Arnon Grunberg - The Jewish Messiah

“Yes, please,” she said.

She looked at Marc, who was playing dumb. No regrets, no pleas for forgiveness, no shock at his own wrongdoing. Only restlessness, because it was taking so long. He sat beside her motionlessly.

“Painkillers, or the nose brace?”

“Both,” she said, “please.”

“We don’t have to reset it,” the doctor said. “It’s a clean break.” Then he felt it was his duty to ask whether she had been the victim of a crime.

“Not that I know of,” she said.

“If you say so, I believe you.”

“You know,” she said, “victims are always culprits, too, and culprits are always victims. No one gets what he doesn’t deserve.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” the doctor said. And, after staring briefly at Mrs. Radek’s nose, he wrote out a prescription for painkillers.

WHEN NO RESPONSE CAME to Xavier’s repeated cries for water, it slowly dawned on him that Marc and his mother had left the house, or perhaps retired to their bedroom with wads of cotton in their ears.

Xavier rolled out of bed. It wasn’t really a roll, though — it was a fall. He lay on the floor of his bedroom, unable to move, without enough strength even to crawl like a baby. The blue of his sex organ had, as he’d feared, spread to his groin. Blisters had also risen on his sex organ; it looked like they were producing a sticky, yellowish-white substance. Because of the pain and the fear, he couldn’t accurately judge whether that yellowish-white substance was coming from the blisters, or from other orifices. It reminded him of the stuff that comes out of pimples when you squeeze them.

Mr. Schwartz had ruined everything.

After that, he didn’t think about Mr. Schwartz anymore, not even about Awromele. He was going to die soon.

But this was not his greatest worry; his greatest worry was whether or not he’d be buried in a Jewish cemetery.

THE MOTHER TOOKthe prescription for painkillers to an all-night pharmacy. Marc waited in the car, watching as she stood shivering in front of the pharmacy until the little hatch opened.

When she sat down beside him again, Marc felt like telling her that he loved her. He wasn’t pleased with what he’d done; he had never broken a part of anyone’s body before. He had always thought he was incapable of that.

“I love you,” he said. “And your son. About what happened tonight, I can’t do anything about that anymore. But I know we will make each other happy very often in the future.” He put his hand on her leg.

The mother looked up from the bottle of painkillers. “You don’t know your own strength,” she said. “You have to be careful if you hit someone.”

He squeezed her leg.

“It runs in the family,” he said. “We used to slaughter our own cows and pigs.”

At the house, they brushed their teeth together in the bathroom. The mother swallowed two painkillers.

Marc slept in his T-shirt; the mother wore polyester pajamas. She had three identical pairs of pajamas in the colors pink, blue, and yellow, and a few nighties as well. Tonight she was wearing the pink pajamas. The architect had given them to her, for Christmas.

Marc was already lying in bed. He was concentrating on a computer magazine, and feeling pleased. It wasn’t nice to break your girlfriend’s nose, but he hadn’t done it on purpose, and when you thought about how things went in other parts of the world, a broken nose was nothing to get upset about. He was immersed in an article about a new operating system when the mother walked past the nursery and saw that the door was ajar. Even though Xavier was no longer a child, she still called his room “the nursery.” She had forgotten all about her son. She was planning to close the door, but for some reason she herself did not completely understand, she opened it and looked in. The light was still on.

The bed was empty. She became angry. She thought that her son had left the house again. How her father had met his end was something she had only heard from others. He had been a terrible sight, she knew that much. He had refused to surrender. Then she saw her son lying on the floor. He was a terrible sight as well.

Xavier seemed unconscious. But in fact the boy was only concentrating on certain thoughts, in order to suppress the pain. Every once in a while, he drifted off into gruesome dreams. He wasn’t exactly what you’d call unconscious, but he wasn’t really conscious, either.

“Xavier,” the mother said. The light was rather dim, but she could see her only child’s sex organ. She thought she was losing her mind. She had never seen a blue sex organ before. She hadn’t seen very many sex organs in the course of her life anyway. The architect had never wanted her to look at him during the deed — he had always preferred to blindfold her with a dishtowel first.

But this was not normal, that much she knew for sure.

“Xavier,” she said again.

The boy looked at her. He saw that it was his mother, but that was all; not much was getting through to him at that point.

The mother went to her bedroom and shook her boyfriend. He had fallen asleep with the magazine on his chest. She had to yank hard.

“The boy,” she said. “There’s something wrong with him. Come and look, quick.”

Marc was wearing a gray T-shirt with the word Spaßvogel written on it in pink lettering. A colleague at the radio station had given it to him. He got up stiffly and followed the mother to the nursery. She was doing her best to remain calm; that was something she had done all her life, and she was good at it. Her mother had been raped by the Russians, and she had stayed calm then as well, even though she was only a child. Someone had put a hand over her eyes, but she had seen it all anyway.

Marc and the mother were standing in the doorway to the nursery; the boy was lying on the floor.

“Look at that,” the mother said, as though she were talking about a vacuum cleaner the cleaning lady had broken.

Marc bent over to get a better look. Then he straightened up again. “I can’t stand it,” he said. “I think I’m going to have to…” He leaned against the wall; he was dizzy; the bandage that Xavier had unraveled with such difficulty was still lying on the bed. The nursery smelled faintly of cheese, and also of the slaughterhouse.

“I can’t stand it, either,” the mother said. “But I suppose I’ll have to.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Marc always did his best to remain unruffled, fatherly, trying not to come down on the boy too hard.

The mother pulled up a chair. Her pajamas made her look almost youthful. Marc gazed at her lovingly.

“What happened to you?” she asked. The boy had closed his eyes again. “Xavier, sweetheart, what happened to you? What have they done to you?”

Xavier couldn’t reply. He was dreaming that his mother was speaking the same words to him, and in his dream he murmured his friend’s name.

The mother loved her only child — she was a mother, after all — but she hated him as well. After he was born, the architect had barely felt any desire for her, or at least hadn’t shown it. He’d never shown much of any feeling at all. Ambition was not what you’d call a feeling, especially not refined ambition. He didn’t want to be in her anymore, not really in her, and she blamed the child for that. But only in her thoughts; she never said it out loud. It was useless to talk about your feelings — it could even be dangerous. Look at You-Know-Who; he had listened to his feelings, and see what had become of him.

Marc went to the bathroom and drank thirstily from the tap. He held his mouth up to the faucet, even though the mother didn’t allow that. His stepson’s sex organ had him worried. He had seen plenty of pigs being slaughtered, so he wasn’t particularly queasy, but this didn’t look good.