Things past and things passed on
Anita Brookner
THE MESSIAH OF STOCKHOLM by Cynthia Ozick Andre Deutsch, £9.95 Lars Andemening, his name picked out of a dictionary, is a book reviewer on a Stockholm newspaper. He has the Monday page, which nobody reads, since culture is only taken seriously towards the weekend, and besides, Lars is rebarbative, given over to Kafka and Broch and Musil and Danilo Kis, emanations of old Europe that have no place in pleasant Stockholm. With his greying hair and his innocent expression Lars is not much regarded by anyone: his two wives have fled, his little daughter has been taken to America. There is nothing about him that retains the affection or the attention. His only intimate appears to be elderly Mrs Eklund at the bookshop. He sells her his review copies and she orders for him the works of the dispossessed, all those European writers in whom he fails to interest the few who read him on a Monday.
Lars, however, is inhabited — and those who have read Cynthia Ozick's other fictions will know that the word is not used lightly — by the image of the father he never knew, since he arrived in Stockholm as just such an emanation of old Europe, from Drohobycz, he thinks, in Galicia, some 40 years ago. He was 'got in', and this is the leitmotiv of this extraordinary novel: people being got in and got out again. He has no history but one large obsession. He thinks he is the son of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer, known for several rhapsodic and cabbalistic works, and he thinks he has to find Schulz's last unfinished or lost manuscript, know as The Messiah.
This illusion or delusion keeps Lars company. Every afternoon, waking up from his nap, he sees the eye of his father regarding him; he comes to consciousness in the light of this eye. Mrs Eklund, at the bookshop, is the only person who knows of this apocalyptic parentage. Lars calls on her after hours to discuss the possible whereabouts of The Messiah and to pore over scraps of letters and photographs which she 'gets in' from Warsaw through her bookseller network. But he has no evidence, apart from his supreme and unshakeable belief, and Mrs Eklund, with her permanently absent husband, is always there to listen to him. Lars learns Polish, knows himself to be a Pole, but Stockholm is full of refugees, and his history, even his anonymity, is too common to be remark- able.
However, one day a woman turns up at this flat. She wears a white beret and carries a white plastic bag, containing, she says, the manuscript of The Messiah. She wants a translator, and Mrs Eklund has recommended Lars. She will not let him see the manuscript, although he tries to take the bag from her. It is hers by right, she says; she is Schulz's daughter; the manuscript was dug up from a cellar in Warsaw and 'got out'. Her story is elabo- rate and unconvincing, but she has two vertical frown lines between her eyes which exactly parallel the lines on Lars' own face. It is entirely possible that she is his sister. But if she is, why does he not like her? And why, with the appearance of this Adela, has his father's consoling eye disappeared, eclipsed by too much reality?
Seeking enlightenment from Mrs Eklund, late at night in the shop, Lars is introduced to Dr Eklund, for once present. This man also is distasteful to him, too much present, too adorned with rings, and smoking a scorching pipe. Dr Eklund inclines to believe in Lars' parentage, although Lars has by now given up the whole idea. At this point Adela turns up bearing a brass urn which contains the manuscript (the dialogue too is surreal). The manuscript is tipped out, and Dr Eklund, who is not a doctor at all but a handwriting expert, pronounces it to be authentic. No-one, he says, could forge Schulz's hand.
It now becomes apparent that the three of them — the Eklunds and Adela — are going to make a present to Lars of the manuscript. There is money in it, they say. It is, of course, a plot: the reader at this point feels sick. They are fraudsters, but fraudsters in a good cause; they get people in, they get people out, passports having been forged by Dr Eklund. Carefully selecting an unused match from the mess created by Dr. Eklund's pipe, Lars strikes it and drops it into the urn. The manuscript goes up in flames.
Delivered of his obsession (and his parentage) Lars becomes wealthy, substan- tial and popular. He lowers his sights, reviews detective stories and romances, and is rewarded with the Sunday page. He even has a word processor. When Adela, now known as Mrs Vaz, turns up again in his office, he doesn't pay much attention. The only thing he notices — and he has always noticed this — is a smell of burning. He used to think this was left by the feathers of a flock of flying angels. Now, successful, 'in the blue light of Stockholm, among zebra fumes, he grieved'.
Cynthia Ozick is a remarkable writer, although this is not her best book. That honour belongs to Envy, or Yiddish in America. Obsessed by the history of the martyrs or the dispossessed, she is striking- ly unfashionable, although The Messiah of Stockholm owes something to Philip Roth, to whom the book is dedicated. Roth's The Ghost Writer and The Prague Orgy both deal with this theme which is a variant of the dybbuk myth, whereby the living are inhabited by the dead — in fact a supersti- tion or even a heresy. Once a dybbuk takes on a corporeal form, that is to say, occu- pies the body of a living person, the anathema must be pronounced. The dead of the Holocaust have a tenacious afterlife, and it may be an act of piety to remain in contact with them. Thus the myth of the dybbuk can be revived even in these unbelieving times — can be but should not. By defusing her potent story into a com- monplace of fraud and deception Cynthia Ozick keeps on the right side of the law but appears to believe it a close-run thing.
It never is. We are never taken in. The obsession is too old, too thin to convince, and this is the book's weakness. What is tenacious, and this is the book's strength, is the miasma of uncertainty that surrounds these people, their lack of memory, their subterfuges, their terrible inheritance. Written eccentrically, jerkily, with flashes of topicality, The Messiah of Stockholm has at its centre the most important of themes: remembrance. Of Lars it is said, 'He was one of the century's casualties, in his own way a victim. He took on every- one's loss, everyone's foolish grief. Foolish because unstinting. Rescue was the only thought he kept in his head — he was arrogant about it, he was steady, he wanted to salvage every scrap of paper all over Europe. Europe's saviour! His head was full of Europe — all those obscure languages in all those shadowy places where there had been all those shootings — in the streets, in the forests. He had attached himself to the leavings of tyranny, tragedy, confusion.'
Cynthia Ozick is an American writer. Her brief, however, is to address herself to just such a task.
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