“You look like your grandfather, do you know that?” she said.
She eased up carefully on the dishtowel; the blood was starting to clot.
“Do you want something else instead of tea?” Xavier asked.
“Sometimes genes will skip a generation,” the mother said. “Our genes have skipped a generation. You’re exactly like your grandpa, the same look, the same nose; a handsome man your grandpa was, a hardworking man, and extremely conscientious.”
“Yes,” Xavier said. “I’ve been blessed with good looks. That’s nice.” He looked at the mother gratefully, as though the blessing had been her doing, as though his looks had been built to her specifications, as though she were the architect of his body and his face.
“Go on upstairs,” the mother said. “I need a little time to freshen up.”
She stepped carefully out of her pajama pants. The kitchen floor was cold. The stained dishtowel she put on the counter.
There were several wounds on her left thigh, but one of them was the biggest, one of them was her favorite wound. She loved her wounds the way other people loved their children, the way other people loved their pets.
Xavier didn’t go away, he couldn’t move. He wanted to hug the mother so badly, but she said again: “Go to your room now. I need to be alone for a little while.”
They heard footsteps upstairs. Marc was awake. They remained quiet until they heard the toilet flush, then footsteps again, and a door being pulled shut.
The mother’s new boyfriend was a sound sleeper. No wakeful nights for him.
“I thought about poisoning you once,” the mother whispered, still holding on to the counter with both hands. “When you were still a baby. I had already bought the rat poison, the strongest I could get. I thought: I’ll mix it in with the milk. I had stopped breastfeeding pretty quickly, because you sucked my nipple raw. Did you know that? You sucked it raw, my nipple. Of course, you couldn’t help it. Still, that’s what you did. Because you were so greedy, so wild. I thought: It will be better for both of us. I decided against it. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, Mama,” Xavier said, as quietly as he could. “You don’t have to be sorry about anything. It all turned out fine.”
“Yes,” said the mother, “it turned out fine. Lots of mothers think about things like that, Xavier. I’m really not the only one. In nature you also see mother animals biting their sick babies to death. A sick child is a burden to everyone; a sick child is a burden to itself. If your father hadn’t been so grumpy and withdrawn, I could have talked to him about it calmly, but you couldn’t talk to him at all. That’s why I decided and went ahead and bought the poison. At the shop, they didn’t suspect a thing. I said: The strongest rat poison you have, please; they’re awfully hard to get rid of. It dissolved quite quickly — all I had to do was stir. I mixed it with lots of sugar. I figured it probably tastes bitter, the poison. That’s what they always say, isn’t it? That it tastes bitter? And I sat there like that, the bottle in one hand and you on my lap. You were wearing green pajamas with a little bear on the front, a present from the neighbor lady. A horrible thing to look at, but I dressed you in them anyway — it would have been a waste to throw them away. Besides, she came over to the house sometimes, and I didn’t want to offend her. You should never offend people, Xavier. So you were lying there in my arms, crying, because you were hungry. And I knew for sure that it was all for the best, I didn’t doubt that for a moment. But then I was suddenly reminded of your grandfather, how he valued life so highly; he would never have wanted that. Life was sacred to him. He said: It doesn’t matter — even if all I can do is swallow, I want to live. So I poured the milk with the rat poison in it down the toilet. I kept the rest of the poison just in case, but it never came up again. In any case, there was never another moment when I was sure it was the best for all concerned. I had my doubts often enough, but then I thought: Forget it, today isn’t the right day for it. And then, at a certain point, you were too old for it. Rat poison works best with babies. The bigger the child is, the more resistance it has. That’s why you’re still alive.”
“I understand,” Xavier said, still not daring to come any closer. “I understand completely. I’m glad you told me this. It’s not a problem, Mama, it’s no problem at all.”
The mother nodded. She seemed to be thinking about something else.
“But, Mama, you’re glad, too, aren’t you?” Xavier asked. “Or are you sorry? That you poured the milk down the toilet, I mean? The bad milk.”
“Things go the way they go,” the mother said. “I had to flush twice, and then I had to scrub the toilet. The milk had splattered on the bottom of the toilet seat. Your father was very adamant about clean toilets. He always looked at the bottom of the toilet seat, because he didn’t like splatters. Go on upstairs now. I have to freshen up.”
“Okay, Mama,” Xavier said. “I love you so much. You’re the best mother I could wish for. Really the best. Don’t ever forget that.”
He meant it, too. It just so happens that you love the people who have spared your life. Besides, it’s easier to love those who hate you, or who don’t feel much for you except indifference, than to love those who love you. Nothing is more unbearable than love.
“I’ll never forget this,” she said. “It’s very sweet of you to say so. You’re probably right, but people don’t understand that. They don’t know how nature works. Sick little animals get bitten to death.” She started cleaning the wound on her thigh. She became absorbed in it, as she did in the washing of teacups and the making of chamomile tea. She seemed to have forgotten that her child was there, just as she forgot the poison, the milk, the baby on her lap, the bottle in her hand, memories that she couldn’t place, that she had never wanted to place.
XAVIER DID NOT crawl into bed; he sat down at his desk. Picking up a pencil, he drew a picture of the mother standing in the kitchen with her pajama pants down around her ankles, feeling life flowing through her. But because the drawing didn’t please him, he crumpled it up and threw it away.
Then he started in on a letter to Awromele. He wrote that his mother had planned to poison him when he was a baby, but that she had changed her mind at the last minute. There was no use denying it, he was proud of it. Other parents had never even thought about poisoning their babies. It was a badge of honor.
Xavier was the baby she hadn’t poisoned. That baby he had been, that baby he would remain. After a while, Xavier went to the bathroom to look at his face, his hair, his chest. So this was what people looked like who had sidestepped their fate. Fascinating. There was fate, there was the baby, and there he stood now, the product of those two. The fate that had been sidestepped. Someone had outsmarted it.
Remarkably enough, it also felt like a loss to him, because now he would never know what it was like to lie dead in his mother’s arms. He had a sneaking suspicion that his mother would have loved him more as a dead baby than she would have loved anyone else. That she would have felt so much love for the dead baby in her arms, who now, at last, was no longer bothered by stomach cramps, that that love would have been enough for the whole world. That was the love Xavier had missed out on because he had gone on living.
Saddened by these thoughts, Xavier went back to his room. There was no sense in bemoaning that life anymore — it was over. The milk had been poured down the toilet, the rat poison had been flushed away and disappeared into the sewer, there was nothing to do about it.
He wrote to Awromele and asked him to meet him next Thursday at two o’clock, on the Mittlere Rheinbrücke.
When you had almost drunk rat poison as a baby, you could toss your pride to the wind. Pride no longer mattered anymore. Xavier had to talk to Awromele, he needed to see him.