The Messiah of Stockholm (11 page)

And not one word taken. Not one word. Not a glimpse. He had been as near to it as to the apparition of his father’s eye.
The Messiah
in his arms, and lost again!

He ran through the passage and outdoors to the sidewalk; she was not there. The pavement was empty. She was nowhere in the street. Whatever direction he looked—he whirled and whirled in
the cold air—she was not there. She had turned a corner; she was out of sight. He knew nothing about her: only that he made her his prey, because of
The Messiah
. A snatch of panic no
bigger than a ragged inch caught him then: it seemed to him Adela was a churning angel. The white bag was flying beside her into the niche behind the wall. Beguiled, he watched her set it down on
the leather chair with the cracked leg; she was delivering
The Messiah
. She left it there for him and vanished. He understood it was the business of angels to vanish.

When he put his head into the angle of the little secret hallway, the leather chair was in its place, with nothing on it but the diurnal dust.

I
T WAS STILL ONLY
noon. The bright perished day hung before him. He walked out to the clamor of the
Morgontörn
, where the secretaries were
eating sandwiches of cold meat and boiled egg. In the book department the stewpot had not yet gathered. Lars plucked up a volume, medium-thick, from the piles of review copies stacked against the
base-boards. A neat small black mouse-pellet was lodged in the binding, so he put it down again and chose another. This turned out to be much thicker. It was the newest novel by the prolific
Ann-Charlott Almgren, a name he knew—it was considerably celebrated—though he had never read her, not even her famous
Nytt och Gammalt
. He inserted his thumb between the pages
somewhere among the middle chapters to catch the smell of the thing. It promised to touch on lust, deceit, ambition, and death, and looked good enough for his purpose.

He had a purpose. Gunnar’s cubicle was vacant; so was Anders’s. He decided on Gunnar’s and commenced. The novel was called
Illusion
. He admired the plot, which was
founded on the principle of ambush. A kind and modest elderly spinster—a self-taught painter—falls in love with a ne’er-do-well, a beautiful and clever young man. She has declined
to show her paintings because she believes them to be of no merit. The young man is the first to see them; she has never had the courage to reveal them to anyone before. But the young man
recognizes at once that she is a hidden genius. He agrees to marry her if she will consent to a deception: he will claim the paintings as his own and give them to the world. The scheme is a grand
success; the marriage is happy. The seeming painter is taken up by the fashionable and honored everywhere. But by then the new husband, awash in charm and glory, has attached himself to a seductive
young woman, the very art critic whose lavish commendations have elevated his reputation. The self-effacing elderly wife, discovering the liaison . . . et cetera, et cetera. The book weighed in
Lars’s hands; it weighed him down. It was as heavy as loss. (And
The Messiah
in his arms—light, ah how light!)

An hour and a half to read. Finished. Half an hour more: his review over and done with. (“Composed.” Spat out.) Another hour: bungling and bumbling on Gunnar’s hostile machine.
Painful, a plunge into needles. Then it was three o’clock. The stewpot was beginning to straggle in with its perilous shards of laughter; but Lars knocked on Nilsson’s office door and
offered to wait—he stood there mute and patient—while Nilsson looked over his page.

“Well, well, well,” Nilsson said. “What do you think of that? My my my. Very nice. This is very nice, Lars. It’s something new for you.” And he said:
“You’re going to work out. I always knew you would. I’ve always had confidence in you, Lars. Not that I haven’t felt alone in it, believe me. But it wouldn’t surprise
me a bit if you started giving Friday a run for its money, what do you think of that?” And he said: “Keep it up, Lars. Give me two months of this kind of work and I’ll get you
your own cubicle, how about it?” And he said: “Just don’t relapse. No more Broch, no more Canetti; a little Kundera goes a long way. I imagine you had to get Central Europe out of
your system—I told them you’d shuck it off in the end.” And he said: “Lars, listen! You’re going to work out.”

Lars sidled around the margins of the stewpot—it never noticed him at all—and gravitated toward home and bed. “Those crocodiles,” he thought he heard Nilsson say. Or was
it “Those cormorants”? Impossible to tell from such a distance—Lars was under his quilt. Over which, lightly—lightly and aloft!—
The Messiah
had skimmed. His
eyes leaked, his nostrils were in commotion. A convulsion of fatigue. Yesterday’s missing nap; the migrations of displaced sleep. A mesmerizing cloud. He slept, in order to wake to his
father’s eye.

When he woke there was only absence. Nothing formed in the black air. The empty dark sent out nothing at all. The greased beak did not seize him. The alabaster egg did not materialize. Lars
threw off the quilt and stared as if his own eyeballs were two breathing bellows inflated by the bottommost power of his pumping lungs. His head was filled with the battering, plodding, butting
force of that staring, that bulging. But the visitation did not occur. No sphere appeared. The author of
The Messiah
had withdrawn. Lars’s father’s eye did not return.

It was seven o’clock. He had not eaten all day long, as if he had deliberately undertaken a fast. But it was only because he had forgotten hunger. After defeat in battle men do not
remember food. He tied on his scarf and squashed his cap over his ears. On the floor near his bed, a white patch. He bent to it, and, bending, grieved over the after-image of Adela’s hair
bundled like feathers at his feet. Dead bird. He had kicked her down: his father’s daughter. His sister, his sister. He saw then that the white patch was a page of
The Messiah
,
overlooked in the battle and left behind. He snatched it up with the knowledge that his right hand would burst like a grenade at the touch of the sheet. He was ready to lose his right hand for the
sake of an errant paragraph out of
The Messiah
.

The patch was not that. He picked it up: Adela’s white beret. It was not what he wanted, so he tossed it on his bed and fell into the night toward Heidi’s shop.

T
HE SHOP WAS SHUT
up and black. But a yellow mist spread forward from the back room: the lit daffodil; she was there. His boots were wet and stuck all
over with grit. A match-stick had caught in the left sole. Lars began by habit to pull them off—then he thought better of it. It wasn’t his intention to please Heidi. Every evening
after hours she ordered the Turkish boy to mop up; the Turkish boy wasn’t allowed to go home until the mud of the day’s customers had been washed away. Lars stamped his feet in the
vestibule. Instantly he stopped stamping. He wasn’t a visitor, he wasn’t anyone’s guest. He had the right of entry—he had it in his pocket. The borrowed cold key. It went
into the lock.

“Who’s there? What’s that?” A raw dark voice. The smell of something roasting. “Is it that woman? It’s that woman?”

“It can’t be. There wasn’t any knock. I told her she’d have to knock. The door’s locked.” This was Heidi, calling from behind the fence of books. She shuffled
out; she had her slippers on.

“Then who is it? Why isn’t it that woman, if she’s coming? We’re closed, can’t they tell that?”

Lars said, “Mrs. Eklund—”

The raw dark fidgety voice, an actor’s voice: “It’s not that woman, it’s a man. Didn’t you close up for the night?”

“Never mind, it’s only Lars. He’s brought your key back, now you’ll have your extra. Lars,” Heidi said, “let me introduce you. Here is Dr. Olle Eklund. And
here is Lars Andemening. Now you see how proper we all are. Dr. Eklund is always so fond of the forms.”

A very large man was sitting at Heidi’s little table with an almost empty teacup in front of him, smoking a pipe. He looked like an oversized sleek startled horse, with long nostrils
punched into a scanty lump of cartilage, a long face, and a long tumescent head, bald and bright. His eye-glasses splashed light. The crown of his head seemed polished. He was fastidiously dressed,
in a coat and vest with glinting silver buttons. He wore a silver ring on the third finger of each hand, and there was something about the buttons and the rings, and also in the way he shot out his
big fingers toward Lars, that suggested a sea captain. Or else it was his seaweedy merman’s odor, mixed with the meatlike scorch of tobacco, strong and salty. His chin was well-shaved,
without a visible prickle; it had a shine of its own.

Lars took the man’s hand—how hot it was—and shook it. “Is it Dr. Eklund?” he said.

“Dr. Eklund got back early this morning,” Heidi said. “Such a strain, such a tiring day after his trip—”

Lars examined the man. He watched him lift his cup and put it down. He watched him light a match and draw on his pipe. “I was here myself this morning,” he said.

“My little Turk
told
me you came by—he doesn’t like you, why is that? I was over at the flat, filling the refrigerator. It’s different with two at home.”
Heidi scraped a chair out of the shadows “Sit down, you brute, and tell us about it. You knocked her down, didn’t you? I’ve neglected to notice that side of you—that poor
Adela! She ran howling back here to complain I’d sent her to a thug.”

Lars said, “
Is
it Dr. Eklund?”

Dr. Eklund held out his cup. “A little more.”

Heidi bustled to the kettle. “She’s coming tonight. To consult Dr. Eklund. If he weren’t Dr. Eklund”—Lars saw she was going to be whimsical—“she
couldn’t consult him,
nicht wahr
?”

“She’s not even bruised! Is she bruised?”

“For heaven’s sake, this isn’t a health clinic, what do you think we are? She’s coming about what’s in that bag. I promised her this time no one would knock her
down. I don’t imagine she’ll be glad to see you, Lars. You’d better leave before.”

“I don’t understand how he got in,” Dr. Eklund said.

“With your key. I gave him your key.”

“If he knocks people down you shouldn’t give him my key.”

“I thought,” Lars said heavily, “there wasn’t any Dr. Eklund.”

“Lars believes in ghosts,” Heidi explained.

“You made me think he was made up.”

“
Cogito, ergo sum
,” Dr. Eklund said. “Why would you think a thing like that?”

“Not everyone has to exist.”

“That is remarkably plausible.”

“He means he’s an orphan,” Heidi said. “He was one of those refugee orphans. He doesn’t know who his mother is.”

“I don’t know who my father is either,” Lars said.

“Here’s something new!” Heidi cried. “Your father is the author of
Cinnamon Shops
. Your father is the author of
Sanatorium
. Your father is the author of
The Messiah
. That’s who your father is.” She let out her rapid doglike laugh.

“I don’t have a father.”

“You’ve lost your father? But not his eye,” she taunted. “You’ve kept that eye?”

“It’s gone. It’s not there.”

Dr. Eklund asked, “Eye? Eye? Where is such an eye?”

“An intelligent boy, but subject to hallucinations,” Heidi declaimed—did she mean to humiliate him? A wave of regret. He had entrusted her with his acrane mote: his visitation,
his apparition. There was no eye. It had left him. It would not come back again.

“Hardly a boy. If he grew whiskers he’d be a graybeard,” Dr. Eklund said through his pipe.

Lars in his shame felt himself stumbling over a certain familiarity of infflection, of accent. Sibilance. Something was too accustomed here; he could not assess it. A strangeness in Dr.
Eklund’s voice. Strange because not strange enough.

“A slight resemblance nevertheless,” Dr. Eklund continued. “A very minor resemblance. The chin, perhaps. No more than an inkling, yes? The summer of 1938—I’m not
mistaken about this—I saw him drinking tea—steaming tea—at a café in a little outdoor courtyard. In Paris this was. He was pointed out to me. Then I absolutely recognized
him for myself.”

“Dr. Eklund is fluent in Polish,” Heidi supplied.

“There was very much Polish being spoken at that table. A group of three or four. They had been to the galleries. The subject was art. I remember what a hot day it was, and still that
fellow was drinking steaming tea! No different from what’s in this cup. Hotter, probably. Sometimes one or two of them would retreat back into French, but mainly it was Polish. Though
that
fellow never said a word. He looked like a hayseed, he wore his pants cuffs too high. You could see an inch more of sock than was decent—imagine, this was only a couple of years
or so after
Cinnamon Shops
. A piece of luck.”

It seemed a muddle—who exactly was it Dr. Eklund was saying he had seen in Paris? Then it occurred to Lars what it was he was hearing in Dr. Eklund’s throat. He had thought at first
it might have been the muffling of the pipe. But it was not the pipe. Dr. Eklund’s vowels—was it possible?—were not unlike Adela’s. Dr. Eklund—was it
possible?—was not a Swede at all.

“You never mentioned it,” Lars accused. “About the Polish.”

“Dr. Eklund doesn’t like it known. He gets people
out
, you see. He does his best. He’s always done his best. He got Mrs. Rozanowska out, for instance.”

“He got the Princess out?”

“That was a long time ago—you’ve heard all about that. Together with her husband. Dr. Eklund got them out and then he got them
in
. For all you know,” she said
maliciously, “he got
you
out. In your swaddling clothes! He knows how to do those tricks, don’t you, Olle?”

Dr. Eklund took a discreet sip. “I don’t like it when you give things away.”

“You’ve got your key back.”

“Not everything given away is recoverable.”

How theatrical they were, Dr. and Mrs. Eklund! Two old troupers in rehearsal. Lars leaned his chair toward Dr. Eklund and bathed his whole head in the roast-meat cloud that was seeping out of
Dr. Eklund’s pipe. “Who was it you saw,” he said, “in Paris?”