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

He said humbly, “I once had a child. She was taken away, I don’t have her any more.”

“Platonic. Literary.” She didn’t believe him, and why should she? It was himself saying it: a father-inventor can just as easily invent a child. “Isn’t anything of yours stuck in the here and now? You should ask yourself if you exist. Maybe you’re only someone’s theory. Someone’s presupposition.” She swooped up her little boy. “You lovers of literature. You parasites. That’s why I came. To make sure you know.”

She was without sympathy. He did not know what it was he was meant to know.

“You finished it off. Cremated. It’s gone. The very one. The only one. It was what it was.”

“Dr. Eklund’s facsimile.” How blurred; how weak.

“The Messiah,” she pronounced: her face was locked; permanent; a live copper mold. “From Drohobycz. Via Warsaw. That one.”

“It’s you saying it,” he said. “Adela says it. So much for that.”

“Burned. Annihilated. Understand!” she commanded.

“You want to get even, that’s why. The forger’s daughter.”

“It was what it was. He does passports, that’s all. He can’t do anything else. At least he’s never tried. He gets people in and out, why don’t you listen to Heidi? He can get people anywhere. My mother goes where she pleases. And so do I.” She was, he saw, gathering herself up, along with her son. She was on her way, wherever that might be. “The last brainchild of Drohobycz,” she told him, “gone up in smoke.”

Thespian!

Refugee impostor!

He could not tell whether she would choose the elevator or the stairs. To his surprise, he heard a double clatter in the hollow of the stairwell, as rapid as a sewing-machine stitch: the boy’s footsteps drumming after hers. She was without sympathy, why was that? She had the habit of obedience. She marched for her father. She was marching those little legs down.

It gave Lars as much time as he needed; he did not need much. He had forgotten which drawer of Nilsson’s bruised old desk he had shoved it into. He splashed through one drawer after another—empty, nothing of worth in any of them. And there it was: the white beret, sticky with Morgontörn damp. He had carried it to the Morgontörn on the day after he left his old flat. The quilt was abandoned: heaped on the leather chair with its cracked leg, in the angle of the hallway.

He ran to the top of the stairwell—he could not see the mother or the child, but from the pattering stitches he understood that already they were close to the lowest landing.

“Mrs. Vaz!” he called into dim vertical air. “Your hat! Take back your hat!” and let it fall, spiraling, down and down and down.

17

not that he believed her. Now and then he discovered that he did; mainly he did not.

What went on troubling him was the smell—that smell of something roasting—all through Stockholm. It was a plague in every corner of the city, no matter how cleanly the bright wind came. Sometimes it seemed to lift from the baffled waters of the locks; sometimes it steamed out of the tips of steeples. It always found him out, wherever he was, whatever the season. It was as if Stockholm, burning, was slowly turning into Africa: the smell, winter or summer, of baking zebra.

He knew this was a hallucination—it was a sort of hallucination—Heidi would have insisted it was a hallucination—it was a fancy. By the end of the year he had nearly stopped thinking about the smell, except when he awoke in the morning; it was always in his clothes in the morning.

The stewpot, for its part, had gone back to not taking much notice of Lars Andemening: though his mail was gratifyingly plentiful and Nilsson had added (despite the envious pallor of Gunnar Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel) a Sunday plum to his Monday and his Tuesday.

Yet it happened on occasion—not very frequently—that Lars grieved for his life. Not because he had failed to purify it. And not because of the lost Messiah. And not because he was an elderly orphan, and had put his finger into a dictionary to needle out a name. And not because of that perjured eye, thrown like a broken blind coal among the cinders of the brass amphora.

When, less and less often, the smell flushed up out of the morning’s crevices, Lars inside the narrow hallway of his skull caught sight of the man in the long black coat, hurrying with a metal garter box squeezed under his arm, hurrying and hurrying toward the chimneys. And then, in the blue light of Stockholm, among zebra fumes, he grieved.

about the author

Cynthia Ozick is the author of Trust, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, Bloodshed and Three Novellas, Levitation, The Cannibal Galaxy, and of a collection of essays, Art and Ardor. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1982. She lives in New Rochelle, New York, with her husband and daughter.

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