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

she
didn’t
have. She didn’t look content. She didn’t look—well,
normal
. These negative hints made Heidi pay attention, though not right
away—Heidi was on the watch for Dr. Eklund. Dr. Eklund was returning momentarily from Copenhagen. The woman had come in out of the blue—out of the snow—with her white plastic bag.
Heidi kept her eye on it—shoplifters carry such things. But the woman didn’t go near the bookshelves at all; she turned in the aisles and turned again. The shop had a wild morning
brightness: snow-dazzle freakishly shot through with slashes of early sunlight, too sharp to bear. All that exaggerated whiteness seemed to be crowding into the narrow vestibule of the shop, and
had swept the woman straight through the doorway. She asked the Turkish boy for the proprietor—it was the proprietor she wanted, because of those heaps of foreign books in the window. The
foreign books had lured her; she had never noticed this shop before. She was used to walking all over Stockholm, but she was still new to it. You could tell from her accent how new. She had
something astonishing, something stupendous, in her bag. Was there anyone here—perhaps even the proprietor—who could read Polish? Or who had access to the local Polish intelligentsia?
In this very bag, the one in her hand (it was light enough, it wasn’t a big tome), lay the work of a genius who happened—she wasn’t going to be shy about this, she wouldn’t
hide
his
light under a bushel!—who happened to be her own father. Dead. Murdered. A victim, long ago, but immortal. 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