The Messiah of Stockholm (17 page)

Thus the stewpot, laughing. Gunnar and Anders observed that these clownings were only a little bit at the expense of poor dim duped Lars. Lars bruised and overthrown. So much for exaltation, so
much for the private ecstasies of the visionary!—he had had his lesson. He was humbled and would henceforth consent to walk among men again.

Yet abruptly the stewpot turned from boiling Lars to throwing its arms around his shoulders. The cackle of satire softened. They chaffed him instead; he was a comrade. Gunnar and Anders,
unprepared for this alteration of spirit, watched Lars, with his graying head and baby cheeks, rising. They looked again: somehow he wasn’t so much fixed in earliness as he used to be; you
could tell at a glance he wasn’t a boy. Impossible to mistake him now for anything but a man of middling years—those grooves dug out in the space between the eyebrows, those beginning
wadis that ran from the ends of the mouth downward toward the faint bulge at either side of the jaw . . . he was putting on weight. He couldn’t negotiate a paragraph without his reading
glasses. And still he was rising. It was as if a wraith of smoke, too elusive for the keenest camera, had all at once solidified into a statue: Lars was
there
. Monday’s customers were
waking up; they wrote him letters. They wrote him six or seven letters; then they wrote him dozens. He overtook Gunnar, he overtook Anders; he had more letters than anyone. He wasn’t comical,
he wasn’t contentious—what could you say he
was
? Whatever he was, he produced an excess of it: Nilsson was ready to let him spill over the brink into Tuesday. It doubled his pay,
and he took it as innocently as if he deserved it. They considered his prose: was there a trick in it; was it something no one could catch him at?

One night Gunnar thought he saw it. Lars had stopped purifying his life. This absence, this cessation, had the effect of an ingredient. The ingredient was the opposite of purification. It
gratified intensely, it flowed out over almost everyone; it was the rosiest of mirrors; it flattered.

“And what is this fabled ingredient?” Anders inquired, returning from the tap. He no longer asked Lars to fetch him water: Lars had risen; and besides, nowadays you couldn’t
count on finding Lars when the mice were out. He was doing something else with his nights. As for the mice, Nilsson was arranging for the exterminators to come as soon as the electricians were
done. The broken walls had exposed their nests.

“Mediocrity,” Gunnar said.

They were not spiteful men, but they recognized the importance of cutting Lars dead. What else do you do with a fellow who prospers on scandal? Olof Flodcrantz had crept back from Finland, but
at least he had vanished south to a job in Malmö; he made himself scarce. He didn’t insult people by slamming himself like a beam in their eyes.

They waited for the stewpot to turn. The stewpot always turns. It swallows up. It casts out. It boils on.

T
HE
M
ORGONTÖRN
WAS EMPTYING
out. The electricians and their sledgehammers were long gone.
They had begun at eight o’clock that morning by thundering open craters in the walls; until half an hour before lunch the ancient upper storeys of the
Morgontörn
were convulsed.
Then the electricians had de-materialized. The secretaries were just now on their way out, fluttering down the stairs like confetti. Nilsson was rocketing shut the fine new drawers of his astral
desk. The elevator, like the clapper of a bell striking the sides of the shaft, was heard to ring him perilously down to the street. Not a relic of the stewpot remained: not even the lees. Gunnar
was already across the square, having his monthly tea with the Librarian of the Academy, an event calculated to impress the stewpot, if only it would allow him the chance to tell—what a
bitterness, that it currently had ears only for the life and works of Lars Andemening! Anders had taken the bus home to the fossildom of his prehistoric household: the primordial stepfather, the
antediluvian aunt.

The child, meanwhile, had fallen asleep with his mouth narrowly tubed—enough to let out a periodic snore, incongruous with such a small frame. The snore was leonine.

Her face was not as he remembered it. In half a year she had—he would not say toughened; but there was a brazen look now. He didn’t mean that old grain of stubbornness, he
didn’t mean impudence; what he had in mind was the opposite. She seemed desperately still:
formed
: a figure cast out of some elemental metal. A motionless pietà, clear as
copper—it might have been the influence of the boy in her lap. As for the boy’s snore—it was as if she held a live trumpet that might go off at any moment.

“Why this rooming house?” he challenged her. “I thought you’d have plenty of money, you people. Why not a nice posh place within walking distance of the Café
Opera? What cakes! You’ve done the little fellow an injustice.”

She set her lips against the boy’s forehead. “He’s getting a fever.”

“Unless the rooming house is part of the scenery? An apt effect?”

“You think anything I do is playacting.”

“Anything I know of. They’ve roped you in. You do what’s expected.”

“He was all right an hour ago,” she murmured: her hand lay on the child’s hand.

“Stage fright,” Lars offered.

“Don’t say those things. He’s my little boy.”

“The family business! How many fathers, how many mothers, and presto, now a son—”

“I’m not like you.” She stopped. “I’m not.”

Again he gave her his impartial stare. “Dr. Eklund’s not imaginary, no. That’s the pity of it. I used to think he was.”

“Neither is my mother. My mother’s in Grenoble, with a new husband. I told you all that.”

“It was a story.”

“Some of it wasn’t.”

“Some of it! And after all this time you’re ready to unscramble it? The whole cast of characters?”

A gargantuan rumble obscured the last words. The child, awakened by his own vibration, drew up his legs, churned, and appeared to drop back into sleep. Two tracks of tears wandered down his
chin—it was like the little stem of an acorn—and onto Elsa Vaz’s sleeve: the hard-breathing nostrils wept, the fat lids watered.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

“You shouldn’t. Now that I see what you’ve come for.”

“You don’t see.”

“A grand sorting-out. That high Party official, was
he
made up?”

“He was my mother’s friend. I told you that. Tosiek Glowko.”

“And the old widow with the box, and the old widower in Warsaw, and the shoes, and those papers in the oven, and the man with the long black coat—”

She looked at him; she was immobile. Even the pupils of her eyes stood stock-still. You could throw a pebble at them and they wouldn’t twitch. “You don’t know anything about
Drohobycz. Nothing. Nothing about Warsaw. It’s all appetite to you—it’s what you want it to be—you don’t have any inkling about those places.”

“I was born there. I’m a refugee.”

“It doesn’t matter how many times you say that, you still don’t know where you were born. A fairy tale. You picked yourself a make-believe father out of a book. Who else does a
thing like that—”

His steadiness faltered; he blinked: his own eye stung by that other eye. It was not so much a recollection as a smarting, a burning. That other eye would no longer submit to his summoning, even
on the palest brink of memory. The truth was he could not call it back. When he tried to visualize it, what he saw was a very small mound of ash, irregularly round, no higher than a thumbnail. The
gray cinders might have passed for a little heap of Elsa Vaz’s hair.

“Tell me,” he said, “is there a father for this boy somewhere? Or is he going to have to figure one out for himself?”

“His father is in Brazil.”

“Brazil? Not Antwerp? He’s escaped the family business?”

“Divorced” was what he thought he heard her say—the child’s sick snore swelled up again and washed over it—but it might have been something else. It might have been
“Forced,” or “Lost,” or “Crushed,” or something similarly stretched out of her strangely middle-throated sound. It might have been any thing at all; the moment
passed; once more the child settled back.

Lars said resolutely, “You’re the worst. You
named
yourself out of a book, I didn’t do that. You swiped Adela, you dressed up in a name, you
masqueraded—”

“Mrs. Eklund thought it would attract you. She wanted you to be interested.”

“Mrs. Eklund. And the pupil, the schoolgirl? Copulation with a child! With one of his own pupils! That wasn’t Mrs. Eklund’s! That was yours, wasn’t it—copulation
with a child, wasn’t that your idea? Heidi wouldn’t think of that! I don’t give her credit for that one.”

“Give her credit if you like.” She lowered her head. “I came to say you were abused.”

“Used,” he corrected.

“She injured you.”

“And not Dr. Eklund? Dr. Eklund with his wonderful magnifying glass? Sherlock Holmes crossed with P. T. Barnum?”

“Not my father, no.”

“Your father,” he said vengefully.

“He injured you only a little.”

“Thank you, only a little. I’m grateful.”

“You injured him more. He isn’t recovered. He’ll never recover. You don’t know what you did. That’s why I’m here,” she said. “I came to tell you
what you did.”

“What I did! I knocked out his handiwork. I suppose a thing like that can take an expert two or three months? Then it’s all right, he can just go ahead and put together another
one.”

She said again, “You don’t know what you did. You didn’t know then and you don’t know now.”

“Well, if I knew, I’d be the expert, wouldn’t I? I imagine it needs the right kind of ink, and the right kind of pen, and the right kind of paper, and the right kind of
gullibility. I imagine he can get those things. And useful sorts of manuscripts—stray letters, smuggled correspondence—to model the handwriting on, that’s the first. And after
that a good storyteller like yourself—a natural Thespian I’d call you—and plenty of mishandling in the way that wrinkles up paper to make it age in a hurry, comings and goings in
bags and jugs and maybe even shoes and ovens, and dunking in puddles—all that’s technical, I don’t know
how
it’s done. But mainly it’s having the right story
that counts—it’s the story, isn’t it?”

“You literary parasites.” She was all thick scorn; the boy stirred in her arms. She was a madonna of contempt. “Revenge and illusion, illusion and revenge! You think everything
is imagination. There’s more to the world than just imagination.”

“Money,” Lars suggested. “Isn’t that what the family business is for?”

The boy shuddered; he was all at once awake. Heavily he lifted his acorn chin and looked sidelong around the cubicle. In the darkness of the doorway, upright on its haunches, a khaki mouse
squatted. It was trembling all over. Its ears wavered; its whiskers shook; it held up its little paws like the hands of a child.

The boy cried out: a long shriek, and slipped to the floor.

“I’ve got to take him away.”

“You shouldn’t have brought him. A sick kid like that.”

“What do
you
know about it?” The thickness of her scorn.

He felt she was right. It struck him—he thought of Karin’s thrown-out paint set, Karin herself stolen away to America—it struck him that he had exchanged his daughter’s
hot life for a heap of gray ash. Illusion, Illusion! And money. Wasn’t he himself alive because of a mercenary traveler’s family business in Warsaw long ago?

He said humbly, “I once had a child. She was taken away, I don’t have her any more.”

“Platonic. Literary.” She didn’t believe him, and why should she? It was himself saying it: a father-inventor can just as easily invent a child. “Isn’t
any
thing of yours stuck in the here and now? You should ask yourself if
you
exist. Maybe you’re only someone’s theory. Someone’s presupposition.” She swooped
up her little boy. “You lovers of literature. You parasites. That’s why I came. To make sure you know.”

She was without sympathy. He did not know what it was he was meant to know.

“You finished it off. Cremated. It’s gone. The very one. The only one. It was what it was.”

“Dr. Eklund’s facsimile.” How blurred; how weak.

“
The Messiah
,” she pronounced: her face was locked; permanent; a live copper mold. “From Drohobycz. Via Warsaw. That one.”

“It’s you saying it,” he said. “Adela says it. So much for that.”

“Burned. Annihilated. Understand!” she commanded.

“You want to get even, that’s why. The forger’s daughter.”

“It was what it was. He does passports, that’s all. He can’t do anything else. At least he’s never tried. He gets people in and out, why don’t you listen to Heidi?
He can get people anywhere. My mother goes where she pleases. And so do I.” She was, he saw, gathering herself up, along with her son. She was on her way, wherever that might be. “The
last brainchild of Drohobycz,” she told him, “gone up in smoke.”

Thespian!

Refugee impostor!

He could not tell whether she would choose the elevator or the stairs. To his surprise, he heard a double clatter in the hollow of the stairwell, as rapid as a sewing-machine stitch: the
boy’s footsteps drumming after hers. She was without sympathy, why was that? She had the habit of obedience. She marched for her father. She was marching those little legs down.

It gave Lars as much time as he needed; he did not need much. He had forgotten which drawer of Nilsson’s bruised old desk he had shoved it into. He splashed through one drawer after
another—empty, nothing of worth in any of them. And there it was: the white beret, sticky with
Morgontörn
damp. He had carried it to the
Morgontörn
on the day after he
left his old flat. The quilt was abandoned: heaped on the leather chair with its cracked leg, in the angle of the hallway.

He ran to the top of the stairwell—he could not see the mother or the child, but from the pattering stitches he understood that already they were close to the lowest landing.