The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (ereader for comics .txt) 📗

those old books of hers. “I saw what your name used to be.”

“There are plenty of Bavarian burghers called Simon. They’re all Catholic.”

“And what are you?”

“By religion? A bookseller.”

“A refugee,” he insisted, “like any refugee. You escaped. A survivor.”

“Stockholm is full of survivors,” she said; she was quiet now. She was obstinate. She was not going to yield. Instead, she held out her key. “Here, let yourself out. You’ll come back, whatever you say.”

“No. I’m not coming back. I told you.”

She slid behind him to the door. The little fear he always had of her seemed to heat up the key as he turned it; then he relinquished it into her hand.

“You’ll want to come back. Think what you’ve got on order! Poles and Czechs! Vaculík, Hrabel, Konwicki. Witold Gombrowicz! You might not want to come back for me, but for Konwicki, for Gombrowicz—”

He stepped out into the cold—she was still laughing back there, behind the door. Mockery. But it was so; for the sake of these he would return. He felt how she had overmastered him after all. He was glad to keep away. It might be weeks before she reeled him back, a helpless fish on her line, to fetch his order. All the time until then he would keep away; he would keep away with all his might. It came to him how desolate he was. He had imagined her entangled with him. It was the shooting, only the shooting, she was entangled with. His father’s skeleton.

6

on the weekend he went to visit Ulrika’s mother. She lived in the suburbs, in a section beyond the city that had once been semi-rural and was now growing more and more Turkish. Ulrika’s mother was proud of her house—it had been in the family, on the female side, for seven generations. The foundation was stone, the rest a rust-colored old brick. It struck Lars—for the first time—that Ulrika’s hair had been just this color: brick dusted all over with powdery brown. Birgitta, his first wife, was an ordinary blonde. He had not heard anything about Birgitta in over a decade. She was married again and had two small children; he knew this much, but otherwise she almost never entered his mind. Ulrika he had once been bitter against, because she had taken his daughter away to America. But the bitterness was stale, and when Ulrika’s mother in her confusion led him into the house he recognized that lately Ulrika too was seldom in his thoughts. Even his little daughter had begun to fade.

“Lars! You should tell me when you’re coming. You should call, for heaven’s sake!”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“You didn’t use to be such a primitive. Look at me, a walking mud pie, look how I am, straight from the garden—”

“I’ve brought you something. My flat is so small I have no room to store anything.”

Ulrika’s mother’s mouth suddenly pinched itself inward. It was a trick Lars recalled from Ulrika.

“I can’t keep things for you, Lars. It isn’t right. We aren’t relations any more. Besides, Ulrika has an American sweetheart now. An engineer. He works for IBM.”

“It’s Karin’s thing, not mine.” He drew out a flat rectangular object from his briefcase and set it down between them on the parlor table. It was his daughter’s old paint set.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Put it away somewhere.”

“It makes no sense to keep a baby thing like that. Next time I see Karin she’ll be grown. I can show you her latest snapshots if you like—they came just last week. A big tall girl. All that black hair—she takes after you before you went gray. And look,” she said, “the paint’s all dried out, it’s no good anyhow.”

“It’s been like that a long time.”

“What do I want a dried-out piece of trash like that for?”

“A keepsake.”

“Your idea of a keepsake, Lord help us! It’s because you don’t know what it is to inherit anything, Lars. I don’t blame you. I’ve always felt for you.”

“When Karin was tiny she already loved to paint,” Lars said.

“All kids like to make messes.”

This ignorant old widow. He thought of his father’s drawings: ready and waiting for us at the very beginning of life. Is it possible that these predestined images can flow from generation to generation?—he remembered how certain phantomlike lines, wanton, curiously powerful and strong, had astonished him, sweeping out from his daughter’s fierce little fist: the power of genes. Ulrika had taken small notice.

“I told Ulrika,” Ulrika’s mother said, “how hard it would be for her if she married an orphan. We’re a family that’s always had our own house. This same house you’re sitting in, solid stone, good brick, if you want to talk about keepsakes! And a nice garden too. Ulrika, I said, we know who we are. We come from right here, and always have. I told her it would be like going with the gypsies to go with an orphan. It’s not your fault, Lars. But it wasn’t right for Ulrika. Don’t think I didn’t tell her! She ended up a gypsy herself. Lord knows when she’ll find her way home again. Maybe never. By now she speaks American day and night and in her sleep. Karin in those pictures looks pure American, doesn’t she? Those shoes! Ulrika shouldn’t allow shoes like that. And that dark hair. I never thought I’d have a grandchild as dark as one of these Turks around here. They’re everywhere now, they’ve moved in on both sides next door. I can’t work in my garden without some Turkish man watching. The women are worse.”

He sat with her for another hour, tracing Ulrika in every one of her gestures—he had never observed this before. Now and then he stared down at the photographs of his daughter. It was evident that she was going to be tall, but otherwise he hardly knew her for his own. He was still unreconciled to her name—he who had chosen his