The Messiah of Stockholm Read Online Free Page A

them. You always show up at my busiest
time.”
    “You’re closed up tight!” But he was used to absurdities in her. She liked to topple him.
    “When else do you think I can get anything done? Not with customers underfoot all day. I’m sorting out a delivery. I’m trying to price things. My God, I’m
concentrating
. And now you’ll want coffee.”
    “No,” he said, standing on the doorsill in his stocking feet. “
Sprit
.”
    “No wonder. You’re a stick of ice. A snowman.”
    “I’m boiling hot,” he contradicted, and followed her into the back room. “I stink of sweat.” He was not in the least meek with her. He was meek with Gunnar and
Anders because they deserved it; they were insufficient. But with Heidi he could be coarse. It hid his small fear.
    “That you do. You smell like a rutting sheep. I’ve got your order—all these Slavs. Don’t expect them to come cheap. They weren’t easy to get hold of, believe me.
Two are in English, from the States. I couldn’t find them any other way.” A long yawn, sumptuous, leisurely, disclosed the gold in her molars. A sleep-crease marked her left cheek.
Pillow and blanket were in disorder on her cot. She hauled a canvas bag off a shelf behind the German lamp and drew out a pair of paperbacks. “Ludvík Vaculík, there. Bohumil
Hrabel, there. Witold Gombrowicz, I’ve got him right here. Nobody but you wants such stuff.”
    “There was supposed to be another—”
    “The other Polish one. Where did I put . . . here. Tadeusz Konwicki, here he is. Hardcover. Him I could track down only in Polish. Your native language,” she said with a lift of her
sardonic little shoulder.
    She handed him a tiny glass of vodka and yawned again. Stingy. He saw she was going to stay annoyed with him. She knew what he knew; she knew it all, every permutation of every speculation; they
had talked and talked about what he knew until it was all ground down into granules. His history—his passion—was no more than a pile of salt between them. There was no longer anything
left for them to sift through. She had, besides, a hard skepticism for every grain of it—even for his Polish, though she had herself introduced him to his teacher, one of her own customers.
It was the cast of her mind to run from self-irony to blatancy—insofar as Lars could guess anything at all about what her mind was like. Her Swedish was cocky and pliant, but it had the whole
tune of German, and when she let out into it, as she frequently did, a German syllable or two, it seemed to Lars that he could, for just that instant, look down through a trapdoor into a private
underground chamber where no one was allowed to follow. For all her noisiness, she was bitingly private. Her husband, for instance—the mysterious, the distant, the vaporous Dr.
Eklund—was either a psychoanalyst or a gastroenterologist: she hinted sometimes at one, sometimes at the other. And her life before—what was that? She wanted not to be what she had been
before. She had arrived in Stockholm after the war, like so many others. She had been quick to marry Dr. Eklund.
    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