The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  He had never seen her so excited. Something had provoked her. Her cheeks were drawn down—puffs of weighted dough; abruptly she had the look of a bulldog. He did not believe her; she was a liar. She wanted not to be what she had been before. It was more intuition than suspicion that he did not believe her: she knew too much about that fence—the other side of it, among the shadows. She knew what they did with the bits of paper—how they squashed every scrap inside their rags to make a lining against the cold, how they paddled their shoes with it against the sores. She had strangely intimate views—they were like summonings—about the hunger and the vomiting and the bursting of the bowels. She summoned these with a votive memory. She summoned too well, too potently, too acutely: the night space beyond the fence could not account for so deep a summoning. He supposed she was one of them, but hidden—one of the shadows inside.

  “You’re a refugee,” he said. “A survivor. Like me.”

  “Like you? You don’t know what you are! Safe in Stockholm your whole life! You don’t know who you are!” She let out that same unconfined newfangled laughter: doglike. “You’ll say you’re anything at all!”

  “You were behind that fence. On the inside.”

  “The outside. I heard the shooting.”

  “You want to conceal it. You’re afraid of being found out.”

  “Oh yes, a Marrano. Like your idea of the Queen, poor woman!”

  “You don’t want to admit it. You want to be rid of it. Your name,” he accused—he had spied it written in one of those old books of hers. “I saw what your name used to be.”

  “There are plenty of Bavarian burghers called Simon. They’re all Catholic.”

  “And what are you?”

  “By religion? A bookseller.”

  “A refugee,” he insisted, “like any refugee. You escaped. A survivor.”

  “Stockholm is full of survivors,” she said; she was quiet now. She was obstinate. She was not going to yield. Instead, she held out her key. “Here, let yourself out. You’ll come back, whatever you say.”

  “No. I’m not coming back. I told you.”

  She slid behind him to the door. The little fear he always had of her seemed to heat up the key as he turned it; then he relinquished it into her hand.

  “You’ll want to come back. Think what you’ve got on order! Poles and Czechs! Vaculík, Hrabel, Konwicki. Witold Gombrowicz! You might not want to come back for me, but for Konwicki, for Gombrowicz—”

  He stepped out into the cold—she was still laughing back there, behind the door. Mockery. But it was so; for the sake of these he would return. He felt how she had over-mastered him after all. He was glad to keep away. It might be weeks before she reeled him back, a helpless fish on her line, to fetch his order. All the time until then he would keep away; he would keep away with all his might. It came to him how desolate he was. He had imagined her entangled with him. It was the shooting, only the shooting, she was entangled with. His father’s skeleton.

  6

  ON THE WEEKEND HE went to visit Ulrika’s mother. She lived in the suburbs, in a section beyond the city that had once been semi-rural and was now growing more and more Turkish. Ulrika’s mother was proud of her house—it had been in the family, on the female side, for seven generations. The foundation was stone, the rest a rust-colored old brick. It struck Lars—for the first time—that Ulrika’s hair had been just this color: brick dusted all over with powdery brown. Birgitta, his first wife, was an ordinary blonde. He had not heard anything about Birgitta in over a decade. She was married again and had two small children; he knew this much, but otherwise she almost never entered his mind. Ulrika he had once been bitter against, because she had taken his daughter away to America. But the bitterness was stale, and when Ulrika’s mother in her confusion led him into the house he recognized that lately Ulrika too was seldom in his thoughts. Even his little daughter had begun to fade.

  “Lars! You should tell me when you’re coming. You should call, for heaven’s sake!”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “You didn’t use to be such a primitive. Look at me, a walking mud pie, look how I am, straight from the garden—”

  “I’ve brought you something. My flat is so small I have no room to store anything.”

  Ulrika’s mother’s mouth suddenly pinched itself inward. It was a trick Lars recalled from Ulrika.

  “I can’t keep things for you, Lars. It isn’t right. We aren’t relations any more. Besides, Ulrika has an American sweetheart now. An engineer. He works for IBM.”

  “It’s Karin’s thing, not mine.” He drew out a flat rectangular object from his briefcase and set it down between them on the parlor table. It was his daughter’s old paint set.

  “What am I supposed to do with that?”

  “Put it away somewhere.”

  “It makes no sense to keep a baby thing like that. Next time I see Karin she’ll be grown. I can show you her latest snapshots if you like—they came just last week. A big tall girl. All that black hair—she takes after you before you went gray. And look,” she said, “the paint’s all dried out, it’s no good anyhow.”

  “It’s been like that a long time.”

  “What do I want a dried-out piece of trash like that for?”

  “A keepsake.”

  “Your idea of a keepsake, Lord help us! It’s because you don’t know what it is to inherit anything, Lars. I don’t blame you. I’ve always felt for you.”

  “When Karin was tiny she already loved to paint,” Lars said.

  “All kids like to make messes.”

  This ignorant old widow. He thought of his father’s drawings: ready and waiting for us at the very beginning of life. Is it possible that these predestined images can flow from generation to generation?—he remembered how certain phantomlike lines, wanton, curiously powerful and strong, had astonished him, sweeping out from his daughter’s fierce little fist: the power of genes. Ulrika had taken small notice.

  “I told Ulrika,” Ulrika’s mother said, “how hard it would be for her if she married an orphan. We’re a family that’s always had our own house. The same house you’re sitting in, solid stone, good brick, if you want to talk about keepsakes! And a nice garden too. Ulrika, I said, we know who we are. We come from right here, and always have. I told her it would be like going with the gypsies to go with an orphan. It’s not your fault, Lars. But it wasn’t right for Ulrika. Don’t think I didn’t tell her! She ended up a gypsy herself. Lord knows when she’ll find her way home again. Maybe never. By now she speaks American day and night and in her sleep. Karin in those pictures looks pure American, doesn’t she? Those shoes! Ulrika shouldn’t allow shoes like that. And that dark hair. I never thought I’d have a grandchild as dark as one of these Turks around here. They’re everywhere now, they’ve moved in on both sides next door. I can’t work in my garden without some Turkish man watching. The women are worse.”

  He sat with her for another hour, tracing Ulrika in every one of her gestures—he had never observed this before. Now and then he stared down at the photographs of his daughter. It was evident that she was going to be tall, but otherwise he hardly knew her for his own. He was still unreconciled to her name—he who had chosen his own name, and out of the dictionary, like a spell! Karin: Ulrika had wanted this commonplace. Lars had dreamt of the Four Matriarchs. Rachel, Rebecca, Sarah, Leah. In the snapshots—he held them like a pack of cards, frivolously—Karin receded from him; she seemed no more than a plaster cast, with empty eyes. The original was elsewhere. In the photos she was older and coarser than the quick child whose paint set he meant to rid himself of. He might meet her again one day; or not. If she longed for him she would search him out. She would study his case if he deserved it. Even a child can become a scholar of loss. He wondered whether he ought to take the paint set back with him—Ulrika’s mother would only toss it out, nothing could be plainer. But he left it behind.

  7

  IT WAS EASY TO keep away from Heid
i. He felt how easy. Heidi was nothing to him. He had lost no one. Still, he was plagued now and then by a heaviness, a thickness of the lung, an inner lurch as glutinous as mourning.

  He walked past the Academy and discovered that this density of breathing, this viscosity, was only ordinary fury. Mrs. Eklund! She was jealous: she had called him a collector and his father a skeleton. A doctor’s wife considers you either a madman or a phony—this was from that last batch of letters Heidi had wangled out of Warsaw: she had recited this insult with zest. “No doubt a bad translation,” she added, to be fair. He seized the Polish original. The words did not change their spots. They belonged to Witold Gombrowicz, one of his father’s epistolary cronies. Six years before the shooting (Heidi’s count), Lars’s father in an open letter to the press had spat out his bitter rebuff to this doctor’s wife and her opinions: Dear Witold . . . These are the mass instincts that eclipse within us a clarity of judgment, reintroducing the archaic and barbaric epistemologies, the arsenal of atavistic and bankrupt logic . . . You side with inferiority. The poor doctor’s wife, a woman Gombrowicz had run into on the Number 18 streetcar, in 1936, on Wilcza Street. It was probably true that Gombrowicz sided with her. She was exasperated: Lars’s father was over her head. A madman or a phony. She condemned him for being beyond her. Barbaric epistemologies!

  She must be an old woman by now, this doctor’s wife Gombrowicz had met on the Number 18, as old as Jozefina, the fiancée; or dead. Gombrowicz, surly humorist, was also dead. You side with inferiority. Over the Academy, in the night sky, floating, wafting, aloft in the streaming snow, Lars saw, or almost saw, his father’s body, not at all a skeleton—an incandescent apparition billowing with light, puffed out the light stretching his father’s skin to palest transparency. This balloon-father, shedding luminosity, light falling in sheets from his swollen body, drifted into the white flux and merged with it. First a blur, then a smudge, then a blankness: above the Academy’s roof now there was only the shower of snow-hyphens brightly descending.

  It was a Thursday night. At the Morgontörn, at Anders’s desk in Anders’s cubicle, Lars—rigid, electric, anxious—was typing his review for the next Monday: a novel by Danilo Kiš, translated from the Serbo-Croatian; and there was Gunnar hanging over him, teasing and prickling, and there was Anders just stepping out of the ancient elevator, breathing dragon steam, streaked and pocked with melting snow. Anders kicked off his galoshes and reached for his vodka. The little mice ran. Lars’s page was stippled with errors. He began typing his first sentence all over again: Here is a universe as confined as a trap, where the sole heroes are victims, where muteness is for the intrepid only. A grand soliloquy—he was instantly sick of his words, trite, portentous, posturing. All gesture. A vertigo passed through Lars’s head. The two of them, Gunnar and Anders, went spinning around him—a pair of desperate vaudevillians, rivals, Siamese twins. They had their old show: cavorting and caviling, nipping at each other and at Lars. Anders handed Lars a scrap—it was Heidi calling him back. She wanted him, she was surrendering. But the note, scribbled off the telephone by the Morgontörn’s somnolent receptionist, was no more than a garble. MRS. EKLUND PHONED ABOUT YOUR SISTER. That fool of a girl downstairs. Lars, in the corridor, obediently filled Anders’s kettle at the tap. In Anders’s cubicle, Gunnar was chirping confined as a trap, where the sole heroes are victims, and all the rest. It shamed Lars. He could not be angry at these interesting sufferers, but he felt himself without weight in the world, a molecule bobbing along in a sluice. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m off,” and trudged out to retrieve his Czechs and Poles at Heidi’s shop.

  8

  ACROSS THE SQUARE, OVER the Academy his father’s bloated shape had long ago disintegrated among the gray steeples and the snow spilling slantwise. A smell of something roasting, what was that? He crossed the bridge over the locks, where the salty Baltic squalled under his feet. He had kept away a good three weeks. Heidi let him cool his heels before coming to the door.

  “You smell like a rutting sheep,” she complained. He was sweating from his rapid walk—nearly a run—in the new snow. His boots were dripping. She made him leave them in the vestibule; she grumbled that he was interrupting—she was hard at work, a big shipment had arrived that very day. But he saw from her long slow helpless yawn that the knock of the penknife on the glass had just now awakened her. She was spending the night on the cot in the back room. Dr. Eklund was somewhere else; it seemed to Lars that she was embarrassed by this.

  “Nobody but you wants such stuff,” she told him—it was, this remark, a commonplace with her. Vaculík, Hrabel, Gombrowicz, Konwichi. She piled up his order on her little back-room table. “What names! Didn’t I say these fellows would fetch you back?” She yawned again, but with a certain willed smugness. “Why didn’t you come last week? When I phoned?”

  “Anders picked up your message from the receptionist’s desk an hour ago,” Lars said.

  “An hour ago? That paper you work for! They’d be a week behind in reporting the end of the world.” A wild alertness took hold of her. “You’re too late, by days. I thought you’d have the sense to get here right away. I kept her waiting that whole afternoon.”

  “Who was that?”

  “A woman with an interest in Polish.”

  She was being wary, tricky. In his three weeks away he had not forgotten how dangerous she could be, how she could topple him.

  “If the Princess wants me back,” he said, “she’s too late. She threw me out when I thought I still needed her. I’ve got no use for her now,” but he recognized in his own croak—swallowing down the bit of vodka Heidi had given him when he asked for it—that something new lay between them.

  “No, no, not Mrs. Rozanowska. I told them who at the Morgontörn. I told them. They said they’d put it in the message. My God, Lars, if you had your own phone in your own flat like an ordinary person—”

  He pulled out the wadded-up square Anders had brought him and looked at it. MRS. EXLUND PHONED ABOUT YOUR SISTER. The snow had somehow crept into his pocket and dampened everything in it. The preposterous words had begun to run. “I haven’t got a sister. There’s no sister anywhere in it at all. You know that.”

  “That’s probably true. I didn’t think she was your sister. It smelled fishy to me from start to finish.” Heidi formulated one of her calculating scowls—she was all scandalous bliss. “I don’t say there wasn’t a resemblance, but the fact is she hasn’t come back. She said she’d come back and she hasn’t. I asked her to leave it for you but she wouldn’t. I don’t blame her, if it’s genuine.”

  “Leave what? If what’s genuine?”

  “My dear boy”—she had never before addressed him this way, him with his graying head! but there was an importance in it that penetrated—“she has the manuscript of The Messiah in a little white plastic bag. She carries it around like that. The original. The thing itself. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “The Messiah? No one has that. It disappeared. It doesn’t exist.”

  “She’s got it in her bag.”

  “Who has, for God’s sake?”

  “Your sister.”

  “There isn’t any sister. A fraud. You’ve been taken in.”

  “She didn’t say she was your sister. I only drew a conclusion.”

  “You drew a conclusion!” he howled.

  “Well, if she calls herself the daughter of the author of The Messiah, and you’re the son of the author of The Messiah, that makes her your sister. It stands to reason.”

  “It stands to reason! The daughter! There isn’t any daughter! There isn’t any Messiah!”

  “Not so long ago you had a different opinion.”

  “The manuscript’s gone, there’s no one alive who thinks anything else.”

  “You said yourself it might have been hidden.”

  “Whoever had it was taken away. Whoever had it is dead.”

  “She isn’t dead. She told me the reason she’s got it is just because she is his
daughter. No one else could have gotten hold of it. It was saved explicitly for her.”

  Lars said, “There’s no room in the story for another child. It’s not feasible. It can’t be. You know the story as well as I do. There’s only me.”

  “Well, maybe there’s you and maybe there’s not. And if there’s you, why can’t there be another one?”

  “What did she say? What exactly?”

  “That the man who wrote The Messiah was her father.”

  “But he’s my father!” Lars cried.

  Heidi beamed out a rascally gleam. “If the manuscript doesn’t exist, and the daughter doesn’t exist—”

  “You know there’s no daughter.”

  “—then maybe there’s no son either.”

  “I’m here. Here I am.”

  “That’s just what she said. A biblical annunciation. And every bit as convinced of it as you.”

  Wearing a white beret. Not too distant from Lars’s own age, judging from the hair, which was just beginning to whiten, though only on one side of a slightly archaic middle part; the face was as clear as a baby’s. There certainly was a resemblance, not acute—she wasn’t a twin—but ripe, somehow, with hints. The similarities were in the absences, in the sort of look she didn’t have. She didn’t look content. She didn’t look—well, normal. These negative hints made Heidi pay attention, though not right away—Heidi was on the watch for Dr. Eklund. Dr. Eklund was returning momentarily from Copenhagen. The woman had come in out of the blue—out of the snow—with her white plastic bag. Heidi kept her eye on it—shoplifters carry such things. But the woman didn’t go near the bookshelves at all; she turned in the aisles and turned again. The shop had a wild morning brightness: snow-dazzle freakishly shot through with slashes of early sunlight, too sharp to bear. All that exaggerated whiteness seemed to be crowding into the narrow vestibule of the shop, and had swept the woman straight through the doorway. She asked the Turkish boy for the proprietor—it was the proprietor she wanted, because of those heaps of foreign books in the window. The foreign books had lured her; she had never noticed this shop before. She was used to walking all over Stockholm, but she was still new to it. You could tell from her accent how new. She had something astonishing, something stupendous, in her bag. Was there anyone here—perhaps even the proprietor—who could read Polish? Or who had access to the local Polish intelligentsia? In this very bag, the one in her hand (it was light enough, it wasn’t a big tome), lay the work of a genius who happened—she wasn’t going to be shy about this, she wouldn’t hide his light under a bushel!—who happened to be her own father. Dead. Murdered. A victim, long ago, but immortal. And she was the daughter. Here I am! She had inherited her father’s last known manuscript, a masterpiece the whole world believed to be wiped out, erased, vanished. It deserved translation into Swedish; she couldn’t do this herself. It deserved translation into every language on the face of the earth. A visionary thing—the title itself showed how visionary—oh, amazing, it couldn’t be explained in only half a minute. Was it possible the proprietor might know someone who could do something for a manuscript like this? Redeem it, accord it salvation, spread it like a gospel? The point was she was looking for a translator.