The Messiah of Stockholm (7 page)

It was a Thursday night. At the
Morgontörn
, at Anders’s desk in Anders’s cubicle, Lars—rigid, electric, anxious—was typing his review for the next Monday: a
novel by Danilo Kiš, translated from the Serbo-Croatian; and there was Gunnar hanging over him, teasing and prickling, and there was Anders just stepping out of the ancient elevator,
breathing dragon steam, streaked and pocked with melting snow. Anders kicked off his galoshes and reached for his vodka. The little mice ran. Lars’s page was stippled with errors. He began
typing his first sentence all over again:
Here is a universe as confined as a trap, where the sole heroes are victims, where muteness is for the intrepid only
. A grand soliloquy—he was
instantly sick of his words, trite, portentous, posturing. All gesture. A vertigo passed through Lars’s head. The two of them, Gunnar and Anders, went spinning around him—a pair of
desperate vaudevillians, rivals, Siamese twins. They had their old show: cavorting and caviling, nipping at each other and at Lars. Anders handed Lars a scrap—it was Heidi calling him back.
She wanted him, she was surrendering. But the note, scribbled off the telephone by the
Morgontörn
’s somnolent receptionist, was no more than a garble.
MRS. EKLUND
PHONED ABOUT YOUR SISTER
. That fool of a girl downstairs. Lars, in the corridor, obediently filled Anders’s kettle at the tap. In Anders’s cubicle, Gunnar was chirping
confined as a trap, where the sole heroes are victims
, and all the rest. It shamed Lars. He could not be angry at these interesting sufferers, but he felt himself without weight in the
world, a molecule bobbing along in a sluice. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m off,” and trudged out to retrieve his Czechs and Poles at Heidi’s shop.

A
CROSS THE SQUARE, OVER
the Academy his father’s bloated shape had long ago disintegrated among the gray steeples and the snow spilling slantwise.
A smell of something roasting, what was that? He crossed the bridge over the locks, where the salty Baltic squalled under his feet. He had kept away a good three weeks. Heidi let him cool his heels
before coming to the door.

“You smell like a rutting sheep,” she complained. He was sweating from his rapid walk—nearly a run—in the new snow. His boots were dripping. She made him leave them in
the vestibule; she grumbled that he was interrupting—she was hard at work, a big shipment had arrived that very day. But he saw from her long slow helpless yawn that the knock of the penknife
on the glass had just now awakened her. She was spending the night on the cot in the back room. Dr. Eklund was somewhere else; it seemed to Lars that she was embarrassed by this.

“Nobody but you wants such stuff,” she told him—it was, this remark, a commonplace with her. Vaculík, Hrabel, Gombrowicz, Konwichi. She piled up his order on her little
back-room table. “What names! Didn’t I say these fellows would fetch you back?” She yawned again, but with a certain willed smugness. “Why didn’t you come last week?
When I phoned?”

“Anders picked up your message from the receptionist’s desk an hour ago,” Lars said.

“An hour ago? That paper you work for! They’d be a week behind in reporting the end of the world.” A wild alertness took hold of her. “You’re too late, by days. I
thought you’d have the sense to get here right away. I kept her waiting that whole afternoon.”

“Who was that?”

“A woman with an interest in Polish.”

She was being wary, tricky. In his three weeks away he had not forgotten how dangerous she could be, how she could topple him.

“If the Princess wants me back,” he said, “
she’s
too late. She threw me out when I thought I still needed her. I’ve got no use for her now,” but he
recognized in his own croak—swallowing down the bit of vodka Heidi had given him when he asked for it—that something new lay between them.

“No, no, not Mrs. Rozanowska. I told them who at the
Morgontörn
. I
told
them. They said they’d put it in the message. My God, Lars, if you had your own phone in
your own flat like an ordinary person—”

He pulled out the wadded-up square Anders had brought him and looked at it. MRS. EXLUND PHONED ABOUT YOUR SISTER. The snow had somehow crept into his pocket and dampened everything in it. The
preposterous words had begun to run. “I haven’t
got
a sister. There’s no sister anywhere in it at all. You know that.”

“That’s probably true. I didn’t think she
was
your sister. It smelled fishy to me from start to finish.” Heidi formulated one of her calculating scowls—she
was all scandalous bliss. “I don’t say there wasn’t a resemblance, but the fact is she hasn’t come back. She said she’d come back and she hasn’t. I asked her to
leave it for you but she wouldn’t. I don’t blame her, if it’s genuine.”

“Leave what? If what’s genuine?”

“My dear boy”—she had never before addressed him this way, him with his graying head! but there was an importance in it that penetrated—“she has the manuscript of
The Messiah
in a little white plastic bag. She carries it around like that. The original. The thing itself. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“
The Messiah
? No one has that. It disappeared. It doesn’t exist.”

“She’s got it in her bag.”

“
Who
has, for God’s sake?”

“Your sister.”

“There isn’t any sister. A fraud. You’ve been taken in.”

“She didn’t
say
she was your sister. I only drew a conclusion.”

“You drew a conclusion!” he howled.

“Well, if she calls herself the daughter of the author of
The Messiah
, and you’re the
son
of the author of
The Messiah
, that makes her your sister. It stands to
reason.”

“It stands to reason! The daughter! There isn’t any daughter! There isn’t any
Messiah
!”

“Not so long ago you had a different opinion.”

“The manuscript’s gone, there’s no one alive who thinks anything else.”

“You said yourself it might have been hidden.”

“Whoever had it was taken away. Whoever had it is dead.”

“
She
isn’t dead. She told me the reason she’s got it is just because she
is
his daughter. No one else could have gotten hold of it. It was saved explicitly for
her.”

Lars said, “There’s no room in the story for another child. It’s not feasible. It can’t be. You know the story as well as I do. There’s only me.”

“Well, maybe there’s you and maybe there’s not. And if there’s you, why can’t there be another one?”

“What did she
say
? What exactly?”

“That the man who wrote
The Messiah
was her father.”

“But he’s
my
father!” Lars cried.

Heidi beamed out a rascally gleam. “If the manuscript doesn’t exist, and the daughter doesn’t exist—”

“You know there’s no daughter.”

“—then maybe there’s no son either.”

“I’m here. Here I am.”

“That’s just what
she
said. A biblical annunciation. And every bit as convinced of it as you.”

Wearing a white beret. Not too distant from Lars’s own age, judging from the hair, which was just beginning to whiten, though only on one side of a slightly archaic middle part; the face
was as clear as a baby’s. There certainly
was
a resemblance, not acute—she wasn’t a twin—but ripe, somehow, with hints. The similarities were in the absences, in the
sort of look she
didn’t
have. She didn’t look content. She didn’t look—well,
normal
. These negative hints made Heidi pay attention, though not right
away—Heidi was on the watch for Dr. Eklund. Dr. Eklund was returning momentarily from Copenhagen. The woman had come in out of the blue—out of the snow—with her white plastic bag.
Heidi kept her eye on it—shoplifters carry such things. But the woman didn’t go near the bookshelves at all; she turned in the aisles and turned again. The shop had a wild morning
brightness: snow-dazzle freakishly shot through with slashes of early sunlight, too sharp to bear. All that exaggerated whiteness seemed to be crowding into the narrow vestibule of the shop, and
had swept the woman straight through the doorway. She asked the Turkish boy for the proprietor—it was the proprietor she wanted, because of those heaps of foreign books in the window. The
foreign books had lured her; she had never noticed this shop before. She was used to walking all over Stockholm, but she was still new to it. You could tell from her accent how new. She had
something astonishing, something stupendous, in her bag. Was there anyone here—perhaps even the proprietor—who could read Polish? Or who had access to the local Polish intelligentsia?
In this very bag, the one in her hand (it was light enough, it wasn’t a big tome), lay the work of a genius who happened—she wasn’t going to be shy about this, she wouldn’t
hide
his
light under a bushel!—who happened to be her own father. Dead. Murdered. A victim, long ago, but immortal. And she was the daughter.
Here I am!
She had inherited her
father’s last known manuscript, a masterpiece the whole world believed to be wiped out, erased, vanished. It deserved translation into Swedish; she couldn’t do this herself. It deserved
translation into every language on the face of the earth. A visionary thing—the title itself showed how visionary—oh, amazing, it couldn’t be explained in only half a minute. Was
it possible the proprietor might know someone who could
do
something for a manuscript like this? Redeem it, accord it salvation, spread it like a gospel? The point was she was looking for a
translator.

“So you offered her the Princess,” Lars bit off.

“I offered her you.”

“What are you talking about? What did you tell her?”

“I told her you’re awash in Polish. I told her it’s under your skin, not that you speak it like a native, but if anyone was ever possessed! I told her you’re a madman for
literature. I told her you’re a connoisseur of the author of
The Messiah
. I told her all that.”

“But not the deep fact. Not that.”

“It’s your secret, isn’t it? You keep on keeping it, except when you spill it. How would I tell what you don’t tell? The trouble is you have no confidence in
me.”

“If she had an accent—” He swallowed it down. “What kind of accent?”

“How do I know? I have an accent myself.”

“The name, then. She gave her name.”

“Elsa. No, Adela. I think it was Adela. Don’t pester me with such things, Lars. I
tried
to reach you, after all. I left that message with the
Morgontörn
, what more
could I do? And then I made her stay and stay. She got sick of waiting and went off, do you blame her?”

“Where does she live?”

“She never told.”

“Didn’t she leave a phone number?”

“She said she would just rather come back.”

“But she hasn’t. Not in a week. We’ve lost her, and she’s a crazy fraud—”

“
Something
was in that bag.”

“It wasn’t
The Messiah
.”

“Then why should you care if we’ve lost her?”

There was an exhaustion between them now, as if they had just run out of a burning house. The roasting smell trickled up out of Lars’s clothes: it fumed up from his belly, his armpits, the
soaked pockets on his rump, his snow-dampened feet. Heidi’s gleam was an ember. Her mouth relapsed to sleepiness. Lars wondered whether, with all her talent for turning things askew, she had
given over his story—his deep fact—to Dr. Eklund; or whether she had given over her own story. The fence. She had, in the last moment, revived their old habit of
“we”—this hadn’t escaped him. But she couldn’t be depended on: it occurred to him that the woman in the white beret, in the morning’s white brilliance, carrying
a featherweight
Messiah
in a white bag, was, if she wasn’t an angel, a lie.

“Something’s burning,” he said.

“Oh God! The stove. Go and see, Lars. I suppose I never shut the flame under this afternoon’s pot. I’m getting to be an old woman.”

He took two steps. “The fire’s off. It wasn’t turned on.”

“Then it’s the smell of glue. The binding glue in that new shipment. Sometimes it smells like that. Or else it’s you. Sweat. A rutting sheep. Smog.” She was dimming,
failing, a light dying out. Something was snuffing her. “The roof of the snow pressing down. It keeps the smoke on the ground. In the streets. Every chimney in the city sending out
smoke—”

“It could be the chimneys,” he agreed. A quirk of the atmosphere. Meteorology. Stockholm smoldering at the northernmost margins of the industrial West, houses in clusters, spires
like an army of bayonets, office blocks, factories, flats, computers, the grit-filled mists of habitation, hesitation, wear, use, decay, loss. The bad smell behind that fence. Even the wake of
angels. The white wings of angels passing in flocks are known to release the odor of burning feathers.

He thought of his little fear. “Dr. Eklund,” he said, “when did he get back from Copenhagen?”

“He’s not back yet. Look at the road, for heaven’s sake. Planes don’t take off in heavy weather.”

“Wasn’t that conference over long ago?”

“What conference?”

“The one in Copenhagen.”

“It wasn’t a conference. You’ve got Copenhagen mixed up with somewhere else. A consultation. The prima ballerina of the Danish ballet. She wouldn’t perform.
Wouldn’t set foot on the stage.”

“Dr. Eklund’s not in Copenhagen,” Lars said.

“Well, maybe not. Lord knows where he’s been stranded. You can never be sure.”

She drifted toward her cot. She wanted her cot; she was old and full of sleep. She wanted him to go. But he persisted—he could feel how his teeth tore into it: “Dr. Eklund,” he
said, “isn’t stranded anywhere.”

She was, he noticed, wearing slippers. She dropped them off under the daffodil and handed him her key. “Lock up when you leave. You can bring this back next time.” Next time: she was
expecting him to resume. She had never before entrusted him with the key—she meant him to take it away with him. He watched her strain as she bent to roll down her stockings, gartered at the
knees; then she fell back on the dishevelled cot. White strings of her hair blew off the pillow. She widened her mouth for another yawn; her eyes watered. “If he isn’t stranded, then
he’s on his way.”