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

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 determined old strictness. Lars was not extremely afraid of her; but he was a little afraid.

In the skimpy vestibule of her shop he stamped his boots so hard they splashed up icy rods from their treads. He saw the light in the narrow back room, a sort of corridor behind the high rear bank of bookshelves, and supposed she was totting up her invoices, or else unpacking the week’s shipment. She was unusually strong for such a small rotundity, such a thick globular dwarf of a woman, and could heave those dead-weight overseas boxes on her own; though when the shop was open she kept a Turkish boy to lug things. Or, he reflected, she might be sitting under her funny old lamp (the lamp, she said, was all she thought worth bringing with her from Germany, not counting a handful of books), reading whatever had just arrived—she read her wares, in nearly any language. Her wares were international. They glimmered out at him from the display window: shining rectangles, like portraits in frames—the newest Americans, North and South, the oldest Russians, that large and steady company of nineteenth-century Englishmen and Englishwomen, a modicum of Czechs and Poles, a whole forest of Balzac; and then the dictionaries and encyclopedias. The shopwindow was stuffed from floor to ceiling: a step-pyramid crowded, on each level, with all the alphabets. Erect in the middle of it, like the thrusting central rose in a wreath, or like a sentry guarding a vault, stood—it really did stand, as if on lion’s legs—a formidable edition of Drottningholm: ett kungligehem, with color pictures of the Royal Family: the wavy-haired King tall and fair and unperturbed, the two little Princesses charming in a garden, the diffident little Prince in a sailor suit on a damask sofa, and the shiveringly beautiful Queen, with her brilliant teeth and black Iberian eyes. The Queen was said to be brainy, a descendant of Marrano nobility. Secret Jews, long attenuated. Heidi was now a Swedish patriot. When the Royal Family was sold out, she displayed one of those oversized landscape volumes, itself as extensive as a plain, showing photographs of windmills and castles and deer galloping over snow and the sea gulls of Lake Vänern and a statue of Selma Lagerlöf, seated, with her hair in a bronze bun.

Lars took out his penknife and tapped on the glass door. No one heard. He tapped again. She might have left the light on and gone home to her flat. Lars had made her his confidante—Heidi was one of those few who knew what he knew—and still he had never been to her flat. Her flat was no more a certainty than any other rumor; no more a certainty than the rumor of her husband, Dr. Eklund. The true signature of her matrimonial relation appeared in gold letters painted across the shopwindow: bokhandlare. When she turned the key in the evening she embraced her two-burner stove and her square small table and her cot. Among the bumpy configurations of cartons in the back room she had a tiny refrigerator and a tiny water closet and a blue-speckled porcelain pot and that funny old German lamp—the shade was a crystal daffodil—and a teakettle. She had no bath at all, though there was a secluded hollow, a sort of alley, that might have closeted a shower. And no radio: nothing for music. She was indifferent to music. It was as if she were a forest gnome who had fashioned a bare little hut for herself, with only one ornament: the necessary daffodil.

The light wavered, dimmed, returned. A figure had passed in front of it. Once again Lars smacked his penknife against the glass. And there was Heidi with her blurred German screech—“All right, all right, the world isn’t coming to an end, you’ll crack my door!”—wheeling across her shop to let him in.

Lars resumed stamping his boots in the vestibule. “Hej,” he said.

“Well, get them off. I won’t have you drip those things in here. For heaven’s sake, the floor’s been mopped. Just leave them. You always show up at my busiest time.”

“You’re closed up tight!” But he was used to absurdities in her. She liked to topple him.

“When else do you think I can get anything done? Not with customers underfoot all day. I’m sorting out a delivery. I’m trying to price things. My God, I’m concentrating. And now you’ll want coffee.”

“No,” he said, standing on the doorsill in his stocking feet. “Sprit.”

“No wonder. You’re a stick of ice. A snowman.”

“I’m boiling hot,” he contradicted, and followed her into the back room. “I stink of sweat.” He was not in the least meek with her. He was meek with Gunnar and Anders because they deserved it; they were insufficient. But with Heidi he could be coarse. It hid his small fear.

“That you do. You smell like a rutting sheep. I’ve got your order—all these Slavs. Don’t expect them to come cheap. They weren’t easy to get hold of, believe me. Two are in English, from the States. I couldn’t find them any other way.” A long yawn, sumptuous, leisurely, disclosed the gold in her molars. A sleep-crease marked her left cheek. Pillow and blanket were in disorder on her cot. She hauled a canvas bag off a shelf behind the German lamp and drew out a pair of paperbacks. “Ludvík Vaculík, there. Bohumil Hrabel, there. Witold Gombrowicz, I’ve got him right here. Nobody but you wants such stuff.”

“There was supposed to be another—”

“The other Polish one. Where did I put…here. Tadeusz Konwicki, here