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

handkerchiefs, and clutching at the woman’s knees. He went on shivering and occasionally sneezing, huddling into his own shoulders. They poked up: a pair of small sharp peaks surrounding a nutlike head.

Lars drew back, thinking of the germs. “Isn’t he too sick to be out?”

“There’s no one to leave him with—we’re in a sort of rooming house.” The familiar recalcitrance. It reminded him of his old distrust. “And anyhow the poor thing would feel lost. He speaks only Portuguese.”

“Why not park him in the shop? They can manage anything over there.”

“She’s left Stockholm, didn’t you know?”

He sent out an impartial stare. “How would I?”

“The shop is sold.”

“I never pass that way.” He concentrated on her face; it was not as he remembered it. “I never thought she’d give it up.”

“He made her. He said it was enough. They’ve gone to live in Antwerp. The opportunities are better there.”

The boy gave out a quick animal sob, followed by an incomprehensible demand in a language that—whatever it was—wasn’t Portuguese. French? Polish? The woman said, “Will you let me sit down? Then I can take him on my lap.”

Lars unwillingly surrendered his chair. “The opportunities,” he echoed, and stood watching her arrange her skirt into a nest for the child. “You understand what it is, I’ve got my deadline breathing down my neck—”

“I’ve been reading you since I came. You’ve gotten just like the others,” she announced.

“I’m told I’ve taken on a touch of fame.”

“You’re an ordinary reviewer.”

“Even a reviewer can have a reputation.”

“Last Monday a detective novel. The Monday before—I don’t remember, was it the autobiography of some film star?”

“Then you’ve been in town two weeks,” he said.

She laughed straight over the child’s head. “There’s an advantage to detective novels! But no, we’ve been here nearly three. The first week we didn’t arrive till Wednesday.”

“On business,” he concluded. “Opportunities. You’re his courier.”

“Say whatever you please.”

“You’ve got a different name now.”

“I have all different names, it stands to reason.”

“For different jobs?” He looked down at the boy; he had shut his eyes, but the lids were fat and red. “Is there a part for him?”

A pounding, just then, on one of the beaverboard partitions: it was Gunnar Hemlig, dropping off the mail. “Nilsson said to give you this”—he threw down a box overflowing with envelopes and whisked himself off. He had no word for Lars. Anders when encountered was almost as silent.

Lars had affronted them; they burned against him. He had put back all those things he had once pushed aside. It wasn’t only the question of the furniture he was stuffing his new flat with—the stewpot had gone through this long before. He had a telephone attached to an automatic answering machine; he had a typewriter in his cubicle, like the rest of them, but at home he had a word processor with a screen that showered down green letters from Japan, and an electronic printer that typed with phantom fingers at a speed equal to the fall of the sun at the world’s end. Nilsson was automating the Morgontörn, but Lars Andemening was robotizing himself. He kept—this was the stewpot’s view of it—a robot woman under his bed. She was stored in an old vodka case. In the middle of the night Lars smacked a button and she clicked herself into position, constructing herself part by part. She was made mainly of styrofoam and hinged with old wedding rings bought wholesale from a divorce lawyer who had batches of them; the only task she required of Lars was to rouge her pale porous cheeks and to satisfy her vibrations.

Thus the stewpot, simmering. Nilsson was contemplating an extra day’s spot for Lars, they said, to add on to his Mondays. He was fast; he was fluent; he had begun to keep regular hours and seldom prowled in the office after midnight. He was reformed, recovered; he had recovered from his old ailment. He was taking the reviewing business seriously. He had, it appeared, given up existential dread; he had given up those indecipherables that steam up from the stomach-hole of Central Europe; he was sticking to the Swedes and the more companionable Americans; you never heard him pronounce Kiš or Canetti or Musil or Broch; his tongue was free of Kafka. He was finished with all those grotesqueries. He was like a man in a coma who has unexpectedly come to, having been declared asleep for life, and who has resumed his normal rounds. The very routine of it seems extraordinary.

The stewpot boiled, but placidly; it had attenuated; by now it showed the mildest minor froth. In the last half year, though it had never taken the smallest notice of him before, Lars had grown to be the stewpot’s steadiest habit. It was, in fact, Gunnar Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel who had initiated this newest seething—it fell to them, no one knew why, Lars least of all. Gunnar and Anders were suddenly Lars Andemening’s celebrants in the rite of the stewpot—the stewpot in its frenzied prime. Gunnar in particular relished the grand comedy of it—how Lars, that beautiful soul, with his skinny nose up to the hilt in belles-lettres, had been hoodwinked by a family of swindlers, forgers, thieves, lovers of high art, symbolists! Entrapped and consumed—their demonic fragrances, their sweet lures and ruses! But no, the point was, Anders argued back, that these beauties were nothing homegrown: a pack of Poles, a gang of outlanders, six or eight of them, four Turks, two Portuguese, possibly some gypsies. Sven Strömberg’s lover tugged at her mannish collar and picked up the thread: gypsies, yes, definitely a gypsy girl among them, on the brown skin of whose silken back had been tattooed—in infancy, in tiny green letters—a missing Psalm, omitted by the generation of the Canonizers, that had been traveling for centuries from back to back of certain young women in certain Romany tribes, young women with split tongues, born mute. As these dusky chosen infants grew, the grass-bright letters expanded over their torsos;