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

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 road, 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 dishevelled 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 are.”
    In the little vestibule, Czechs and Poles in his arms, he struggled back into his boots, teetering on one leg at a time and leaning against the glass of the display window. It was just where she
had