The Jewish Messiah

A Clean Break

WHILE MARC, against his better judgment, was trying to scrub the spots off the carpet, and his mother was lying on her bed and cursing her life, Xavier dragged himself into the living room. He couldn’t remember ever having walked like a normal person. A world without wounds had become unimaginable.

Xavier remained sprawled on the floor, beside the easy chair in which Marc had been seated a few minutes before, watching the mother’s act. From the bedroom came the sound of her sobbing, punctuated by the occasional shriek.

Xavier was hurting too badly to pay any attention. He needed to get the sloppily wrapped bandage, which had now turned a dark red, off of his sex organ. He had to examine and heal himself. But he didn’t dare to do that in the middle of the living room.

When Marc was finished scrubbing the carpet, he leaned over and patted Xavier’s warm head.

“Are you really feeling that bad?” he asked, his hand resting on Xavier’s head. “What have you been drinking?”

Xavier fidgeted at Mr. Schwartz’s trousers. An old man’s trousers, that’s what life looked like once you’d brushed all the myths off it.

“Take me to my room,” Xavier whispered. He closed his eyes tightly. “Please, take me to my room.”

“Oh, little fellow,” Marc said, “cute little guy.” And he kissed Xavier’s forehead. Then he picked up his stepson and carried him upstairs.

Marc was not strong, so it wasn’t easy for him, but he didn’t let that show. He laid Xavier on the single bed that the mother had bought when they moved in here. His old bed was still at the architect’s house.

After Marc had put Xavier on the bed, he took a good look at him, how he lay there, so helpless and alone. A feeling of regret came over him again. He wished he could help the boy, but he didn’t know how.

In the next room, Xavier’s mother’s sobs grew quieter. They changed to deep sighs and heavy breathing. She thought about the orphan she had been, about how she’d given birth, about the way she had imagined being happy, long ago. The love she had felt once she knew she was pregnant, a feeling she now doubted. Before the conception, there had been almost no love at all. Tension, there was that, the hope of a better life, a longing for something more than poverty and shame. She didn’t know whether she had ever felt love in her life. Yes, as a child she had loved You-Know-Who, but that was different, that had been a love without lust, because back then she didn’t know about lust yet. That was a love born of patriotism and self-sacrifice.

She thought about the book she had read recently, about the magazine in which that book had been praised by female experts who knew how she could keep her sex life exciting. She doubted whether she had ever felt lust. Maybe she had only wanted to see desire in the eyes of the man she needed. Desire as a dire need, that was the life-insurance policy for a woman like her, a woman who only wanted to erase Saxony, the humiliation, and the poverty from her mind, to become what every woman in Basel was: a wife, a lady with a family life. But the dire need of men never lasts long, it continually changes shape, unreliable as the weather. A few weeks, six months at most, was the longest it ever lasted, she’d once heard someone say in the ladies’ room. In her case: four months. Then the desire that had made the architect — still a graduate student at the time — tear the clothes off her body had turned into a long winter’s sleep, interrupted only by a ritual that was always performed in great haste. After the birth, the architect had focused on her rear end, as though disgusted by the hole from which his son had crawled. And now she was disgusted by it herself. She moved her hand across her stomach, across the shallow wrinkles that, when she lay like this, were nothing more than shadows, nothing more than the hint of wrinkles, but which would grow deeper, deeper, and deeper, which would hollow her out as water hollows out the stone.

She thought about her father, a modest man, who had valued nothing so much as simplicity. She remembered her boyfriend’s blow, and carefully felt her nose. When she had noticed Marc at that cocktail party, it had been because she had seen in his eyes something she had missed for so long: the dire need of desire. And now look what that dire need had done: dire need had given her a bloody nose.

Downstairs, Marc put on the headphones again. He became one with the jazz music, the way he could become one with the flight simulator. It wasn’t that easy with people, but fusing with machines and with Benny Goodman, he was good at that.

In his room, lying on his bed, Xavier carefully pulled down his trousers. It didn’t go very quickly. Every millimeter they descended made Xavier feel as though his sex organ were slowly being torn from his body.

As he unfastened the clips that held the bandage in place, the pain made him writhe. It took him a few minutes to dare to go on unwrapping the bandage. His whispered his friend’s name: “Awromele.”

He remembered the pictures of his grandfather, the task he had assigned himself, the ambitions of most of the people he had known in his life, people who were satisfied with very little, with the corruptive presence of enduring happiness, with the prison that happiness constituted. For Xavier, who had always been happy, that prison had become increasingly meaningless.

In the bathroom, the mother was washing her face. Her eyes were still moist; her throat was raw from screaming. She put a little Nivea on a cotton swab and rubbed it slowly across her cheeks and forehead. Tears were still running down her face. Her nose was bent, she thought — she took another look at it — really bent, and it hurt, too.

In the doctor’s waiting room, she had seen posters warning against domestic violence. Inquisitively, she had studied the pictures on those posters: a woman with a black eye, a woman missing four front teeth, a woman with burns on her arm.

There was plenty you could say about the architect, but domestic violence would never have occurred to him. Even when he took her up the anus, which had happened less and less in the last few years, he had done so hastily, that above all. She had had to do all the work, she had had to keep everything open and greased up; he had limited himself to what was strictly necessary.

The son slowly unwrapped the bandages from his organ. There were tears in his eyes as well, but they were not the product of self-pity, not the moist vestige of the eternal lament over a past gone by, a past that would never return but which had been so imperfect, so close, so fresh, and yet so dead. The nerves branching out from his crotch were stronger than his self-control. They were what made him weep.

Once the bandage had been removed, he looked at what he had looked at so often without undue interest — not like other boys his age, who could look at it for hours, ruler in hand. What he saw he did not recognize. What was lying or hanging there looked like part of an English breakfast. A black sausage, a little greasy, more dark-blue than black. The testicles were blue as well, and quite swollen. Bigger than ever, like little balloons that might burst loudly any moment.

During his admission into the covenant of the chosen, something had gone wrong. There was no denying that anymore. He had to tell Awromele, and probably Mr. Schwartz as well, in case he ever risked doing a circumcision again. A person can always learn from his mistakes.

The mother slammed the bathroom door; there was still a little Nivea on her face. She hurried down the stairs. “Look,” she shouted when she saw Marc sitting on the sofa.

He didn’t react.

“Look,” she shouted, louder now.

He took off the headphones.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Marc attached great importance to harmony, even in times of war.

“Can’t you see it?” she asked.

“What?”

“My nose.”

“What about your nose?”

“Can’t you see it? What you’ve done?”

Marc shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

He wanted to kiss her, to press her against him, to forget everything that had happened.

“You broke it.”

“I’m sorry,” her boyfriend said again. He was generous when it came to apologies; at work he often apologized for other people’s mistakes. “I didn’t mean to do that.” He took her hand, but she yanked it away. “I don’t know what got into me,” he said. “My stomach was hurting. I really apologize.”

“It’s crooked.”

“It doesn’t look any different. I don’t see anything wrong with your nose. It’s a cute little nose you’ve got there, and it looks just like it always has.”

The mother felt the urge to punch him, to dig her nails into his face and scratch it open, but she restrained herself: single men were rare in Basel. “Take me to the hospital,” she said. “Take me there right now. My nose is broken.” She spoke excitedly, as though complaining at the cleaner’s about a spot that was still in her favorite dress.

“Maybe it’s just bruised,” Marc said. “Your nose looks fine.”

But he got up and put on his coat. It wasn’t worth making a fuss about.

Five minutes later, they were in his Alfa, on the way to the hospital. The mother looked at Marc and thought: I’m going to break you, I’m going to break you like you’ve never been broken.

She had never had thoughts like that before. It cheered her up. She had always seen herself as a victim. First as a victim of You-Know-Who, who had betrayed things so shamefully by committing suicide in his bunker, then as a victim of her husband, who was indifferent to the glorious hole the good Lord had drilled into her body. There was plenty you could say about the Russian soldiers back in ’45, but not that they were indifferent to holes like hers. And then she had become a victim of her son, who had come creeping out of that hole after twenty-four hours of pushing and suffering, and who thanked her now by going swimming with Zionists.

But that was done with; she was going to strike back. She wasn’t going to let anyone walk all over her again. She had read about it in that book, she’d heard about it from friends. Stick up for yourself, don’t let yourself be pushed in a corner, tell it like it is, say what’s on your mind. That was living.

By the time she found herself sitting in the waiting room at the emergency unit, there wasn’t much left of her need for revenge, and she felt just as passive as ever.

IN HIS BEDROOM, her child was still lying on his bed. Every now and then he took a look at his testicles. The color alone made him nauseous. Dark-blue, with a vein bulging out here and there, but the blue background made the veins look sick, porous, no longer fit to transport blood. They were going to burst. Bled to death, as the brief reports in the paper always said.

Xavier didn’t know how he was going to survive this without help from his mother or Marc. He jabbered a few words in Yiddish, the few words he could remember from Awromele’s lessons. Sometimes he stopped and whispered: “God of the Jews, do You see what they’re doing to me?”

Then he shouted for his mother again; he didn’t know that she had left the house.

He thought that the blue of his testicles would spread slowly, first to his legs, then to his stomach, and finally to his head. By that time he would be dead.

“Thirst,” he shouted, “thirst.”

AFTER AN HOUR and a half in the waiting room, Xavier’s mother was examined by a young doctor who tried to put her at ease by telling jokes. They needed to take X-rays. The X-rays confirmed her fears: “Your nose is broken,” the doctor said. He didn’t ask how it had happened; he had his suspicions, but his job was healing people; the rest he left up to the social workers.

The mother began weeping quietly. The thought that the man she had hoped to marry had already broken her nose made her despair. The architect had ignored her, had treated her like a wall unit that you couldn’t bring yourself to throw away, despite its serious defects. But ignoring was better than breaking. And what had she done to deserve this, anyway? She had spread herself open for her boyfriend, she had finally had the courage to use her fantasy. She would never open up again, at least not voluntarily; she would remain shut till the bitter end.

“Do you have to put it in a cast?” she asked. The doctor smiled. “We don’t do that with noses,” he said. “It’s a matter of taking it easy, that’s the most important thing. We can give you a nose brace, though, if you’d like. Or shall I prescribe some painkillers?”

“Yes, please,” she said.

She looked at Marc, who was playing dumb. No regrets, no pleas for forgiveness, no shock at his own wrongdoing. Only restlessness, because it was taking so long. He sat beside her motionlessly.

“Painkillers, or the nose brace?”

“Both,” she said, “please.”

“We don’t have to reset it,” the doctor said. “It’s a clean break.” Then he felt it was his duty to ask whether she had been the victim of a crime.

“Not that I know of,” she said.

“If you say so, I believe you.”

“You know,” she said, “victims are always culprits, too, and culprits are always victims. No one gets what he doesn’t deserve.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” the doctor said. And, after staring briefly at Mrs. Radek’s nose, he wrote out a prescription for painkillers.

WHEN NO RESPONSE CAME to Xavier’s repeated cries for water, it slowly dawned on him that Marc and his mother had left the house, or perhaps retired to their bedroom with wads of cotton in their ears.

Xavier rolled out of bed. It wasn’t really a roll, though — it was a fall. He lay on the floor of his bedroom, unable to move, without enough strength even to crawl like a baby. The blue of his sex organ had, as he’d feared, spread to his groin. Blisters had also risen on his sex organ; it looked like they were producing a sticky, yellowish-white substance. Because of the pain and the fear, he couldn’t accurately judge whether that yellowish-white substance was coming from the blisters, or from other orifices. It reminded him of the stuff that comes out of pimples when you squeeze them.

Mr. Schwartz had ruined everything.

After that, he didn’t think about Mr. Schwartz anymore, not even about Awromele. He was going to die soon.

But this was not his greatest worry; his greatest worry was whether or not he’d be buried in a Jewish cemetery.