The Jewish Messiah

The Most Wonderful Day

XAVIER HAD DEVELOPED a high fever, and he had soiled himself.

When his mother came in at seven-thirty to look at her child, he was lying in his own feces. She smelled it right away. “What have you done now?” she asked.

The only reply was a little peeping sound, as though the infection had not only nestled in the sex organ but had reached the vocal cords as well.

“What have you done now?” she asked a little louder. “Are you going to start acting like a baby? Haven’t we given you enough attention yet?”

Xavier opened his mouth but was unable to say anything, not even to cry for help. The mother yanked the blankets away. Now he screamed. But not loudly, and not for long, either.

The feather bed, which was real eiderdown, had made the wound start to fester. There were no longer a few isolated blisters on the sex organ. The sex organ had become one huge blister with yellow moisture running out of it. The same went for the boy’s balls. Everything had swollen to unnatural proportions. What Xavier had between his legs was the funhouse mirror of sex organs.

The mother might have noticed, but she had no eye for her son’s wounds just then. All she saw was the fecal material he was lying in. Not solid turds, but a squishy mess. She thought about the laundry. And cooking pans with caked-on fat, she thought about them, too. All her life she’d had an aversion to dirty diapers. One time she had even fainted while changing her child.

The mother loved Xavier — she was a mother, after all — but with her the love came in waves. “Do you think I don’t have enough to do?” she asked. Tears welled up in her eyes. The falling in love, the Jews, the Nazis, the babies, the United Nations, everything existed and was brought to be in order to make her life difficult. She had never said it in so many words, but that was how she viewed the world, that was how she would always view the world — as an affront, a macabre conspiracy against her and every other decent person.

“Say something,” she said to her son.

Silence.

“Say something,” she shouted more loudly now. “Say something. I won’t have you ignoring me like this.”

The mother’s shouts had awakened Marc. He came to her shouts like a hungry cat to a herring bone. As soon as he reached the door, he saw the condition his stepson’s sex organ was in, and he knew there was no way to avoid a trip to the doctor.

When he laid his hand on the mother’s shoulder, she shrank from his unexpected touch. She thought about her broken nose. Thanks to the painkillers, it didn’t hurt much anymore, only when she grimaced or tried to blow her nose, but the humiliation, she couldn’t forget that. She would never forget that. How her boyfriend had beaten her up when she had finally started using her fantasy.

“It might be better to call the doctor,” Marc suggested.

She sighed, and said quietly, “Yes, it might.”

The mother was afraid of gossip over which she had no control, deathly afraid of suggestive looks at the butcher’s. So she said: “Let’s wait a while and see. It will probably go away by itself. Nature is the best medicine. Waiting rooms and hospitals are breeding grounds for bacteria.”

At the thought of bacterial infections in hospitals, motherly love overpowered her the way the heart attack had overpowered her husband. She knelt down beside the bed and said: “Poor Xavier, I know it’s not easy for you, I know that. It’s never been easy for you. I’m going to make you a nice hot cup of tea.” She ran her hand over her son’s forehead and did her best to love him, but all she could think of was: My child stinks to high heaven. How do I get out of here? Cow shit smells like roses compared with this.

She thought about her father, about how much he had loved cows.

After twenty-four hours of labor, when Xavier had finally come into the world and she had slowly recovered from the unbearable pain, her first thought had been: Now I’ll never have a weekend to myself again.

For punishment, Xavier had sucked her left nipple until it bled. The mother thought it was his revenge for the heartless thoughts she’d had during and after his birth. She had been raised to believe that she was guilty in the eyes of God. Guilty in the eyes of everyone, but most of all guilty before God.

Her baby was aware of none of that. Not the guilt, not God, not his mother’s thoughts. He didn’t even know that he had sucked her nipple till it bled, but from that day on things had never been completely right between her and the child. After the bleeding nipple, she had seen Xavier through different eyes, from a distance, in amazement, sometimes even in disgust, the way you look at a child you regret having adopted.

An older woman friend of hers had adopted and raised a Chinese baby, and she had told Xavier’s mother, “It’s a terrible thing to say, but the happiest day of my life was the day that Chinaman left my house.”

The mother often caught herself thinking: If only my child was an adopted Chinaman who would leave my home at eighteen and never come back. Later, she hated herself for having such thoughts.

Back then, her gynecologist had said: “He’s hungry, that’s all. Some babies suck hard. There’s nothing unusual about it. Your nipple will heal, don’t worry. You just have to squeeze it a little before you breastfeed him.” The nipple got better, but the rest didn’t.

“He’s shit his bed,” Marc said.

“That’s right,” the mother said.

“Poor kid,” Marc said.

“He did it on purpose,” the mother said. “Just to spite me. He hates me.”

“Come on,” Marc said, “don’t say that, that’s an exaggeration. He doesn’t hate you at all.”

“He hates me. From the moment he was born, he’s always hated me.”

“He’s lying in his own shit,” said Marc, who found hatred a ponderous subject for so early in the morning.

“He hates me, so he’s lying in his own feces. What other boy his age would lie in his own poop on a day like this?”

She threw open the curtains. Romantic sunlight entered the room.

“He’s sick,” Marc said. “He hurt himself. That’s why he’s lying in his own…”

“He craves attention,” the mother interrupted. “That’s why he did this. He was late with potty-training. He was early with reading and talking, but late with the rest. With the rest he was always a little backward.”

Her boyfriend felt the boy’s cheek. “He has a fever,” he said. “He’s sick as a dog.”

The boy was making incoherent noises.

“What’s he saying?” the mother asked. Her child had lost his ability to express himself well, and she was repulsed by that. She despised weakness, and she despised weak family members even more. Deep in her heart, she had considered her husband a weakling as well, but she had disguised that thought by acting servile, by never contradicting him, and by opening her behind to him once every three months. He had lived like a weakling — died like a weakling, too. Her father may have lived by ideas that were considered objectionable these days, but at least he hadn’t lived like a weakling, and he hadn’t died that way, either. No, there was nothing more repulsive than weakness.

“I can’t figure it out,” Marc said. “But I can tell that he’s running a high fever. Maybe we should have someone look at him, sweetheart. An expert.”

“Oh, please,” the mother said, “most of the time those experts just talk through their hats, they don’t really know much more than the interested layman.”

“But we should at least clean him up. Poop isn’t good for the skin. I know. One of my uncles became senile, and he lay in his own poop all the time. He played with it, too, and then he came down with a skin disease.”

“Senility is a terrible thing,” the mother said. “A horrible thing.” The two of them looked at the boy, whose breathing was labored.

In the kitchen, the mother put some water on the stove; her hands were shaking. If this ever got out, she’d never be able to show her face again. She’d be a goner, they would have to move. Before you knew it, her life in Basel would be ruined. Her life in Switzerland.

She took a bag of chamomile tea out of the cupboard, and tried to come up with a plan to save her life, and that of her family.

ALL THAT DAY, for almost nine whole hours, the mother tried to heal her son by regularly dribbling iodine on the wound and feeding him chamomile tea, and the whole time she murmured, “What have you done to us, child, what have you done to us?”

The boy couldn’t hear these rhetorical questions; he was far, far away, in the world of pain.

When Marc came home from work around five, the first thing he did was to take the boy’s temperature. He didn’t reproach Xavier the way the mother did, he only made tender little noises.

Altruism is wonderful, he realized. It’s wonderful to help people, especially defenseless people who are in great pain and can hardly move. Of course, it’s also wonderful to curse people roundly once in a while — he remembered the curses he had heaped upon the dying architect in the hospital — but, all things considered, it was more satisfying to help them and be gentle with them. You really felt like a human being when you did that.

The thermometer showed that Xavier’s temperature was up to almost 103. Marc carefully pulled back the blanket.

The wound was a battlefield of pus.

The bed had not been cleaned. The sick boy was still lying in his own feces, which had become hard and dry by now and stuck to his skin here and there.

It looked even more distasteful than it had that morning. But because Marc was feeling altruistic, he went on producing sounds that people usually make to babies lying in the cradle.

Then he went down to the kitchen, where the mother was making tea, and said: “We really have to take Xavier to the hospital now; his temperature is up to a hundred and three.” He held his hands under the tap and asked, “Why didn’t you clean him?”

“I didn’t want to wake him up,” the mother said. “Besides, I can’t do everything on my own around here.”

She had started to fear the worst as well, though, so they carried the boy downstairs and laid him, blanket and all, on the backseat of Marc’s Alfa. A maneuver that hurt Xavier so badly that he shrieked a few times.

The mother went back to the bathroom and quickly applied a touch of red lipstick; she knew that in all situations one was judged by one’s appearance. Then they drove like mad to the hospital. Marc liked to drive like a speed demon. It made the mother feel nauseous. The boy was already nauseous.

IN THE WAITING ROOM, where she had been sitting with her broken nose not so long before, the mother now sat with her child. He couldn’t sit upright, so they had laid him across three chairs. The waiting room was crowded that day, full of casualties from a soccer game that had gotten out of hand even before it started. The mother prayed that she wouldn’t see anyone she knew.

Every once in a while, Marc got up to see how the boy was doing, and to speak a few words of comfort to him, along the lines of: “You’ll be okay. Nothing to worry about. It will be over soon.”

The mother had put on her sunglasses and gone to the ladies’ room to look at herself in the mirror. She had grown prettier since the divorce. And after her husband’s death, her appearance had actually improved notably. It wasn’t nice to think so, but it was the truth. Although it was possible, of course, that his death had nothing to do with it.

When she came out of the restroom, the nurse called Xavier Radek’s name.

Along with her boyfriend and the friendly nurse, Xavier’s mother carried the child to the doctor’s office. The nurse apologized for the inconvenience, but all the stretchers were occupied because of the rioting.

“Stretchers can give you a hernia anyway,” said the mother, who had read an article about that in a women’s magazine.

They had to wait for the doctor to come in. “There’s still some shit sticking to his skin,” Marc said.

“They’ll wash that off,” the mother said. “Just put the sheet over it.” Marc didn’t want to argue, so he pulled up the sheet, making quiet little cooing noises the whole time.

Then the doctor arrived. The doctor was a woman. What’s more, she was almost seven feet tall.

The mother decided right away that this was an unpleasant woman. She was relieved, however, to find that they didn’t know each other from any of the social engagements she was obliged to attend each year. The architect had given generously to good causes, and generosity and social engagements went together. Now she was the one who gave to good causes — less generously, things had changed, but she always gave something. People in need could count on her.

The doctor had barely sat down at her desk before getting up again to look at the patient. One look was enough.

“Why did they make you wait so long?” she asked. Then she picked up a phone and snarled a few words into the receiver.

“What’s this?” the doctor asked, pointing to something black sticking to the unconscious boy’s leg.

“He soiled himself,” the mother said.

Within thirty seconds, four orderlies had come into the room. They picked up the boy and ran with him through the corridors of the hospital, towards Intensive Care. The mother ran after them, still wearing her sunglasses, and Marc ran behind her.

At Intensive Care the adults had to wait outside, in front of a large window.

“What are they doing?” the mother asked.

“I can’t see,” Marc said. “They’ve pulled a curtain around him.”

Two doctors, along with two other nurses, worked on Xavier for the next hour and a half.

“Why are they taking so long?” the mother wanted to know.

When the seven-foot doctor finally came out, she walked straight up to the mother and said, “So now I want you to tell me what happened to that boy.”

The mother got up from the couch where she had been waiting calmly all this time, resigning herself to the hand of fate. She was still wearing her sunglasses. “He played with himself,” the mother said, smiling amiably at the doctor. She had everything under control. “Boys his age do that all the time.”