The Messiah of Stockholm Read Online Free Page B

The Messiah of Stockholm
Book: The Messiah of Stockholm Read Online Free
Author: Cynthia Ozick
Pages:
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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
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