The Messiah of Stockholm (5 page)

Still, Heidi stuck by him; she wasn’t throwing him out, like the Princess. Heidi appeared to be as absorbed in their little stock as he was: together they combed through the letters, one
by one, taking turns reading them out. With their heads close they gazed into the photographs. Lars’s young father was always the central figure, the only male, ringed round by women. Lars
memorized each woman’s face. One of these might easily be the face of his father’s lover—any one of them. Any one of them might be Lars’s own mother. Heidi disagreed:
Lars’s father—they knew this from the letters—was too withdrawn, too isolated, too obsessive, to have gone casually into a woman’s bed. And the women themselves: these
faces: they were too worldly, too lightly content, too
exterior
, to belong to someone who might become Lars’s father’s lover. His lover must be elsewhere, in a secret place
beyond the photos. She would need to be a poet. There were so many letters written to literary women. Romana Halpern? No. Zofia Nalkowska? No. Deborah Vogel? No. All these candidates were, for this
and that good reason, wrong. Besides, there was the fact of Jozefina: the Catholic fiancée, still alive. An old woman. Well into her eighties, perhaps, living in London.

“You should go over there,” Heidi said, “and find out her side of the story. Before it’s too late.”

“What do I need London for? We
know
her side. She wanted to settle in Warsaw after the wedding. She even spoke of Paris. And
he
wouldn’t budge out of Drohobycz. Stuck.
Paralyzed.”

“She’s a living witness to the man. She could tell you things. She could tell you why the wedding didn’t come off. You should talk to her.”

Lars said grimly, “She was his enemy.”

“She loved him more than he loved her—he said so himself! As if we didn’t read
exactly
that letter less than a week ago! As if I hadn’t broken my head getting
hold
of that letter!”

“She wanted him to be normal,” Lars said.

They went back and forth in this way, on every point, piecing things out, quarreling. Tracings, leavings, enigmatic vestiges—over each tendril they had their calculations and speculations
and probings and puzzlings. Drohobycz itself a puzzle: a place recorded on the map of Poland only in the tiniest print. It was hardly there at all. To push through into the scenery and substance of
Drohobycz was like entering a pinhole. The hasidim of the neighborhood—gone. Lars’s father’s father’s shop—a drygoods business—gone. Nothing left; not a ribbon,
not a thimble. Between Drohobycz and Lars’s father there had occurred a mutual digestion. Street by street, house by house, shop by shop, Lars’s father had swallowed Drohobycz whole;
Drohobycz was now inside every tale. And Drohobycz had swallowed Lars’s father also: a drab salary, a job he despised, a band of relatives to support—paralyzed, stuck, how was it
possible to leave? Lars’s father was a gargoyle on the flank of Drohobycz, a mole on its inmost sinew. Once he traveled to Warsaw. Once he traveled to Lvov. Once he even went as far as Paris!
But in the end he came home to be digested. All those weighty names Heidi recited out of the letters, poets and painters and philosophers and novelists, sometimes two or three in the same
person—Stanislaus Witkiewicz, for instance, famously nicknamed Witkacy—what kind of living ghost did they think they were addressing, a high school teacher of arts and crafts, smeared
with provincial paste and paint? Underground, immobile, cut off. Jozefina wanted him baptized after their engagement. He refused, but offered a concession: he would forsake the world of the Jews.
His family had anyhow always kept their distance from the teeming outlandish hasidim in their long black coats. He was a Pole: he had already thrown himself on the unyielding breast of mother
Poland, and nestled into the underside of her tongue. If he had ever sipped a word or two of Yiddish out of the air, it did not ride his spittle or his pen.

These were their accumulations and
incidentals. They understood how little they had. They folded and unfolded the layers of Lars’s father’s thin life—it grew thinner yet. They had scratched out of Drohobycz all
there was to scratch, and out of the poor fiancée the same. They were, they saw, nearly finished—it was squeezing milk from a stone to hope for more. The rest was quotations, excerpts,
recitations. Vyings. Heidi had traced down a handwritten memoir: an account of a dinner party at which Lars’s father and his fiancée are guests. Lars’s father eats without
emitting a syllable, mute; meanwhile the elegant Jozefina is animated, talkative. The bride chirps, the bridegroom is dumb. The memoirist thinks to herself:
There will be no bread from this
flour
. An old proverb, and prophetic: no marriage followed. And one night Lars telephoned from the
Morgontörn
to announce the recovery, from Anders’s trash basket, of an
American review. An American review! An amazement. Both books are reviewed. In America they call
Cinnamon Shops
by another name:
The Street of Crocodiles
, after one of the most
horrifying of the tales. The second book is called in English
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
—an endless train of hissings. The lost third one isn’t mentioned.
“He’s reached across finally,” Lars said, agitated, “he’s passed beyond little Europe.” He promised to bring the review to Heidi’s shop within the hour, to
lay it, so to speak, at her feet. It seemed to him that hers was the only brain in Stockholm able to value such an offering. But when he arrived the black mustaches were wobbling: she was all
victory and spite. She flashed at him an out-of-the-way periodical.

“Look what’s here! A letter! A new one. Published for the first time.” There was an engine in her breathing; she was pumping out elation. “He’s writing in 1934.
Eight years before the shooting. Listen to this! I
need a companion
. I
need a kindred spirit close by me. I long for an acknowledgment of the inner world whose existence I postulate
.
And you think you can come in here bragging about finding an American review! What’s a review? Nothing. Listen!
I would like to lay my burden on someone else’s shoulder for a moment.
I need a partner in discovery
—”

Lars said hoarsely, “Where did you get all that?”

“I keep my eye out. I have my sources. If there’s something that hasn’t come home to roost, leave it to me to dig it up.”

“He means me,” Lars said. “I’m the one he means.”

“Please. So much and no farther. This is years before you were born.”

“You don’t understand him. You don’t know. He’s thinking of the future. A laying-on of hands. He’s thinking ahead.”

“He’s thinking of a woman,” Heidi said. “It’s a woman he wants.
A partner in discovery
—that’s a wife, isn’t it?”

“A son.
An acknowledgment of the inner world
—it can’t be a wife. He keeps his privacy, it’s not a wife he wants. He never
had
a wife. He can give up
Jozefina, but not solitude. Solitude is just the thing he won’t give up. The burden is sent ahead—a signal through the genes. The partner in discovery is the next generation.”

Heidi struck off a click of exasperation. “If he isn’t looking for a woman, why else are there all those letters to women?”

“Ha!” Lars said; he felt the advantage shift. He could outthink her; he would make her pay for belittling the American review. “The life of a recluse—nobody comes in or
out of the house, except through letters. He lives on correspondence. People leave him alone. The mitigation of solitude without the bother of human flesh.”

“Your mother,” Heidi tossed back, “wasn’t a piece of paper.”

“My father turned everything into paper.” He took in a brief preparatory pinch of air. “
Reality is as thin as paper
—”

“Don’t spout that again. I know what it’s going to be. It’s what you always—”

“
Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks . . .
”

“
. . . its intuitive character
,” Heidi finished. “Nincom-poopery. Standing things on their head. What’s real is real.”

She fell back into her chair under the daffodil; she had the sleepy look he often thought to be secretive. He was conscious once again of having bested her. It had become a contest between
them—a contest of assimilation and disclosure. She had, for a while, pulled up equal with him, shoulder to shoulder; she was right there beside him. She comprehended, she engulfed, she
devoured. She
had
things—she had facts, she had everything
he
had; she knew and kept it all. And in the end she was no more than an onlooker. It wasn’t fair: even when she
pulled up equal she wasn’t equal; she could never be equal, because the author of
Cinnamon Shops
, the author of
Sanatorium
, the author of the vanished
Messiah
,
wasn’t her father. Lars had to be, in the nature of it, ahead—always, always; he was his father’s son.

She punished him for it by orphaning him; again and again she led him back to the shooting. She came to it by a dozen routes. Each time it was a surprise, an ambush. She could begin anywhere,
and still she would smash Lars into Thursday, that Thursday, the Thursday of the shooting: Thursday the nineteenth of November. They discovered—Heidi’s research—that the terrible
day had a name among the Jews of Drohobycz: Black Thursday. And the hunt itself, the hunt for Jews in the streets, was called “the wild action.” No matter how wary Lars tried to be,
Heidi was canny enough to catch him up in the wild action. Her snares were ingenious. Had Lars been mooning once more over the missing
Messiah
? It ended in the wild action; in a camp; in
murder. It was known that Lars’s father had handed over the manuscript—to whom? when?—for its preservation. What had become of
The Messiah
and its keeper? Was its keeper
man or woman, neighbor or stranger? Killed in the wild action, on Black Thursday? Or else deported, gassed. The corpse thrown into the oven; smoke up the chimney. And
The Messiah
? If its
keeper was shot in the street, was
The Messiah
scattered loose in the gutter, to be chewed over by dogs, to rot in the urine of cats? Or was
The Messiah
shut up in an old dresser in a
house in Drohobycz until this day? Or put out with the trash thirty-five years ago? Or left tangled between its keeper’s coat and shoes in the mountain of coats and shoes behind a fence in
the place of death?

Whatever they touched on, Heidi rattled her links—everything belonged to the shooting. Everything was connected to the shooting. Were they leafing through Lars’s father’s
drawings? They were sure to run into the wild action; the wild action was irresistible. The drawings were unearthly enough on their own—dwarfish, askew, psychological, symbolical. Abnormal.
The drawings, what were they? Frozen panic. Wildness transfixed. Lars’s father himself, in a letter to Witkacy, spoke of them as predestined images,
ready and waiting for us at the very
beginning of life
. There was one of a top-hatted gentleman who has just walked out of an arbor into town; an importuning thick-necked beast in a business suit—a dog of some kind—is
resting a heavy paw on the gentleman’s elbow, urging, entreating. Some distance off, hidden among trees, a man stands watching, his whole head swallowed by leafiness. This picture had
attracted the taste of a certain Gestapo officer. On account of the drawings he undertook to become the artist’s “protector.” The Gestapo officer gave Lars’s father a
special pass out of the ghetto—they had set up a little ghetto in Drohobycz—to the Aryan side of town. There was bread on that side, so off Lars’s father went. It was the day of
the wild action, the S.S. out suddenly in swarms; even so, Lars’s father was not shot randomly. An S.S. man recognized him as the Gestapo of cer’s Jew and gunned him down. The S.S. man
was said to be the Gestapo of cer’s “rival.” Rival in what? Rival for what?

“You make everything come out in the same place,” Lars complained. “The wrong place. That’s not how it’s supposed to go. You get me off the track. You make me lose
the thread.”

“The thread? The thread? What’s this thread? What’s this track?”

“My father’s books. His sentences.”

“Nouns and verbs! You think that’s what it’s about, nouns and verbs?
Sentences!
Subjects! Predicates! Pieces of paper!”

“Language. Literature. My father’s”—he let out a sigh no wider than a filament—“genius.”

“Go knock at the door of the Academy and tell them to let your father in.”

“They’d have given him the Prize if he’d lived.”

“Well, maybe there’s still a chance. Maybe they’ll change the rules and start giving it to skeletons.”

A shock: she could see straight through to the skeleton. Without warning he understood how it was that Heidi could make him afraid. Skeletons. Everyone who walked by her. All her refugee
customers. Probably even that Turkish boy—she abused him, she barked at him. Not to mention Lars’s ex-tutor, the phony Princess, who was plump enough. And what of Dr. Eklund? Dr.
Eklund, turning beside her in bed in the rushings of the night—the big connubial bed of their flat—did she drill clear through to the xylophone of the ribs? And the tall infantile
graying head of Lars Andemening: no more than a clean skull when she stared across at him with her sleepy sidewise mouth?

He shouted, “Maybe you like it that they shot him dead in the streets! Maybe you have affectionate feelings for the S.S.! Nostalgia for the Gestapo!”

His head felt all skull. He watched her stand up, straining from the chair: an old woman.

“Prove you’re your father’s son,” she commanded. “Why don’t you prove it? I don’t say prove he’s a genius. I don’t say prove his nouns and
verbs. I say prove he’s your father.”

“I know his voice. I know his mind.” A pressure of telling rose in him. He wanted to tell her that he knew his father’s eye; but he did not.

“Why don’t you pick Kafka to be the son of? Then people would have some recognition. They’d be impressed. They’d look around at you.”