The Jewish Messiah

Cold and Wet

XAVIER STOOD THERE on the gravel path for a few seconds. He thought that Awromele would stop and turn around, that it was a joke, a game, that he would come back again as soon as he noticed Xavier wasn’t chasing him. But Awromele wasn’t running in order to come back, Awromele was running to disappear. And when Xavier realized that at last, he started running, too. He ran across the wet grass, straight through newly trimmed rosebushes, down paths, between trees, across mushy patches of lawn, shouting: “Awromele, stop! You misunderstood me. You misunderstood me completely.”

But his voice was heard only by the bare trees, and a few passersby who had braved the biting wind and the drizzle: a nurse out walking a lady in a wheelchair, a mother with her child.

Awromele ran faster than he ever had during the occasional gym class he hadn’t skipped at school, faster than he had run as a child after ringing someone’s doorbell for a prank, even faster than he had the time he’d stolen a chocolate Easter egg from a shop. His mother had made him bring back the egg, but he had been unable to find the shop. Now he had no idea what calamity he was running from; all he knew was that he had seen something he never wanted to see again.

Xavier was catching up with him. He was in better shape than Awromele, and unlike Awromele he had on sturdy leather shoes fit for mountain walks, and for kicking. Besides, he was a poor loser, and today he had no desire at all to lose, he didn’t want to lose Awromele, not now, maybe never. When you start looking at the world from a certain perspective, everything is about winning or losing. For a long time, Xavier had thought his relationship with Awromele wasn’t about that, but now he knew that he’d been mistaken. In order to comfort Awromele, he first had to defeat him.

Xavier ran and thought about King David. He saw the jar in the bookcase, he saw his missing body part hanging above him, big as life, and that body part, blue and inflamed, amputated, sick yet still alive, seemed to call to him: “You can do it, Xavier. Run — you won’t get a second chance. Run, comforter of the Jews, run!”

Xavier ran like blue blazes, not allowing himself a moment’s rest, the way his grandfather had fought tirelessly against the enemies of happiness, for something that was bigger than himself, something outside himself, an ideal, a fantasy that could no longer be distinguished from reality, that had become reality itself. All ambition begins with the fantasy that you can be a different person from who you are now: defeated and beaten, without a future, and, in a certain sense, without a past as well. It’s the fantasy that lifts you up, drags you along, lifts you to greater heights than you’d ever thought you would reach, then leaves you behind like an empty bag. Any careful observer will see that we are merely tools in the hands of our fantasies. And it may be not even our own fantasies that we’re fulfilling, but the fantasies of others, people we’ve never known and never will know. We fulfill the fantasies of phantoms.

Under the spreading boughs of a pine tree, Xavier caught up with Awromele at last. He jumped on his back, pulled on his blond hair, screamed his name, shouted a few of the words in Yiddish that he could still remember. He yanked and tugged on the struggling body that was still trying to run away, until Awromele fell to the ground at last. There he lay, on top of old pinecones, rotten leaves, moss, twigs, an empty soft-drink bottle, mandarin-orange peels. The ground was cold and wet, but Xavier had no eye for the mix of garbage and decaying nature. All he saw was Awromele, his face, his eyes, the pin curls. His mouth, his nose, his hair.

Xavier threw himself on top of Awromele and pushed his Yiddish teacher’s head against the ground. There were streaks on Awromele’s face, even a little blood on his throat, where Xavier had sunk his nails into his flesh without thinking about it, the way the mother went looking for pain in the kitchen, concentrating only on the deed itself, no more outside world, no bridge club, no memories, only the bread knife and the thigh, a glorious vacuum.

“Awromele,” Xavier said. “Awromele, what are you doing?”

The most important thing is to know what can’t be taken from you, and Xavier had decided that Awromele could not be taken from him. They could take everything else, father, mother, home, nourishment, the roof over his head, but not Awromele.

“What are you running away for?” Xavier asked. He had his hands around the throat of the boy they couldn’t take from him, and he pressed gently against Awromele’s Adam’s apple. It had to hurt. It definitely had to hurt — he wanted a confession, and confessions do not come without pain. He wanted the truth, no more games. As though the truth ruled out games.

“Why did you run away?” Xavier asked again. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.” He let go of Awromele’s throat. Awromele still didn’t say a word. He lay there looking at Xavier’s face, at the head he had held in his hands not so long ago and then quickly let go of, the way you let go of a hot casserole.

“You don’t feel anything?” Awromele asked quietly. His throat still hurt where Xavier’s fingers had squeezed it. He had a stitch in his side, his mouth was dry, his head was pounding. There was disbelief in his voice, as though he feared that Xavier might feel something that shouldn’t be felt. As though it couldn’t be possible. As though it were too good to be true, a lie, meant to take you in and then, once you’ve been taken in, to cough you up again, to gobble you up, to make you a prisoner and a slave, because there’s nothing harder than letting go of the lies for which you’ve sold yourself.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t feel anything?” Awromele asked.

“No,” Xavier said. “I don’t feel anything. Not now, and not ever. I’ve never felt anything.” He brought his face down closer to Awromele’s; he pressed his lips against Awromele’s, roughly, the way a plumber presses together two lengths of pipe before welding them together. He stuck his tongue in Awromele’s mouth; his tongue ran in circles around that mouth like a mouse in a plastic bag.

That is how their lives looked, that’s how they lay there. They were experiencing all kinds of things, but because there was no time to think about it, because there was no way they could possibly think about it, because he was there but at the same time not — not enough, in any case — Xavier had the idea that, if only for a second, he was experiencing nothing all over again. That he was still waiting for something more real; something inevitable, something you couldn’t refuse. That’s why he thrust his tongue even deeper into Awromele’s mouth, as far as it could go — to experience something, to find out what that was like.

Then he realized what a richness it was, Awromele’s mouth, and his tongue was a richness, too, but a strange, stupefying richness. One too good to be true, and therefore probably just another lie.

Xavier pulled his tongue out of Awromele’s mouth. “I don’t feel anything,” he said again. “That’s the truth. Never in my life have I felt anything. I don’t know what it is.” He pulled on Awromele’s hair, but not hard enough to tear it out. He tugged on it playfully, as though Awromele were a little animal.

Awromele wriggled out from under Xavier. His clothes were wet and dirty and torn here and there. There were mud spots on his gym socks. But Xavier pushed Awromele back onto the ground, onto half-decayed pinecones that animals had gnawed on, onto the peels, the apple cores, a ballpoint someone had lost or thrown away.

“We mustn’t feel anything,” Awromele said after Xavier had sat down on him again. “That’s the most important thing.” He was still short of breath. From running, from Xavier’s weight, from the glimpse he had caught of himself. He never wanted to see himself like that again. As a stranger.

“We won’t feel anything,” Xavier said. “I promise, in my family almost no one feels a thing; it isn’t hard to do, it happens by itself. We’ll never feel anything.”

Again he pressed his mouth to Awromele’s like a plumber; he took Awromele’s head in both hands like a sink that needs to be installed. He wasn’t sure where aggression ended and tenderness began, he didn’t know where death began and life ended, he no longer knew whom he hated more, himself or the boy lying on the moist ground and the apple cores. All he knew, but that he knew for sure, was that Awromele could not be taken from him. He was as certain of that as he was that he would comfort the Jews.

He licked the mud and the blood from Awromele’s face, like a cat cleaning its kittens. He ran his tongue across Awromele’s skin as though he wanted to taste everything, and couldn’t stop tasting now. Tasting — maybe that was the same thing as experiencing.

Awromele closed his eyes, because Xavier’s tongue was gliding over his eyelids. When he opened them again he said: “If we start feeling anything, we have to stop. As soon as we feel anything, we should never see each other again; then it will be like we’ve never known each other; then we have to forget each other completely; and then we have to tear up and burn every shred of evidence that shows we ever met.”

“Absolutely,” Xavier said. “But it’s not going to happen. We’ll never feel a thing, believe me.” He tugged at Awromele’s black plastic belt, he unbuttoned the black trousers. Awromele’s father had trousers just like these. A pair of white underpants peeked out at him. The sturdy kind, underpants that had seen the inside of a washing machine on hundreds of occasions. He slid the underpants down carefully and murmured: “Never will we feel a thing, Awromele, believe me. We can’t feel a thing. Where feeling starts, we end.”

Awromele’s sex wasn’t stiff, but it was circumcised. Circumcised differently from Xavier’s — better, more carefully, not as roughly, more neatly healed, that above all. Xavier stuck it in his mouth like a meatball, greedily but not too fast.

Xavier sucked, but tasted nothing. No taste, no skin, no special texture. And he thought, just as he had while lying on Mr. Schwartz’s bed: Accept, O Lord, this humble sacrifice.

That was how Xavier lay there, in the park, between Awromele’s legs, and at the same time he was somewhere else. On Bettina’s bed. He remembered how he had adopted the two villages in India. Why did he have to think about that now? It disgusted him; he should stop making those donations. Otherwise he’d think of India every time he put a weenie in his mouth.

Awromele’s sex gradually stiffened in Xavier’s mouth. That was pleasant. The satisfaction of having someone else’s sex expanding in his own mouth, the sensation, the hardness, he never wanted to forget that. He sucked harder.

“Ow,” Awromele shouted. “You’re biting me.”

Xavier stopped sucking. He climbed up from between Awromele’s legs and sat on his stomach again. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was an accident. I wanted to taste you — I’m just as inquisitive as you are — that’s all. I want to taste everything, too. Everything, everything. Everything.”

He leaned down to kiss Awromele, and for a second, perhaps only a fraction of a second, it seemed as though he was finally able to forget who he was. His father’s death, Marc’s love, his mother’s knife, nothing existed anymore, only Awromele’s mouth.

When the kiss was finally over, when he finally took his mouth away from Awromele’s and they could both take a deep breath, the world began coming back to Xavier.

At that moment, Awromele screamed, loud and high, the way he had screamed when he’d caught a glimpse of himself. He screamed like an animal in distress, and maybe that’s what he was. But Xavier wasn’t about to be put off by screaming. Awromele could scream as much as he liked, as long as he remained lying there, as long as he still belonged to Xavier and Xavier alone. He pushed his face into Awromele’s crotch and snuffled like a dog. The apple cores, the filth, the mandarin-orange peels, the passersby — none of this mattered to him.

Xavier took the circumcised sex in his mouth again and sucked and licked obsessively, as though it were a contest, as though tenderness and aggression were made of the same substance, as though it were a prayer, a prayer to something nameless. Not a God, no Almighty, only something absent, something nonexistent, a prayer to a jar of pickles or a roll of tape, a prayer to an empty soft-drink bottle, a psalm as desperate as the most desperate prayers in this world.

Awromele submitted to it the same way Xavier had submitted to his circumcision, first as an act of torture, later in a state of partial numbness, and still later as something pleasurable and horrible as well, that, too. Something terrifying that it might be better to abolish. As if he felt that it would compromise him. He knew that the greatest minds had been felled by pleasure, that the memory of pleasure had led them to forge bonds they had never meant to forge, to go down paths they would never have taken in a moment of clarity, because pleasure distorts, pleasure is the biggest liar in this world.

And Awromele knew that he was in danger, that he had never been in danger the way he was in danger now, here in this park, on the ground. He screamed again. Higher and louder than before.

With Awromele’s sex in his mouth, Xavier moved his head back and forth as though it had become a runaway steam engine, as though pleasure now consisted only of that one high scream from Awromele’s lips, a scream that hurt the ears so badly that it could only be a scream of horror. But Xavier heard in it something very different: doubt. Awromele’s cry was more than the cry of an animal, or of a eunuch lying on the guillotine, hearing the knife come hissing down, seeing his life pass before his eyes and realizing that he had done it all wrong. In Awromele’s cry there was more than just horror. Xavier suspected that this was closeness, nothing more than that, this scream that made him think of the slaughterhouse.

Awromele’s sperm flowed slowly into Xavier’s mouth. Xavier went on sucking. He didn’t know when to stop, he had never known when to stop.

Then the movements of Awromele’s lower body told him that the pleasure had turned to irritation, to pain. He raised his mouth to Awromele’s and kissed him, clumsily, but with passion. Neither of them tasted much — nothing special, in any case — at most something thicker than spittle, spicier, too, and of a higher specific gravity.