The Messiah of Stockholm (2 page)

F
OR SOME REASON
G
UNNAR
Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel, enemies of each other—old combatants—both tolerated Lars. They
were not fond of him, but there was little danger in him and he was rarely underfoot. Unlike Gunnar and Anders, Lars—possibly because of the ignominy of Monday—had no cubicle of his
own. He appeared at the
Morgontörn
chiefly to deliver his work and to pick up his messages. He kept out of most conversations, had no gossip, and seemed, with regard to office politics,
almost newborn. He turned up at ten o’clock, generally on a Thursday night, to type up his manuscript. Often he would use Anders’s typewriter in Anders’s cubicle if Anders was not
there; or else Gunnar’s. Sometimes they were both away. But it was not unusual for the two of them to be smoking or reading, each in his own cubicle, when Lars arrived, and on these occasions
Lars would wander like an anxious phantom, looking for a desk and a free machine. He sat wherever there was an empty chair and struggled against the perversity of the keys. For want of practice he
was a bad typist. He habitually struck a
j
where he intended a
t
, fabricating strange words.

“North Dakota Swedish,” Gunnar said, peering down at Lars’s sheet.

“My flat’s so cramped,” Lars apologized, “it’s either keep a typewriter or clean socks.”

“Maybe if you typed on your socks, you’d come up with some clean copy,” Gunnar said; it was a night when Anders was not there. The place was subject to spectral
mutterings—the floorboards had a way of spitting, or growling, or now and then even whistling, under their feet. The
Morgontörn
’s editorial departments were situated in
Gamla Stan, the Old Town, around the corner from the Stock Exchange and the Academy, in a neighborhood cleverly rehabilitated for picturesqueness. But the last carpenter to attend to the
Morgontörn
’s forlorn and rickety quarters had lifted his hammer almost eighty years ago; consequently the
Morgontörn
was picturesque only from the street. Inside, it
was all ingenious impediment. Its lower façade hinted at the tavern (also named
Morgontörn
, in homage to ancient festivities lasting till dawn) that had occupied that site a
hundred and fifty years before. The staff joked that the plumbing had been installed by the tavern’s predecessor, an eighteenth-century apothecary who was said to have invented, in a
futuristic dream, the water-closet pull chain. The elevator was an inconvenience that could accommodate two persons, on condition that one of them was suitably skeletal.

Lars was thin enough for any purpose. Gunnar remarked that he exactly resembled the building that housed the
Morgontörn
. Gray, narrow, and tall, it had six wretched storeys. The
cultural section claimed the topmost floor, where a well-disciplined regiment of mice held their command post. There were heaps of books on every surface. The mice made an orderly meal of them,
prefaces for appetizers and indexes for dessert. Skyscrapers of nibbled volumes grew out of the floor and tilted against patched baseboards.

“Minnesota Swedish,” Gunnar said. Instead of
tolerans
, Lars had typed
jolerans
; instead of
takt, jakt
. “Know what’ll help you, Lars? Computerization.
Though if it isn’t Apple or IBM I don’t want it. Leave it to Nilsson, he’ll bring them in all Japanese, I’ll lay money on it. Not that we’ll ever get that far. The
electrical system the way it is now can’t take it, and Nilsson says he can’t get a permit for new wiring until something happens with the walls—God knows what. A collapse
maybe.”

“I’m happy with my pen,” Lars said. He x’d out
jakt
typed
takt
. He was awkward with machines, but his style was pure. Gunnar’s reviews, by contrast,
were larded with Americanisms. Gunnar loved everything American, including their fake cheese; on his last trip to New York he had brought back six pounds of Velveeta as a present for his wife.

“Know how long they’ve been computerized over at
Expressen
?” Gunnar said.

“I’d rather be out here in the Old Town.”

“Well, you fit right in,” Gunnar said. “Gogol. Balzac—Lucien de Rubempré didn’t own a typewriter either. Hooray, there go the walls.”

A rumble, a vibration. It was the elevator coming up.

“If that’s Anders,” Lars said, “I’ve got to finish this. He’ll want his desk.”

“He’ll want what’s
in
it.” Gunnar prodded open a drawer. There lay Anders’s current bottle, reclining on its side. “You’re an exception here,
Lars. Not everyone has belles-lettres on the brain day and night. Some have water, and others wine.”

The question of Lars and belles-lettres was one of Gunnar’s chronic comical points: it frequently signaled a flight of annoyance with Anders. Anders, he maintained, used his choice Friday
spot for wheezing and whining; he was out to pull down Swedish self-respect. He was an anti-patriot. The Swedes are a shy people, too modest to bear praise, too withdrawn. But Anders had turned
bashfulness inside out; with Anders it was all self-abasement, self-accusation. Self-destruction. It came of being partly Finnish on his mother’s side—you wouldn’t expect a sunny
disposition in a Finn. “Spits in his own soup,” Gunnar persisted. “In America flatbread is chic, they spread it with caviar. You see what it comes to. A soiler and a spoiler. When
was the last time he reviewed anything he approved of? When was the last time he had a good word for something new? Grouses over every writer since Strindberg. Can’t leave anything alone, not
even, God help us, our daily bread.”

“
Hej
,” Anders said. His coat was sprinkled with snow rapidly dissolving into teardrops. “Here’s a note for you, Lars. Mrs. Eklund, who’s that? That fool of a
girl downstairs, everything gets stale. I see this is dated last week.”

Lars snatched the bit of paper and shoved it into his pocket. “There’s just this last paragraph to do. Two more sentences.”

Anders tossed his galoshes into a corner. A startled mouse, so young it was barely at the cadet stage, jumped out from behind a filing cabinet. “Mrs. Eklund,” he repeated.
“Start with taking someone’s wife, Lars, no wonder you’ll end up taking someone’s desk and chair. Not to mention their vodka.” He stared down at Lars’s typing.
“You’ve put
jalteori
for
talteori
.”

“On a Monday,” Gunnar said, “who’ll notice?”

“My drawer is open,” Anders said.

Lars said quickly, “I was looking for an eraser in there—”

“Nobody’s touched your vodka,” Gunnar said. “Isn’t Mrs. Eklund the one who got you your Polish tutor, Lars?”

“Yet another foreigner,” Anders said. “Tell me, is this Stockholm or Timbuktu?”

“She owns a bookshop,” Lars said. “Sometimes I give her orders.”

“I bet you do,” Gunnar said.

“Poles and Turks all over town. The deterioration of the Swedish temperament. The decay of Europe. Litter in downtown Stockholm. Adultery in bookshops. How about plugging in the kettle,
Lars?”

“I have to go,” Lars said.

“Plug in the kettle first, all right? There’s nothing like a drop of vodka in a dram of tea to warm up with.”

Lars took up Anders’s electric kettle and went out into the corridor to the tap just outside the men’s toilet. The water, running rusty at the start, barely trickled. He waited for
it to clear and then fill. Meanwhile he fished for the message in his pocket:
MRS. EKLUND PHONED ABOUT YOUR SISTER
. That fool of a girl downstairs. A mistake. He had no
sister. When he got back to Anders’s cubicle, Anders was rolling up his damp coat on top of the filing cabinet and Gunnar was reading aloud, in a liturgical voice, the first sentence of
Lars’s typescript:
Here is a universe as confined as a trap, where the sole heroes are victims, where muteness is for the intrepid only
.

“My my,” Gunnar said. “What a scare your mother got. I mean when she was pregnant with you. An assault by the higher forms of literature.”

“A bad sign,” Anders said, “this Polish tutor.”

“Leave my papers be,” Lars said.

“Mea culpa,” Gunnar said, and bowed. “The trouble with you, Lars, is that you’re a beautiful soul. A daily reviewer shouldn’t be a beautiful soul. It leads to
belles-lettres, which leads to exaltation and other forms of decline.”

“This pond,” Anders said. “This little pond of translators and chameleons. Swedish, the secret language. Who else knows it besides the Swedes? Who else runs to learn everyone
else’s language? The paralysis of Swedish identity. Pour the water, Lars.”

“The Poles are just the same. The Czechs. The Hungarians. We’re no worse off than anyone,” Gunnar objected. “Why blame the Swedes?”

Lars filled Anders’s pink china mug, and Anders measured out a long magnanimous spill of vodka from the bottle in his desk.

“Half the population of Stockholm think they’re French philosophers. And the other half ”—Anders looked straight at Gunnar—“are circus barkers.”

Lars jammed on his stocking cap and picked up his pages. “I’ll just leave this on Nilsson’s table. Good night, gentlemen.”

“A nocturnal visit,” Anders asked, “to the Polish tutor?”

“I don’t have her any more.”

“I’ll tell you what your trouble is, Lars. Central Europe, that’s your trouble.” Gunnar turned his back on Anders, who was allowing the steam from his cup to rise up the
two smokestacks of his redoubtable nose, right-angled and attached high at the bridge so as to conceal the other side of his face. “Prague and Vienna and Cracow. A touch of Budapest, a sniff
of Bucharest. Throw in Dubrovnik and a handful of Paris misanthropes. You might fetch up Borges from the rump, but otherwise it’s all the crazies from the middle. You think my Wednesday
people ever heard of this Danilo Kiš? You carry on about him, but they never heard of him. When they move Yugoslavia over to Norway it might be worth a look next door.”

“Our Mrs. Eklund,” Anders pressed, “can she recommend a tutor in Serbo-Croatian?”

“Don’t forget that lemon pulp squeezed out there in the California citrus groves–Adrian Leverkühn, Dr. Faustus! Kafka, Musil, Broch, Canetti, Jabès and Kundera.
Those fellows, and don’t ignore the ladies, what’s her name, Sarraute? The more inscrutable the better. Chasing after the impenetrable. Prince of the indecipherable.
That’s
what’s eating Monday’s brain. What we’ve got in Lars is a Monday Faust.”

Lars finished tying on his scarf. “Gentlemen, I’m off.”

The elevator rattled down, swaying on threadbare ropes. All the way to the bottom Lars could hear them clanging away, hammer and tongs. He rarely saw either of them during regular hours; in the
clarity of midday he thought them weak, bleached. They were big Viking men, crest-fallen. Gunnar had his own kettle in his own cubicle. He kept his things meticulously separate. Thirty years ago he
had come to Stockholm from Göteborg; Anders had arrived about the same time from Malmö. They were both night workers who slept the morning away and break-fasted at four in the afternoon.
When the daylight foam of ordinariness—secretaries and telephones—cleared out, it pleased them to prowl among the stacks of reviewers’ galleys, sniffing after literary prey and
flushing out the mice. Even the Niagara of the overhead toilet box in the men’s room seemed to them more momentous after midnight. Though they went on contending about this and
that—they charged each other with negativism, self-denigration, narrowness—they saw eye to eye on everything; they were privy to what most mattered. They had all the news—which
translators cut corners (they agreed that no one could tell the difference between Sven Strömberg’s Swedish and Sven Strömberg’s Spanish), whose lover had just switched from
one critic to another, who was hanging by a hair.

Lars did not know much about their days (they had wives, they had grown children, and Anders even boasted a stepfather of eighty-seven and a still more antediluvian aunt, both imported to
Stockholm from Malmö), but he understood their nights. Like himself, they were sunk in books, chained to the alphabet, in thrall to sentences and paragraphs. And beyond this, Lars was charmed
by certain corners of their lives. Anders, for instance, had translated, with all its cadences intact, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Klockorna”; it was used in a school text and recited by
children. Once a month Gunnar crossed the street to have tea with the Librarian of the Academy. He was proud of this, and promised to introduce Lars.

The meeting somehow never materialized, but it was enough for Lars that his own feet took him, almost daily, down the threading alleys of the Old Town and into the open bright
square—bright, it struck him, even in rainlight—that skirted the Academy, more sacred to him than any cathedral. He felt his allegiance to all of it: the ten thousand cherished volumes
sequestered in those high rooms above the queerly silent Stock Exchange, where computer screens flickered, and a single muffled voice ebbed, and a few old men sat as if in a parliament of statues;
the multi-colored miles of shelves where the new books, crying the banner of their dust jackets in so many languages, vied for the notice of the Academicians; and, all around, the gray steeples
that punctuated the air like pen nibs, up one street and down another. The Library of the Academy was old, old, with old wooden catalogues and long sliding drawers; its records were dispatched by
human hands, and had nothing to do with computers. Instead, rows and rows of superannuated encyclopedias were solemnly cradled, like crown jewels, in glass-flanked cabinets in a red-brick cellar.
Lars had been to see all this for himself: the benign dungeon, scalloped with monastic arches, and the worktables where specially appointed scholars set down their burdened briefcases. Those cases:
he imagined a plenitude, a robustness, many-stanzaed Eddas, sagas winding on and on. Bliss of scholar-poets, archaeologists of old Norse twilights. The cold gods with their winking breastplates and
their hot whims. Hammer of the terrible Thor. Odin and Freya. All diminished into the world’s week: the comedy of that.