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

through insidious means and for a magnanimous fee (hence the big new flat, the new furniture, the robot appliances), Lars had been approached to transcribe: he was seized, willy-nilly, being peculiarly eligible, according to the ancient forms, since the girl who currently carried the Psalm engraved even in the delta of her buttocks was his own stolen daughter…. Sven Strömberg’s version was simpler. The chief of the swindlers was Olof Flodcrantz in disguise.

Thus the stewpot, laughing. Gunnar and Anders observed that these clownings were only a little bit at the expense of poor dim duped Lars. Lars bruised and overthrown. So much for exaltation, so much for the private ecstasies of the visionary!—he had had his lesson. He was humbled and would henceforth consent to walk among men again.

Yet abruptly the stewpot turned from boiling Lars to throwing its arms around his shoulders. The cackle of satire softened. They chaffed him instead; he was a comrade. Gunnar and Anders, unprepared for this alteration of spirit, watched Lars, with his graying head and baby cheeks, rising. They looked again: somehow he wasn’t so much fixed in earliness as he used to be; you could tell at a glance he wasn’t a boy. Impossible to mistake him now for anything but a man of middling years—those grooves dug out in the space between the eyebrows, those beginning wadis that ran from the ends of the mouth downward toward the faint bulge at either side of the jaw…he was putting on weight. He couldn’t negotiate a paragraph without his reading glasses. And still he was rising. It was as if a wraith of smoke, too elusive for the keenest camera, had all at once solidified into a statue: Lars was there. Monday’s customers were waking up; they wrote him letters. They wrote him six or seven letters; then they wrote him dozens. He overtook Gunnar, he overtook Anders; he had more letters than anyone. He wasn’t comical, he wasn’t contentious—what could you say he was? Whatever he was, he produced an excess of it: Nilsson was ready to let him spill over the brink into Tuesday. It doubled his pay, and he took it as innocently as if he deserved it. They considered his prose: was there a trick in it; was it something no one could catch him at?

One night Gunnar thought he saw it. Lars had stopped purifying his life. This absence, this cessation, had the effect of an ingredient. The ingredient was the opposite of purification. It gratified intensely, it flowed out over almost everyone; it was the rosiest of mirrors; it flattered.

“And what is this fabled ingredient?” Anders inquired, returning from the tap. He no longer asked Lars to fetch him water: Lars had risen; and besides, nowadays you couldn’t count on finding Lars when the mice were out. He was doing something else with his nights. As for the mice, Nilsson was arranging for the exterminators to come as soon as the electricians were done. The broken walls had exposed their nests.

“Mediocrity,” Gunnar said.

They were not spiteful men, but they recognized the importance of cutting Lars dead. What else do you do with a fellow who prospers on scandal? Olof Flodcrantz had crept back from Finland, but at least he had vanished south to a job in Malmö; he made himself scarce. He didn’t insult people by slamming himself like a beam in their eyes.

They waited for the stewpot to turn. The stewpot always turns. It swallows up. It casts out. It boils on.

16

the Morgontörn was emptying out. The electricians and their sledgehammers were long gone. They had begun at eight o’clock that morning by thundering open craters in the walls; until half an hour before lunch the ancient upper storeys of the Morgontörn were convulsed. Then the electricians had dematerialized. The secretaries were just now on their way out, fluttering down the stairs like confetti. Nilsson was rocketing shut the fine new drawers of his astral desk. The elevator, like the clapper of a bell striking the sides of the shaft, was heard to ring him perilously down to the street. Not a relic of the stewpot remained: not even the lees. Gunnar was already across the square, having his monthly tea with the Librarian of the Academy, an event calculated to impress the stewpot, if only it would allow him the chance to tell—what a bitterness, that it currently had ears only for the life and works of Lars Andemening! Anders had taken the bus home to the fossildom of his prehistoric household: the primordial stepfather, the antediluvian aunt.

The child, meanwhile, had fallen asleep with his mouth narrowly tubed—enough to let out a periodic snore, incongruous with such a small frame. The snore was leonine.

Her face was not as he remembered it. In half a year she had—he would not say toughened; but there was a brazen look now. He didn’t mean that old grain of stubbornness, he didn’t mean impudence; what he had in mind was the opposite. She seemed desperately still: formed: a figure cast out of some elemental metal. A motionless pietà, clear as copper—it might have been the influence of the boy in her lap. As for the boy’s snore—it was as if she held a live trumpet that might go off at any moment.

“Why this rooming house?” he challenged her. “I thought you’d have plenty of money, you people. Why not a nice posh place within walking distance of the Café Opera? What cakes! You’ve done the little fellow an injustice.”

She set her lips against the boy’s forehead. “He’s getting a fever.”

“Unless the rooming house is part of the scenery? An apt effect?”

“You think anything I do is playacting.”

“Anything I know of. They’ve roped you in. You do what’s expected.”

“He was all right an hour ago,” she murmured: her hand lay on the child’s hand.

“Stage fright,” Lars offered.

“Don’t say those things. He’s my little boy.”

“The family business! How many fathers, how many mothers, and