The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick Read Free Book Online Page A

a second version of absence were struggling to swim up out of the aboriginal absence. For Puttermesser, it was as if the white of her own eye could suddenly see what the purposeful retina had shunned. It was in fact not so much a seeing as the sharpness of a reading, and what Puttermesser read—she whose intellectual passions were pledged to every alphabet—was a single primeval Hebrew word, shimmering with its lightning holiness, the Name of Names, that which one dare not take in vain. Aloud she uttered it:

    whereupon the inert creature, as if drilled through by electricity, as if struck by some principle of instantaneous vitality, leaped straight from the bed; Puttermesser watched the fingernails grow rapidly into place, and the toenails, and the eyebrows and lashes: complete. A configuration of freckles appeared on the forehead. The hair of the head and of the mons Veneris thickened, curled, glistened dark red, the color of clay; the creature had risen to walk. She did it badly, knocking down the desk-chair and bumping into the dresser. Sick, drugged, drunk; vandal; thief of earth!
    â€œGet your clothes on and get out,” Puttermesser said. Where were the thing’s clothes? She had none; she seemed less pale moment by moment; she was lurching about inher skin. She was becoming rosy. A lively color was in her cheeks and hands. The mouth, Puttermesser’s own handiwork, was vivid. Puttermesser ran to her closet and pulled out a shirt, a skirt, a belt, a cardigan. From her drawers she swept up bra, panty-hose, slip. There was only the question of shoes. “Here,” she said, “summer sandals, that’s all I can spare. Open toes, open heels, they’ll fit. Get dressed. I can give you an old coat—go ahead. Sit down on the bed. Put this stuff on. You’re lucky I’m not calling the police.”
    The creature staggered away from the bed, toward the teak desk.
    â€œDo what I say!”
    The creature had seized a notepad and a ballpoint pen, and was scribbling with shocking speed. Her fingers, even the newly lengthened one, were rhythmically coordinated. She clenched the pen, Puttermesser saw, like an experienced writer: as if the pen itself were a lick of the tongue, or an extension of the thinking digits. It surprised Puttermesser to learn that this thief of earth was literate. In what language? And would she then again try to swallow what she wrote, leaving one untouchable word behind?
    The thing ripped away the alphabet-speckled page, tottered back with the pad, and laid the free sheet on the pillow.
    â€œWhat’s the matter? Can’t you walk?” Puttermesser asked; she thought of afflicted children she had known, struck by melancholy witherings and dodderings.
    But the answer was already on the paper. Puttermesser read: “I have not yet been long up upon my fresh-made limbs. Soon my gait will come to me. Consider the newborncolt. I am like unto that. All tongues are mine, especially that of my mother. Only speech is forbidden me.”
    A lunatic! Cracked! Alone in the house with a maniac; a deaf-mute to boot. “Get dressed,” Puttermesser again commanded.
    The thing wrote: “I hear and obey the one who made me.”
    â€œWhat the hell is this,” Puttermesser said flatly.
    The thing wrote: “My mother,” and rapidly began to jerk herself into Puttermesser’s clothes, but with uneven sequences of the body—the more vitality the creature gained, the more thing-like she seemed.
    Puttermesser was impatient; she longed to drive the creature out. “Put on those shoes,” she ordered.
    The thing wrote: “No.”
    â€œShoes!” Puttermesser shouted. She made a signpost fist and flung it in the direction of the door. “Go out the way you came in!”
    The thing wrote: “No shoes. This is a holy place. I did not enter. I was formed. Here you spoke the Name of the Giver of Life. You blew in my nostril and