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

And she was the daughter. Here I am! She had inherited her father’s last known manuscript, a masterpiece the whole world believed to be wiped out, erased, vanished. It deserved translation into Swedish; she couldn’t do this herself. It deserved translation into every language on the face of the earth. A visionary thing—the title itself showed how visionary—oh, amazing, it couldn’t be explained in only half a minute. Was it possible the proprietor might know someone who could do something for a manuscript like this? Redeem it, accord it salvation, spread it like a gospel? The point was she was looking for a translator.

“So you offered her the Princess,” Lars bit off.

“I offered her you.”

“What are you talking about? What did you tell her?”

“I told her you’re awash in Polish. I told her it’s under your skin, not that you speak it like a native, but if anyone was ever possessed! I told her you’re a madman for literature. I told her you’re a connoisseur of the author of The Messiah. I told her all that.”

“But not the deep fact. Not that.”

“It’s your secret, isn’t it? You keep on keeping it, except when you spill it. How would I tell what you don’t tell? The trouble is you have no confidence in me.”

“If she had an accent—” He swallowed it down. “What kind of accent?”

“How do I know? I have an accent myself.”

“The name, then. She gave her name.”

“Elsa. No, Adela. I think it was Adela. Don’t pester me with such things, Lars. I tried to reach you, after all. I left that message with the Morgontörn, what more could I do? And then I made her stay and stay. She got sick of waiting and went off, do you blame her?”

“Where does she live?”

“She never told.”

“Didn’t she leave a phone number?”

“She said she would just rather come back.”

“But she hasn’t. Not in a week. We’ve lost her, and she’s a crazy fraud—”

“Something was in that bag.”

“It wasn’t The Messiah.”

“Then why should you care if we’ve lost her?”

There was an exhaustion between them now, as if they had just run out of a burning house. The roasting smell trickled up out of Lars’s clothes: it fumed up from his belly, his armpits, the soaked pockets on his rump, his snow-dampened feet. Heidi’s gleam was an ember. Her mouth relapsed to sleepiness. Lars wondered whether, with all her talent for turning things askew, she had given over his story—his deep fact—to Dr. Eklund; or whether she had given over her own story. The fence. She had, in the last moment, revived their old habit of “we”—this hadn’t escaped him. But she couldn’t be depended on: it occurred to him that the woman in the white beret, in the morning’s white brilliance, carrying a featherweight Messiah in a white bag, was, if she wasn’t an angel, a lie.

“Something’s burning,” he said.

“Oh God! The stove. Go and see, Lars. I suppose I never shut the flame under this afternoon’s pot. I’m getting to be an old woman.”

He took two steps. “The fire’s off. It wasn’t turned on.”

“Then it’s the smell of glue. The binding glue in that new shipment. Sometimes it smells like that. Or else it’s you. Sweat. A rutting sheep. Smog.” She was dimming, failing, a light dying out. Something was snuffing her. “The roof of the snow pressing down. It keeps the smoke on the ground. In the streets. Every chimney in the city sending out smoke—”

“It could be the chimneys,” he agreed. A quirk of the atmosphere. Meteorology. Stockholm smoldering at the northernmost margins of the industrial West, houses in clusters, spires like an army of bayonets, office blocks, factories, flats, computers, the grit-filled mists of habitation, hesitation, wear, use, decay, loss. The bad smell behind that fence. Even the wake of angels. The white wings of angels passing in flocks are known to release the odor of burning feathers.

He thought of his little fear. “Dr. Eklund,” he said, “when did he get back from Copenhagen?”

“He’s not back yet. Look at the roads, for heaven’s sake. Planes don’t take off in heavy weather.”

“Wasn’t that conference over long ago?”

“What conference?”

“The one in Copenhagen.”

“It wasn’t a conference. You’ve got Copenhagen mixed up with somewhere else. A consultation. The prima ballerina of the Danish ballet. She wouldn’t perform. Wouldn’t set foot on the stage.”

“Dr. Eklund’s not in Copenhagen,” Lars said.

“Well, maybe not. Lord knows where he’s been stranded. You can never be sure.”

She drifted toward her cot. She wanted her cot; she was old and full of sleep. She wanted him to go. But he persisted—he could feel how his teeth tore into it: “Dr. Eklund,” he said, “isn’t stranded anywhere.”

She was, he noticed, wearing slippers. She dropped them off under the daffodil and handed him her key. “Lock up when you leave. You can bring this back next time.” Next time: she was expecting him to resume. She had never before entrusted him with the key—she meant him to take it away with him. He watched her strain as she bent to roll down her stockings, gartered at the knees; then she fell back on the disheveled cot. White strings of her hair blew off the pillow. She widened her mouth for another yawn; her eyes watered. “If he isn’t stranded, then he’s on his way.”

“Mrs. Eklund.”

Her face was in the pillow. Her voice was drawing itself out, thinner and thinner. It was dissolving. “Be sure to get that key back here pretty soon. It’s one of Dr. Eklund’s extras. It isn’t that he loses them. He leaves them places. At the hospital. In the flat.”

Lars said steadily, “You’re all alone here every night. There isn’t any flat. There isn’t any Dr. Eklund.”

“Go away. Take your books and go. I need to sleep. I’m asleep.”

“Dr. Eklund’s a phantom.”

“No, no, you don’t follow, you don’t see,” she soughed into the pillow. “She’s dancing again. The prima ballerina.”

The key was heating up in his hand. “A refugee impostor,” he said. “That’s what you