The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (ereader for comics .txt) 📗

own name, and out of the dictionary, like a spell! Karin: Ulrika had wanted this commonplace. Lars had dreamt of the Four Matriarchs. Rachel, Rebecca, Sarah, Leah. In the snapshots—he held them like a pack of cards, frivolously—Karin receded from him; she seemed no more than a plaster cast, with empty eyes. The original was elsewhere. In the photos she was older and coarser than the quick child whose paint set he meant to rid himself of. He might meet her again one day; or not. If she longed for him she would search him out. She would study his case if he deserved it. Even a child can become a scholar of loss. He wondered whether he ought to take the paint set back with him—Ulrika’s mother would only toss it out, nothing could be plainer. But he left it behind.

7

it was easy to keep away from Heidi. He felt how easy. Heidi was nothing to him. He had lost no one. Still, he was plagued now and then by a heaviness, a thickness of the lung, an inner lurch as glutinous as mourning.

He walked past the Academy and discovered that this density of breathing, this viscosity, was only ordinary fury. Mrs. Eklund! She was jealous: she had called him a collector and his father a skeleton. A doctor’s wife considers you either a madman or a phony—this was from that last batch of letters Heidi had wangled out of Warsaw: she had recited this insult with zest. “No doubt a bad translation,” she added, to be fair. He seized the Polish original. The words did not change their spots. They belonged to Witold Gombrowicz, one of his father’s epistolary cronies. Six years before the shooting (Heidi’s count), Lars’s father in an open letter to the press had spat out his bitter rebuff to this doctor’s wife and her opinions: Dear Witold…These are the mass instincts that eclipse within us a clarity of judgment, reintroducing the archaic and barbaric epistemologies, the arsenal of atavistic and bankrupt logic…. You side with inferiority. The poor doctor’s wife, a woman Gombrowicz had run into on the Number 18 streetcar, in 1936, on Wilcza Street. It was probably true that Gombrowicz sided with her. She was exasperated: Lars’s father was over her head. A madman or a phony. She condemned him for being beyond her. Barbaric epistemologies!

She must be an old woman by now, this doctor’s wife Gombrowicz had met on the Number 18, as old as Jozefina, the fiancée; or dead. Gombrowicz, surly humorist, was also dead. You side with inferiority. Over the Academy, in the night sky, floating, wafting, aloft in the streaming snow, Lars saw, or almost saw, his father’s body, not at all a skeleton—an incandescent apparition billowing with light, puffed out, the light stretching his father’s skin to palest transparency. This balloon-father, shedding luminosity, light falling in sheets from his swollen body, drifted into the white flux and merged with it. First a blur, then a smudge, then a blankness: above the Academy’s roof now there was only the shower of snow-hyphens brightly descending.

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.

8

across 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 his 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, Konwicki.