The Messiah of Stockholm (4 page)

All this Heidi listened to in a concentration of rage. He was just then describing how he had invented a new surname for himself straight out of the dictionary—she stopped him right there
in the middle. She shut the lights, locked the door, and drew him with her into her back room; she sat him down under the crystal daffodil and spat her dry gargle into her tiny sink. “Why do
you tell me these things? Why should I want to know? You think you’re the only one with a story? Stockholm is full of refugees! All my customers are refugees! Professors! Intellectuals! I
have my own story!”

Lars curved his thumb into the darkened shop. “You’ve got my father out there. In the original. This is the only place in Stockholm that has him in the original.”

“Your father! There’s something wrong with you, you’re a
Verrückter
, how can you say who your father is with a story like that!”

He gave this some thought. “Well, in a way you’re right—I don’t know who my mother is. I’ve never found out.”

“You don’t know your father either!”

“No, no, you can see the resemblance. All those photos—”

“What photos, where? Where did you get them, who gave them to you?”

“Photos in books, I mean.”

“Oh, books! If they don’t come from family—”

“I’ve got every detail of his face, I know it by heart. I know almost every word he ever wrote. Father and son. We look alike, two peas in a pod. It’s the same nose, you see
how my chin comes to a point? And it isn’t even a matter of looks. There’s an affinity. His voice. His mind.”

A great hornlike snort burst from her. But she was letting him have his say; she wasn’t throwing him out. He watched her dip a big spoon into the tin on the shelf behind the
lamp—right into what might have been Dr. Eklund’s ashes. She was brewing him some coffee. “Theatrical. Self-pity. You’re an orphan? An orphan is alive, what’s the
matter with that? Besides, you’re a Swede like any Swede. Why be a fool and dredge all that up—nobody cares, old Nazi stories, you think anyone cares any more?”

“They shot him in the streets. Murdered. The underground got him false papers—in those times forgery was a sacrament. They had already found him a hiding place. But he wouldn’t
leave home. He was glued there.”

“And where did you learn all this? Also from books?”

“I’ve read everything. There’s nothing I haven’t read. I’ve read
Cinnamon Shops
a thousand times over. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read
the other one. But in translation. It’s my father, I need to read the original—”

“The original!”

“The Polish.”

“The Polish, yes.” She splashed a full cup down before him. “A stranger, a lunatic probably, comes into my shop, mangles the merchandise, doesn’t buy a thing, claims
he’s a Pole, can’t read a word of Polish, and here I am serving him coffee! God knows what my husband would make of this. Dr. Eklund,” she said, “takes an interest in
original behavior. Dr. Eklund and I understand exactly what you are.”

“I’ve announced what I am.”

“An impostor. Another refugee impostor. It’s nothing new, believe me! Half my customers have made themselves up. Fabricators. Every Pole of a certain age who walks in here, male or
female, used to be a famous professor in Warsaw. Every Hungarian was once ambassador to Argentina. The French are the worst. I’ve never had one of those in my shop who didn’t turn out
to be just the one who got Sartre started on the Talmud. By now I’ve counted twenty-five female teachers of Talmud—poor Mlle. de Beauvoir.”

“It’s a Polish teacher
I
want,” Lars said.

“Done. I’ll get you the fanciest professor I can think of. There’s a lady from Cracow, extremely literary, in fact a member of the nobility, a Radziwill actually, related to
the husband of the sister of the American Onassis—she used to own a hat store. She gives Polish lessons. Her husband was just as good a Communist as the ones who chased him out. You’ll
have to play along and call her Doctor, unless she makes you call her Princess. Her father was a
maître d
’. Her mother was a milliner.”

He saw then that what he had taken for rage was something else: a fever of isolation. She was often alone, especially after hours—Dr. Eklund, she said, had his late rounds at the hospital;
sometimes he had to go out of town. But the shop was quiet even in the middle of the day. An afternoon might pass without a single customer. Lars observed that the crammed window display seldom
changed. The only books in the window that shook off their dust were the Royal Family and the photographs of northern landscapes. The tourists bought these, Americans and English and Germans. There
was not so much demand for foreign books—you could find practically anything in translation. As for the refugees, they had all learned Swedish long ago. The Academy was always ordering
foreign books, of course, but it got them directly from abroad; it wouldn’t bother with a little local bookshop, would it? And off the beaten path, who even knew it was there? Despite these
troubles, Heidi said, she managed to make ends meet, but if it weren’t for Dr. Eklund’s encouragement—not to mention his tiding her over now and then—where would she be? The
shop ran—well, not on faith, she didn’t believe in the invisible, but on something else just as unreliable: it ran on human oddity. You never could tell what kind of human curiosity
might walk in and spend two thousand kroner. Dr. Eklund was a great collector of such curiosities. Tangled lives appealed to him. From his patients he picked up the most bizarre histories. A
bookshop is the same—a magnet for freaks, gypsies, nomads. Last month a genuine sheikh had turned up, burnoose and all, in sandals, stockingless, his toenails painted red and matted over with
snow, looking for the
Kama Sutra
in Arabic.

“And did you have it?” Lars asked.

“We were just out. It’s one of my biggest sellers.”

It seemed to Lars finally that Heidi had not only not intended to throw him out—she had more or less kidnapped him and locked him in with her. It was difficult to gauge, since then, who was whose captive. Lars came
and went whenever he pleased, though he could never be sure of a welcome. “Ha, it’s you,” Heidi would say, scowling. “Just when I’m expecting Dr. Eklund. He should be
here any minute now.” A ruin of gloomy creases traveled through the black mustaches. “It’s your footsteps—they sound exactly like Dr. Eklund’s. Light as smoke.”
This meant Dr. Eklund was again delayed, or else had gone straight home to the flat. Another time she blamed the Turkish boy for writing up an order for Lars. “Mr. Andemening doesn’t
really
want
it. He’s not a customer. Nothing from him goes into the order book unless
I
put it there, do you understand? In his business he gets all the books he wants for free,
and if he orders something here, it’s only because he likes to make a show of earning his keep.” Once she presented Lars with a volume thick as a brick—it was the other Polish
grammar, the really good one he didn’t own. But mostly the traffic between them went the other way: every two weeks or so Lars thudded down right there on Heidi’s cash-register counter
a load of discarded reviewers’ copies from the
Morgontörn
. This excited her always. She was interested to know whether Anders had reviewed any of these, and which ones Gunnar had
cast off. She read these gentlemen in the
Morgontörn
on Wednesdays and Fridays; she liked Fridays better, because Mr. Fiskyngel was so cantankerous; it was amusing. Mr. Hemlig often
tried
to be amusing, and that was less amusing. She rarely said a word to Lars about Mondays, and if she did, it was again to topple him: “
Furchtbar!
Ordinary people have no
patience for that sort of thing. After all, a newspaper isn’t a university seminar. I’m surprised they keep you on. —Good God, that devilish little Turk’s got your name down
in the order book again. After I’ve told him and told him not to go scribbling—”

Lars broke in: “An assignment from the Princess.”

“If it’s Polish books you want, you should come straight to me. How can a little Turk—”

“You were out. He said you’d gone to get groceries.”

“Groceries! Wasn’t that Wednesday? In the late afternoon? I went with Dr. Eklund to buy a new suit. He likes me there to select the fabric. He won’t choose even a necktie if
I’m not with him.” She squinted down at Lars’s order through the big magnifiers of her reading glasses. “
Sanatorium pod Klepsydra
. It’s a miracle that boy got
it down right. We don’t keep it in stock anyhow, you can see for yourself it’s only
Cinnamon Shops
on the shelf.”

“This is the one he wrote after
Cinnamon Shops
. The second one. The one before the last—
The Messiah
was the last.”

“Well, I can guarantee you my jobber won’t have it.”

“Your jobber,” Lars burst out, “won’t have
The Messiah
, no! No one has it. It’s lost.”

“These things have to come from Warsaw,” Heidi said placidly, “lost or found. It may take weeks.”

“Too long. The Princess won’t like it, she’ll be annoyed. She can’t wait for the finish. She’s getting ready to throw me out. I’m practically dismissed. On my
own. Kicked out.”

“You’d think she’d want to hang on to you. For the money at least.”

“First she says I’m coming along at a tremendous rate, and the next minute she wants to get rid of me. She doesn’t believe in me, that’s why.”

Heidi snorted, “Believe in you! What are you, a priest, a holy man?”

“She won’t accept it.”

“Accept what, for God’s sake?”

“That I’m my father’s son.”

“You shouldn’t have talked about that. A craziness to talk about that! And you say you keep it to yourself, you never talk about it at all, you never tell it,
I’m
the
only one—”

“You are.”

“Oh, yes! Myself, and Mrs. Rozanowska, and Mr. Fiskyngel, and Mr. Hemlig—”

“I’ve never told anyone at the paper.”

“A woman gives you Polish lessons, you tell
her
.”

“An accident. I didn’t intend to. She was making me read out loud to her. She’s been trying to fix my accent. So I picked out the part about furniture—you know, furniture
breaking out in a rash. My father’s own syllables—there they were, coming out of my mouth. In my own voice. In the original.”

“Poor Mrs. Rozanowska. She’s afraid you’re deranged.”

“
She
thinks she’s a Princess!”

“She doesn’t
think
so. She only says so.”

A
FTER THAT
L
ARS FELT
a change: a thickening between them. She was all at once willing to be entangled with him. She began to
question him about how he lived—he was clearly fond of looking alert in the middle of the night. Lars hesitated to tell her how out of the power of his secret dreamless sleep he had learned
to enter his father’s throat; to see his father’s eye. The terrifying germ and nucleus of his origin. In the end he told her he slept in daylight. The rest he kept to himself; there was
sorcery in it. Otherwise he withheld nothing from her. He was not certain whether
she
believed he was his father’s son—she acknowledged that she believed he believed it. He came
almost every night now. She cooked him dinner in the back room—while Dr. Eklund was away it was more convenient to live in the shop, she explained, than in the flat: Dr. Eklund was attending
a mental health conference in Copenhagen. It would last more than a week, and since Dr. Eklund was giving a paper in the final seminar, he was obliged to stay to the bitter end. For dinner she
mainly scrambled eggs mixed with onion. Lars peeled and chopped the onions on a board on the tiny table. He wept drearily. It was the fumes that set him off, but the tears derived from reasons of
the heart. He was grateful: Heidi had fallen into his condition alongside him, a companion, a fellow collector of his father’s fate, a kind of partner. She was already intimate with his
father’s books—no great feat, she said, since the man’s whole canon, after all, consisted of two lone volumes.

“Three,” Lars said. “Don’t forget
The Messiah
.”

“Not if it’s lost. It doesn’t exist. You can’t count what doesn’t exist.”

“But if we’re speaking of everything he wrote—”

“It doesn’t matter what he wrote. The only thing that matters is what’s here to be read.”

“The manuscript might have survived somehow. Nobody knows what happened to it.”

“If it disappeared it was destroyed.”

“Or else it wasn’t destroyed. It might be hidden. When the Nazis came he gave it away for safekeeping.”

“And even if he did give it away it evaporated. It doesn’t exist,” Heidi said again. “Whoever had it was hauled off. You’re always expecting what isn’t there
to
be
there.” She opened out derisive palms: small callused squares that had, by now, a familiar way of accusing him. She thought him a master of the insubstantial: a fantasist. Often
enough she threw out at him her special taunt: “
Hauch
,” she liked to say—his ideas were no more than a breath of air; she did not regard them.

It was the shooting that drew her. The shooting; the murder. Shot in the streets! Lars suspected that Heidi cared more for his father’s death than for his father’s tales, where
savagely crafty nouns and verbs were set on a crooked road to take on engorgements and transmogrifications: a bicycle ascends into the zodiac, rooms in houses are misplaced, wallpaper hisses, the
calendar acquires a thirteenth month. Losses, metamorphoses, degradations. In one of the stories the father turns into a pincered crab; the mother boils it and serves it to the family on a dish.
Heidi shouldered all that aside: it was the catastrophe of fact she wanted, Lars’s father gunned down in the gutters of Drohobycz along with two hundred and thirty other Jews. A Thursday in
1942, as it happened: the nineteenth of November. Lars’s father was bringing home a loaf of bread.

They settled in to their night’s work: the recitation of scraps. By now they had gathered up every shred and grain; still, their stock was small. Heidi had discovered on her own
shelves—misplaced behind Tuwim the poet—Lars’s father’s translation of Kafka’s
The Trial
. Lars was less pleased with this than she had expected. He complained
that he didn’t care for his father in the role of the dummy on Franz Kafka’s lap; it was his father’s own voice he was after. But when Heidi somehow finagled from a dealer she was
acquainted with a brittle browning copy of the Warsaw weekly in which “The Comet” had first appeared, Lars felt an onion-sting of joy. His nose moistened. It was like coming on a
missing pair of gloves—how it warmed his hands! The look of Polish had begun finally to fit his eye-sockets without estrangement, and it was the weight in his heated hands of that dog-eared
rust-speckled journal, dated fifty years back, that made him forgive the Princess for casting him out. He didn’t need her; he was on his own. He read—he could read!—how the father
in “The Comet” thrusts a microscope into a chimney shaft and examines the starlight that has infiltrated into the sooty darkness: the star is composed of a human brain with an embryo
sunk inside. Heidi was indifferent to the notion of a homunculus in the sky. She told Lars it was all madness. Images in magnetic batches. She scolded him for turning his father into some sort of
ceremonial mystification; there was a smoldering cultishness in all of it. His father’s tales—animism, sacrifice, mortification, repugnance! Everything abnormal, everything wild.