The Messiah of Stockholm (6 page)

“I know who my father is. I know him inside out. I know more than anyone.”

“You know him inside out,” she sang. “You’ve collected him, you’re a collector!”

“Sometimes,” Lars said slowly, “his words come out of my mouth.”

“You’re a reviewer! You write reviews! Nobody gets the Nobel Prize for writing on Mondays!”

Very slowly he began to tell. A stone lay on his tongue; but he began. “When I wake up,” he said heavily, “I can see my father’s eye. It seems to be my eye, but
it’s his. As if he lets me have his own eye to look through.”

“You want to resurrect him. You want to
be
him.” She did not soften. “Mimicry. Posing in a mirror. What’s the point of it? What will it bring you? You throw out
your life.”

“And your life?” The stone fell away. “If you think there’s no point, how come
you’re
in it? You’re in it as much as I am. More. You’ve found all
the best things. The letters. Everything from Warsaw. If it’s not worth
my
while, how is it worth yours?”

“When Dr. Eklund’s away it passes the time.” She sank back under the lamp; she lifted her hand and switched it off. “Dr. Eklund warned me long ago against sleeping in
daylight. It induces hallucinations. Poor Lars, you’re a visionary. There’s no
use
to it. If I didn’t have my shop to keep me on my toes, I’d nap in the afternoon
like you.”

The last syllables swam into black space. A trickle of light from the street drifted through the mullioned door.

Lars came and hunched himself on the floor beside her.

“Do you want coffee?” she suddenly asked him.

“No.”

“Take some vodka.”

“No.”

“Then you’d better go home. It’s the middle of the night.”

“I’m not coming back,” he said.

A fragment of laughter scraped the darkness.

Lars said, “No, it’s finished. What I get from you is mockery. Enough.”

“You want to be taken on faith.”

“Trust. I want trust.”

“Vapor and smoke. Stories, letters—they’re all someone’s hallucination. How do you know you weren’t born right here in Stockholm? An infant, smuggled! It’s
only a story. You don’t know anything for sure. Your mother’s a cloud, your father’s a fog. There’s nothing reliable in any of it.”

“Except the shooting. You believe in
that
.”

“Death’s reliable.”

She was all at once discomposed; she flung out her hands. The gesture of an oracle. He was astonished—she was surrendering her own old landscape, she was taking her turn. It was her
life—the life before—she was giving him, out of the blue: the life before Dr. Eklund. She pressed it out in the swoop of two or three lines—her arms a line in the black air, the
fence a row of black lines. It appeared before him in the dark with the clarified simplicity of a charcoal drawing—a predestined image. He followed the black lines, he traced her, there at
the fence, heaving lumps over it to the shadows on the other side: as a young woman she had lived, she said, in a village not far from one of those camps, and crept at night as often as she could
without detection to throw food over the fence. It was like a cage in there, crammed with dying beasts. She heard their scratchings, clawings, mufflings, muzzlings; they were all shadows; they were
afraid to come near. She heard them tear into the paper wrappings; then they stuffed the wrappings into their sleeves, into their shoes; she heard them gulp and chew. Occasionally they vomited, or
exploded, with cries like muzzled beasts, into floods of diarrhoea; she made out all this in the blind night by the sound and the pestilential smell. Often she heard shooting; there was no sense to
the shooting, she could not tell where or why, it had no direction. Sometimes it seemed to come from between her own feet. And immediately after the war she picked up the daffodil lamp, only that,
and a few old books, and traveled north across the border, leaving Germany behind. She would never go back. If she had a family there she did not mention it. In Stockholm she found Dr. Eklund and
married him.

He had never seen her so excited. Something had provoked her. Her cheeks were drawn down—puffs of weighted dough; abruptly she had the look of a bulldog. He did not believe her; she was a
liar. She wanted not to be what she had been before. It was more intuition than suspicion that he did not believe her: she knew too much about that fence—the other side of it, among the
shadows. She knew what they did with the bits of paper—how they squashed every scrap inside their rags to make a lining against the cold, how they paddled their shoes with it against the
sores. She had strangely intimate views—they were like summonings—about the hunger and the vomiting and the bursting of the bowels. She summoned these with a votive memory. She summoned
too well, too potently, too acutely: the night space beyond the fence could not account for so deep a summoning. He supposed she was one of them, but hidden—one of the shadows inside.

“You’re a refugee,” he said. “A survivor. Like me.”

“Like you? You don’t know what you are! Safe in Stockholm your whole life! You don’t know
who
you are!” She let out that same unconfined newfangled laughter:
doglike. “You’ll say you’re anything at all!”

“You were behind that fence. On the inside.”

“The outside. I heard the shooting.”

“You want to conceal it. You’re afraid of being found out.”

“Oh yes, a Marrano. Like your idea of the Queen, poor woman!”

“You don’t want to admit it. You want to be rid of it. Your name,” he accused—he had spied it written in one of those old books of hers. “I saw what your name used
to be.”

“There are plenty of Bavarian burghers called Simon. They’re all Catholic.”

“And what are you?”

“By religion? A bookseller.”

“A refugee,” he insisted, “like any refugee. You escaped. A survivor.”

“Stockholm is full of survivors,” she said; she was quiet now. She was obstinate. She was not going to yield. Instead, she held out her key. “Here, let yourself out.
You’ll come back, whatever you say.”

“No. I’m not coming back. I told you.”

She slid behind him to the door. The little fear he always had of her seemed to heat up the key as he turned it; then he relinquished it into her hand.

“You’ll
want
to come back. Think what you’ve got on order! Poles and Czechs! Vaculík, Hrabel, Konwicki. Witold Gombrowicz! You might not want to come back for me,
but for Konwicki, for Gombrowicz—”

He stepped out into the cold—she was still laughing back there, behind the door. Mockery. But it was so; for the sake of these he would return. He felt how she had over-mastered him after
all. He was glad to keep away. It might be weeks before she reeled him back, a helpless fish on her line, to fetch his order. All the time until then he would keep away; he would keep away with all
his might. It came to him how desolate he was. He had imagined her entangled with him. It was the shooting, only the shooting, she was entangled with. His father’s skeleton.

O
N THE WEEKEND HE
went to visit Ulrika’s mother. She lived in the suburbs, in a section beyond the city that had once been semi-rural and was now
growing more and more Turkish. Ulrika’s mother was proud of her house—it had been in the family, on the female side, for seven generations. The foundation was stone, the rest a
rust-colored old brick. It struck Lars—for the first time—that Ulrika’s hair had been just this color: brick dusted all over with powdery brown. Birgitta, his first wife, was an
ordinary blonde. He had not heard anything about Birgitta in over a decade. She was married again and had two small children; he knew this much, but otherwise she almost never entered his mind.
Ulrika he had once been bitter against, because she had taken his daughter away to America. But the bitterness was stale, and when Ulrika’s mother in her confusion led him into the house he
recognized that lately Ulrika too was seldom in his thoughts. Even his little daughter had begun to fade.

“Lars! You should tell me when you’re coming. You should call, for heaven’s sake!”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“You didn’t use to be such a primitive. Look at me, a walking mud pie, look how I am, straight from the garden—”

“I’ve brought you something. My flat is so small I have no room to store anything.”

Ulrika’s mother’s mouth suddenly pinched itself inward. It was a trick Lars recalled from Ulrika.

“I can’t
keep
things for you, Lars. It isn’t right. We aren’t relations any more. Besides, Ulrika has an American sweetheart now. An engineer. He works for
IBM.”

“It’s Karin’s thing, not mine.” He drew out a flat rectangular object from his briefcase and set it down between them on the parlor table. It was his daughter’s old
paint set.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Put it away somewhere.”

“It makes no sense to keep a baby thing like that. Next time I see Karin she’ll be grown. I can show you her latest snapshots if you like—they came just last week. A big tall
girl. All that black hair—she takes after you before you went gray. And look,” she said, “the paint’s all dried out, it’s no good anyhow.”

“It’s been like that a long time.”

“What do I want a dried-out piece of trash like that for?”

“A keepsake.”

“Your idea of a keepsake, Lord help us! It’s because you don’t know what it is to inherit anything, Lars. I don’t blame you. I’ve always felt for you.”

“When Karin was tiny she already loved to paint,” Lars said.

“All kids like to make messes.”

This ignorant old widow. He thought of his father’s drawings:
ready and waiting for us at the very beginning of life
. Is it possible that these predestined images can flow from
generation to generation?—he remembered how certain phantomlike lines, wanton, curiously powerful and strong, had astonished him, sweeping out from his daughter’s fierce little fist:
the power of genes. Ulrika had taken small notice.

“I told Ulrika,” Ulrika’s mother said, “how hard it would be for her if she married an orphan. We’re a family that’s always had our own house. The same house
you’re sitting in, solid stone, good brick, if you want to talk about keepsakes! And a nice garden too. Ulrika, I said, we know who we are. We come from right here, and always have. I told
her it would be like going with the gypsies to go with an orphan. It’s not your fault, Lars. But it wasn’t right for Ulrika. Don’t think I didn’t tell her! She ended up a
gypsy herself. Lord knows when she’ll find her way home again. Maybe never. By now she speaks American day and night and in her sleep. Karin in those pictures looks pure American,
doesn’t she? Those shoes! Ulrika shouldn’t allow shoes like that. And that dark hair. I never thought I’d have a grandchild as dark as one of these Turks around here.
They’re everywhere now, they’ve moved in on both sides next door. I can’t work in my garden without some Turkish man watching. The women are worse.”

He sat with her for another hour, tracing Ulrika in every one of her gestures—he had never observed this before. Now and then he stared down at the photographs of his daughter. It was
evident that she was going to be tall, but otherwise he hardly knew her for his own. He was still unreconciled to her name—he who had chosen his own name, and out of the dictionary, like a
spell! Karin: Ulrika had wanted this commonplace. Lars had dreamt of the Four Matriarchs. Rachel, Rebecca, Sarah, Leah. In the snapshots—he held them like a pack of cards,
frivolously—Karin receded from him; she seemed no more than a plaster cast, with empty eyes. The original was elsewhere. In the photos she was older and coarser than the quick child whose
paint set he meant to rid himself of. He might meet her again one day; or not. If she longed for him she would search him out. She would study his case if he deserved it. Even a child can become a
scholar of loss. He wondered whether he ought to take the paint set back with him—Ulrika’s mother would only toss it out, nothing could be plainer. But he left it behind.

I
T WAS EASY TO
keep away from Heidi. He felt how easy. Heidi was nothing to him. He had lost no one. Still, he was plagued now and then by a heaviness,
a thickness of the lung, an inner lurch as glutinous as mourning.

He walked past the Academy and discovered that this density of breathing, this viscosity, was only ordinary fury. Mrs. Eklund! She was jealous: she had called him a collector and his father a
skeleton.
A doctor’s wife considers you either a madman or a phony
—this was from that last batch of letters Heidi had wangled out of Warsaw: she had recited this insult with
zest. “No doubt a bad translation,” she added, to be fair. He seized the Polish original. The words did not change their spots. They belonged to Witold Gombrowicz, one of his
father’s epistolary cronies. Six years before the shooting (Heidi’s count), Lars’s father in an open letter to the press had spat out his bitter rebuff to this doctor’s wife
and her opinions:
Dear Witold
. . .
These are the mass instincts that eclipse within us a clarity of judgment, reintroducing the archaic and barbaric epistemologies, the arsenal of
atavistic and bankrupt logic . . . You side with inferiority
. The poor doctor’s wife, a woman Gombrowicz had run into on the Number 18 streetcar, in 1936, on Wilcza Street. It was
probably true that Gombrowicz sided with her. She was exasperated: Lars’s father was over her head. A madman or a phony. She condemned him for being beyond her. Barbaric epistemologies!

She must be an old woman by now, this doctor’s wife Gombrowicz had met on the Number 18, as old as Jozefina, the fiancée; or dead. Gombrowicz, surly humorist, was also dead.
You
side with inferiority
. Over the Academy, in the night sky, floating, wafting, aloft in the streaming snow, Lars saw, or almost saw, his father’s body, not at all a skeleton—an
incandescent apparition billowing with light, puffed out the light stretching his father’s skin to palest transparency. This balloon-father, shedding luminosity, light falling in sheets from
his swollen body, drifted into the white flux and merged with it. First a blur, then a smudge, then a blankness: above the Academy’s roof now there was only the shower of snow-hyphens
brightly descending.