Arnon Grunberg - The Jewish Messiah

“What’s he saying?” the mother asked. Her child had lost his ability to express himself well, and she was repulsed by that. She despised weakness, and she despised weak family members even more. Deep in her heart, she had considered her husband a weakling as well, but she had disguised that thought by acting servile, by never contradicting him, and by opening her behind to him once every three months. He had lived like a weakling — died like a weakling, too. Her father may have lived by ideas that were considered objectionable these days, but at least he hadn’t lived like a weakling, and he hadn’t died that way, either. No, there was nothing more repulsive than weakness.

“I can’t figure it out,” Marc said. “But I can tell that he’s running a high fever. Maybe we should have someone look at him, sweetheart. An expert.”

“Oh, please,” the mother said, “most of the time those experts just talk through their hats, they don’t really know much more than the interested layman.”

“But we should at least clean him up. Poop isn’t good for the skin. I know. One of my uncles became senile, and he lay in his own poop all the time. He played with it, too, and then he came down with a skin disease.”

“Senility is a terrible thing,” the mother said. “A horrible thing.” The two of them looked at the boy, whose breathing was labored.

In the kitchen, the mother put some water on the stove; her hands were shaking. If this ever got out, she’d never be able to show her face again. She’d be a goner, they would have to move. Before you knew it, her life in Basel would be ruined. Her life in Switzerland.

She took a bag of chamomile tea out of the cupboard, and tried to come up with a plan to save her life, and that of her family.

ALL THAT DAY, for almost nine whole hours, the mother tried to heal her son by regularly dribbling iodine on the wound and feeding him chamomile tea, and the whole time she murmured, “What have you done to us, child, what have you done to us?”

The boy couldn’t hear these rhetorical questions; he was far, far away, in the world of pain.

When Marc came home from work around five, the first thing he did was to take the boy’s temperature. He didn’t reproach Xavier the way the mother did, he only made tender little noises.

Altruism is wonderful, he realized. It’s wonderful to help people, especially defenseless people who are in great pain and can hardly move. Of course, it’s also wonderful to curse people roundly once in a while — he remembered the curses he had heaped upon the dying architect in the hospital — but, all things considered, it was more satisfying to help them and be gentle with them. You really felt like a human being when you did that.

The thermometer showed that Xavier’s temperature was up to almost 103. Marc carefully pulled back the blanket.

The wound was a battlefield of pus.

The bed had not been cleaned. The sick boy was still lying in his own feces, which had become hard and dry by now and stuck to his skin here and there.

It looked even more distasteful than it had that morning. But because Marc was feeling altruistic, he went on producing sounds that people usually make to babies lying in the cradle.

Then he went down to the kitchen, where the mother was making tea, and said: “We really have to take Xavier to the hospital now; his temperature is up to a hundred and three.” He held his hands under the tap and asked, “Why didn’t you clean him?”

“I didn’t want to wake him up,” the mother said. “Besides, I can’t do everything on my own around here.”

She had started to fear the worst as well, though, so they carried the boy downstairs and laid him, blanket and all, on the backseat of Marc’s Alfa. A maneuver that hurt Xavier so badly that he shrieked a few times.

The mother went back to the bathroom and quickly applied a touch of red lipstick; she knew that in all situations one was judged by one’s appearance. Then they drove like mad to the hospital. Marc liked to drive like a speed demon. It made the mother feel nauseous. The boy was already nauseous.

IN THE WAITING ROOM, where she had been sitting with her broken nose not so long before, the mother now sat with her child. He couldn’t sit upright, so they had laid him across three chairs. The waiting room was crowded that day, full of casualties from a soccer game that had gotten out of hand even before it started. The mother prayed that she wouldn’t see anyone she knew.

Every once in a while, Marc got up to see how the boy was doing, and to speak a few words of comfort to him, along the lines of: “You’ll be okay. Nothing to worry about. It will be over soon.”

The mother had put on her sunglasses and gone to the ladies’ room to look at herself in the mirror. She had grown prettier since the divorce. And after her husband’s death, her appearance had actually improved notably. It wasn’t nice to think so, but it was the truth. Although it was possible, of course, that his death had nothing to do with it.

When she came out of the restroom, the nurse called Xavier Radek’s name.

Along with her boyfriend and the friendly nurse, Xavier’s mother carried the child to the doctor’s office. The nurse apologized for the inconvenience, but all the stretchers were occupied because of the rioting.

“Stretchers can give you a hernia anyway,” said the mother, who had read an article about that in a women’s magazine.

They had to wait for the doctor to come in. “There’s still some shit sticking to his skin,” Marc said.

“They’ll wash that off,” the mother said. “Just put the sheet over it.” Marc didn’t want to argue, so he pulled up the sheet, making quiet little cooing noises the whole time.

Then the doctor arrived. The doctor was a woman. What’s more, she was almost seven feet tall.

The mother decided right away that this was an unpleasant woman. She was relieved, however, to find that they didn’t know each other from any of the social engagements she was obliged to attend each year. The architect had given generously to good causes, and generosity and social engagements went together. Now she was the one who gave to good causes — less generously, things had changed, but she always gave something. People in need could count on her.

The doctor had barely sat down at her desk before getting up again to look at the patient. One look was enough.

“Why did they make you wait so long?” she asked. Then she picked up a phone and snarled a few words into the receiver.

“What’s this?” the doctor asked, pointing to something black sticking to the unconscious boy’s leg.

“He soiled himself,” the mother said.

Within thirty seconds, four orderlies had come into the room. They picked up the boy and ran with him through the corridors of the hospital, towards Intensive Care. The mother ran after them, still wearing her sunglasses, and Marc ran behind her.

At Intensive Care the adults had to wait outside, in front of a large window.

“What are they doing?” the mother asked.

“I can’t see,” Marc said. “They’ve pulled a curtain around him.”

Two doctors, along with two other nurses, worked on Xavier for the next hour and a half.

“Why are they taking so long?” the mother wanted to know.

When the seven-foot doctor finally came out, she walked straight up to the mother and said, “So now I want you to tell me what happened to that boy.”

The mother got up from the couch where she had been waiting calmly all this time, resigning herself to the hand of fate. She was still wearing her sunglasses. “He played with himself,” the mother said, smiling amiably at the doctor. She had everything under control. “Boys his age do that all the time.”