The Jewish Messiah

Autism

AWROMELE LOOKED AT Xavier confusedly for a moment. Then he said quietly, “Just like my father.”

“What?” Xavier asked.

“Just like my father. He does that all the time, too. Suddenly loses control, then he smashes something against the wall or starts hitting people. My mother says it’s because he’s autistic and can’t see the big picture.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be — I’m used to it.”

“But I’m sorry anyway. I lost control.”

“He only sees little pieces of reality, and he can’t put those little pieces together.”

“The rabbi?”

“My father. He’s not a rabbi. He’s autistic.”

“But autistic people can be rabbis, too, can’t they?”

Awromele had to think about that one. “In principle, yes,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you still talking about my ear?”

“No, yes, well, that, too, but I meant about your father being autistic. That above all. I’m sorry. That must be difficult.”

“Oh,” Awromele said, “for an autistic person he’s actually quite sweet; he can’t do anything about it. No one can do anything about it.” For a moment, a dark cloud seemed to pass over his face, but then he smiled broadly again. “He just pretends, that’s all.”

“He pretends to be autistic?”

“No, he pretends to be a rabbi. He never passed the exams. When his matrimonial agency went down the tubes, he had no choice but to become a rabbi — there was nothing else he could do. Especially not after he molested my aunt, God rest her soul. She was the sweetest aunt I had.”

Xavier suggested that they find a better place to talk. Awromele’s excitement was making him nervous.

They started off in the direction of a wine bar that Xavier knew well. Then he realized that it would be better not to show up there with Awromele. Before you knew it, rumors would be flying. So he took him instead to the Drei Könige am Rhein Hotel.

“He had sired eight children,” Awromele said as they crossed the lobby, “before he found out.” Awromele walked through the hotel as though he’d been coming there for years. He barely seemed to notice his surroundings, taken up by his story and relishing the way Xavier listened to him. Apparently they didn’t listen to him much at home.

“Before he found out what?” Xavier asked.

“That he was actually in love with my mother’s sister, and that she was in love with him. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. After he’d made eight children with my mother. You’d think of that beforehand, wouldn’t you? Does your mother have a sister?”

“No,” Xavier said, “no sisters. She’s an only child. An orphan, to be precise.”

“That’s better, less risky — to have no sister.”

They found a table on the patio with a view of the Rhine. Xavier had often swum by here in the past, alone at first, later with his friends the Zionists.

Awromele ordered sparkling water, then nipped at it a bit, as if it might be poisonous.

“Are there people you can’t keep your hands off of?” Awromele asked.

Xavier thought about it. “No,” he said after a moment, “there’s no one like that. I can keep my hands off of everyone.”

They were a strange pair. People were looking at them.

“So your parents are assimilated,” Awromele said as the ice in his sparkling water slowly melted away.

“Assimilated?”

“They act as if they aren’t anything.”

“I guess you could say that,” Xavier said. “That’s what they do.” His wineglass was empty, but he didn’t want to order another one — he didn’t want to make an unfavorable impression on Awromele.

The worst that can happen to you is to have no goal in life, not to be anything. Xavier had read that somewhere. In the forbidden book, he had also read that Jews systematically brought girls and women to ruin. He couldn’t imagine Awromele doing something like that: he wouldn’t bring anyone to ruin. Xavier’s wisdom came from books. His parents were silent most of the time, and his teachers doubted everything, except for the man who taught the classics. He believed that Aristotle had an answer for everything.

Something about Xavier’s recently chosen goal in life caused him to blush one moment and grow desperate the next. But that desperation was nothing compared with the real suffering which he craved. The suffering of others.

“Is that why you’re an only child?” Awromele asked.

“What?”

“Your family being assimilated, I mean. Assimilated people never produce a lot of children. That’s how they destroy their Jewishness, my father says. In the long run, they do what Hitler did, but demographically. Has your family always been assimilated? Or was it something you became?”

“No, we’ve always been like that.”

“So you don’t know any better.”

Awromele looked pensive again, and Xavier felt the urge to grab hold of a body part that was causing the pain. He had the impression that Awromele’s pain came from all his body parts.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” Xavier asked.

“I have to get home pretty quickly — you know how my father is.”

“It won’t take long.”

“Go ahead. Just ask.”

“Are you a Zionist?”

Awromele started laughing. He laughed loudly, he laughed in abandon, not like Xavier’s mother, who didn’t laugh much anyway. And when she did, it sounded like the laughter of an actress who doesn’t feel like playing her part.

More and more people on the patio of the Drei Könige am Rhein Hotel were staring at them. The more people stared, the uneasier Xavier felt. You saw people like Awromele walking down the street sometimes, but you never saw them at chic hotels. They always kept to themselves.

“Of course I’m not a Zionist,” Awromele said. “First the Messiah, then the Jewish state. You know that. We have to wait for the Messiah; then the state will come of its own accord. You don’t know much, do you? What have your parents been teaching you all these years? Are you even circumcised?”

Awromele talked rather loudly, and his voice was high for his age, so half the people on the patio could hear what they were saying.

“Circumcised,” Xavier said as quietly as he could, without actually whispering. “Not really. We didn’t have the time for it, or the money. Not in those days. And we’re assimilated, I told you that already.”

“All the assimilated Jews I know are circumcised. Circumcision doesn’t interfere with assimilation. Were your parents really that assimilated? What did they think about when you came along?”

“I don’t know what they were thinking. My father is an architect; he’s awfully busy.”

“And then that stuff about the money being a problem. What kind of excuse is that? A circumcision doesn’t cost anything. Sixty francs, some people will do it for twenty — maybe with less sophisticated instruments, but that’s no problem for a baby. A baby can take a lot. My mother used to have us eat off the floor, to build up our resistance. Maybe it was a kind of revenge, because my father was doing it with her sister, God rest her soul, but still. One of my father’s cousins was a circumciser. He had a butcher shop. He moved to Australia, and no one knows what he’s doing over there. Do you have smegma?”

“Excuse me?”

Xavier began to regret bringing Awromele to this hotel. They didn’t have any manners. They were an ancient people, okay, but they’d left their manners behind in the desert. He knew it wasn’t right to generalize, but if you intended to apply the principles of science, you didn’t have much choice. And that’s what he wanted to do, to approach the Jews scientifically. To study suffering in an objective fashion, to enter the paradise of pain as a scientist. Perhaps the only justification for pain was the beauty produced by its infliction.

“Do you have smegma? I’m so curious about what it looks like, but no one will show me. Apparently it looks a little like sheep cheese. But that doesn’t say much to me, either.”

Xavier reached for a bowl of nuts, put two of them in mouth, and ground them slowly between his molars.

“I wash myself carefully,” he said after both nuts had been ground to a pulp. Then, just to change the subject, he asked, “Do you mean grass cheese?”

“Grass cheese?”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t that a real white kind of cheese?”

“That’s right,” Xavier said, “that’s it exactly.” Cheese was the only thing his father ate on bread, so he knew a lot about it.

“No, I mean sheep cheese, real sheep cheese. Do you have to scrape it off, or does it fall off in the shower? I’ve never met anyone who has smegma. You’re the first.”

Xavier choked and started coughing.

Awromele got up and pounded him on the back. That morning, Awromele had locked himself in his room and smoked a cigarette. After that he had trimmed his hair with a pair of manicure scissors. For a few minutes he had entertained the hope that, from now on, everything would be different. The worst thing about life was the endless repetition, the same holy days each year, the same Day of Atonement, the same matzos, the same hut roofed with branches, the same God who could write people’s name in the Book of Life or in the Book of Death. The repetition was the worst, but the rest wasn’t too great, either. Despite his age, Awromele had the sneaky feeling that there was nothing new, that there never would be anything new, that he already knew everything, and that the things he didn’t know yet he could easily guess about. Then he lay down on the bed with his clothes on and studied the lines on his hand. He’d had his palm read at a fair once and was fascinated by fortunetelling. If you knew the future, there was no longer any need to change it. All you had to do was know it, and then hide from it. That, in fact, was what Awromele saw as his task in life, and in the lives of others.

“What about blow jobs — isn’t that a problem?” Awromele asked after he sat down again.

Xavier’s coughing had become the hiccups. “I have to be going,” he said. Despite his size and the interest shown in him by a lot of girls, he was still a virgin. “Could I ask you one final question?”

“Of course.”

A waiter interrupted them to ask if they wanted anything else, but Xavier simply asked for the check. The way his father always did, sounding slightly irritated at having to think about anything as banal as a check.

“How do you deal with the Holocaust?” Xavier asked.

“Deal with the Holocaust? What do you mean?”

“Nothing special. How you deal with it. Do you talk about it a lot at home?”

“Twice a week.”

“Only twice a week?”

“In the winter, three times a week.”

“And then? Do you try to cope with it?”

The ice in Awromele’s glass had melted completely. A piercing, almost inhuman giggling came from Awromele’s mouth — inhuman in the way his beauty was almost inhuman. Too lovely. Too soft. Too glorious. Too wonderful. Not that everyone could see it. A lot of people probably didn’t notice, they only recognized as beauty a picture in a fashion magazine. But Xavier was a frequent visitors of museums, both those of natural history and of medieval art. He had seen countless pictures of the saints and the Redeemer. Some beauty, but not much, was changeless. And it was one single drop of that changeless beauty that he recognized in Awromele. In this young Jew he recognized something that destroyed his appetite, that frightened him to death.

“I want to ask you one more thing,” Xavier said. “Or, actually, I want to make you a proposal.” He feigned distraction for a moment; the hiccups had finally stopped; he paid the check.

“Would you consider tutoring me?” he asked. “I’ll pay for it, of course. I want to learn Yiddish.”

Awromele looked concerned, like an older brother, almost suspicious.

“Yiddish? Why do you want to learn Yiddish? You’re not even circumcised.”

“I want to be circumcised as well. But first I want to learn Yiddish.”

“First you’re going to learn Yiddish, then you’re going to get circumcised. Are you feeling all right? Why?”

“Because.”

“Just because? Nobody just wants to learn Yiddish. Have you had enough of being assimilated, is it getting old?”

“I want to write a book.”

“A book? What kind of book?”

“A book that will comfort people.”

“What people?”

“You know, people. You, for example.”

“Me?” Awromele looked disgusted. “What do you want to comfort me for?”

“For…well, for everything.”

Awromele got up. Xavier did, too. They walked to the entrance. People were watching them go — Xavier could tell even without looking back. The talking would start now. Out on the street he said, “Thanks for a pleasant afternoon.” They shook hands.

Awromele’s fingers were soft. If there was anything soft and feminine about Xavier, it wasn’t his hands. He had the hands of a workman; in the winter, his fingers quickly turned ruddy from the cold.

“Are you serious about this?” Awromele asked.

“About the lessons? Yes, completely serious. See me as a friend.”

Awromele looked amazed, then started laughing loudly. “That’s a good one, I have to remember that. You know what my father always says? He says it so often it makes you sick, but, then, he says everything so often it makes you sick. He says: Jews have no friends.”

Awromele’s laughter was contagious.

Xavier started laughing a little himself. But not wholeheartedly. He leaned forward. Without asking himself what he was doing, he kissed Awromele on his milky-white cheek. “Teach me, Awromele,” he said quietly. “Teach me.”

Xavier walked home with a bounce in his step. The Jews had a friend at last. If passersby had seen him walking along, they would have known: there he went, the friend of the Jews.