The Jewish Messiah

The Irony of History

MR. RADEK, the grandson’s father, was a hardworking architect. The grandson’s mother, Mrs. Radek, was a housewife, but hardworking as well. For generations his father’s side of the family had lived in Basel; his mother’s came from Saxony. After the war, his mother had fled, arrived in Basel after a great many detours, and ended up in a foster home. She fell in love and became pregnant, or vice versa. A child came wriggling out of her belly. They called him Xavier. And that was it: no other children came out of her belly.

Xavier Radek. The name said it all. Sometimes he wrote out his name twenty times on a scrap of paper, as though he couldn’t believe it went with his body.

Xavier’s parents did not demand a great deal from him. As long as he went to school and kept a low profile in public, they were at peace. His visits to the synagogue, which could not remain a secret in a city like Basel, were tolerated. His parents would rather have seen him visit prostitutes, if he absolutely had to go in search of the exotic, but one had to make do: at least their son was healthy and not some heroin addict.

On a lovely summer evening, after he had been swimming in the Rhine with his young Zionists again, his mother said during dinner: “The Germans are the modern Jews. Look what a burden they have to bear.”

Xavier’s father, who never said much, but who could always be counted on for a clever remark at the right moment, said: “That’s the irony of history.”

Swimming with Zionists was a phase, his parents figured. Just like the blue hair, which had already grown out almost completely. Other children his age struggled with homosexuality, or suffered sudden attacks of kleptomania. It would blow over, would vanish as though it had never been. Just like Xavier’s grandfather.

AT THE SYNAGOGUE, he sat on a bench all the way in the back, where he occasionally entered into a conversation with a misfit. Houses of prayer tend to attract misfits. They were places where one could smell that death had once walked abroad. And perhaps that was the Almighty’s intention, because only death points unequivocally to Him.

Because Xavier was well mannered and, of all the misfit men, the most interested in Jewish rites and customs, and because he did not stink or walk around dressed improperly, one Saturday morning the rabbi struck up a conversation with him.

The rabbi asked him to come to his house for lunch. God expects His people to be hospitable, especially on Saturdays and other holy days.

“I’d like that,” said Xavier Radek.

“What’s your name?” asked the rabbi, who had thirteen children and the fatigued air of a man whose patience was often tested by his offspring, but more often by God, to say nothing of his wife.

“Xavier,” he said. He would rather have given a different name, David, for example, or Aaron — good biblical names. But he did not possess the art of lying.

“Xavier what?” the rabbi asked.

“Radek.” He slicked his neatly combed hair down even flatter. On his head was the crumpled skullcap he had been handed by the doorman of the synagogue. The man was from Armenia, and he watched over the synagogue to earn a little money on the side. He had bad teeth. Because he himself wasn’t Jewish, he was able to do what the Orthodox Jews did not allow themselves on the Sabbath. In actual practice, his duties as guardian were marginal; he peered through the peephole (which was senseless, because he let everyone in anyway), he turned up the heating when it was cold, and he passed out crumpled skullcaps to misfits who didn’t have their own. Misfit men who probably all had real problems, all except for Xavier, who felt glad to be alive.

Later, when Xavier became a radical but successful politician in Israel, he would think back on the synagogue in Basel, the smell of death and the doorman’s teeth, and he thought of the future as a set of Armenian teeth that would make even a dental hygienist throw up his hands in despair.

“Xavier,” the rabbi repeated, while a group of children fought to take his hand. The rabbi let them fight. “Xavier Radek, have you had a religious upbringing?”

“No,” Xavier said, “not really. Not to speak of.”

The rabbi held his tongue tactfully. Or perhaps he was merely bored. His beard was long, there were spots on his black jacket, and when Xavier came close to him he smelled the smell of food that had been on the stove all day. But Xavier didn’t let odors put him off.

Along with a few of the gentlemen from the synagogue, they were now strolling towards the rabbi’s house. “What is it you would like to learn?” the rabbi asked. Two children had won the struggle for his hand, a girl and a boy. The girl had white skin with the occasional freckle, and hair that was more red than blond, particularly in sunlight. She wore white tights, black patent-leather shoes, and a plaid skirt.

Xavier couldn’t imagine how he had put up with the steam engine and the chemistry set for so long. What did a steam engine really signify, anyway?

“What do you mean, rabbi?”

“Don’t call me rabbi. I’m Mr. Michalowitz.”

“Mr. Michalowitz.” Xavier ran over that name a few times in his mind, so he would not forget it.

“Would you like to learn something about Judaism, about the customs of your ancestors? Where do they come from?”

“Who?”

“Your parents. Where are they from? Are they Ashkenazim?”

How it had happened he was never able to figure out. Perhaps it was the color of his hair, his eyes, his physique, his white shirt, his gestures, his lips that seemed always on the verge of a smile, but in the synagogue at Basel no one doubted that Xavier Radek was a Jew. That was how he gained a culture, and a tradition; it was all that simple. This, too, could be no coincidence. He thought of his grandfather’s photo, the resemblance, the words he had whispered to the photo on quiet Sunday afternoons, the questions he had asked him, the most important of which had to do with the sense of suffering.

“Poland.” It was the first thing that came to mind. While they were swimming in the Rhine one evening, Mr. Salomons had told him that his parents came from Poland. It was in the Rhine that the fraternization had begun.

“From Poland, yes,” the rabbi said. “Of course, but where in Poland?”

Xavier thought for a moment. “Central Poland,” he said.

Apparently this was enough to place his parents, for the rabbi asked no further questions — at least not about that.

“And what is it you would like to learn?”

“I want to learn about suffering,” Xavier Radek said.

The rabbi stopped in his tracks. The children were pulling on his arms. The lonely men who, just like Xavier, had been invited to have lunch at the rabbi’s walked on. They didn’t notice a thing, immersed as they were in a discussion of the political situation in the Middle East.

“Which suffering?”

“Your suffering,” Xavier said. “Suffering in general.” He realized that his throat was dry, as though he were alone in a room with a woman for the first time and, halfway through some bland conversation — about the Rubik’s Cube, for example, she had suddenly removed a crucial item of apparel.

“Can you read Hebrew?” the rabbi asked.

“No.”

“Well, start with that.”

Then the rabbi walked on, and said nothing more to Xavier the rest of the way to the house.

The wind had come up. Occasionally Xavier had to put his hand on his head to keep the skullcap from blowing away. And because he was a social animal — there was no helping that — he joined in the single men’s discussion. He felt like a trained pig that had just found itself in the vicinity of truffles. He said: “The Jews need Lebensraum, too.”

AT THE TABLE, he sat between two of the rabbi’s sons. The oldest boy went by the name of Awromele; the other one’s name he only half understood, and half-names were impossible for him to remember. Across the table from him was a girl with braces on her teeth, who stared at him throughout the meal. He ate with relish, this food of the Jews. You couldn’t call it refined — they would have to wander at least another forty years in the wilderness before getting to nouvelle cuisine — but they did have a healthy appetite. Heroism didn’t need to be anything huge; this was good enough for starters. Xavier decided he should do this more often. Visit their homes.

He had washed his hands in ritual fashion, just like the others. He had heard the wine being blessed, he had drunk of the sweet wine itself, and he reveled in his new role. There was singing. At first Xavier Radek was prudent enough to keep quiet, but he had a good feeling for music, and the second time the refrain came around he could restrain himself no longer. He hummed along. He felt at ease amid the enemies of happiness, and so he hummed more and more loudly all the time, until his humming drowned out all the others, except for the rabbi. The girl with the braces tossed him glances of annoyance, but Xavier didn’t notice. He enjoyed the music; he lost himself in it.

The chosen people liked to sing at the table, just like the Boy Scouts. All details that he had never stopped to think about before, and that you never read about in the paper. The enjoyment bothered him, though. Enjoyment is shallow. You can enjoy yourself all morning, but around noon the tristesse of superficiality always strikes.

When the singing was over, Awromele, who had curly blond hair down over his ears, asked him: “Do you speak Yiddish?”

“No,” Xavier said, “I’m afraid not.”

Fortunately, the rabbi was not paying attention to them, he was busy explaining that a man does better to leave the choice of a wife to others who can be more objective. “That’s too bad,” Awromele said. “When you speak Yiddish, you can tell the filthiest jokes in the tram and no one understands you.” He shook his head ruefully when his father said: “I’ve helped more than twenty men to find a bride; they were happy then, and they are happy today. I can help you men find a bride as well, but you will have to be open to my counsel. You can’t turn down every bride I come up with — you mustn’t start finding fault in advance.”

“You know what?” Awromele said. “Tell me a dirty joke, and I’ll translate it into Yiddish. What’s the dirtiest joke you know?” He beamed, his face glowing red. It was not a blush, it was the excitement of life itself rushing through him, as though Awromele had no other reason to exist than to translate jokes sneakily into a slowly dying language.

Xavier felt a shiver run through him, without knowing why. He thought: That’s surrendering to life, what this fellow’s doing, surrendering to life head over heels. That’s what a warrior must do. But he said: “I don’t know. It’s not really the kind of thing I’m very familiar with.”

“A joke so dirty people would go nuts if they heard it.”

“I’ll think about it,” Xavier said. He didn’t know any jokes like that. He barely knew any jokes at all.

When the misfits got up to say goodbye — no agreement had yet been reached concerning their brides-to-be — Xavier got up as well. He thanked the rabbi profusely, and murmured something along the lines of “we must do this again sometime soon.” He tried to shake hands with the rabbi’s wife, but she didn’t respond. All she said was “Gut Shabbes.” He went down the steps in a daze.

When he was outside he realized that he was still wearing the black skullcap. He put it in his pocket.

AT DINNER THAT EVENING, the skullcap was lying like a huge insect in Xavier’s white soup-bowl. By the time he arrived at the table, his father and mother had already dished up asparagus soup for themselves. His own bowl was standing there, half filled with something that, in this setting, was clearly obscene.

He looked at it and realized that his parents had gone through his pockets. Undoubtedly with the best of intentions. Parents do everything with the best of intentions.

“Enough is enough,” his mother said.

He saw tears in her eyes. It made him sad.

“Enough is enough,” his mother said again, but a little louder now, putting a little more stress on the final word. Then she picked up the ladle and filled Xavier’s bowl.

He looked at the light-green liquid. The black skullcap came slowly floating to the surface like a huge squished beetle. More tears could now be seen in his mother’s eyes. This wasn’t such a disaster, was it? No one had died. They hadn’t lost any money. The house hadn’t burned down.

“Is this from a package?” Xavier asked.

“What?” his father asked.

“Is this soup from a package?”

“No, of course not,” his mother said. “Since when do we eat soup from a package?”

Asparagus heads were floating in the soup as well. Green asparagus. Xavier looked at them.

He picked up his spoon, wiped it on his napkin, wished his parents a bon appétit, and began to eat.

For a moment he thought: I’m eating the Jews’ lice. That thought occupied him, and even excited him a little, the way forbidden thoughts will sometimes excite young people. Life was even more mysterious than Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had predicted. He thought about Awromele, and was afraid for a moment that his parents might be able to read his thoughts.

“Xavier,” his mother said after he had taken a few bites, “take that thing out of your soup.”

“I didn’t put it there.”

“Xavier, take that thing out of your soup. I’m not going to ask you again.” She made it sound as though a catastrophe were looming over them. It wasn’t anger he heard in her voice, it was fear.

“Mama, I didn’t put it in there. Besides, it tastes wonderful, there’s nothing wrong with this soup. So, please, bon appétit.”

Patient but unflinching. That’s how Xavier was. That is how he would always be.

The twentieth century had not yet come to an end, there was still room for a little last-minute heroism. The vague events that had composed the story of his life until now had to be more than just coincidence, a little pile of happenstance — life wasn’t supposed to be like that.

At first his grandfather had guarded the enemies of happiness, then he had killed them with his own hands, without much in the way of technical resources, sometimes with nothing more than just a club. Grandpa had performed his duties conscientiously and, unlike many employees, had shown true initiative. And now he, Xavier Radek, created in his grandfather’s image, was eating the lice of the enemies of happiness. The irony of history, that was he himself.

“Xavier,” his mother said, and for the first time in his life he heard her raise her voice — one could even have called it screaming—“this is unhygienic. What you’re doing there is filthy.”

“I didn’t put it in my soup. And like I said, it tastes wonderful. You’ve outdone yourself again. Thank you.” His sense of fair play was keen. And hard as crystal.

His father, who was unable to come up with a clever remark at that particular moment, said: “I understand your being curious, we’re all curious sometimes, but in the long run it’s not the kind of thing for you. That’s all we’re trying to say.”

Xavier didn’t think about the long run. Heroism was not about the long run.

The irony currently attached to heroism had rendered itself obsolete, now that everything had become ironic: the wars, the newspapers, the news itself. It was time to get serious.

“As from today,” said Xavier, who had forgotten that he meant to spare his parents grief, “count me among the chosen people. I love both of you, but I belong to the chosen people.”

From that evening on, Xavier considered himself a foe of irony and moral relativism, which often went hand in hand. The relativism that claimed there was no black and white, only gray, was always ironic. His mother was fond of saying, with a certain regularity, “Xavier, the victims are always culprits, and the culprits are always victims.”

For a few seconds nothing happened, the way almost nothing ever happened in the villa where Xavier lived, especially nothing uncouth. Then his mother took his bowl away from him and threw it, soup and all, into the wastebasket. Carefully, because she didn’t want spots on the parquet. Standing beside the wastebasket, the mother then glared at her family with hostility.

Xavier looked and tried to find something of her father in her, but he couldn’t; nothing about her face reminded him of his grandpa. His mother’s father now lived on in him, and in him alone.