The Messiah of Stockholm (13 page)

The smell of roasting flame: Dr. Eklund striking still another match—match after match—to rekindle his smothered pipe.

The women went on contending. It was a quarrel; it was not a quarrel. It might have been the pretense of a quarrel. Marionettes. Heidi’s back room rife with plots, cabals—why was he
thinking that? A stage frenzy: willed, directed, cued. Adela wanted him to go. Heidi wanted him to stay.

Dr. Eklund was indifferent. “Let the fellow go, let the fellow stay. If the text is valid—that’s the proper question.”

Adela said bitterly, “He thinks it belongs to him.”

“Now, now,” Dr. Eklund said.

“He takes things. You heard him! He’s got my hat.”

Their two voices were just the same. A family sound. The smoky air had becalmed itself. Nothing spontaneous rose in that space. Dr. Eklund propped his lit pipe on his saucer. Then he pushed cup,
saucer, and pipe aside. The brass amphora—it had no handles; it was no more than a dented old pot—stretched its archaic shape up from the middle of the little table. From the pocket of
his vest Dr. Eklund drew out, by its big black stem, a large round magnifying glass and placed it next to cup, saucer, and pipe.

“Smart!” Heidi said, tapping her knuckles against the pot, making it ring. “To think of bringing that. With the snow coming down.”

“So. The Solomonic moment. Then let us examine our dubious author.”

With both hands Dr. Eklund took hold of the brass amphora and raised it above the table. There it was, high up, travelling at a decent steady speed—a torpedo; a whale with its mouth wide;
a chalice. Midway he tipped it over, until the mouth hung upside down, vomiting disorder, chaos: a shower of ragged white wings, a jumbled armada of white sails. A hundred sheets spiraled
out—crumpled, splotched, speckled, aged. What had littered Lars’s quilt that morning came tumbling now out of Ali Baba’s jar. “Smart!” Heidi said again. “Keeping
everything dry!” Dr. Eklund clanged down the emptied-out amphora. It hit the floor with the reverberating note of a cymbal, and rolled on its side toward Dr. Eklund’s feet. It was plain
that Dr. Eklund—sorcery!—had instantly understood what to do with this peculiar vessel. He had seen that it was there to be turned upside down and emptied out.

Lars looked over at Adela. She had moved to crouch beside Dr. Eklund—she was picking up the runaway sheets that had fallen to the floor. She was picking them up and putting them on the
table, with the others. That wounded handwriting—buried, beaten, bruised, drowned. She lifted each stray page one by one. She had carried them to Heidi’s shop in that tall metal
trophy-cup: Hebe the cup-bearer, messenger, deliverer. He knew her as nothing else. He wanted to cry, Ulrika, Birgitta! Not one but two wives! And a child, lost, stolen! Himself now without even
that paintbox. The last trace expunged. Erased. And Adela? Had she had a life prior to bags and jars? A woman his own age, graying like himself. She was not his sister; he had no sister, he had no
father, he had no inkling of his mother’s name. He had named himself, in secret: Lazarus Baruch. Who was to tell him otherwise, who was to deny him these twinings and entanglings? And,
through dictionary divinations and cabalistic displacements: Lars Andemening. Who was there to prevent it? He had an orphan’s terrifying freedom to choose. He could become whatever he wished;
no one could prohibit it, he could choose his own history. He could choose and he could relinquish. He was horribly, horribly free.

And she? Adela? Was there a husband behind the scenes? Had she left a trail of some kind? Did she have a child? A father?

Dr. Eklund did not hurry. His magnifying glass hovered pitilessly. He seemed to be studying one word at a time; or else one letter of one word. Again he burrowed inside his vest pocket. A
document inside an envelope. He was comparing the inky loops of the document with the inky loops—broken, beaten, hidden—that had flown out of the brass amphora.

“It recurs,” Dr. Eklund said. “Observe how it recurs. The telltale spur. This omnipresent hook. A shepherd’s crook. Or a bishop’s.”

“Dr. Eklund,” Heidi said, “is a holographic authority. A world authority. People summon him for verification from all over. He goes all over Europe. He’s been to South
America. They call on him everywhere.”

Dr. Eklund reached for his pipe, inserted it between his lips, and sucked. “Soon we will strike,” he said, “on the truth.”

A wail came loose in Lars. The foetal ape that lived alongside his inmost belly-organs snapped itself alert; it lurched. “The truth!” he said. “Malice, it’s malice! With
a schoolgirl, his own pupil! As if such a man—
such
a man—would copulate with a child!”

Dr. Eklund began a scanty fragment of hum. Heidi took off her slippers and put them side by side under the daffodil and slid onto her cot: her face had thickened; her lids had thickened.
“You should wait for the verdict,” she murmured.

“There isn’t any verdict. There’s only what’s really there,” Adela said from the floor.

The magnifying glass hovered; wandered left, wandered right. Dr. Eklund continued to hum—two bars and silence; three bars and silence. The bits of it suggested something between lullaby
and a sea shanty; it made Lars dimly restive, skittish. His little fear—he remembered it. It was trickling back, old, unaccountable, recognizable. And here was Dr. Eklund provoking it,
pricking it alive again: Dr. Eklund with his pirate’s finger and their glittering rings, pinching page after page of the lost
Messiah
, and the great lens circling.

“No question. No question at all,” Dr. Eklund pronounced. “Observe, observe. The capitals. As specif able as a fingerprint. You won’t find
W
in the world like this
fellow’s. You won’t find another
T
. What we have here”—he held the magnifier aloft, like a bishop’s crook—“is entirely genuine. Authentic, I
guarantee it. It is what it purports to be. I have no doubt of it. I would stake everything on it. The original.”

Heidi, drowsy, the threads of her white bangs weaving like the smoke from Dr. Eklund’s pipe, purred languidly from her cot: “A forgery. It could be a very good forgery. Olle, you
know how clever a forger can be,” and shut her eyes.

Adela sat like a doll, a foot away from the brass amphora immobile, braced against the leg of the table.
Adela is fast asleep, her mouth half open, her face relaxed and absent; but her closed
lids are transparent, and on their parchment the night is writing its pact with the devil, half text, half picture, fun of erasures, corrections, and scribbles
.

“My good woman,” Dr. Eklund urged, “no forger on earth can duplicate these shepherd’s crooks. However expert. Not the most inspired master, believe me! Here is a letter,
to a certain Tadeusz Breza, written by our author, and here is this sheet. Sheet unfortunately much abused, but observe. The lineamen identical. You can see how the longer-armed characters breathe
through a type of sporule, exceptionally gauzy. And these commas, with their tails coughed off! Who could impersonate such a mannerism? A scrimshaw of the nervous system. These devious ropes of the
nerves themselves. The ink is very close. The paper not identical, but very close. Of that period, no doubt of Warsaw manufacture, possibly Lvov . . .”

Adela did not stir. Heidi did not stir. These women were apathetic; lethargic. Probably it was what they had expected. They had known all along. They had believed all along. The verdict had only
exhausted them; it was by now—so long awaited—a kind of soporific. Even Dr. Eklund did not appear to be aroused.

But there on the table lay the scattered
Messiah
. Retrieved. The original.
The Messiah
, spread out in its curiously rapturous Polish for anyone’s bare blink. The original!
Recovered; resurrected; redeemed. Lars, looking with all his strength, felt his own ordinary pupil consumed by a conflagration in the socket. As if copulating with an angel whose wings were on
fire.

A
LWAYS AFTERWARD—AFTER THE
letters had collapsed to char and flakes of ash—Lars regretted this animal urgency that swept him through the
scrambled pages of
The Messiah
. Dr. Eklund was willing enough to concentrate on his pipe while Lars tore through those layers of ruined papers. The two women—Heidi dazed on her cot,
Adela quiescent on the floor—seemed suspended. They waited. You could not hear them breathe. It was as if they had given up oxygen; or else had suppressed the predilection for it.

Meanwhile Lars fell into the text with the force of a man who throws himself against a glass wall. He crashed through it to the other side, and what was there? Baroque arches and niches,
intricately hedged byways of a language so incised, so
bleeding
—a touch could set off a hundred slicing blades—that it could catch a traveler anywhere along the way with this
knife or that prong. Lars did not resist or hide; he let his flesh rip. Nothing detained him, nothing slowed him down. The terrible speed of his hunger, chewing through hook and blade, tongue and
voice, of the true
Messiah
! Rapacity, gluttony!

Always afterward Lars remembered the rising of his lamentation. It was as if he had been accumulating remorse even as he fled through passage after passage. He could not contain what he met; he
could not keep it. Amnesia descended with the opacity of a dropped hood. What he took he lost. And instantly grieved, because he could not keep it.

Adela was not there. The servant girl, sinister, elusive, brutal, who lurked in corridors and attics, in
Cinnamon Shops
, in
Sanatorium
—she was nowhere in
The Messiah
.
This made Lars glad: a revenge against the self-important living Adela who leaned like a puppet against the leg of the table.
The Messiah
had annihilated her name.

Still, what Adela had told him was true: the order of the pages did not matter. These poor battered sheets were erratically paginated, some not numbered at all, and one eddying f owed into
another; there were sequences and consequences, parallels and paradoxes, however you shuffled them. Lars thought of those mountain ranges growing out of the chasm of the world, along the bottommost
spine of the sea, so platonically dark and deep that even the scuttling blindfish swim away, toward higher water—but within this overturned spittoon of an abyss are criss-crossing rivers,
whirlpools twisting their foaming necks, multiple streams braiding upward, cascades sprouting rivulets like hairs, and a thousand shoots and sprays bombarding the oceanscape’s peaks. So it
was with the intelligence of
The Messiah
’s order and number and scheme of succession: everything voluminously overlapping, everything simultaneous and multiform.

But this understanding applied only to a consciousness of system.
The Messiah
was a waterless tract. No cloud, no mist, no fog; no well and no bucket; neither ocean nor 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 cornucopia 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 wire.
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 dry-goods 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 masterworks. 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.