The Messiah of Stockholm (12 page)

“That fellow. That author of yours.”

“In Paris? You saw him in Paris?”

“Only for a few moments. A piece of luck.”

“But you
saw
him! You saw his face?”

“He had a pointed chin. I remember that.”

“And what else? How did he look?”

“Like someone drinking hot tea in July.”

Lars turned on Heidi: “Your husband
saw
him! You never mentioned it, you never told—”

“I’m hearing it now for the first time myself.”

“In a pig’s foot you are. And on top of that the Polish! To have a husband
fluent in Polish
,” he echoed, “and never to say a word about it—”

“Well, you should have figured that out on your own.”

“Figured it out!” How preposterous she was; how senseless, how operatic. “Why not send Adela to your husband, if it’s translation she wants?
I’m
not the one
she’s looking for!”

“Dr. Eklund prefers not to translate. Dr. Eklund is obliged to go back and forth. He follows things up. He gets things out.”

“Translation is not my interest,” Dr. Eklund affirmed. “Especially of dubious manuscripts.”

“What a baby you are, Lars. Naïve. It’s not only ghosts you believe in. It’s a question of detective work, can’t you understand that? Agents. Connections.
Combinations. How else would I have gotten hold of those Warsaw items? Who am I to get hold of such things? A little hole-in-the-wall bookseller—”

“I don’t like it,” Dr. Eklund said again, “when you give things away.”

Heidi swept on. “You think a letter dated 1934 grows on trees? You think pieces of a memoir about a dinner conversation in Warsaw in 1936 can be picked up in the street? Just like that?
Lars, please, let me ask you—left to yourself, what would you have come up with? Left to yourself, that’s the point! I’ll tell you what—you would have come up with the only
scrap you
did
come up with! An American review from the
Morgontörn
’s trash barrel, that’s what.” The black eyebrows were wobbling like rocking-horse manes.
“No, no, it’s not so simple. You dreamers would like it to be simple, you would like everything to turn on the issue of literary passion. I suppose Warsaw releases its valuables just
like that? Or maybe it’s only a matter of telephoning long-distance to a dealer in Drohobycz, ha! You’re a baby, you don’t understand the world. You think the world is made of
literature. You think reality is a piece of paper.”

What was it she was telling him? It was something to do with Dr. Eklund. Somehow it was about Dr. Eklund—which couldn’t be, in any case, his right name. Dr. Eklund wasn’t a
Swede. Was he even a doctor? Was he, with his weedy pungencies, a sea captain in earnest? He got things out—people and things. He got things in—things and people. A smoother of
obstinacies. When Dr. Eklund was said to be in Copenhagen, or on his hospital rounds, or asleep in the flat, did it mean he was actually in Budapest? Had he really—four years after the
publication of
Cinnamon Shops
, in a summertime Paris already darkening toward war—had he really seen Lars’s father?

Lars had no father. No father ever again. He was giving his father up—to the probabilities, if not to the facts. There were no facts. Beyond the shooting there was nothing at all. Only the
turbulence of desire, the merciless boil of a saving chimerical eye. The eye of deliverance. Of redemption. It had burst out over the little cave of Lars’s quilt like the wheel of a sun. A
fiery hoop. A roaring egg. An intelligence. A devouring certainty. Gone; erased; wiped out. Heidi didn’t appear to be at all unsettled by these whirlwind blanks: it didn’t touch her
that Lars had thrown off his claim to the author of
The Messiah
, that he was willing now to withdraw to nothingness, that he was no one’s son, that he had no father; that he was
undone. It didn’t touch her, either way. She had never believed in his case; it didn’t matter to her that he was tearing up his case then and there. It didn’t seem to please
her.

“I’m stopping, Mrs. Eklund,” he said. “It’s over. I’m quitting.”

“What’s over? What are you quitting?”

“I told you. I don’t have a father.”

“Did you ever have a father? I never thought you did.”

“Adam, the father of us all,” Dr. Eklund said.

“No more Warsaw items. No letters, no memoirs, no photographs, no drawings, no proverbs, no quotations—I won’t be bothering you,” Lars said.

“Not at all a bother,” Dr. Eklund said. “More in the way of business.”

“Dr. Eklund is always so much concerned with anything to do with the shop,” Heidi said.

“My father has nothing to do with the shop.”

“Your ex-father. Shouldn’t you be saying your ex-father?”

“Take my word that I’m finished.”

“Really finished?”

“It’s the end.”

“Oh, but
we
don’t quit,” she countered.

We? Who was “we”? It was, Lars considered, a new “we.” Now it included Dr. Eklund.

“Dr. Eklund,” she pointed out, “has had a certain interest in accumulating these items.”

“These evidences,” Dr. Eklund suggested.

“These evidences. That’s why he agreed to see Adela. He’s worn out—just look how worn out the poor man is. But he agreed to see her anyhow, and you know why?”

“Why?” asked Dr. Eklund. Raillery or was he hurrying her on?

“Because he sympathizes. He knows how you’re consumed by all this He understands you, Lars.”

“Comprehends. Penetrates,” Dr. Eklund offered. “The attraction—the seduction, the magnetism—of a sublime text. This is a feeling I myself admit to.”

“Dr. Eklund is so to speak your psychological twin.”

“Now don’t go too far,” Dr. Eklund said. “I don’t propose to be in this gentleman’s category. There’s no one else just like him. Not in Stockholm,
no.”

“My category? What category is that?”

“
Use
fulness,” Heidi said, covering it over with her joking little bark.

A single wild church bell. If not a church bell, then a kind of gong.

“Good God, what
is
it?” Heidi burst out. “I told her just to knock—did she break the glass? She broke it!”

Dr. Eklund sprang up—he wasn’t at all tired; he was robust and acrobatic, more of a sea captain than ever—and sprinted across the length of the shop to the door, darting in and
out of the blocks of shelves like an oversized rat in a tunnel.

Heidi reached up to switch on the lights; the shop looked suddenly open for business.

“You nearly broke my glass!”

“Well, but I didn’t.” Adela rubbed her foot in the slide-marks across the vestibule. “I slipped in the snow with this thing. Right against the door. It’s started
coming down again.”

“Look at your shoes,” Heidi said. “You’ll leak all over my floors. The boy mopped only an hour ago.”

Adela was bareheaded; Lars knew why. Her hair was sprinkled with snow-beads. She was not carrying the white plastic bag. Her arms were pressed around the belly of a round brass jug; a sort of
amphora. It was either a very large flower vase or a very modest umbrella stand. The open mouth of it had been shielded from the weather by a plastic shower cap.

“No hat? In the snow you should wear a hat,” Dr. Eklund reprimanded. It was, Lars noted, a version of Heidi’s whimsicality; it was part of his being histrionic. And what if
this woman clutching a barrel, or an urn, or whatever it was, did or didn’t wear a hat? Dr. Eklund was too suddenly intimate; he was ready instantly to absorb her. There was a clownish
anxiety in it. He was looking her over like a potential deckhand signing on for a voyage. He wasn’t sure she would do. He was ready to order, advise, interrogate.

Lars said, “I’ve got her hat in my house.”

Adela turned; Lars watched the startled tide rise in her face.

“It’s in my bed. Your hat.”

“You! This man, this insane man! It’s enough for one day! Why should he
be
here? Who asked him to come?” The two vertical trenches drew together like a pair of fence
pickets. But it was more calculation than rage.

“No one asked him. He just turned up,” Heidi said.

“Because he had my key,” Dr. Eklund complained. “He took my key, that’s why.”

Adela clashed the brass amphora down on the little backroom table, an inch from Dr. Eklund’s cup. “He’ll say anything. He’ll do anything. The right thing would be to call
the police.”

“Now that would be the wrong thing,” Dr. Eklund said.

“The police are for thieves, aren’t they?”

“Now, now. Hold on, please. A manuscript of dubious origin. We don’t yet know whether it is or isn’t
The Messiah
.”

“That’s exactly the question Dr. Eklund’s going to settle,” Heidi said placatingly. It was as if she was being launched—was it by invisible confluences, was it by
Dr. Eklund himself, was it really by the thought of the police?—on a peacekeeping mission. “You don’t have to worry about Lars. He’s had a crisis and it’s done
with.”

Adela blew out a ferocious breath. “An assault! Oh yes, done with—I told him everything and he knocked me down.”

“Because you weren’t letting me have a look.”

“A look?” said Dr. Eklund. “A look at what?”

“
The Messiah
. She ran off with it in that bag.”

“He tried to steal it.”

“You should have let him have a look,” Dr. Eklund said severely.

“You should have let him,” Heidi said. “It wasn’t fair. Anyhow he’ll apologize, you’ll see. Lars, you’ll apologize, won’t you?”

“Never
mind
,” Dr. Eklund muttered; the whimsicality was drained out. “It gets late for our business. If she doesn’t want him, he should go away.”

Lars said, “Where’s that bag? You don’t have that bag with you.”

“I don’t have my hat,” Adela mocked.

“Why doesn’t he
go
?” Dr. Eklund said, fidgeting with another match.

It was remarkable: Dr. Eklund’s voice—the habit of emphasis, the hard little undulation in
go—
was exactly Adela’s. The sea captain and Adela were from a far part
of the world—the same part. The same modulations, the same eruptions and lavalike descent of the vowels. It was clear they had once been neighbors, Dr. Eklund and Adela. And yet Adela was
somehow a provocation. Dr. Eklund the sympathizer, Dr. Eklund the psychological twin—now here was Dr. Eklund trying to throw Lars out. The change had arrived with Adela. It was as if a
warning vibration had been set off, some sudden machine or subtle alarm Lars could detect the hum of—in the background, behind the shelves, out of sight.

It made Heidi his unexpected advocate. “He has the right to stay, why shouldn’t he stay?” She was accommodatingly soft, she was amiable, she was all at once mollifying; she
meant to take his part. “He cares about what’s in that manuscript more than anyone alive. It’s his
mania
,” she said, naming it like an awful contagion.
“It’s what he concentrates on. I can’t claim he’s ever knocked me down to get at it. Not actually, not in my bones. But talk of assault! I’m the one who can testify to
that! He’s gone after my brain, and isn’t that worse? He’s made me pick at all his leavings. I’ve had to chew over whatever he’s chewed. Such people get born, God
knows how or to whom, to compensate for what isn’t there. They pour the strangest things into the void. Like sand into a sack.”

Mild babble: she kept on with it. She said she had become his slave, he had enslaved her to his concentration, to his obsession. His mind was no better than any other single-product
manufacturing contraption. He had fettered her to it, he had fettered himself, and at the same time he was uncontrollable, he couldn’t be restrained. He was one of the century’s
casualties, in his own way a victim. He took on everyone’s loss; everyone’s foolish grief. Foolish because unstinting. Rescue was the only thought he kept in his head—he was
arrogant about it, he was steady, he wanted to salvage every scrap of paper all over Europe. Europe’s savior! His head was full of Europe—all those obscure languages in all those
shadowy places where there had been all those shootings—in the streets, in the forests. He had attached himself to the leavings of tyranny, tragedy, confusion.

“There’s no one else like him,” she finished. “Not anywhere. It’s just what Dr. Eklund says—a category of his own.”

Through all this Adela was flaunting a crooked caustic smile. “All right, a madam. You called him priest and you meant madam. Then why on earth would you send me to him? You sent me
there!”

Heidi twisted her stout little torso. “You wanted a translator.”

“You knew he wouldn’t do it. And you sent me!”

“Well, I thought he should have a look.”

“The priest should have a look? Or the savior should? Or just the madam? Mrs. Eklund, he never
considered
translating. You knew that. Don’t tell me you didn’t!
That’s
why I didn’t let him have a look.”

“No, no,” Heidi protested, “you’re not following. The way he went after Polish—didn’t I see for myself how he went after Polish? He swallowed it right down.
He’s after what’s primary—”

“He tells stupendous lies.”

“What he wants is the original of things. It’s what I said, it’s just what I told you. He’s a priest of the original—isn’t that what I told you?”

She was his advocate, she was taking his part. It was a sort of play. He was in a theater. Lars felt himself shut out. Behind a curtained proscenium—but the curtain was sealed against
him—some unintelligible drama raged. Even as onlooker he had no rational place in it. What was he to be henceforth, if he was not to be his father’s son? And she, the daughter, this
falsehood of a daughter? The author of
The Messiah
was nobody’s father now. What Lars had given up! A capitulation; he had surrendered to the false daughter’s tale. He had no
solid tale of his own to set against it; only this rush of blood. Hers was as probable as anything else in the wilderness of Europe forty years ago. These stories had their plausibility. Lars
had—what did he have? His old certainty, grown out of him a fingernail. He chopped it off. He stood there stripped of verisimilitude. Was she nobody’s daughter? Then he, so much the
more, was nobody’s son. How hard it was to breathe, to breathe in and out, without illumination! Everything quenched, snuffed, suffocated. Surrendered. The light that rode forth like a horn,
as though a huge saddle had been flung over the flanks of the universe, a saddle with its fiery horn of light, riding out from his father’s fixed eye . . . Dissolved. It had let itself die.
It would not return.