The Messiah of Stockholm (15 page)

“My power? I have no power.” How pointless she was:
The Messiah
was in Adela’s power; or, at least, in her grip. As for him, he had taken in
some
thing,
yes—something too quickly, something too hotly—like a man half-blinded, who can descry only the flat light, not the characters on a page. Or he had swallowed it down like a priest, the
priest of some passionate sect, for whom scripture is subordinate to the hour of sacral access. Awe consumes any brand that ignites it: was it the true
Messiah
he had taken in, or only the
Walpurgisnacht caravan of his private menagerie trekking across his poor fevered brain-pan?

“He’s in your hands. The author of
The Messiah
.”

“I told you, I’ve quit. I’m finished. He’s not mine. I can’t hold on to him. My hands,” he said, turning them over to show her his white palms, “are
empty.”

“No, no, think! Think how you’ve got the means.”

“You’ve got that column,” Adela said abruptly. “You write those reviews. You’ve got Mondays.”

“You can let them know,” Dr. Eklund said. “You can deliver up some stupendous thing. You can explain.”

“You can be
use
ful,” Heidi said. “If you’re shrewd about it. If you want to restore to the world what belongs to the world. If you believe in it
yourself.”

The World, the world—they all three spoke of the world. What speechifiers! They were mad for the world. They had something in mind for the world. The world had put them in perfect
agreement. Lars in his newest bewilderment felt how he was marveling at it: the sulphurous tail of some underlying unanimity. To what did it attach itself?

Dr. Eklund’s matches—the same smothered crash of spark after spark, every match in concert with every other, all designed to light a recalcitrant fire in the great man’s
pipe.

Toll of a gong, small and sharp. Adela clattering the brass amphora down at last.

“You can take the manuscript if you like,” she offered—it was Dr. Eklund’s rawest stage voice—“even before it’s translated. To show it. That it exists.
Translation’s the least of it—you can show it at your paper if you want.”

How he wanted to knock her down!

“She’ll let you take it now, you know,” said Dr. Eklund, approving.

“There’s no question she’ll let you take it. You’re the one to do it.” Heidi’s web was loosening more and more—she was sliding from placating to
out-and-out importuning. “It’s just what Dr. Eklund said—you’re the only one in Stockholm who
can
. You’ve got the reputation for it. It’s what people
expect—you’re an introducer, you pave the way. An usher—you’re the only one who dares or cares. You’ve brought in all those difficult creatures—all those Central
Europeans we’ve always got on order! Those Czechs and Poles! Yugoslavians and Hungarians! You’ve made everyone notice. Mr. Hemlig and Mr. Fiskyngel, for instance—they rely on you
to alert them. You wake them up. You shake them up. You make them
see
.”

It was a speech, a declamation—her mouth was tumultuous: her old woman’s disorderly gold teeth. She was imploring him. There was something he was intended for. A quaver had entered
her nostrils.

Dr. Eklund, meanwhile, was nodding his big face up and down, cheering her on like a human baton. “Dif cult creatures!” he said admiringly. “You were born to it, Mr. Andemening.
Granted it’s elusive—what work of art isn’t? But you’ve absorbed it. We’ve allowed you to absorb it. You’ve had our silence. What we need from you now is some
word. A judgment. Is it worthy? Is it beautiful? Will you embrace it? We need to have your sounding.”

“We need to have your column,” Adela said. Did Adela too have her “we”? They all three had a “we”—the same one. They adhered. They were a cabal; a
family. His column! His unreal and sequestered Mondays—she was ridiculing him. Yet he understood she was not. It came to him—incompletely, slowly, stupidly—that they were, the
three of them, in some logical alliance: they had a common principle. Clearly they intended him for something. He was a pipe they were all three attempting to kindle. What was smoldering in this
place was not so much a lie as a latency. It was their private idea. What they wanted from him was his own day of the week. Monday was the whole purpose of his standing just where he was standing.
He was standing a foot from Heidi’s little back-room table—on which Adela, with the ringing of some weighty doubloon, had half a minute ago settled
The Messiah
in its brass
vessel. For the sake of Monday he had been given Dr. Eklund’s key. For the sake of Monday Adela had invaded his flat. For the sake of Monday he had been made to come and go, and then to
stay.

He saw everything exactly. They had done everything to lure him into believing
The Messiah
was false, in order to persuade him it was genuine. They had sent him Adela with her story, to
mock the fraudulent son with the fraudulent daughter. An artificial sister! Family mockery. He had fallen among players, among plotters.

“Dr. Eklund,” he charged—he was breathing like a runner—“why do you say you’re Dr. Eklund?”

“He isn’t anyone else,” Heidi said. “Who else should he be?”

“Someone who fits the name.”

“We poor wanderers with our pitiful accents, yes?” Dr. Eklund said.

“It’s fakery.”

“In Rome do as the Romans.” Dr. Eklund pulled vainly on his pipe, meditating. “In this country they are so shy with foreigners. It goes much better not to contradict the
feelings of a shy people.”

“Refugee impostor,” Lars shot out.

“Lars, Lars,” Heidi begged.

Dr. Eklund placidly lit another match. “A name is such a little thing. A ribbon. A modest pennant. A harmless decoration. I myself was born Eckstein.”

The ape in Lars’s chest sprang awake with an electric shudder and hurled itself across his ribs. Harmless! How hard it was to breathe, to breathe in and out! There was, however,
illumination. He saw everything exactly. He said the chosen syllables to himself:
Lazarus Baruch. Lars Andemening
.

“
I made up my name. I made up my father.”

His father out of libraries, his name out of dictionaries.

“Dr. Eklund knows all this. You can’t mind that I told him your theory of paternity? You’re the one who told Adela.”

Adela surrendered to what seemed to be her duty: “It doesn’t matter to him, he’ll say anything.” But she had grown as dull as an obedient child.

“The immersion. The concentration. What it took to put on those robes—the ascent! Admirable,” Dr. Eklund trumpeted. “For an ordinary Alter Eckstein to jump into Stockholm
and start calling himself Olle Eklund—nothing. Purely nothing. There’s no nerve to it. I’ve never had a nervous hour over it. But you! Gilgul! Karma! Transmigration of an
impassioned soul! Mr. Andemening,” he finished, “I’ll tell you what it makes you. Do you understand what it makes you? It makes you just our man.”

Heidi put in, “Because of Monday.”

“Two or three of those columns, that’s the way. Holy space. Fill it with the news. You’ve done exalted things there. The cognoscenti know what you’ve done, don’t
think they’re not aware. You’ve got your little following—you’re just the one to make it happen.”

“I’m just the one to bring on
The Messiah
.” The sound of it was as flat as if someone had asked him the time.

“Isn’t that what you’ve lived for?” Heidi said.

“Fakery. I’ve lived for fakery.”

“But you’ve stopped. You’ve quit.”

“
You
haven’t. You said yourself you’re not quitting, Mrs. Eklund.”

“It’s a question of recognition. We’ve got the original, right here—you saw it. A long look, you can’t complain. What you can
do
for it! No one knows better
than you. You had your hand on it.”

His transient little fear. His hands were hot. His fingers were heating up like the staves of a fence on fire.

“
The Messiah
went into the camps with its keeper.” Lars shook: the ape had him by the throat. “That’s all that could have happened, nothing else.
The
Messiah
was burned up in those places. Behind those fences, in those ovens. It was burned, Mrs. Eklund, burned!”

“You don’t believe your own two eyes? You had it in your own two hands! You don’t believe Dr. Eklund? Dr. Eklund dealt with these situations all over, he’s done this sort
of work in dozens of countries—”

“
Dealt
with them. I’ll bet he’s dealt with them. When there’s fire there’s a match. Those hospital rounds. The Danish prima ballerina. A wheeler-dealer in
shady manuscripts, that what it’s about.”

“You’re a baby, Lars. You don’t understand any of it.”

“Shady, well, well,” Dr. Eklund said. “It’s what you would call a little awning. Mrs. Eklund knows I don’t like it when she gives things away, so she rolls down
this little awning.”

Dr. Eklund got up out of his chair and began to wander—he picked up the kettle from the stove, swung it to hear how much water was left in it, and put it back again. In this snug and
narrow galley he was massively seaworthy—more like a ship than its captain. The daffodil lamp on its stalk might have been another pipe he was about to poke between his teeth. He had anyhow
lost interest in his pipe; he was distracted; he had let it go out.

“Anything original—anything that’s a masterwork, you know—needs a little awning to begin with. If you want to talk about shady, I don’t deny there are transactions
that can’t be negotiated in the noonday sun. Too much light rots the merchandise. On the other hand, after three or four decades in the shade a text becomes diffident. Bashful, you might say.
Sometimes it takes persuasion to lure it out of hiding. It could be in francs or marks or rubles or kroner, whatever’s suitable. The texts don’t care. The money brightens them and they
want to show how brave they are. Then their heads slide out. If only I had such money of my own.”

“There you are. You’ve heard it all,” Heidi said. “Now you can stop being a baby about these things. As if those Warsaw items got here out of the blue! If not for Dr.
Eklund’s
net
work—”

“No, no,” Dr. Eklund broke in. “In the beginning the blue is all there is. Everything comes out of the blue. Here’s
The Messiah
, out of the blue.” He clinked
his rings against the brass amphora: what pealed out was the trill of an heir-loom chime—the striking of some old family clock. “And this fine woman—this nervous noble handsome
woman—now isn’t
she
out of the blue?”

He had taken Adela by the shoulders; it was ludicrous how he hunched down his own shoulders to put his long face in the way of hers. There was something curiously practiced in the exchange of
light that passed between their pairs of eyes. The two foreheads closed brow to brow: the channel midway might have been harboring signals. Or else nothing more than the blinking crescents of Dr.
Eklund’s lenses, throwing off reflections. His captain’s stare of ownership, his potent pirate’s touch—he had already released one half of her, and was stroking the side of
her nose. No, inconceivable: he was lifting away a single hair that was intruding there. A peculiarly private act, like a cat that licks its own paw clean—there was a strain of habituation in
it. Adela hardly minded; she barely noticed. She was intent on her mood: she was inured to this large-fingered mechanical caress; it appeared to toughen the resistant line of her lip. It was only
her lip that was resisting; she was turning more and more docile. She resembled someone who has done her duty. They had been in combination before, Adela and Dr. Eklund—was such a thing
possible? They had the accommodation of an old couple; it didn’t count that Dr. Eklund was surely three decades in advance in the sea of life. Something had been compounded between them:
something more abrasive than mere familiarity. Had they once been lovers, had this been her duty, now far behind her? The man still liked the woman; the woman didn’t like the man. But she
lent herself. She obeyed.

Her head pulled back; she was squirming herself loose. A resentful childish movement. A woman of forty, and she wriggled like a child. It put Lars in mind of Karin’s small slippery body,
sad years ago, ripping free of him; it had been Ulrika’s game to provoke Karin against him. Adela was pliant enough; it was only her lip that was hard. Her head, pulling back, was all at once
new: he took in the graven trenches at the roots of her eyes, the white thistles speckled through her hair, the momentary glimmer of child—it was all new. She was not what she had been. He
had imagined himself a looking-glass Adela; he had imagined her his sister. She was not his sister. A conspiratorial illusion. She was as unlike him as it was in the power of nature to contrive.
She belonged to another line. His mother—that omission—was not her mother, whoever her mother might be. Whoever had fathered him had not fathered her.

Then he saw—a wind flew through his brain—who had fathered her.

Adela was released. Dr. Eklund had released her. She stood a little to the side of him. She was not willing to meet his look again.

Heidi let herself down on her cot and sighed. “Can’t we come to an agreement? All you have to do is agree.”

“I don’t know what you want me to agree to,” Lars said.

“You do know. You know exactly.”

“There’s money in it,” Adela said thinly; but this mildness and thinness held a fleeting brutality, like faint lightning far away.

“The value of the sublime,” Dr. Eklund said.

Their plausibly concocting voices—they might have been two urns of the same ancestry, shape for shape, turn for turn.

“It wouldn’t be out of your own brain,” Heidi said. “It wouldn’t be like that eye—it’s something you could set straight out in the light. As solid as
that jar.”

“Again this eye. What is this eye?” Dr. Eklund asked.

“Don’t talk about it,” Lars said roughly. “Didn’t I tell you it’s over and done with?”

Adela hung back; she was very quiet. Lars noticed for the first time how her nose showed a narrow sharp bone. Dr. Eklund’s was different. The puny centerpiece of Dr. Eklund’s great
spread-out face was a quick round spurt of tallow sliced through by two long slashes. So it wasn’t to be found
there
: the rest of the likeness. Then it might be somewhere else, it
might be something altogether other—some way of starting or stopping this or that muscle. It wasn’t in their features—not nose or lip or eye. Lars didn’t know where it was.
It was enough that he felt it, and not only in their voices. Of their voices he was certain.