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

it, believe me. But it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if you started giving Friday a run for its money, what do you think of that?” And he said: “Keep it up, Lars. Give me two months of this kind of work and I’ll get you your own cubicle, how about it?” And he said: “Just don’t relapse. No more Broch, no more Canetti; a little Kundera goes a long way. I imagine you had to get Central Europe out of your system—I told them you’d shuck it off in the end.” And he said: “Lars, listen! You’re going to work out.”

Lars sidled around the margins of the stewpot—it never noticed him at all—and gravitated toward home and bed. “Those crocodiles,” he thought he heard Nilsson say. Or was it “Those cormorants”? Impossible to tell from such a distance—Lars was under his quilt. Over which, lightly—lightly and aloft!—The Messiah had skimmed. His eyes leaked, his nostrils were in commotion. A convulsion of fatigue. Yesterday’s missing nap; the migrations of displaced sleep. A mesmerizing cloud. He slept, in order to wake to his father’s eye.

When he woke there was only absence. Nothing formed in the black air. The empty dark sent out nothing at all. The greased beak did not seize him. The alabaster egg did not materialize. Lars threw off the quilt and stared as if his own eyeballs were two breathing bellows inflated by the bottommost power of his pumping lungs. His head was filled with the battering, plodding, butting force of that staring, that bulging. But the visitation did not occur. No sphere appeared. The author of The Messiah had withdrawn. Lars’s father’s eye did not return.

It was seven o’clock. He had not eaten all day long, as if he had deliberately undertaken a fast. But it was only because he had forgotten hunger. After defeat in battle men do not remember food. He tied on his scarf and squashed his cap over his ears. On the floor near his bed, a white patch. He bent to it, and, bending, grieved over the afterimage of Adela’s hair bundled like feathers at his feet. Dead bird. He had kicked her down: his father’s daughter. His sister, his sister. He saw then that the white patch was a page of The Messiah, overlooked in the battle and left behind. He snatched it up with the knowledge that his right hand would burst like a grenade at the touch of the sheet. He was ready to lose his right hand for the sake of an errant paragraph out of The Messiah.

The patch was not that. He picked it up: Adela’s white beret. It was not what he wanted, so he tossed it on his bed and fell into the night toward Heidi’s shop.

12

the shop was shut up and black. But a yellow mist spread forward from the back room: the lit daffodil; she was there. His boots were wet and stuck all over with grit. A matchstick had caught in the left sole. Lars began by habit to pull them off—then he thought better of it. It wasn’t his intention to please Heidi. Every evening after hours she ordered the Turkish boy to mop up; the Turkish boy wasn’t allowed to go home until the mud of the day’s customers had been washed away. Lars stamped his feet in the vestibule. Instantly he stopped stamping. He wasn’t a visitor, he wasn’t anyone’s guest. He had the right of entry—he had it in his pocket. The borrowed cold key. It went into the lock.

“Who’s there? What’s that?” A raw dark voice. The smell of something roasting. “Is it that woman? It’s that woman?”

“It can’t be. There wasn’t any knock. I told her she’d have to knock. The door’s locked.” This was Heidi, calling from behind the fence of books. She shuffled out; she had her slippers on.

“Then who is it? Why isn’t it that woman, if she’s coming? We’re closed, can’t they tell that?”

Lars said, “Mrs. Eklund—”

The raw dark fidgety voice, an actor’s voice: “It’s not that woman, it’s a man. Didn’t you close up for the night?”

“Never mind, it’s only Lars. He’s brought your key back, now you’ll have your extra. Lars,” Heidi said, “let me introduce you. Here is Dr. Olle Eklund. And here is Lars Andemening. Now you see how proper we all are. Dr. Eklund is always so fond of the forms.”

A very large man was sitting at Heidi’s little table with an almost empty teacup in front of him, smoking a pipe. He looked like an oversized sleek startled horse, with long nostrils punched into a scanty lump of cartilage, a long face, and a long tumescent head, bald and bright. His eyeglasses splashed light. The crown of his head seemed polished. He was fastidiously dressed, in a coat and vest with glinting silver buttons. He wore a silver ring on the third finger of each hand, and there was something about the buttons and the rings, and also in the way he shot out his big fingers toward Lars, that suggested a sea captain. Or else it was his seaweedy merman’s odor, mixed with the meatlike scorch of tobacco, strong and salty. His chin was well-shaved, without a visible prickle; it had a shine of its own.

Lars took the man’s hand—how hot it was—and shook it. “Is it Dr. Eklund?” he said.

“Dr. Eklund got back early this morning,” Heidi said. “Such a strain, such a tiring day after his trip—”

Lars examined the man. He watched him lift his cup and put it down. He watched him light a match and draw on his pipe. “I was here myself this morning,” he said.

“My little Turk told me you came by—he doesn’t like you, why is that? I was over at the flat, filling the refrigerator. It’s different with two at home.” Heidi scraped a chair out of the shadows. “Sit down, you brute, and tell us about it. You knocked