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

Adela was on the floor—flogged, crumpled, thrashed. He had not touched her even with the brush of his little finger. But her head was twisted round: the vertical trenches took on the bitter horizontal look of an equal sign. Her bird-bone nose streamed. “There’s your priest, you called him priest—”

“Douse it, douse it!” Dr. Eklund commanded.

But Heidi had already catapulted from her cot to the kettle on the stove, and was pouring water into the flaming neck of the brass amphora. The fire fought back and would not give way; the steeple spurted higher, the roaring gargled louder, the jar went on chattering and boiling, battering the little table, dancing across it like a demon. It danced to the edge of the table and crashed down an inch from the heap that was Adela.

“My shop! The whole place may catch, my God!”

“Move! Watch your hair! Out of the way!” With all the orderly brutishness of his captain’s shoe Dr. Eklund kicked at Adela to make her roll.

She rolled and moaned.

“Quiet, keep quiet, can’t you? Olle, fill it again, fill it,” and handed over the kettle to Dr. Eklund; meanwhile Heidi stamped on the big burned cabbage leaves that were creeping out of the brass amphora—curling black sheets with delicately crimped ruffs glowing red. A flood came shooing down through the smoke. “There, we’ve got it, fill it again—”

The brass amphora had turned black at the lip: it wobbled, sputtered, expired; it smoked and smoked. The rivers flying down its hot flanks steamed among cinders. The smoke rummaged.

Heidi flailed at her eyes with a piece of her sleeve. “You’ve put us inside a chimney! Spiteful! Deranged!”

Dr. Eklund said coldly: “Arson.”

“You’ve sizzled us!”

Adela murmured from the floor, “Didn’t I say he’d do anything—”

“Fake,” Lars said.

“And aren’t you the one who forged his father? Refugee impostor! The pot,” Heidi blazed at him, “calling the kettle black.”

“Barbarian.” Dr. Eklund spat down on the blackened amphora: a sneeze of steam leaped up. “I could make that? I, I? A seraph made it! Idiocy—I could make that? Instinct’s the maker! Transfiguration, is this your belief? Conspiracy gives birth to a masterwork? You had your look, you saw! You think what’s born sublime can be connived at? How? How, without that dead man’s genius? What is there to empower such an impersonation?” The smoke snatched him then; the sea captain was now a Chinese mandarin in the grip of an encrusted language moving through powerful forms; he fell into a long clamor of coughing. He coughed and whitened. “Do you think there is a magical eye that drops from heaven to inspire? Barbarian, where is such an eye?”

“Mrs. Eklund,” Lars addressed her, “it isn’t just the shop, is it? There’s more to the family business than just the shop.” His feet churned through puddles, he felt himself drenched in smoke. “It isn’t only getting people in and getting people out—it’s not even a matter of taking people in, that’s the wonder. You took me in—you hooked me practically from the start. A pack of swindlers, I don’t care—that’s not the family business. You want to be in competition with God, that’s the thing.”

Adela lifted her wild face. A bloody rip across the blade of the frail nose. It wasn’t Lars’s work; not even the lick of his burning little finger. It was her father who had smashed her. The ferocious kick of the author of The Messiah.

Dr. Eklund’s head shone like a polished shield. He tore his glasses from his ears; and there it was, without warning—the likeness. It wasn’t in any particular inch of him. It was all over—the resemblance, the pulse of ancestry. His naked eyes spilled catastrophe: he had nothing to defend him now, not his rings, not the militant glitter of his sailor’s buttons. His big scraped face with its awful nostril-craters rambled on, a worn old landscape lost to any habitation. Wild, wild. Adela’s look exactly, at last.

15

at five o’clock in the afternoon a little more than seven months after the fire in the brass amphora—the stewpot was just disbanding—a woman named Elsa Vaz, accompanied by a little boy, came to see Lars Andemening at the Morgontörn. He had his own cubicle now. It was a small bare box, with sides made of beaverboard, fitted out with a splintered table (formerly Nilsson’s), a pink china mug (indistinguishable from Anders’s), a typewriter, a coffeepot, and a chair covered with a torn and lumpy cushion. Plaster dust thickened the air—all the walls on the top floor of the Morgontörn were being broken open for new wiring. Nilsson had announced the installation of a whole row of computer terminals: the staff of the Morgontörn couldn’t expect to catch up with Expressen, of course, but at least they could say hello to the century they were living in—in deference to which Nilsson had acquired a resplendent new desk fabricated entirely out of a substance hitherto used exclusively on the underside of the noses of space capsules.

Elsa Vaz explained to Lars that she had first gone to his old flat, only to learn that he had moved out some time ago. He pinched his fitful eyeglasses back into position (they took getting used to) and retorted that she might have telephoned him: he had a large apartment on Bergsundsstrand, not far from where Nellie Sachs had once resided; a civilized street, and didn’t civilized people telephone before barging right on into someone’s office? That fool of a girl downstairs! To have allowed Elsa Vaz to burst in on him, and with a child! After all, he kept rigid enough hours, had plenty of reading to push through, and couldn’t sustain any kind of interruption: he had his Monday space to attend to, not to mention the masses of mail it brought him.

The little boy—he seemed to be about six years old—was struggling with a cold, miserably scrubbing away at himself with one or the other of two big white