“Enough is enough,” his mother said.
He saw tears in her eyes. It made him sad.
“Enough is enough,” his mother said again, but a little louder now, putting a little more stress on the final word. Then she picked up the ladle and filled Xavier’s bowl.
He looked at the light-green liquid. The black skullcap came slowly floating to the surface like a huge squished beetle. More tears could now be seen in his mother’s eyes. This wasn’t such a disaster, was it? No one had died. They hadn’t lost any money. The house hadn’t burned down.
“Is this from a package?” Xavier asked.
“What?” his father asked.
“Is this soup from a package?”
“No, of course not,” his mother said. “Since when do we eat soup from a package?”
Asparagus heads were floating in the soup as well. Green asparagus. Xavier looked at them.
He picked up his spoon, wiped it on his napkin, wished his parents a bon appétit, and began to eat.
For a moment he thought: I’m eating the Jews’ lice. That thought occupied him, and even excited him a little, the way forbidden thoughts will sometimes excite young people. Life was even more mysterious than Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had predicted. He thought about Awromele, and was afraid for a moment that his parents might be able to read his thoughts.
“Xavier,” his mother said after he had taken a few bites, “take that thing out of your soup.”
“I didn’t put it there.”
“Xavier, take that thing out of your soup. I’m not going to ask you again.” She made it sound as though a catastrophe were looming over them. It wasn’t anger he heard in her voice, it was fear.
“Mama, I didn’t put it in there. Besides, it tastes wonderful, there’s nothing wrong with this soup. So, please, bon appétit.”
Patient but unflinching. That’s how Xavier was. That is how he would always be.
The twentieth century had not yet come to an end, there was still room for a little last-minute heroism. The vague events that had composed the story of his life until now had to be more than just coincidence, a little pile of happenstance — life wasn’t supposed to be like that.
At first his grandfather had guarded the enemies of happiness, then he had killed them with his own hands, without much in the way of technical resources, sometimes with nothing more than just a club. Grandpa had performed his duties conscientiously and, unlike many employees, had shown true initiative. And now he, Xavier Radek, created in his grandfather’s image, was eating the lice of the enemies of happiness. The irony of history, that was he himself.
“Xavier,” his mother said, and for the first time in his life he heard her raise her voice — one could even have called it screaming—“this is unhygienic. What you’re doing there is filthy.”
“I didn’t put it in my soup. And like I said, it tastes wonderful. You’ve outdone yourself again. Thank you.” His sense of fair play was keen. And hard as crystal.
His father, who was unable to come up with a clever remark at that particular moment, said: “I understand your being curious, we’re all curious sometimes, but in the long run it’s not the kind of thing for you. That’s all we’re trying to say.”
Xavier didn’t think about the long run. Heroism was not about the long run.
The irony currently attached to heroism had rendered itself obsolete, now that everything had become ironic: the wars, the newspapers, the news itself. It was time to get serious.
“As from today,” said Xavier, who had forgotten that he meant to spare his parents grief, “count me among the chosen people. I love both of you, but I belong to the chosen people.”
From that evening on, Xavier considered himself a foe of irony and moral relativism, which often went hand in hand. The relativism that claimed there was no black and white, only gray, was always ironic. His mother was fond of saying, with a certain regularity, “Xavier, the victims are always culprits, and the culprits are always victims.”
For a few seconds nothing happened, the way almost nothing ever happened in the villa where Xavier lived, especially nothing uncouth. Then his mother took his bowl away from him and threw it, soup and all, into the wastebasket. Carefully, because she didn’t want spots on the parquet. Standing beside the wastebasket, the mother then glared at her family with hostility.
Xavier looked and tried to find something of her father in her, but he couldn’t; nothing about her face reminded him of his grandpa. His mother’s father now lived on in him, and in him alone.
Favorable Light
HE COULDN’T REMEMBER exactly how he’d come up with the idea; the thought had simply struck him while he was sitting outside a wine bar with a few girls from school, pricking toothpicks into little blocks of cheese. Pleasure was shallow by nature, but that was no reason to swear off it completely. He had continued to frequent the wine bar.
Xavier Radek was a mild-mannered, handsome young man. When the two top buttons of his shirt were open, you could see little tufts of hair on his chest. He said little, and above all nothing untoward; that made some people think he was shy, while some found him mysterious.
Sitting in front of the wine bar, he had a sudden flash of inspiration. He would photograph Jews. It seemed like a brilliant idea. He would place them in a favorable light. They could use that. Xavier would succeed where others had failed. After all, he was possessed of a great sense of beauty, and an optimistic nature.
Most photographers-to-be focused on plants, teenagers at the beach, mass tourism. One of his father’s friends had stirred up quite a fuss in and around Basel with a book of photographs about scooter accidents. It had sold welclass="underline" modern man loves the sight of a catastrophe.
Just as the fashion photographer tries to capture the model at her best at the sublime moment, so he would go after the look in the eye, the wisdom, and the incomparable humor of this ancient people.
“I’m going to photograph Jews,” he told the girls at his table.
They stared at him blankly for a few seconds, until a girl with big earrings said, “Well, have fun.”
Being misunderstood went with the status aparte of the man with a mission. He decided not to tell anyone else about it.
He waited a few days, then called the only Jew whose house he had ever visited. Starting with the rabbi himself might be a bit presumptuous. Could I take your picture? You couldn’t just blurt that out to a man like that. No, better to start with his son.
At the end of the afternoon — he was so nervous that he’d taken a cold shower, just to be on the safe side — Xavier dialed the number. It was a lovely phone number, with three sixes in it, the sign of the Beast.
A woman answered. In a shaky voice, he asked to speak to Awromele.
“Just a moment,” the woman’s voice said.
It took him two minutes to explain to Awromele who he was, but then the boy said: “Oh yeah, now I remember, it’s you. Have you got a joke for me?”
“A joke?”
“You were going to come up with a joke for me, right? A dirty one — then I’ll translate it for you, and you can go around telling it without anyone knowing what you’re saying. Have you got one? It’s got to be really filthy. One with a clit in it, for instance.”
Xavier didn’t know any jokes with clits in them.
“I haven’t quite gotten around to that yet,” he said. “But there’s something else, and, well, sorry to intrude like this, but I’d like to take your picture.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“Me? Take my picture? Why?”