The Jewish Messiah

Pedophile Lenin

THE HEALING PROCESS took a long time. The first three days had looked bad for Xavier, and a doctor, not the seven-foot woman but a young man with brown skin, had spoken ominously to the mother about castration — about the pros and cons of the procedure at this stage of the illness.

“The colored man wants to castrate him,” the mother told her boyfriend.

Upon further investigation, though, the doctors saw that that operation would not be needed. Only Xavier’s left testicle could not be saved. During an operation that lasted less than forty-five minutes, a surgeon skillfully cut off Xavier’s left testicle and the pouch of skin around it. To help the boy adjust mentally to this minor mutilation, two nurses put the testicle in a jar of formaldehyde, so that Xavier could see what he lacked for the rest of his life. Seeing what you lack assists in the process of mourning.

The surgeon assured the mother that her son still had his right testicle, and that the chances for reproduction had therefore not been drastically reduced. “Of course, we’ll have to wait and see whether he ever has a normal erection again,” the surgeon said. “But if not, we can always tap off some sperm. As far as that goes, medicine is making great leaps forward each year.” When he left the room, the mother said to her son, “Don’t worry, it’s only your epididymis.”

Within a few days after the removal of the infected testicle — which was a dark-blue color, in some places even black, when the surgeon put the knife to it — Xavier was able to talk again. The seven-foot female doctor came and sat beside his bed.

“Well,” she said.

Xavier, who was still in a great deal of pain, struggled to open his eyes. He was still sleeping almost twenty hours a day. To combat the dehydration, a drip was attached to his arm.

“So — what happened to you?” she asked.

She was not particularly attractive; men tended not to fall for her, also because of her deep voice. Though she was intelligent and quite social, and therefore had a large circle of friends, almost no one dared to touch her.

“What happened?” she asked. “What did they do to you?” It had been clear to her from the start that this was a matter for the police, but after talking with a colleague she had decided to let the boy recover before exposing him to questioning.

“What do you mean?” Xavier asked.

“Your mother says you were playing with yourself, but that doesn’t seem very likely to me.”

Xavier looked the tall woman in the eyes. “I got circumcised,” he said. Telling the truth seemed like a good idea.

“Yes, you certainly did,” she said. “No doubt about that. You’re lucky there’s anything left.” Her laugh was curt and unpleasant. She picked up the jar of formaldehyde, which the nurses had put on the side table, beside a bouquet from Marc, and jiggled the testicle back and forth before the boy’s eyes. That would loosen his tongue. “Look,” she said. “This is what you lost. You don’t have this anymore.”

The boy peered at his left testicle, but couldn’t really see what was in the jar. He saw the little hairs that had grown on the scrotum. The flesh in the jar reminded him of the remains of a poorly plucked chicken that had turned blue with mold. He suddenly thought of Awromele; he missed him.

“Who did this?” the doctor demanded. “Who are you protecting?”

“I’m not protecting anyone,” Xavier said. With effort, he rolled over onto his side.

The doctor picked up her chair and moved it to the other side of the bed, so she could continue to look the boy in the eye. “Who did it?” she asked again, more forcefully this time. “Who was messing around with you? We have to know. He may try to do this to other boys as well.”

It had to be a man — women didn’t do things like this, she knew that. As a young girl, she had been so unattractive that it had roused the hatred of her classmates. Ugliness rouses hatred. The idea that the body is the mirror of the soul is ineradicable. They had kicked her bicycle to pieces all the time. And when the children were done with the bicycle, they started in on its owner. Teachers who cared about her welfare and who knew that the body was not the mirror of the soul were nevertheless powerless to alter the opinions and behavior of their pupils. And so it was decided that she was to be allowed to leave the classroom fifteen minutes before the final bell rang, that she might bicycle home quickly and avoid the worst of it. But when the wind was blowing from the wrong direction, the older boys often caught up with her, hit her, and ruined her bicycle. One might think that when a person has been molested as often as she was in her younger years, everything after that would be easy. But it wasn’t like that in her case. Little things could still reduce her to a shambles. She cried a lot, which is why she never put on mascara.

“Who did this to you?” she asked Xavier for the third time.

“No one,” he said a bit dreamily. “Mr. Schwartz circumcised me.”

“Mr. Schwartz,” she said. “Aha, Mr. Schwartz. And where does this Mr. Schwartz live?”

Xavier told her the name of the street. He didn’t know where he was anymore. He thought about Awromele and how much he’d like to see him again.

The doctor wrote it all down and held her patient’s hand for a moment. Then she went to her office, where she wept bitterly for ten minutes before calling the police to give them the name and address of the child molester.

The police wasted no time. Within the hour, twelve of them were standing at Mr. Schwartz’s door. He was busy weighing a piece of Emmentaler. Because he didn’t answer right away, the policeman kicked down his door.

The old man was led outside with gentle coercion, but only after they had thrown him twice against a cupboard. Policemen, too, have a healthy aversion to child molesters. All this confused Mr. Schwartz so badly that he raised his left fist and shouted, “Long live Lenin!” before they threw him into the paddy wagon.

THE NEXT EVENING, a candlelight march was held around the block where Mr. Schwartz lived. More than two thousand concerned citizens had signed up, and many of them carried signs bearing the names of children who had been molested by their fathers, uncles, brothers-in-law, and other pedophiles. Some of them even carried signs with the names of molested children from Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The citizens of Basel preferred to be on the safe side.

A woman carrying a sign with the name “Lea” on it was so moved by the candlelight procession that she used her sign to shatter Mr. Schwartz’s front window. Her deed met with modest applause. Concerned citizens wormed their way through the broken window into the apartment. Within minutes, they were back outside with Mr. Schwartz’s cheeses, which they rolled enthusiastically down the street.

The concerned citizens, whipped to a frenzy by the sight, kicked the pedophile’s cheeses. At first some of them kicked reticently, but soon they got the hang of it, and it was as though they’d been doing this all their lives. After a while, a scuffle arose, because not all the concerned citizens got an equal chance to kick the cheeses, and that, of course, was not fair.

When the kicking of the cheeses was over, the concerned citizens began dragging Mr. Schwartz’s furniture out into the street. They enthusiastically kicked that to pieces as well. They were alight with indignation.

When Mr. Schwartz’s window was shattered, the three policemen who had been accompanying the candlelight procession quickly went for a little walk. They couldn’t stand the sight of violence.

Thanks to the coverage given the case by the local media, and later by the national media as well, twenty of Mr. Schwartz’s other victims filed charges as well, including a sixty-five-year-old woman from Bellinzona. Months later, it became clear that their numbers were greatly exaggerated. Xavier Radek proved to be Mr. Schwartz’s only victim. But by then it was already too late.

Young people painted runes on the boarded-up windows of Mr. Schwartz’s house, and tried to set fire to it. The concerned citizens distanced themselves from these attacks. There was no sense in comparing apples with pears.

The Committee of Vigilant Parents was set up on the night of the candlelight procession. Xavier’s mother was made an honorary member. She raced to the hospital to tell her son about it, but he was sleeping, and she couldn’t wake him.

A few days later, wearing her sunglasses, she spoke the following words during a meeting of the committee in a local park: “What has been done to me must not be done to any other mother in Basel. We have been living for ourselves, and we have stopped living for each other. That is how this horrible, this unspeakable thing could happen.”

Awromele’s father, who realized that the Jewish community had to act as well, set up the Committee of Vigilant Jews. “We tolerate no pedophiles in our midst,” he told a reporter from the local paper. “And certainly no pedophiles who attack their victims with scissors and knives. Mr. S.’s membership in the Jewish community is hereby rescinded, with retroactive effect.”

When she read about it, Bettina immediately signed up for the Committee of Vigilant Jews. Because it was so far away, solidarity with India had become a bit too theoretical for her. She felt a growing need to put her solidarity into practice.

After his first, rather meagerly attended press conference, the rabbi visited a massage parlor; God had told him to seek pleasure wherever it was to be found. In the arms of the prostitute, a lady from the town of Thun, he wept for five minutes and said at last: “I didn’t have any choice. I can’t protect Mr. Schwartz. If I did that, I would only be encouraging anti-Semitism. Then there would be no stopping it.”

The masseuse ran her hand soothingly over the rabbi’s stomach. It occurred to her that, in this room, she had seen as many men cry as come.

A PHOTOGRAPHER from a local tabloid had no trouble sneaking into the hospital where Xavier lay. Once in the boy’s room, he immediately noticed the jar with the blue testicle. “Here,” he said. “Hold this — it will make a great picture.”

Xavier held the jar containing his left testicle. He was still awfully sleepy.

That evening, the tabloid opened with a big photograph of the victim holding his own testicle.

In Basel, tempers really flared.

The photograph was sent around the world, and was later voted Photo of the Year, with the caption “Victim with Testicle.”

The deputy mayor of Basel felt the need to make the following announcement: “The citizens of this city must never forget that there are also Jews who have nothing to do with pederasty, who even condemn such practices and see them as a danger to their little community.”

At the police station, Mr. Schwartz was interrogated for hours, but all the hubbub had confused him so badly that he could only talk about Lenin and kosher cheese. A journalist from the Baseler Zeitung received a transcript of the interrogations from a friend on the force. That is how the popular press came to give Mr. Schwartz the nickname “Pedophile Lenin.”

Xavier wasn’t a Jew yet, but he was already a victim. It was a start.