Only very sporadically did she get up in the middle of the night in order to drive the bread knife into her thigh, an act that summoned up in her a brief feeling of satisfaction. She had the motion that a gust of life blew through her as she stood there with the knife in her hand. A gust, that was all, but it was enough. After that, she returned to the kingdom of the dead, where she had resided for years.
AWROMELE SPENT a great part of each day under the blankets in his room. At first he had waited for a phone call from Xavier, but when it became clear that Xavier was not going to call again, Awromele tried to forget him. The more he tried to forget him, the more he thought about him.
Xavier did not call because he thought Awromele was angry at him. He didn’t want to force himself on anyone, not even on Jews. He had his pride, and he planned to keep it. He too suffered under the silence, but even more under the way he pictured Awromele taking the weenies of strange men into his mouth.
Xavier decided to take up drawing. The world needed prettying up. Besides, the activity freed him from his unpleasant visions.
At first he used colored pencils. Later, he switched to oil paint and watercolors. Because he was often home alone with his mother — Marc did not return from work with the end of the afternoon — he asked her to pose for him.
Anything was better than a Zionist youth club, the mother thought, so she said, “Use me for your drawings.”
Within a short period, he produced six paintings of the mother, which he himself thought were not bad, although Klimt’s influence was perhaps a bit pronounced. While he painted, he thought about the task he had assigned himself, which he could not accomplish without Awromele.
Marc was enthusiastic about the boy’s paintings. “Keep at it,” he said. “You have talent. I have talent, too, but I can’t do anything with it, and the great thing is that you can. There are two kinds of people, the ones who can do something with their talent and the ones who can’t.”
“Let the boy finish school first,” the mother said. “After that we’ll see.”
The day Xavier began on the seventh big portrait of his mother — he had decided now to paint more in the style of Chagall — Awromele finally left the bed in which he had been drowsing, longing, and whining for the last few days. He had never been able to stand his parents’ whining, but now he was on the verge of becoming a crybaby himself. “Enough,” he had shouted at himself, “enough is enough.” Sitting there under the blankets with his clothes on, he had felt like an Indian in a wigwam; sometimes he dreamed that Xavier came and sat in the wigwam with him, and that they played a game, or simply ate a piece of chocolate together in silence and looked at each other contentedly.
Awromele got dressed, trimmed his curls, borrowed some of his father’s aftershave, and walked to Xavier’s house.
The closer he got to the house, the faster he walked. What nonsense, to wait for a phone call! You could spend your whole life waiting. Maybe there was something wrong with the phone. He started running. As he ran, his yarmulke kept blowing off, so he stuck it in his pocket.
When, at last, he reached the street where Xavier lived, he remembered what Xavier had told him: he was never to call, and certainly never just to pop in, because Xavier’s mother was a sensitive person who didn’t like unexpected visitors; she suffered from intense migraines.
All Awromele’s courage and good resolutions faded at the thought of Xavier’s mother with a migraine. He couldn’t just ring the bell and ask, “Is Xavier at home?” As long as he didn’t ring the bell, there was still hope; but if he rang the bell, everything was lost.
He sat down beneath a tree across from the house and waited. He waited until he was chilled to the bone. Then he got up and walked back to his own house, where he climbed into bed, clothes and all, and cried as if his heart was broken. His sister Rochele heard it, but didn’t want to disturb him.
Xavier was in the living room, painting with a sure hand. He had purchased a secondhand easel. Every two minutes he thought about Awromele. Which is probably why he painted his mother in pin curls. With every pin curl that took shape on the canvas, his anger grew. Why hadn’t Awromele bothered to call and ask how he was doing? That was the normal thing to do, wasn’t it, especially when someone had been in the hospital for a few weeks because of complications following a circumcision? You got in touch. At the very least you sent a card, without a return address if need be. He looked at the bookshelf with the volumes of Schiller on it and saw King David.
“Could you just hold the jar like this?” he asked the mother. He lifted it down off the shelf and handed it to her; she took it without protest. She didn’t look at her son’s testicle.
Her remedy for suffering had stood the test of time. She had nibbled at it all her life, a certain passivity, a certain compliance, living as though it had nothing to do with you. And that was how Xavier, thinking of Awromele doing dastardly things with other men, came to paint the mother with testicle.
When Marc came home that evening, he was thrilled with the canvas, which was standing in the hall to dry. He said: “You should go to the art academy. This latest painting of yours is something else. I’m no expert, but there is something very special going on here.”
The mother glanced at the painting and said, “It doesn’t look like me.”
That evening, in his cell, Mr. Schwartz had a moment of clarity. He tore a sheet into strips and decided to hang himself. The shame of being thrown out of the Jewish community was more than he could bear. He said the prayer for the dead, although to his annoyance there were a few stanzas he couldn’t remember. He started in on the prayer a few times, but finally gave up. Then he thought about his kosher cheese, and about the receipts he had written on wrapping paper. After that, there was nothing left to bind him to life — a vague feeling of abhorrence perhaps, the memory of something gruesome that you’ve seen and would like to forget as quickly as possible.
The hanging did not go smoothly. Life was stubborn. But Mr. Schwartz finally got the better of it.
WHILE MR. SCHWARTZ was dangling from his sheets, Xavier decided that from then on he would make only paintings of his mother with the testicle, in order to present them later as a series to an art academy. You needed a portfolio, he knew that, a portfolio with drawings, paintings, videotapes, perhaps even some clay figures. Marc’s enthusiasm had strengthened Xavier in the idea that it would be wise to focus now on painting, on art. The comforting of the Jews would flow forth from the art of its own accord. Visions got him through the day, visions about great deeds in a distant future, and the smell of roast lamb in the near future. Hope is a stunning creature, rather like a horse that has hopped a fence and is galloping towards you.
He woke up in the middle of the night, having dreamed of Awromele. It had been a grim dream. “Where are you, Awromele?” he had felt like shouting. When he went to the bathroom for a drink of water, he heard sounds coming from downstairs. It might be a burglar, he thought, or a window his mother had forgotten to close. But the mother never forgot to close windows and doors.
Xavier went downstairs. He wasn’t afraid. Losing Awromele was the only thing he was afraid of. There were moments when he thought he had already lost him. Perhaps on the very first day they’d met, when he had been unable to come up with a dirty joke for Awromele to translate into Yiddish.