The Messiah of Stockholm (3 page)

His father belonged there, in the ventricles of the Academy; Lars was as certain of this as he was of the snow beating against his eyelids. His father had been born to be of that
pantheon—with Selma Lagerlöf and Knut Hamsun; with Camus and Pasternak. Shaw, Mann, Pirandello. Faulkner, Yeats, Bellow, Singer, Canetti! Maeterlinck and Tagore. The long, long
stupendous list of Winners. His father, if he had lived, would have won the great Prize—it was self-evident. He was of that magisterial company.

T
HERE WAS A BITTER
wind now, lording it over the back of one o’clock. The blackness went on throwing the snow into Lars’s face, and he
packed his scarf over his nose and mouth—how warm his breath was in the little cave this made! He hurried past the Stock Exchange and the Academy—not a lit bulb anywhere, or even the
daub of a watchman’s flashlight. Succession of whitening roofs: how easy to see into the thickest dark through a lens of snow. The spiraling flakes stuttered around him like Morse code. A
smell of something roasting, what was that? Chimneys. It was clear to him finally that he was walking fast and far; tramping, trotting; he had already traversed the bridge over the locks, where the
salty Baltic fought the rush of fresh waters to the death; he caught where he was heading. That burning. He listened for fire engines. O the chimneys. Quiet everywhere: here was the street where
Nellie Sachs and her old mother had once lived. The poet’s flat; the poet’s windows. All moribund there. He came to the end of Bergsundsstrand at a boiling pace, overheated under his
scarf and cap. The few cars with their sleepless headlights slipped like slow cats. Stockholm, an orderly city, has its underlife, its hidden wakeful. Whoever owns a secret in Stockholm turns and
turns in the night emptiness, but not in sleep.

Under the screen of revolving flakes the steeples had the look of whirling Merlin hats. Twenty streets behind him, the voices of Gunnar and Anders, beating, flying. Gull cries. Even now, when he
was not there. Rodomontade, long-winded rococo affectations, what poseurs! Shelfworn, shopworn, scarred and marred. It was mainly their scratches that took Lars’s love, their weakness, their
comedown. They were like Tiu, Odin’s son, god of war, god of victory. First Fanrir the wolf bites off one whole hand. Then all the rest of powerful Tiu—head, torso, and three strong
remaining limbs—is reduced to being only Tuesday. Also, Lars loved their maimed scribblers’ odor, pale and dimly prurient, a fuminess skimmed from the
Morgontörn
’s
omni-present staleness, like some fungus regenerated out of antiquity. For all Lars knew, he too was infiltrated by this smell. The mice were innocent. Their militarily clean pellets left no
scent.

That roasting in the air. His own sweat. The exertion. His legs like gyros. O the chimneys of armpits, moist and burning under wool. Ahead, he made out the mullioned door of Heidi’s shop.
She was often among the nighttime wakeful. A woman of sixty-five or so, a round little bundle, with a girl’s name. She wore curly bangs, like a girl; but they were white and sheeplike, and
dropped in ringlets over two serenely misplaced black mustaches that jumped intermittently above reckless eyes. Reckless and cherry-dark, with toughened skins for lids. Saccharine, to call a child
after a figment in a novel. The Germans are sentimental. Their word
Heimweh
. The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish.
Hemsjuk
. Leave it to the Germans to pull out, like
some endless elastic belt of horrible sweetness, all that molasses woe. Heidi, in self-appointed exile, denied any twinge of
Heimweh
; she spat on it. She was practical and impatient, and had
long ago given up ridiculing her name. In the last decades, she explained, it had, in fact, begun to suit her. It was as if by the principle of her own obstinacies she had changed its disposition:
from tremulous edelweiss to the forces of a determined old strictness. Lars was not extremely afraid of her; but he was a little afraid.

In the skimpy vestibule of her shop he stamped his boots so hard they splashed up icy rods from their treads. He saw the light in the narrow back room, a sort of corridor behind the high rear
bank of bookshelves, and supposed she was totting up her invoices, or else unpacking the week’s shipment. She was unusually strong for such a small rotundity, such a thick globular dwarf of a
woman, and could heave those dead-weight overseas boxes on her own; though when the shop was open she kept a Turkish boy to lug things. Or, he reflected, she might be sitting under her funny old
lamp (the lamp, she said, was all she thought worth bringing with her from Germany, not counting a handful of books), reading whatever had just arrived—she read her wares, in nearly any
language. Her wares were international. They glimmered out at him from the display window: shining rectangles, like portraits in frames—the newest Americans, North and South, the oldest
Russians, that large and steady company of nineteenth-century Englishmen and Englishwomen, a modicum of Czechs and Poles, a whole forest of Balzac; and then the dictionaries and encyclopedias. The
shopwindow was stuffed from floor to ceiling: a step-pyramid crowded, on each level, with all the alphabets. Erect in the middle of it, like the thrusting central rose in a wreath, or like a sentry
guarding a vault, stood—it really did stand, as if on lion’s legs—a formidable edition of
Drottningholm
:
ett kungligehem
, with color pictures of the Royal Family:
the wavy-haired King tall and fair and unperturbed, the two little Princesses charming in a garden, the diffident little Prince in a sailor suit on a damask sofa, and the shiveringly beautiful
Queen, with her brilliant teeth and black Iberian eyes. The Queen was said to be brainy, a descendant of Marrano nobility. Secret Jews, long attenuated. Heidi was now a Swedish patriot. When the
Royal Family was sold out, she displayed one of those oversized landscape volumes, itself as extensive as a plain, showing photographs of windmills and castles and deer galloping over snow and the
sea gulls of Lake Vänern and a statue of Selma Lagerlöf, seated, with her hair in a bronze bun.

Lars took out his penknife and tapped on the glass door. No one heard. He tapped again. She might have left the light on and gone home to her flat. Lars had made her his confidante—Heidi
was one of those few who knew what he knew—and still he had never been to her flat. Her flat was no more a certainty than any other rumor; no more a certainty than the rumor of her husband,
Dr. Eklund. The true signature of her matrimonial relation appeared in gold letters painted across the shopwindow:
BOKHANDLARE
. When she turned the key in the evening she
embraced her two-burner stove and her square small table and her cot. Among the bumpy configurations of cartons in the back room she had a tiny refrigerator and a tiny water closet and a
blue-speckled porcelain pot and that funny old German lamp—the shade was a crystal daffodil—and a teakettle. She had no bath at all, though there was a secluded hollow, a sort of alley,
that might have closeted a shower. And no radio: nothing for music. She was indifferent to music. It was as if she were a forest gnome who had fashioned a bare little hut for herself, with only one
ornament: the necessary daffodil.

The light wavered, dimmed, returned. A figure had passed in front of it. Once again Lars smacked his pen-knife against the glass. And there was Heidi with her blurred German
screech—“All right, all right, the world isn’t coming to an end, you’ll crack my door!”—wheeling across her shop to let him in.

Lars resumed stamping his boots in the vestibule. “
Hej
,” he said.

“Well, get them off. I won’t have you drip those things in here. For heaven’s sake, the floor’s been mopped. Just leave them. You always show up at my busiest
time.”

“You’re closed up tight!” But he was used to absurdities in her. She liked to topple him.

“When else do you think I can get anything done? Not with customers underfoot all day. I’m sorting out a delivery. I’m trying to price things. My God, I’m
concentrating
. And now you’ll want coffee.”

“No,” he said, standing on the doorsill in his stocking feet. “
Sprit
.”

“No wonder. You’re a stick of ice. A snowman.”

“I’m boiling hot,” he contradicted, and followed her into the back room. “I stink of sweat.” He was not in the least meek with her. He was meek with Gunnar and
Anders because they deserved it; they were insufficient. But with Heidi he could be coarse. It hid his small fear.

“That you do. You smell like a rutting sheep. I’ve got your order—all these Slavs. Don’t expect them to come cheap. They weren’t easy to get hold of, believe me.
Two are in English, from the States. I couldn’t find them any other way.” A long yawn, sumptuous, leisurely, disclosed the gold in her molars. A sleep-crease marked her left cheek.
Pillow and blanket were in disorder on her cot. She hauled a canvas bag off a shelf behind the German lamp and drew out a pair of paperbacks. “Ludvík Vaculík, there. Bohumil
Hrabel, there. Witold Gombrowicz, I’ve got him right here. Nobody but you wants such stuff.”

“There was supposed to be another—”

“The other Polish one. Where did I put . . . here. Tadeusz Konwicki, here he is. Hardcover. Him I could track down only in Polish. Your native language,” she said with a lift of her
sardonic little shoulder.

She handed him a tiny glass of vodka and yawned again. Stingy. He saw she was going to stay annoyed with him. She knew what he knew; she knew it all, every permutation of every speculation; they
had talked and talked about what he knew until it was all ground down into granules. His history—his passion—was no more than a pile of salt between them. There was no longer anything
left for them to sift through. She had, besides, a hard skepticism for every grain of it—even for his Polish, though she had herself introduced him to his teacher, one of her own customers.
It was the cast of her mind to run from self-irony to blatancy—insofar as Lars could guess anything at all about what her mind was like. Her Swedish was cocky and pliant, but it had the whole
tune of German, and when she let out into it, as she frequently did, a German syllable or two, it seemed to Lars that he could, for just that instant, look down through a trapdoor into a private
underground chamber where no one was allowed to follow. For all her noisiness, she was bitingly private. Her husband, for instance—the mysterious, the distant, the vaporous Dr.
Eklund—was either a psychoanalyst or a gastroenterologist: she hinted sometimes at one, sometimes at the other. And her life before—what was that? She wanted not to be what she had been
before. She had arrived in Stockholm after the war, like so many others. She had been quick to marry Dr. Eklund.

Between Heidi’s back room and the public space of the shop a fence of books reared up. Now and then Lars imagined that Dr. Eklund was hiding out there on the other side, beyond the reach
of the daffodil’s yellow arc. Or he imagined that Dr. Eklund was dead. Cremated. His remains were in the big coffee tin on the shelf behind the lamp; Heidi was a widow. It occurred to Lars
that he would like to marry such a woman, independent, ungenial, private, old; a kind of heroine.

He was glad she was old. It meant she was prepared to be proprietary—the old have a way of taking over the young. She regarded Lars as her discovery—a discovery four years in the
past that, she said, she had grown to regret. She had stumbled on him kneeling next to his briefcase among the S’s in
FOREIGN FICTION
—a new face in the shop, and
already he was dawdling there, for an hour or more, over a copy of
Cinnamon Shops
in Polish. She clapped her hands at him, the way you clap your hands to shoo away a harmless animal, and he
circled slowly round to absorb her anger, not startled, but oddly distracted, like someone who has had a vision: it came to him instantly that he would tell this old woman what he knew about
himself. The shape of her head drew him—small, jumbled, those curly bangs white as a sheep fallen over the wobbly mustaches. He had never seen such eyebrows. Her head was a sheep’s
head, but she was as shrewd and impatient as a lion. She warned him that she wouldn’t allow her merchandise to look shopworn before sale; he was in plenty of trouble with her—she had
been watching him turn the pages over; a hundred times. It was true. He had washed his fingers in that half-familiar dread print like a butcher with a bloody sheep in his grip, or like a tug
dragging a river for a body.

“My father wrote this,” he told her.

She seized the book from his hands and slipped it back into its slot on the shelf of foreign S’s.

“It’s five o’clock,” she said. “We’re closing now.”

“I would buy it,” Lars said, “but I can’t really read it yet.”

“Then go home and learn Polish.”

“I’m doing that,” he said, and pulled his Polish grammar out of his briefcase to show her.

“You bought that somewhere else. We don’t carry that, it’s not the best one.”

“I’m a refugee. I was born in Poland.” He shoved away his grammar and reached down again for
Cinnamon Shops
. “My native language, and I can’t read
it.”

“If you’re not going to purchase that book,” she said sharply, “put it back.”

“It’s already mine,” he said, “by inheritance.”

“Put it back, please. We’re closing now.”

He was afraid she would push him out the door. Her voice was oily, elongated, ironic: she thought him a crazy man. He stood his ground; he had chosen her, he had made up his mind. She was the
one. He explained how, newborn, pulled from the fork of his mother, he was smuggled, through all the chaos over the face of the deep that was the logic of that time, to a relative in
Stockholm—a poor scared refugee herself, an elderly cousin with a sliver of luck. A handful of other infants had been spirited away from Poland—Poland overrun by Nazis—and
squeezed into Stockholm under the same auspices: a merciful Swedish traveler, well-paid, under the protection of her government’s neutrality. Like any story that hangs on suffering, chance,
whim, stupidity in the right quarters, mercy and money, there was something random to it—a randomness that swelled and swelled like an abscess. The elderly cousin, lost in bewilderment, fell
away, and Lars, while the war went on, found himself in the household of the widowed sister-in-law of the merciful mercenary traveler’s own cousin. This sister-in-law already had a son, and
did not need another; she took Lars anyhow, despite his brown eyes, and thanked her stars as he grew that he could be mistaken—as long as no one suspected anything different—for
Swedish. She did not like the looks of other nations, especially those more distant from the Arctic Circle than her own. Lars ripened into ingratitude, and at sixteen left home to live alone in
someone’s attic room. He met his rent by getting a job as a messenger boy on a newspaper. Already he knew his future was print.