The Jewish Messiah

Jerusalem

AWROMELE’S PARENTS couldn’t sleep. Earlier in the evening, they had gone to the police station. The officer on duty there had said: “Just take it easy and wait. If he’s not back by tomorrow night, come by again.”

After that, the rabbi had called the members of the Committee of Vigilant Jews. He was afraid that the anti-Semite had struck; he could think of no other explanation for his son’s disappearance. He wasn’t the kind of boy simply to run away — he had always been content to lie under the blankets in his room.

During a few of those leisurely hours in bed, Awromele had translated the first few pages of Mein Kampf into Yiddish, but the rabbi knew nothing about that. He thought the boy had been studying the Mishne Torah or the Pirke Avot. But whatever he had been doing in there, the anti-Semite had struck now, that much was clear to the rabbi.

For years, Awromele’s father had lived in dread of the moment the anti-Semite would strike. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night and shake his bald wife until she awoke. His wife had shaved her head so that her wig would stay put. Her husband was the only one allowed to see or touch her hair, but she had shaved her head anyway, just to be sure. She had no intention of showing her real hair to anyone; hence the wig. Not even to her husband. Especially not to her husband. And in the middle of the night, the rabbi was therefore able to ask the bald woman beside him, “When was it that the anti-Semite was going to strike again?”

On some days it was no longer clear to him whether he was waiting for the arrival of the Messiah or the anti-Semite. In some strange fashion, the fact that it had finally happened came as something of a relief. The anti-Semite had come, he had arisen from his rat hole and shown his true colors.

Just before midnight, the most active members of the committee gathered at the home of Awromele’s parents. Some of them wanted only a Coke or a Fanta, but others asked for vodka. It was an animated gathering. Bettina had been recruited as well. Whether it was India or the Committee of Vigilant Jews, she applied herself 100 percent. She was one of those people with a keen sense of responsibility.

In addition to Bettina, the committee had a number of other non-Jewish members who sympathized, for any number of reasons, with the Jews. One man had joined because there was no other club that would have him for a member.

“We have to go looking for him,” the members told each other. “Awromele has fallen into the hands of the anti-Semite.”

“Or into the hands of the PLO,” said the man who couldn’t join anything else. He had already knocked back four vodkas, and with each glass his decisiveness grew.

“Why did he pick Awromele? We’re not Zionists,” said Awromele’s mother. Her eyes and hands were red; nervousness immediately triggered her eczema. “Why is the PLO homing in on us? All we want is the Messiah. Until then, there’s nothing else we want, and certainly not a Jewish state. Only the Messiah, that’s all. Is that asking too much?”

One of Awromele’s younger sisters, a girl with braces on her teeth, said: “It doesn’t even have to be a big messiah, not the kind that performs miracles. A little one would be okay too.” And an even younger sister, Rochele, said: “I want a messiah who can fly. Then I’ll climb on his back, and he’ll take me to America in two seconds. Then I’ll say: Dear Messiah, now I want to go to the North Pole, where the Eskimos live. And then I’ll climb onto his back again, and he’ll fly me right to the North Pole.”

The rabbi pounded his fist against the wall, so hard that flakes of paint fell to the floor. “Rochele, don’t sin against God,” he shouted. “The Messiah isn’t a private jet. And that you should talk like that on the day your brother has disappeared!”

“Stop screaming, Asher,” his wife cried. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar. Think of your heart!” Then she turned to the other members of the Committee of Vigilant Jews and said, “My husband is autistic — he can’t help it.”

The rabbi pounded his fist against the wall again, even harder now, so that even more paint fell. The baby of the family awoke with a shriek. “How dare you say that!” the rabbi shouted. “How dare you accuse me of being autistic? And that on the day that Awromele has been kidnapped by the anti-Semite! And God only knows what the anti-Semite has been up to with our son.”

The rabbi’s wife took the baby from its cradle and stuck a pacifier in its mouth. The baby calmed down soon enough; it was used to shouting. “But, Asher,” the rabbi’s wife said, “everyone knows you’re autistic. It was even in the synagogue newsletter. The whole congregation knows. There’s nothing wrong with being autistic. I’ve been living with an autistic man for thirty years. They’re people, too!”

The rabbi muttered under his breath and poured himself a glass of cola.

“I could just as easily have said,” his wife went on, “that you fooled around on me for years with my own sister, until she died of a horrible illness that I don’t wish to name out loud right here. My own sister, and if she’d been prettier than me, okay, but, no, she was older and uglier, God rest her soul. And her personality was worse, too. It’s a mystery to me what you saw in her, but I don’t go around saying things like that, because that’s no one else’s business. All I said was that you’re autistic. And that’s the truth. That’s all I’m saying.”

“No, no,” the members of the Committee of Vigilant Jews said to each other, “we don’t want to hear this, we don’t want to know. We came here to help look for Awromele.”

The rabbi said nothing more, only shook his head and took little sips of cola. Between sips, he muttered furious curses at his wife and his family. “Okay, so tell them,” he shouted at last. “Tell them everything. Tell them I embezzled funds, for all I care — you can’t keep your mouth shut anyway.”

Rochele, who was standing in one corner of the room with a doll in her hand, said, “I know for sure that the Messiah is a bird.”

Her brothers and sisters laughed at her. “What kind of a bird?” they wanted to know. “A parrot, I bet it’s a parrot, or is he a sparrow? Or a pigeon?” They named all the kinds of birds they knew and laughed wildly. There was never much laughter in this household, so when the opportunity presented itself they took full advantage of it.

“No,” Rochele said, “a tropical bird. I know for sure. I dreamed about it.”

The rabbi’s wife put the baby back in the cradle, picked up Rochele, and said to her guests: “Maybe the Messiah is a tropical bird. Who knows what kind of tricks the Almighty is willing to play on us? Maybe He’ll send us a messiah in the form of a tropical bird, because of our sins.” As she said that, she stared pointedly at her husband.

The committee member who had signed up only because no other association or club in Basel would have him, asked: “But what kind of tropical bird? Doesn’t the Torah give us a clue about what kind of tropical bird we should be looking for?”

Then the rabbi pounded on the wall a third time and shouted: “Enough of this nonsense! Enough, or I’ll throw you all out of the house. How dare you talk about the Messiah like that on the day the anti-Semite has struck? The Almighty is not going to send us a messiah in the form of a tropical bird, no matter how much we’ve sinned — He would never do that. The Messiah is a man of flesh and blood, not a bird, not a hippopotamus, and not an elephant, either. Don’t ever talk like that again, not if you hope for a long and prosperous life.”

At one-thirty in the morning, the members of the committee left the house to look for Awromele in groups of two or three. Some of the members took the search seriously. They waved big flashlights back and forth and shouted at a few automobilists, “Dirty anti-Semites in your fat BMWs!”

Three other members, including Bettina, felt that a search only made sense if you had a plan. They stopped in at a kebab place run by an Egyptian. They hung out at the bar of Jerusalem Kebabs, waiting for a plan to come to them. But it didn’t come.

The Egyptian had chosen that name for his restaurant because he was planning to liberate Jerusalem, once he had earned enough money selling kebabs. The place he’d had before was called Bethlehem, the one before that Nazareth, and before that he’d even had a restaurant called Jericho. The time was ripe, he believed, for doing things in a big way: Jerusalem Kebabs. Twenty seats, standing room for thirty.

Like Bettina, the Egyptian was a virtuous person. Part of his profits he donated to Hamas charities. His conscience bothered him on occasion, and when it did he tried to soothe it by supporting Hamas, which did a lot of good work in and around the Occupied Territories.

After making a donation like that, he would feel better, and could go back to boosting his market share in Basel without being bothered by scruples. He had to work hard, because the competition was capable of almost anything. His donations to Hamas were really only symbolic, a couple of thousand Swiss francs here, a couple of thousand Swiss francs there. He had opened a Swiss bank account for them. No self-respecting charity could get by these days without one of those. In Switzerland the Egyptian’s donations wouldn’t have gone far, but in Gaza you could buy a couple of Uzis for that money, from Israeli soldiers who didn’t mind a reprimand in return for a month’s supply of hash. Any soldier serving in the Occupied Territories needed hash as badly as he needed a weapon.

Many of the Egyptian’s best customers were Jews, and he got along wonderfully with them. Money doesn’t discriminate. He had even made friends with some of them. He sent them cards at the Jewish New Year. He could even speak a few words of Yiddish.

Three members of the Committee of Vigilant Jews were now sitting at his bar, talking about the Middle East and the exchange rate for the dollar, as though both the Middle East and the exchange rate were some wayward woman who refused to listen to their good advice.

One of the committee members, a bald man who had dropped out of law school and now worked in an office as an archivist, said to the Egyptian, “Hey, pal, how about a few of those M&Ms?”

The Egyptian tapped on the counter the way croupiers do in the casino, to show that he’d understood the code. He went to the back room, opened the refrigerator where the M&Ms were kept hidden behind a big bottle of condensed milk, and brought back a few. The bald man handed the Egyptian a pile of banknotes and retired to the men’s room.

“What are you people doing out so late?” the Egyptian asked. He poured himself a glass of tea. “Is it already time for carnival?”

Bettina said, “We’re looking for a boy.” She was from a staunch Catholic family, and had been raised in a village, Ilanz, not far from the town of Chur, before her family had moved to Basel when she was twelve. She said proudly: “The anti-Semite has struck. We’re looking for our rabbi’s son.”

“Oh,” the Egyptian said. “That’s terrible. That breaks my heart. We’re cousins, did you know that? We come from the same family. You’ve heard that before, I guess?”

The Egyptian’s wife ironed his shirts. He liked to wear white ones, with the top buttons always open, even in winter. The hair on his chest was grayer than the hair on his head; he was pleased with the hair on his chest, felt that it lent him a certain authority, something mystical, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. In any case, women seemed impressed by it.

“Abraham was your patriarch, but he was ours, too. So we’re family,” he said.

He took Bettina’s head in his hands, pressed it to his chest, and said in his deep voice: “I feel for you. What’s your name?”

“Bettina,” she whispered. In a short time, she had learned so much about Jewish history that she could relate ten-minute anecdotes about famous Jews at the drop of a hat.

The Egyptian felt the urge to stick his tongue in Bettina’s ear, but restrained himself. “Bettina,” he whispered, “would you like a couple of M&Ms too?”

“How much does it cost?” she asked. She had heard from other members of the committee that Jerusalem Kebab sold more than just skewered lamb. Happiness, pure happiness, with nothing to be said against it except, perhaps, that it lasted only briefly. The Egyptian named a price. She was stunned. You didn’t get rich by supporting and protecting Jews, or by adopting Indian villages, but if the other members of the committee were trying M&Ms, how could she refrain?

“I don’t have that much with me.”

“Doesn’t matter,” the Egyptian said with a charming smile, scratching the hair on his chest with his left hand. “There’s a cash machine just around the corner. Money doesn’t discriminate. Not against me and not against you. That’s why we get along so well. I love you people.”

The Egyptian thought he was talking to an authentic Jewess. “Everybody hates us,” he said, pouring Bettina a glass of peppermint tea. “Everyone is against the Arabs, everyone is against the Jews. The only one who isn’t against us is money, and money needs the night the way a man needs a woman. That’s why we like the night. The night doesn’t discriminate, either; the night is there for everyone. My wife is Swiss; she’s from Rapperswil. At first I thought she wanted to marry me because she loved me, because she thought I was handsome, because I am handsome and I used to be even more handsome. I have the stamina of six wild horses. But do you know why she married me? Would you like to know?”

Bettina nodded. She wanted to know everything.

“Because money doesn’t discriminate against me.”

Then he couldn’t control himself any longer; he leaned over and stuck his tongue into Bettina’s ear.

The moment the Egyptian’s big tongue touched her earlobe, Bettina began to giggle. Giggling was always the right thing to do. Her face turned red. That encouraged the Egyptian to stick his tongue even deeper into her ear. Naïveté is a glorious thing. The blushing of a young woman was perhaps as alluring as nakedness.

But Bettina was not naïve. She just blushed quickly, there in Jerusalem Kebabs. For her life began there where the Jew began, but the Arab wasn’t exactly chopped liver, either. It was no accident, both of them being Semites. She had suspected that, even back when she lived in Ilanz. And only now did she discover how right her suspicions had been. She’d always wanted to be exotic. She had dreamed about that when she was only nine years old.

After the Egyptian’s tongue had licked her ear clean, Bettina felt more exotic than ever. There was indeed a huge difference between theoretical solidarity and solidarity that was put into practice with a passion.

“Hurry up, go to the cash machine,” the Egyptian said. “Look, it’s almost getting light. It’s not a good idea to postpone happiness. Happiness can’t take that. It dies.”

Bettina slid from her bar stool and put on her yellow jacket. Now that she had joined the committee, she enjoyed wearing bright clothes. It was raining, but her jacket had a hood. She put up the hood and ran to the cash machine.

Five minutes later, Bettina came back into Jerusalem Kebabs and slipped the Egyptian her banknotes. That was all the money she had for the rest of the month, but the important thing was to live. What good was the future if you skipped the present?

The Egyptian shuffled back to the refrigerator, took out a packet of M&Ms, and handed them lovingly to Bettina.

“What’s your name, anyway?” she asked the Egyptian.

“Ibrahim,” he said, and stuck out his hand. Because he found a handshake rather meager, and because he was pleased to do a little something extra for new customers, he stuck his tongue in her ear again. “But everyone calls me Nino. I used to work at an Italian restaurant in Rapperswil, and in an Italian restaurant you have to be Italian. That’s why they call me Nino. When I go back to Egypt, to my mama, then I’m Ibrahim again, but for you I’m Nino.”

BETTINA ENJOYED the feeling of his tongue in her ear more than she had the first time. Life was a table spread before her, and she felt like taking a second helping.

In her bedroom, the baby on her arm, the rabbi’s wife was murmuring prayers for Awromele’s well-being. The eczema on her hands had spread; her wig was on crooked. She feared the worst; she didn’t know how she was going to live through this, or whether she even wanted to.

Only vaguely did she know why she had to live through this — for her children.