The Jewish Messiah

Our Genes

THE WEEKS FOLLOWING Marc’s confession went by in relative harmony. There was no more talk of his love for Xavier; there was no more talk of love at all. Marc occasionally urged the mother to make a baby with him, proposals the mother refused politely. “Not yet,” she said. “It’s all still so new.” She had never told Marc the truth about her age, and she wasn’t planning to now. In the course of time, she had chipped off a few years here and there. First two, then three, now it was more than five. And after her divorce she had undergone a rejuvenation cure. She looked good for her age. Almost no wrinkles, firm buttocks, no drooping flesh. She felt young. On the street she easily overtook women twenty years her junior.

Only very sporadically did she get up in the middle of the night in order to drive the bread knife into her thigh, an act that summoned up in her a brief feeling of satisfaction. She had the motion that a gust of life blew through her as she stood there with the knife in her hand. A gust, that was all, but it was enough. After that, she returned to the kingdom of the dead, where she had resided for years.

AWROMELE SPENT a great part of each day under the blankets in his room. At first he had waited for a phone call from Xavier, but when it became clear that Xavier was not going to call again, Awromele tried to forget him. The more he tried to forget him, the more he thought about him.

Xavier did not call because he thought Awromele was angry at him. He didn’t want to force himself on anyone, not even on Jews. He had his pride, and he planned to keep it. He too suffered under the silence, but even more under the way he pictured Awromele taking the weenies of strange men into his mouth.

Xavier decided to take up drawing. The world needed prettying up. Besides, the activity freed him from his unpleasant visions.

At first he used colored pencils. Later, he switched to oil paint and watercolors. Because he was often home alone with his mother — Marc did not return from work with the end of the afternoon — he asked her to pose for him.

Anything was better than a Zionist youth club, the mother thought, so she said, “Use me for your drawings.”

Within a short period, he produced six paintings of the mother, which he himself thought were not bad, although Klimt’s influence was perhaps a bit pronounced. While he painted, he thought about the task he had assigned himself, which he could not accomplish without Awromele.

Marc was enthusiastic about the boy’s paintings. “Keep at it,” he said. “You have talent. I have talent, too, but I can’t do anything with it, and the great thing is that you can. There are two kinds of people, the ones who can do something with their talent and the ones who can’t.”

“Let the boy finish school first,” the mother said. “After that we’ll see.”

The day Xavier began on the seventh big portrait of his mother — he had decided now to paint more in the style of Chagall — Awromele finally left the bed in which he had been drowsing, longing, and whining for the last few days. He had never been able to stand his parents’ whining, but now he was on the verge of becoming a crybaby himself. “Enough,” he had shouted at himself, “enough is enough.” Sitting there under the blankets with his clothes on, he had felt like an Indian in a wigwam; sometimes he dreamed that Xavier came and sat in the wigwam with him, and that they played a game, or simply ate a piece of chocolate together in silence and looked at each other contentedly.

Awromele got dressed, trimmed his curls, borrowed some of his father’s aftershave, and walked to Xavier’s house.

The closer he got to the house, the faster he walked. What nonsense, to wait for a phone call! You could spend your whole life waiting. Maybe there was something wrong with the phone. He started running. As he ran, his yarmulke kept blowing off, so he stuck it in his pocket.

When, at last, he reached the street where Xavier lived, he remembered what Xavier had told him: he was never to call, and certainly never just to pop in, because Xavier’s mother was a sensitive person who didn’t like unexpected visitors; she suffered from intense migraines.

All Awromele’s courage and good resolutions faded at the thought of Xavier’s mother with a migraine. He couldn’t just ring the bell and ask, “Is Xavier at home?” As long as he didn’t ring the bell, there was still hope; but if he rang the bell, everything was lost.

He sat down beneath a tree across from the house and waited. He waited until he was chilled to the bone. Then he got up and walked back to his own house, where he climbed into bed, clothes and all, and cried as if his heart was broken. His sister Rochele heard it, but didn’t want to disturb him.

Xavier was in the living room, painting with a sure hand. He had purchased a secondhand easel. Every two minutes he thought about Awromele. Which is probably why he painted his mother in pin curls. With every pin curl that took shape on the canvas, his anger grew. Why hadn’t Awromele bothered to call and ask how he was doing? That was the normal thing to do, wasn’t it, especially when someone had been in the hospital for a few weeks because of complications following a circumcision? You got in touch. At the very least you sent a card, without a return address if need be. He looked at the bookshelf with the volumes of Schiller on it and saw King David.

“Could you just hold the jar like this?” he asked the mother. He lifted it down off the shelf and handed it to her; she took it without protest. She didn’t look at her son’s testicle.

Her remedy for suffering had stood the test of time. She had nibbled at it all her life, a certain passivity, a certain compliance, living as though it had nothing to do with you. And that was how Xavier, thinking of Awromele doing dastardly things with other men, came to paint the mother with testicle.

When Marc came home that evening, he was thrilled with the canvas, which was standing in the hall to dry. He said: “You should go to the art academy. This latest painting of yours is something else. I’m no expert, but there is something very special going on here.”

The mother glanced at the painting and said, “It doesn’t look like me.”

That evening, in his cell, Mr. Schwartz had a moment of clarity. He tore a sheet into strips and decided to hang himself. The shame of being thrown out of the Jewish community was more than he could bear. He said the prayer for the dead, although to his annoyance there were a few stanzas he couldn’t remember. He started in on the prayer a few times, but finally gave up. Then he thought about his kosher cheese, and about the receipts he had written on wrapping paper. After that, there was nothing left to bind him to life — a vague feeling of abhorrence perhaps, the memory of something gruesome that you’ve seen and would like to forget as quickly as possible.

The hanging did not go smoothly. Life was stubborn. But Mr. Schwartz finally got the better of it.

WHILE MR. SCHWARTZ was dangling from his sheets, Xavier decided that from then on he would make only paintings of his mother with the testicle, in order to present them later as a series to an art academy. You needed a portfolio, he knew that, a portfolio with drawings, paintings, videotapes, perhaps even some clay figures. Marc’s enthusiasm had strengthened Xavier in the idea that it would be wise to focus now on painting, on art. The comforting of the Jews would flow forth from the art of its own accord. Visions got him through the day, visions about great deeds in a distant future, and the smell of roast lamb in the near future. Hope is a stunning creature, rather like a horse that has hopped a fence and is galloping towards you.

He woke up in the middle of the night, having dreamed of Awromele. It had been a grim dream. “Where are you, Awromele?” he had felt like shouting. When he went to the bathroom for a drink of water, he heard sounds coming from downstairs. It might be a burglar, he thought, or a window his mother had forgotten to close. But the mother never forgot to close windows and doors.

Xavier went downstairs. He wasn’t afraid. Losing Awromele was the only thing he was afraid of. There were moments when he thought he had already lost him. Perhaps on the very first day they’d met, when he had been unable to come up with a dirty joke for Awromele to translate into Yiddish.

In the kitchen, Xavier did not find a burglar or an open window. Only the mother, standing in front of the dish rack, her pink pajama pants around her ankles, a bread knife in her right hand.

A little lamp was burning above the fridge; the mother didn’t need much light, she could find the wound by touch.

Blood was dripping from the mother’s thigh. Xavier looked at her without a word. She put the knife in the sink, pressed a dishtowel to the wound. “Sorry,” she said, “sorry.” She didn’t really know whom she was speaking to — maybe to herself, maybe to You-Know-Who, she wasn’t sure. She stood there as though this was where she belonged, as though this was her spot, as though she was predestined to this, to this forbidden love — for love it was — between her and the knife, which could no longer be denied.

Xavier was wearing only a T-shirt and underpants. He rubbed the back of his neck. What he felt like doing the most was running right back upstairs, going back to his dreams of Awromele, horrible as those dreams were. The most horrible dream about Awromele was better than this. But the mother had already seen him; he couldn’t run away. Now he had to stay in the kitchen, now he had to talk.

“Mama,” he said quietly. He didn’t want to wake Marc, especially not tonight. Marc had to remain asleep, deep and peaceful, dreaming about his great and naughty love. “What are you doing?” There was tenderness in his voice. Tenderness was something Xavier had a lot of.

The question was unnecessary. What she was doing was quite clear.

She looked at the boy. For the first time in years, she felt some compassion for her son. Not a lot, but enough, enough for a lifetime, as far as she was concerned. She would rather have had a daughter. Even more, she would rather have had nothing at all. But when she saw her son standing there in her kitchen, so shocked, so little and afraid — yes, she saw that, his fear, that he was afraid of her — then deep down inside she enjoyed it, for no one had ever been afraid of her. Then she loved him for a moment. Against her judgment, for she knew it wasn’t good for her. The way you might put food in your mouth even though you know you’re allergic to it.

“I’m living,” she said. “Can’t you see that? I’m living.”

She smiled magnanimously, the way a loser smiles when he receives halfhearted applause, and started washing off the knife. The dishtowel fell onto her pajama pants, which were still around her ankles. Xavier said, “But, Mama, it’s the middle of the night.” She had to lean against the counter to keep from fainting. Perhaps she had lost too much blood, perhaps she had done it too often, stabbed too often into that same wound. Or maybe it was seeing her son, that terrible and at the same time delicious feeling of being caught red-handed. Caught at last. When she was little, she had always wanted to catch her parents at it, but she had never been able. Now she wanted to be caught herself. “You need to get some sleep, Mama,” Xavier said. “It’s the middle of the night. You don’t have to apologize. But you do have to get some sleep.”

Xavier had seen something he was not supposed to see, something that would make him look at the mother differently from now on. He would see her with a knife in the kitchen, while the rest of the family was asleep, her pajamas down around her ankles. So that was living. You did it in the kitchen, you did it at night with a bread knife in your hand, and you had to apologize for it.

The mother sighed. She bent down to pick up the dishtowel and pressed it against the wound again.

“Has he been fiddling with you?” the mother asked as she put the knife in the dish rack, beside the teacups she had washed carefully that evening.

“Who?”

“My boyfriend. Has he been fiddling with you, the way he used to fiddle with me?”

“No, never,” Xavier said. “Really, never.”

The mother smiled magnanimously again, as though hearing lies that she, to keep the peace, had decided not to unmask any further. She seemed to be in a trance, yet in a completely different, impenetrable world.

“If he does,” she said, “I want you to let me know.”

“All right,” Xavier said, “I’ll let you know. But it’s not going to happen, Mama, really, it’s not going to happen.”

“He never fiddled with me much, either,” the mother said, adjusting the dishtowel slightly, because the blood had started to trickle through.

“Who?”

Xavier barely dared to look at his mother; he especially didn’t dare to look at the dishtowel. That bloody dishtowel at his mother’s thigh seemed to exercise on him an attraction almost as great as Awromele’s.

“My boyfriend, who else?” The mother stared at the sink, then wiped at it absentmindedly with a sponge. “That first night, and then two or three times after that, but no more. What about you? How often does he fiddle with you?” She squeezed the water out of the sponge.

“Never, Mama, really,” Xavier said. “Really, never. I swear.” He took a step towards her, but didn’t dare touch her. What he saw when he looked at her was mostly the dishtowel, which had turned a dark red in places. A neatly ironed dishtowel: she ironed everything, even the dishtowels.

“Do you want me to get you a bandage?”

“No,” the mother said, “no, absolutely not — a bandage. But maybe he can’t do it anymore.” She laughed as though this were a joke. The bandage, or his not being able to do it anymore, or maybe both.

“Can I do anything for you, Mama? Do you want me to take you upstairs? Shall we both go up and go to sleep?” Xavier asked. His vocal cords had started to hurt from talking so quietly. But he really wanted to do something for her.

“Your father didn’t, either,” the mother said quietly, still holding on to the counter. “Once every four or five months, and then in a very special way. Well, he was afraid of having children — that’s why he could only do it in that special way.”

“Oh, Mama,” Xavier said, “he’s dead anyway. It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s dead.”

“Yes,” she said, “he’s dead. He is, anyway.”

She pushed aside a bottle of liquid detergent. Her mouth was dry. Cutting into your own flesh dried you out, like walking in the desert. She had friends in her bridge club who were going to go walking in the desert two weeks from now, and then spend two weeks at the beach to recover from the desert. Lazy vacations were better when you had something to recover from. If you came out of a concentration camp, all life would probably be one long, lazy vacation.

“What can I do for you?” Xavier asked. “Please, tell me, aren’t you cold? Shall we have a cup of tea?”

He came another step closer; there was still half a yard between him and his mother. On the kitchen floor he saw a few drops of blood. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked.

“I want you to look at me,” the mother said. “I want you to take a good look at me, so you can paint me. Later on. Then I want you to paint me the way I am right now, in the kitchen. You mustn’t tell anyone — no one must know — I just want you to paint me.”

“Okay,” Xavier said. “I’ll do that, Mama. Don’t worry. I’ll paint you as you are in the kitchen. Exactly the way you are now. That’s how I’ll paint you. As often as you like.” He felt that he needed to keep talking, as though to keep from having to hear his mother’s next request, as though he didn’t want to hear anything else at all.

“Sorry,” she said when he was finally finished talking, “sorry for the inconvenience.”

The mother moved the dishtowel a little to one side again.

Xavier wanted to hug her, to hold her, to hold her tightly and not let her go for the time being, but he didn’t dare: he was afraid that she would start playing with knives again. That she might take something out of the dish rack and stab it into her flesh again, maybe a fork this time.

“You look like your grandfather, do you know that?” she said.

She eased up carefully on the dishtowel; the blood was starting to clot.

“Do you want something else instead of tea?” Xavier asked.

“Sometimes genes will skip a generation,” the mother said. “Our genes have skipped a generation. You’re exactly like your grandpa, the same look, the same nose; a handsome man your grandpa was, a hardworking man, and extremely conscientious.”

“Yes,” Xavier said. “I’ve been blessed with good looks. That’s nice.” He looked at the mother gratefully, as though the blessing had been her doing, as though his looks had been built to her specifications, as though she were the architect of his body and his face.

“Go on upstairs,” the mother said. “I need a little time to freshen up.”

She stepped carefully out of her pajama pants. The kitchen floor was cold. The stained dishtowel she put on the counter.

There were several wounds on her left thigh, but one of them was the biggest, one of them was her favorite wound. She loved her wounds the way other people loved their children, the way other people loved their pets.

Xavier didn’t go away, he couldn’t move. He wanted to hug the mother so badly, but she said again: “Go to your room now. I need to be alone for a little while.”

They heard footsteps upstairs. Marc was awake. They remained quiet until they heard the toilet flush, then footsteps again, and a door being pulled shut.

The mother’s new boyfriend was a sound sleeper. No wakeful nights for him.

“I thought about poisoning you once,” the mother whispered, still holding on to the counter with both hands. “When you were still a baby. I had already bought the rat poison, the strongest I could get. I thought: I’ll mix it in with the milk. I had stopped breastfeeding pretty quickly, because you sucked my nipple raw. Did you know that? You sucked it raw, my nipple. Of course, you couldn’t help it. Still, that’s what you did. Because you were so greedy, so wild. I thought: It will be better for both of us. I decided against it. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, Mama,” Xavier said, as quietly as he could. “You don’t have to be sorry about anything. It all turned out fine.”

“Yes,” said the mother, “it turned out fine. Lots of mothers think about things like that, Xavier. I’m really not the only one. In nature you also see mother animals biting their sick babies to death. A sick child is a burden to everyone; a sick child is a burden to itself. If your father hadn’t been so grumpy and withdrawn, I could have talked to him about it calmly, but you couldn’t talk to him at all. That’s why I decided and went ahead and bought the poison. At the shop, they didn’t suspect a thing. I said: The strongest rat poison you have, please; they’re awfully hard to get rid of. It dissolved quite quickly — all I had to do was stir. I mixed it with lots of sugar. I figured it probably tastes bitter, the poison. That’s what they always say, isn’t it? That it tastes bitter? And I sat there like that, the bottle in one hand and you on my lap. You were wearing green pajamas with a little bear on the front, a present from the neighbor lady. A horrible thing to look at, but I dressed you in them anyway — it would have been a waste to throw them away. Besides, she came over to the house sometimes, and I didn’t want to offend her. You should never offend people, Xavier. So you were lying there in my arms, crying, because you were hungry. And I knew for sure that it was all for the best, I didn’t doubt that for a moment. But then I was suddenly reminded of your grandfather, how he valued life so highly; he would never have wanted that. Life was sacred to him. He said: It doesn’t matter — even if all I can do is swallow, I want to live. So I poured the milk with the rat poison in it down the toilet. I kept the rest of the poison just in case, but it never came up again. In any case, there was never another moment when I was sure it was the best for all concerned. I had my doubts often enough, but then I thought: Forget it, today isn’t the right day for it. And then, at a certain point, you were too old for it. Rat poison works best with babies. The bigger the child is, the more resistance it has. That’s why you’re still alive.”

“I understand,” Xavier said, still not daring to come any closer. “I understand completely. I’m glad you told me this. It’s not a problem, Mama, it’s no problem at all.”

The mother nodded. She seemed to be thinking about something else.

“But, Mama, you’re glad, too, aren’t you?” Xavier asked. “Or are you sorry? That you poured the milk down the toilet, I mean? The bad milk.”

“Things go the way they go,” the mother said. “I had to flush twice, and then I had to scrub the toilet. The milk had splattered on the bottom of the toilet seat. Your father was very adamant about clean toilets. He always looked at the bottom of the toilet seat, because he didn’t like splatters. Go on upstairs now. I have to freshen up.”

“Okay, Mama,” Xavier said. “I love you so much. You’re the best mother I could wish for. Really the best. Don’t ever forget that.”

He meant it, too. It just so happens that you love the people who have spared your life. Besides, it’s easier to love those who hate you, or who don’t feel much for you except indifference, than to love those who love you. Nothing is more unbearable than love.

“I’ll never forget this,” she said. “It’s very sweet of you to say so. You’re probably right, but people don’t understand that. They don’t know how nature works. Sick little animals get bitten to death.” She started cleaning the wound on her thigh. She became absorbed in it, as she did in the washing of teacups and the making of chamomile tea. She seemed to have forgotten that her child was there, just as she forgot the poison, the milk, the baby on her lap, the bottle in her hand, memories that she couldn’t place, that she had never wanted to place.

XAVIER DID NOT crawl into bed; he sat down at his desk. Picking up a pencil, he drew a picture of the mother standing in the kitchen with her pajama pants down around her ankles, feeling life flowing through her. But because the drawing didn’t please him, he crumpled it up and threw it away.

Then he started in on a letter to Awromele. He wrote that his mother had planned to poison him when he was a baby, but that she had changed her mind at the last minute. There was no use denying it, he was proud of it. Other parents had never even thought about poisoning their babies. It was a badge of honor.

Xavier was the baby she hadn’t poisoned. That baby he had been, that baby he would remain. After a while, Xavier went to the bathroom to look at his face, his hair, his chest. So this was what people looked like who had sidestepped their fate. Fascinating. There was fate, there was the baby, and there he stood now, the product of those two. The fate that had been sidestepped. Someone had outsmarted it.

Remarkably enough, it also felt like a loss to him, because now he would never know what it was like to lie dead in his mother’s arms. He had a sneaking suspicion that his mother would have loved him more as a dead baby than she would have loved anyone else. That she would have felt so much love for the dead baby in her arms, who now, at last, was no longer bothered by stomach cramps, that that love would have been enough for the whole world. That was the love Xavier had missed out on because he had gone on living.

Saddened by these thoughts, Xavier went back to his room. There was no sense in bemoaning that life anymore — it was over. The milk had been poured down the toilet, the rat poison had been flushed away and disappeared into the sewer, there was nothing to do about it.

He wrote to Awromele and asked him to meet him next Thursday at two o’clock, on the Mittlere Rheinbrücke.

When you had almost drunk rat poison as a baby, you could toss your pride to the wind. Pride no longer mattered anymore. Xavier had to talk to Awromele, he needed to see him.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, the mother was scrubbing the spots out of her pajama pants. She wondered whether maybe she should poison her boyfriend, but smiled at the thought. It had been such a long time since she’d tried to poison anyone. It seemed like so long ago that she had mixed the poison into the warm milk. She had been a rather good-looking woman, even after the baby was born. The day she had decided to kill her baby, she had spent an hour and a half at the hairdresser’s.

She laughed out loud, and the sound of her laughter did not startle her. For just a moment, she experienced real pleasure.

Upstairs, Xavier closed his letter to Awromele with the words: “I need you.”

“I need you.” he wrote one more time, just to be sure. And then again: “I need you!” With an exclamation point. But when he looked at his letter again, that final exclamation point seemed only to stress the impotence of his need.

IN THE PRISON, the guards found Mr. Schwartz’s body. They cursed under their breath. Suicides were such an inconvenience.