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

Lars did not know much about their days (they had wives, they had grown children, and Anders even boasted a stepfather of eighty-seven and a still more antediluvian aunt, both imported to Stockholm from Malmö), but he understood their nights. Like himself, they were sunk in books, chained to the alphabet, in thrall to sentences and paragraphs. And beyond this, Lars was charmed by certain corners of their lives. Anders, for instance, had translated, with all its cadences intact, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Klockorna”; it was used in a school text and recited by children. Once a month Gunnar crossed the street to have tea with the Librarian of the Academy. He was proud of this, and promised to introduce Lars.

The meeting somehow never materialized, but it was enough for Lars that his own feet took him, almost daily, down the threading alleys of the Old Town and into the open bright square—bright, it struck him, even in rainlight—that skirted the Academy, more sacred to him than any cathedral. He felt his allegiance to all of it: the ten thousand cherished volumes sequestered in those high rooms above the queerly silent Stock Exchange, where computer screens flickered, and a single muffled voice ebbed, and a few old men sat as if in a parliament of statues; the multicolored miles of shelves where the new books, crying the banner of their dust jackets in so many languages, vied for the notice of the Academicians; and, all around, the gray steeples that punctuated the air like pen nibs, up one street and down another. The Library of the Academy was old, old, with old wooden catalogues and long sliding drawers; its records were dispatched by human hands, and had nothing to do with computers. Instead, rows and rows of superannuated encyclopedias were solemnly cradled, like crown jewels, in glass-flanked cabinets in a red-brick cellar. Lars had been to see all this for himself: the benign dungeon, scalloped with monastic arches, and the worktables where specially-appointed scholars set down their burdened briefcases. Those cases: he imagined a plenitude, a robustness, many-stanzaed Eddas, sagas winding on and on. Bliss of scholar-poets, archaeologists of old Norse twilights. The cold gods with their winking breastplates and their hot whims. Hammer of the terrible Thor. Odin and Freya. All diminished into the world’s week: the comedy of that.

His father belonged there, in the ventricles of the Academy; Lars was as certain of this as he was of the snow beating against his eyelids. His father had been born to be of that pantheon—with Selma Lagerlöf and Knut Hamsun; with Camus and Pasternak. Shaw, Mann, Pirandello. Faulkner, Yeats, Bellow, Singer, Canetti! Maeterlinck and Tagore. The long, long stupendous list of Winners. His father, if he had lived, would have won the great Prize—it was self-evident. He was of that magisterial company.

4

there was a bitter wind now, lording it over the black of one o’clock. The blackness went on throwing the snow into Lars’s face, and he packed his scarf over his nose and mouth—how warm his breath was in the little cave this made! He hurried past the Stock Exchange and the Academy—not a lit bulb anywhere, or even the daub of a watchman’s flashlight. Succession of whitening roofs: how easy to see into the thickest dark through a lens of snow. The spiraling flakes stuttered around him like Morse code. A smell of something roasting, what was that? Chimneys. It was clear to him finally that he was walking fast and far; tramping, trotting; he had already traversed the bridge over the locks, where the salty Baltic fought the rush of fresh waters to the death; he caught where he was heading. That burning. He listened for fire engines. O the chimneys. Quiet everywhere: here was the street where Nellie Sachs and her old mother had once lived. The poet’s flat; the poet’s windows. All moribund there. He came to the end of Bergsundsstrand at a boiling pace, overheated under his scarf and cap. The few cars with their sleepless headlights slipped by like slow cats. Stockholm, an orderly city, has its underlife, its hidden wakeful. Whoever owns a secret in Stockholm turns and turns in the night emptiness, but not in sleep.

Under the screen of revolving flakes the steeples had the look of whirling Merlin hats. Twenty streets behind him, the voices of Gunnar and Anders, beating, flying. Gull cries. Even now, when he was not there. Rodomontade, long-winded rococo affectations, what poseurs! Shelfworn, shopworn, scarred and marred. It was mainly their scratches that took Lars’s love, their weakness, their comedown. They were like Tiu, Odin’s son, god of war, god of victory. First Fanrir the wolf bites off one whole hand. Then all the rest of powerful Tiu—head, torso, and three strong remaining limbs—is reduced to being only Tuesday. Also, Lars loved their maimed scribblers’ odor, pale and dimly prurient, a fuminess skimmed from the Morgontörn’s omnipresent staleness, like some fungus regenerated out of antiquity. For all Lars knew, he too was infiltrated by this smell. The mice were innocent. Their militarily clean pellets left no scent.

That roasting in the air. His own sweat. The exertion. His legs like gyros. O the chimneys of armpits, moist and burning under wool. Ahead, he made out the mullioned door of Heidi’s shop. She was often among the nighttime wakeful. A woman of sixty-five or so, a round little bundle, with a girl’s name. She wore curly bangs, like a girl; but they were white and sheeplike, and dropped in ringlets over two serenely misplaced black mustaches that jumped intermittently above reckless eyes. Reckless and cherry-dark, with toughened skins for lids. Saccharine, to call a child after a figment in a novel. The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh. The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk. Leave it to the Germans to pull out, like some endless elastic