The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  “So you offered her the Princess,” Lars bit off.

  “I offered her you.”

  “What are you talking about? What did you tell her?”

  “I told her you’re awash in Polish. I told her it’s under your skin, not that you speak it like a native, but if anyone was ever possessed! I told her you’re a madman for literature. I told her you’re a connoisseur of the author of The Messiah. I told her all that.”

  “But not the deep fact. Not that.”

  “It’s your secret, isn’t it? You keep on keeping it, except when you spill it. How would I tell what you don’t tell? The trouble is you have no confidence in me.”

  “If she had an accent—” He swallowed it down. “What kind of accent?”

  “How do I know? I have an accent myself.”

  “The name, then. She gave her name.”

  “Elsa. No, Adela. I think it was Adela. Don’t pester me with such things, Lars. I tried to reach you, after all. I left that message with the Morgontörn, what more could I do? And then I made her stay and stay. She got sick of waiting and went off, do you blame her?”

  “Where does she live?”

  “She never told.”

  “Didn’t she leave a phone number?”

  “She said she would just rather come back.”

  “But she hasn’t. Not in a week. We’ve lost her, and she’s a crazy fraud—”

  “Something was in that bag.”

  “It wasn’t The Messiah.”

  “Then why should you care if we’ve lost her?”

  There was an exhaustion between them now, as if they had just run out of a burning house. The roasting smell trickled up out of Lars’s clothes: it fumed up from his belly, his armpits, the soaked pockets on his rump, his snow-dampened feet. Heidi’s gleam was an ember. Her mouth relapsed to sleepiness. Lars wondered whether, with all her talent for turning things askew, she had given over his story—his deep fact—to Dr. Eklund; or whether she had given over her own story. The fence. She had, in the last moment, revived their old habit of “we”—this hadn’t escaped him. But she couldn’t be depended on: it occurred to him that the woman in the white beret, in the morning’s white brilliance, carrying a featherweight Messiah in a white bag, was, if she wasn’t an angel, a lie.

  “Something’s burning,” he said.

  “Oh God! The stove. Go and see, Lars. I suppose I never shut the flame under this afternoon’s pot. I’m getting to be an old woman.”

  He took two steps. “The fire’s off. It wasn’t turned on.”

  “Then it’s the smell of glue. The binding glue in that new shipment. Sometimes it smells like that. Or else it’s you. Sweat. A rutting sheep. Smog.” She was dimming, failing, a light dying out. Something was snuffing her. “The roof of the snow pressing down. It keeps the smoke on the ground. In the streets. Every chimney in the city sending out smoke—”

  “It could be the chimneys,” he agreed. A quirk of the atmosphere. Meteorology. Stockholm smoldering at the northernmost margins of the industrial West, houses in clusters, spires like an army of bayonets, office blocks, factories, flats, computers, the grit-filled mists of habitation, hesitation, wear, use, decay, loss. The bad smell behind that fence. Even the wake of angels. The white wings of angels passing in flocks are known to release the odor of burning feathers.

  He thought of his little fear. “Dr. Eklund,” he said, “when did he get back from Copenhagen?”

  “He’s not back yet. Look at the road, for heaven’s sake. Planes don’t take off in heavy weather.”

  “Wasn’t that conference over long ago?”

  “What conference?”

  “The one in Copenhagen.”

  “It wasn’t a conference. You’ve got Copenhagen mixed up with somewhere else. A consultation. The prima ballerina of the Danish ballet. She wouldn’t perform. Wouldn’t set foot on the stage.”

  “Dr. Eklund’s not in Copenhagen,” Lars said.

  “Well, maybe not. Lord knows where he’s been stranded. You can never be sure.”

  She drifted toward her cot. She wanted her cot; she was old and full of sleep. She wanted him to go. But he persisted—he could feel how his teeth tore into it: “Dr. Eklund,” he said, “isn’t stranded anywhere.”

  She was, he noticed, wearing slippers. She dropped them off under the daffodil and handed him her key. “Lock up when you leave. You can bring this back next time.” Next time: she was expecting him to resume. She had never before entrusted him with the key—she meant him to take it away with him. He watched her strain as she bent to roll down her stockings, gartered at the knees; then she fell back on the dishevelled cot. White strings of her hair blew off the pillow. She widened her mouth for another yawn; her eyes watered. “If he isn’t stranded, then he’s on his way.”

  “Mrs. Eklund.”

  Her face was in the pillow. Her voice was drawing itself out, thinner and thinner. It was dissolving. “Be sure to get that key back here pretty soon. It’s one of Dr. Eklund’s extras. It isn’t that he loses them. He leaves them places. At the hospital. In the flat.”

  Lars said steadily, “You’re all alone here every night. There isn’t any flat. There isn’t any Dr. Eklund.”

  “Go away. Take your books and go. I need to sleep. I’m asleep.”

  “Dr. Eklund’s a phantom.”

  “No, no, you don’t follow, you don’t see,” she soughed into the pillow. “She’s dancing again. The prima ballerina.”

  The key was heating up in his hand. “A refugee impostor,” he said. “That’s what you are.”

  In the little vestibule, Czechs and Poles in his arms, he struggled back into his boots, teetering on one leg at a time and leaning against the glass of the display window. It was just where she had stood—the so-called daughter—with her white plastic bag. In which rested, or swarmed in chaos, certain sheets of manuscript, whatever they were. In the window the enameled Royal Family were still tucked benignly into their sofas, and the sea gulls were speckling Lake Vänern, and alongside were those towering piles of Russians and South Americans and Englishmen, so many foreign urgencies babbling. The key went straight into the lock without difficulty in the broad circle of light that looped out from the streetlamp. In this spot she—the so-called daughter—had determined to declare herself. Here I am.

  “He’s on his way,” he heard Heidi call from the back room. A moan: or not exactly a moan. Rather, the sound of indecipherable syllables evaporating at the bottom of the sea. German? Polish? Serbo-Croatian? A foreign babble, unintelligible. He put the key in his pocket. It burned against his thigh. His little fear. And then he thought: look! it doesn’t burn, it isn’t burning. There is no Dr. Eklund. Dr. Eklund doesn’t exist. Dr. Eklund is a phantom. Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character. Now he was not sure whether Heidi had called out anything at all. He was, anyhow, already yards away from the shop. But his little fear was cooled. His little fear was gone.

  9

  HE DECIDED, THE NEXT day, to forgo his afternoon quilt. He headed instead for the Morgontörn; it was the first time in months he had seen the place in light. It was business, it was the world, it was movement—they were putting out the paper. It went on like this, telephones and shouts and typewriters, until the secretaries left for home—an office boy flashing by with a long noodle of galleys, the stutter of someone’s typing clacking out of one of the cubicles; Nilsson yelling: something was missing, something was late. There was a common energy—the intermittent vowels in the floorboards weren’t the least bit ghostly, and the noise of it all ground together had the unitary drive of an organism out on its own: God knew what the name of such a single-minded animal might be. Nothing spooky. A big nosy dog. Lars didn’t take note of any mice. No doubt they were confined to barracks.

  “Lars! What are you doing here?” Nilsson gave him a bossy thump and raced on through the roil. It was a thing to marvel at, the book department in daylight—how the sun, moonl
ike, wan, wintry, grainy and fickle, more gray than pale, cut out patches everywhere. The strangeness of these sun-pockets: windows! A vague electric bulb and the usual scratchings and scrapings against the shaft kept the elevator in its shabby night, but otherwise the chairs and desks and file cabinets had the look of life. Over in a corner the gang of three-o’clock gossips were well into it, Gunnar and Anders among them. Lars was surprised, and then, on second thought, he wasn’t. Night prowlers somewhat on his own style, they gargled with what was what and who was where and why—it meant they had to come to the well, now and then, for water.

  He was breathing through a veil—a sort of stupor or trance. It was the habit of the quilt; at this hour he was used to his nap. The rims of his eyes itched and bothered: a pair of old hoops he had bumped through too many ditches. He was wakeful enough, but with a ragged edge; a buzz; a recklessness. He felt somehow abused—he didn’t care what anyone said. He nudged himself nearer; no one acknowledged him, no one lifted a shoulder to let him in. They were telling a translation story—how Sven Strömberg, in an absent moment, pushing to meet a deadline on an Australian novel and meaning to engage the word “trust,” inadvertently transmuted it to “trussed,” and tied up his faithful heroine in knots. “You can’t pin it on Sven, it could happen to anyone. All those puns and homonyms.” “Homer nodding.” “Freud. A psychological substitution.” “You forget that Sven Strömberg doesn’t have a psyche.” “So what’s he keep in that paunch?” “Some sort of cheese. You can smell it on his breath.” “It isn’t cheese that’s on his breath.” “At least his howlers are his own, nothing’s swiped.”

  Laughter. “Has anyone seen Flodcrantz?” “I heard he ran to Finland to hide out.” “He’s got the shakes. Even his ears. His knuckles. My God, last I had a look at him the man was a jelly.” “It’s his own doing. He asked for it.” “They say he’s suicidal.” “That Olof? He takes vitamins!” “Well, he wanted to be talked about. It’s better than getting buried every week on the culture page.” “He’s made himself famous. He’s relishing the whole business.” “His hand quivers. His chin.” “It’s an act. He’s an actor. The greatest Thespian of them all.” “Please, the fellow’s suffering. He’s sick. He’s not normal.”

  And on and on. It was this month’s scandal. A reviewer at one of the evening papers, an admired (some said dangerously envied) younger poet who had just published his second collection of verse, had been exposed—by Sven Strömberg, of all people!—as a plagiarist. Every single poem in Olof Flodcrantz’s new book was a purloined translation of the work of a different American poet. Flodcrantz had actually been shameless enough to include, among the safer unknowns, a few stanzas by Robert Frost that Sven Strömberg had himself translated a dozen years ago for an anthology remaindered six weeks after publication: Bards of the New World. The most captivating circumstance in the story was its luckless climax—how Sven Strömberg had uncovered the crime against all odds, since he was celebrated for never reading anything he wasn’t being paid to read. On the other hand, he was also celebrated for lapping up the most impudent syrups of flattery, so when Olof Flodcrantz sent—sent!—a copy of the criminal volume, eloquently inscribed, to Sven Strömberg, and when Sven Strömberg took in the inscription naming him the foremost man of letters in the nation, it was natural enough for Sven Strömberg (a courteous man) to return the compliment by endorsing Olof Flodcrantz’s newest lucubrations. “Purely original,” he wrote to Olof; “purely original,” he said to everyone he ran into. Sven’s confirmation of Olof’s pure originality had already been well circulated in the stewpot when, thumbing through the pages to gaze once again on Olof’s pleasing inscription, Sven Strömberg happened to come on the familiar lines by Robert Frost. In his own translation. Pirated; usurped.

  The most delectable shock of the season so far. The three-o’clock gossips—it was now nearer five o’clock—turned it this way and that, testing for motives, for consequences. Who had duped whom? Mad Olof!—putting his head in the lion’s mouth, but only after first waking up the lion. Yet the poor lion was hardly in a position to bite. Was it a case of rage, malice, revenge, despair? Or—“Contrariwise,” said Gunnar—puckishness, camp, comedy, dada? A post-modernist plot. Sven was behind it all: it was Sven who had dug up for Olof all those Americans cleverly named Robert. Creeley and Mezey and Bly! Lowell, Penn Warren, Graves. Anders would have nothing to do with this theory of looking under beds for the culprit. A solemn accident of reformist patriotism, whatever the intent. Just what we need, showing us up for what we are, rubbing our noses in the dollhouse dust. Ultimate ironic burlesque of Swedish parochialism. Exposure, once and for all, of the littleness of the life of letters in decrepit old Stockholm.

  “Crocodiles! Earn your keep,” Nilsson yelled, running by. The secretaries were going home. The moonlike sun had faded in the windows. It was the stewpot at full boil.

  “Well, there’s something else,” Lars said. No one heard. They had moved on to Olof Foldcrantz’s fate at his paper, whether he would be fired or kept on as a culture hero. He was, whatever else you thought of him, daring—you had to admit he had brio: all those Roberts! Not to mention the blurring of borders, of property lines. Internationalism versus the local pond. Socialism in the ideal—the text’s the thing, never mind who sets it down. Shakespeare by any other name. A narrow moralist might speak of theft, but what was it if not the halo of the universal that the whole planet strains toward? Non-exclusive loveliness going from hand among the nations. The fool in the case was Sven Strömberg—showing up the impostor, even at the price of his own dignity. How ludicrous the leap from “purely original” to “Stop, thief!”—everything turns on whose ox is gored: there you are.

  In spite of which, not one of them would mind if Olof Foldcrantz got fired.

  Thus the stewpot in the early winter dark. Cigarette smoke like torn nets hanging. All over the world the great ladle was stirring, stirring. The poets, dreamers, thinkers, hacks. The ambitious and the meditative. The opportunists and the provocateurs. The cabalists and the seducers. This stewpot—these hot tides—Lars under his quilt a short walk away had shut out, week after week: for the sake of catching sight of his father’s eye. His father too had shunned the stewpot. Drohobycz instead of Warsaw, Drohobycz instead of Paris, Drohobycz instead of anywhere.

  “Deadlines, gentlemen!” Nilsson yelled, flying past; he had on his coat and muffler. The tight little cluster loosened, and out from the middle of it serenely stepped, or was mildly ejected, the Morgontörn’s only literary woman, in her man’s shirt and tie, saluting Lars with two fingers raised, one with a blackened writer’s bump. She was rumored to be Sven Strömberg’s lover of twenty years’ standing; she had not spoken a syllable in his defense—her voice anyhow had the brittle electronic character of an official interpreter—but her small sly mouth was rich with a certain moist-looking sweetness. There was a sweetness in all of them, the whole three-o’clock crew—the weak honey of reverence. Literary creatures who served, sidestepped, and sometimes sold out the Muses. Their so-called scandals, their scramblings, their feuds, their polymorphous life in the stewpot: how innocent, how distant from the palaces of live thunder, how weak they were before the altar of Lars’s father’s unmoving eye. Now they were putting on their padded jackets, fur hats, fleece boots; it seemed to Lars they were snubbing him, or else they were oblivious—here was Gunnar rushing by, and then Anders, hurrying toward wives, stepfathers, aunts, groaning elderly households. The stewpot was breaking up. The Morgontörn was beginning to take on its rickety nighttime mien.

  “Wait,” Lars called again, “there’s something else.”

  They were streaming past him, some toward the bottleneck in front of the elevator, most down the grunting wooden stairs. The poor old Morgontörn, collapsing backward—into the last century, into night, into decay. Already the mice were preparing to emerge; you could hear them drilling in phalanxes behind the walls.