The Messiah of Stockholm Read Free Page A

better. Chasing after the impenetrable. Prince of the indecipherable.
That’s
what’s eating Monday’s brain. What we’ve got in Lars is a Monday Faust.”
    Lars finished tying on his scarf. “Gentlemen, I’m off.”
    The elevator rattled down, swaying on threadbare ropes. All the way to the bottom Lars could hear them clanging away, hammer and tongs. He rarely saw either of them during regular hours; in the
clarity of midday he thought them weak, bleached. They were big Viking men, crest-fallen. Gunnar had his own kettle in his own cubicle. He kept his things meticulously separate. Thirty years ago he
had come to Stockholm from Göteborg; Anders had arrived about the same time from Malmö. They were both night workers who slept the morning away and break-fasted at four in the afternoon.
When the daylight foam of ordinariness—secretaries and telephones—cleared out, it pleased them to prowl among the stacks of reviewers’ galleys, sniffing after literary prey and
flushing out the mice. Even the Niagara of the overhead toilet box in the men’s room seemed to them more momentous after midnight. Though they went on contending about this and
that—they charged each other with negativism, self-denigration, narrowness—they saw eye to eye on everything; they were privy to what most mattered. They had all the news—which
translators cut corners (they agreed that no one could tell the difference between Sven Strömberg’s Swedish and Sven Strömberg’s Spanish), whose lover had just switched from
one critic to another, who was hanging by a hair.
    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 multi-colored 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