The Messiah of Stockholm Read Free Page B

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
    T HERE WAS A BITTER wind now, lording it over the back 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 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
omni-present 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 belt of horrible sweetness, all that molasses woe. Heidi, in self-appointed exile, denied any twinge of
Heimweh
; she spat on it. She was practical and impatient, and had
long ago given up ridiculing her name. In the last decades, she explained, it had, in fact, begun to suit her. It was as if by the principle of her own obstinacies she had changed its disposition:
from tremulous edelweiss to the forces of a