“I’ll never forget that, Mama,” Xavier said. “And I’ll never let myself go to the dogs, either. I know that I have only one testicle, and that’s why I’ll always do my very best.”
“Some people,” the mother said, “have only one kidney, and they have to be very careful with that kidney, because if they lose it they don’t have anything left. You’re down by a point, Xavier, and you’ll never catch up.” She said it dreamily. Xavier kissed his mother good night and went to his room.
SITTING ON THE BED in his well-furnished room — a little TV, a bookcase, a fan, a jar of paper clips in all different colors — the tall boy took off his shoes and said to himself, “Man can no longer speak with his lips, but he has learned to talk with his feet.” The thought satisfied him. He took off his sock and rubbed his right foot until it grew warm. “Speak, feet,” he said. “Speak. I’m all ears.”
He squatted down to hear what his feet had to say, and as he did that he was filled with the awareness of finitude, of absolute finitude, not only his own, but of everything. He could almost smell the finitude; he could, if he was very still, hear the finitude creeping up on him. The realization of that made his life grander, and important. For a single moment, he believed he could take on the world, squatting there beside his bed and listening to the language of the future, the language of feet.
Xavier crawled into bed naked, laid a hand on his sex in order to hasten sleep, and decided not to think about Awromele. Otherwise it would become an obsession.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, Marc was helping the mother with the dishes. As he dried a plate, he said to her, “It’s good for our relationship to be able to sort of chitchat.”
Jerusalem
AWROMELE’S PARENTS couldn’t sleep. Earlier in the evening, they had gone to the police station. The officer on duty there had said: “Just take it easy and wait. If he’s not back by tomorrow night, come by again.”
After that, the rabbi had called the members of the Committee of Vigilant Jews. He was afraid that the anti-Semite had struck; he could think of no other explanation for his son’s disappearance. He wasn’t the kind of boy simply to run away — he had always been content to lie under the blankets in his room.
During a few of those leisurely hours in bed, Awromele had translated the first few pages of Mein Kampf into Yiddish, but the rabbi knew nothing about that. He thought the boy had been studying the Mishne Torah or the Pirke Avot. But whatever he had been doing in there, the anti-Semite had struck now, that much was clear to the rabbi.
For years, Awromele’s father had lived in dread of the moment the anti-Semite would strike. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night and shake his bald wife until she awoke. His wife had shaved her head so that her wig would stay put. Her husband was the only one allowed to see or touch her hair, but she had shaved her head anyway, just to be sure. She had no intention of showing her real hair to anyone; hence the wig. Not even to her husband. Especially not to her husband. And in the middle of the night, the rabbi was therefore able to ask the bald woman beside him, “When was it that the anti-Semite was going to strike again?”
On some days it was no longer clear to him whether he was waiting for the arrival of the Messiah or the anti-Semite. In some strange fashion, the fact that it had finally happened came as something of a relief. The anti-Semite had come, he had arisen from his rat hole and shown his true colors.
Just before midnight, the most active members of the committee gathered at the home of Awromele’s parents. Some of them wanted only a Coke or a Fanta, but others asked for vodka. It was an animated gathering. Bettina had been recruited as well. Whether it was India or the Committee of Vigilant Jews, she applied herself 100 percent. She was one of those people with a keen sense of responsibility.
In addition to Bettina, the committee had a number of other non-Jewish members who sympathized, for any number of reasons, with the Jews. One man had joined because there was no other club that would have him for a member.
“We have to go looking for him,” the members told each other. “Awromele has fallen into the hands of the anti-Semite.”
“Or into the hands of the PLO,” said the man who couldn’t join anything else. He had already knocked back four vodkas, and with each glass his decisiveness grew.
“Why did he pick Awromele? We’re not Zionists,” said Awromele’s mother. Her eyes and hands were red; nervousness immediately triggered her eczema. “Why is the PLO homing in on us? All we want is the Messiah. Until then, there’s nothing else we want, and certainly not a Jewish state. Only the Messiah, that’s all. Is that asking too much?”
One of Awromele’s younger sisters, a girl with braces on her teeth, said: “It doesn’t even have to be a big messiah, not the kind that performs miracles. A little one would be okay too.” And an even younger sister, Rochele, said: “I want a messiah who can fly. Then I’ll climb on his back, and he’ll take me to America in two seconds. Then I’ll say: Dear Messiah, now I want to go to the North Pole, where the Eskimos live. And then I’ll climb onto his back again, and he’ll fly me right to the North Pole.”
The rabbi pounded his fist against the wall, so hard that flakes of paint fell to the floor. “Rochele, don’t sin against God,” he shouted. “The Messiah isn’t a private jet. And that you should talk like that on the day your brother has disappeared!”
“Stop screaming, Asher,” his wife cried. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar. Think of your heart!” Then she turned to the other members of the Committee of Vigilant Jews and said, “My husband is autistic — he can’t help it.”
The rabbi pounded his fist against the wall again, even harder now, so that even more paint fell. The baby of the family awoke with a shriek. “How dare you say that!” the rabbi shouted. “How dare you accuse me of being autistic? And that on the day that Awromele has been kidnapped by the anti-Semite! And God only knows what the anti-Semite has been up to with our son.”
The rabbi’s wife took the baby from its cradle and stuck a pacifier in its mouth. The baby calmed down soon enough; it was used to shouting. “But, Asher,” the rabbi’s wife said, “everyone knows you’re autistic. It was even in the synagogue newsletter. The whole congregation knows. There’s nothing wrong with being autistic. I’ve been living with an autistic man for thirty years. They’re people, too!”
The rabbi muttered under his breath and poured himself a glass of cola.
“I could just as easily have said,” his wife went on, “that you fooled around on me for years with my own sister, until she died of a horrible illness that I don’t wish to name out loud right here. My own sister, and if she’d been prettier than me, okay, but, no, she was older and uglier, God rest her soul. And her personality was worse, too. It’s a mystery to me what you saw in her, but I don’t go around saying things like that, because that’s no one else’s business. All I said was that you’re autistic. And that’s the truth. That’s all I’m saying.”
“No, no,” the members of the Committee of Vigilant Jews said to each other, “we don’t want to hear this, we don’t want to know. We came here to help look for Awromele.”
The rabbi said nothing more, only shook his head and took little sips of cola. Between sips, he muttered furious curses at his wife and his family. “Okay, so tell them,” he shouted at last. “Tell them everything. Tell them I embezzled funds, for all I care — you can’t keep your mouth shut anyway.”