The Jewish Messiah

Water over the Desert

AFTER EIGHT YEARS in city politics, Xavier announced that he was going into national politics. He didn’t want to comfort a municipality, he wanted to comfort a nation, a people.

He appointed Awromele as his campaign manager. Never before had a checkout assistant been given the job of campaign manager. That created a lot of goodwill for Xavier, although in some ultra-Orthodox circles people spoke of nepotism.

Nothing is worse for a politician than to have everyone love him — for then, in fact, no one loves him. If he hungers after power, he must be contentious and controversial.

“Power,” Xavier told Awromele, “is the accumulation of missteps made by your opponents. Some of my opponents have not yet made any missteps. For them, we have to arrange a misstep. If they don’t make a misstep voluntarily, we have to help them.” And he went back to work on his enemies’ dossiers.

Occasionally he leaked something out to journalist friends who, in exchange for exclusive stories about his life, were willing to cite Xavier as an anonymous source.

“Look,” Xavier said to Awromele in bed one night. “It’s just a matter of reading between the lines. Study their speeches, study their draft legislation, study the marks they’ve made, you’ll always find a weak spot somewhere. And then you have to apply deconstruction to that. You deconstruct what they’ve said, what they’ve done, what they’ve proposed, what they’ve believed in or claimed to believe in, until that weak spot spreads across their entire career like an oil slick. It’s like tennis — you have to help your opponent make a mistake, let your opponent beat himself. No one made a greater contribution to the death of communism than Stalin.”

Xavier hired six assistants whose work consisted solely of passing along his opponents’ weak spots to the media. They were willing to go through fire and water for Xavier. They praised his energy, his charisma, his belief that things couldn’t go on like this, that a great of deal of work remained to be done.

Xavier realized that the voter was nothing but meaningless pain, pain to which a leader had to lend meaning. He who accepts that all truth is pain need not shrink from accepting power. He knows power like the back of his hand.

One by one, systematically, and with an unerring sense of timing, Xavier eliminated his enemies, until only one remained.

That was Jossi Dolav. He, too, wanted to be the leader of the Likud Party. Xavier despised Dolav, but that was nothing personal, it was part of his job. Jossi Dolav had started out as a lawyer and, after some idealistic ramblings, had become a professional politician. He had a family and a mustache. Xavier invited him to the bar at the Dan Hotel, close to the beach, where they could talk undisturbed.

“Jossi,” Xavier said, after inquiring in detail after his wife and children, “Jossi, you’re an intelligent person, a nice person. You’re a credit to the party — you would be a credit to any party. That’s why I’m pleased that you’ve chosen our party.”

Jossi Dolav smiled. Like so many people, he was fond of compliments, especially when they came from someone like Xavier, who, though younger than he, was very well respected.

Xavier put a few peanuts in his mouth. Then he remembered that he didn’t really like peanuts, and pulled a plastic bag of sunflower seeds out of his pocket. He cracked the shells deftly and ate the contents with amazing speed. Amid the cracking of shells, he told Jossi Dolav: “Jossi, you want something that I want. That’s bad for you, that’s bad for me, and ultimately it’s bad for the party. Withdraw your candidacy and I’ll make sure you’re richly rewarded — after the elections, of course, which I will win. An attractive and responsible post as minister in my Cabinet. I leave it up to you. I’m a generous person, you know that. If you like to travel, I’ll make you minister of foreign affairs. If you prefer to take it easy and you like a nice massage now and then, I’ll make you minister of tourism. Just tell me, you know how I am, I’m as good as my word.”

“I’m not like that,” Jossi Dolav said. “I have ideals.”

“So do I. That’s precisely why I’m talking to you, because I have ideals, too. That’s why I’m warning you. As a friend. As a fellow party member. Your candidacy is a mistake. You’re splitting the party, and ultimately you’ll split yourself. A party that’s split can heal again, but a politician, never. A split politician is a dead politician. Don’t kill yourself.”

Jossi Dolav shook his head. He put a couple of peanuts in his mouth; peanut skins were sticking to his lips. “Don’t worry about me,” he said.

Xavier was eating even more sunflower seeds now, even faster. “Jossi,” he said, “Jossi, Jossi, it was, what, five years ago when we were still on the City Council? You remember?”

Jossi Dolav nodded. He looked outside, at the beach, but it was dark, there wasn’t much beach to be seen.

“There was a soccer stadium built back then — it was your responsibility. I’m sure you remember that, because you’ve got a memory like an elephant. That’s another thing that makes you such a talented politician. It would be a terrible pity to have such a promising career nipped in the bud, a terrible pity. Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, that soccer stadium. Who did you have build that stadium? I bet you remember that, too. It was your brother-in-law. That was awfully loyal and insightful of you. Always prepared to help family and friends in need. Fortunately, that brother-in-law of yours rewarded your insight, to the tune of fifty thousand dollars, if I’m not mistaken.”

Xavier pulled out a plastic folder and slid it across the bar to Jossi Dolav. The folder contained photographs and copies of documents. Without looking at it, Jossi said: “Everyone does that. That’s the way it works here. That’s the way it works everywhere.”

“I know,” Xavier said, “of course everyone does that. Of course that’s the way it works everywhere, and that’s the way it works here, too. In itself, there’s nothing wrong with it. But you need to ask yourself, Jossi, what is news? Ask yourself that question. Do you think news is something about which you can objectively determine, this is news, and that’s no news? No, of course you don’t think that. You’re not that dumb. News is news when enough people know that it’s news. Say, a quarter of the population. My campaign manager and his staff, they make news. That’s their job. That’s what I pay them for. Of course, you have to let journalists go about their business — that’s very important. You always have to let journalists think that they’ve come up with it themselves. If you take that illusion away from them, they stop being pliable. But listen to me — why am I telling you this? Anyway, we feed the journalists stories the way a rabbit farmer feeds his rabbits. News is a big, unpredictable wave, a tornado, that’s what news is. As you undoubtedly recall, your brother-in-law was convicted a few years ago of molesting a girl, a girl who was underage. Stupid of that brother-in-law, to let himself be convicted of something like that. Did he maybe cross somebody? Was he a little too ambitious? Was he traveling in the company of friends who turned out not to be friends at all?”

“What does this have to do with me?” Jossi Dolav snorted. “What does this have to do with anything?” He was starting to lose patience; he was slapping his right hand gently but rhythmically against the back of his chair.

The hotel lobby was almost empty. There weren’t any tourists anymore — they had stopped coming because of the terrorists.

“Nothing,” Xavier replied, “in fact, nothing. But news establishes connections between A and B, news makes connections, news is the great unknown, news assembles some facts and tears other facts apart. It’s our job to inform the voter. You shouldn’t forget that. You inform, I inform, that’s what we’re here for.”

“Listen,” Jossi said. “I worked for this all my life, for this moment, for this election. I’m not going to let it be taken away by you, by some, some…”

“Say it,” Xavier said. “Come on, say it, have the courage to say it. Don’t stifle it up.”

Jossi Dolav put a few more peanuts in his mouth. “I’m not letting you take this away from me. You hear me? That’s all I wanted to say, that’s all. I’m not letting myself be intimidated — the way you intimidate everyone. I’m not falling for it.”

The sunflower seeds were finished. Xavier wiped his hands on a napkin. “If you withdraw your candidacy within forty-eight hours,” he said, “in a couple of months you’ll be a Cabinet minister. You’ll be happy; you’ll have power, too. Don’t let yourself be misled by the gossip — ministers have power, too, even in a democracy. But if you don’t, Jossi, if you don’t withdraw, then in a couple of months you’ll be a dung heap that everybody, even your friends, will go out of their way to avoid. You’ll be a dung heap — and make no mistake about that, being a dung heap is a real drag.”

He stood up, shook Jossi Dolav’s hand, and said in a friendly, almost conspiratorial tone: “Clothing is the only form of communication that doesn’t necessarily have to hurt. Think about buying your suits somewhere else.”

JOSSI DOLAV did not withdraw his candidacy for the party’s leadership, and within a week there erupted a scandal concerning the funding of the soccer stadium for which Jossi had been responsible.

At first Jossi Dolav dismissed all accusations and said, “It will blow over.”

But it didn’t blow over. Every day, new details of the scandal appeared in the papers. Before long, it was public knowledge that Jossi’s brother-in-law had molested an underage girl, and although of course Jossi couldn’t have done much about it, every day he had to answer questions about girls who were underage.

Two weeks later, Jossi withdrew his candidacy. But that decision could not put a stop to reports on the scandal. There was no stopping them. New scandals came to light. It was a cesspool. The public loved it.

Two weeks before the elections, Jossi Dolav put a bullet through his head beneath a tree on the Mount of Olives. Because Judaism forbids suicide, the official explanation was that it had been an accident while Jossi was cleaning his rifle.

The suicide was inconvenient for Xavier, but before the funeral, he gave a speech that moved friend and enemy alike. He spoke of Jossi’s qualities, about everything he had done for the country, for the party, for his family. Then the body, wrapped in a prayer shawl, was lowered into the grave. The widow and children cried, and Xavier pulled out his hankie for the cameras as well.

Xavier won the elections with ease. He had almost no competitors left. The competition that was still around stayed quiet, waiting for the storm that called itself Xavier Radek to abate.

Because people still had trouble pronouncing his first name, Xavier now began calling himself Radek for short. And also The Radek, or “ha-Radek” in Hebrew.

HIS ELECTORAL VICTORY was international news. That someone of his sexual inclination could become prime minister of the Jewish state was seen as a sign of hope. The papers wrote: “Perhaps someone like this can make peace with the Palestinians. Perhaps precisely someone like this.”

During the victory party, ha-Radek, who had lost his voice from all the speeches he had given in the months before — a dictator can allow himself to be silent, but a democrat must speak, speak, and go on speaking — whispered: “This is King David, this is the testicle I lost at sixteen, when I discovered who I was. At that point, I accepted the consequences of being who I was. I accepted my people’s history. I had myself circumcised, King David brought me to this country, King David made me win the elections. King David is my king, but he can be your king, too.”

He held the jar with the testicle in it above his head, with both hands.

“Yes,” ha-Radek’s supporters screamed. “Let King David be our king, too. Let King David lead us through these dark days. Don’t let him leave our side.”

Xavier Radek silenced his opponents by publicizing missteps they had made in the past. But ha-Radek also had houses and highways built, planted forests and orange groves, let water flow over the desert. Unemployment fell, inflation decreased, the spending deficit shrank. The Economist praised his employment policies and called ha-Radek “the miracle from Jerusalem.”

ABOUT SIX MONTHS LATER, rumors began circulating to the effect that the Redeemer was a testicle in a jar. At first only on a few obscure Web sites, but later the leading newspapers and magazines began granting coverage to King David as well. Orthodox Christians wrote serious articles about him. Several theologians said, “We may not rule out the possibility that Christ has returned in the form of a testicle.” And they supported this thesis with quotations from the Old and New Testaments.

More and more Jews were becoming convinced as well. They saw the sexual inclinations of ha-Radek as an additional sign that King David was the Messiah. That a homosexual could become the prime minister of Israel was a miracle. And God’s miracles always had a purpose.

Time ran a photo of King David on its cover, with the line “Is This the Redeemer?” Beaten silly by wars, poverty, diseases, scandals, corruption, and a sluggish equity market, the world was ripe for a redeemer in a unique guise.

In bed, Awromele asked Xavier, “Were you planning this the whole time, or did you come up with it later on?”

Xavier said nothing. He shivered, the way he had the time he had met the terrorist in Beatrixpark. He held Awromele tight, but he didn’t answer his questions. He only kissed him.