The Messiah of Stockholm

by Cynthia Ozick

  Between Heidi’s back room and the public space of the shop a fence of books reared up. Now and then Lars imagined that Dr. Eklund was hiding out there on the other side, beyond the reach of the daffodil’s yellow arc. Or he imagined that Dr. Eklund was dead. Cremated. His remains were in the big coffee tin on the shelf behind the lamp; Heidi was a widow. It occurred to Lars that he would like to marry such a woman, independent, ungenial, private, old; a kind of heroine.

  He was glad she was old. It meant she was prepared to be proprietary—the old have a way of taking over the young. She regarded Lars as her discovery—a discovery four years in the past that, she said, she had grown to regret. She had stumbled on him kneeling next to his briefcase among the S’s in FOREIGN FICTION—a new face in the shop, and already he was dawdling there, for an hour or more, over a copy of Cinnamon Shops in Polish. She clapped her hands at him, the way you clap your hands to shoo away a harmless animal, and he circled slowly round to absorb her anger, not startled, but oddly distracted, like someone who has had a vision: it came to him instantly that he would tell this old woman what he knew about himself. The shape of her head drew him—small, jumbled, those curly bangs white as a sheep fallen over the wobbly mustaches. He had never seen such eyebrows. Her head was a sheep’s head, but she was as shrewd and impatient as a lion. She warned him that she wouldn’t allow her merchandise to look shopworn before sale; he was in plenty of trouble with her—she had been watching him turn the pages over; a hundred times. It was true. He had washed his fingers in that half-familiar dread print like a butcher with a bloody sheep in his grip, or like a tug dragging a river for a body.

  “My father wrote this,” he told her.

  She seized the book from his hands and slipped it back into its slot on the shelf of foreign S’s.

  “It’s five o’clock,” she said. “We’re closing now.”

  “I would buy it,” Lars said, “but I can’t really read it yet.”

  “Then go home and learn Polish.”

  “I’m doing that,” he said, and pulled his Polish grammar out of his briefcase to show her.

  “You bought that somewhere else. We don’t carry that, it’s not the best one.”

  “I’m a refugee. I was born in Poland.” He shoved away his grammar and reached down again for Cinnamon Shops. “My native language, and I can’t read it.”

  “If you’re not going to purchase that book,” she said sharply, “put it back.”

  “It’s already mine,” he said, “by inheritance.”

  “Put it back, please. We’re closing now.”

  He was afraid she would push him out the door. Her voice was oily, elongated, ironic: she thought him a crazy man. He stood his ground; he had chosen her, he had made up his mind. She was the one. He explained how, newborn, pulled from the fork of his mother, he was smuggled, through all the chaos over the face of the deep that was the logic of that time, to a relative in Stockholm—a poor scared refugee herself, an elderly cousin with a sliver of luck. A handful of other infants had been spirited away from Poland—Poland overrun by Nazis—and squeezed into Stockholm under the same auspices: a merciful Swedish traveler, well-paid, under the protection of her government’s neutrality. Like any story that hangs on suffering, chance, whim, stupidity in the right quarters, mercy and money, there was something random to it—a randomness that swelled and swelled like an abscess. The elderly cousin, lost in bewilderment, fell away, and Lars, while the war went on, found himself in the household of the widowed sister-in-law of the merciful mercenary traveler’s own cousin. This sister-in-law already had a son, and did not need another; she took Lars anyhow, despite his brown eyes, and thanked her stars as he grew that he could be mistaken—as long as no one suspected anything different—for Swedish. She did not like the looks of other nations, especially those more distant from the Arctic Circle than her own. Lars ripened into ingratitude, and at sixteen left home to live alone in someone’s attic room. He met his rent by getting a job as a messenger boy on a newspaper. Already he knew his future was print.

  All this Heidi listened to in a concentration of rage. He was just then describing how he had invented a new surname for himself straight out of the dictionary—she stopped him right there in the middle. She shut the lights, locked the door, and drew him with her into her back room; she sat him down under the crystal daffodil and spat her dry gargle into her tiny sink. “Why do you tell me these things? Why should I want to know? You think you’re the only one with a story? Stockholm is full of refugees! All my customers are refugees! Professors! Intellectuals! I have my own story!”

  Lars curved his thumb into the darkened shop. “You’ve got my father out there. In the original. This is the only place in Stockholm that has him in the original.”

  “Your father! There’s something wrong with you, you’re a Verrückter, how can you say who your father is with a story like that!”

  He gave this some thought. “Well, in a way you’re right—I don’t know who my mother is. I’ve never found out.”

  “You don’t know your father either!”

  “No, no, you can see the resemblance. All those photos—”

  “What photos, where? Where did you get them, who gave them to you?”

  “Photos in books, I mean.”

  “Oh, books! If they don’t come from family—”

  “I’ve got every detail of his face, I know it by heart. I know almost every word he ever wrote. Father and son. We look alike, two peas in a pod. It’s the same nose, you see how my chin comes to a point? And it isn’t even a matter of looks. There’s an affinity. His voice. His mind.”

  A great hornlike snort burst from her. But she was letting him have his say; she wasn’t throwing him out. He watched her dip a big spoon into the tin on the shelf behind the lamp—right into what might have been Dr. Eklund’s ashes. She was brewing him some coffee. “Theatrical. Self-pity. You’re an orphan? An orphan is alive, what’s the matter with that? Besides, you’re a Swede like any Swede. Why be a fool and dredge all that up—nobody cares, old Nazi stories, you think anyone cares any more?”

  “They shot him in the streets. Murdered. The underground got him false papers—in those times forgery was a sacrament. They had already found him a hiding place. But he wouldn’t leave home. He was glued there.”

  “And where did you learn all this? Also from books?”

  “I’ve read everything. There’s nothing I haven’t read. I’ve read Cinnamon Shops a thousand times over. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read the other one. But in translation. It’s my father, I need to read the original—”

  “The original!”

  “The Polish.”

  “The Polish, yes.” She splashed a full cup down before him. “A stranger, a lunatic probably, comes into my shop, mangles the merchandise, doesn’t buy a thing, claims he’s a Pole, can’t read a word of Polish, and here I am serving him coffee! God knows what my husband would make of this. Dr. Eklund,” she said, “takes an interest in original behavior. Dr. Eklund and I understand exactly what you are.”

  “I’ve announced what I am.”

  “An impostor. Another refugee impostor. It’s nothing new, believe me! Half my customers have made themselves up. Fabricators. Every Pole of a certain age who walks in here, male or female, used to be a famous professor in Warsaw. Every Hungarian was once ambassador to Argentina. The French are the worst. I’ve never had one of those in my shop who didn’t turn out to be just the one who got Sartre started on the Talmud. By now I’ve counted twenty-five female teachers of Talmud—poor Mlle. de Beauvoir.”

  “It’s a Polish teacher I want,” Lars said.

  “Done. I’ll get you the fanciest professor I can think of. There’s a lady from Cracow, extremely literary, in fact a member of the nobility, a Radziwill actually, related to the husband of the sister of the American Onassis—she used to own a hat store. She gives Polish lessons. Her husband was just as good a Communist as the ones who chased him out.
You’ll have to play along and call her Doctor, unless she makes you call her Princess. Her father was a maître d’. Her mother was a milliner.”

  He saw then that what he had taken for rage was something else: a fever of isolation. She was often alone, especially after hours—Dr. Eklund, she said, had his late rounds at the hospital; sometimes he had to go out of town. But the shop was quiet even in the middle of the day. An afternoon might pass without a single customer. Lars observed that the crammed window display seldom changed. The only books in the window that shook off their dust were the Royal Family and the photographs of northern landscapes. The tourists bought these, Americans and English and Germans. There was not so much demand for foreign books—you could find practically anything in translation. As for the refugees, they had all learned Swedish long ago. The Academy was always ordering foreign books, of course, but it got them directly from abroad; it wouldn’t bother with a little local bookshop, would it? And off the beaten path, who even knew it was there? Despite these troubles, Heidi said, she managed to make ends meet, but if it weren’t for Dr. Eklund’s encouragement—not to mention his tiding her over now and then—where would she be? The shop ran—well, not on faith, she didn’t believe in the invisible, but on something else just as unreliable: it ran on human oddity. You never could tell what kind of human curiosity might walk in and spend two thousand kroner. Dr. Eklund was a great collector of such curiosities. Tangled lives appealed to him. From his patients he picked up the most bizarre histories. A bookshop is the same—a magnet for freaks, gypsies, nomads. Last 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 was obliged to stay to the bitter end. For dinner she mainly scrambled eggs mixed with onion. Lars peeled and chopped the onions on a board on the tiny table. He wept drearily. It was the fumes that set him off, but the tears derived from reasons of the heart. He was grateful: Heidi had fallen into his condition alongside him, a companion, a fellow collector of his father’s fate, a kind of partner. She was already intimate with his father’s books—no great feat, she said, since the man’s whole canon, after all, consisted of two lone volumes.

  “Three,” Lars said. “Don’t forget The Messiah.”

  “Not if it’s lost. It doesn’t exist. You can’t count what doesn’t exist.”

  “But if we’re speaking of e
verything he wrote—”

  “It doesn’t matter what he wrote. The only thing that matters is what’s here to be read.”

  “The manuscript might have survived somehow. Nobody knows what happened to it.”

  “If it disappeared it was destroyed.”

  “Or else it wasn’t destroyed. It might be hidden. When the Nazis came he gave it away for safekeeping.”

  “And even if he did give it away it evaporated. It doesn’t exist,” Heidi said again. “Whoever had it was hauled off. You’re always expecting what isn’t there to be there.” She opened out derisive palms: small callused squares that had, by now, a familiar way of accusing him. She thought him a master of the insubstantial: a fantasist. Often enough she threw out at him her special taunt: “Hauch,” she liked to say—his ideas were no more than a breath of air; she did not regard them.

  It was the shooting that drew her. The shooting; the murder. Shot in the streets! Lars suspected that Heidi cared more for his father’s death than for his father’s tales, where savagely crafty nouns and verbs were set on a crooked road to take on engorgements and transmogrifications: a bicycle ascends into the zodiac, rooms in houses are misplaced, wallpaper hisses, the calendar acquires a thirteenth month. Losses, metamorphoses, degradations. In one of the stories the father turns into a pincered crab; the mother boils it and serves it to the family on a dish. Heidi shouldered all that aside: it was the catastrophe of fact she wanted, Lars’s father gunned down in the gutters of Drohobycz along with two hundred and thirty other Jews. A Thursday in 1942, as it happened: the nineteenth of November. Lars’s father was bringing home a loaf of bread.