The Messiah of Stockholm, Cynthia Ozick [motivational novels TXT] 📗

not only because it did not conform—he had been seized in infancy by an unnatural history—but because this father of his was a legend, a dream; or, more exactly, an errant seed thrown back by a corpse. Lars had never learned his mother’s name, but his father had become his craze.

His father, a high school art teacher who had lived obscurely in an obscure Galician town, was the author of certain peculiar tales. His name was Bruno Schulz.

For the sake of these tales Lars had saturated himself in Polish, at first on his own, and afterward with an eccentric elderly Polish woman, a retired professor of literature from the University of Cracow; she had escaped to Stockholm with her Jewish husband in the uproar of 1968. Her origins, she said, were high, a family of old blood, used to rigor and noblesse oblige—she would give him his money’s worth. She pressed her pupil hard, thrusting Lars from his primer straight into the bosky forests of the between-the-wars modernists. By now Lars was quick enough. He read with a clumsy tongue but a lightning eye, in pursuit of his father’s tales.

On account of this father Lars shrank himself. He felt he resembled his father: all the tales were about men shrinking more and more into the phantasmagoria of the mind. One of them was about a man in his sleep, his fall into the bedclothes—like a swimmer against the current; like the captive of a great bowl of dough.

2

in casting off his old married ways, Lars had kept nothing but his little daughters paint set. The telephone on which he had had so many quarrels with Ulrika after she had run off with the child—out! The typewriter that linked him to the literary stewpot—out! He meant to purify his life. Anyone who wanted to get in touch with him had to go through the receptionist at the Morgontörn. All these circumstances—these predicaments—gave Lars, God knows how, the face of a foetus; it was as if he was waiting for his dead father to find him, and was determined to remain recognizable.

Yet he was already well into graying. The tall pelt of his head was filigreed with strings the color of goat-milk cheese, and between his entirely beautiful eyes there were two well-established vertical trenches. He was probably on the brink of needing glasses; it was his habit to pull on the cords of his eyebrow muscles, which in turn shot folds across the lids, and these, squeezing down, sharpened his view and deepened the trenches. In spite of such gnarling and graying, he could still be taken, by a stranger on the elevator, for a messenger boy.

On the Morgontörn he was one of three reviewers. The others were Gunnar Hemlig, the Wednesday reviewer, and Anders Fiskyngel, who had Friday. Lars was stuck with Monday: it was settled long ago that no one paid any attention to the culture page on Monday mornings. On buses you could see people yawning their way straight past the headlines to the letters columns, where the anti-alcohol grouches held forth. As the week wore on, the somnolence that characterized the Morgontörn’s early-edition constituency began to lift. By Wednesday it was ready for Gunnar, an authority on the contemporary American novel; he taught a course on the side, which he called, in the undulations of his recognizable snicker, “The Marriage of Mailer and Jong.” By Friday, Anders—who had the favored spot—found the Morgontörn’s readers alert to any outbreak of temperament. Spy thrillers, royalty, sports, the culinary arts—Anders was insolent in all these categories, and his range of negative specialties was always being augmented. Friday’s customers were wide-awake. Nearly a quarter of all the letters the Morgontörn received were addressed to Anders Fiskyngel; he was a kind of provocateur, particularly on the subject of flatbread. He was nasty to any cookbook that praised it. It was an instance, he said, of Swedish provincialism.

Few letters came for Lars Andemening. Mondays were worthless. Lars was unread, unmolested, unharassed; he was free. This freedom sent him to bed before evening—not out of indolence. On the wall over his bed he had taped two mottoes:

even leonardo da vinci had only twenty-four hours in a day.

******

archimedes also sometimes slept.

These were not jokes. Lars, unlike Gunnar, was untouched by the comic muse. He had the chasteness of a consummate gravity. He had long ago thrown himself on the altar of literature. If he slept—secretly—in the afternoon, it was to wring two days out of one.

In the morning he read. This meant that he started on the first page and finished on the last. He was not a skimmer or a sniffer; he read meticulously, as if, swimming, he were being filmed in slow motion. The text swept him away and consumed him—he was like a man (the man in the bedclothes in his father’s tale) drawn down by an undertow. Slowly, slowly, the imaginary cinema recorded his heavy resisting gulps. Reading was as exhausting to him as the long, weighted strokes of a drowning man. He gave it all his power. Then he cooked himself a bowl of farina and fell into the wilderness of his quilt.

When he woke at seven into full blackness of night, he felt oddly fat—he was sated with his idea, he understood what he thought. He sat down immediately to his review. He wrote it straight off, a furnace burning fat. It was as if his pen, sputtering along the line of rapid letters it ignited, flung out haloes of hot grease. The air brightened, then charred. He was very quick now, he was encyclopedic, he was in a crisis of inundation. He drove through all the caged hypotheses of his author—some were overt and paced behind bars, others were camouflaged, dappled; he was a dervish, he penetrated everything. When he was within sight of conquest he began to fuzz over with vertigo; he was a little frightened of all he