The Messiah of Stockholm (16 page)

“It’s true,” he said.

“Keep away,” Adela said.

But he had begun. He was driving toward her. It wasn’t the ape. The ape was dead; its carcass was a dead weight on his lung. It was himself now, it was the blast of his own force that
drove him.

“Oh yes, it’s true, I can see for myself it’s true, and I apologize.”

“There!” said Heidi. “I told you he’d apologize!”

“I didn’t think it was true, but now I see it is. It’s just the way you said it was. You’re the daughter.”

“Don’t come
near
me,” Adela said.

He raised his arm. He knew how terrible his arm was, high up—how he wanted to knock her down! How he wanted to stamp on her face, on the beautiful little bird-bone of her nose. How he
wanted to trample on the dove-colored feathers of her hair!

“You’re the daughter of the author of
The Messiah
, that’s who you are. And the author of
The Messiah
is Dr. Eklund.” An ugly noise went rattling against the
brass amphora like a thrown coin: his old croak, or knot, or rasp, or whatever it was: the ape’s sprawling carcass cast loose. “It’s a forgery, isn’t it? Mrs. Eklund,
it’s a forgery, admit it! It’s a forgery, and you want me to pass it off for you. To legitimate it. How easy it is, I’m just the one to do it! To pass it into the world, admit
it!”

“What a spiteful version you’ve got,” Heidi sent out from her cot; but she was appealing to Dr. Eklund.

Lars turned on Adela: “
Your
version’s not the one.”

“What do you know about Drohobycz? What’s Drohobycz to you?” Adela said in her new thin voice, with its distant dim flashes. His arm was high up. She was under his lifted arm.
The daffodil spilled out its yellow syrup, and his arm shadowed her mouth and neck and chin; and hadn’t her own arms made darkness over his quilt, hadn’t she blotted out his
father’s eye with her out-stretched arms?

“Let the barbarian dare,” Dr. Eklund warned, “and the barbarian pays.”

“I’m the barbarian? I’m the one who pays?” Lars yelled.

“In the long run, if you’re willing”—but Heidi’s crooked golden mouth was plunged into her pillow—“it’s going to pay.”

“I’ll show you what pays, I’ll show you”—and beat his arm through a descending gale, the fingers hooked, the fingers on fire, ready to pluck, sweeping past the
blackening scorn of Adela’s lightning eyes—how he wanted to pluck them out, to dig them out with his fingernails, to pound on her rustling dovelike head, how he wanted to break her, to
plunder her face, how she had toyed with him, how she had blotted out his father’s eye, how she had orphaned him, how she had mocked and nullified the author of
The Messiah
. . . It
was a tiny stick he dived for instead: one of Dr. Eklund’s matches on the little back-room table, dropped near the base of the brass amphora.

The first one was no good. The tip was charred; it was burned out. The table was littered with these tiny charred sticks. He found a clean unused one and struck it and threw it down the throat
of the brass amphora and watched the steeple of fire rise straight out of it like the flame from an ogre’s nostril. The jar shook, it roared, it seemed to howl; it was as if an unholy beast
were rocking in there, drubbing on the inside walls, howling out its dying.

Adela was on the floor—flogged, crumpled, thrashed. He had not touched her even with the brush of his little finger. But her head was twisted round: the vertical trenches took on the
bitter horizontal look of an equal sign. Her bird-bone nose streamed. “There’s your priest, you called him priest—”

“Douse it, douse it!” Dr. Eklund commanded.

But Heidi had already catapulted from her cot to the kettle on the stove, and was pouring water into the flaming neck of the brass amphora. The fire fought back and would not give way; the
steeple spurted higher, the roaring gargled louder, the jar went on chattering and boiling, battering the little table, dancing across it like a demon. It danced to the edge of the table and
crashed down an inch from the heap that was Adela.

“My shop! The whole place may catch, my God!”

“Move! Watch your hair! Out of the way!” With all the orderly brutishness of his captain’s shoe Dr. Eklund kicked at Adela to make her roll.

She rolled and moaned.

“Quiet, keep quiet, can’t you? Olle, fill it again, fill it,” and handed over the kettle to Dr. Eklund; meanwhile Heidi stamped on the big burned cabbage leaves that were
creeping out of the brass amphora—curling black sheets with delicately crimped ruffs glowing red. A flood came shooing down through the smoke. “There, we’ve got it, fill it
again—”

The brass amphora had turned black at the lip: it wobbled, sputtered, expired; it smoked and smoked. The rivers flying down its hot flanks steamed among cinders. The smoke rummaged.

Heidi flailed at her eyes with a piece of her sleeve. “You’ve put us inside a chimney! Spiteful! Deranged!”

Dr. Eklund said coldly: “Arson.”

“You’ve sizzled us!”

Adela murmured from the floor, “Didn’t I say he’d do anything—”

“Fake,” Lars said.

“And aren’t you the one who forged his father? Refuge impostor! The pot,” Heidi blazed at him, “calling the kettle black.”

“Barbarian.” Dr. Eklund spat down on the blackened amphora: a sneeze of steam leaped up. “
I
could make that? I, I? A seraph made it! Idiocy—
I
could make
that? Instinct’s the maker. Transfiguration, is this your belief? Conspiracy gives birth to masterwork? You had your look, you saw! You think what’s born sublime can be connived at?
How? How, without that dead man’s genius? What is there to empower such an impersonation?” The smoke snatched him then; the sea captain was now a Chinese mandarin in the grip of an
encrusted language moving through powerful forms; he fell into a long clamor of coughing. He coughed and whitened. “Do you think there is a magical eye that drops from heaven to inspire?
Barbarian, where is such an eye?”

“Mrs. Eklund,” Lars addressed her, “it isn’t just the shop, is it? There’s more to the family business than just the shop.” His feet churned through puddles,
he felt himself drenched in smoke. “It isn’t only getting people in and getting people out—it’s not even a matter of
taking
people in, that’s the wonder. You
took
me
in—you hooked me practically from the start. A pack of swindlers, I don’t care—that’s not the family business. You want to be in competition with God,
that’s the thing.”

Adela lifted her wild face. A bloody rip across the blade of the frail nose. It wasn’t Lars’s work; not even the lick of his burning little finger. It was her father who had smashed
her. The ferocious kick of the author of
The Messiah
.

Dr. Eklund’s head shone like a polished shield. He tore his glasses from his ears; and there it was, without warning—the likeness. It wasn’t in any particular inch of him. It
was all over—the resemblance, the pulse of ancestry. His naked eyes spilled catastrophe: he had nothing to defend him now, not his rings, not the militant glitter of his sailor’s
buttons. His big scraped face with its awful nostril-craters rambled on, a worn old landscape lost to any habitation. Wild, wild. Adela’s look exactly, at last.

A
T FIVE O
’
CLOCK IN
the afternoon a little more than seven months after the fire in the brass amphora—the stewpot was
just disbanding—a woman named Elsa Vaz, accompanied by a little boy, came to see Lars Andemening at the
Morgontörn
. He had his own cubicle now. It was a small bare box, with sides
made of beaverboard, fitted out with a splintered table (formerly Nilsson’s), a pink china mug (indistinguishable from Anders’s) a typewriter, a coffeepot, and a chair covered with a
torn and lumpy cushion. Plaster dust thickened the air—all the walls on the top floor of the
Morgontörn
were being broken open for new wiring. Nilsson had announced the
installation of a whole row of computer terminals: the staff of the
Morgontörn
couldn’t expect to catch up with
Expressen
, of course, but at least they could say hello to
the century they were living in—in deference to which Nilsson had acquired a resplendent new desk fabricated entirely out of a substance hitherto used exclusively on the underside of the
noses of space capsules.

Elsa Vaz explained to Lars that she had first gone to his old flat, only to learn that he had moved out some time ago. He pinched his fitful eyeglasses back into position (they took getting used
to) and retorted that she might have telephoned him: he had a large apartment on Bergsundsstrand, not far from where Nellie Sachs had once resided; a civilized street, and didn’t civilized
people telephone before barging right on into someone’s office? That fool of a girl downstairs! To have allowed Elsa Vaz to burst in on him, and with a child! After all, he kept rigid enough
hours, had plenty of reading to push through, and couldn’t sustain any kind of interruption: he had his Monday space to attend to, not to mention the masses of mail it brought him.

The little boy—he seemed to be about six years old—was struggling with a cold, miserably scrubbing away at himself with one or the other of two big white handkerchiefs, and clutching
at the woman’s knees. He went on shivering and occasionally sneezing, huddling into his own shoulders. They poked up: a pair of small sharp peaks surrounding a nutlike head.

Lars drew back, thinking of the germs. “Isn’t he too sick to be out?”

“There’s no one to leave him with—we’re in a sort of rooming house.” The familiar recalcitrance. It reminded him of his old distrust. “And anyhow the poor
thing would feel lost. He speaks only Portuguese.”

“Why not park him in the shop? They can manage anything over there.”

“She’s left Stockholm, didn’t you know?”

He sent out an impartial stare. “How would I?”

“The shop is sold.”

“I never pass that way.” He concentrated on her face; it was not as he remembered it. “I never thought she’d give it up.”

“He made her. He said it was enough. They’ve gone to live in Antwerp. The opportunities are better there.”

The boy gave out a quick animal sob, followed by an incomprehensible demand in a language that—whatever it was—wasn’t Portuguese. French? Polish? The woman said, “Will
you let me sit down? Then I can take him on my lap.”

Lars unwillingly surrendered his chair. “The opportunities,” he echoed, and stood watching her arrange her skirt into a nest for the child. “You understand what it is,
I’ve got my deadline breathing down my neck—”

“I’ve been reading you since I came. You’ve gotten just like the others,” she announced.

“I’m told I’ve taken on a touch of fame.”

“You’re an ordinary reviewer.”

“Even a reviewer can have a reputation.”

“Last Monday a detective novel. The Monday before—I don’t remember, was it the autobiography of some film star?”

“Then you’ve been in town two weeks,” he said.

She laughed straight over the child’s head. “There’s an advantage to detective novels! But no, we’ve been here nearly three. The first week we didn’t arrive till
Wednesday.”

“On business,” he concluded. “Opportunities. You’re his courier.”

“Say whatever you please.”

“You’ve got a different name now.”

“I have all different names, it stands to reason.”

“For different jobs?” He looked down at the boy; he had shut his eyes, but the lids were fat and red. “Is there a part for him?”

A pounding, just then, on one of the beaverboard partitions; it was Gunnar Hemlig, dropping off the mail. “Nilsson said to give you this”—he threw down a box overflowing with
envelopes and whisked himself off. He had no word for Lars. Anders when encountered was almost as silent.

Lars had affronted them; they burned against him. He had put back all those things he had once pushed aside. It wasn’t only the question of the furniture he was stuffing his new flat
with—the stewpot had gone through this long before. He had a telephone attached to an automatic answering machine; he had a typewriter in his cubicle, like the rest of them, but at home he
had a word processor with a screen that showered down green letters from Japan, and an electronic printer that typed with phantom fingers at a speed equal to the fall of the sun at the
world’s end. Nilsson was automating the
Morgontörn
, but Lars Andemening was robotizing himself. He kept—this was the stewpot’s view of it—a robot woman under his
bed. She was stored in an old vodka case. In the middle of the night Lars smacked a button and she clicked herself into position, constructing herself part by part. She was made mainly of styrofoam
and hinged with old wedding rings bought wholesale from a divorce lawyer who had batches of them; the only task she required of Lars was to rouge her pale porous cheeks and to satisfy her
vibrations.

Thus the stewpot, simmering. Nilsson was contemplating an extra day’s spot for Lars, they said, to add on to his Mondays. He was fast; he was fluent; he had begun to keep regular hours and
seldom prowled in the office after midnight. He was reformed, recovered; he had recovered from his old ailment. He was taking the reviewing business seriously. He had, it appeared, given up
existential dread; he had given up those indecipherables that steam up from the stomach-hole of Central Europe; he was sticking to the Swedes and the more companionable Americans; you never heard
him pronounce Kiš or Canetti or Musil or Broch; his tongue was free of Kafka. He was finished with all those grotesqueries. He was like a man in a coma who has unexpectedly come to, having
been declared asleep for life, and who has resumed his normal rounds. The very routine of it seems extraordinary.

The stewpot boiled, but placidly; it had attenuated; by now it showed the mildest minor froth. In the last half year, though it had never taken the smallest notice of him before, Lars had grown
to be the stewpot’s steadiest habit. It was, in fact, Gunnar Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel who had initiated this newest seething—it fell to them, no one knew why, Lars least of all.
Gunnar and Anders were suddenly Lars Andemening’s celebrants in the rite of the stewpot—the stewpot in its frenzied prime. Gunnar in particular relished the grand comedy of it—how
Lars, that beautiful soul, with his skinny nose up to the hilt in belles-lettres, had been hoodwinked by a family of swindlers, forgers, thieves, lovers of high art, symbolists! Entrapped and
consumed—their demonic fragrances, their sweet lures and ruses. But no, the point was, Anders argued back, that these beauties were nothing homegrown: a pack of Poles, a gang of outlanders,
six or eight of them, four Turks, two Portuguese, possibly some gypsies. Sven Strömberg’s lover tugged at her mannish collar and picked up the thread: gypsies, yes, definitely a gypsy
girl among them, on the brown skin of whose silken back had been tattooed—in infancy, in tiny green letters—a missing Psalm omitted by the generation of the Canonizers, that had been
traveling for centuries from back to back of certain young women in certain Romany tribes, young women with split tongues, born mute. As these dusky chosen infants grew, the grass-bright letters
expanded over their torsos; through insidious means and for a magnanimous fee (hence the big new flat, the new furniture, the robot appliances), Lars had been approached to transcribe: he was
seized, willy-nilly, being peculiarly eligible according to the ancient forms, since the girl who currently carried the Psalm engraved even in the delta of her buttocks was his own stolen daughter
. . . Sven Strömberg’s version was simpler. The chief of the swindlers was Olof Flodcrantz in disguise.