Downstairs, in the kitchen, the mother was scrubbing the spots out of her pajama pants. She wondered whether maybe she should poison her boyfriend, but smiled at the thought. It had been such a long time since she’d tried to poison anyone. It seemed like so long ago that she had mixed the poison into the warm milk. She had been a rather good-looking woman, even after the baby was born. The day she had decided to kill her baby, she had spent an hour and a half at the hairdresser’s.
She laughed out loud, and the sound of her laughter did not startle her. For just a moment, she experienced real pleasure.
Upstairs, Xavier closed his letter to Awromele with the words: “I need you.”
“I need you.” he wrote one more time, just to be sure. And then again: “I need you!” With an exclamation point. But when he looked at his letter again, that final exclamation point seemed only to stress the impotence of his need.
IN THE PRISON, the guards found Mr. Schwartz’s body. They cursed under their breath. Suicides were such an inconvenience.
Customers’ Memory
IT WAS FRONT-PAGE NEWS in the country’s biggest tabloid: “Pedophile Lenin Hangs Himself in Cell.”
The executive board of the Committee of Vigilant Parents bought ten bottles of champagne in order to throw a little party. The executive board felt that death was never a reason to celebrate, but that, in this gruesome exception, Schwartz had brought it upon himself. Xavier’s mother, the honorary member, did not show up. A member of the board called her and urged her to come — he said the mother was “indispensable” on an evening like this — but she wasn’t feeling well. “I’m sorry,” the mother said, “I’d be pleased to join you some other time.”
Awromele and his father were deeply affected by the death of Mr. Schwartz. Awromele’s father said, “There was no way I could have helped; no matter what I did, it would only have made things worse.” He said that to his wife, then to a few of his children, and finally he said it only to himself.
Awromele sat on his bed, under the blankets, and thought. He thought about Xavier’s circumcision, and knew that it had not been a particularly good idea to let Mr. Schwartz carry out that procedure. Somewhere along the line he had made a mistake. Overlooked something important.
He waited for the sorrow to come, but it didn’t, so he addressed himself instead to Mr. Schwartz, even though he could no longer hear him. Empathy that arrives too late is better than no empathy at all. “Dear Mr. Schwartz,” he said. Then he said something unintelligible, the unintelligible words turned to humming, and then the sorrow came anyway. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered to the wall beside his bed. The wall was yellowed and badly in need of paint. “I’m so sorry.” He kept repeating those words until he felt that all the regret had flowed out of him.
We don’t speak for other people, only for ourselves. We speak to ourselves without pause. The idea that anyone else hears us is an illusion, the way color is an illusion to a blind man and Mozart an illusion to the deaf. The world is filled with endless monologues, Awromele realized. Then he had a practical thought: if any more circumcising was to go on, he would wield the knife himself. He had no experience, but his hands didn’t shake, or hardly at all, and that was something in itself.
Awromele had smoked hash on occasion. He’d never really liked it much, and a boy from the synagogue had warned him: “Never become friends with your dealer. Before you know it, your dealer’s in prison, and then you’ve got a problem. Then you have to visit him, and bring him fruit and matzos at Pesach.”
Never become friends with your dealer. That had been an important lesson in life for him, maybe the most important lesson of all. The rest was elaboration and frill.
MR. SCHWARTZ WAS hurriedly interred in a windy, deserted corner of the Jewish cemetery. The corner for dubious corpses. There weren’t many people there, only a few pesky reporters who had decided that even Mr. Schwartz’s burial was news, Awromele’s father and Awromele himself, that was all. Mr. Schwartz had had no friends or family. He had had customers — many customers, in fact — but customers have a short memory. Awromele realized that, there in that windy corner of the cemetery. He felt it not only as theory but as an incontrovertible truth.
While Awromele was saying the prayer for the dead, quickly and embarrassedly, he realized that he had hastened Mr. Schwartz’s demise, and that that was putting it mildly. Awromele was the kind of Jew who ran through the rituals too hastily because he did not believe in their power to heal, but who also dreaded the horrifying emptiness of a life without them. He thought about Xavier’s legs, which he had held tightly while Mr. Schwartz performed the procedure with shaky hands. Mr. Schwartz had had to fetch a magnifying glass in order to see what he was doing. Missing Xavier caused him more pain than Mr. Schwartz’s death. The thought of that put him to shame. As soon as the funeral was over, he combated that shame by crawling back under the covers.
WHEN XAVIER’S LETTER arrived at last, Awromele dragged it to his bed the way a predator drags a carcass to its lair. He ate four of his mother’s homemade cookies before opening the letter under the blankets. Reading the letter made him happy. It was a feeling he’d never had before, at least not in this way. He had been content before, but really happy, no. Later, he would call it one of the most wonderful moments in his life. The Jews were not particularly sold on the devil, but angels existed — lots of them, in fact — and Awromele had heard that the devil was nothing but a fallen angel. He had heard that the devil wore beautiful garments that didn’t smell of cholent or perenkugel, that he was more charming than the best Jewish marriage candidate you could imagine. Awromele had dreamed that the devil would bring him to life, because he wasn’t really living yet — translating jokes with clits in them into Yiddish was amusing, but it wasn’t living. And after that he would tame the devil, the way his mother had finally tamed the rabbi.
When Awromele read in the letter that Xavier’s mother had tried to poison her son as a baby, it didn’t disturb him. To have escaped death at such an early age was a sign of strength. He was used to people’s being floored by adversity. It had floored them all — his father’s autism, the war, his brothers and sisters, who were, in his eyes, often little more than walking adversities, his religion (safe enough to say, his origins) — it was all adversity. His whole life, Awromele had been looking for a sign of strength. He longed to have normal parents, like Xavier’s.
Awromele tidied himself and his bed, drank two cups of tea without sugar at a nearby coffeehouse, and, purely out of nervousness, ate a bar of chocolate. Then he read Xavier’s letter three more times. He felt like writing back right away, he felt like writing: “I’ll be there, Xavier, I’ll be there. From now on, on the Mittlere Rheinbrücke, any hour of the day, even on Yom Kippur.”
He felt like calling Xavier to shout that same message through the phone, but he remembered his friend’s admonition and realized that he should keep a low profile. It wasn’t a good idea to seem too eager. It would be better for him to hide his eagerness.
He waited for Thursday the way other Jews wait for the Messiah. Never before had waiting made him so happy. To make the waiting even more pleasant, he bought himself a white shirt and a pair of gym socks. He still looked like an Orthodox Jew, but when it came to his socks he was already pretty well assimilated.
He also placed a call to the publisher who had expressed interest in the Yiddish translation of Mein Kampf. Awromele thought it would be a good idea to give his meeting with Xavier at least a semblance of something businesslike. And he would urge Xavier to resume his Yiddish lessons, he resolved. Xavier hadn’t learned the future and past tenses yet, and it would be a waste to stop so soon.