching every idol with its bit of hay. And then there rose up out of Drohobycz the sound of lamentation and elegy, as the bonfires were extinguished, and the idols were dissolved into sparks by the tiny wand of hay flicked here and there by the poor thrashing bird, until the town was desolate, empty streets and empty shops and empty houses, and the flecks of sparks fading to ash.

The human beings—gone; the idols—gone; only this small beating bird born of an organism called the Messiah, and dim wails dying…

14

there was, Lars saw, a lie in the room.

“You didn’t come for a translator,” he told Adela. “It wasn’t that. Even if I could.”

“Even if you could.” Dr. Eklund busied himself gathering up the pages of The Messiah. He reached his bulky sea captain’s arm down to the floor after the brass amphora; his sleeve, swinging on its own, gave Adela’s ear a quick slap. “You see? There you have it, miss. In my judgment there’s no doubt, and I say it again—none. The hand of the artist.”

“The hand,” Heidi echoed, “of the artist.” It seemed to Lars he was in the kitchen of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, when the trance is broken and all the pots begin to boil again. It was as if Heidi had switched herself back on. And what was it, after all, that had put these women into trance?

Adela—bounced out of somnolence—had snatched the sheets from Dr. Eklund and was stuffing them, in bunches, back into the brass amphora.

“No, my dear, this is not the way. You are mishandling matter valuable in the extreme—”

“Immensely valuable. Immensely, immensely,” Heidi said.

“Don’t tell me that. I’m the one who found them! I’m the one they belong to. I’m the daughter of the man who wrote them.”

Heidi threw out her doglike laugh.

“This man’s papers belong to the world,” Dr. Eklund said. “He said”—Adela shot her arrow at Lars—“they belong to him.”

“Please. No rancor. The question is what is to be done. A decision, yes? We must come to a decision.”

So Dr. Eklund too had a “we.”

“I’m out of it,” Lars said.

“Oh, you’re in it. Lars, you’re definitely in it,” Heidi argued. “Look how you’re involved!”

“If he kept my key,” Dr. Eklund said.

“If he kept my hat,” Adela said.

How alike their two voices were!

Lars scoffed: “She said she was looking for a translator.”

“Translation is the least of it,” Heidi said. “Stockholm’s swarming with Polish translators.”

“The Princess.”

“Better than that.”

“Dr. Eklund, then.”

“I told you, he has more important things.”

Match after failed match; Dr. Eklund was tending his pipe again. “This work,” he announced, “will live to enter every language on the planet.”

“The planet?” Heidi said. “Put the planet aside, Olle, and think of Stockholm.”

“Yes, start with Stockholm,” Adela