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

word for something new? Grouses over every writer since Strindberg. Can’t leave anything alone, not even, God help us, our daily bread.”

“Hej,” Anders said. His coat was sprinkled with snow rapidly dissolving into teardrops. “Here’s a note for you, Lars. Mrs. Eklund, who’s that? That fool of a girl downstairs, everything gets stale. I see this is dated last week.”

Lars snatched the bit of paper and shoved it into his pocket. “There’s just this last paragraph to do. Two more sentences.”

Anders tossed his galoshes into a corner. A startled mouse, so young it was barely at the cadet stage, jumped out from behind a filing cabinet. “Mrs. Eklund,” he repeated. “Start with taking someone’s wife, Lars, no wonder you’ll end up taking someone’s desk and chair. Not to mention their vodka.” He stared down at Lars’s typing. “You’ve put jalteori for talteori.”

“On a Monday,” Gunnar said, “who’ll notice?”

“My drawer is open,” Anders said.

Lars said quickly, “I was looking for an eraser in there—”

“Nobody’s touched your vodka,” Gunnar said. “Isn’t Mrs. Eklund the one who got you your Polish tutor, Lars?”

“Yet another foreigner,” Anders said. “Tell me, is this Stockholm or Timbuktu?”

“She owns a bookshop,” Lars said. “Sometimes I give her orders.”

“I bet you do,” Gunnar said.

“Poles and Turks all over town. The deterioration of the Swedish temperament. The decay of Europe. Litter in downtown Stockholm. Adultery in bookshops. How about plugging in the kettle, Lars?”

“I have to go,” Lars said.

“Plug in the kettle first, all right? There’s nothing like a drop of vodka in a dram of tea to warm up with.”

Lars took up Anders’s electric kettle and went out into the corridor to the tap just outside the men’s toilet. The water, running rusty at the start, barely trickled. He waited for it to clear and then fill. Meanwhile he fished for the message in his pocket: mrs. eklund phoned about your sister. That fool of a girl downstairs. A mistake. He had no sister. When he got back to Anders’s cubicle, Anders was rolling up his damp coat on top of the filing cabinet and Gunnar was reading aloud, in a liturgical voice, the first sentence of Lars’s typescript: Here is a universe as confined as a trap, where the sole heroes are victims, where muteness is for the intrepid only.

“My my,” Gunnar said. “What a scare your mother got. I mean when she was pregnant with you. An assault by the higher forms of literature.”

“A bad sign,” Anders said, “this Polish tutor.”

“Leave my papers be,” Lars said.

“Mea culpa,” Gunnar said, and bowed. “The trouble with you, Lars, is that you’re a beautiful soul. A daily reviewer shouldn’t be a beautiful soul. It leads to belles-lettres, which leads to exaltation and other forms of decline.”

“This pond,” Anders said. “This little pond of translators and chameleons. Swedish, the secret language. Who else knows it besides the Swedes? Who else runs to learn everyone else’s language? The paralysis of Swedish identity. Pour the water, Lars.”

“The Poles are just the same. The Czechs. The Hungarians. We’re no worse off than anyone,” Gunnar objected. “Why blame the Swedes?”

Lars filled Anders’s pink china mug, and Anders measured out a long magnanimous spill of vodka from the bottle in his desk.

“Half the population of Stockholm think they’re French philosophers. And the other half”—Anders looked straight at Gunnar—“are circus barkers.”

Lars jammed on his stocking cap and picked up his pages. “I’ll just leave this on Nilsson’s table. Good night, gentlemen.”

“A nocturnal visit,” Anders asked, “to the Polish tutor?”

“I don’t have her any more.”

“I’ll tell you what your trouble is, Lars. Central Europe, that’s your trouble.” Gunnar turned his back on Anders, who was allowing the steam from his cup to rise up the two smokestacks of his redoubtable nose, right-angled and attached high at the bridge so as to conceal the other side of his face. “Prague and Vienna and Cracow. A touch of Budapest, a sniff of Bucharest. Throw in Dubrovnik and a handful of Paris misanthropes. You might fetch up Borges from the rump, but otherwise it’s all the crazies from the middle. You think my Wednesday people ever heard of this Danilo Kiš? You carry on about him, but they never heard of him. When they move Yugoslavia over to Norway it might be worth a look next door.”

“Our Mrs. Eklund,” Anders pressed, “can she recommend a tutor in Serbo-Croatian?”

“Don’t forget that lemon pulp squeezed out there in the California citrus groves—Adrian Leverkühn, Dr. Faustus! Kafka, Musil, Broch, Canetti, Jabès and Kundera. Those fellows, and don’t ignore the ladies, what’s her name, Sarraute? The more inscrutable the better. Chasing after the impenetrable. Prince of the indecipherable. That’s what’s eating Monday’s brain. What we’ve got in Lars is a Monday Faust.”

Lars finished tying on his scarf. “Gentlemen, I’m off.”

The elevator rattled down, swaying on threadbare ropes. All the way to the bottom Lars could hear them clanging away, hammer and tongs. He rarely saw either of them during regular hours; in the clarity of midday he thought them weak, bleached. They were big Viking men, crestfallen. Gunnar had his own kettle in his own cubicle. He kept his things meticulously separate. Thirty years ago he had come to Stockholm from Goteborg; Anders had arrived about the same time from Malmö. They were both night workers who slept the morning away and breakfasted at four in the afternoon. When the daylight foam of ordinariness—secretaries and telephones—cleared out, it pleased them to prowl among the stacks of reviewers’ galleys, sniffing after literary prey and flushing out the mice. Even the Niagara of the overhead toilet box in the men’s room seemed to them more momentous after midnight. Though they went on contending about this and that—they charged each other with negativism, self-denigration, narrowness—they saw eye to eye on everything; they were privy to what most mattered. They had all the news—which translators cut corners (they agreed that no one could tell the difference between Sven Strömberg’s Swedish and Sven Strömberg’s Spanish), whose lover had just