The Jewish Messiah

Favorable Light

HE COULDN’T REMEMBER exactly how he’d come up with the idea; the thought had simply struck him while he was sitting outside a wine bar with a few girls from school, pricking toothpicks into little blocks of cheese. Pleasure was shallow by nature, but that was no reason to swear off it completely. He had continued to frequent the wine bar.

Xavier Radek was a mild-mannered, handsome young man. When the two top buttons of his shirt were open, you could see little tufts of hair on his chest. He said little, and above all nothing untoward; that made some people think he was shy, while some found him mysterious.

Sitting in front of the wine bar, he had a sudden flash of inspiration. He would photograph Jews. It seemed like a brilliant idea. He would place them in a favorable light. They could use that. Xavier would succeed where others had failed. After all, he was possessed of a great sense of beauty, and an optimistic nature.

Most photographers-to-be focused on plants, teenagers at the beach, mass tourism. One of his father’s friends had stirred up quite a fuss in and around Basel with a book of photographs about scooter accidents. It had sold well: modern man loves the sight of a catastrophe.

Just as the fashion photographer tries to capture the model at her best at the sublime moment, so he would go after the look in the eye, the wisdom, and the incomparable humor of this ancient people.

“I’m going to photograph Jews,” he told the girls at his table.

They stared at him blankly for a few seconds, until a girl with big earrings said, “Well, have fun.”

Being misunderstood went with the status aparte of the man with a mission. He decided not to tell anyone else about it.

He waited a few days, then called the only Jew whose house he had ever visited. Starting with the rabbi himself might be a bit presumptuous. Could I take your picture? You couldn’t just blurt that out to a man like that. No, better to start with his son.

At the end of the afternoon — he was so nervous that he’d taken a cold shower, just to be on the safe side — Xavier dialed the number. It was a lovely phone number, with three sixes in it, the sign of the Beast.

A woman answered. In a shaky voice, he asked to speak to Awromele.

“Just a moment,” the woman’s voice said.

It took him two minutes to explain to Awromele who he was, but then the boy said: “Oh yeah, now I remember, it’s you. Have you got a joke for me?”

“A joke?”

“You were going to come up with a joke for me, right? A dirty one — then I’ll translate it for you, and you can go around telling it without anyone knowing what you’re saying. Have you got one? It’s got to be really filthy. One with a clit in it, for instance.”

Xavier didn’t know any jokes with clits in them.

“I haven’t quite gotten around to that yet,” he said. “But there’s something else, and, well, sorry to intrude like this, but I’d like to take your picture.”

“Who?”

“You.”

“Me? Take my picture? Why?”

Xavier had to speak quietly. He was afraid his mother would hear, and that would only increase her suffering. He had begun skirting the truth for his parents’ sake. Things that made your parents suffer had to be tucked away like Easter eggs; otherwise their lives would be ruined. Later, you had to alleviate the suffering of your husband or wife, and then that of your children, and so you spent your entire life alleviating the suffering of others.

For the time being, though, Xavier limited himself to the suffering of his parents, and that of the Jews.

“Because you’re good-looking,” he told Awromele.

“Me, good-looking?”

Good-looking is always good, Xavier thought. Who doesn’t want to be good-looking? Besides, Xavier thought, Awromele really was good-looking, young and fresh, like an angel with those curls, which wasn’t something you could say about Awromele’s father. Angels don’t smell of food that’s been on the stove for twenty-four hours.

“Yes, extremely good-looking.”

“Says who?”

“What?”

“That I’m good-looking.”

“Nobody. I figured it out for myself.”

“Oh. How?”

“By…” Xavier had to swallow a little excess saliva. “By looking at you. But I need to ask you something. That is, if I’m not intruding, if you’ve got the time.”

Xavier felt he was starting to sweat, and began speaking louder in spite of himself. His mother was downstairs, soaking raisins for the apple pie. She was good at pies. Just like her mother before her, who had baked pies in Saxony. Even when the news from the Eastern Front had become grimmer, she had gone on kneading the dough and stirring the batter.

“I’ve got some time,” Awromele said. “What was it you wanted to ask?”

“What I just said, whether I could take your picture.”

“You already said that, yeah.”

Xavier grew even more nervous. Nothing ruffles an enthusiastic optimist more than a closemouthed Jew.

“Are you still there?” Xavier asked.

“Hello,” Awromele said. “Yes, I’m still here, I’m just thinking it over.”

The line seemed to fall dead again.

“What are you going to do with it?” Awromele asked at last.

“With the photo?”

“Yes.”

“Keep it. Exhibit it, later on.”

“Exhibit it. Here in Basel?”

“For instance. Or else in Zürich. You’re good-looking. These are going to be art pictures. Architecture is the king of the arts, second only to music. I read that somewhere. But photography is the queen. I want to get the emotion across.”

“Emotion? What emotion?”

“Art tries to get emotion across. When I see you I feel an emotion, and I want to get that across. So other people will feel that emotion, too. Suffering is the emergency exit of beauty.”

“Do I have to take my clothes off?”

“No, why would you do that?”

“Oh, just wondering.” Awromele sounded disappointed. “But you’re saying you don’t have a joke for me, one I can translate, a joke with a clit in it? Or something like that?”

Xavier promised he would bring a joke like that along with him when they met for the picture, maybe even more than one joke. Xavier would have promised anything just to hear Awromele say yes: the heavens, the stars, a nation, a kingdom.

They agreed to meet the next day on the Mittlere Rheinbrücke.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, Xavier’s mother was still soaking raisins. She was wearing an apron with pictures of all kinds of vegetables on it.

She looked at her son as he came in and picked a raisin from the bowl, but said nothing. He laid a hand on her shoulder, as he often did to comfort the orphan who was his mother.

“Xavier,” she said after he had eaten three raisins, “back then everything was different. What is done is done. It wasn’t pleasant for anyone, not for my parents, either. That’s all in the past now; we have to keep our eyes on the future.”