The Messiah of Stockholm (8 page)

“Mrs. Eklund.”

Her face was in the pillow. Her voice was drawing itself out, thinner and thinner. It was dissolving. “Be sure to get that key back here pretty soon. It’s one of Dr. Eklund’s
extras. It isn’t that he loses them. He leaves them places. At the hospital. In the flat.”

Lars said steadily, “You’re all alone here every night. There isn’t any flat. There isn’t any Dr. Eklund.”

“Go away. Take your books and go. I need to sleep. I’m asleep.”

“Dr. Eklund’s a phantom.”

“No, no, you don’t follow, you don’t see,” she soughed into the pillow. “She’s dancing again. The prima ballerina.”

The key was heating up in his hand. “A refugee impostor,” he said. “That’s what you are.”

In the little vestibule, Czechs and Poles in his arms, he struggled back into his boots, teetering on one leg at a time and leaning against the glass of the display window. It was just where she
had stood—the so-called daughter—with her white plastic bag. In which rested, or swarmed in chaos, certain sheets of manuscript, whatever they were. In the window the enameled Royal
Family were still tucked benignly into their sofas, and the sea gulls were speckling Lake Vänern, and alongside were those towering piles of Russians and South Americans and Englishmen, so
many foreign urgencies babbling. The key went straight into the lock without difficulty in the broad circle of light that looped out from the streetlamp. In this spot she—the so-called
daughter—had determined to declare herself.
Here I am
.

“He’s on his way,” he heard Heidi call from the back room. A moan: or not exactly a moan. Rather, the sound of indecipherable syllables evaporating at the bottom of the sea.
German? Polish? Serbo-Croatian? A foreign babble, unintelligible. He put the key in his pocket. It burned against his thigh. His little fear. And then he thought: look! it doesn’t burn, it
isn’t burning. There is no Dr. Eklund. Dr. Eklund doesn’t exist. Dr. Eklund is a phantom.
Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character
. Now
he was not sure whether Heidi had called out anything at all. He was, anyhow, already yards away from the shop. But his little fear was cooled. His little fear was gone.

H
E DECIDED, THE NEXT
day, to forgo his afternoon quilt. He headed instead for the
Morgontörn
; it was the first time in months he had seen
the place in light. It was business, it was the world, it was movement—they were putting out the paper. It went on like this, telephones and shouts and typewriters, until the secretaries left
for home—an office boy flashing by with a long noodle of galleys, the stutter of someone’s typing clacking out of one of the cubicles; Nilsson yelling: something was missing, something
was late. There was a common energy—the intermittent vowels in the floorboards weren’t the least bit ghostly, and the noise of it all ground together had the unitary drive of an
organism out on its own: God knew what the name of such a single-minded animal might be. Nothing spooky. A big nosy dog. Lars didn’t take note of any mice. No doubt they were confined to
barracks.

“Lars! What are you doing here?” Nilsson gave him a bossy thump and raced on through the roil. It was a thing to marvel at, the book department in daylight—how the sun,
moonlike, wan, wintry, grainy and fickle, more gray than pale, cut out patches everywhere. The strangeness of these sun-pockets: windows! A vague electric bulb and the usual scratchings and
scrapings against the shaft kept the elevator in its shabby night, but otherwise the chairs and desks and file cabinets had the look of life. Over in a corner the gang of three-o’clock
gossips were well into it, Gunnar and Anders among them. Lars was surprised, and then, on second thought, he wasn’t. Night prowlers somewhat on his own style, they gargled with what was what
and who was where and why—it meant they had to come to the well, now and then, for water.

He was breathing through a veil—a sort of stupor or trance. It was the habit of the quilt; at this hour he was used to his nap. The rims of his eyes itched and bothered: a pair of old
hoops he had bumped through too many ditches. He was wakeful enough, but with a ragged edge; a buzz; a recklessness. He felt somehow abused—he didn’t care what anyone said. He nudged
himself nearer; no one acknowledged him, no one lifted a shoulder to let him in. They were telling a translation story—how Sven Strömberg, in an absent moment, pushing to meet a deadline
on an Australian novel and meaning to engage the word “trust,” inadvertently transmuted it to “trussed,” and tied up his faithful heroine in knots. “You can’t
pin it on Sven, it could happen to anyone. All those puns and homonyms.” “Homer nodding.” “Freud. A psychological substitution.” “You forget that Sven
Strömberg doesn’t
have
a psyche.” “So what’s he keep in that paunch?” “Some sort of cheese. You can smell it on his breath.” “It
isn’t
cheese
that’s on his breath.” “At least his howlers are his own, nothing’s swiped.”

Laughter. “Has anyone seen Flodcrantz?” “I heard he ran to Finland to hide out.” “He’s got the shakes. Even his ears. His knuckles. My God, last I had a look
at him the man was a jelly.” “It’s his own doing. He asked for it.” “They say he’s suicidal.” “That Olof? He takes vitamins!” “Well, he
wanted to be talked about. It’s better than getting buried every week on the culture page.” “He’s made himself famous. He’s relishing the whole business.”
“His hand quivers. His chin.” “It’s an act. He’s an actor. The greatest Thespian of them all.” “Please, the fellow’s suffering. He’s sick.
He’s not normal.”

And on and on. It was this month’s scandal. A reviewer at one of the evening papers, an admired (some said dangerously envied) younger poet who had just published his second collection of
verse, had been exposed—by Sven Strömberg, of all people!—as a plagiarist. Every single poem in Olof Flodcrantz’s new book was a purloined translation of the work of a
different American poet. Flodcrantz had actually been shameless enough to include, among the safer unknowns, a few stanzas by Robert Frost that Sven Strömberg had himself translated a dozen
years ago for an anthology remaindered six weeks after publication:
Bards of the New World
. The most captivating circumstance in the story was its luckless climax—how Sven
Strömberg had uncovered the crime against all odds, since he was celebrated for never reading anything he wasn’t being paid to read. On the other hand, he was also celebrated for lapping
up the most impudent syrups of flattery, so when Olof Flodcrantz sent—
sent!
—a copy of the criminal volume, eloquently inscribed, to Sven Strömberg, and when Sven
Strömberg took in the inscription naming him the foremost man of letters in the nation, it was natural enough for Sven Strömberg (a courteous man) to return the compliment by endorsing
Olof Flodcrantz’s newest lucubrations. “Purely original,” he wrote to Olof; “purely original,” he said to everyone he ran into. Sven’s confirmation of Olof’s pure originality had already been well circulated in the stewpot when, thumbing through the pages to gaze once again on Olof’s pleasing inscription, Sven Strömberg happened to
come on the familiar lines by Robert Frost. In his own translation. Pirated; usurped.

The most delectable shock of the season so far. The three-o’clock gossips—it was now nearer five o’clock—turned it this way and that, testing for motives, for
consequences. Who had duped whom? Mad Olof!—putting his head in the lion’s mouth, but only after first waking up the lion. Yet the poor lion was hardly in a position to bite. Was it a
case of rage, malice, revenge, despair? Or—“Contrariwise,” said Gunnar—puckishness, camp, comedy, dada? A post-modernist plot. Sven was behind it all: it was Sven who had
dug up for Olof all those Americans cleverly named Robert. Creeley and Mezey and Bly! Lowell, Penn Warren, Graves. Anders would have nothing to do with this theory of looking under beds for the
culprit. A solemn accident of reformist patriotism, whatever the intent. Just what we need, showing us up for what we are, rubbing our noses in the dollhouse dust. Ultimate ironic burlesque of
Swedish parochialism. Exposure, once and for all, of the littleness of the life of letters in decrepit old Stockholm.

“Crocodiles! Earn your keep,” Nilsson yelled, running by. The secretaries were going home. The moonlike sun had faded in the windows. It was the stewpot at full boil.

“Well, there’s something else,” Lars said. No one heard. They had moved on to Olof Foldcrantz’s fate at his paper, whether he would be fired or kept on as a culture hero.
He was, whatever else you thought of him, daring—you had to admit he had brio: all those Roberts! Not to mention the blurring of borders, of property lines. Internationalism versus the local
pond. Socialism in the ideal—the text’s the thing, never mind who sets it down. Shakespeare by any other name. A narrow moralist might speak of theft, but what was it if not the halo
of the universal that the whole planet strains toward? Non-exclusive loveliness going from hand among the nations. The fool in the case was Sven Strömberg—showing up the impostor, even
at the price of his own dignity. How ludicrous the leap from “purely original” to “Stop, thief!”—everything turns on whose ox is gored: there you are.

In spite of which, not one of them would mind if Olof Foldcrantz got fired.

Thus the stewpot in the early winter dark. Cigarette smoke like torn nets hanging. All over the world the great ladle was stirring, stirring. The poets, dreamers, thinkers, hacks. The ambitious
and the meditative. The opportunists and the provocateurs. The cabalists and the seducers. This stewpot—these hot tides—Lars under his quilt a short walk away had shut out, week after
week: for the sake of catching sight of his father’s eye. His father too had shunned the stewpot. Drohobycz instead of Warsaw, Drohobycz instead of Paris, Drohobycz instead of anywhere.

“Deadlines, gentlemen!” Nilsson yelled, flying past; he had on his coat and muffler. The tight little cluster loosened, and out from the middle of it serenely stepped, or was mildly
ejected, the
Morgontörn
’s only literary woman, in her man’s shirt and tie, saluting Lars with two fingers raised, one with a blackened writer’s bump. She was rumored
to be Sven Strömberg’s lover of twenty years’ standing; she had not spoken a syllable in his defense—her voice anyhow had the brittle electronic character of an official
interpreter—but her small sly mouth was rich with a certain moist-looking sweetness. There was a sweetness in all of them, the whole three-o’clock crew—the weak honey of
reverence. Literary creatures who served, sidestepped, and sometimes sold out the Muses. Their so-called scandals, their scramblings, their feuds, their polymorphous life in the stewpot: how
innocent, how distant from the palaces of live thunder, how weak they were before the altar of Lars’s father’s unmoving eye. Now they were putting on their padded jackets, fur hats,
fleece boots; it seemed to Lars they were snubbing him, or else they were oblivious—here was Gunnar rushing by, and then Anders, hurrying toward wives, stepfathers, aunts, groaning elderly
households. The stewpot was breaking up. The
Morgontörn
was beginning to take on its rickety nighttime mien.

“Wait,” Lars called again, “there’s something else.”

They were streaming past him, some toward the bottleneck in front of the elevator, most down the grunting
wooden stairs. The poor old
Morgontörn
, collapsing backward—into the last century, into night, into decay. Already the mice were preparing to emerge; you could hear them drilling
in phalanxes behind the walls.

Lars ran to the top of the stairwell and called down, “Something else! News!”

Sven Strömberg’s lover, hitching her sailor’s coat over her shirt and tie, stopped on the landing.

Lars called, “
The Messiah
’s turned up! Here! In Stockholm!”

Clatter on the steps; chatter; rumblings. “It’s Lars Andemening,” Sven Strömberg’s lover explained to the landing below. “I think he’s announcing the
Second Coming.”

“Don’t tell me Olof Flodcrantz is back from Finland?” someone hooted up. “That soon?”

Laughter up and down the stairs.

“His daughter’s got the manuscript. It’s
found
,” Lars called.

“What manuscript?”

Lars leaned over the rail. In the twilight of all those flights of stairs a thousand flickering faces were lifting toward him. “
The Messiah
,” he called. “The lost
Messiah
of Bruno Schulz.”

“Stockholm rumors. The world’s hotbed.”

“That Pole? He never had a daughter.”

“If you’ve never heard of it, leave it to Lars.”

“Or if it’s dead.”

“No, no, everybody’s dead. Tolstoy. Ibsen. Even Strindberg. It gets to Lars only if it’s to-tal-ly obscure.”

“If it never existed.”

“If you
wish
it never existed.”

“Lars!” This was Anders, halfway down. “Cat’s out of the bag. All that resurrecting you do. All those unknowns and esoterics raised from the grave—”

Sven Strömberg’s lover said neatly, “Lars Andemening, the Messiah of Stockholm.”

“Crocodiles!” Nilsson yelled up. “Always after a sensation.”

At the bottom of the staircase Lars met Nilsson waiting for him. “The telephone girl handed me this a second before quitting time. I ran into her coming out of the ladies’ room. Why
don’t you get yourself a phone at home, Lars? The staff here isn’t your butler. I’m not your valet.”

Lars read:
MRS. EKLUND PHONED, DR. EKLUND BACK, PLEASE RETURN KEY
.

He pressed, “But you know what it signifies—if
The Messiah
’s found.”

“One more book in the world,” Nilsson said, “that isn’t
Pippi Longstocking
. People complain, Lars—your reviews are practically theology. A little more
wholesomeness for Monday, how about it? Soft-pedal the surreal, go easy on the existential dread, how about it? Give it a try.”

Lars had entered the stewpot and it had vomited him up.

I
N THE MORNING THE
snow was brownish in the road, and tire-marked. There were heaps of it, in waist-high banks, at the sidewalk’s edge. Walking
was easy and light. Lars arrived at Heidi’s shop so quickly that he had no time to notice his mood. He noticed it only when he looked all around for Heidi and instead came on the Turkish boy
raising the feather duster to his shoulder like a sentry with a rifle. Mrs. Eklund was out. “You take this for her then,” Lars told the Turkish boy, holding out the key. The Turkish boy
demurred:
he
wasn’t supposed to have any key, and if he was allowed to watch the shop at all it was because there were no real customers (clearly Lars wasn’t one of
these
)
at this hour anyhow.