The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  Lars snatched the bit of paper and shoved it into his pocket. “There’s just this last paragraph to do. Two more sentences.”

  Anders tossed his galoshes into a corner. A startled mouse, so young it was barely at the cadet stage, jumped out from behind a filing cabinet. “Mrs. Eklund,” he repeated. “Start with taking someone’s wife, Lars, no wonder you’ll end up taking someone’s desk and chair. Not to mention their vodka.” He stared down at Lars’s typing. “You’ve put jalteori for talteori.”

  “On a Monday,” Gunnar said, “who’ll notice?”

  “My drawer is open,” Anders said.

  Lars said quickly, “I was looking for an eraser in there—”

  “Nobody’s touched your vodka,” Gunnar said. “Isn’t Mrs. Eklund the one who got you your Polish tutor, Lars?”

  “Yet another foreigner,” Anders said. “Tell me, is this Stockholm or Timbuktu?”

  “She owns a bookshop,” Lars said. “Sometimes I give her orders.”

  “I bet you do,” Gunnar said.

  “Poles and Turks all over town. The deterioration of the Swedish temperament. The decay of Europe. Litter in downtown Stockholm. Adultery in bookshops. How about plugging in the kettle, Lars?”

  “I have to go,” Lars said.

  “Plug in the kettle first, all right? There’s nothing like a drop of vodka in a dram of tea to warm up with.”

  Lars took up Anders’s electric kettle and went out into the corridor to the tap just outside the men’s toilet. The water, running rusty at the start, barely trickled. He waited for it to clear and then fill. Meanwhile he fished for the message in his pocket: MRS. EKLUND PHONED ABOUT YOUR SISTER. That fool of a girl downstairs. A mistake. He had no sister. When he got back to Anders’s cubicle, Anders was rolling up his damp coat on top of the filing cabinet and Gunnar was reading aloud, in a liturgical voice, the first sentence of Lars’s typescript: Here is a universe as confined as a trap, where the sole heroes are victims, where muteness is for the intrepid only.

  “My my,” Gunnar said. “What a scare your mother got. I mean when she was pregnant with you. An assault by the higher forms of literature.”

  “A bad sign,” Anders said, “this Polish tutor.”

  “Leave my papers be,” Lars said.

  “Mea culpa,” Gunnar said, and bowed. “The trouble with you, Lars, is that you’re a beautiful soul. A daily reviewer shouldn’t be a beautiful soul. It leads to belles-lettres, which leads to exaltation and other forms of decline.”

  “This pond,” Anders said. “This little pond of translators and chameleons. Swedish, the secret language. Who else knows it besides the Swedes? Who else runs to learn everyone else’s language? The paralysis of Swedish identity. Pour the water, Lars.”

  “The Poles are just the same. The Czechs. The Hungarians. We’re no worse off than anyone,” Gunnar objected. “Why blame the Swedes?”

  Lars filled Anders’s pink china mug, and Anders measured out a long magnanimous spill of vodka from the bottle in his desk.

  “Half the population of Stockholm think they’re French philosophers. And the other half ”—Anders looked straight at Gunnar—“are circus barkers.”

  Lars jammed on his stocking cap and picked up his pages. “I’ll just leave this on Nilsson’s table. Good night, gentlemen.”

  “A nocturnal visit,” Anders asked, “to the Polish tutor?”

  “I don’t have her any more.”

  “I’ll tell you what your trouble is, Lars. Central Europe, that’s your trouble.” Gunnar turned his back on Anders, who was allowing the steam from his cup to rise up the two smokestacks of his redoubtable nose, right-angled and attached high at the bridge so as to conceal the other side of his face. “Prague and Vienna and Cracow. A touch of Budapest, a sniff of Bucharest. Throw in Dubrovnik and a handful of Paris misanthropes. You might fetch up Borges from the rump, but otherwise it’s all the crazies from the middle. You think my Wednesday people ever heard of this Danilo Kiš? You carry on about him, but they never heard of him. When they move Yugoslavia over to Norway it might be worth a look next door.”

  “Our Mrs. Eklund,” Anders pressed, “can she recommend a tutor in Serbo-Croatian?”

  “Don’t forget that lemon pulp squeezed out there in the California citrus groves–Adrian Leverkühn, Dr. Faustus! Kafka, Musil, Broch, Canetti, Jabès and Kundera. Those fellows, and don’t ignore the ladies, what’s her name, Sarraute? The more inscrutable the better. Chasing after the impenetrable. Prince of the indecipherable. That’s what’s eating Monday’s brain. What we’ve got in Lars is a Monday Faust.”

  Lars finished tying on his scarf. “Gentlemen, I’m off.”

  The elevator rattled down, swaying on threadbare ropes. All the way to the bottom Lars could hear them clanging away, hammer and tongs. He rarely saw either of them during regular hours; in the clarity of midday he thought them weak, bleached. They were big Viking men, crest-fallen. Gunnar had his own kettle in his own cubicle. He kept his things meticulously separate. Thirty years ago he had come to Stockholm from Göteborg; Anders had arrived about the same time from Malmö. They were both night workers who slept the morning away and break-fasted at four in the afternoon. When the daylight foam of ordinariness—secretaries and telephones—cleared out, it pleased them to prowl among the stacks of reviewers’ galleys, sniffing after literary prey and flushing out the mice. Even the Niagara of the overhead toilet box in the men’s room seemed to them more momentous after midnight. Though they went on contending about this and that—they charged each other with negativism, self-denigration, narrowness—they saw eye to eye on everything; they were privy to what most mattered. They had all the news—which translators cut corners (they agreed that no one could tell the difference between Sven Strömberg’s Swedish and Sven Strömberg’s Spanish), whose lover had just switched from one critic to another, who was hanging by a hair.

  Lars did not know much about their days (they had wives, they had grown children, and Anders even boasted a stepfather of eighty-seven and a still more antediluvian aunt, both imported to Stockholm from Malmö), but he understood their nights. Like himself, they were sunk in books, chained to the alphabet, in thrall to sentences and paragraphs. And beyond this, Lars was charmed by certain corners of their lives. Anders, for instance, had translated, with all its cadences intact, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Klockorna”; it was used in a school text and recited by children. Once a month Gunnar crossed the street to have tea with the Librarian of the Academy. He was proud of this, and promised to introduce Lars.

  The meeting somehow never materialized, but it was enough for Lars that his own feet took him, almost daily, down the threading alleys of the Old Town and into the open bright square—bright, it struck him, even in rainlight—that skirted the Academy, more sacred to him than any cathedral. He felt his allegiance to all of it: the ten thousand cherished volumes sequestered in those high rooms above the queerly silent Stock Exchange, where computer screens flickered, and a single muffled voice ebbed, and a few old men sat as if in a parliament of statues; the multi-colored miles of shelves where the new books, crying the banner of their dust jackets in so many languages, vied for the notice of the Academicians; and, all around, the gray steeples that punctuated the air like pen nibs, up one street and down another. The Library of the Academy was old, old, with old wooden catalogues and long sliding drawers; its records were dispatched by human hands, and had nothing to do with computers. Instead, rows and rows of superannuated encyclopedias were solemnly cradled, like crown jewels, in glass-flanked cabinets in a red-brick cellar. Lars had been to see all this for himself: the benign dungeon, scalloped with monastic arches, and the worktables where specially appointed scholars set down their burdened briefcases. Those cases: he imagined a plenitude, a robustness, many-stanzaed Eddas, sagas winding on and on. Bliss of scholar-poets, archaeologists of old Norse twilights. The cold gods with their winking breastplates and their hot whims. Hammer of the terrible Thor. Odin and Freya. Al
l diminished into the world’s week: the comedy of that.

  His father belonged there, in the ventricles of the Academy; Lars was as certain of this as he was of the snow beating against his eyelids. His father had been born to be of that pantheon—with Selma Lagerlöf and Knut Hamsun; with Camus and Pasternak. Shaw, Mann, Pirandello. Faulkner, Yeats, Bellow, Singer, Canetti! Maeterlinck and Tagore. The long, long stupendous list of Winners. His father, if he had lived, would have won the great Prize—it was self-evident. He was of that magisterial company.

  4

  THERE WAS A BITTER wind now, lording it over the back of one o’clock. The blackness went on throwing the snow into Lars’s face, and he packed his scarf over his nose and mouth—how warm his breath was in the little cave this made! He hurried past the Stock Exchange and the Academy—not a lit bulb anywhere, or even the daub of a watchman’s flashlight. Succession of whitening roofs: how easy to see into the thickest dark through a lens of snow. The spiraling flakes stuttered around him like Morse code. A smell of something roasting, what was that? Chimneys. It was clear to him finally that he was walking fast and far; tramping, trotting; he had already traversed the bridge over the locks, where the salty Baltic fought the rush of fresh waters to the death; he caught where he was heading. That burning. He listened for fire engines. O the chimneys. Quiet everywhere: here was the street where Nellie Sachs and her old mother had once lived. The poet’s flat; the poet’s windows. All moribund there. He came to the end of Bergsundsstrand at a boiling pace, overheated under his scarf and cap. The few cars with their sleepless headlights slipped like slow cats. Stockholm, an orderly city, has its underlife, its hidden wakeful. Whoever owns a secret in Stockholm turns and turns in the night emptiness, but not in sleep.

  Under the screen of revolving flakes the steeples had the look of whirling Merlin hats. Twenty streets behind him, the voices of Gunnar and Anders, beating, flying. Gull cries. Even now, when he was not there. Rodomontade, long-winded rococo affectations, what poseurs! Shelfworn, shopworn, scarred and marred. It was mainly their scratches that took Lars’s love, their weakness, their comedown. They were like Tiu, Odin’s son, god of war, god of victory. First Fanrir the wolf bites off one whole hand. Then all the rest of powerful Tiu—head, torso, and three strong remaining limbs—is reduced to being only Tuesday. Also, Lars loved their maimed scribblers’ odor, pale and dimly prurient, a fuminess skimmed from the Morgontörn’s omni-present staleness, like some fungus regenerated out of antiquity. For all Lars knew, he too was infiltrated by this smell. The mice were innocent. Their militarily clean pellets left no scent.

  That roasting in the air. His own sweat. The exertion. His legs like gyros. O the chimneys of armpits, moist and burning under wool. Ahead, he made out the mullioned door of Heidi’s shop. She was often among the nighttime wakeful. A woman of sixty-five or so, a round little bundle, with a girl’s name. She wore curly bangs, like a girl; but they were white and sheeplike, and dropped in ringlets over two serenely misplaced black mustaches that jumped intermittently above reckless eyes. Reckless and cherry-dark, with toughened skins for lids. Saccharine, to call a child after a figment in a novel. The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh. The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk. Leave it to the Germans to pull out, like some endless elastic belt of horrible sweetness, all that molasses woe. Heidi, in self-appointed exile, denied any twinge of Heimweh; she spat on it. She was practical and impatient, and had long ago given up ridiculing her name. In the last decades, she explained, it had, in fact, begun to suit her. It was as if by the principle of her own obstinacies she had changed its disposition: from tremulous edelweiss to the forces of a determined old strictness. Lars was not extremely afraid of her; but he was a little afraid.

  In the skimpy vestibule of her shop he stamped his boots so hard they splashed up icy rods from their treads. He saw the light in the narrow back room, a sort of corridor behind the high rear bank of bookshelves, and supposed she was totting up her invoices, or else unpacking the week’s shipment. She was unusually strong for such a small rotundity, such a thick globular dwarf of a woman, and could heave those dead-weight overseas boxes on her own; though when the shop was open she kept a Turkish boy to lug things. Or, he reflected, she might be sitting under her funny old lamp (the lamp, she said, was all she thought worth bringing with her from Germany, not counting a handful of books), reading whatever had just arrived—she read her wares, in nearly any language. Her wares were international. They glimmered out at him from the display window: shining rectangles, like portraits in frames—the newest Americans, North and South, the oldest Russians, that large and steady company of nineteenth-century Englishmen and Englishwomen, a modicum of Czechs and Poles, a whole forest of Balzac; and then the dictionaries and encyclopedias. The shopwindow was stuffed from floor to ceiling: a step-pyramid crowded, on each level, with all the alphabets. Erect in the middle of it, like the thrusting central rose in a wreath, or like a sentry guarding a vault, stood—it really did stand, as if on lion’s legs—a formidable edition of Drottningholm: ett kungligehem, with color pictures of the Royal Family: the wavy-haired King tall and fair and unperturbed, the two little Princesses charming in a garden, the diffident little Prince in a sailor suit on a damask sofa, and the shiveringly beautiful Queen, with her brilliant teeth and black Iberian eyes. The Queen was said to be brainy, a descendant of Marrano nobility. Secret Jews, long attenuated. Heidi was now a Swedish patriot. When the Royal Family was sold out, she displayed one of those oversized landscape volumes, itself as extensive as a plain, showing photographs of windmills and castles and deer galloping over snow and the sea gulls of Lake Vänern and a statue of Selma Lagerlöf, seated, with her hair in a bronze bun.

  Lars took out his penknife and tapped on the glass door. No one heard. He tapped again. She might have left the light on and gone home to her flat. Lars had made her his confidante—Heidi was one of those few who knew what he knew—and still he had never been to her flat. Her flat was no more a certainty than any other rumor; no more a certainty than the rumor of her husband, Dr. Eklund. The true signature of her matrimonial relation appeared in gold letters painted across the shopwindow: BOKHANDLARE. When she turned the key in the evening she embraced her two-burner stove and her square small table and her cot. Among the bumpy configurations of cartons in the back room she had a tiny refrigerator and a tiny water closet and a blue-speckled porcelain pot and that funny old German lamp—the shade was a crystal daffodil—and a teakettle. She had no bath at all, though there was a secluded hollow, a sort of alley, that might have closeted a shower. And no radio: nothing for music. She was indifferent to music. It was as if she were a forest gnome who had fashioned a bare little hut for herself, with only one ornament: the necessary daffodil.

  The light wavered, dimmed, returned. A figure had passed in front of it. Once again Lars smacked his pen-knife against the glass. And there was Heidi with her blurred German screech—“All right, all right, the world isn’t coming to an end, you’ll crack my door!”—wheeling across her shop to let him in.

  Lars resumed stamping his boots in the vestibule. “Hej,” he said.

  “Well, get them off. I won’t have you drip those things in here. For heaven’s sake, the floor’s been mopped. Just leave them. You always show up at my busiest time.”

  “You’re closed up tight!” But he was used to absurdities in her. She liked to topple him.

  “When else do you think I can get anything done? Not with customers underfoot all day. I’m sorting out a delivery. I’m trying to price things. My God, I’m concentrating. And now you’ll want coffee.”

  “No,” he said, standing on the doorsill in his stocking feet. “Sprit.”

  “No wonder. You’re a stick of ice. A snowman.”

  “I’m boiling hot,” he contradicted, and followed her into the back room. “I stink of sweat.” He was not in the least meek with her. He was meek with Gunnar and Anders because they deserved it; they were insuf
ficient. But with Heidi he could be coarse. It hid his small fear.

  “That you do. You smell like a rutting sheep. I’ve got your order—all these Slavs. Don’t expect them to come cheap. They weren’t easy to get hold of, believe me. Two are in English, from the States. I couldn’t find them any other way.” A long yawn, sumptuous, leisurely, disclosed the gold in her molars. A sleep-crease marked her left cheek. Pillow and blanket were in disorder on her cot. She hauled a canvas bag off a shelf behind the German lamp and drew out a pair of paperbacks. “Ludvík Vaculík, there. Bohumil Hrabel, there. Witold Gombrowicz, I’ve got him right here. Nobody but you wants such stuff.”

  “There was supposed to be another—”

  “The other Polish one. Where did I put . . . here. Tadeusz Konwicki, here he is. Hardcover. Him I could track down only in Polish. Your native language,” she said with a lift of her sardonic little shoulder.

  She handed him a tiny glass of vodka and yawned again. Stingy. He saw she was going to stay annoyed with him. She knew what he knew; she knew it all, every permutation of every speculation; they had talked and talked about what he knew until it was all ground down into granules. His history—his passion—was no more than a pile of salt between them. There was no longer anything left for them to sift through. She had, besides, a hard skepticism for every grain of it—even for his Polish, though she had herself introduced him to his teacher, one of her own customers. It was the cast of her mind to run from self-irony to blatancy—insofar as Lars could guess anything at all about what her mind was like. Her Swedish was cocky and pliant, but it had the whole tune of German, and when she let out into it, as she frequently did, a German syllable or two, it seemed to Lars that he could, for just that instant, look down through a trapdoor into a private underground chamber where no one was allowed to follow. For all her noisiness, she was bitingly private. Her husband, for instance—the mysterious, the distant, the vaporous Dr. Eklund—was either a psychoanalyst or a gastroenterologist: she hinted sometimes at one, sometimes at the other. And her life before—what was that? She wanted not to be what she had been before. She had arrived in Stockholm after the war, like so many others. She had been quick to marry Dr. Eklund.