Arnon Grunberg - The Jewish Messiah

“The management sees us, too,” the guard said. “The management is not stupid. The management says: A customer who doesn’t feel safe doesn’t buy anything. Customers like that mean the end of our department store, and do you know what that means? It means that a thousand people are out of work. So, if I sit on you in a minute, if I start applying pressure to your throat to discourage you from putting up a struggle, then that’s not something between you and me. It’s much bigger than that — it’s about the good example and the bad example, it’s about good and evil.”

Xavier felt like running away, but he couldn’t leave the wheelbarrow with Awromele in it behind. Never again would he leave Awromele behind. Never again.

The guard was standing right in front of Xavier now, and had already laid his hand on the throat of the boy in whom he saw the shoplifter. He was poised to carry out the procedure he had learned in class.

“Please,” Xavier said. “I’m on my way to the doctor. That’s all I want, a doctor, for him.” The guard looked the boy in the eye, but instead of forcing Xavier to the ground and sitting on him, he began caressing Xavier’s Adam’s apple with two fingers.

He smelled the scent of urine.

The guard went on caressing Xavier’s Adam’s apple.

The boy trembled. The guard could see the fear in his eyes. Christ, did that boy tremble! He was afraid, afraid of him, the security guard. He put his mouth up close to Xavier’s ear. He flicked his tongue in and out of the ear of the trembling boy. “We’re trapped,” the guard said in a whisper. “We’re all stuck in the trap. They’re everywhere. In every business, every organization, at every train station. You don’t recognize them, but they’re everywhere.” Then he took a step back and straightened his uniform. “Do you promise never to come back here again?” he asked. “Do you guys promise to stop stealing?”

Xavier nodded.

The security guard caressed Xavier’s Adam’s apple with two fingers again, and brought his face closer to Xavier’s once more; for a moment it seemed as though he was going to bite Xavier on the nose; then he let him go.

“Get out of here,” the guard said. “Go, quick, before I change my mind, little Gypsy.”

Xavier had thought he wouldn’t be able to, but he picked up the wheelbarrow and pushed it along the blank wall in the direction of the shopping street. His wet underpants chafed against his body.

“A thousand eyes are looking at you,” the guard shouted after him. He turned his walkie-talkie back on.

GESINE MÜLLER left the children’s department. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea after all to offer those boys sweaters. It only encouraged dependency. Before you knew it, they wouldn’t be able to stand on their own feet. They had to stay far from the machinery of the social-welfare organization, because once you were caught in it you could never get out.

She stopped and looked at the coats, but the prices were completely out of the question. Armin was breathing heavily again. Was her dog about to have another coronary? She held his head between her shins and whispered his name lovingly. She had done the wrong thing; she shouldn’t have become involved with those boys. One sick dog was enough.

THE RABBI’S WIFEtook Danica to school, and came home asking, “Did anyone call?” But Rochele, who had been told to sit beside the phone and not to move, could only shake her head. No one had called, not even the rabbi, who was out wandering the streets.

When she saw Rochele shake her head, the rabbi’s wife opened her mouth and wailed, “Awromele, where are you?”

She didn’t really believe in anything, except that she was the rabbi’s wife, and that after death worms would be her share.

Rochele was so startled by the wailing that she slipped off her chair beside the phone and hid beneath the table, where she tried to forget her mother’s desperation by concentrating on the pelican that was the Messiah. She found a pencil and a drawing pad and began making a drawing of the bird that would lift her up and take her to America and then, if she wanted, to the North Pole.

TO HIS OWN AMAZEMENT, Xavier succeeded in pushing the wheelbarrow a long way in the direction of the hospital where he’d been treated after his operation at the hands of Mr. Schwartz. He was even able to walk quickly part of the way. He was afraid that the guard would come after him and sit on him anyway, and maybe on Awromele as well. Fear gives wings to the exhausted soul.

Xavier stopped at a traffic light. The wheelbarrow slipped from his hands; everything was shaking now, his arms, his head, his legs, the whole world seemed to be shaking. He staggered and fell. He no longer had the strength to get up. First he lay still, then he began moving his lips silently, until at last you could heard him murmur, “An ambulance, please, call an ambulance.”

Because he looked so frightening, many people were afraid to stop and listen. He lay there murmuring for about five minutes, until a man stopped and bent down. The man heard the word “ambulance” and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Xavier, Xavier Radek.”

“Are you in pain?” the man asked. A seemingly silly question, perhaps, but there were a lot of people who faked it.

Xavier nodded.

In a perfume shop, the man called the emergency number.

“I am the comforter of the Jews,” Xavier had called out after him, but the man didn’t hear that.

While the man was placing his call, Xavier sat up. “Forgive me,” he said to Awromele, who was lying in the wheelbarrow like a crumpled piece of parcel post, “forgive me.” And he seized the wheelbarrow with both hands. Awromele felt so cold and looked so pale, even his lips were white. Xavier wondered whether this was what the dead looked like. Had his grandfather’s prisoners looked like this? Probably not — they had never been identified; they were ash floating in the breeze.

The shopping street was gradually becoming busier.

When Xavier’s last bit of strength left him, he let go of the wheelbarrow and slid back onto the pavement.

The charitable man had no time to wait for the ambulance. When he came back from the perfume shop, he found Xavier lying beside the wheelbarrow and said, “The ambulance is on its way.”

He paused for a moment, but Xavier didn’t reply. The man walked on. He had total confidence in the paramedical personnel of Basel.

Within ten minutes, the ambulance arrived. A man and a woman carried Awromele into the hospital on a stretcher, but when they tried to put Xavier on a stretcher he began struggling and cried out, “I’m not a shoplifter, I’m the comforter of the Jews.”

They looked at each other, raised their eyebrows, shook their heads. When Xavier shouted, “I am the comforter of the Jews,” for the second time, they decided to give him a shot of sedative.

IN THE SCHOOLYARD, the tall boy was walking around with a volume of Kierkegaard under his arm, as he did almost every day. “Here,” he said to his friends, who were walking around with him; they were inseparable. “Listen to this. ‘The door to happiness does not open in. It opens out, so there is nothing to be done about it.’ That’s what Kierkegaard wrote. Remember that. There is nothing you can do about it.”

The bell for classes had already sounded, but they had a free period. They hung around in the schoolyard, citing Kierkegaard, until they caught sight of a girl who was late for class.

They didn’t know her: she hadn’t been at their school very long and was in one of the lower classes. She was ugly, especially because of the braces she wore. But she wouldn’t have been very pretty even without the braces. Her book bag was big and bright-pink. She stuffed far too much into it, she took books to school that she wouldn’t be needing that day at all. Her hair was light-blond.