“Don’t let me get in your way,” the mother said.
After a few moments, she pressed her hands to her ears — she couldn’t stand the noises her boyfriend was making.
Before Marc had even spilled his seed on the ground, the mother had fallen into a deep sleep.
Xavier was sleeping now as well. He was having visions and dreams in which Awromele, Mr. Schwartz, and his grandfather appeared. This was all the hell he had ever known, so he thought he had ended up in hell. He was burning. He was burning for the sins of others as well, and in his dream he whispered, “Accept, O Lord, this humble sacrifice.”
The Most Wonderful Day
XAVIER HAD DEVELOPED a high fever, and he had soiled himself.
When his mother came in at seven-thirty to look at her child, he was lying in his own feces. She smelled it right away. “What have you done now?” she asked.
The only reply was a little peeping sound, as though the infection had not only nestled in the sex organ but had reached the vocal cords as well.
“What have you done now?” she asked a little louder. “Are you going to start acting like a baby? Haven’t we given you enough attention yet?”
Xavier opened his mouth but was unable to say anything, not even to cry for help. The mother yanked the blankets away. Now he screamed. But not loudly, and not for long, either.
The feather bed, which was real eiderdown, had made the wound start to fester. There were no longer a few isolated blisters on the sex organ. The sex organ had become one huge blister with yellow moisture running out of it. The same went for the boy’s balls. Everything had swollen to unnatural proportions. What Xavier had between his legs was the funhouse mirror of sex organs.
The mother might have noticed, but she had no eye for her son’s wounds just then. All she saw was the fecal material he was lying in. Not solid turds, but a squishy mess. She thought about the laundry. And cooking pans with caked-on fat, she thought about them, too. All her life she’d had an aversion to dirty diapers. One time she had even fainted while changing her child.
The mother loved Xavier — she was a mother, after all — but with her the love came in waves. “Do you think I don’t have enough to do?” she asked. Tears welled up in her eyes. The falling in love, the Jews, the Nazis, the babies, the United Nations, everything existed and was brought to be in order to make her life difficult. She had never said it in so many words, but that was how she viewed the world, that was how she would always view the world — as an affront, a macabre conspiracy against her and every other decent person.
“Say something,” she said to her son.
Silence.
“Say something,” she shouted more loudly now. “Say something. I won’t have you ignoring me like this.”
The mother’s shouts had awakened Marc. He came to her shouts like a hungry cat to a herring bone. As soon as he reached the door, he saw the condition his stepson’s sex organ was in, and he knew there was no way to avoid a trip to the doctor.
When he laid his hand on the mother’s shoulder, she shrank from his unexpected touch. She thought about her broken nose. Thanks to the painkillers, it didn’t hurt much anymore, only when she grimaced or tried to blow her nose, but the humiliation, she couldn’t forget that. She would never forget that. How her boyfriend had beaten her up when she had finally started using her fantasy.
“It might be better to call the doctor,” Marc suggested.
She sighed, and said quietly, “Yes, it might.”
The mother was afraid of gossip over which she had no control, deathly afraid of suggestive looks at the butcher’s. So she said: “Let’s wait a while and see. It will probably go away by itself. Nature is the best medicine. Waiting rooms and hospitals are breeding grounds for bacteria.”
At the thought of bacterial infections in hospitals, motherly love overpowered her the way the heart attack had overpowered her husband. She knelt down beside the bed and said: “Poor Xavier, I know it’s not easy for you, I know that. It’s never been easy for you. I’m going to make you a nice hot cup of tea.” She ran her hand over her son’s forehead and did her best to love him, but all she could think of was: My child stinks to high heaven. How do I get out of here? Cow shit smells like roses compared with this.
She thought about her father, about how much he had loved cows.
After twenty-four hours of labor, when Xavier had finally come into the world and she had slowly recovered from the unbearable pain, her first thought had been: Now I’ll never have a weekend to myself again.
For punishment, Xavier had sucked her left nipple until it bled. The mother thought it was his revenge for the heartless thoughts she’d had during and after his birth. She had been raised to believe that she was guilty in the eyes of God. Guilty in the eyes of everyone, but most of all guilty before God.
Her baby was aware of none of that. Not the guilt, not God, not his mother’s thoughts. He didn’t even know that he had sucked her nipple till it bled, but from that day on things had never been completely right between her and the child. After the bleeding nipple, she had seen Xavier through different eyes, from a distance, in amazement, sometimes even in disgust, the way you look at a child you regret having adopted.
An older woman friend of hers had adopted and raised a Chinese baby, and she had told Xavier’s mother, “It’s a terrible thing to say, but the happiest day of my life was the day that Chinaman left my house.”
The mother often caught herself thinking: If only my child was an adopted Chinaman who would leave my home at eighteen and never come back. Later, she hated herself for having such thoughts.
Back then, her gynecologist had said: “He’s hungry, that’s all. Some babies suck hard. There’s nothing unusual about it. Your nipple will heal, don’t worry. You just have to squeeze it a little before you breastfeed him.” The nipple got better, but the rest didn’t.
“He’s shit his bed,” Marc said.
“That’s right,” the mother said.
“Poor kid,” Marc said.
“He did it on purpose,” the mother said. “Just to spite me. He hates me.”
“Come on,” Marc said, “don’t say that, that’s an exaggeration. He doesn’t hate you at all.”
“He hates me. From the moment he was born, he’s always hated me.”
“He’s lying in his own shit,” said Marc, who found hatred a ponderous subject for so early in the morning.
“He hates me, so he’s lying in his own feces. What other boy his age would lie in his own poop on a day like this?”
She threw open the curtains. Romantic sunlight entered the room.
“He’s sick,” Marc said. “He hurt himself. That’s why he’s lying in his own…”
“He craves attention,” the mother interrupted. “That’s why he did this. He was late with potty-training. He was early with reading and talking, but late with the rest. With the rest he was always a little backward.”
Her boyfriend felt the boy’s cheek. “He has a fever,” he said. “He’s sick as a dog.”
The boy was making incoherent noises.
“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.