The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  Lars ran to the top of the stairwell and called down, “Something else! News!”

  Sven Strömberg’s lover, hitching her sailor’s coat over her shirt and tie, stopped on the landing.

  Lars called, “The Messiah’s turned up! Here! In Stockholm!”

  Clatter on the steps; chatter; rumblings. “It’s Lars Andemening,” Sven Strömberg’s lover explained to the landing below. “I think he’s announcing the Second Coming.”

  “Don’t tell me Olof Flodcrantz is back from Finland?” someone hooted up. “That soon?”

  Laughter up and down the stairs.

  “His daughter’s got the manuscript. It’s found,” Lars called.

  “What manuscript?”

  Lars leaned over the rail. In the twilight of all those flights of stairs a thousand flickering faces were lifting toward him. “The Messiah,” he called. “The lost Messiah of Bruno Schulz.”

  “Stockholm rumors. The world’s hotbed.”

  “That Pole? He never had a daughter.”

  “If you’ve never heard of it, leave it to Lars.”

  “Or if it’s dead.”

  “No, no, everybody’s dead. Tolstoy. Ibsen. Even Strindberg. It gets to Lars only if it’s to-tal-ly obscure.”

  “If it never existed.”

  “If you wish it never existed.”

  “Lars!” This was Anders, halfway down. “Cat’s out of the bag. All that resurrecting you do. All those unknowns and esoterics raised from the grave—”

  Sven Strömberg’s lover said neatly, “Lars Andemening, the Messiah of Stockholm.”

  “Crocodiles!” Nilsson yelled up. “Always after a sensation.”

  At the bottom of the staircase Lars met Nilsson waiting for him. “The telephone girl handed me this a second before quitting time. I ran into her coming out of the ladies’ room. Why don’t you get yourself a phone at home, Lars? The staff here isn’t your butler. I’m not your valet.”

  Lars read: MRS. EKLUND PHONED, DR. EKLUND BACK, PLEASE RETURN KEY.

  He pressed, “But you know what it signifies—if The Messiah’s found.”

  “One more book in the world,” Nilsson said, “that isn’t Pippi Longstocking. People complain, Lars—your reviews are practically theology. A little more wholesomeness for Monday, how about it? Soft-pedal the surreal, go easy on the existential dread, how about it? Give it a try.”

  Lars had entered the stewpot and it had vomited him up.

  10

  IN THE MORNING THE snow was brownish in the road, and tire-marked. There were heaps of it, in waist-high banks, at the sidewalk’s edge. Walking was easy and light. Lars arrived at Heidi’s shop so quickly that he had no time to notice his mood. He noticed it only when he looked all around for Heidi and instead came on the Turkish boy raising the feather duster to his shoulder like a sentry with a rifle. Mrs. Eklund was out. “You take this for her then,” Lars told the Turkish boy, holding out the key. The Turkish boy demurred: he wasn’t supposed to have any key, and if he was allowed to watch the shop at all it was because there were no real customers (clearly Lars wasn’t one of these) at this hour anyhow.

  Lars drifted back into the street. What was this exulting? It was nearly ten o’clock: he tried to imagine where Heidi might be. She was not in her flat; she had no flat. She was not with Dr. Eklund; Dr Eklund was a phantom. What was this exulting? The delirium of what he had done! He had proclaimed the return of his father’s lost last book. The stewpot’s disbelief, their indifference, what was that? He hardly credited it himself. And the daughter! There was no daughter, and still he had proclaimed her, in order to proclaim the risen Messiah.

  He had nowhere to go, so he headed for his flat. He wondered whether he ought to worry about Nilsson’s “Give it a try”—was it a warning? Would Nilsson, who had hired him and who was in a way his protector—would Nilsson throw him out? For the sins of unwholesomeness, theology, surrealism, existential dread? Or for the larger sin of unpopularity? He might work at enlivening his style—Gunnar, for instance, peppered his columns with slow motion, back alley, big deal, wisecrack, even so what. Anders called all these expressions “Velveetisms”; a truly cosmopolitan mind, he said, wouldn’t stoop to such vulgarities. But Lars remembered a passage in one of his father’s tales concerning a great theater of illusion, a magnificent wax figure exhibition, that once came to Drohobycz: No, they were not authentic Dreyfuses, Edisons, or Lucchenis; they were only pretenders. They may have been real madmen, caught red-handed at the precise moment a brilliant idée fixe had entered their heads . . . Ever since then, that one idea remained in their heads like an exclamation mark, and they clung to it, standing on one foot, suspended in midair. Gunnar Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel, waxwork men. The Morgontörn, a wax museum. Even the mice were artificial, operated by hidden motors in the walls.

  What a tenderness he felt—this exulting that had hold of him!—for their wax faces, wax eyes with (this was odd) wax tears of pain or reproach or deprivation: Gunnar and Anders and Sven Strömberg’s lover with her curly wax tie and even Nilsson, all of them wax exhibits connected to wires by buttons at the coccyx, or else invisibly controlled by distant wireless computers. Their terrible helplessness. One idea remained like an exclamation mark in the sweet-tasting pink wax of their heads: the stewpot, the stewpot! While here, here—Lars had reached the door of his flat, and was fingering his key—here in his own startled bed, under his tossed and tangled quilt, his father’s eye, lit, steady, unmoving, strong and blatant, a violent white ray, was spilling out the wilderness of God. A vivid bestiary strangely abundant, discharging the white light of plenitude, and they turned from it, they shunned it, if they did not deride it they were remote from it, the greased beak had never seized them, no apparition, no sphere, no egg, no globe, no ultimate and forcing eye. He was forcing the key into the door; his own door—it did not fit. Then he understood it was the wrong key—it was the key to Heidi’s shop, so he fluttered inside his pocket to find his own.

  He lived on the ground floor, just off a minuscule hallway cut from an angle of the wall. There was a diseased old leather chair out there, with a cracked leg, that a doctor had once set down in that spot, long ago, for the purpose of receiving certain large parcels. No one knew what was in them, except that it meant the doctor was rich—the house had seen better days, magical deliveries: enormous frosted cakes, ladies’ hats plumed and ribboned, birds in cages. This fabled chair gave its characteristic squeal, and from around the corner, out of the little hallway came a woman wearing a white beret.

  “Mrs. Eklund told me where you live. If,” she said, “you’re the right one?”

  She was carrying the white plastic bag.

  “Lars Andemening? You can do Polish? You don’t look Swedish.”

  The last one to say this to him—that he didn’t look Swedish—was his foster mother; he was then sixteen. It made him run away: he had not yet learned whose son he was.

  “I’m a refugee.”

  She showed no surprise, “All right, let’s start”—she walked straight past him into his tiny flat; there was his bed, there was his crumpled wild quilt. It was more than a year since another human being had stood in this place. He was humiliated. Or else he did not know what he was. He was ashamed, frenetic. He rushed around to sweep some clothes off a chair. He cleared the table with a lightning arm. He was exposed, he was fearful he was exulting.

  “Mrs. Eklund told you to come here?”

  “Because you don’t have a telephone.”

  “You wouldn’t leave your own number. You wouldn’t say where you live.”

  “I have to be careful, don’t I?”

  “Careful of what?” he asked.

  “Of what I’m in charge of.” She gave her bag a shake. “I have an impulsive nature—I need to watch myself. I’ve spent a couple of weeks now watching you. I’ve been getting a point of view.”

  He was preoccupied by her accent. Did she sound like the Princess? But even the Princess was not so
confident.

  “Mrs. Eklund told me where to look. Mondays in the Morgontörn. I’ve been trying you out. You know things. If you can do it I’ll take you.”

  “Do what?”

  Now she was sitting on the edge of his bed. “I want a translator.”

  “I’m not a translator,” Lars said. “I’ve never done any of that kind of thing.”

  “You Swedish intellectuals do everything. Mrs. Eklund says Stockholm is filled with literary virtuosos. History professors who do criticism, critics who do translations, every sort of linguist—”

  “I’m not anything like that.”

  “Mrs. Eklund says you are.”

  “She’s not qualified. She’s nobody. She runs a bookshop, what’s that? She wants to make fun of me, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  He dangled Heidi’s key. “Revenge. I’ve unlocked her secrets. I know all about her. She isn’t what she seems.”

  Again the woman shook her bag. A witch with a rattle. “Revenge and illusion! You’re just the one I want. Mrs. Eklund says you’re crazy for the Polish writers.”

  “You shouldn’t rely on her.”

  “Everyone important comes into her shop. One of her customers is actually a Princess. She gets all the professors—the intelligentsia. The Academy orders from her, did you know that?”

  “Don’t be so quick,” he said. “You’ve only just met her.”

  “That’s right,” she agreed. “It went quick, quick! I think she’s clairvoyant. She sees through walls. She saw through walls. She saw through me, it didn’t take her a minute—she understood even before I explained. She understood it all. Most people don’t. Most people haven’t heard of it. Not even the literary ones.”

  She pulled off her beret. She meant to settle in for a visit. It was true, it was just as Heidi had described it; she was graying, like himself. Sad streaks of grime like old slush. She looked to be his own age, or near it, but when she lifted her chin and he caught the plane of her flat cheek, a momentary child flashed out. She had that in common with him: that suddenly simplified gaze, as if some long-ago movie reel were running fleetingly through. He warned himself to be vigilant. Between her eyes—blackish-brown like his own—there were two well-established vertical trenches. Vigilance! She was not his sister; he had no sister.

  “Most people don’t know anything about any of it,” she said.

  His breath was trapped in his throat. “It isn’t really The Messiah.”

  “Mrs. Eklund told you, didn’t she? She told you what I’ve got.”

  “No one will ever believe you.”

  “You will.”

  “Is it in that bag? Not in that bag!” A foolishness: how foolish he was; but the unfamiliar jubilation quickened.

  “Yes, yes, right here”—and shook it. The sound of fifty wings.

  “It should be in a library,” he said. “It should be in a vault. It should be somewhere safe.”

  “It’s safe with me. It’s mine. I’m in charge of it.”

  “You’re not afraid of theft? You’ve made copies?”

  “Copies?” Contempt: a voice of contempt. “If I brought you a copy, would you believe in it?”

  “How can I believe anything?” Lars said. “You haven’t got any credentials, you come out of nowhere—”

  “Oh, credentials.” And again he was puzzled by her accent, with its odd sibilances. “I’ll give you my name.”

  “Adela.”

  “Adela, is that enough? That’s only what Mrs. Eklund said. Don’t you want the rest of it? Don’t you want where I was born, and all about my parents, my education, all of that? I’ve had an education, whatever people think.”

  “I want to see what’s in that bag,” Lars said.

  “It’ll break your heart, the look of it. The condition it’s in. Some of these pages I had to pull out of a pair of shoes.”

  “Shoes!”

  “They were just stuffed in there, way in. In the toes, after a rain. To keep the shape. Have you ever been to Drohobycz?”

  “No,” Lars said.

  “Warsaw?”

  “No.”

  “I was born in Brazil, did you realize that? No one’s told you that. In São Paulo. My mother ran there in the middle of the war. You call yourself a refugee! She was only fifteen and pregnant, it wasn’t easy to get passage—she managed it without a visa, she’s a crafty type. She makes friends, that’s how she does it. And then she got used to it—living all over. People say we’re bedouins.”

  “A pair of shoes?” Lars said.

  “They belonged to this old woman in Warsaw. We’ve lived in São Paulo, Amsterdam, Budapest, Brussels. Then Warsaw. The place we stayed the longest was Warsaw. My mother grew up in Poland, she speaks Polish best. So do I, except for Portuguese. Six months ago we went to Grenoble, we all went, don’t ask me why. It’s just the way my mother is—”

  “All? Are you a tribe, your mother and you?”

  She colored a little. “She actually married someone down there—a funny Frenchman, I don’t like him—so I came here. My Swedish is really good, isn’t it? Good grasp of idiom—lots of people tell me that. Don’t you think my Swedish is good? Well, it’s not good enough. Not for revenge and illusion! Heaven help us, your bed’s an act of God, an avalanche.”

  “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.”