The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  When he woke there was only absence. Nothing formed in the black air. The empty dark sent out nothing at all. The greased beak did not seize him. The alabaster egg did not materialize. Lars threw off the quilt and stared as if his own eyeballs were two breathing bellows inflated by the bottommost power of his pumping lungs. His head was filled with the battering, plodding, butting force of that staring, that bulging. But the visitation did not occur. No sphere appeared. The author of The Messiah had withdrawn. Lars’s father’s eye did not return.

  It was seven o’clock. He had not eaten all day long, as if he had deliberately undertaken a fast. But it was only because he had forgotten hunger. After defeat in battle men do not remember food. He tied on his scarf and squashed his cap over his ears. On the floor near his bed, a white patch. He bent to it, and, bending, grieved over the after-image of Adela’s hair bundled like feathers at his feet. Dead bird. He had kicked her down: his father’s daughter. His sister, his sister. He saw then that the white patch was a page of The Messiah, overlooked in the battle and left behind. He snatched it up with the knowledge that his right hand would burst like a grenade at the touch of the sheet. He was ready to lose his right hand for the sake of an errant paragraph out of The Messiah.

  The patch was not that. He picked it up: Adela’s white beret. It was not what he wanted, so he tossed it on his bed and fell into the night toward Heidi’s shop.

  12

  THE SHOP WAS SHUT up and black. But a yellow mist spread forward from the back room: the lit daffodil; she was there. His boots were wet and stuck all over with grit. A match-stick had caught in the left sole. Lars began by habit to pull them off—then he thought better of it. It wasn’t his intention to please Heidi. Every evening after hours she ordered the Turkish boy to mop up; the Turkish boy wasn’t allowed to go home until the mud of the day’s customers had been washed away. Lars stamped his feet in the vestibule. Instantly he stopped stamping. He wasn’t a visitor, he wasn’t anyone’s guest. He had the right of entry—he had it in his pocket. The borrowed cold key. It went into the lock.

  “Who’s there? What’s that?” A raw dark voice. The smell of something roasting. “Is it that woman? It’s that woman?”

  “It can’t be. There wasn’t any knock. I told her she’d have to knock. The door’s locked.” This was Heidi, calling from behind the fence of books. She shuffled out; she had her slippers on.

  “Then who is it? Why isn’t it that woman, if she’s coming? We’re closed, can’t they tell that?”

  Lars said, “Mrs. Eklund—”

  The raw dark fidgety voice, an actor’s voice: “It’s not that woman, it’s a man. Didn’t you close up for the night?”

  “Never mind, it’s only Lars. He’s brought your key back, now you’ll have your extra. Lars,” Heidi said, “let me introduce you. Here is Dr. Olle Eklund. And here is Lars Andemening. Now you see how proper we all are. Dr. Eklund is always so fond of the forms.”

  A very large man was sitting at Heidi’s little table with an almost empty teacup in front of him, smoking a pipe. He looked like an oversized sleek startled horse, with long nostrils punched into a scanty lump of cartilage, a long face, and a long tumescent head, bald and bright. His eye-glasses splashed light. The crown of his head seemed polished. He was fastidiously dressed, in a coat and vest with glinting silver buttons. He wore a silver ring on the third finger of each hand, and there was something about the buttons and the rings, and also in the way he shot out his big fingers toward Lars, that suggested a sea captain. Or else it was his seaweedy merman’s odor, mixed with the meatlike scorch of tobacco, strong and salty. His chin was well-shaved, without a visible prickle; it had a shine of its own.

  Lars took the man’s hand—how hot it was—and shook it. “Is it Dr. Eklund?” he said.

  “Dr. Eklund got back early this morning,” Heidi said. “Such a strain, such a tiring day after his trip—”

  Lars examined the man. He watched him lift his cup and put it down. He watched him light a match and draw on his pipe. “I was here myself this morning,” he said.

  “My little Turk told me you came by—he doesn’t like you, why is that? I was over at the flat, filling the refrigerator. It’s different with two at home.” Heidi scraped a chair out of the shadows “Sit down, you brute, and tell us about it. You knocked her down, didn’t you? I’ve neglected to notice that side of you—that poor Adela! She ran howling back here to complain I’d sent her to a thug.”

  Lars said, “Is it Dr. Eklund?”

  Dr. Eklund held out his cup. “A little more.”

  Heidi bustled to the kettle. “She’s coming tonight. To consult Dr. Eklund. If he weren’t Dr. Eklund”—Lars saw she was going to be whimsical—“she couldn’t consult him, nicht wahr?”

  “She’s not even bruised! Is she bruised?”

  “For heaven’s sake, this isn’t a health clinic, what do you think we are? She’s coming about what’s in that bag. I promised her this time no one would knock her down. I don’t imagine she’ll be glad to see you, Lars. You’d better leave before.”

  “I don’t understand how he got in,” Dr. Eklund said.

  “With your key. I gave him your key.”

  “If he knocks people down you shouldn’t give him my key.”

  “I thought,” Lars said heavily, “there wasn’t any Dr. Eklund.”

  “Lars believes in ghosts,” Heidi explained.

  “You made me think he was made up.”

  “Cogito, ergo sum,” Dr. Eklund said. “Why would you think a thing like that?”

  “Not everyone has to exist.”

  “That is remarkably plausible.”

  “He means he’s an orphan,” Heidi said. “He was one of those refugee orphans. He doesn’t know who his mother is.”

  “I don’t know who my father is either,” Lars said.

  “Here’s something new!” Heidi cried. “Your father is the author of Cinnamon Shops. Your father is the author of Sanatorium. Your father is the author of The Messiah. That’s who your father is.” She let out her rapid doglike laugh.

  “I don’t have a father.”

  “You’ve lost your father? But not his eye,” she taunted. “You’ve kept that eye?”

  “It’s gone. It’s not there.”

  Dr. Eklund asked, “Eye? Eye? Where is such an eye?”

  “An intelligent boy, but subject to hallucinations,” Heidi declaimed—did she mean to humiliate him? A wave of regret. He had entrusted her with his acrane mote: his visitation, his apparition. There was no eye. It had left him. It would not come back again.

  “Hardly a boy. If he grew whiskers he’d be a graybeard,” Dr. Eklund said through his pipe.

  Lars in his shame felt himself stumbling over a certain familiarity of infflection, of accent. Sibilance. Something was too accustomed here; he could not assess it. A strangeness in Dr. Eklund’s voice. Strange because not strange enough.

  “A slight resemblance nevertheless,” Dr. Eklund continued. “A very minor resemblance. The chin, perhaps. No more than an inkling, yes? The summer of 1938—I’m not mistaken about this—I saw him drinking tea—steaming tea—at a café in a little outdoor courtyard. In Paris this was. He was pointed out to me. Then I absolutely recognized him for myself.”

  “Dr. Eklund is fluent in Polish,” Heidi supplied.

  “There was very much Polish being spoken at that table. A group of three or four. They had been to the galleries. The subject was art. I remember what a hot day it was, and still that fellow was drinking steaming tea! No different from what’s in this cup. Hotter, probably. Sometimes one or two of them would retreat back into French, but mainly it was Polish. Though that fellow never said a word. He looked like a hayseed, he wore his pants cuffs too high. You could see an inch more of sock than was decent—imagine, this was only a couple of years or so after Cinnamon Shops. A piece of luck.”

  It seemed a muddle—who exactly was it Dr. Eklund was saying he had seen in Paris? Then it occu
rred to Lars what it was he was hearing in Dr. Eklund’s throat. He had thought at first it might have been the muffling of the pipe. But it was not the pipe. Dr. Eklund’s vowels—was it possible?—were not unlike Adela’s. Dr. Eklund—was it possible?—was not a Swede at all.

  “You never mentioned it,” Lars accused. “About the Polish.”

  “Dr. Eklund doesn’t like it known. He gets people out, you see. He does his best. He’s always done his best. He got Mrs. Rozanowska out, for instance.”

  “He got the Princess out?”

  “That was a long time ago—you’ve heard all about that. Together with her husband. Dr. Eklund got them out and then he got them in. For all you know,” she said maliciously, “he got you out. In your swaddling clothes! He knows how to do those tricks, don’t you, Olle?”

  Dr. Eklund took a discreet sip. “I don’t like it when you give things away.”

  “You’ve got your key back.”

  “Not everything given away is recoverable.”

  How theatrical they were, Dr. and Mrs. Eklund! Two old troupers in rehearsal. Lars leaned his chair toward Dr. Eklund and bathed his whole head in the roast-meat cloud that was seeping out of Dr. Eklund’s pipe. “Who was it you saw,” he said, “in Paris?”

  “That fellow. That author of yours.”

  “In Paris? You saw him in Paris?”

  “Only for a few moments. A piece of luck.”

  “But you saw him! You saw his face?”

  “He had a pointed chin. I remember that.”

  “And what else? How did he look?”

  “Like someone drinking hot tea in July.”

  Lars turned on Heidi: “Your husband saw him! You never mentioned it, you never told—”

  “I’m hearing it now for the first time myself.”

  “In a pig’s foot you are. And on top of that the Polish! To have a husband fluent in Polish,” he echoed, “and never to say a word about it—”

  “Well, you should have figured that out on your own.”

  “Figured it out!” How preposterous she was; how senseless, how operatic. “Why not send Adela to your husband, if it’s translation she wants? I’m not the one she’s looking for!”

  “Dr. Eklund prefers not to translate. Dr. Eklund is obliged to go back and forth. He follows things up. He gets things out.”

  “Translation is not my interest,” Dr. Eklund affirmed. “Especially of dubious manuscripts.”

  “What a baby you are, Lars. Naïve. It’s not only ghosts you believe in. It’s a question of detective work, can’t you understand that? Agents. Connections. Combinations. How else would I have gotten hold of those Warsaw items? Who am I to get hold of such things? A little hole-in-the-wall bookseller—”

  “I don’t like it,” Dr. Eklund said again, “when you give things away.”

  Heidi swept on. “You think a letter dated 1934 grows on trees? You think pieces of a memoir about a dinner conversation in Warsaw in 1936 can be picked up in the street? Just like that? Lars, please, let me ask you—left to yourself, what would you have come up with? Left to yourself, that’s the point! I’ll tell you what—you would have come up with the only scrap you did come up with! An American review from the Morgontörn’s trash barrel, that’s what.” The black eyebrows were wobbling like rocking-horse manes. “No, no, it’s not so simple. You dreamers would like it to be simple, you would like everything to turn on the issue of literary passion. I suppose Warsaw releases its valuables just like that? Or maybe it’s only a matter of telephoning long-distance to a dealer in Drohobycz, ha! You’re a baby, you don’t understand the world. You think the world is made of literature. You think reality is a piece of paper.”

  What was it she was telling him? It was something to do with Dr. Eklund. Somehow it was about Dr. Eklund—which couldn’t be, in any case, his right name. Dr. Eklund wasn’t a Swede. Was he even a doctor? Was he, with his weedy pungencies, a sea captain in earnest? He got things out—people and things. He got things in—things and people. A smoother of obstinacies. When Dr. Eklund was said to be in Copenhagen, or on his hospital rounds, or asleep in the flat, did it mean he was actually in Budapest? Had he really—four years after the publication of Cinnamon Shops, in a summertime Paris already darkening toward war—had he really seen Lars’s father?

  Lars had no father. No father ever again. He was giving his father up—to the probabilities, if not to the facts. There were no facts. Beyond the shooting there was nothing at all. Only the turbulence of desire, the merciless boil of a saving chimerical eye. The eye of deliverance. Of redemption. It had burst out over the little cave of Lars’s quilt like the wheel of a sun. A fiery hoop. A roaring egg. An intelligence. A devouring certainty. Gone; erased; wiped out. Heidi didn’t appear to be at all unsettled by these whirlwind blanks: it didn’t touch her that Lars had thrown off his claim to the author of The Messiah, that he was willing now to withdraw to nothingness, that he was no one’s son, that he had no father; that he was undone. It didn’t touch her, either way. She had never believed in his case; it didn’t matter to her that he was tearing up his case then and there. It didn’t seem to please her.

  “I’m stopping, Mrs. Eklund,” he said. “It’s over. I’m quitting.”

  “What’s over? What are you quitting?”

  “I told you. I don’t have a father.”

  “Did you ever have a father? I never thought you did.”

  “Adam, the father of us all,” Dr. Eklund said.

  “No more Warsaw items. No letters, no memoirs, no photographs, no drawings, no proverbs, no quotations—I won’t be bothering you,” Lars said.

  “Not at all a bother,” Dr. Eklund said. “More in the way of business.”

  “Dr. Eklund is always so much concerned with anything to do with the shop,” Heidi said.

  “My father has nothing to do with the shop.”

  “Your ex-father. Shouldn’t you be saying your ex-father?”

  “Take my word that I’m finished.”

  “Really finished?”

  “It’s the end.”

  “Oh, but we don’t quit,” she countered.

  We? Who was “we”? It was, Lars considered, a new “we.” Now it included Dr. Eklund.

  “Dr. Eklund,” she pointed out, “has had a certain interest in accumulating these items.”

  “These evidences,” Dr. Eklund suggested.

  “These evidences. That’s why he agreed to see Adela. He’s worn out—just look how worn out the poor man is. But he agreed to see her anyhow, and you know why?”

  “Why?” asked Dr. Eklund. Raillery or was he hurrying her on?

  “Because he sympathizes. He knows how you’re consumed by all this He understands you, Lars.”

  “Comprehends. Penetrates,” Dr. Eklund offered. “The attraction—the seduction, the magnetism—of a sublime text. This is a feeling I myself admit to.”

  “Dr. Eklund is so to speak your psychological twin.”

  “Now don’t go too far,” Dr. Eklund said. “I don’t propose to be in this gentleman’s category. There’s no one else just like him. Not in Stockholm, no.”

  “My category? What category is that?”

  “Usefulness,” Heidi said, covering it over with her joking little bark.

  A single wild church bell. If not a church bell, then a kind of gong.

  “Good God, what is it?” Heidi burst out. “I told her just to knock—did she break the glass? She broke it!”

  Dr. Eklund sprang up—he wasn’t at all tired; he was robust and acrobatic, more of a sea captain than ever—and sprinted across the length of the shop to the door, darting in and out of the blocks of shelves like an oversized rat in a tunnel.

  Heidi reached up to switch on the lights; the shop looked suddenly open for business.

  “You nearly broke my glass!”

  “Well, but I didn’t.” Adela rubbed her foot in the slide-marks across the vestibule. “I slipped in the snow with this thing. Right against the door.
It’s started coming down again.”

  “Look at your shoes,” Heidi said. “You’ll leak all over my floors. The boy mopped only an hour ago.”

  Adela was bareheaded; Lars knew why. Her hair was sprinkled with snow-beads. She was not carrying the white plastic bag. Her arms were pressed around the belly of a round brass jug; a sort of amphora. It was either a very large flower vase or a very modest umbrella stand. The open mouth of it had been shielded from the weather by a plastic shower cap.

  “No hat? In the snow you should wear a hat,” Dr. Eklund reprimanded. It was, Lars noted, a version of Heidi’s whimsicality; it was part of his being histrionic. And what if this woman clutching a barrel, or an urn, or whatever it was, did or didn’t wear a hat? Dr. Eklund was too suddenly intimate; he was ready instantly to absorb her. There was a clownish anxiety in it. He was looking her over like a potential deckhand signing on for a voyage. He wasn’t sure she would do. He was ready to order, advise, interrogate.

  Lars said, “I’ve got her hat in my house.”

  Adela turned; Lars watched the startled tide rise in her face.

  “It’s in my bed. Your hat.”

  “You! This man, this insane man! It’s enough for one day! Why should he be here? Who asked him to come?” The two vertical trenches drew together like a pair of fence pickets. But it was more calculation than rage.

  “No one asked him. He just turned up,” Heidi said.

  “Because he had my key,” Dr. Eklund complained. “He took my key, that’s why.”

  Adela clashed the brass amphora down on the little backroom table, an inch from Dr. Eklund’s cup. “He’ll say anything. He’ll do anything. The right thing would be to call the police.”

  “Now that would be the wrong thing,” Dr. Eklund said.

  “The police are for thieves, aren’t they?”

  “Now, now. Hold on, please. A manuscript of dubious origin. We don’t yet know whether it is or isn’t The Messiah.”