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

he is. Hardcover. Him I could track down only in Polish. Your native language,” she said with a lift of her sardonic little shoulder.

She handed him a tiny glass of vodka and yawned again. Stingy. He saw she was going to stay annoyed with him. She knew what he knew; she knew it all, every permutation of every speculation; they had talked and talked about what he knew until it was all ground down into granules. His history—his passion—was no more than a pile of salt between them. There was no longer anything left for them to sift through. She had, besides, a hard skepticism for every grain of it—even for his Polish, though she had herself introduced him to his teacher, one of her own customers. It was the cast of her mind to run from self-irony to blatancy—insofar as Lars could guess anything at all about what her mind was like. Her Swedish was cocky and pliant, but it had the whole tune of German, and when she let out into it, as she frequently did, a German syllable or two, it seemed to Lars that he could, for just that instant, look down through a trapdoor into a private underground chamber where no one was allowed to follow. For all her noisiness, she was bitingly private. Her husband, for instance—the mysterious, the distant, the vaporous Dr. Eklund—was either a psychoanalyst or a gastroenterologist: she hinted sometimes at one, sometimes at the other. And her life before—what was that? She wanted not to be what she had been before. She had arrived in Stockholm after the war, like so many others. She had been quick to marry Dr. Eklund.

Between Heidi’s back room and the public space of the shop a fence of books reared up. Now and then Lars imagined that Dr. Eklund was hiding out there on the other side, beyond the reach of the daffodil’s yellow arc. Or he imagined that Dr. Eklund was dead. Cremated. His remains were in the big coffee tin on the shelf behind the lamp; Heidi was a widow. It occurred to Lars that he would like to marry such a woman, independent, ungenial, private, old; a kind of heroine.

He was glad she was old. It meant she was prepared to be proprietary—the old have a way of taking over the young. She regarded Lars as her discovery—a discovery four years in the past that, she said, she had grown to regret. She had stumbled on him kneeling next to his briefcase among the S’s in foreign fiction—a new face in the shop, and already he was dawdling there, for an hour or more, over a copy of Cinnamon Shops in Polish. She clapped her hands at him, the way you clap your hands to shoo away a harmless animal, and he circled slowly round to absorb her anger, not startled, but oddly distracted, like someone who has had a vision: it came to him instantly that he would tell this old woman what he knew about himself. The shape of her head drew him—small, jumbled, those curly bangs white as a sheep fallen over the wobbly mustaches. He had never seen such eyebrows. Her head was a sheep’s head, but she was as shrewd and impatient as a lion. She warned him that she wouldn’t allow her merchandise to look shopworn before sale; he was in plenty of trouble with her—she had been watching him turn the pages over; a hundred times. It was true. He had washed his fingers in that half-familiar dread print like a butcher with a bloody sheep in his grip, or like a tug dragging a river for a body.

“My father wrote this,” he told her.

She seized the book from his hands and slipped it back into its slot on the shelf of foreign S’s.

“It’s five o’clock,” she said. “We’re closing now.”

“I would buy it,” Lars said, “but I can’t really read it yet.”

“Then go home and learn Polish.”

“I’m doing that,” he said, and pulled his Polish grammar out of his briefcase to show her.

“You bought that somewhere else. We don’t carry that, it’s not the best one.”

“I’m a refugee. I was born in Poland.” He shoved away his grammar and reached down again for Cinnamon Shops. “My native language, and I can’t read it.”

“If you’re not going to purchase that book,” she said sharply, “put it back.”

“It’s already mine,” he said, “by inheritance.”

“Put it back, please. We’re closing now.”

He was afraid she would push him out the door. Her voice was oily, elongated, ironic: she thought him a crazy man. He stood his ground; he had chosen her, he had made up his mind. She was the one. He explained how, newborn, pulled from the fork of his mother, he was smuggled, through all the chaos over the face of the deep that was the logic of that time, to a relative in Stockholm—a poor scared refugee herself, an elderly cousin with a sliver of luck. A handful of other infants had been spirited away from Poland—Poland overrun by Nazis—and squeezed into Stockholm under the same auspices: a merciful Swedish traveler, well-paid, under the protection of her government’s neutrality. Like any story that hangs on suffering, chance, whim, stupidity in the right quarters, mercy and money, there was something random to it—a randomness that swelled and swelled like an abscess. The elderly cousin, lost in bewilderment, fell away, and Lars, while the war went on, found himself in the household of the widowed sister-in-law of the merciful mercenary traveler’s own cousin. This sister-in-law already had a son, and did not need another; she took Lars anyhow, despite his brown eyes, and thanked her stars as he grew that he could be mistaken—as long as no one suspected anything different—for Swedish. She did not like the looks of other nations, especially those more distant from the Arctic Circle than her own. Lars ripened into ingratitude, and at sixteen left home to live alone in someone’s