Read Online The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick - Free Book Online

whole afternoon.”
    “Who was that?”
    “A woman with an interest in Polish.”
    She was being wary, tricky. In his three weeks away he had not forgotten how dangerous she could be, how she could topple him.
    “If the Princess wants me back,” he said, “
she’s
too late. She threw me out when I thought I still needed her. I’ve got no use for her now,” but he
recognized in his own croak—swallowing down the bit of vodka Heidi had given him when he asked for it—that something new lay between them.
    “No, no, not Mrs. Rozanowska. I told them who at the
Morgontörn
. I
told
them. They said they’d put it in the message. My God, Lars, if you had your own phone in
your own flat like an ordinary person—”
    He pulled out the wadded-up square Anders had brought him and looked at it. MRS. EXLUND PHONED ABOUT YOUR SISTER. The snow had somehow crept into his pocket and dampened everything in it. The
preposterous words had begun to run. “I haven’t
got
a sister. There’s no sister anywhere in it at all. You know that.”
    “That’s probably true. I didn’t think she
was
your sister. It smelled fishy to me from start to finish.” Heidi formulated one of her calculating scowls—she
was all scandalous bliss. “I don’t say there wasn’t a resemblance, but the fact is she hasn’t come back. She said she’d come back and she hasn’t. I asked her to
leave it for you but she wouldn’t. I don’t blame her, if it’s genuine.”
    “Leave what? If what’s genuine?”
    “My dear boy”—she had never before addressed him this way, him with his graying head! but there was an importance in it that penetrated—“she has the manuscript of
The Messiah
in a little white plastic bag. She carries it around like that. The original. The thing itself. I saw it with my own eyes.”
    “
The Messiah
? No one has that. It disappeared. It doesn’t exist.”
    “She’s got it in her bag.”
    “
Who
has, for God’s sake?”
    “Your sister.”
    “There isn’t any sister. A fraud. You’ve been taken in.”
    “She didn’t
say
she was your sister. I only drew a conclusion.”
    “You drew a conclusion!” he howled.
    “Well, if she calls herself the daughter of the author of
The Messiah
, and you’re the
son
of the author of
The Messiah
, that makes her your sister. It stands to
reason.”
    “It stands to reason! The daughter! There isn’t any daughter! There isn’t any
Messiah
!”
    “Not so long ago you had a different opinion.”
    “The manuscript’s gone, there’s no one alive who thinks anything else.”
    “You said yourself it might have been hidden.”
    “Whoever had it was taken away. Whoever had it is dead.”
    “
She
isn’t dead. She told me the reason she’s got it is just because she
is
his daughter. No one else could have gotten hold of it. It was saved explicitly for
her.”
    Lars said, “There’s no room in the story for another child. It’s not feasible. It can’t be. You know the story as well as I do. There’s only me.”
    “Well, maybe there’s you and maybe there’s not. And if there’s you, why can’t there be another one?”
    “What did she
say
? What exactly?”
    “That the man who wrote
The Messiah
was her father.”
    “But he’s
my
father!” Lars cried.
    Heidi beamed out a rascally gleam. “If the manuscript doesn’t exist, and the daughter doesn’t exist—”
    “You know there’s no daughter.”
    “—then maybe there’s no son either.”
    “I’m here. Here I am.”
    “That’s just what
she
said. A biblical annunciation. And every bit as convinced of it as you.”
    Wearing a white beret. Not too distant from Lars’s own age, judging from the hair, which was just beginning to whiten, though only on one side of a slightly archaic middle part; the face
was as clear as a baby’s. There certainly
was
a resemblance, not acute—she wasn’t a twin—but ripe, somehow, with hints. The similarities were in the absences, in the
sort of look