“Please, the table, on the table, not there—”
But she had already turned the white plastic bag upside down. A cascade of papers spilled over the humps and ridges of his quilt.
His father’s handwriting. The writing—the letters—growing out of his father’s true hand. Crossed-out words all over. He pitied each one: discarded, canceled, exiled. A beast—a sort of ape—began to jump inside his frame, from rib to rib: could it only be this pump, this pump of a heart? An inward ape heaving itself about. Beating with its fists, crashing. Exultation! And pity, pity. These old sheets, his father’s poor old foolscap, had been through water, he saw. Wrinkled dead skins, rubbed, creased, drowned.
“They’ve gotten wet,” he said.
“Their cellar was flooded once. The woman with the shoes—she was only a peasant woman, her husband delivered milk—”
“In Warsaw?” The ape, blind and berserk.
“In Drohobycz. A man in a long black coat paid the husband to dig under their cellar in the middle of the night. You know the kind of flat metal box men’s garters used to be sold in? Long ago? The papers were in one of those. A drygoods box, the husband buried it under the cellar floor. The man in the coat said he would come back for it when the war was over and pay them some more, but he never did.”
The Messiah: those scattered bruised pages. Leaves and leavings, nullified. Swallowed up. And resurrected now, on his own bed! The bed of rebirth—where, a hundred times before, the greased beak had seized him and thrust him under his father’s terrible eye.
“It’s enough,” Lars said. “It’s not the point.”
“Don’t you want to hear credentials? You said credentials. It’s how I got the manuscript.”
“I don’t care about how. It’s why. Why should you have it? Who are you to have it?”
“He gave it to me. The husband.”
“He gave it to you in Drohobycz?”
She spread her arms as wide as geography. “Not the Drohobycz husband. The Warsaw husband.”
The north light, knifing through his narrow window—he had a window, an archer’s slit—sent a bright scimitar across his bed: the light was too cold, too sharp. A winter sharpness coursed like a spray of icicles over the peaks and valleys of his quilt. Her arms, stretched out, were contriving a cloud over his father’s words. His father’s words, under her shadow.
“You won’t let me tell it,” she argued.
And told: she went on telling it—it didn’t occur to Lars to disbelieve or believe. Here was The Messiah; here. It was here. He thought of that. The story went on: he believed it, he didn’t believe it. How the woman’s husband died of a stroke, after the war, when there were no more Jews in Drohobycz. Deported, perished. All the Jews, all the hasidim in their long black coats—gassed, undone. How the man in the long black coat never came back to fetch the box. How the box had gone out of the woman’s head—she was only a peasant woman, what was it to her? Her head was busy with selling her little house, no bigger than a hut, with a cellar that was damp and easy to dig up; then she went off to Warsaw to get work. In Warsaw she became a domestic, what else could she do? The box was left in Drohobycz, under the earth—she didn’t give it a thought, why should she? The man in the long black coat never came back. It was the new people, the people who had bought the house—well, the cellar had a dirt floor, they started to lay cement down there, and the pickaxe threw up the box with its papers. They imagined it was a will when they opened it, a Jew’s will, and they set out to find the woman in Warsaw, supposing she would reward them for restoring the papers; the papers might mean something; they might mean a legacy. The Jews when they went away left their valuables behind, everyone knew this—sometimes even their pots, pots with false bottoms, in which they hid their gold. But by then, in Warsaw, the woman had married again, she had a new husband and had moved away, to a brand-new flat on the other side of the city, in the rebuilt neighborhood where the Ghetto had stood. Where the Ghetto had fallen. Clean new flats in that place, no one could tell anything at all from the looks of it; the Ghetto was buried and gone; it was a nice new neighborhood.
“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 consecutiveness: 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
