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

in mind of Karin’s small slippery body, sad years ago, ripping free of him; it had been Ulrika’s game to provoke Karin against him. Adela was pliant enough; it was only her lip that was hard. Her head, pulling back, was all at once new: he took in the graven trenches at the roots of her eyes, the white thistles speckled through her hair, the momentary glimmer of child—it was all new. She was not what she had been. He had imagined himself a looking-glass Adela; he had imagined her his sister. She was not his sister. A conspiratorial illusion. She was as unlike him as it was in the power of nature to contrive. She belonged to another line. His mother—that omission—was not her mother, whoever her mother might be. Whoever had fathered him had not fathered her.

Then he saw—a wind flew through his brain—who had fathered her.

Adela was released. Dr. Eklund had released her. She stood a little to the side of him. She was not willing to meet his look again.

Heidi let herself down on her cot and sighed. “Can’t we come to an agreement? All you have to do is agree.”

“I don’t know what you want me to agree to,” Lars said.

“You do know. You know exactly.”

“There’s money in it,” Adela said thinly; but this mildness and thinness held a fleeting brutality, like faint lightning far away.

“The value of the sublime,” Dr. Eklund said.

Their plausibly concocting voices—they might have been two urns of the same ancestry, shape for shape, turn for turn.

“It wouldn’t be out of your own brain,” Heidi said. “It wouldn’t be like that eye—it’s something you could set straight out in the light. As solid as that jar.”

“Again this eye. What is this eye?” Dr. Eklund asked.

“Don’t talk about it,” Lars said roughly. “Didn’t I tell you it’s over and done with?”

Adela hung back; she was very quiet. Lars noticed for the first time how her nose showed a narrow sharp bone. Dr. Eklund’s was different. The puny centerpiece of Dr. Eklund’s great spread-out face was a quick round spurt of tallow sliced through by two long slashes. So it wasn’t to be found there: the rest of the likeness. Then it might be somewhere else, it might be something altogether other—some way of starting or stopping this or that muscle. It wasn’t in their features—not nose or lip or eye. Lars didn’t know where it was. It was enough that he felt it, and not only in their voices. Of their voices he was certain.

“It’s true,” he said.

“Keep away,” Adela said.

But he had begun. He was driving toward her. It wasn’t the ape. The ape was dead; its carcass was a dead weight on his lung. It was himself now, it was the blast of his own force that drove him.

“Oh yes, it’s true, I can see for myself it’s true, and I apologize.”

“There!” said Heidi. “I told you he’d apologize!”

“I didn’t think it was true, but now I see it is. It’s just the way you said it was. You’re the daughter.”

“Don’t come near me,” Adela said.

He raised his arm. He knew how terrible his arm was, high up—how he wanted to knock her down! How he wanted to stamp on her face, on the beautiful little bird-bone of her nose! How he wanted to trample on the dove-colored feathers of her hair!

“You’re the daughter of the author of The Messiah, that’s who you are. And the author of The Messiah is Dr. Eklund.” An ugly noise went rattling against the brass amphora like a thrown coin: his old croak, or knot, or rasp, or whatever it was: the ape’s sprawling carcass cast loose. “It’s a forgery, isn’t it? Mrs. Eklund, it’s a forgery, admit it! It’s a forgery, and you want me to pass it off for you. To legitimate it. How easy it is, I’m just the one to do it! To pass it into the world, admit it!”

“What a spiteful version you’ve got,” Heidi sent out from her cot; but she was appealing to Dr. Eklund.

Lars turned on Adela: “Your version’s not the one.”

“What do you know about Drohobycz? What’s Drohobycz to you?” Adela said in her new thin voice, with its distant dim flashes. His arm was high up. She was under his lifted arm. The daffodil spilled out its yellow syrup, and his arm shadowed her mouth and neck and chin; and hadn’t her own arms made a darkness over his quilt, hadn’t she blotted out his father’s eye with her outstretched arms?

“Let the barbarian dare,” Dr. Eklund warned, “and the barbarian pays.”

“I’m the barbarian? I’m the one who pays?” Lars yelled.

“In the long run, if you’re willing”—but Heidi’s crooked golden mouth was plunged into her pillow—“it’s going to pay.”

“I’ll show you what pays, I’ll show you”—and beat his arm through a descending gale, the fingers hooked, the fingers on fire, ready to pluck, sweeping past the blackening scorn of Adela’s lightning eyes—how he wanted to pluck them out, to dig them out with his fingernails, to pound on her rustling dovelike head, how he wanted to break her, to plunder her face, how she had toyed with him, how she had blotted out his father’s eye, how she had orphaned him, how she had mocked and nullified the author of The Messiah…. It was a tiny stick he dived for instead: one of Dr. Eklund’s matches on the little back-room table, dropped near the base of the brass amphora.

The first one was no good. The tip was charred; it was burnt out. The table was littered with these tiny charred sticks. He found a clean unused one and struck it and threw it down the throat of the brass amphora and watched the steeple of fire rise straight out of it like the flame from an ogre’s nostril. The jar shook, it roared, it seemed to howl; it was as if an unholy beast were rocking in there, drubbing on the inside walls, howling out