The Jewish Messiah

Injustice Spares No Man

IN HER BEDROOM, which had gradually been transformed into a filing cabinet full of information about Indian villages, sponsors, hydroelectric plants, and reports from the World Bank, Bettina said, “We’re no good for each other.”

Xavier looked at her, speechless. He had never looked at it that way.

“I’m involved with India, and these days with women’s studies, too. I don’t know what you’re involved with, but every time we see each other it’s rush, rush, rush.”

Xavier had just taken off his shoes and socks, and now he began playing with his socks. It had never occurred to him that it could go any other way. Rush, rush, rush had always seemed like the right tempo to him.

“We can still be friends,” she said.

He thought about his parents and about his mother’s new boyfriend. His father spent more time these days in Singapore than he did in Basel. Now that he was no longer married — or at least no longer living in the same house as his wife, for the official divorce was still a long way off — he was able to live by different standards, and he frequented massage parlors in Basel as well. He had always had a weak spot for older women, but these days he tended more towards the transsexual. Xavier had heard that it was mostly Asians who worked there, of both sexes.

Xavier’s mother had once asked the architect, “Is there someone else in your life?” And he had replied, “No, no one. I just need time for myself.”

And there was, indeed, no one in his life. Masseurs are no one. Invisible hands, invisible mouths that show up for a moment, then disappear again into the darkness.

“If you don’t want to be friends,” Bettina said, “or if you think we should leave each other alone for a while, I can understand that. It’s not easy.”

Xavier was still fiddling with his socks. He decided to put them on again.

“I bought a present for you,” Bettina said. It was a book, lying ready on her desk. She had prepared this farewell beforehand, it seemed, as though it were an aid campaign for a little Indian community.

Xavier carefully unwrapped his present. It was a book about Jewish rites and customs throughout the ages. He smiled.

“I thought you’d like it,” Bettina said. “But you can exchange it if you want.”

“No, no,” Xavier said, “I don’t have this one yet. Thanks. But how did you know I was interested in this?”

“Everyone knows that,” she said. “I’m interested in things like that too. I love peoples who have a real culture of their own. And I think men with a culture of their own are a lot more interesting too.”

“More interesting than who?” Xavier asked.

There was no reply. She was the way all women that age should be, the way all women of all ages should be, in fact. And so she cried. First quietly, then louder and louder. Then Xavier began crying, too. At first because he figured you were supposed to do that when someone left you. But he was touched by Bettina as well, how she sat there on the bed, cross-legged, the stuffed animals — four in total — lined up against the neatly painted wall. A beloved’s pain was easier to bear than her joy. Only when she was obviously in pain did you get that pleasant feeling: She needs me. I’m not here for nothing.

Xavier looked at the book about Jewish rites and customs. A book with illustrations, not like Mein Kampf. Written in yellow letters on the cover was “Richly Illustrated.” This book contained everything about the culture of the people he was going to comfort, a threatened culture.

He thought of Mr. Schwartz.

Bettina went out and came back with a roll of paper towels.

“Here,” she said.

They daubed at their faces, and Bettina put an arm around Xavier.

He looked at the stuffed animals: a dog, a bear, a lamb, and a mouse. Then he leafed through the book and looked at the typically Jewish faces. He wondered what it meant, that everyone at his school knew about his interest in this subject. Probably not much good. Jews were no longer in fashion.

“Xavier,” Bettina said, without taking her arm away, “maybe we just don’t fit together.” Art tries to convey emotion, he recalled. This was how he had explained it to Awromele. You-Know-Who had wanted to be an artist. You-Know-Who had tried to convey emotion, even though the father of You-Know-Who forbade him to do so. Perhaps that was why You-Know-Who had started his thousand-year Reich. It must be horrible to make something, to work on something for years, and then to find out that it doesn’t convey emotion.

“Xavier,” Bettina said again.

She wasn’t Jewish, but he still found her awfully sad.

Xavier closed his book and folded the wrapping paper around it. “Maybe ten years from now neither of us will have found anyone else,” Bettina said. “Then we can start over again.”

As Xavier was getting up to say goodbye, he was struck by how powerless he was to convey the poignancy he’d felt just a few minutes before. But the more he thought about how he could ever do that, the less certain he was that the feeling of poignancy had ever been there at all.

They hugged. Bettina said, “Maybe even a week from now, we’ll think, How could we have been so stupid?”

“Yes,” Xavier said, “we might think that.”

Strange, actually, that only now, now that he was losing her — or being freed of her, he wasn’t sure which — was he starting to love her. Maybe not a lot, maybe in all the wrong ways, but still. When you cried over someone, and with someone, there was a fair chance that you loved that someone.

“I’m going to bring you a present, too,” Xavier said. He held the book about Jewish rites and customs to his chest, kissed Bettina on the lips, and left the room where he had been deflowered, where he had wept for the first time in the presence of another, and where he had adopted two Indian villages.

He never went back there again.

WHEN HE ARRIVED HOME, Xavier found his mother standing in the living room with her raincoat on. She looked bad. Xavier’s first thought was: She’s found out that I’m going to get circumcised.

But the mother said: “We’ve been waiting for you. We have to go to the hospital; there’s something wrong with your father.”

Marc came out of the bedroom. He was pulling on a blue V-necked sweater, They climbed into Marc’s car, a twenty-year-old Alfa Romeo. Marc liked flight simulators and industrial design.

On the way to the hospital, no one said a word.

The architect was lying in a room of his own. Intensive care. A nurse was doing something with him, but when she saw the visitors she said, “The doctor is coming,” and left.

The three of them stood around the architect’s bed. He wouldn’t open his eyes.

“Maybe you should wait outside for a bit,” the mother told Marc. “If you don’t mind.”

“You’re right,” Marc said. “That would be better.” Marc’s parents were both still alive; they had constitutions of iron. He didn’t see them very often — once every three months at most. He wasn’t used to sickness and death. To him, death was nothing but a pig you could use to make excellent ham.

When he was gone, Xavier’s mother said to her ex-husband, “Hello, sweetheart, it’s us.”

The architect still didn’t open his eyes.

The neighbor lady had found him earlier that afternoon, lying beneath his punching bag. He must have been lying there a while. She had a copy of his house key, for vacations and emergencies. Because the architect’s car was blocking her driveway, and because he didn’t pickup the phone, she had decided this was an emergency and barged into his house in a fury. She hated it when other people blocked her driveway. Then she had found the architect lying helpless beneath his punching bag, and her rage disappeared. “Poor man,” she had murmured, “poor, poor man.” She called the emergency number. And forty-five minutes later, with a certain eagerness, she had let the ambulance crewin to her neighbor’s house. “So young,” she told the attendants, “and there you are, lying in your own house like that. No one to care for you. I put a pillow under his head and threw a blanket over him.”

The attendants had lifted the architect into the ambulance without a word. For a moment the neighbor lady wondered whether she shouldn’t go along to the hospital. But she had a hat-making course to attend that afternoon.

“Xavier, say something to your father,” said the mother, who was feeling at a loss.

“Hi, Dad,” Xavier said. “It’s me, Xavier. How are you doing?” He realized that the situation was critical. The equipment that had been arranged around the architect’s bed spoke of the dedication with which the medical profession tried to prolong dwindling lives. Yet all he could think was: If this is death, it’s awfully boring. He wasn’t familiar with death, only from the secret notes his grandfather had left behind, death as a club, death as a simple man with simple beliefs who occasionally strikes out when all he needs to do is guard. Death was so normal, so simple, so ordinary.

Xavier’s next thought was less edifying. If his father died, the only one left for him to convert to Judaism was his mother. Maybe he could convert Marc as well, but he had a hard time imaging Marc as a Jew. Besides, he wasn’t interested enough in Marc to bother showing him the way to the chosen people.

“He looks so pale,” the mother said, “and so sunken. We have to talk to him. Hello, sweetheart. Hello, dearest.” She caressed her ex-husband’s forehead, but he didn’t respond.

The mother had her feelings under control. You-Know-Who had not had his feelings under control. He had listened attentively to those feelings, and had heard the strangest things.

Finally, the doctor came in. He shook hands with mother and son and led them to his office, where he tried to explain the situation. He didn’t want to give them any false hope: “I want you to realize that the chances are very slim indeed, and…”

While he was inhaling deeply, in order to finish this sentence, the architect died.

The staff of the Asian massage parlor close to Basel’s Central Station waited for him in vain that afternoon. They knew the architect as a man of the clock. It was a disappointment for them, because the night before he had called to say, “Tomorrow I want to try a transsexual.”

And so the architect died without ever having tried a transsexual. Injustice spares no man, and regularly drags down the non-Jewish with it as well.

THE FIRST PERSON to notice that the architect was dying was Marc. He had been sitting in the corridor waiting while the physician on duty sat in his office, trying to explain everything to the architect’s family. While he sat there being bored, Marc was suddenly overcome by curiosity about the man with whom his girlfriend had spent most of her life. He pushed open the door and entered the room.

There he lay, his girlfriend’s ex, peaceful and pale but exhausted. Marc took a few steps towards the bed; the door fell closed behind him. He leaned over the face of the man who was officially still his girlfriend’s husband. And although it wasn’t like him at all, for he was a quiet man who lived in harmony with himself and his surroundings, he said: “Hello, you worthless piece of shit.”

The architect did not respond to these words, either.

Marc walked to the other side of the bed and, to his own surprise, said: “You thought you were really something, didn’t you? Well, look at you now.”

Marc did not consider it immoral to say such things. The architect couldn’t hear him. When people can’t hear you, you may say whatever you like. Strangely enough, it made him feel relieved. Expressing feelings that he had never known he had. It was glorious to finally listen to your heart. They say the heart is good at loving, but the heart can swear mightily as well. Marc’s heart swore to beat the band.

He was planning to go on tossing curses at the dying man, but then his eye was caught by the equipment to the left of the bed. Marc took a good look at the equipment, and while he was doing so, one of the instruments began beeping. Life was leaving the architect for good.

Beneath Marc’s eyes the life disappeared, yet he saw nothing, and, to tell the truth, there wasn’t much to see. He didn’t hesitate for a moment, despite the enjoyment he felt in railing against the dying man; when the actual dying started, he sided with the living. He ran out into the corridor and shouted: “Help! Emergency!”

Within forty-five seconds, two nurses and a young intern had gathered around the architect’s bed, and all three of them noted that there was not much left for them to do. For the sake of protocol, they performed a few maneuvers.

The life had gone out of the architect, and life that has gone does not easily return.

One of the nurses went to the office of the physician on duty, where he was still informing the family of the risks, the possibilities, the dangers, and the hopes for the future. Marc followed her. On their way down the corridor, Marc felt himself growing light with sorrow. Standing eye to eye with death had not left him cold.

The nurse looked at the doctor, then at Xavier and his mother. They had to turn around to see her. When they had, she said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you…”

That was all she needed to say. Marc threw his arms around his girlfriend and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Then he turned and hugged Xavier, who less than two hours before had been weeping bitterly in Bettina’s room, but who now could not shed a tear.

XAVIER THOUGHT ABOUT his grandfather’s club, his beautiful eyes and prominent nose. He thought: I have a duty to perform, and I mustn’t allow anything as mundane as my father’s death to let me lose sight of that. Parents die, that’s something every child has to go through. That is how things are supposed to be. They die. That’s Nature. That is no catastrophe. My father died of natural causes, with the emphasis on “natural.” A person can live with that.

“Of course you’ll want to say goodbye to him,” the doctor said. He led the family and Marc to the little hospital room, where the equipment had already been disconnected, in order to save electricity.

“Come with us, Marc,” Xavier’s mother said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

They stood around the bed of the man who had missed his first transsexual by a hair. Somewhere in Basel, that transsexual was walking around the massage parlor, shouting, “Where’s my three o’clock?” And in the hospital corridor the physician on duty thought: If I have to go skiing with the family again this winter, I’m going to jump out the window. He was in the midst of a crisis. The combination of family, adultery, and work had produced first a rut, then disappointment, and finally bitterness.

The mother sighed. Marc squeezed her hand, he whispered: “Everything will be fine.” Xavier examined his father’s body. A steam engine that had exploded — that was the closest comparison that presented itself.

Marc, Xavier, and the mother left the room. They had said goodbye. The architect’s life was over. It had been a rich life, by human standards.

“If he had been found a little earlier,” the mother asked the physician on duty once they were out in the corridor, “could you have done anything for him?”

“I don’t think so,” the doctor said. “No, there was nothing we could have done.” He was thinking about the shambles his own life had become.

The doctor shook hands warmly with the remains of the Radek family.

Perhaps Xavier was oversensitive, perhaps he had a lively imagination, but when the doctor’s hand slipped into his he thought about killing as a profession, as work that had to be done, and which therefore resembled all the other work that could not be left undone. If death alone can put an end to suffering, then death would seem to be a solution, an answer. Perhaps even a prudent answer.

He wanted to ask the physician what happened to patients who turned into vegetables, but he held himself in check.

Less than a mile away, the transsexual was pacing peevishly around the massage parlor, shouting: “I could just as well have stayed at home, instead of getting all gussied up like this. And for what?” His colleagues weren’t listening to him. They were smoking and drinking cola in order to pass the time. They had enough problems with their own customers, who often didn’t show up, either.

MARC DROVE XAVIER and the mother back to the house. Death had made Marc silent. It took a while before his mind was once again occupied by the Boeing 737.

They had barely entered the living room when the phone rang. It was the architect’s neighbor.

“How is your husband doing?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

“He just passed away,” Xavier’s mother replied.

“That’s terrible,” the neighbor said. But it sounded as though she had expected nothing less. “I feel so bad. He was so young. And so handsome. This is a great blow for all of us, for the city, for the neighborhood, for Swiss architecture. And just this afternoon he was lying there so peacefully under his punching bag. I did what I could, I put a blanket over him and a pillow under his head, I asked whether he wanted something to drink. But he was unconscious. As though he’d been struck by lightning. But, now that I have you on the phone anyway, I know this isn’t the right moment to talk about this, but your husband’s Saab is still parked in front of my driveway, and I can’t get out. I thought, well, maybe you could move the car up a little? If you tell me where the keys are, I can do it myself.” The three of them drove to the villa where Xavier had grown up. They looked for the car keys.

The neighbor lady came, too; she offered to warm up a can of soup for the next of kin, and talked nonstop. When they said they didn’t want any soup, she offered to open a can of pineapple slices. But her pineapple was not wanted, either. The next of kin were not hungry. A death on the street made the neighbor lady extremely talkative. Like so many people, she subscribed to the newspaper only for the obituaries, which she studied closely and read out loud to her husband, often accompanied by remarks of disapproval. After more than an hour, Xavier finally found the keys to the Saab on the floor beneath a dresser.

The punching bag, which the architect had originally bought for his son, hung unattended. The neighbor lady explained in detail how she had found the architect. “You never know what’s going to kill a person. My husband and I know so many joggers who have dropped dead on the spot. That’s why we take the car wherever we go.”

Xavier went to his room. It had been stripped: only a bed, a desk, and a stereo system were still in it.

He sat down on his old bed and thought of Awromele.

Now he was completely alone with his mother and his mother’s new boyfriend.

And with his grandfather. He had entered him. He had taken possession of him.