The Jewish Messiah

Relief

THE FIRST THING the mother did was go into the kitchen and wash her hands. She always did that when she came in. Then she hung up her coat, came into the living room, and said hello to her family.

“They’re still talking about Xavier at the bridge club,” she said to no one in particular. “But I told them that we’re all back to normal in this house.”

The mother went into the kitchen to make some chamomile tea, which she brought back into the living room a few minutes later in a thermos jug of Italian design that she and the architect had bought one time in Bologna.

They drank their chamomile tea in silence. Xavier had a vision in which Awromele was taking the weenies of strange boys in his mouth. He had never imagined Awromele doing such things, but it worried him.

When Marc realized that he couldn’t put it off any longer, that he had to say it now, that otherwise it would never happen, he rubbed his hands together and said, “Sweetheart.” Marc coughed. His hands were moist, but that could just as easily have been from the hot tea. “Sweetheart,” he said again, and he looked at the mother. She was ignoring him. “Darling.” Marc couldn’t come up with any pet names; he couldn’t even remember whether he had ever thought up pet names for her. “As far as I can see, you don’t have a narcissistic disorder,” he said at last.

The mother poured herself another cup of tea. She had never thought about herself in connection with disorders, but now that her boyfriend was stating so emphatically that she had no narcissistic disorder, she began to have her doubts. Did she seem less than normal to the outside world?

“Right,” Marc said. “Not that. And, well, I’m glad. Because a lot of people really do suffer from that.”

The mother said nothing. She didn’t know what there was to be glad about; disorders she didn’t have didn’t do much to cheer her up.

“I love you very much,” Marc said. He tried to look at her lovingly, with the fire that he had really only felt for her on one evening, a fire that had gone out as inconspicuously as it had been lit.

The mother took a little sip, the tea was still a bit too hot. She thought about the stories she had heard from her girlfriends at the bridge club, stories she couldn’t join in with, stories about feelings she knew about only from magazines.

Xavier bent deeper over his book. He tried not to think about Awromele, and at the same time not to listen to this conversation. He was afraid of knocking over his cup. He noticed he was trembling, as though he were hypoglycemic.

“What I mean is, I love you,” Marc said, because the mother had still not said a thing. “And in the last couple of weeks I have really come to appreciate you, as a person, as a woman. Well, as everything.”

The mother looked at her boyfriend, who had broken her nose one evening when she had spread herself open for him. She had tried to forgive him, but she still couldn’t. Forgiveness was a tricky business. In fact, she had never been able to forgive anyone, and she had the feeling that no one had been able to forgive her, either. Even though she had no idea what she’d done wrong.

“That’s nice,” she said.

“People without a narcissistic disorder can cope well with the truth, because they live in harmony with themselves and with their surroundings,” Marc continued. He had good hope that she would understand everything, that it would all turn out fine, that she would be able to live with it as long as he didn’t beat around the bush, as long as he was honest. “I want you to know that I love you very much, but there is one other person I love just a little more.”

The mother looked at him. She had heard the words without understanding them. She’d had that problem before, not being able to understand what men were saying to her. Her late husband had often said things to her that she hadn’t understood. Men — well, not that there had been so many of them. Two. Others had intruded into her life briefly, but they had stuck to being silent, and the rest.

“Don’t you want to know who I love so much?” Marc asked, and he picked up his spoon and pretended to play with it absentmindedly. “Don’t you want to know who I love so terribly much that it drives me crazy?”

Xavier became increasingly absorbed in his homework. He seemed to be in a trance. He saw the letters dancing on the page, and he was reminded of the Jewish mystics Awromele had told him about one afternoon in the tram. Jewish mystics had seen letters dancing as well.

“Yes,” the mother said, after she’d thought about it a bit. “Yes, actually, I’d like to know.”

Marc smiled; he tried to look as sweet as he had the evening he’d met her. That evening, he had looked sweet and innocent, too, so terribly sweet, and at the same time lovesick and brutish. Hungry. Why, he didn’t know anymore himself — loneliness perhaps, the need to forget a whole series of women who had left him. You could grow tired of having people stick to you, but people who ran away were tiresome as well.

“Well,” the mother said, “I’m all ears.” Now it was Marc’s turn to be silent.

The mother remembered exactly why she had let him seduce her: it was because she hadn’t felt a man for decades. She had been penetrated, mostly from behind, but she hadn’t felt a man, not that; as far as that went, she had only feeble memories that had grown so vague that she could no longer tell the difference between what was real and what was fantasy. She had also forgotten what it was like to drive a man wild. She did remember what it felt like when a man didn’t want you anymore, when the father of your child was disgusted by what had crawled out of you, by the belly in which the embryo had grown so slowly. She had wanted to experience it one last time, before it was too late; she had wanted to know what it felt like to drive a man wild. That’s why she had laughed that evening even when there was nothing to laugh about, giggled without good reason, rolled her eyes like a bad actress, tilted her head to one side, and encouraged Marc to go on, above all to go on, not to give up, never to give up. She wanted to know what it was like to have a man long for her. “Read my palm,” she had said to Marc, who would someday break her nose. “Read my palm,” and he had taken her hand and never let go.

“Your son,” Marc said. “Your sweet son. That glorious creature.”

The mother looked at her child, whom she had hated since the day he had entered the world with a shriek. Whom she had to hate, because he had made her what she didn’t want to be, but what she had to become in order to be respectable in this city: a mother. She had thought it was a part of being happy, a child.

She looked at Marc and then at her tea. She took a sip. She was amazed to discover that she felt nothing, not even surprise, as though she had been expecting this for years, even back when she was taken to the hospital with contractions and all she’d been able to think was: Something terrible is going to happen, there’s no way out. Something terrible is going to happen.

“I know I can tell you this,” Marc said, “because you don’t have a narcissistic disorder. Otherwise I would never have told you. But people like us, who love each other very much, don’t have to keep secrets from each other.”

“No,” the mother said.

Xavier looked at the dancing letters in his book. He thought about Awromele; he thought: Save me, Awromele, save me. Get me out of here. Get me out of here forever. Life is wonderful, but not here. Not here, never again.

“I’m going to bed,” his mother said. “I’m tired.”

“Wait a minute,” Marc said, rolling up his sleeves for the umpteenth time. “I want you to know that I’m not going to leave you. I want to stay here. I will never leave you. Nothing has to change. Between us. I’m staying with you because of the boy, but that doesn’t matter, I’m staying with you, that’s the important thing. I love him, so I also love you. You understand? I love everything that comes crawling out of you, and I would be so happy if more things came out of you, something that was mine as well.”

“I need to go to bed,” the mother said again. “It’s late.” She looked at her watch. A present from her late husband, she’d replaced the strap only recently.

She got up and took the thermos and the cups to the kitchen.

Before going to bed, she came back into the living room, where her son was still sitting across from Marc. “By the way, did you know about this, Xavier?” she asked.

Xavier saw the mother, whom he had wished to spare all grief, whom he had wished to spare the suffering of the world. But he couldn’t give up Awromele for her sake. That would be too much. That would be too great a sacrifice. Between him and Awromele stood the mother. “About what?”

“About this. About what Marc just said. Did you know about it?”

“A little,” Xavier said. “I don’t know any more than you do. I don’t know—”

“You don’t know what?”

Xavier shrugged, and looked at his book. His freshly healed sex organ usually began hurting around this time of night.

“What don’t you know, Xavier?”

“Nothing, nothing really.”

The mother crossed her arms. She looked at the two men in her house.

One of them she had made — the word made her laugh — the other she had met in a museum, at a cocktail party, he had started talking to her, she had looked at him willingly. That was what she had told herself to be that evening, willing.

“Why my son?” she asked. “I mean, there are so many men in Basel, so many young men. Why my son?”

The mother’s boyfriend looked at her son. All hope was longing, but why did longing have to be so complicated? He didn’t understand that. Why couldn’t he long for her? That would be simpler, and he had tried, he had tried so hard, even when he broke her nose he had been trying, he had been working on longing for her.

“That’s love,” Marc said at last. “Love is inexplicable, but beautiful. Don’t you think? So huge, so all-embracing. So vast, so mysterious — that, too, my sweet, so terribly mysterious.”

So filthy, he had felt like adding, so godforsaken filthy, filthy as a corruption scandal that will never completely be unraveled, filthy as a gas chamber from which the corpses have just been raked out with a hook. Yes, his love was filthy, he had always known that, and now he had reconciled himself to it. True love was filthy.

The mother nodded distractedly.

In the bathroom, she cleaned her face with a cotton ball.

Xavier came into the bathroom and put a hand on her shoulder. But she took his hand and laid it on the sink.

“Mama,” he said, “I really don’t know anything about this. I don’t know what’s gotten into him. You didn’t know about it, either, when you brought him home, did you?”

Xavier waited for a reply, and when it didn’t come he squeezed some toothpaste onto his toothbrush.

The mother crawled into bed. She couldn’t sleep, so she took a sleeping pill. It didn’t help. Marc had come in and lain beside her. He had tried to kiss her, but she had pushed his head away gently. “Not now,” she had said. “Not now.”

“I don’t mean anything bad by it,” he had answered. “I still think you’re pretty and attractive. I don’t want you to think that I suddenly have no more sexual feelings for you. If it had been possible, I would have liked to have a child with you. I would love to make a child with you. My dream is to have a child.”

Then he had stroked her arm, but she pushed away his hand as well. All she said was: “It’s still possible, just barely.”

In the middle of the night, she got up and went to the kitchen. She stood there silently, for minutes. Her own breathing was all she could hear. In the semidarkness, she looked at the dishes lined up in the dish rack. She leaned on the counter.

It surprised her that she still didn’t feel a thing. She tried to cry, but couldn’t. All she felt was a coldness, a repressed rage, not even that, the residue of rage and eternal bitterness. She took a cup and filled it with water from the tap. She took a couple of sips. Then she pulled her pajama pants down to her knees and, still in the semidarkness, looked at her thighs.

The flesh was white.

She took a fork out of the dish rack. Why didn’t she feel anything? She didn’t understand — she had every reason to feel something, everyone felt something. The only thing she could catch herself feeling was a vague sense of being cold, like when you’ve taken a walk outside in the winter too lightly dressed.

She put the fork back in the rack.

That she had borne a child, she hated that. The rest not, the rest was over, a closed book that had left nothing unpleasant in its wake.

She moved her hand over her left leg. Her hands were cold and dry.

“Cold hands and a warm heart,” someone had said to her once. She couldn’t remember who, maybe Marc, that evening at the museum, that evening when she had wanted to be willing, nothing but willing.

She picked up the bread knife, Italian design, purchased in Verona with her late husband. A little pubic hair was sticking out from beneath her panties. It had once been a different color, lighter — curlier, too — she thought. She wasn’t sure. She tried to picture her pubic hair as it had been twenty years ago, but couldn’t.

Using her right hand, she drove the bread knife into her left thigh, close to her cunt.

She pulled the knife out of the white flesh. The blood flowed slowly, almost too slowly in her eyes, but gradually it began flowing more quickly. The edge of her panties and a wisp of pubic hair turned red.

She thought about the Committee of Vigilant Parents, about her marriage, the bridge club, the trips to Italy.

The pain was a relief.

Pain is always a relief.

She washed the bread knife and put it back in the rack.

The blood dripped down her leg and onto the pajama pants that were drooping around her ankles. She took off the pants; blood spots are hard to get out of polyester.

Now the blood was on the kitchen floor. That was a matter of a little mopping.

Never again will anyone come right inside me again, she thought, no one will ever come right inside me again. I am Yours, and Yours alone.

She wasn’t sure who You was, God or You-Know-Who. Or maybe a combination of the two.