Arnon Grunberg - The Jewish Messiah

Then she closed the door and went back to the table. She had waited for Xavier before starting with dinner, but she had no intention of waiting any longer. She dished out the food and shouted, “Marc, dinner’s ready!”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Marc called from upstairs. “I’m right in the middle of a forced landing.”

Outside, on the doorstep, Xavier howled as loudly as he could: “I haven’t been drinking, Mama, help me, open the door. Please, open the door, Mama.”

A window flew open, and a woman shrieked, “Shut up, or I’ll call the police.”

Xavier stopped his howling. Now there was only the pain, the pain that kept getting worse. It felt as though the circumcision were still going on, as though Mr. Schwartz were beginning over and over again on the same operation. Like a mantra, Xavier repeated quietly, “Accept, O Lord, this humble sacrifice.”

Marc came downstairs at last. He had made it. He liked forced landings — they kept things a little exciting. Sometimes, when he was bored, Marc would throw his plane into a nosedive.

He poked his fork absentmindedly into the homemade mashed potatoes. Xavier’s mother made almost everything from scratch.

“He’s been out carousing with his friends,” Xavier’s mother said. “Now he’s lying in front of the door. But I think I’ll just let him lie there. That will teach him.”

“Who?” Marc asked.

“Xavier.”

“Oh,” Marc said, cutting off a piece of chicken. “Where did you say he was lying?”

“In front of the door. Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Xavier’s mother declared, without knowing exactly why. Ever since her husband’s death, she had grown more voluble. Sometimes, to her own surprise, she discovered that life actually appealed to her.

A man with a dog of indeterminate breed stopped to stare at Xavier.

“I live here,” Xavier said quietly, “but I lost my keys.” Then he couldn’t help it anymore, he moaned. Not the way actors moan in a pornographic film, but the moaning you hear when you walk into a hospital ward in which twelve patients are just coming out from under anesthetic.

The man with the dog looked at Xavier — without fear, but also without much interest. He looked at him the way you might look at a new work of art in a local park and think: I’ve seen worse.

In the living room, the mother dished herself a second helping. Marc didn’t eat enough, she felt, and she hadn’t gone to all the trouble of making mashed potatoes just to have them wasted. “He needs to learn a lesson,” she said. “Let him lie there for a couple of hours. Let him come to his senses. Later on, he’ll thank me for it.”

“He’s a good-looking boy,” Marc said, pouring a little more mineral water for himself and his girlfriend.

“Who?”

“Xavier.”

“Oh.”

“He looks like President Kennedy in his younger years, but with different hair.”

“Well,” Xavier’s mother said, “I’ve never noticed that.” Only a few minutes ago, her son had reminded her of an abandoned alley cat, and President Kennedy definitely had never reminded anyone of an abandoned alley cat, not even in his younger years.

Marc started reading the label on the bottle of mineral water. “Did you know that tap water is actually a lot better for you?” he asked.

“No,” the mother said, “I didn’t know that. And it’s not true, either.”

Outside, the man with the dog continued to stare at Xavier. The dog did its duty, and took a long time doing so. Old dogs resemble old people in that respect.

Xavier should have been able to smell it — it took place less than ten feet from his head — but the stink couldn’t reach him anymore. He mumbled, “Help me, please, help me.” Not too loudly — he was afraid the neighbors would call the police.

“So you live here?” the man asked, once the dog was finished. “I live here, too. I’ve never seen you around.”

Xavier thought his balls and his sex organ were going to explode, that little pieces of flesh would go flying past his ears, and that the rest of him would then explode as well. All that would be left was a hundred thousand pieces of flesh, flying into the air higher and higher.

“I walk past here every night,” the man said, “with Lou.” He scratched the dog’s head.

Xavier moaned, almost inaudibly, but the street was quiet, and Lou’s master could hear Xavier’s moan quite clearly. “You wouldn’t say so from the looks of him,” the man said, “but when this dog was young he took part in more than forty dog shows. Lots of honorable mentions. A couple of times he even won third prize.” The man petted the dog, which had grown too old to be eligible for honorary mentions.

“Please, help me,” Xavier was finally able to utter. “Please, won’t you please help me?”

The man looked at him in surprise — as though he only realized now what Xavier had been saying all this time.

He pulled a one-franc piece out of his pocket and set it carefully beside Xavier’s head. Then he walked on. He was pleased with himself. It was important never to lose the capacity to pick a fellow human in need out of the crowd. Helping people out a little, striking up a conversation where other people only maintained a moody silence, that was charity.

After the man turned the corner, he suddenly regretted not having given the young transient two francs, but he was too embarrassed to walk all the way back for the sake of that second franc.

“It’s not just carousing with his friends over the weekend,” the mother was saying in the living room. “I could overlook that. It’s much more. Did you know that he’s joined a Zionist youth people’s club? They sent him a letter asking him to pay his annual contribution. I intercepted it.”

They were having dessert. Yogurt with fresh fruit.

“What kind of youth club?”

“A Zionist one.”

“Jesus,” Marc said. “But, still, he’s a special boy. You shouldn’t forget that. Well groomed. Always friendly. Never grumpy. And it can’t be easy for him, suddenly having a stepfather who’s not that much older than he is.”

The mother was a bit startled by the word “stepfather.” It was a word she had always avoided.

“Yeah, yeah,” the mother said. She ate her yogurt quickly. Marc wasn’t much help, she had started noticing. He was there, but not really. Yet she had no intention of letting it go at that — she’d let too many things go for too long. The books she’d bought were full of practical tips, and she had decided to involve Marc more in her life, not to bottle things up, but to talk to him more. To struggle against what made her suffer. Suffering existed, you had to acknowledge that. That was the first step.

Prompted by one book in particular, which she was actually a bit embarrassed to own, she had decided to take the initiative in bed for a change. The book said it was important from time to time to change the location where the initiative was taken. In principle, any location was suitable for taking the initiative. You simply had to use your imagination. Xavier’s mother felt that she had left her imagination unused for too long. She had to let her fantasy come barging in, like a family member showing up unexpectedly from Australia.

“Before we go to bed, I’ll let him into the house,” she said. “Staying out all night is too much, especially at this time of year. But a couple of hours on the doorstep, for a boy his age, that only builds character.”

“He’s a sensitive boy,” Marc said. He put on a pair of headphones to listen to some jazz. He often listened to jazz while operating the flight simulator.

The dishwasher was filled. Out on the doorstep, Xavier’s moaning subsided, until it stopped altogether.