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

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 Gamia 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 and 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 reviewed anything he approved of? When was the last time he had a good