The Messiah of Stockholm Read Online Free

determined old strictness. Lars was not extremely afraid of her; but he was a little afraid.
    In the skimpy vestibule of her shop he stamped his boots so hard they splashed up icy rods from their treads. He saw the light in the narrow back room, a sort of corridor behind the high rear
bank of bookshelves, and supposed she was totting up her invoices, or else unpacking the week’s shipment. She was unusually strong for such a small rotundity, such a thick globular dwarf of a
woman, and could heave those dead-weight overseas boxes on her own; though when the shop was open she kept a Turkish boy to lug things. Or, he reflected, she might be sitting under her funny old
lamp (the lamp, she said, was all she thought worth bringing with her from Germany, not counting a handful of books), reading whatever had just arrived—she read her wares, in nearly any
language. Her wares were international. They glimmered out at him from the display window: shining rectangles, like portraits in frames—the newest Americans, North and South, the oldest
Russians, that large and steady company of nineteenth-century Englishmen and Englishwomen, a modicum of Czechs and Poles, a whole forest of Balzac; and then the dictionaries and encyclopedias. The
shopwindow was stuffed from floor to ceiling: a step-pyramid crowded, on each level, with all the alphabets. Erect in the middle of it, like the thrusting central rose in a wreath, or like a sentry
guarding a vault, stood—it really did stand, as if on lion’s legs—a formidable edition of
Drottningholm
:
ett kungligehem
, with color pictures of the Royal Family:
the wavy-haired King tall and fair and unperturbed, the two little Princesses charming in a garden, the diffident little Prince in a sailor suit on a damask sofa, and the shiveringly beautiful
Queen, with her brilliant teeth and black Iberian eyes. The Queen was said to be brainy, a descendant of Marrano nobility. Secret Jews, long attenuated. Heidi was now a Swedish patriot. When the
Royal Family was sold out, she displayed one of those oversized landscape volumes, itself as extensive as a plain, showing photographs of windmills and castles and deer galloping over snow and the
sea gulls of Lake Vänern and a statue of Selma Lagerlöf, seated, with her hair in a bronze bun.
    Lars took out his penknife and tapped on the glass door. No one heard. He tapped again. She might have left the light on and gone home to her flat. Lars had made her his confidante—Heidi
was one of those few who knew what he knew—and still he had never been to her flat. Her flat was no more a certainty than any other rumor; no more a certainty than the rumor of her husband,
Dr. Eklund. The true signature of her matrimonial relation appeared in gold letters painted across the shopwindow: BOKHANDLARE . When she turned the key in the evening she
embraced her two-burner stove and her square small table and her cot. Among the bumpy configurations of cartons in the back room she had a tiny refrigerator and a tiny water closet and a
blue-speckled porcelain pot and that funny old German lamp—the shade was a crystal daffodil—and a teakettle. She had no bath at all, though there was a secluded hollow, a sort of alley,
that might have closeted a shower. And no radio: nothing for music. She was indifferent to music. It was as if she were a forest gnome who had fashioned a bare little hut for herself, with only one
ornament: the necessary daffodil.
    The light wavered, dimmed, returned. A figure had passed in front of it. Once again Lars smacked his pen-knife against the glass. And there was Heidi with her blurred German
screech—“All right, all right, the world isn’t coming to an end, you’ll crack my door!”—wheeling across her shop to let him in.
    Lars resumed stamping his boots in the vestibule. “
Hej
,” he said.
    “Well, get them off. I won’t have you drip those things in here. For heaven’s sake, the floor’s been mopped. Just leave