The Jewish Messiah

Where Evil Grows

WHEN HE GOT HOME, Xavier took a shower. He cleaned his cheek; it didn’t look good, bloody and inflamed, someone had really taken a bite out of it. In the bathroom, he filled a bucket with soapy water and put his clothes in it. He threw his shoes away. They were almost two years old anyway.

Awromele still hadn’t come home, but Xavier couldn’t worry about that. He climbed into bed naked and pulled the covers up around him. There was no way he could get warm. Sleep wouldn’t come, either. He was delirious; he dreamed, he awoke with a start, called for his mother, then for God, then Awromele. He thought about his grandfather, about You-Know-Who; he took King David out of the cupboard, laid him beside him in bed, and looked at him as though seeing him for the first time.

When he heard the clock of the old West Church strike seven, he sat straight up in bed. He rocked his upper body rhythmically back and forth, the way devout Jews do when praying, and thought about the boy with the moped. At last he had beaten his imagination, shut it up for good, crushed it beneath his heel. He was no longer thinking about Awromele, about what he was doing, or could be doing; he thought about the boy with the moped, the terrorist in the park for whom he had sung a song of love. People still couldn’t understand how beautiful that was, the song that had been sung there, in the middle of the night. Only the ducks had heard. But someday people would understand; someday the world would see that only pain is communication. Human beings wanted to communicate, again and again. Even the saint on his desert pillar wants that — that’s why he sits on his pillar, to talk to it, to tell it everything, even if it remains silent, to love the pillar and be loved by it in return. Without the pillar, he would go mad.

But all painless conversation, all chitchat that doesn’t even scratch the surface, is a diversion, fluff, oil that polishes the surface until it shines but finally ruins it. Talking makes us forget we’re alive, makes us wonder whether life even exists, whether there is even anything like life, whether this isn’t a form of death that we have collectively overestimated.

Xavier was still rocking back and forth. He weighed his thoughts, arranged and rearranged them, and saw the boy in the park.

Awromele came home at eight-thirty. He smelled of cigarettes and manager.

“What happened to you?” Awromele asked. He pointed at Xavier’s cheek.

“Oh, nothing,” Xavier said. “I was bitten.”

“Bitten — you’re right about that. How did that happen?” He ran his hand over Xavier’s hair. He looked at the wound. Awromele couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

“I got bitten because I was talking to someone. I had a good conversation, finally, I have to admit.”

Awromele wasn’t listening closely; he took off his clothes and crawled into bed with Xavier.

“Shouldn’t you take a shower?” Xavier asked.

“Later,” Awromele said. “Not now. I’m tired. I love you.”

Xavier pulled Awromele up against him, as close as he could. “I made a sacrifice,” he said. “All true communication requires a sacrifice. If you want to help someone escape his loneliness, you have to make a sacrifice, you have to break down the walls.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” asked Awromele, who already had his eyes closed.

“A sacrifice for you,” Xavier said. “Only for you. To comfort you.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” Awromele asked again. The pressure of Xavier’s body had given him an erection. He opened his eyes again.

“A sacrifice,” Xavier repeated. “I made contact with the enemy.”

“What enemy?”

“Your enemy.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Awromele said. “I don’t have any enemies.”

“Everyone has enemies,” Xavier whispered in Awromele’s good ear. “Everyone. You just have to recognize them, that’s all. You have to say hello to them, know where they live; you need their phone number so you can call them. Their first and last names. Their ZIP code. Life is struggle, nothing more.”

“Don’t make any more sacrifices for me,” Awromele said. He was awfully tired; he couldn’t focus well on the conversation. He had spent half the night listening to the manager, who had poured out his heart to him in bed. Awromele was in the process of dropping off into a just and healing slumber.

“So how was your evening?” asked Xavier, who couldn’t sleep anyway. He wanted to be close to Awromele, in whatever way he could.

“Oh, all right,” Awromele murmured. “I couldn’t say no again. I hope I learn someday.” He looked at Xavier’s cheek, and just before falling asleep he said, “We need to get you to a doctor with that cheek.” Then he rolled over.

Xavier was still trembling, exactly like the little terrorist for whom he’d sung.

They would have to leave the Venice of the North. In Beatrixpark, beside the pond, lay a lonely moped. There was nothing left for him to do here. Marc had been right. He was made for bigger, more important things than the little they expected from him at the Rietveld Academy.

Then he fell asleep at last, shivering from the cold, dreaming that he held a stone in his hand. And in his sleep he spoke to the pretty terrorist, again and again, each time anew, despite everything.

They slept for the next four hours. Awromele didn’t have to work at Albert Heijn that day. When Xavier woke up, he had made up his mind. He would never go to the Rietveld Academy again. He had started off as an autodidact, and that was what he would remain. Awromele was still asleep. Xavier kissed him gently on the back of the neck until he woke up. Awromele was in a morning mood, the way he often was after a night when he had been unable to say no.

“Would you like some tea?” Xavier asked. “It’s late already.”

“Water. Just water.”

Xavier brought him a glass of water.

Awromele drank thirstily. He not only remembered the night he had spent with the manager and the manager’s stories, he also remembered his early-morning conversation with Xavier. “What was that about the enemy?” he asked.

“What enemy?”

“What you told me about when I got home this morning.”

“Forget it, it’s not important. I was still a little drunk, I was just talking.”

“More water,” Awromele said. He loved Xavier, so he didn’t doubt his word. But he found him so tiring sometimes, so principled, so moralistic, so impractical.

Xavier fetched some more water.

Then he lay down beside Awromele, under the blanket. The sheets needed changing, but if Xavier didn’t do it it wouldn’t happen, and Xavier hadn’t done it for a long time — he’d been too busy.

Awromele put down the glass. They held each other without talking.

“I’ve decided,” Xavier said after a while, “to drop out of the Rietveld.”

“Why?”

“I’m an autodidact.”

“A what?”

“An autodidact.”

“Oh.” Awromele wiped his lips, blew his nose in his hand, and then wiped it on the blanket. He was in every way a practical person. He knew that a little dirt wouldn’t kill you. Exaggerated hygiene only lowered your resistance.

“I thought we came here because you wanted to go to the Rietveld so badly.” Awromele held his own head in his hands, pressed his fingertips against his temples, rubbed his eyes hard; nothing helped. He felt worse than he had in a long time.

“The Rietveld isn’t stimulating enough for me. You know what they told me? Go do something with plants and flowers. Flower-arranging, ikebana, working with living materials, Oriental aesthetics.”

“Yeah, why not?”

“Why not?”

“Why don’t you open a flower shop? I think I’d like that. I don’t know much about flowers, but I think it would be romantic to start a business with you. And you have a good sense of color and shapes.”

“Because I want to do more with my life than open a florist’s, Awromele. I want to do more than arrange bouquets.”

Xavier shook his friend. It amazed him that he couldn’t see what Marc had seen. That his own friend didn’t recognize the genius in him. But he was too proud to say that. He felt lonely. It was probably a temporary thing. Once they got to Israel, his talents would show themselves. He would plant forests, orange groves, olive trees. He would make the desert blossom, the way he’d tried to make Awromele blossom.

“We don’t belong here,” Xavier said. “There’s that, too, dearest. Haven’t you ever noticed how people look at us?”

“What people?”

“In the street. In the tram.”

“They look at me because they think I’m pretty,” Awromele said. “I never knew I was pretty, but it turns out I am. People like to look at pretty things. Don’t you think I’m pretty?”

“No, that’s not why they look,” Xavier said. “They look because they’re afraid of you. And because they’re afraid of you, they despise you.”

Awromele’s headache wouldn’t go away. He squeezed his temples — he had read somewhere that that helped. “We didn’t fit in in Basel, either,” he said quietly. “So it’s not such a disaster.”

“It is a disaster.”

Awromele shook his head. “No,” he said. “Get me some more water. I’m dying. My head.”

Xavier got some more water; there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for Awromele. Especially after last night.

Awromele emptied the glass down his throat. Then he went to the toilet and tried to vomit. After hanging over the pot for ten minutes, to no avail, he climbed back into bed, sweaty and exhausted. “Never again,” he whispered. “Never again. Fucking is one thing, but I’m never going to drink again.”

“You mean you fuck them?”

“Who?”

“The people you can’t say no to.”

“Only if they insist. And if I’m in the mood. Otherwise it’s just a little messing around.”

Tears came to Xavier’s eyes. Despite his headache, Awromele saw the tears. “Xavier,” he said, “listen, I can’t say no. Let it be. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. And, besides, we weren’t going to feel anything. We swore we wouldn’t feel anything. I don’t see that happening. If you ask me, you feel all kinds of things, and your feelings upset me. Your feelings make me sick. Your feelings aren’t good for you, and I’m afraid they’re not good for me, either.”

“I really don’t feel anything, Awromele,” Xavier said. “I really don’t, just like you don’t feel anything. I know we’d go crazy if we felt anything. We’d spatter all over the place like a bomb. But that doesn’t have anything to do with that other stuff.”

“What other stuff?”

Xavier caressed Awromele’s head, the same way he had caressed the head of the pretty terrorist, and for a moment, for one brief moment, he couldn’t tell the two of them apart, he didn’t know who he was caressing.

“There is one country,” Xavier said, “that was made for people like us.”

Awromele looked at Xavier questioningly. What was he talking about now?

“That’s right,” Xavier said. “That country is called Israel, and it was made for you and me.”

“When I first met you,” Awromele said, “you barely knew you were a Jew. It’s okay by me, it’s not that, but you can overdo it. I didn’t know what it meant not to be able to say no when I met you; I didn’t know that it involved taking off your clothes so often. But I don’t really mind, I’ve learned to live with it. I just moved here, and I don’t really feel like moving again.”

“We’re not staying here,” Xavier said. “This is no city for me, and not for you, either. We’re going to Israel. I can already speak Hebrew pretty well, I can learn the rest there. There we’ll be at home, there we’ll finally be among our own.”

Xavier suddenly remembered the boy’s pendant. Did a camel have one hump, or two? He needed to look it up in the encyclopedia. He saw himself again, sitting in the mud with the young terrorist’s head in his lap.

“Actually, I want to stay here,” Awromele said after a few minutes’ silence. “I just signed up at the gym. I paid for a whole year — it would be a waste to go away now.”

“No,” Xavier shouted, “you’re going with me.”

“Why? Why should I, if I’d rather be here?”

“Because you can’t say no. That’s why.”

Xavier lay down on top of Awromele. “I can’t sleep,” he said, “and when I can’t sleep I always start thinking, and if I think long enough the good ideas come by themselves.” Xavier didn’t know who he was lying on; he was dizzy; he pressed his nails softly into Awromele’s forearm.

“You really need to do something about that wound,” Awromele said. “It looks terrible. I don’t know who bit you, but it wasn’t a normal person.”

“I’ve been thinking. About evil.”

“About what?”

“Evil,” Xavier said.

“Oh.”

“It exists.”

“Yeah.”

“But where does it come from?”

“I don’t know,” Awromele said. “No idea. So many things exist, and I don’t know where they come from.”

“Where do you think it comes from?”

“I don’t know,” Awromele said. “Christ, I stock shelves at Albert Heijn, I know where the butter is, the yogurt, the peanut butter, the smoked sausage. That’s enough. That’s all a person needs to know. And you, early in the morning, while I’m lying here with a splitting headache, you start asking me riddles.”

“It isn’t early in the morning anymore, it’s almost late afternoon.”

“Whatever it is,” Awromele cried, “I don’t know. And get off me. You’re too heavy. I don’t feel good.”

But Xavier didn’t get off of him. “I think I know where evil comes from.”

Awromele closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep; maybe that would help.

“You know where it comes from?” Xavier asked. “Where it starts, where it arises, like a river? From the cunt. Evil comes from the cunt.”

Awromele wiped his lips. “Which cunt?” he asked, not sounding very interested.

“All cunts,” Xavier said. “Without exception.”

“Oh,” Awromele said. “Well, no wonder. Shall we try to get a little sleep?”

Xavier was shivering even more than before, as though he weren’t lying in a warm bed but still sitting in the mud beside the pond. “That’s where it comes from,” he said. “That’s where it lives. That is the headquarters of evil. The good comes from the backside, the lovely, the beautiful, the unselfish, the aesthetic — it all comes from the backside. But evil comes crawling out of the cunt. People always choose for the wrong side.”

“That’s not very smart of people,” Awromele said. “Good of you to find that out. I really love you, do you know that? But I don’t feel so well.”

Xavier kissed Awromele on the forehead, on his eyelids, the eyes of the boy he didn’t want to lose, without whom he was nothing. All comforting began with Awromele, but it couldn’t end there — a people awaited him.

“If we want to help people,” Xavier said, “we should close off the cunt.” Xavier searched around under the pillow, then farther down in the bed. He found King David.

“Look,” he said, “come on, look at him.”

“I’m looking,” Awromele said. “I know him, don’t I? I know exactly what he looks like.”

Xavier closed his eyes. He saw the moped lying in the gravel; he felt the pain in his leg when the moped fell against him. You had to find it, evil, you had to smell it in order to know where it came from, you had to go looking for it; otherwise you’d never know what life was, otherwise it would always remain a promise, a vague promise. Where it stopped and where it ended, you had to find out about that. What life really was.