The Jewish Messiah

They Had Nuclear Weapons, Too

BEING A METICULOUS young man, Xavier had not only bought a camera, an Olympus, but also a joke book. He read it twice, from cover to cover, but the word “clit” was nowhere to be found. The jokes didn’t make him laugh, either. Maybe it was just him — he couldn’t rule out the possibility that he had no sense of humor. Humor, he’d learned at school, was born of deficiency. Once he finally started to suffer, the humor would take care of itself.

When the appointed time came, he walked to the Mittlere Rheinbrücke. By heart he had learned four jokes that could pass for smutty.

As he was walking through Basel with his camera, the second flash of inspiration came to him. It mustn’t stop at photography; people would say that was only a pose. They wouldn’t take his attempts seriously, would say that others had done it before, that these days a project like his was simply a way to play it safe, that if he was going to do it he should have done it fifty years ago — which was easy enough for them to say, because he hadn’t even been alive then. He may have been born under a lucky star, but at least he knew what made people tick. Their main goal was to not have to feel their own pain. A goal that often didn’t pan out.

What they forgot — his father, for example — or overlooked — his mother, for example — was that once you were dead you didn’t feel anything anymore, not even pain. Xavier wanted to combine the advantages of life with those of death. Therein lay comfort. Great minds before him had lived in and strolled through Basel. They inspired him, seized him by the hand, and drew him in the right direction.

He had to comfort the Jews. No halfway measures, not an adhesive bandage here, a bit of mercurochrome there. To comfort and to comfort well — that for starters — then the rest would come of its own accord. Xavier felt a deep and formidable sympathy for them. For personal reasons, but also in general, for reasons of science.

The Christians had Jesus, the capitalists had profit maximization, the Buddhists could gradually melt into Nothingness, the socialists could uplift the wage slaves — three evenings a week, in the open air when the weather allowed — but the Jews had nothing. No messiah, a God who never showed, and everyone hated them, perhaps not as openly as before, a bit more sniggeringly, in the men’s room at the coffeehouse, behind drawn curtains, at meetings where the press was not invited, but they hated them nonetheless. There had to be a reason for that.

What’s more, you also had Jews who hated themselves, Xavier had read in an encyclopedia, the self-hating Jews. When it came to comforting, those were the ones who should be first in line.

He wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it. He hadn’t comforted all that many people in his life. He’d tried to soothe his mother’s pain, but her pain was chronic, so soothing it didn’t help much. It even seemed to irritate her. She would push him away and say, “Stop slobbering all over me, Xavier, you’re too old for that now.” And his father would say, “Keep your hands off your mother — that’s unhealthy.”

But he wasn’t about to be discouraged. The desire to comfort was a part of him, the way tragic humor is a part of the clown.

When he stopped to think about it, though — he was almost to the bridge now — the Jews might have nothing, but at the same time they had everything. They had a country of their own; they had nuclear weapons, too; they had Einstein and Billy Wilder. He had read somewhere in a book: “Has there actually been anything filthy, any brazenness in any form whatsoever, especially in the area of culture, in which at least one Jew has not taken part?” Even Muhammad Ali had Jewish blood in him, it seemed. And they had suffered as well. What, in fact, didn’t they have?

Then, as he stood on the Mittlere Rheinbrücke, waiting for Awromele, who was late, Xavier was struck by a flash of inspiration that would change his life.

They had filthy Yiddish jokes, translated by Awromele; they had Yiddish music, melancholy songs once sung by partisans but today performed by people who, though not Jewish themselves, had a great deal of affinity with the Jews, and who therefore sang in Yiddish while accompanying themselves on violin and guitar. In that way, the leftovers of a decimated culture could be warmed over and dished up to the public in plastic containers. Only when a culture had been decimated did people become interested in it, and Xavier couldn’t blame people for that. Staring at mishaps, that was people’s favorite pastime.

But did they have a Great Yiddish Novel? Xavier Radek had never heard about it. No. There were Jewish Nobel Prize laureates, some of whom had even written in Yiddish, but that was it. Whenever anything filthy or brazen took place in the area of culture, at least one Jew was involved, but the Great Yiddish Novel remained unwritten. And if something didn’t happen fast, it would remain unwritten for all time.

He would write the Great Yiddish Novel.

To provide structural comfort for the Jews.

What better comfort than a novel in a language everyone said was dying out? A novel like that would combine the advantages of death with those of life. The book would be full of death and the dead — across the Lethe one no longer needed to feel pain — but it would also be an ode to the joie de vivre of the young pioneer.

Xavier would utter the final, heartrending gasp of an almost dead language. The way all of life should be, a final, heartrending gasp before dying.

In the distance he saw Awromele approaching, a black dot against the sun.

That morning Awromele had risen early and trimmed his pin curls with a pair of nail scissors. He wanted to look good for the camera, and for Xavier.

Xavier was sweating; he unbuttoned another button on his shirt, so the hair on his chest was easier to see.

They shook hands, a bit stiffly and uncomfortably.

Now that Xavier had Awromele before him, he realized what an awkward situation this was. Far more awkward than swimming in the Rhine with Zionists.

He was a comforter now, but he had no idea where to begin. Where did it hurt most? In which part of the Jew’s body was most of the pain concentrated?

“What do you want me to do?” Awromele asked. Under his shirt he wore a prayer shawl; its tassels hung down the front of his pants. Lovely, thought Xavier, who had decided to find everything lovely when it came to Awromele’s person.

“Lean against the railing,” Xavier said. He hoped no one would see him, at least no one his parents knew, no one who would tell them right away whom he had been seen with.

Xavier photographed Awromele. When he had shot three rolls of film and didn’t dare go on any longer, he said: “Well, that was it. You want me to tell you those jokes now?”

“Do they have clits in them?”

“No, actually, they don’t.”

“Well, then, forget it.”

“Could I buy you a drink, then?”

“Not really,” Awromele said. “I have to get home, lernen. I go to Talmud school.” He took Xavier’s hand, then dropped it right away. “Not a word about this, right? If you see my father, not a word. He’s such a hothead.”

“The rabbi?”

Awromele made a smacking sound with his lips. “He’s not really a rabbi, he just acts like one because it’s the only way he can earn money. He used to have a matrimonial agency, along with Mother and my aunt, my mother’s sister, God rest her soul, but he ruined the matrimonial agency by being such a hothead. He’ll just light into you all of a sudden, for no good reason. And if he gets the chance, he’ll box your ears, too, or tweak your nose. People looking for a partner don’t want verbal abuse — maybe from their partner, but not from the matrimonial agency. Besides, he molested my aunt, my mother’s sister, God rest her soul. Can you imagine that?”

Xavier couldn’t imagine that. The only thing he could imagine was taking Awromele’s hand and holding it, holding it for a long time. He didn’t care which body part contained the pain. Any old body part was all right by him. Still, he said, “Yes, I can imagine that very well.”

“And then that business with the grant.”

“What grant?”

“The municipal grant.”

“What about it?”

“You never heard about it?”

“No,” Xavier said. They were still standing on the Mittlere Rheinbrücke, but he had forgotten all about the Rhine, his parents, and the fatherland.

“Every Jew in Basel is talking about it.”

“We don’t do a lot of talking at home,” Xavier said. “We’re quiet Jews.”

“We got a subsidy from the city to build a new community center. My father and his brother split half the grant between them. The rest of it they invested, but it was an unsound investment. An extremely unsound one.”

“You’re kidding!” Xavier cried. He forgot his good manners for a moment and shouted, “That’s horrible!” He wasn’t naïve, he knew how things went in the real world, but there were some things you were never really prepared for, things that always came as a shock when you were confronted with them. These people embezzled public funds like there was no tomorrow. Of course, that was no reason to club them to death, but they needed to exercise a little more discretion. It’s never wise to give people a reason to club you to death. If there’s no way to avoid it anyway, well, then, better simply to have it happen. To be clubbed for clubbing’s sake.

Xavier had been raised to believe that stealing was inherent to capitalism, but that one should never steal grant money. Subsidies, after all, were a socialist invention for the fairer distribution of capital. His father was an architect, but he had his heart in the right place. He designed buildings for banks and for pharmaceutical companies that had written off Africa as an export market because they subscribed to the — not entirely illogical — view that people who had no money to get better would sooner or later fall ill again, and could therefore better be left ill right from the start. His father made up for those clients by working on all kinds of social housing projects. He had also built prisons, and had tried in his own modest fashion to see to it that drug dealers were given bigger cells. In this way, he did his best to relieve his conscience, burdened as it was by all the office buildings he’d built for the pharmaceutical industry.

Xavier noticed anger welling up inside him. So there you had it. He had come to them with the best of intentions, with no other intention than to comfort them, and within ten minutes they had lived up to all the clichés. You couldn’t photograph fast enough, or write fast enough, to make up for that, not even if you wrote ten Great Yiddish Novels. No, if they couldn’t keep their fingers out of the cookie jar, there wasn’t much use in trying. And Basel was having a hard enough time of it as it was. The municipality was feeling the crunch from all sides — less money for welfare, less for theater, less for the roadworkers.

His parents had warned him. His mother had said: “Give them a finger and they’ll take the whole hand, and then your whole arm. I’m not saying that because I’m a racist, it’s just the way they are. They can’t do anything about it, either — that’s the tragic thing. Their history has made them that way.”

Xavier couldn’t hold back. What he wanted to do most was to take Awromele’s hand and say that it was no problem, that nothing was a problem anymore, because he was here. But stealing grant money was downright indecent, especially when it was stolen by people like the rabbi, who served as an example to others.

Just as some women were apparently asking to be raped, so, too, some Jews were apparently asking for a pogrom. Before he knew what he was doing, he had reached out and boxed Awromele’s ear.