Arnon Grunberg - The Jewish Messiah

“Yes, he certainly was,” Xavier said. He was feeling a bit better now, but still a little weak. It seemed wise to change the subject. He remembered what Awromele had said a few minutes earlier, and that memory produced a stabbing pain in his chest that was only bearable when he bent over. That way he still felt the pain, but it wasn’t as unbearable as before.

“Awromele,” he said, bending over like that, “please tell me the truth. I have to know.”

“What do you have to know?”

“Have you ever been with a woman who accepted money from you, and credit cards?”

“Money, yes. Credit cards, no. I don’t go to women like that. And I can barely hear you when you’re bent over like that. Stand up straight. What’s wrong with you?”

“It’s nothing,” Xavier said. “It’ll go away. But what do you mean, ‘yes’? What do you mean by that? Explain to me what ‘yes’ means.”

“Yes, what does that mean?” Awromele said. “In principle, it can mean all kinds of things, but in this case it means ‘yes.’ Just ‘yes.’ Let’s not go on about it or we’ll be standing here all night. That would be stupid, because Mr. Schwartz is waiting for us, and I don’t want to be late. He’s an old man.”

Xavier began moaning softly, the way he’d seen men do before the Wailing Wall, on TV.

“And your father?” Xavier asked with the last ounce of strength he had left.

“My father?”

“Does your father go, too?”

“To women who accept money and credit cards?”

“Yes.”

“My father. Listen. He knows a lot about the Torah for someone who’s autistic, and he’s read a lot of the Gemara, considering that he’s extremely excitable. But what he really knows about best are the whores of Basel. He knows them all, their first names, their surnames, their professional names, where they live, the kind of cars they drive, where they go swimming, their favorite foods — sometimes he even visits their parents. Whores’ parents are often sympathetic, warmhearted people. And he brings them presents on their birthdays. As far as that goes, he’s a walking encyclopedia, but you see that pretty often with autistic people, you know what I mean? That they know an awful lot about just one thing, and that they can repeat by heart. It’s pretty amazing. I could never do it, but when you’re autistic, it seems, there’s nothing to it.”

“But you’re a devout Jew, an Orthodox Jew. And so is your father. The two of you are…”

Xavier didn’t know what he wanted to say, or, rather, he knew but he was afraid he was going to start saying terrible things. When he finally realized that it was best to be silent, Xavier felt like grabbing hold of Awromele’s legs. But he didn’t dare to do that, either.

“Pull yourself together,” said Awromele, who could see that Xavier was feeling poorly. “You haven’t even been circumcised yet and we’re already getting this. This is going to be great. A circumcision at your age isn’t just a matter of circumcising, a little disinfectant, and then you’re back out on the street. Are you all right?”

“No,” Xavier said. “I’m not all right. I’m not all right at all.”

There was not much left of the easy-mannered young man who had once been so interested in steam engines and who, when the moment was right, never lacked for an appropriate quote from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Hegel. He had never read more of those thinkers than a few isolated quotes, but that was enough for his purposes.

“Listen,” Awromele said, “I don’t know where you’ve been all this time, and maybe there are devout Jews who don’t go to the whorehouse, maybe there are people like that walking around, but I sure don’t know them. Where are devout Jews supposed to go? To the beach? To the disco? You want them to join a volleyball club? Are you nuts or something?”

Xavier’s moaning grew louder. “So what about God?”

“Stop asking me questions you already know the answers to. My father claims that he found a passage in the Kabbalah in which the Almighty gives His blessings to rabbis who pay for it. I admit, it’s a passage you can interpret in two ways, maybe even three, but my father’s sure that his interpretation is the right one. I don’t know what kind of God you’ve got in mind, but the Almighty wants to see joy grow on this earth. Which is why the rabbi is allowed to visit whores as long as it increases his joy. Because, if the rabbi’s joy increases, the world’s joy does, too; the mathematics you can do for yourself. Of course he’s not allowed to go every day — that’s a different story. No one is allowed to do everything every day, because then there would be no difference between one day and the next, and that would be boring. Imagine if we couldn’t tell the difference between young and old, sweet and tasty, Tuesday and Thursday, dirty and ugly. That would be a disaster. The Almighty gave us the ability to tell the difference, in order to increase the total quantity of joy in this world. But that’s too complicated for right now. Exactly how God wants to see the joy distributed, opinions differ on that. And of course the rabbi isn’t supposed to go home and tell his wife how his joy has increased, because, even if you increase your own joy as much as possible, you have to be careful not to decrease the joy of others. That’s why God wants us to do some things in the dark, and other things in broad daylight.”

Xavier felt like he was being drawn and quartered. “And what about the Holocaust?”

“Listen,” said Awromele, who was becoming really irritated now. “I’ll be the first to admit that the Almighty has faults of His own, and it’s a good thing, too. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to stand Him. Do you know anybody who doesn’t have any faults? But in principle He’s a reasonable, right-thinking entity who wants the best for us and who wants nothing more than to see joy increase on earth, like I’ve explained to you now about a hundred times. And that’s why He’s given us all kinds of instruments to use, and we can’t refuse to use them, because then He would be really pissed off.”

“But we have to conquer our instincts, Awromele. We have to overcome them, we have to subdue them; otherwise we’re lost.” Xavier was almost unable to speak. Just as in the sauna, he was having visions, and, just as in the sauna, he was unable to make sense of those visions.

“No,” Awromele said, “you’re wrong there. That’s what creates all the misunderstandings. God wants us to listen to our instincts, not overcome them. He wants us to hear the lovely music those instincts make, even lovelier than Mozart or Beethoven. But most people don’t know that, because they never listen to that music, even though they have the radio turned on all day. Just try listening closely to your instincts; a world will open up to you. God didn’t give us something just to have us subdue it. Ideas like that really make Him angry.”

Xavier listened to his instincts. But he didn’t hear much, and what he heard wasn’t at all what he wanted to hear.

Awromele did a little jig. “Jews and dancing,” he said, “they don’t go together, either, but that’s a different story. And Jews and figure skating, they don’t go together at all. Listen, what you need to do is learn to sing along with your instincts. Because that’s the only way to fill up the void a little.”

At that moment, the instincts were telling Xavier the most horrible things. That he should cover Awromele with kisses from head to toe, then throttle him slowly. He couldn’t keep listening to his instincts; if he did, he would go crazy.

A God who wanted the joy on this earth to increase — you’d have to be Jewish to come up with that. A God like that really wasn’t any God at all, more like an amusement-park ride.