The Jewish Messiah

An Overdrawn Account

AT THE RIETVELD ACADEMY, they were more impressed by Xavier’s drive than by his paintings. Yet they still decided to admit him. One of the professors told his colleagues: “He may not have much in the way of technique, but he has something special. He has character and willpower, and then there are those hypnotic brown eyes that stare right through you. That boy has something.”

Awromele and Xavier found a room in a student hostel on Prinsengracht. The room would have been small for one person, let alone two, but they didn’t mind.

When their money ran out, they went looking for work.

Xavier found a job waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant downtown, not far from the central train station. Despite Xavier’s broken Dutch, the owner had fallen for his charm, his helpfulness, and his personality, and also for his eyes, which could have passed for those of a Mexican. Besides, the boy was always polite to customers, even when they weren’t polite to him.

Awromele found a job at the Albert Heijn supermarket. Even though he was actually an illegal alien in the Netherlands, the manager of the chain store on Middenweg told him, after flipping through his passport a few times: “A Swiss citizen is never really illegal. I’ll tell you what — I’ll pay you half the minimum wage, and we’ll leave it at that. We help you, and you help us; that way everybody’s happy.”

That was the kind of reasoning Awromele could appreciate. Besides, he wasn’t working solely to make money, but also to meet people and make friends. And he made friends, he made friends one after another. Sometimes he made out with those friends; sometimes he tactfully shared their beds.

Despite his vow to feel nothing, these activities caused Xavier a great deal of sorrow. At unexpected moments, they also caused him to fly into a rage.

When Awromele was lucky, Xavier would pick up his drawing pad during such a fit of rage and begin sketching away furiously. At the academy, they said of the drawings he made then, “You can’t really call it talent, but these days passion is a rare enough thing in itself.”

At less fortunate moments, Xavier did not pick up his drawing pad, but smashed all the furniture in their room. Then he would say to Awromele: “I hope you realize that I’m doing this because I love you. Consider it a compliment. If I didn’t love you so much, I wouldn’t let myself go like this.”

Awromele understood that, but he didn’t enjoy it. “It’s so agitating,” he said. “I’d rather have you not feel anything, like me.”

The mirror in the bathroom they shared with ten other students had been destroyed in this way, as had the bookcase they had just put together one Saturday afternoon after buying it at IKEA, when Awromele confessed that he had kissed a married man from North Brabant Province in the furniture store’s coffee corner. “I can’t help it, sweetheart,” Awromele said, taking Xavier’s hand and holding it tenderly. “I can’t do anything about it, I can’t say no. That’s how we were raised. What would you do if you had grown up hearing, ‘Don’t say no, the Jews already have such a bad name’? You wouldn’t resist, either. I do it out of courtesy.”

“But you’re not courteous,” Xavier shouted, picking up the hammer and smashing the new bookcase to smithereens. Even though he was never around when it happened, he could see the details of the kissing and making out in his mind’s eye, in color, sometimes even with a soundtrack.

The imaginative power that won him praise at the Rietveld Academy was a hindrance to him. His fantasies drove him to the brink of madness, yet it was not something he could allow himself to repress. He had to transform that energy into beauty. But it came back again and again, and every time it came back it was more powerful than the time before. “Stop saying that!” Xavier screamed amid the ruins of the bookcase. “The fact that you’re Jewish is no excuse for hopping in the sack with every man who comes along. You’re disgusting, that’s all.”

He ran out of the house. That was how most of his tantrums ended. He had never been hot-tempered before, and never unhappy, either. It had to be love, love changed you, love made a complete person out of you. But he continued to have difficulty with Awromele’s giving his body to almost any man who asked. Anti-Semitism could not be combated in bed. Awromele’s behavior only made it worse.

After these fits of rage, if the line wasn’t too long, Xavier would go to the Anne Frank House around the corner. It was one of the only places where he could regain his calm. The staff knew him. They thought he was a nice boy, charming, interested, and helpful. In addition, he spoke a little Yiddish and had a slight knowledge of Hebrew. Despite Xavier’s tantrums, Awromele had continued to give him lessons, and not only in Yiddish: Xavier now wanted to learn Hebrew as well. He took his task seriously. Every morning before breakfast, he would learn his vocabulary list, and before they went to bed at night Awromele would drill him. Comforting without discipline was for chumps.

Yes, Xavier thought as he walked through the Anne Frank House, Awromele doesn’t do much except stock shelves and screw, but I still have to comfort him. I must and shall comfort him. Him and his people. And then he would repeat these words to himself silently, in Yiddish.

His visits to the Anne Frank House, meanwhile, aroused his interest in the problems of the Middle East. He bought a scrapbook and began cutting out all the articles he could find about the Middle East. He pinned little flags to a map to trace the course of the First Intifada, and to his fellow students and professors at the Rietveld Academy he praised the courage and creativity of that ancient people. He told them, “You wouldn’t think so to see them run, but they are fighting machines.”

Xavier was a man with a mission. Nothing Awromele did could change that.

IN THE EARLY DAYS of their stay in the Venice of the North, which, as it turned out, was also referred to as “the Jerusalem of the North,” Awromele and Xavier called home regularly. Later, the calls became less frequent. The mother didn’t say much, mostly “yes” and “no,” and the rabbi’s wife mostly cried. That didn’t help anyone much. And the phone bills got too high.

Xavier quickly grew accustomed to missing his mother. He still painted his testicle, without his mother now, but with Israeli soldiers and Jewish war heroes instead — Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, Golda Meir.

And Awromele was able to compensate for the emptiness family had left behind. Amsterdam pepped him up. He began dressing differently, and once or twice a week he would violate the dietary laws. He shaved more carefully than he had in Basel, and for the first time in his life, he bought himself a bottle of aftershave.

Awromele also developed the growing urge to talk to strange men, and to kiss them. It almost became an addiction. And the more he kissed, the more frantically Xavier painted, and the more fanatically he worked at his Yiddish lessons with Awromele.

On occasion, Xavier would ask Awromele for details: “Do you take off all your clothes?” And: “Do they touch your butt, too? I thought I was the only one who was allowed to do that.” But Awromele never felt much like talking about it. He usually said: “I can’t say no. Let’s leave it at that.”

“But I don’t go around kissing other people, do I?” Xavier would say. “I feel no need for that. So why do you? I thought we would be enough for each other.”

“You can say no,” Awromele said. “You should be glad about that. Do you think it’s easy for me?”

Because Awromele himself couldn’t say no, Xavier would sometimes follow him, in order to intervene if need be. And sometimes, when he should actually have been at the Rietveld Academy working on a collage, he would take the tram to the store on Middenweg, to watch Awromele innocently stocking shelves. Spying on him like that, seeing him in his Albert Heijn outfit, lining up bottles of fabric softener, he was overwhelmed by infatuation. The simple fact that no one was fiddling with Awromele at that moment was enough to make him happy. Afterwards, he would catch the tram back to the Rietveld Academy and press on ecstatically with his oeuvre.

Although their interests these days were so widely divergent, they still worked together on translating Mein Kampf. Three times a week, sometimes a little more often. Once they were bent over that book, their notebooks and dictionaries at hand, they never argued. And at such moments Xavier did not feel even the slightest pang of the jealousy that at other moments drove him to the Anne Frank House.

Awromele said to Xavier: “Let’s keep at it. The market is ripe right now for a translation like this. If we wait too long, maybe it won’t be anymore.” Then they would sit down on the bed together, with the book by You-Know-Who and with their notebooks and dictionaries. And they translated, with dedication and love. They weighed each word — each word had to be the right one. The text had to be given the treatment it deserved.

AFTER ABOUT FOUR MONTHS, the rabbi’s wife came to Amsterdam in an attempt to convince her son to return to Basel. She brought with her a big box of cheese biscuits, shortbread, and creampuffs, all of which she had baked herself.

Awromele was happy to see his mother again, and launched greedily into the cheese biscuits. Xavier, meanwhile, did his best to comfort her.

She went home again two days later, without having accomplished her purpose.

Throughout the train ride to Basel, which lasted more than eight hours, she wept. A German railway conductor offered her a free cup of tea.

One week after her return, the rabbi died of a brain hemorrhage. Awromele flew to Basel, dressed for the last time in the clothing of his youth, and sat shiva for a whole week. Then he flew back to Amsterdam and kissed more men than ever, in order to make up for lost time.

XAVIER WAS MAKING good progress with his Hebrew and Yiddish; he learned those languages faster than the techniques of painting. But that’s not the way he looked at it. He continued to paint with great discipline, despite the occasional dip. And during those dips he would think: maybe, as a painter, I’m actually an autodidact; maybe the academy is ruining me. The spontaneity is fading. They’re forcing me into a mold. My own personality is getting lost.

Whenever he had these dry periods, he would suggest to Awromele that they immigrate to Israel together. Awromele had been raised with principled objections to the Jewish state in its present form. The Jewish state was to be established only after the arrival of the Messiah, not before.

“I kind of like it here,” Awromele would say then. “And, besides, first the Messiah, then the state.”

“Can’t we do something to trigger the Messiah’s arrival?” Xavier asked.

“No, you can’t trigger that. These aren’t contractions. What are you talking about?”

“Without Israel, every Jew is an overdrawn account. And who knows how long we’ll have to wait for the Messiah? Maybe we should buckle down and do something about it. God protects those who protect themselves. The Almighty hates overdrawn accounts. We should get to work.”

“I’ve never accounted for anything,” Awromele said. “Besides, someone has to stock the shelves. So why shouldn’t it be me?”

Xavier was not particularly convinced by Awromele’s arguments. Giving comfort, the way he understood it, was not a metaphysical affair. The place where the most suffering and dying was going on, that was where the comforter should be ready to move. The Anne Frank House was a bit too limited for such ambitions.

“Let’s go,” Xavier would say to Awromele as they lay in bed at night. “Before long, there will be more Palestinians there than Jews. Then there will be no point to it. There’s nothing left for us to do here — our lives here are empty — but there we have a task to perform, there we’re needed.”

But Awromele truly enjoyed his work at Albert Heijn. A person like him, who had never learned to say no, shouldn’t take on too much responsibility. And besides, the Palestinians didn’t worry him, not even if ten million of them showed up next week. He had traded in God for pleasure, and it was the best deal he’d ever made.

In the months that followed, Xavier made little progress at the academy. He kept painting the same subject, and his teachers slowly but surely began steering him towards photography. Though his painting was of debatable quality, his professors had no trouble imagining that their student might become an original photographer.

But Xavier stuck stubbornly to his canvases. Photography was beneath his dignity. “Anyone can push a button,” he said. “But creating a new reality, that’s a different story.”

AWROMELE BEGAN STAYING away at night now as well. At such times, Xavier did his utmost not to feel anything. It wasn’t easy. He lay in bed and couldn’t sleep. Every fifteen minutes, he would look at the alarm clock and tell himself, “He’ll be home by four.” But when four o’clock arrived and Awromele still hadn’t come home, Xavier would get dressed and go into town. Sometimes he would wander through Amsterdam till the crack of dawn and think, When I get home at seven, Awromele will be sound asleep in bed. But with increasing frequency, Awromele wasn’t there at seven, either.

When that happened, Xavier would kneel beside their bed, pick up the notebooks containing their translation of Mein Kampf, and begin to read aloud. In the Yiddish translation, he read: “Hence the lie concerning the language of the Jews, which is not a means to express their thoughts but, on the contrary, a means to disguise them. He speaks French, he thinks in Yiddish, and when he puts together poems in German, he does nothing but indulge the character of his own folk.”

That calmed him.

Although he was not religious, he addressed himself with increasing frequency to God: “Let him come home soon, God. Don’t let him trade me in for someone else. Give me the strength to comfort him better.”