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

month a genuine sheikh had turned up, burnoose and all, in sandals, stockingless, his toenails painted red and matted over with snow, looking for the Kama Sutra in Arabic.

“And did you have it?” Lars asked.

“We were just out. It’s one of my biggest sellers.”

It seemed to Lars finally that Heidi had not only not intended to throw him out—she had more or less kidnapped him and locked him in with her. It was difficult to gauge, since then, who was whose captive. Lars came and went whenever he pleased, though he could never be sure of a welcome. “Ha, it’s you,” Heidi would say, scowling. “Just when I’m expecting Dr. Eklund. He should be here any minute now.” A ruin of gloomy creases traveled through the black mustaches. “It’s your footsteps—they sound exactly like Dr. Eklund’s. Light as smoke.” This meant Dr. Eklund was again delayed, or else had gone straight home to the flat. Another time she blamed the Turkish boy for writing up an order for Lars. “Mr. Andemening doesn’t really want it. He’s not a customer. Nothing from him goes into the order book unless I put it there, do you understand? In his business he gets all the books he wants for free, and if he orders something here, it’s only because he likes to make a show of earning his keep.” Once she presented Lars with a volume thick as a brick—it was the other Polish grammar, the really good one he didn’t own. But mostly the traffic between them went the other way: every two weeks or so Lars thudded down right there on Heidi’s cash-register counter a load of discarded reviewers’ copies from the Morgontörn. This excited her always. She was interested to know whether Anders had reviewed any of these, and which ones Gunnar had cast off. She read these gentlemen in the Morgontörn on Wednesdays and Fridays; she liked Fridays better, because Mr. Fiskyngel was so cantankerous; it was amusing. Mr. Hemlig often tried to be amusing, and that was less amusing. She rarely said a word to Lars about Mondays, and if she did, it was again to topple him: “Furchtbar! Ordinary people have no patience for that sort of thing. After all, a newspaper isn’t a university seminar. I’m surprised they keep you on.—Good God, that devilish little Turk’s got your name down in the order book again. After I’ve told him and told him not to go scribbling—”

Lars broke in: “An assignment from the Princess.”

“If it’s Polish books you want, you should come straight to me. How can a little Turk—”

“You were out. He said you’d gone to get groceries.”

“Groceries! Wasn’t that Wednesday? In the late afternoon? I went with Dr. Eklund to buy a new suit. He likes me there to select the fabric. He won’t choose even a necktie if I’m not with him.” She squinted down at Lars’s order through the big magnifiers of her reading glasses. “Sanatorium pod Klepsydra. It’s a miracle that boy got it down right. We don’t keep it in stock anyhow, you can see for yourself it’s only Cinnamon Shops on the shelf.”

“This is the one he wrote after Cinnamon Shops. The second one. The one before the last—The Messiah was the last.”

“Well, I can guarantee you my jobber won’t have it.”

“Your jobber,” Lars burst out, “won’t have The Messiah, no! No one has it. It’s lost.”

“These things have to come from Warsaw,” Heidi said placidly, “lost or found. It may take weeks.”

“Too long. The Princess won’t like it, she’ll be annoyed. She can’t wait for the finish. She’s getting ready to throw me out. I’m practically dismissed. On my own. Kicked out.”

“You’d think she’d want to hang on to you. For the money at least.”

“First she says I’m coming along at a tremendous rate, and the next minute she wants to get rid of me. She doesn’t believe in me, that’s why.”

Heidi snorted, “Believe in you! What are you, a priest, a holy man?”

“She won’t accept it.”

“Accept what, for God’s sake?”

“That I’m my father’s son.”

“You shouldn’t have talked about that. A craziness to talk about that! And you say you keep it to yourself, you never talk about it at all, you never tell it, I’m the only one—”

“You are.”

“Oh, yes! Myself, and Mrs. Rozanowska, and Mr. Fiskyngel, and Mr. Hemlig—”

“I’ve never told anyone at the paper.”

“A woman gives you Polish lessons, you tell her.”

“An accident. I didn’t intend to. She was making me read out loud to her. She’s been trying to fix my accent. So I picked out the part about furniture—you know, furniture breaking out in a rash. My father’s own syllables—there they were, coming out of my mouth. In my own voice. In the original.”

“Poor Mrs. Rozanowska. She’s afraid you’re deranged.”

“She thinks she’s a Princess!”

“She doesn’t think so. She only says so.”

5

after that Lars felt a change: a thickening between them. She was all at once willing to be entangled with him. She began to question him about how he lived—he was clearly fond of looking alert in the middle of the night. Lars hesitated to tell her how out of the power of his secret dreamless sleep he had learned to enter his father’s throat; to see his father’s eye. The terrifying germ and nucleus of his origin. In the end he told her he slept in daylight. The rest he kept to himself; there was sorcery in it. Otherwise he withheld nothing from her. He was not certain whether she believed he was his father’s son—she acknowledged that she believed he believed it. He came almost every night now. She cooked him dinner in the back room—while Dr. Eklund was away it was more convenient to live in the shop, she explained, than in the flat: Dr. Eklund was attending a mental health conference in Copenhagen. It would last more than a week, and since Dr. Eklund was giving a paper in the final seminar, he