The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (beginner reading books for adults TXT) 📕

She piled up his order on her little back-room table. “What names! Didn’t I say these fellows would fetch you back?” She yawned again, but with a certain willed smugness. “Why didn’t you come last week? When I phoned?”

“Anders picked up your message from the receptionist’s desk an hour ago,” Lars said.

“An hour ago? That paper you work for! They’d be a week behind in reporting the end of the world.” A wild alertness took hold of her. “You’re too late, by days. I thought you’d have the sense to get here right away. I kept her waiting that whole afternoon.”

“Who was that?”

“A woman with an interest in Polish.”

She was being wary, tricky. In his three weeks away he had not forgotten how dangerous she could be, how she could topple him.

“If the Princess wants me back,” he said, “she’s too late. She threw me out when I thought I still needed her. I’ve got no use for her now,” but he recognized in his own croak—swallowing down the bit of vodka Heidi had given him when he asked for it—that something new lay between them.

“No, no, not Mrs. Rozanowska. I told them who at the Morgontörn. I told them. They said they’d put it in the message. My God, Lars, if you had your own phone in your own flat like an ordinary person—”

He pulled out the wadded-up square Anders had brought him and looked at it. mrs. eklund phoned about your sister. The snow had somehow crept into his pocket and dampened everything in it. The preposterous words had begun to run. “I haven’t got a sister. There’s no sister anywhere in it at all. You know that.”

“That’s probably true. I didn’t think she was your sister. It smelled fishy to me from start to finish.” Heidi formulated one of her calculating scowls—she was all scandalous bliss. “I don’t say there wasn’t a resemblance, but the fact is she hasn’t come back. She said she’d come back and she hasn’t. I asked her to leave it for you but she wouldn’t. I don’t blame her, if it’s genuine.”

“Leave what? If what’s genuine?”

“My dear boy”—she had never before addressed him this way, him with his graying head! but there was an importance in it that penetrated—“she has the manuscript of The Messiah in a little white plastic bag. She carries it around like that. The original. The thing itself. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“The Messiah? No one has that. It disappeared. It doesn’t exist.”

“She’s got it in her bag.”

“Who has, for God’s sake?”

“Your sister.”

“There isn’t any sister. A fraud. You’ve been taken in.”

“She didn’t say she was your sister. I only drew a conclusion.”

“You drew a conclusion!” he howled.

“Well, if she calls herself the daughter of the author of The Messiah, and you’re the son of the author of The Messiah, that makes her your sister. It stands to reason.”

“It stands to reason! The daughter! There isn’t any daughter! There isn’t any Messiah!”

“Not so long ago you had a different opinion.”

“The manuscript’s gone, there’s no one alive who thinks anything else.”

“You said yourself it might have been hidden.”

“Whoever had it was taken away. Whoever had it is dead.”

“She isn’t dead. She told me the reason she’s got it is just because she is his daughter. No one else could have gotten hold of it. It was saved explicitly for her.”

Lars said, “There’s no room in the story for another child. It’s not feasible. It can’t be. You know the story as well as I do. There’s only me.”

“Well, maybe there’s you and maybe there’s not. And if there’s you, why can’t there be another one?”

“What did she say? What exactly?”

“That the man who wrote The Messiah was her father.”

“But he’s my father!” Lars cried.

Heidi beamed out a rascally gleam. “If the manuscript doesn’t exist, and the daughter doesn’t exist—”

“You know there’s no daughter.”

“—then maybe there’s no son either.”

“I’m here. Here I am.”

“That’s just what she said. A biblical annunciation. And every bit as convinced of it as you.”

Wearing a white beret. Not too distant from Lars’s own age, judging from the hair, which was just beginning to whiten, though only on one side of a slightly archaic middle part; the face was as clear as a baby’s. There certainly was a resemblance, not acute—she wasn’t a twin—but ripe, somehow, with hints. The similarities were in the absences, in the sort of look she didn’t have. She didn’t look content. She didn’t look—well, normal. These negative hints made Heidi pay attention, though not right away—Heidi was on the watch for Dr. Eklund. Dr. Eklund was returning momentarily from Copenhagen. The woman had come in out of the blue—out of the snow—with her white plastic bag. Heidi kept her eye on it—shoplifters carry such things. But the woman didn’t go near the bookshelves at all; she turned in the aisles and turned again. The shop had a wild morning brightness: snow-dazzle freakishly shot through with slashes of early sunlight, too sharp to bear. All that exaggerated whiteness seemed to be crowding into the narrow vestibule of the shop, and had swept the woman straight through the doorway. She asked the Turkish boy for the proprietor—it was the proprietor she wanted, because of those heaps of foreign books in the window. The foreign books had lured her; she had never noticed this shop before. She was used to walking all over Stockholm, but she was still new to it. You could tell from her accent how new. She had something astonishing, something stupendous, in her bag. Was there anyone here—perhaps even the proprietor—who could read Polish? Or who had access to the local Polish intelligentsia? In this very bag, the one in her hand (it was light enough, it wasn’t a big tome), lay the work of a genius who happened—she wasn’t going to be shy about this, she wouldn’t hide his light under a bushel!—who happened to be her own father. Dead. Murdered. A victim, long ago, but immortal.