Arnon Grunberg - The Jewish Messiah

Xavier dried himself quickly and, after he had put on his underpants, mustered up enough courage to look at himself in the mirror. His one eye had indeed turned blue, almost black, and his eyebrow looked torn. He dripped some iodine onto the eyebrow and took two aspirins, he hesitated for a moment, then popped a third one into his mouth.

As he dressed, he thought about Awromele. He hid his soiled clothing under his bed.

In the kitchen, the mother was breading a third schnitzel. She heard her son coming down the stairs and couldn’t repress her feeling of disgust. “Dinner is almost ready,” she shouted.

Xavier went into the kitchen. The mother had the schnitzel in her hand, already breaded, now to be fried. In fact, cooking disgusted her as well.

“I have to go out for a minute,” Xavier said. “Marc’s not back yet anyway.” He wanted to protect the mother from unpleasant discoveries. Only when he had truly become a comforter would he tell her everything. He would rock her in his arms, the way he would one day rock the Jews.

The mother dropped the schnitzel into the pan; the fat hissed and spattered. She looked at her son and saw his black eye.

“What happened to you?” she asked, picking up an oven mitt. “Did you get in a fight?”

“A little accident,” Xavier said. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Don’t be gone too long,” she said. “We’re going to eat soon.”

She spoke mechanically, like a machine. She looked at the lettuce, which she had washed three times already. She was afraid of accidentally eating little insects.

THE ROUTE BACK to the park Xavier took running as well. It was dark. The aspirin hadn’t helped his headache, which had been located only behind his eyes at first but had now spread to the rest of his head as well.

With every yard he ran, his melancholy grew. When he arrived at the park, he went looking for the place where they’d lain beneath the pine tree, but couldn’t find it. He remembered where they had stood when Awromele suddenly took off running, but not where they had run to.

It had all happened so quickly. The way two bottles of wine will usher in forgetfulness, he could no longer remember what had happened between the moment Awromele had run from him and the punch in the eye. Maybe you could get drunk on sperm as well if you kept it in your mouth long enough.

He shouted his friend’s name. There was no one walking in the park anymore; the only sound was the wind, and distant noises from the street.

In the study at his home, the tall boy who had mistaken Awromele’s head for a football was reading Kierkegaard. He was holding a pencil and marking certain passages.

“Awromele,” Xavier shouted, “where are you?” Just as loudly as Awromele had shouted Xavier’s name only half an hour earlier.

In his mind’s eye, Xavier saw a dead Awromele, a corpse, cold and stiff and cleaned by the funeral attendants, but he suppressed his fear by telling himself: Of course, he’s gone home already, he’s probably sitting at the dinner table with his twelve brothers and sisters, he’s probably forgotten everything that happened in the park by now. I’m getting all worked up about nothing.

Xavier walked across a lawn he had crossed when he was running after Awromele, but halfway to the other side he could no longer remember whether it was the right lawn. There were so many lawns in this park. His eyes were smarting. The bruised one, and the other one, too.

He stepped in a pile of dog shit, or maybe a molehill — he didn’t see it, it didn’t interest him anymore, either. He slipped, fell to the ground, got up, ran on, and shouted again, as loudly as he could, “Awromele.”

In the kitchen, the mother was putting three schnitzels on a platter. Marc had come home; he was upstairs, at the computer, taking off in a737. His mouth was hanging open in concentration.

AWROMELE DREAMED. Images blurred together, he heard snatches of conversation, but wasn’t sure whether they were real or whether he making them up on the spot. The blood that had come out of his ear was clotting. His left hand had stopped swelling, but he couldn’t move it anymore. He had to let the hand dangle, the fingers — the whole arm, really. The slightest movement caused him pain, but he didn’t have enough energy to worry about that. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t worrying about anything at all. He wanted to disappear, to dissolve, to become one with the mandarin-orange peels and the empty Coke bottle.

The cut on his ear was slowly turning into a black scab. He was dreaming, he was sure of that now, about the cleanser his mother used to scrub the sink, or, rather, about the way that cleanser smelled, and then about a field trip he had taken in the school bus, long ago. They had gone to visit a rabbi who some people said could heal people.

Xavier walked into the bushes. He was afraid that a late passerby or a policeman would mistake him for a rapist. He had the feeling that he had ruined everything. Without Awromele, all was lost. Stupid of him to have left home without a flashlight, stupid to have run away. And why? Simply because of a stupid punch in the eye. He was furious with himself; he tolerated no faults in himself, strove for perfection in everything, but above all in his relationship with Jews.

He squatted down beside a bush; he couldn’t go on. All the running and searching had exhausted him. His head had become a zooming bumblebee he wished he could swat and kill.

Nausea grew inside him. Still, he shouted one last time, very loudly: “Awromele, where are you!” His eyes were watering so badly that even if it had been daylight he couldn’t have seen a thing. But he didn’t cry.

Awromele was not far away, fifteen or twenty yards at most. Awromele dreamed that someone was calling his name, but because he wasn’t sleeping, only trying to forget the pain and humiliation, he realized after a few seconds that someone really was calling his name. It wasn’t a dream, it was real, like the pain in his ear. His ear felt as though it were being sawed off. He’d never known ears could hurt like that.

Awromele knew who was calling him; he recognized the voice. That voice was one he would always recognize.

For a moment he felt the urge to cry out, for a moment he felt an intense joy, for a moment he felt like shouting: “I’m over here, Xavier! Help me!”

But he stopped himself. He was not going to move. He would remain lying there without a sound. He would punish the one who had betrayed him. His pride was stronger than his desire. This was the only meaningful protest against a world that had given him something he did not deserve, and which it was therefore right for him to spurn. His parents would be worried, but he didn’t care; they needed to be punished as well.

Barely twenty yards away, Xavier vomited until his stomach was empty. He threw up all over his shoes, and got a little on his trousers as well, but he couldn’t see that; it was too dark to see.

After he had thrown up everything he had in him, he walked home. For the first time in his life, he suffered. At last he was up to his bellybutton in the pool of suffering, and all the future he could see promised more of the same. It tasted the way the last bits of vomit in his mouth had tasted, so bitter that it hurt his throat.

THE MOTHER AND MARC had finished their schnitzels. The boy’s schnitzel was growing cold on its plate.

Xavier came in, washed his hands, rinsed his mouth, and sat down at the table.

“What happened to you?” Marc asked. He looked at Xavier’s eye. Then he got up and laid a hand on Xavier’s shoulder, to give the boy some support. Xavier began eating, reluctantly. The meat was gristly.

“Isn’t your schnitzel cold?” Marc asked, after glancing at the mother and returning to his seat. He looked at the mother like that more often lately, as though to make sure he wasn’t going too far.