Arnon Grunberg - The Jewish Messiah

“Strange men? What do you mean?” Awromele stole a quick glance at his socks. He thought they were sexy.

They stood there on the bridge. Sometimes they took a few steps to the left, then a few seconds later a few steps to the right. They circled each other like dogs that don’t know where to begin.

“Men in general. Boys. That’s what I mean.”

“In my mouth? No, of course not! What makes you think that?”

“Well, you put mine in your mouth, so I thought maybe you did that more often.”

“No. I only did it to you out of curiosity. You weren’t circumcised yet, and I’d never seen smegma; I’d never tasted it, either. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want just to see things, I want to taste them, too. My brothers are more abstract, but I’m the practical one. I want to touch things, and once I’ve touched them I often want to taste them, too. Do you really like my socks?” Awromele pulled up his pant legs again, so Xavier could see his socks.

“Yeah, they’re great. But do you, for instance, want to touch me?”

Awromele let his pant legs fall back into place. “Yeah, in principle, yeah. I’m very inquisitive.” He pressed his lips to Xavier’s for a moment, but caught himself and said: “We need to talk about those Yiddish lessons. You don’t learn a language by taking a couple of lessons and then stopping for a few weeks. Continuity, that’s extremely important. If we’re going to translate Mein Kampf together, we’re going to have to meet a few times a week — in the park, for example — and then we’ll have to buckle down and teach you some Yiddish.”

“You’re right,” Xavier said. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do. But first we’re going to go for a walk.” He took Awromele’s hand. “You have thin wrists.”

“It runs in the family. My mother’s wrists are also very thin.”

“What kind of woman is your mother, anyway? I don’t have a very good picture of her.”

“What kind of woman is she? What do you think? She gave birth to thirteen children — she’s tired. That’s the kind of woman she is.”

They crossed the bridge in the direction of town. There they caught a tram. In one of the outlying districts, they hopped off and walked through a park that was unusually quiet, because the weather was so drizzly.

“I missed you,” Xavier said. “I really missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” Awromele said. He took Xavier’s head in his hands, and as he did so, he broke. That was how it felt: he tore loose the way wallpaper tears loose, he peeled off like paint. As though he had been broken in two by Xavier’s words, by the head he was holding, the indescribable scent of a person that he would recognize in any case because he had held Xavier’s legs for so long while Mr. Schwartz performed his operation. As though his weakness refused to be concealed any longer, as though he could no longer hide the pain he’d hidden from the eyes of the world so successfully all this time, as though he’d sprung a leak, as though now, finally, for the first time, he coincided with the pain he didn’t feel, the way a deaf person sees lips moving but doesn’t hear the sound, as though he had forgotten that it even existed, that anything like pain even existed at all. Behind his endless joking, his lightheartedness, his energy (at least to the outside world; when the outside world wasn’t looking, he climbed into bed with his clothes on and ate chocolate), behind all his stories and plans, there turned out to be something, something horrible, a sickness, a hole better left unopened. In a flash he caught a glimpse of who he was, a glimpse of himself from head to toe, naked, no more stories, no plans, no jokes, and what he had seen was a missing person. Missing in action, that was him, he saw someone who was no longer there, who had actually never been there at all, and who never would be there. It was this that made him feel nauseous, that made him deathly ill, in fact; he screamed like an animal at the slaughter. In the quiet park he screamed, holding Xavier’s head in his hands for just a moment, then pushing it away. His screaming was high and loud; it cut through everything, then it died out. “Go away,” Awromele shouted. “Go away, don’t come to me with your feelings. We have a business agreement: I give you Yiddish lessons, then we’re going to translate Mein Kampf , and in return I was allowed to taste your smegma. And that’s it, do you hear me, that’s it!”

Then Awromele took off running.

XAVIER STOOD THEREon the gravel path for a few seconds. He thought that Awromele would stop and turn around, that it was a joke, a game, that he would come back again as soon as he noticed Xavier wasn’t chasing him. But Awromele wasn’t running in order to come back, Awromele was running to disappear. And when Xavier realized that at last, he started running, too. He ran across the wet grass, straight through newly trimmed rosebushes, down paths, between trees, across mushy patches of lawn, shouting: “Awromele, stop! You misunderstood me. You misunderstood me completely.”

But his voice was heard only by the bare trees, and a few passersby who had braved the biting wind and the drizzle: a nurse out walking a lady in a wheelchair, a mother with her child.

Awromele ran faster than he ever had during the occasional gym class he hadn’t skipped at school, faster than he had run as a child after ringing someone’s doorbell for a prank, even faster than he had the time he’d stolen a chocolate Easter egg from a shop. His mother had made him bring back the egg, but he had been unable to find the shop. Now he had no idea what calamity he was running from; all he knew was that he had seen something he never wanted to see again.

Xavier was catching up with him. He was in better shape than Awromele, and unlike Awromele he had on sturdy leather shoes fit for mountain walks, and for kicking. Besides, he was a poor loser, and today he had no desire at all to lose, he didn’t want to lose Awromele, not now, maybe never. When you start looking at the world from a certain perspective, everything is about winning or losing. For a long time, Xavier had thought his relationship with Awromele wasn’t about that, but now he knew that he’d been mistaken. In order to comfort Awromele, he first had to defeat him.

Xavier ran and thought about King David. He saw the jar in the bookcase, he saw his missing body part hanging above him, big as life, and that body part, blue and inflamed, amputated, sick yet still alive, seemed to call to him: “You can do it, Xavier. Run — you won’t get a second chance. Run, comforter of the Jews, run!”

Xavier ran like blue blazes, not allowing himself a moment’s rest, the way his grandfather had fought tirelessly against the enemies of happiness, for something that was bigger than himself, something outside himself, an ideal, a fantasy that could no longer be distinguished from reality, that had become reality itself. All ambition begins with the fantasy that you can be a different person from who you are now: defeated and beaten, without a future, and, in a certain sense, without a past as well. It’s the fantasy that lifts you up, drags you along, lifts you to greater heights than you’d ever thought you would reach, then leaves you behind like an empty bag. Any careful observer will see that we are merely tools in the hands of our fantasies. And it may be not even our own fantasies that we’re fulfilling, but the fantasies of others, people we’ve never known and never will know. We fulfill the fantasies of phantoms.

Under the spreading boughs of a pine tree, Xavier caught up with Awromele at last. He jumped on his back, pulled on his blond hair, screamed his name, shouted a few of the words in Yiddish that he could still remember. He yanked and tugged on the struggling body that was still trying to run away, until Awromele fell to the ground at last. There he lay, on top of old pinecones, rotten leaves, moss, twigs, an empty soft-drink bottle, mandarin-orange peels. The ground was cold and wet, but Xavier had no eye for the mix of garbage and decaying nature. All he saw was Awromele, his face, his eyes, the pin curls. His mouth, his nose, his hair.