The Messiah of Stockholm (10 page)

“The woman told you all this?”

“The husband. When I came there it was much later, the woman was dead, she had died. That’s how I came there, because she died in Tosiek Glowko’s kitchen. His wife’s
kitchen. Tosiek Glowko was my mother’s special friend all the time we lived in Warsaw. All my mother’s special friends are younger—she can’t help it, that’s how she
is, she’s always been that way, except when she was young herself. The woman died of a stroke just like the Drohobycz husband. She was scrubbing a wall.”

Lars was quiet: it was as if the foreign ape had calmed itself, and was now swinging tranquilly in his breast. He was relieved. He sank down under her flow. Did he believe any of it? It made him
think of Heidi’s fence, Heidi with her arms flung out just this way, insisting and insisting.

“That box”—her arms passed over his quilt, over the twisted papers—“well, it’s gone. Lost. I looked everywhere for it. In every closet and cabinet of that
flat. The husband let me look, he didn’t care. He was in a hurry to get rid of every bit of it. That’s how I found the pages in the shoes—looking for the box.” And went on,
then, with the cadence of it, the mad consecutive-ness: how the box was carried to Warsaw by the people who had bought the woman’s house, how when they showed her the box she was
outraged—it was money they wanted. Why should I pay you? she said. For what? It can’t be worth two zlotys. She told them it wasn’t a will in there, it was nothing at all, no one
could figure out what it was. The husband looked in the box and shifted the papers and sniffed the dampness and said, No, it isn’t a will, it isn’t a legacy, nothing like that.
It’s Jew-prayers, what the
Żydki
pray, it’s hexes and curses. So it turned out that the people who had bought the house were glad to go all the way back to Drohobycz without
getting paid for the box, at least they were safe from the hexes, and the woman said to her husband, How do you know it’s what the
Żydki
pray? Mother of God, he said, I tried to
read it, it’s all a jumble, it’s the way they pray. And also the letters on the top,
The Messiah
, it’s the Jews cursing Our Lord. Get rid of it, the husband said. But
it’s good paper, she said, thick and strong, I’ll find some use for it, so after she walked out in the rain one time, she stuffed some of the sheets into her shoes. To keep the shape.
And she told her lady, the lady she worked for, whose husband was Tosiek Glowko, my mother’s special friend, a Party official, high up in the Party, she told the lady that back in her old
house in Drohobycz there was a box of prayers, what the Jews pray, buried under the floor in the cellar, and the people who bought the house wanted to get money out of her just for returning it;
but she wasn’t a fool, it wasn’t her box to begin with, it was only scribbles in there—real prayers, even what the Jews pray, come in prayerbooks. The lady said, Then maybe
it’s actually not prayers, and the woman said, My husband thinks the same, he says what the Jews pray is hexes and curses, and besides it’s scribbled all over with Our Lord’s
name, in mockery. The lady recounted all this to her husband, Tosiek Glowko, my mother’s special friend—she was laughing at these mysterious papers her maid was keeping in a funny box
dug up out of the ground. It’s how they behave out there in those country towns, outlanders, hicks, they don’t understand the world; the woman had this box for years in the cellar of
her shack in Drohobycz, ever since the middle of the war; it’s something the Jews left. Tosiek Glowko said, Drohobycz? Because he knew that was where my mother grew up, my mother grew up in
Drohobycz and went to school there. But for my mother it wasn’t a hick town, in her eyes it was a little Vienna. And then the woman scrubbed the kitchen wall, and Tosiek Glowko said to my
mother, oh my poor wife, her maid dropped dead right at her feet, she had a stroke in my poor wife’s kitchen, we had to call the police—and do you know, this old woman is from your own
town, she’s from Drohobycz?

“You see,” she finished, “that’s how it went.” She reached out over the quilt to gather in his father’s strewn and confounded words. He watched her pile up
the sheets and pat them and tap them, until she had constructed a neat rectangular stack. It struck Lars that there was an idiocy in this sudden tidying-up: he almost laughed. It was as if the
order of the pages didn’t matter to her in the least. The progenitrix of chaos. She stared across at him. “Now do you see how it went? My mother heard about the
manuscript—”

“From her lover. The man high up in the Party.”

“—and I got on the bus and rode across Warsaw and found the old man and took away all the papers there were.”

“He let you? The woman’s husband? The widower,” he corrected.

“Well, there he was, running around and collecting whatever he could put his hands on, wherever his wife had stuck them. In the oven, can you imagine? Three sheets in the oven. And six in
those shoes. He let me look everywhere. By then there wasn’t any box. The box was gone.”

“But why you?” Lars urged. “Why would he give them to you?”

“He would have given them to anyone. He would have burned them in the trash. I got there in time to save them from the trash. He was afraid.” She sent out a pale little smile,
perilously edged. “He thought she’d died from the curse, don’t you see? Because the curse had been dug up. Because when he told her to get rid of the papers she didn’t
obey.”

It came to him then that he didn’t believe a word. What an invention! The best inventions are those with the most substantial particulars. A fabricator. Or else a cunning inheritor, a
spinner of old fables: buried vessels, spells, incantations, magical instant dyings. Or else simply crazed. Adela! This name of terror lifted straight out of his father’s spectral scenery. I
could not tell whether these pictures were implanted in my mind by Adela’s tales or whether I had witnessed them myself . . . Perhaps in our treachery there was secret approval of the
victorious Adela to whom we dimly ascribed some commission and assignment from forces of a higher order . . . Adela, warm from sleep and with unkempt hair, was grinding coffee in a mill which she
pressed to her white bosom, imparting her warmth to the broken beans
.

Crazed. A grinder of broken beans.

He accused, “You’ve mixed up all the pages.”

“It makes no difference. You can shuffle them however you like. It has the same effect no matter what. You’ll see for yourself when you begin.”

“Begin what? I’m not beginning anything.” He asked, “Why do you call yourself Adela?”

“It’s my name.”

“It’s from
Cinnamon Shops
. From
Sanatorium
. Is that why you took it?”

“I didn’t take it. People don’t give themselves their own names, do they? My father picked it. He told my mother to call me Adela. This was before I was born, when they knew
she was pregnant. Then he was shot in the wild action, you’ve heard of the wild action? My mother ran to Brazil, she got out, even then. She could do it, she’s crafty that way. Even
then.”

An electric jolt: the ape was hurled. “Your father—” Lars stood in his little space, between the table and the bed. The light was still brilliant, a great unholy glare: her
head against it looked inky-dark. He could not see her eyes with the morning’s brilliance in his own. “It’s only a story,” he said. He did not say: Your mother’s a
cloud, your father’s a fog. “Don’t go spreading such a thing—you’ll only do yourself damage. It isn’t possible. A figment. A lie.”

“Mrs. Eklund
said
you’d carry on.” But she faltered—he saw what her trouble was. There was a word and she was refusing it. She was resisting. “She said
you’d act as if, as if—” She plucked up the white beret and came to stand with her face close to his. “As if you owned every syllable. Every syllable he ever put
down.”

The breath of her voice streamed into his nostrils. Her voice was hot. How free she seemed, how like a bedouin!

“If that old fellow in Warsaw let you take away the manuscript—just like that—”

“Priest,” Adela threw out. “
That’s
what she said. You act like a priest!”

“—then the other version isn’t so.”

“There isn’t any other version. It’s only what I’ve told you.”

“Mrs. Eklund’s version. The one she got from you—that
The Messiah
was waiting for you to come up and pick it up. There it was, in Warsaw. In Drohobycz. Under the ground.
Under the arm of the man with the coat. God knows where it was! Loitering there—decades—waiting for you to turn up, all the way from Brazil! It was being
saved
, that’s the
point. For the daughter.” He wanted to be raucous, he wanted to jeer; instead he found himself raveled in a simple-minded knot of a cough. “The daughter! They were keeping it for
you.”

“They weren’t. It wasn’t being saved.”

“No one else could have gotten hold of it. Only the daughter.” He ended, “That’s Mrs. Eklund’s version.”

“I never told her any of that.”

“You never told her you’re the daughter—”

“I did. I am.” She gave him a look of fire. “A priest is just what’s needed. You’d be on your knees, wouldn’t you? On your knees to every word. You’d
think you were anointed.”

“There can’t be a daughter,” Lars said.

“You won’t do it. I can see that. You won’t. You’re exactly the one to do it, but you won’t.”

“Mrs. Eklund’s going to introduce you to her Polish Princess, wait and see. The Princess translates a thousand times better than I can. Ask Mrs. Eklund.” He was perfectly
serene: he was certain that the ape, exhausted at last, had foolishly dropped off. He said, “There’s no logic in the daughter business, is there? You can’t make it come out right.
It won’t come out.”

She fixed him, eye to eye. Two vertical trenches like his own. “He was my mother’s art teacher. In the high school in Drohobycz. She was fifteen years old. She modeled for his
drawings.”

His drawings! A mistake, a mistake!

Those photographs. Heidi had misled him. Or else he had misled Heidi. They had misled each other. They had misconceived. They had not known how to imagine. The photographs had arrested them; had
held
them. The photographs had held their heads like a pincers! Their heads, pinched together, side by side, peering into the faces in the circle of women. Always the circle of women. He,
the author of
The Messiah
, the only male; the central figure; ringed round by women. Heidi testing those faces, scrutinizing, reconnoitering: together they had fallen into the eyes and
mouths of these women. Not one of them was the lover. Not one. They had never thought of a child. They had never imagined a pupil. One of his pupils!

Adela said, “He used to take her home. He invented different costumes for her. He asked her to pose, to playact. You can see yourself if you want. You can look her up.”

“Look her up?”

“In the illustrations. She’s there in most of them. A little man in a top hat, with a giant dog. A boy with big buttons. A fellow in riding boots. A woman in high heels wearing a
coat with a fur collar. All of those. Sometimes she’s naked.”

A pupil. The high school. Smeared with provincial paste and paint. The drawings! That triangular little jaw, those unearthly eyes, those tapered small torsos; dwindling little feet and toes. A
child!

“The pregnancy frightened him,” she announced.

“Where are you going? You can’t—” He took desolate note of it: she was packing up. “Stop it, what are you doing? You haven’t let me see—” Now she
was shoving the stack of papers—creased and assaulted—back into the white plastic bag.

“She loved him more than he loved her. He was afraid to be connected to anyone. In the end,” she flung back, “there was the wild action, so it didn’t matter.”

A stride like a pounce. Another; she was at the door.

“Don’t take it away. You haven’t let me have a look. I haven’t
seen
it. Wait!” he pleaded. “I haven’t told you
my
side.”

“I know your side. You don’t care. If you cared you would do it, you would work at putting it in the world.”

“No, no, it’s something else. Mrs. Eklund didn’t tell you—”

“I’ve contradicted something she said? All right, then you’ve shown me what you think. You think she can’t be relied on.”

“I haven’t shown you anything. You don’t know anything.”

He tore at her like a drunkard and snatched the bag from her grip.

“Give that back.”

“It’s mine,” he said.

“Give it back.”

“He’s my father. I’m his son!”

The foetal ape was awake, unfurled, raging; huge.
The Messiah
was light, light; it was not heavy at all. Lars drew it against him, he bunched it against his chest: the exulting, the ape,
the heaving, the hurling!

“Give it
back
.”

She ground toward him, she was fit and fleet—she twisted the plastic bag to pry it free of him. They crushed the papers between them: her tongue snapped, he drove off the hole of her
turbulent mouth—she spat. He thought of her poor crumpled breasts. He was steady now,
The Messiah
was in his arms, he would not let her take it away. Her spittle was on his cheek. He
raised one leg—the leg was heavy, it had a weight—and kicked Adela to the floor.

He saw her head near his victorious shoes; her hands were on her breasts. He was a colossus staring down.

“There’s only me. There isn’t any son. You’re a schemer, you’re a thief. You’ll say anything.”

How distant and small, how Lilliputian, this fury of hers! Her head, far below, a dead bird. Then in a sudden spiraling of pure flight, as elastic as the rising up of a bird, she jumped her
haunches into a squat and flew up to beat at the white bag—it slipped from him, she had it in her fist; and escaped. Escaped.

A mistake, a mistake! She was gone, she was away. The door vibrated on its hinges. Violence like a burning; the door still rocking. Or else it was his bones in their long shiver. The broken
beans of his shaking. How he had crushed her breasts, how he had crumpled his father’s brain. That cradling of
The Messiah
: good God, hadn’t he held it in his arms? It had
possessed, for one holy hour, his house; his bed; his quilt. He ought to have been on his knees to it; she had warned him. He might have knelt there—gazing—before the caves and grottoes
of his quilt.