The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (beginner reading books for adults TXT) 📕

In the little vestibule, Czechs and Poles in his arms, he struggled back into his boots, teetering on one leg at a time and leaning against the glass of the display window. It was just where she had stood—the so-called daughter—with her white plastic bag. In which rested, or swarmed in chaos, certain sheets of manuscript, whatever they were. In the window the enameled Royal Family were still tucked benignly into their sofas, and the sea gulls were speckling Lake Vänern, and alongside were those towering piles of Russians and South Americans and Englishmen, so many foreign urgencies babbling. The key went straight into the lock without difficulty in the broad circle of light that looped out from the streetlamp. In this spot she—the so-called daughter—had determined to declare herself. Here I am.

“He’s on his way,” he heard Heidi call from the back room. A moan: or not exactly a moan. Rather, the sound of indecipherable syllables evaporating at the bottom of the sea. German? Polish? Serbo-Croatian? A foreign babble, unintelligible. He put the key in his pocket. It burned against his thigh. His little fear. And then he thought: look! it doesn’t burn, it isn’t burning. There is no Dr. Eklund. Dr. Eklund doesn’t exist. Dr. Eklund is a phantom. Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character. Now he was not sure whether Heidi had called out anything at all. He was, anyhow, already yards away from the shop. But his little fear was cooled. His little fear was gone.

9

he decided, the next day, to forgo his afternoon quilt. He headed instead for the Morgontörn; it was the first time in months he had seen the place in light. It was business, it was the world, it was movement—they were putting out the paper. It went on like this, telephones and shouts and typewriters, until the secretaries left for home—an office boy flashing by with a long noodle of galleys, the stutter of someone’s typing clacking out of one of the cubicles; Nilsson yelling: something was missing, something was late. There was a common energy—the intermittent vowels in the floorboards weren’t the least bit ghostly, and the noise of it all ground together had the unitary drive of an organism out on its own: God knew what the name of such a single-minded animal might be. Nothing spooky. A big nosy dog. Lars didn’t take note of any mice. No doubt they were confined to barracks.

“Lars! What are you doing here?” Nilsson gave him a bossy thump and raced on through the roil. It was a thing to marvel at, the book department in daylight—how the sun, moonlike, wan, wintry, grainy and fickle, more gray than pale, cut out patches everywhere. The strangeness of these sun-pockets: windows! A vague electric bulb and the usual scratchings and scrapings against the shaft kept the elevator in its shabby night, but otherwise the chairs and desks and file cabinets had the look of life. Over in a corner the gang of three-o’clock gossips were well into it, Gunnar and Anders among them. Lars was surprised, and then, on second thought, he wasn’t. Night prowlers somewhat on his own style, they gargled with what was what and who was where and why—it meant they had to come to the well, now and then, for water.

He was breathing through a veil—a sort of stupor or trance. It was the habit of the quilt; at this hour he was used to his nap. The rims of his eyes itched and bothered: a pair of old hoops he had bumped through too many ditches. He was wakeful enough, but with a ragged edge; a buzz; a recklessness. He felt somehow abused—he didn’t care what anyone said. He nudged himself nearer; no one acknowledged him, no one lifted a shoulder to let him in. They were telling a translation story—how Sven Strömberg, in an absent moment, pushing to meet a deadline on an Australian novel and meaning to engage the word “trust,” inadvertently transmuted it to “trussed,” and tied up his faithful heroine in knots. “You can’t pin it on Sven, it could happen to anyone. All those puns and homonyms.” “Homer nodding.” “Freud. A psychological substitution.” “You forget that Sven Strömberg doesn’t have a psyche.” “So what’s he keep in that paunch?” “Some sort of cheese. You can smell it on his breath.” “It isn’t cheese that’s on his breath.” “At least his howlers are his own, nothing’s swiped.”

Laughter. “Has anyone seen Flodcrantz?” “I heard he ran to Finland to hide out.” “He’s got the shakes. Even his ears. His knuckles. My God, last I had a look at him the man was a jelly.” “It’s his own doing. He asked for it.” “They say he’s suicidal.” “That Olof? He takes vitamins!” “Well, he wanted to be talked about. It’s better than getting buried every week on the culture page.” “He’s made himself famous. He’s relishing the whole business.” “His hand quivers. His chin.” “It’s an act. He’s an actor. The greatest Thespian of them all.” “Please, the fellow’s suffering. He’s sick. He’s not normal.”

And on and on. It was this month’s scandal. A reviewer at one of the evening papers, an admired (some said dangerously envied) younger poet who had just published his second collection of verse, had been exposed—by Sven Strömberg, of all people!—as a plagiarist. Every single poem in Olof Flodcrantz’s new book was a purloined translation of the work of a different American poet. Flodcrantz had actually been shameless enough to include, among the safer unknowns, a few stanzas by Robert Frost that Sven Strömberg had himself translated a dozen years ago for an anthology remaindered six weeks after publication: Bards of the New World. The most captivating circumstance in the story was its luckless climax—how Sven Strömberg had uncovered the crime against all odds, since he was celebrated for never reading anything he wasn’t being paid