The Messiah of Stockholm

Cynthia Ozick

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780857899774
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857899781
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

From the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, who's been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, the Man Booker International Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction comes the brilliant novel The Messiah of Stockholm. Lars Andeming, perhaps overly intellectual and certainly eccentric, is the Monday book reviewer for a Stockholm daily. He is also the self-proclaimed son of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer who was executed by the Nazis before his last novel, The Messiah, could be published. When a manuscript of The Messiah mysteriously appears in Stockholm, in the possession of Schulz's 'daughter', Lars's circumscribed world of paper, apartment, and favorite bookstore turns upside down, catapulting him into a whirlwind of dream, magic, and illusion. A Brilliant novel... The Messiah of Stockholm is a worthy companion to Philip Roth's superb Prague Orgy... A complex and fascinating meditation on the nature of writing and the responsibilities of those who choose to create - or judge - tales. - Harold Bloom, New York Times

Contents

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1

AT THREE IN THE afternoon—the hour when, all over the world, the Literary stewpot boils over, when gossip in the book-reviewing departments of newspapers is most untamed and swarming, and when the autumn sky over Stockholm begins to draw down a translucent dusk (an eggshell shielding a blue-black yolk) across the spired and watery town—at this lachrymose yet exalted hour, Lars Andemening could be found in bed, napping. Not that there was anyone to look for him there. He had no wife; his apartment was no bigger than a crack in the wall, and any visitor a biennial event; and the quilt, heaped on itself in large knots, was a risen tangle that might or might not have hinted at the presence of Lars under it. As it happened, he was there nearly every afternoon from November to early in a certain bare and harrowing March, when he gave it up; but no one knew.

He lived a ten-minute walk from the Morgontörn, his employer—a relatively young newspaper of unsettled character, in competition for the morning trade with the majestic old Dagens Nyheter and the respectable Svenska Dagbladet. Lars himself was, at least in appearance, relatively young; he was forty-two and looked much younger, probably because he was spare and showed bone, and had no belly at all under his belt buckle. But also there was something in his face that opened into unripeness—a tentativeness, an unfinished tone. The hand of an indifferent maker had smeared his mouth and chin Adam’s apple. He was often dealt with as if he were just starting out, heaving his greening masculine forces against life.

The truth was he had been married not once but twice, and both times had lived, a decade all told, in a presentable flat with proper furniture: a crystal chandelier with the first wife, a sleigh-bed with the second, and, with both, scattered low candles in glass balls lit and pulsing at dusk. He had behind him much of the ordinary bourgeois predicament, and had lost it not through intention but through attrition. Neither wife had liked him for long. Birgitta complained that there was something irregular—undigested—in his spirit. Ulrika fought him and stole their daughter from him; he heard from the doleful woman who had been his mother-in-law that they had gone to America. His ex-mother-in-law had no anger for him—she thought him a kind of orphan.

Ulrika’s mother was not intelligent, but she was not far wrong. Lars Andemening believed himself to be an arrested soul: someone who has been pushed off a track. He belonged elsewhere. His name was his own fabrication. He had told almost no one—not his wives during all those years, and none of his colleagues at the Morgontörn, where he was a once-a-week reviewer—what he understood about himself: that he was the son of a murdered man, a man shot down in the streets over forty years ago, in Poland, while the son was still in the mother’s womb. It was a thing he knew and kept buried. There was something dangerous in it, not only because it did not conform—he had been seized in infancy by an unnatural history—but because this father of his was a legend, a dream; or, more exactly, an errant seed thrown back by a corpse. Lars had never learned his mother’s name, but his father had become his craze.

His father, a high school art teacher who had lived obscurely in an obscure Galician town, was the author of certain peculiar tales. His name was Bruno Schulz.

For the sake of these tales Lars had saturated himself in Polish, at first on his own, and afterward with an eccentric elderly Polish woman, a retired professor of literature from the University of Cracow; she had escaped to Stockholm with her Jewish husband in the uproar of 1968. Her origins, she said, were high, a family of old blood, used to rigor and noblesse oblige—she would give him his money’s worth. She pressed her pupil hard, thrusting Lars from his primer straight into the bosky forests of the between-the-wars modernists. By now Lars was quick enough. He read with a clumsy tongue but a lightning eye, in pursuit of his father’s tales.

On account of his father Lars shrank himself. He felt he resembled his father: all the tales were about men shrinking more and more into the phantasmagoria of the mind. One of them was about a man in his sleep, his fall into the bedclothes—like a swimmer against the current; like the captive of a great bowl of dough.

2

IN CASTING OFF HIS old married ways, Lars had kept nothing but his little daughter’s paint set. The telephone on which he had had so many quarrels with Ulrika after she had run off with the child—out! The typewriter that linked him to the literary stewpot—out! He meant to purify his life. Anyone who wanted to get in touch with him had to go through the receptionist at the Morgontörn. All these circumstances—these predicaments—gave Lars, God knows how, the face of a foetus; it was as if he was waiting for his dead father to find him, and was determined to remain recognizable.

Yet he was already well into graying. The tall pelt of his head was filigreed with strings the color of goat-milk cheese, and between his entirely beautiful eyes there were two well-established vertical trenches. He was probably on the brink of needing glasses; it was his habit to pull on the cords of his eyebrow muscles, which in turn shot folds across the lids, and these, squeezing down, sharpened his view and deepened the trenches. In spite of such gnarling and graying, he could still be taken, by a stranger on the elevator, for a messenger boy.

On the Morgontörn he was one of three reviewers. The others were Gunnar Hemlig, the Wednesday reviewer, and Anders Fiskyngel, who had Friday. Lars was stuck with Monday: it was settled long ago that no one paid any attention to the culture page on Monday mornings. On buses you could see people yawning their way straight past the headlines to the letters columns, where the anti-alcohol grouches held forth. As the week wore on, the somnolence that characterized the Morgontörn’s early edition constituency began to lift. By Wednesday it was ready for Gunnar, an authority on the contemporary American novel; he taught a course on the side, which he called, in the undulations of his recognizable snicker, “The Marriage of Mailer and Jong.” By Friday, Anders—who had the favored spot—found the Morgontörn’s readers alert to any outbreak of temperament. Spy thrillers, royalty, sports, the culinary arts—Anders was insolent in all these categories, and his range of negative specialties was always being augmented. Friday’s customers were wide-awake. Nearly a quarter of all the letters the Morgontörn received were addressed to Anders Fiskyngel; he was a kind of provocateur, particularly on the subject of flatbread. He was nasty to any cookbook that praised it. It was an instance, he said, of Swedish provincialism.

Few letters came for Lars Andemening. Mondays were worthless. Lars was unread, unmolested, unharassed; he was free. This freedom sent him to bed before evening—not out of indolence. On the wall over his bed he had taped two mottoes:

EVEN LEONARDO DA VINCI HAD ONLY

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IN A DAY.

******

ARCHIMEDES ALSO SOMETIMES SLEPT.

These were not jokes. Lars, unlike Gunnar, was untouched by the comic muse. He had the chasteness of a consummate gravity. He had long ago thrown himself on the altar of literature. If he slept—secretly—in the afternoon, it was to wring two days out of one.

In the morning he read. This meant that he started on the first page and finished on the last. He was not a skimmer or a sniffer; he read meticulously, as if, swimming, he were being filmed in slow motion. The text swept him away and consumed him—he was like a man (the man in the bed-clothes in his father’s tale) drawn down by an undertow. Slowly, slowly, the imaginary cinema recorded his heavy resisting gulps. Reading was as exhausting to him as the long, weighted strokes of a drowning man. He gave it all his power. Then he cooked himself a bowl of farina and fell into the wilderness of his quilt.

When he woke at seven into full blackness of night, he felt oddly fat—he was sated with his idea, he understood what he thought. He sat down immediately to his review. He wrote it straight off, a furnace burning fat. It was as if his pen, sputtering along the line of rapid letters it ignited, flung out haloes of hot grease. The air brightened, then charred. He was very quick now, he was encyclopedic, he was in a crisis of inundation. He drove through all the caged hypotheses of his author—some were overt and paced behind bars, others were camouflaged, dappled; he was a dervish, he penetrated everything. When he was within sight of conquest he began to fuzz over with vertigo; he was a little frightened of all he knew. A greased beak tore him off his accustomed ledge and brought him to a high place beyond his control. Something happened in him while he slept. It was not the sleep of refreshment or restoration. He had no dreams. Afterward his lids clicked open like a marionette’s and he saw: what he saw, before he had formulated even a word of it, was his finished work. He saw it as a kind of vessel, curved, polished, hollowed out. In its cup lay an alabaster egg with a single glittering spot; no, not an egg; a globe, marvelously round. An eye. A human eye: his own; and then not his own. His father’s murdered eye.

3

FOR SOME REASON GUNNAR Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel, enemies of each other—old combatants—both tolerated Lars. They were not fond of him, but there was little danger in him and he was rarely underfoot. Unlike Gunnar and Anders, Lars—possibly because of the ignominy of Monday—had no cubicle of his own. He appeared at the Morgontörn chiefly to deliver his work and to pick up his messages. He kept out of most conversations, had no gossip, and seemed, with regard to office politics, almost newborn. He turned up at ten o’clock, generally on a Thursday night, to type up his manuscript. Often he would use Anders’s typewriter in Anders’s cubicle if Anders was not there; or else Gunnar’s. Sometimes they were both away. But it was not unusual for the two of them to be smoking or reading, each in his own cubicle, when Lars arrived, and on these occasions Lars would wander like an anxious phantom, looking for a desk and a free machine. He sat wherever there was an empty chair and struggled against the perversity of the keys. For want of practice he was a bad typist. He habitually struck a j where he intended a t, fabricating strange words.

“North Dakota Swedish,” Gunnar said, peering down at Lars’s sheet.

“My flat’s so cramped,” Lars apologized, “it’s either keep a typewriter or clean socks.”

“Maybe if you typed on your socks, you’d come up with some clean copy,” Gunnar said; it was a night when Anders was not there. The place was subject to spectral mutterings—the floorboards had a way of spitting, or growling, or now and then even whistling, under their feet. The Morgontörn’s editorial departments were situated in Gamla Stan, the Old Town, around the corner from the Stock Exchange and the Academy, in a neighborhood cleverly rehabilitated for picturesqueness. But the last carpenter to attend to the Morgontörn’s forlorn and rickety quarters had lifted his hammer almost eighty years ago; consequently the Morgontörn was picturesque only from the street. Inside, it was all ingenious impediment. Its lower façade hinted at the tavern (also named Morgontörn, in homage to ancient festivities lasting till dawn) that had occupied that site a hundred and fifty years before. The staff joked that the plumbing had been installed by the tavern’s predecessor, an eighteenth-century apothecary who was said to have invented, in a futuristic dream, the water-closet pull chain. The elevator was an inconvenience that could accommodate two persons, on condition that one of them was suitably skeletal.

Lars was thin enough for any purpose. Gunnar remarked that he exactly resembled the building that housed the Morgontörn. Gray, narrow, and tall, it had six wretched storeys. The cultural section claimed the topmost floor, where a well-disciplined regiment of mice held their command post. There were heaps of books on every surface. The mice made an orderly meal of them, prefaces for appetizers and indexes for dessert. Skyscrapers of nibbled volumes grew out of the floor and tilted against patched baseboards.

“Minnesota Swedish,” Gunnar said. Instead of tolerans, Lars had typed jolerans; instead of takt, jakt. “Know what’ll help you, Lars? Computerization. Though if it isn’t Apple or IBM I don’t want it. Leave it to Nilsson, he’ll bring them in all Japanese, I’ll lay money on it. Not that we’ll ever get that far. The electrical system the way it is now can’t take it, and Nilsson says he can’t get a permit for new wiring until something happens with the walls—God knows what. A collapse maybe.”

“I’m happy with my pen,” Lars said. He x’d out jakt typed takt. He was awkward with machines, but his style was pure. Gunnar’s reviews, by contrast, were larded with Americanisms. Gunnar loved everything American, including their fake cheese; on his last trip to New York he had brought back six pounds of Velveeta as a present for his wife.

“Know how long they’ve been computerized over at Expressen?” Gunnar said.

“I’d rather be out here in the Old Town.”

“Well, you fit right in,” Gunnar said. “Gogol. Balzac—Lucien de Rubempré didn’t own a typewriter either. Hooray, there go the walls.”

A rumble, a vibration. It was the elevator coming up.

“If that’s Anders,” Lars said, “I’ve got to finish this. He’ll want his desk.”

“He’ll want what’s in it.” Gunnar prodded open a drawer. There lay Anders’s current bottle, reclining on its side. “You’re an exception here, Lars. Not everyone has belles-lettres on the brain day and night. Some have water, and others wine.”

The question of Lars and belles-lettres was one of Gunnar’s chronic comical points: it frequently signaled a flight of annoyance with Anders. Anders, he maintained, used his choice Friday spot for wheezing and whining; he was out to pull down Swedish self-respect. He was an anti-patriot. The Swedes are a shy people, too modest to bear praise, too withdrawn. But Anders had turned bashfulness inside out; with Anders it was all self-abasement, self-accusation. Self-destruction. It came of being partly Finnish on his mother’s side—you wouldn’t expect a sunny disposition in a Finn. “Spits in his own soup,” Gunnar persisted. “In America flatbread is chic, they spread it with caviar. You see what it comes to. A soiler and a spoiler. When was the last time he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Epigraph page
• Contents
• Note on the Author