=2013 Books Read=

The Messiah of Stockholm
Cynthia Ozick

Unmarked, of course, silent as a predator, the long black sedan pulls to the curb. It's there before you know it, like a cat upon a sparrow. I've feared this all along, and yet I go on courting arrest. I shouldn't be out walking, a woman alone, it's more than dangerous, it's downright foolish. And then there's the curfew. The siren sounded over an hour ago. I've been at my book club's reading group again. We meet once a week. We've been reading The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick.

The back door of the sedan is thrown open. A man leans out one hand still on the door handle. "How about a lift, young lady?"

His face is thin, his smile rubbery. He's wearing a long black leather trench coat, and, underneath, the sleek, gleaming black uniform of the Internal Security Service. Not a Nazi uniform, the Nazis are ancient history, but all uniforms are basically the same uniform. A point on a continuum. Just as all patriotism at its extreme is Nazism.

"I prefer to walk. It's not far."

"Nonsense. It's beginning to rain. Come inside. It's warm and dry. Out there, you'll catch your death." By way of assurance, he displays his humorless, death's-head grin.

It's the same old dream again. I can see he won't take no for an answer. It's not a question that he's asking. It's not an invitation that he's offering. He looks away and motions me brusquely inside the car.

It's best to obey, up to a point. He slides back into the dark interior and I climb inside. The door, as if on its own, shuts with a sound hushed and well-machined. Shuts, definitively, I can't help but think, like the lid of a coffin.

Then I wake up.

***

His name is Bruno Schulz. And he cannot wake up. He doesn't have that luxury. If he wakes up, he will return to the horrors of the real world and he will die.

He is, in ordinary life, an unremarkable school teacher. But his "real" identity marks him as a visionary artist and writer of fantastical tales. Up to this point in his life, age fifty, he has compiled two collections of stories "Cinnamon Shops" and "Sanitarium Under the Sign of the Hourglass." These magical, absurdist fables out-Kafka Kafka in their weirdness and poignancy. But few know this for at this time Schulz is all but unread except for a handful of admiring friends. Tonight, this virtually unknown man is walking through the streets of Nazi-occupied Poland with a loaf of bread. He is returning home through the restricted sector. Jews are not allowed in this neighborhood after dark, but Schulz has protection. He tries to sidestep the Gestapo officer striding towards him. But the officer purposely sidesteps with him, blocking his path. Schulz feels his heart sink. This is a dance he cannot refuse. He carries papers permitting him passage, but that doesn't mean that he can't be harassed, that he can't be abused.

"I know you," the Gestapo man declares. "You're Landau's Jew."

His voice rings out on the quiet street like an accusation. But what is there to accuse? Schulz does not deny it. So this man knows him. Yes, it's true. He has been fortunate enough to have the patronage of a ranking Gestapo officer who has seen and admired Schulz's drawings. Schulz has even drawn a mural depicting a fairy tale on the bedroom wall of the officer's son. For his artistic skill, Schulz has been given a certain degree of protection.

"May I pass then?" Schulz asks. "The hour is late and I should be home. Even with the proper papers."

"Yes, you should be home. But you won't be going there tonight, Jew."

Bruno sighs. It is so tiresome. Will he be beaten up and arrested or merely humiliated? No, the Gestapo man probably won't beat him up, at least not too badly, knowing he is Landau's Jew. He often feels guilty getting these special privileges, but what practical point would refusing them prove? A man is given enough of a burden of misery in life. What harm is there in accepting what luck comes his way every so often. So long as it hurts no one else. And now the "gift" itself has turned into another few pounds of misery in the form of this belligerent Gestapo agent bearing some sort of grudge against his patron, who has recognized Schulz as "Landau's Jew." Isn't that just the way? The irony and absurdity of life, where a blessing turns a curse and, sometimes, though far less often, vice-versa? Should he produce his papers anyway? He begins to do so when he sees the Walther pistol in the Gestapo agent's fist. What is this then? He looks up questioningly, daring in his puzzlement to look the Nazi eye-to-eye for the first time.

"A Jew for Jew," the Gestapo officer laughs, barking like a Doberman. "He killed mine. Now I kill his."

This must be a dream, Schulz thinks, lying in the gutter, bleeding. How did this happen? He heard no shots. There is surprisingly little pain. That is because he has instinctively decided that the entire encounter is a dream; in fact, his entire life has been a dream, a monstrous nightmarish dream that he only dreamt he remembered. Lying there, close to death, he begins to tell himself a story and immediately he finds him walking down the Street of Crocodiles, which, as it happens, is the title and subject of one his most famous tales. But the story he tells himself now is even stranger, even more fantastic than any he has ever written. And he must keep telling it to himself. For every sentence is another step into this new interior world, a world he is creating as he goes in order to escape his sordid dying in the gutter.

***

In literary circles, there has long-circulating rumor that Bruno Schulz was working on a third book when he died. The manuscript of this unpublished tome was to be called The Messiah and it would have been his masterpiece. So the story goes. But let's admit it: stories such as these are the stuff of literary legends and those who love books cannot resist falling under the spell of such legends.

Of course, it's a necessary part of the legend that the book must be irretrievably lost and so it is in this case. No trace of Bruno Schulz's Messiah, if it exists, if it ever existed, has ever been found. But evidence, or lack thereof, means little in the survival of a legend. In fact, such lack of evidence only feeds a legend, gives it life.

Were the pages of Schulz's lost classic scattered in the gutter the night he died, fluttering away down the street like doves scattered at the sound of the gunshots that ended their author's life? Were they hidden in the wall of a building subsequently reduced to a smoking rubble by a Russian tank when the tide of war reversed and the Soviet army swept  with inexorable vengeance toward Berlin? Perhaps the manuscript was entrusted to a friend of Bruno's, who was eventually rounded up and sent to a camp where the pages were used to stuff shoes and line threadbare coats against the cold, ultimately burned up in Hitler's furnaces? No one knows, but many have come up with answers. Most unthinkable of all...did the very man who murdered Schulz, the Gestapo officer Karl Gunther, discover the pages on Schulz's body--a grotesque irony that would be worthy of a story by Bruno Schulz himself.

***

I thought I had woken myself up, but no, I am still dreaming, or dreaming once again. The story has continued. I am with my once-a-week reading group again and we are discussing The Messiah of Stockholm. It is a novel by Cynthia Ozick and it is about the discovery of Bruno Schulz's lost manuscript, the one that he may have composed in his mind as he lay dying in a Polish gutter, at fifty, on the night of November 19th, 1942.

In Ozick's novel, a Swedish book reviewer of unknown parentage convinces himself that he is the long-lost son of Bruno Schulz, that he has inherited his "father's eye." He has no proof other than his affinity for the works and world that Schulz has left behind. This world--in all its absurdity--looks to Lars the same to him as it did to his putative father. If it is a delusion under which he lives, then Lars is content to live within a delusion; it gives his otherwise drab and meaningless life a magic and a meaning.

And who's to say what is a fantasy when one believes in it wholeheartedly? When one believes in a fantasy with a will just as strong if not stronger than others believe in what is agreed to be "reality" can not the fantasy prevail? After all, it's generally agreed that the power of the imagination is limitless, is it not? In his works, Bruno Schulz had concretized a world to rival the Nazi nightmare; and Lars has created his own reality to counter the drab existence he ekes out in Stockholm. In fact, Lars does so fine a job of imagining himself to be the son of Bruno Schulz that he attracts the attention of an old elfin bookseller named Heidi, her mysterious sea-captain husband "Dr. Elkund" who is a broker of, among other things, literary artifacts, and a young woman who claims to be the long-lost daughter of Bruno Schulz...and, therefore, Lars's own long-lost half-sister.  This young woman arrives in Stockholm with a manuscript she claims is the long-lost "Messiah."

We are in the midst of discussing this novel at my weekly book club, debating whether the bookseller and her shady husband aren't, in fact, swindlers. Whether the young woman isn't in on the plot and her manuscript a forgery meant to dupe Lars and, through him, utilizing his role as a book reviewer, a gullible public; whether Lars, himself, is really the long-lost son of Bruno Schulz or himself just another sort of "counterfeit," an ordinary man attempting to make of himself and his life something extraordinary. And we are debating whether, in the end, these sorts of lies we tell ourselves are such a bad a thing, after all, given the grim realities of life. Is it really so bad a thing to make a little magic in the world, even if, ultimately, magic is no more than a trick, a sleight-of-hand, a fraud? Isn't that better than the dark "truths" of our existence: the dreary grinding days, the dead-end jobs, the ever-present headlines of war and famine, the daily signs of our aging and diminishment, the cancer, the dying in the gutter?

We are in the midst of this heated discussion, the members of my book club and I, when the door bursts open and the windows shatter and a fog rises that replaces most of the breathable air in the room and through this sudden fog one can make out the looming, ominous shapes of the black-clad agents of Internal Security, their weapons drawn, set on overkill. They are figures in a postmodern Grimm fairy-tale, telling us through their insectoid breathing masks that we are all under arrest.

As I lie there on my belly, my wrists cuffed behind my back, gasping, my blind eyes stinging, I remember to wake myself up and once again I get away...

***

We are living in a bad time. It is a Dark Age though very few think of it as such with all the flashy gadgetry available to us, devices that we use to spirit us here and there, anywhere but away from here, the way an amputee uses an artificial limb. It is an age that has the outward look of accelerating progress, where the sounds are louder and the chatter more incessant, the lights brighter and more dazzling than they ever were before, but, in truth, what no one sees, or few see, is that this only because the dark has never before been darker.

This is what we are not meant to see.

What is the crime in reading, you might well ask. Where is the danger? There is none. By the same token, there is no merit in reading either if you read books that are merely the equivalent of what you see on television. Books that don't question anything, that don't lead you to think, that are merely passive entertainment whose added virtue, if any, are that they provide a little extra in the way of calisthenics for your eyes.

This is what is generally considered "reading" today.

***

There is something about a bookshop, not just any bookshop, not, certainly, one of those mega book malls that sell everything from greeting cards to feathered pens to children's stuff animals, but a real bookshop, the dusty, cluttered kind, where the unalphabetized volumes teeter in leaning towers in ever imminent danger of collapse and an ancient proprietor lurks somewhere or other, a bald little gnome of a man or woman, making an inventory of a moldering box of books brought in just that morning from the attic of a deceased professor of philosophy.

Real book lovers live to stumble upon little shops such as these. Their hearts pick up speed when they come upon them on some well-trafficked street, popping up seemingly from out of nowhere, sandwiched between an eyeglass outlet and a laundromat, or down a flight of broken concrete steps, a damp little basement below the level of the sidewalk, out of sight and out of mind, in the hustle-bustle of daily commerce.

For it is here, in shops such as these, that the true lover of books seeks, conscious of it or not, that one magical book that will change his or her life forever. The lost "Messiah" of Bruno Schulz is such a book. The very fact that it is lost makes it such a book. Somewhere in those uncategorized and uncategorizable stacks the manuscript exists. In it, the spell, the secret, the cure for grief and death and is perpetually awaiting our discovery.

We are always awaiting the "Messiah" in one form or another. In whatever form it takes, book or god, what we seek is that which will resurrect us into a new life. It is a variation of this archetypal search that Cynthia Ozick describes in her novel The Messiah of Stockholm. We never find the book we are looking for. The Messiah never comes. But it is the search, it is the expectation that revelation is just around the corner on the Street of Crocodiles that saves us. 

As it saved Bruno Schulz who bled to death in the gutter, shot by a jealous Gestapo agent, on November 19th, 1942.