The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  Adela lifted her wild face. A bloody rip across the blade of the frail nose. It wasn’t Lars’s work; not even the lick of his burning little finger. It was her father who had smashed her. The ferocious kick of the author of The Messiah.

  Dr. Eklund’s head shone like a polished shield. He tore his glasses from his ears; and there it was, without warning—the likeness. It wasn’t in any particular inch of him. It was all over—the resemblance, the pulse of ancestry. His naked eyes spilled catastrophe: he had nothing to defend him now, not his rings, not the militant glitter of his sailor’s buttons. His big scraped face with its awful nostril-craters rambled on, a worn old landscape lost to any habitation. Wild, wild. Adela’s look exactly, at last.

  15

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK IN the afternoon a little more than seven months after the fire in the brass amphora—the stewpot was just disbanding—a woman named Elsa Vaz, accompanied by a little boy, came to see Lars Andemening at the Morgontörn. He had his own cubicle now. It was a small bare box, with sides made of beaverboard, fitted out with a splintered table (formerly Nilsson’s), a pink china mug (indistinguishable from Anders’s) a typewriter, a coffeepot, and a chair covered with a torn and lumpy cushion. Plaster dust thickened the air—all the walls on the top floor of the Morgontörn were being broken open for new wiring. Nilsson had announced the installation of a whole row of computer terminals: the staff of the Morgontörn couldn’t expect to catch up with Expressen, of course, but at least they could say hello to the century they were living in—in deference to which Nilsson had acquired a resplendent new desk fabricated entirely out of a substance hitherto used exclusively on the underside of the noses of space capsules.

  Elsa Vaz explained to Lars that she had first gone to his old flat, only to learn that he had moved out some time ago. He pinched his fitful eyeglasses back into position (they took getting used to) and retorted that she might have telephoned him: he had a large apartment on Bergsundsstrand, not far from where Nellie Sachs had once resided; a civilized street, and didn’t civilized people telephone before barging right on into someone’s office? That fool of a girl downstairs! To have allowed Elsa Vaz to burst in on him, and with a child! After all, he kept rigid enough hours, had plenty of reading to push through, and couldn’t sustain any kind of interruption: he had his Monday space to attend to, not to mention the masses of mail it brought him.

  The little boy—he seemed to be about six years old—was struggling with a cold, miserably scrubbing away at himself with one or the other of two big white handkerchiefs, and clutching at the woman’s knees. He went on shivering and occasionally sneezing, huddling into his own shoulders. They poked up: a pair of small sharp peaks surrounding a nutlike head.

  Lars drew back, thinking of the germs. “Isn’t he too sick to be out?”

  “There’s no one to leave him with—we’re in a sort of rooming house.” The familiar recalcitrance. It reminded him of his old distrust. “And anyhow the poor thing would feel lost. He speaks only Portuguese.”

  “Why not park him in the shop? They can manage anything over there.”

  “She’s left Stockholm, didn’t you know?”

  He sent out an impartial stare. “How would I?”

  “The shop is sold.”

  “I never pass that way.” He concentrated on her face; it was not as he remembered it. “I never thought she’d give it up.”

  “He made her. He said it was enough. They’ve gone to live in Antwerp. The opportunities are better there.”

  The boy gave out a quick animal sob, followed by an incomprehensible demand in a language that—whatever it was—wasn’t Portuguese. French? Polish? The woman said, “Will you let me sit down? Then I can take him on my lap.”

  Lars unwillingly surrendered his chair. “The opportunities,” he echoed, and stood watching her arrange her skirt into a nest for the child. “You understand what it is, I’ve got my deadline breathing down my neck—”

  “I’ve been reading you since I came. You’ve gotten just like the others,” she announced.

  “I’m told I’ve taken on a touch of fame.”

  “You’re an ordinary reviewer.”

  “Even a reviewer can have a reputation.”

  “Last Monday a detective novel. The Monday before—I don’t remember, was it the autobiography of some film star?”

  “Then you’ve been in town two weeks,” he said.

  She laughed straight over the child’s head. “There’s an advantage to detective novels! But no, we’ve been here nearly three. The first week we didn’t arrive till Wednesday.”

  “On business,” he concluded. “Opportunities. You’re his courier.”

  “Say whatever you please.”

  “You’ve got a different name now.”

  “I have all different names, it stands to reason.”

  “For different jobs?” He looked down at the boy; he had shut his eyes, but the lids were fat and red. “Is there a part for him?”

  A pounding, just then, on one of the beaverboard partitions; it was Gunnar Hemlig, dropping off the mail. “Nilsson said to give you this”—he threw down a box overflowing with envelopes and whisked himself off. He had no word for Lars. Anders when encountered was almost as silent.

  Lars had affronted them; they burned against him. He had put back all those things he had once pushed aside. It wasn’t only the question of the furniture he was stuffing his new flat with—the stewpot had gone through this long before. He had a telephone attached to an automatic answering machine; he had a typewriter in his cubicle, like the rest of them, but at home he had a word processor with a screen that showered down green letters from Japan, and an electronic printer that typed with phantom fingers at a speed equal to the fall of the sun at the world’s end. Nilsson was automating the Morgontörn, but Lars Andemening was robotizing himself. He kept—this was the stewpot’s view of it—a robot woman under his bed. She was stored in an old vodka case. In the middle of the night Lars smacked a button and she clicked herself into position, constructing herself part by part. She was made mainly of styrofoam and hinged with old wedding rings bought wholesale from a divorce lawyer who had batches of them; the only task she required of Lars was to rouge her pale porous cheeks and to satisfy her vibrations.

  Thus the stewpot, simmering. Nilsson was contemplating an extra day’s spot for Lars, they said, to add on to his Mondays. He was fast; he was fluent; he had begun to keep regular hours and seldom prowled in the office after midnight. He was reformed, recovered; he had recovered from his old ailment. He was taking the reviewing business seriously. He had, it appeared, given up existential dread; he had given up those indecipherables that steam up from the stomach-hole of Central Europe; he was sticking to the Swedes and the more companionable Americans; you never heard him pronounce Kiš or Canetti or Musil or Broch; his tongue was free of Kafka. He was finished with all those grotesqueries. He was like a man in a coma who has unexpectedly come to, having been declared asleep for life, and who has resumed his normal rounds. The very routine of it seems extraordinary.

  The stewpot boiled, but placidly; it had attenuated; by now it showed the mildest minor froth. In the last half year, though it had never taken the smallest notice of him before, Lars had grown to be the stewpot’s steadiest habit. It was, in fact, Gunnar Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel who had initiated this newest seething—it fell to them, no one knew why, Lars least of all. Gunnar and Anders were suddenly Lars Andemening’s celebrants in the rite of the stewpot—the stewpot in its frenzied prime. Gunnar in particular relished the grand comedy of it—how Lars, that beautiful soul, with his skinny nose up to the hilt in belles-lettres, had been hoodwinked by a family of swindlers, forgers, thieves, lovers of high art, symbolists! Entrapped and consumed—their demonic fragrances, their sweet lures and ruses. But no, the point was, Anders argued back, that these beauties were nothing homegrown: a pack of Poles, a gang of outlanders, six or eight of them, four Turks, two Portuguese, possibly some gypsies. S
ven Strömberg’s lover tugged at her mannish collar and picked up the thread: gypsies, yes, definitely a gypsy girl among them, on the brown skin of whose silken back had been tattooed—in infancy, in tiny green letters—a missing Psalm omitted by the generation of the Canonizers, that had been traveling for centuries from back to back of certain young women in certain Romany tribes, young women with split tongues, born mute. As these dusky chosen infants grew, the grass-bright letters expanded over their torsos; through insidious means and for a magnanimous fee (hence the big new flat, the new furniture, the robot appliances), Lars had been approached to transcribe: he was seized, willy-nilly, being peculiarly eligible according to the ancient forms, since the girl who currently carried the Psalm engraved even in the delta of her buttocks was his own stolen daughter . . . Sven Strömberg’s version was simpler. The chief of the swindlers was Olof Flodcrantz in disguise.

  Thus the stewpot, laughing. Gunnar and Anders observed that these clownings were only a little bit at the expense of poor dim duped Lars. Lars bruised and overthrown. So much for exaltation, so much for the private ecstasies of the visionary!—he had had his lesson. He was humbled and would henceforth consent to walk among men again.

  Yet abruptly the stewpot turned from boiling Lars to throwing its arms around his shoulders. The cackle of satire softened. They chaffed him instead; he was a comrade. Gunnar and Anders, unprepared for this alteration of spirit, watched Lars, with his graying head and baby cheeks, rising. They looked again: somehow he wasn’t so much fixed in earliness as he used to be; you could tell at a glance he wasn’t a boy. Impossible to mistake him now for anything but a man of middling years—those grooves dug out in the space between the eyebrows, those beginning wadis that ran from the ends of the mouth downward toward the faint bulge at either side of the jaw . . . he was putting on weight. He couldn’t negotiate a paragraph without his reading glasses. And still he was rising. It was as if a wraith of smoke, too elusive for the keenest camera, had all at once solidified into a statue: Lars was there. Monday’s customers were waking up; they wrote him letters. They wrote him six or seven letters; then they wrote him dozens. He overtook Gunnar, he overtook Anders; he had more letters than anyone. He wasn’t comical, he wasn’t contentious—what could you say he was? Whatever he was, he produced an excess of it: Nilsson was ready to let him spill over the brink into Tuesday. It doubled his pay, and he took it as innocently as if he deserved it. They considered his prose: was there a trick in it; was it something no one could catch him at?

  One night Gunnar thought he saw it. Lars had stopped purifying his life. This absence, this cessation, had the effect of an ingredient. The ingredient was the opposite of purification. It gratified intensely, it flowed out over almost everyone; it was the rosiest of mirrors; it flattered.

  “And what is this fabled ingredient?” Anders inquired, returning from the tap. He no longer asked Lars to fetch him water: Lars had risen; and besides, nowadays you couldn’t count on finding Lars when the mice were out. He was doing something else with his nights. As for the mice, Nilsson was arranging for the exterminators to come as soon as the electricians were done. The broken walls had exposed their nests.

  “Mediocrity,” Gunnar said.

  They were not spiteful men, but they recognized the importance of cutting Lars dead. What else do you do with a fellow who prospers on scandal? Olof Flodcrantz had crept back from Finland, but at least he had vanished south to a job in Malmö; he made himself scarce. He didn’t insult people by slamming himself like a beam in their eyes.

  They waited for the stewpot to turn. The stewpot always turns. It swallows up. It casts out. It boils on.

  16

  THE MORGONTÖRN WAS EMPTYING out. The electricians and their sledgehammers were long gone. They had begun at eight o’clock that morning by thundering open craters in the walls; until half an hour before lunch the ancient upper storeys of the Morgontörn were convulsed. Then the electricians had de-materialized. The secretaries were just now on their way out, fluttering down the stairs like confetti. Nilsson was rocketing shut the fine new drawers of his astral desk. The elevator, like the clapper of a bell striking the sides of the shaft, was heard to ring him perilously down to the street. Not a relic of the stewpot remained: not even the lees. Gunnar was already across the square, having his monthly tea with the Librarian of the Academy, an event calculated to impress the stewpot, if only it would allow him the chance to tell—what a bitterness, that it currently had ears only for the life and works of Lars Andemening! Anders had taken the bus home to the fossildom of his prehistoric household: the primordial stepfather, the antediluvian aunt.

  The child, meanwhile, had fallen asleep with his mouth narrowly tubed—enough to let out a periodic snore, incongruous with such a small frame. The snore was leonine.

  Her face was not as he remembered it. In half a year she had—he would not say toughened; but there was a brazen look now. He didn’t mean that old grain of stubbornness, he didn’t mean impudence; what he had in mind was the opposite. She seemed desperately still: formed: a figure cast out of some elemental metal. A motionless pietà, clear as copper—it might have been the influence of the boy in her lap. As for the boy’s snore—it was as if she held a live trumpet that might go off at any moment.

  “Why this rooming house?” he challenged her. “I thought you’d have plenty of money, you people. Why not a nice posh place within walking distance of the Café Opera? What cakes! You’ve done the little fellow an injustice.”

  She set her lips against the boy’s forehead. “He’s getting a fever.”

  “Unless the rooming house is part of the scenery? An apt effect?”

  “You think anything I do is playacting.”

  “Anything I know of. They’ve roped you in. You do what’s expected.”

  “He was all right an hour ago,” she murmured: her hand lay on the child’s hand.

  “Stage fright,” Lars offered.

  “Don’t say those things. He’s my little boy.”

  “The family business! How many fathers, how many mothers, and presto, now a son—”

  “I’m not like you.” She stopped. “I’m not.”

  Again he gave her his impartial stare. “Dr. Eklund’s not imaginary, no. That’s the pity of it. I used to think he was.”

  “Neither is my mother. My mother’s in Grenoble, with a new husband. I told you all that.”

  “It was a story.”

  “Some of it wasn’t.”

  “Some of it! And after all this time you’re ready to unscramble it? The whole cast of characters?”

  A gargantuan rumble obscured the last words. The child, awakened by his own vibration, drew up his legs, churned, and appeared to drop back into sleep. Two tracks of tears wandered down his chin—it was like the little stem of an acorn—and onto Elsa Vaz’s sleeve: the hard-breathing nostrils wept, the fat lids watered.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t. Now that I see what you’ve come for.”

  “You don’t see.”

  “A grand sorting-out. That high Party official, was he made up?”

  “He was my mother’s friend. I told you that. Tosiek Glowko.”

  “And the old widow with the box, and the old widower in Warsaw, and the shoes, and those papers in the oven, and the man with the long black coat—”

  She looked at him; she was immobile. Even the pupils of her eyes stood stock-still. You could throw a pebble at them and they wouldn’t twitch. “You don’t know anything about Drohobycz. Nothing. Nothing about Warsaw. It’s all appetite to you—it’s what you want it to be—you don’t have any inkling about those places.”

  “I was born there. I’m a refugee.”

  “It doesn’t matter how many times you say that, you still don’t know where you were born. A fairy tale. You picked yourself a make-believe father out of a book. Who else does a thing like that—”

  His steadiness faltered; he blinked: his own ey
e stung by that other eye. It was not so much a recollection as a smarting, a burning. That other eye would no longer submit to his summoning, even on the palest brink of memory. The truth was he could not call it back. When he tried to visualize it, what he saw was a very small mound of ash, irregularly round, no higher than a thumbnail. The gray cinders might have passed for a little heap of Elsa Vaz’s hair.

  “Tell me,” he said, “is there a father for this boy somewhere? Or is he going to have to figure one out for himself?”

  “His father is in Brazil.”

  “Brazil? Not Antwerp? He’s escaped the family business?”

  “Divorced” was what he thought he heard her say—the child’s sick snore swelled up again and washed over it—but it might have been something else. It might have been “Forced,” or “Lost,” or “Crushed,” or something similarly stretched out of her strangely middle-throated sound. It might have been any thing at all; the moment passed; once more the child settled back.

  Lars said resolutely, “You’re the worst. You named yourself out of a book, I didn’t do that. You swiped Adela, you dressed up in a name, you masqueraded—”

  “Mrs. Eklund thought it would attract you. She wanted you to be interested.”

  “Mrs. Eklund. And the pupil, the schoolgirl? Copulation with a child! With one of his own pupils! That wasn’t Mrs. Eklund’s! That was yours, wasn’t it—copulation with a child, wasn’t that your idea? Heidi wouldn’t think of that! I don’t give her credit for that one.”

  “Give her credit if you like.” She lowered her head. “I came to say you were abused.”

  “Used,” he corrected.

  “She injured you.”