The Messiah of Stockholm Read Free

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