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

“If it never existed.”

“If you wish it never existed.”

“Lars!” This was Anders, halfway down, “Cat’s out of the bag. All that resurrecting you do. All those unknowns and esoterics raised from the grave—”

Sven Strömberg’s lover said neatly, “Lars Andemening, the Messiah of Stockholm.”

“Crocodiles!” Nilsson yelled up. “Always after a sensation.”

At the bottom of the staircase Lars met Nilsson waiting for him. “The telephone girl handed me this a second before quitting time. I ran into her coming out of the ladies’ room. Why don’t you get yourself a phone at home, Lars? The staff here isn’t your butler. I’m not your valet.”

Lars read: mrs. eklund phoned, dr. eklund back. please return key.

He pressed, “But you know what it signifies—if The Messiah’s found.”

“One more book in the world,” Nilsson said, “that isn’t Pippi Longstocking. People complain, Lars—your reviews are practically theology. A little more wholesomeness for Monday, how about it? Soft-pedal the surreal, go easy on the existential dread, how about it? Give it a try.”

Lars had entered the stewpot and it had vomited him up.

10

in the morning the snow was brownish in the roads, and tire-marked. There were heaps of it, in waist-high banks, at the sidewalk’s edge. Walking was easy and light. Lars arrived at Heidi’s shop so quickly that he had no time to notice his mood. He noticed it only when he looked all around for Heidi and instead came on the Turkish boy raising the feather duster to his shoulder like a sentry with a rifle. Mrs. Eklund was out. “You take this for her then,” Lars told the Turkish boy, holding out the key. The Turkish boy demurred: he wasn’t supposed to have any key, and if he was allowed to watch the shop at all it was because there were no real customers (clearly Lars wasn’t one of these) at this hour anyhow.

Lars drifted back into the street. What was this exulting? It was nearly ten o’clock: he tried to imagine where Heidi might be. She was not in her flat; she had no flat. She was not with Dr. Eklund; Dr. Eklund was a phantom. What was this exulting? The delirium of what he had done! He had proclaimed the return of his father’s lost last book. The stewpot’s disbelief, their indifference, what was that? He hardly credited it himself. And the daughter! There was no daughter, and still he had proclaimed her, in order to proclaim the risen Messiah.

He had nowhere to go, so he headed for his flat. He wondered whether he ought to worry about Nilsson’s “Give it a try”—was it a warning? Would Nilsson, who had hired him and who was in a way his protector—would Nilsson throw him out? For the sins of unwholesomeness, theology, surrealism, existential dread? Or for the larger sin of unpopularity? He might work at enlivening his style—Gunnar, for instance, peppered his columns with slow motion, back alley, big deal, wisecrack, even so what. Anders called all these expressions “Velveetisms”; a truly cosmopolitan mind, he said, wouldn’t stoop to such vulgarities. But Lars remembered a passage in one of his father’s tales concerning a great theater of illusion, a magnificent wax figure exhibition, that once came to Drohobycz: No, they were not authentic Dreyfuses, Edisons, or Lucchenis; they were only pretenders. They may have been real madmen, caught red-handed at the precise moment a brilliant idée fixe had entered their heads…. Ever since then, that one idea remained in their heads like an exclamation mark, and they clung to it, standing on one foot, suspended in midair. Gunnar Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel, waxwork men. The Morgontörn, a wax museum. Even the mice were artificial, operated by hidden motors in the walls.

What a tenderness he felt—this exulting that had hold of him!—for their wax faces, wax eyes with (this was odd) wax tears of pain or reproach or deprivation: Gunnar and Anders and Sven Strömberg’s lover with her curly wax tie and even Nilsson, all of them wax exhibits connected to wires by buttons at the coccyx, or else invisibly controlled by distant wireless computers. Their terrible helplessness. One idea remained like an exclamation mark in the sweet-tasting pink wax of their heads: the stewpot, the stewpot! While here, here—Lars had reached the door of his flat, and was fingering his key—here in his own startled bed, under his tossed and tangled quilt, his father’s eye, lit, steady, unmoving, strong and blatant, a violent white ray, was spilling out the wilderness of God. A vivid bestiary strangely abundant, discharging the white light of plenitude, and they turned from it, they shunned it, if they did not deride it they were remote from it, the greased beak had never seized them, no apparition, no sphere, no egg, no globe, no ultimate and forcing eye. He was forcing the key into the door; his own door—it did not fit. Then he understood it was the wrong key—it was the key to Heidi’s shop, so he fluttered inside his pocket to find his own.

He lived on the ground floor, just off a minuscule hallway cut from an angle of the wall. There was a diseased old leather chair out there, with a cracked leg, that a doctor had once set down in that spot, long ago, for the purpose of receiving certain large parcels. No one knew what was in them, except that it meant the doctor was rich—the house had seen better days, magical deliveries: enormous frosted cakes, ladies’ hats plumed and ribboned, birds in cages. This fabled chair gave its characteristic squeal, and from around the corner, out of the little hallway, came a woman wearing a white beret.

“Mrs. Eklund told me where you live. If,” she said, “you’re the right one?”

She was carrying the white plastic bag.

“Lars Andemening? You can do Polish? You don’t look Swedish.”

The last one to say this to him—that he didn’t look Swedish—was his