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

attic room. He met his rent by getting a job as a messenger boy on a newspaper. Already he knew his future was print.

All this Heidi listened to in a concentration of rage. He was just then describing how he had invented a new surname for himself straight out of the dictionary—she stopped him right there in the middle. She shut the lights, locked the door, and drew him with her into her back room; she sat him down under the crystal daffodil and spat her dry gargle into her tiny sink. “Why do you tell me these things? Why should I want to know? You think you’re the only one with a story? Stockholm is full of refugees! All my customers are refugees! Professors! Intellectuals! I have my own story!”

Lars curved his thumb into the darkened shop. “You’ve got my father out there. In the original. This is the only place in Stockholm that has him in the original.”

“Your father! There’s something wrong with you, you’re a Verrückter, how can you say who your father is with a story like that!”

He gave this some thought. “Well, in a way you’re right—I don’t know who my mother is. I’ve never found out.”

“You don’t know your father either!”

“No, no, you can see the resemblance. All those photos—”

“What photos, where? Where did you get them, who gave them to you?”

“Photos in books, I mean.”

“Oh, books! If they don’t come from family—”

“I’ve got every detail of his face, I know it by heart. I know almost every word he ever wrote. Father and son. We look alike, two peas in a pod. It’s the same nose, you see how my chin comes to a point? And it isn’t even a matter of looks. There’s an affinity. His voice. His mind.”

A great hornlike snort burst from her. But she was letting him have his say; she wasn’t throwing him out. He watched her dip a big spoon into the tin on the shelf behind the lamp—right into what might have been Dr. Eklund’s ashes. She was brewing him some coffee. “Theatrical. Self-pity. You’re an orphan? An orphan is alive, what’s the matter with that? Besides, you’re a Swede like any Swede. Why be a fool and dredge all that up—nobody cares, old Nazi stories, you think anyone cares any more?”

“They shot him in the streets. Murdered. The underground got him false papers—in those times forgery was a sacrament. They had already found him a hiding place. But he wouldn’t leave home. He was glued there.”

“And where did you learn all this? Also from books?”

“I’ve read everything. There’s nothing I haven’t read. I’ve read Cinnamon Shops a thousand times over. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read the other one. But in translation. It’s my father, I need to read the original—”

“The original!”

“The Polish.”

“The Polish, yes.” She splashed a full cup down before him. “A stranger, a lunatic probably, comes into my shop, mangles the merchandise, doesn’t buy a thing, claims he’s a Pole, can’t read a word of Polish, and here I am serving him coffee! God knows what my husband would make of this. Dr. Eklund,” she said, “takes an interest in original behavior. Dr. Eklund and I understand exactly what you are.”

“I’ve announced what I am.”

“An impostor. Another refugee impostor. It’s nothing new, believe me! Half my customers have made themselves up. Fabricators. Every Pole of a certain age who walks in here, male or female, used to be a famous professor in Warsaw. Every Hungarian was once ambassador to Argentina. The French are the worst. I’ve never had one of those in my shop who didn’t turn out to be just the one who got Sartre started on the Talmud. By now I’ve counted twenty-five female teachers of Talmud—poor Mlle. de Beauvoir.”

“It’s a Polish teacher I want,” Lars said.

“Done. I’ll get you the fanciest professor I can think of. There’s a lady from Cracow, extremely literary, in fact a member of the nobility, a Radziwill actually, related to the husband of the sister of the American Onassis—she used to own a hat store. She gives Polish lessons. Her husband was just as good a Communist as the ones who chased him out. You’ll have to play along and call her Doctor, unless she makes you call her Princess. Her father was a maître d’. Her mother was a milliner.”

He saw then that what he had taken for rage was something else: a fever of isolation. She was often alone, especially after hours—Dr. Eklund, she said, had his late rounds at the hospital; sometimes he had to go out of town. But the shop was quiet even in the middle of the day. An afternoon might pass without a single customer. Lars observed that the crammed window display seldom changed. The only books in the window that shook off their dust were the Royal Family and the photographs of northern landscapes. The tourists bought these, Americans and English and Germans. There was not so much demand for foreign books—you could find practically anything in translation. As for the refugees, they had all learned Swedish long ago. The Academy was always ordering foreign books, of course, but it got them directly from abroad; it wouldn’t bother with a little local bookshop, would it? And off the beaten path, who even knew it was there? Despite these troubles, Heidi said, she managed to make ends meet, but if it weren’t for Dr. Eklund’s encouragement—not to mention his tiding her over now and then—where would she be? The shop ran—well, not on faith, she didn’t believe in the invisible, but on something else just as unreliable: it ran on human oddity. You never could tell what kind of human curiosity might walk in and spend two thousand kroner. Dr. Eklund was a great collector of such curiosities. Tangled lives appealed to him. From his patients he picked up the most bizarre histories. A bookshop is the same—a magnet for freaks, gypsies, nomads. Last