Arnon Grunberg - The Jewish Messiah

She took off her bra. After a few weeks of breastfeeding, she hadn’t been able to stand it and had switched to the bottle. She ran her hands over her breasts.

Marc was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. He was willing to do things for others, certainly for the woman he lived with, but there were limits. You couldn’t force a person.

“Use your fantasy,” she said, taking a step forward. She brought her face down close to his, ready to kiss him again, ready to bite his lip. “Use your fantasy for once.” That’s what the book had said: “Use not only your own fantasy, but let him use his as well.”

Without thinking about it, without actually even realizing it, Marc hit her on the nose as hard as he could.

The mother staggered, took a few steps back. She was bleeding.

The apron, the one from the department store in Milan, was lying on the floor.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Marc said when he saw the blood flowing from her nose. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

She pressed her arm against her nose and looked at him. She wasn’t sure whether or not to be angry; spontaneity wasn’t her strong suit. Only then did she feel the pain. She ran upstairs. Halfway up the stairs, she kicked off her shoes. She threw herself onto the bed. A peeping sound was coming from her mouth, and the blood kept dripping from her nose.

She felt more than the pain in her nose, she felt something else, something you could express only by screaming. And that is exactly what she did.

She screamed so loudly that her son, lying on the doorstep, heard her. Lying there, racked with pain, he found it only logical that the rest of world should be racked with pain as well, and so he didn’t think about it much.

Marc found a rag in the kitchen and tried to wipe the blood off the carpet. It didn’t work. Nothing to do about it. Then he picked up the bra and the apron and hung them over a chair. Remembering that his stepson was still lying outside on the doorstep, he opened the door and said to Xavier: “Come on in. Your mother’s in a bit of a state today.”

It took Xavier a few seconds to realize that he was now allowed to enter his own house. He crawled across the threshold, and cried out briefly in pain. But his cry was drowned out by his mother’s screams.

“Shall I get you an aspirin?” asked Marc, whose mind was on something else. He wasn’t just sorry about having given Xavier’s mother a bloody nose; there were more things he regretted now.

Xavier was lying half naked in the doorway.

His mother’s hibernation had ended, that much was certain. She had awakened with a scream.

In the kitchen, Marc filled a glass with water.

Between two stabs of pain, Xavier realized that he needed to look at the little mummy between his legs. He had to unwrap the bandages. In order to stop the pain, he needed to know what it looked like down there between his legs.

Now there was one thing Xavier knew for sure. He knew which part of the body it was that caused a Jew the most pain.

WHILE MARC,against his better judgment, was trying to scrub the spots off the carpet, and his mother was lying on her bed and cursing her life, Xavier dragged himself into the living room. He couldn’t remember ever having walked like a normal person. A world without wounds had become unimaginable.

Xavier remained sprawled on the floor, beside the easy chair in which Marc had been seated a few minutes before, watching the mother’s act. From the bedroom came the sound of her sobbing, punctuated by the occasional shriek.

Xavier was hurting too badly to pay any attention. He needed to get the sloppily wrapped bandage, which had now turned a dark red, off of his sex organ. He had to examine and heal himself. But he didn’t dare to do that in the middle of the living room.

When Marc was finished scrubbing the carpet, he leaned over and patted Xavier’s warm head.

“Are you really feeling that bad?” he asked, his hand resting on Xavier’s head. “What have you been drinking?”

Xavier fidgeted at Mr. Schwartz’s trousers. An old man’s trousers, that’s what life looked like once you’d brushed all the myths off it.

“Take me to my room,” Xavier whispered. He closed his eyes tightly. “Please, take me to my room.”

“Oh, little fellow,” Marc said, “cute little guy.” And he kissed Xavier’s forehead. Then he picked up his stepson and carried him upstairs.

Marc was not strong, so it wasn’t easy for him, but he didn’t let that show. He laid Xavier on the single bed that the mother had bought when they moved in here. His old bed was still at the architect’s house.

After Marc had put Xavier on the bed, he took a good look at him, how he lay there, so helpless and alone. A feeling of regret came over him again. He wished he could help the boy, but he didn’t know how.

In the next room, Xavier’s mother’s sobs grew quieter. They changed to deep sighs and heavy breathing. She thought about the orphan she had been, about how she’d given birth, about the way she had imagined being happy, long ago. The love she had felt once she knew she was pregnant, a feeling she now doubted. Before the conception, there had been almost no love at all. Tension, there was that, the hope of a better life, a longing for something more than poverty and shame. She didn’t know whether she had ever felt love in her life. Yes, as a child she had loved You-Know-Who, but that was different, that had been a love without lust, because back then she didn’t know about lust yet. That was a love born of patriotism and self-sacrifice.

She thought about the book she had read recently, about the magazine in which that book had been praised by female experts who knew how she could keep her sex life exciting. She doubted whether she had ever felt lust. Maybe she had only wanted to see desire in the eyes of the man she needed. Desire as a dire need, that was the life-insurance policy for a woman like her, a woman who only wanted to erase Saxony, the humiliation, and the poverty from her mind, to become what every woman in Basel was: a wife, a lady with a family life. But the dire need of men never lasts long, it continually changes shape, unreliable as the weather. A few weeks, six months at most, was the longest it ever lasted, she’d once heard someone say in the ladies’ room. In her case: four months. Then the desire that had made the architect — still a graduate student at the time — tear the clothes off her body had turned into a long winter’s sleep, interrupted only by a ritual that was always performed in great haste. After the birth, the architect had focused on her rear end, as though disgusted by the hole from which his son had crawled. And now she was disgusted by it herself. She moved her hand across her stomach, across the shallow wrinkles that, when she lay like this, were nothing more than shadows, nothing more than the hint of wrinkles, but which would grow deeper, deeper, and deeper, which would hollow her out as water hollows out the stone.

She thought about her father, a modest man, who had valued nothing so much as simplicity. She remembered her boyfriend’s blow, and carefully felt her nose. When she had noticed Marc at that cocktail party, it had been because she had seen in his eyes something she had missed for so long: the dire need of desire. And now look what that dire need had done: dire need had given her a bloody nose.

Downstairs, Marc put on the headphones again. He became one with the jazz music, the way he could become one with the flight simulator. It wasn’t that easy with people, but fusing with machines and with Benny Goodman, he was good at that.

In his room, lying on his bed, Xavier carefully pulled down his trousers. It didn’t go very quickly. Every millimeter they descended made Xavier feel as though his sex organ were slowly being torn from his body.