The Messiah of Stockholm (18 page)

“Mrs. Vaz!” he called into dim vertical air. “Your hat! Take back your hat!” and let it fall, spiraling, down and down and down.

N
OT THAT HE BELIEVED HER
. Now and then he discovered that he did; mainly he did not.

What went on troubling him was the smell—that smell of something roasting—all through Stockholm. It was a plague in every corner of the city, no matter how cleanly the bright wind
came. Sometimes it seemed to lift from the baffled waters of the locks; sometimes it steamed out of the tips of steeples. It always found him out, wherever he was, whatever the season. It was as if
Stockholm, burning, was slowly turning into Africa: the smell, winter or summer, of baking zebra.

He knew this was a hallucination—it was a sort of hallucination—Heidi would have insisted it was a hallucination—it was a fancy. By the end of the year he had nearly stopped
thinking about the smell, except when he awoke in the morning; it was always in his clothes in the morning.

The stewpot, for its part, had gone back to not taking much notice of Lars Andemening; though his mail was gratifyingly plentiful and Nilsson had added (despite the envious pallor of Gunnar
Hemlig and Anders Fiskyngel) a Sunday plum to his Monday and his Tuesday.

Yet it happened on occasion—not very frequently—that Lars grieved for his life. Not because he had failed to purify it. And not because of the lost
Messiah
. And not because he
was an elderly orphan, and had put his finger into a dictionary to needle out a name. And not because of that perjured eye, thrown like a broken blind coal among the cinders of the brass
amphora.

When, less and less often, the smell flushed up out of the morning’s crevices, Lars inside the narrow hallway of his skull caught sight of the man in the long black coat, hurrying with a
metal garter box squeezed under his arm, hurrying and hurrying toward the chimneys. And then, in the blue light of Stockholm, among zebra fumes, he grieved.

C
YNTHIA
O
ZICK IS THE
author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes and, in 2012, her novel
Foreign Bodies
was shortlisted for the
Orange Prize for Fiction. She currently lives in New York.