Autism
AWROMELE LOOKED AT Xavier confusedly for a moment. Then he said quietly, “Just like my father.”
“What?” Xavier asked.
“Just like my father. He does that all the time, too. Suddenly loses control, then he smashes something against the wall or starts hitting people. My mother says it’s because he’s autistic and can’t see the big picture.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be — I’m used to it.”
“But I’m sorry anyway. I lost control.”
“He only sees little pieces of reality, and he can’t put those little pieces together.”
“The rabbi?”
“My father. He’s not a rabbi. He’s autistic.”
“But autistic people can be rabbis, too, can’t they?”
Awromele had to think about that one. “In principle, yes,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you still talking about my ear?”
“No, yes, well, that, too, but I meant about your father being autistic. That above all. I’m sorry. That must be difficult.”
“Oh,” Awromele said, “for an autistic person he’s actually quite sweet; he can’t do anything about it. No one can do anything about it.” For a moment, a dark cloud seemed to pass over his face, but then he smiled broadly again. “He just pretends, that’s all.”
“He pretends to be autistic?”
“No, he pretends to be a rabbi. He never passed the exams. When his matrimonial agency went down the tubes, he had no choice but to become a rabbi — there was nothing else he could do. Especially not after he molested my aunt, God rest her soul. She was the sweetest aunt I had.”
Xavier suggested that they find a better place to talk. Awromele’s excitement was making him nervous.
They started off in the direction of a wine bar that Xavier knew well. Then he realized that it would be better not to show up there with Awromele. Before you knew it, rumors would be flying. So he took him instead to the Drei Könige am Rhein Hotel.
“He had sired eight children,” Awromele said as they crossed the lobby, “before he found out.” Awromele walked through the hotel as though he’d been coming there for years. He barely seemed to notice his surroundings, taken up by his story and relishing the way Xavier listened to him. Apparently they didn’t listen to him much at home.
“Before he found out what?” Xavier asked.
“That he was actually in love with my mother’s sister, and that she was in love with him. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. After he’d made eight children with my mother. You’d think of that beforehand, wouldn’t you? Does your mother have a sister?”
“No,” Xavier said, “no sisters. She’s an only child. An orphan, to be precise.”
“That’s better, less risky — to have no sister.”
They found a table on the patio with a view of the Rhine. Xavier had often swum by here in the past, alone at first, later with his friends the Zionists.
Awromele ordered sparkling water, then nipped at it a bit, as if it might be poisonous.
“Are there people you can’t keep your hands off of?” Awromele asked.
Xavier thought about it. “No,” he said after a moment, “there’s no one like that. I can keep my hands off of everyone.”
They were a strange pair. People were looking at them.
“So your parents are assimilated,” Awromele said as the ice in his sparkling water slowly melted away.
“Assimilated?”
“They act as if they aren’t anything.”
“I guess you could say that,” Xavier said. “That’s what they do.” His wineglass was empty, but he didn’t want to order another one — he didn’t want to make an unfavorable impression on Awromele.
The worst that can happen to you is to have no goal in life, not to be anything. Xavier had read that somewhere. In the forbidden book, he had also read that Jews systematically brought girls and women to ruin. He couldn’t imagine Awromele doing something like that: he wouldn’t bring anyone to ruin. Xavier’s wisdom came from books. His parents were silent most of the time, and his teachers doubted everything, except for the man who taught the classics. He believed that Aristotle had an answer for everything.
Something about Xavier’s recently chosen goal in life caused him to blush one moment and grow desperate the next. But that desperation was nothing compared with the real suffering which he craved. The suffering of others.
“Is that why you’re an only child?” Awromele asked.
“What?”
“Your family being assimilated, I mean. Assimilated people never produce a lot of children. That’s how they destroy their Jewishness, my father says. In the long run, they do what Hitler did, but demographically. Has your family always been assimilated? Or was it something you became?”
“No, we’ve always been like that.”
“So you don’t know any better.”
Awromele looked pensive again, and Xavier felt the urge to grab hold of a body part that was causing the pain. He had the impression that Awromele’s pain came from all his body parts.
“Do you mind if I ask you something?” Xavier asked.
“I have to get home pretty quickly — you know how my father is.”
“It won’t take long.”
“Go ahead. Just ask.”
“Are you a Zionist?”
Awromele started laughing. He laughed loudly, he laughed in abandon, not like Xavier’s mother, who didn’t laugh much anyway. And when she did, it sounded like the laughter of an actress who doesn’t feel like playing her part.
More and more people on the patio of the Drei Könige am Rhein Hotel were staring at them. The more people stared, the uneasier Xavier felt. You saw people like Awromele walking down the street sometimes, but you never saw them at chic hotels. They always kept to themselves.
“Of course I’m not a Zionist,” Awromele said. “First the Messiah, then the Jewish state. You know that. We have to wait for the Messiah; then the state will come of its own accord. You don’t know much, do you? What have your parents been teaching you all these years? Are you even circumcised?”
Awromele talked rather loudly, and his voice was high for his age, so half the people on the patio could hear what they were saying.
“Circumcised,” Xavier said as quietly as he could, without actually whispering. “Not really. We didn’t have the time for it, or the money. Not in those days. And we’re assimilated, I told you that already.”
“All the assimilated Jews I know are circumcised. Circumcision doesn’t interfere with assimilation. Were your parents really that assimilated? What did they think about when you came along?”
“I don’t know what they were thinking. My father is an architect; he’s awfully busy.”
“And then that stuff about the money being a problem. What kind of excuse is that? A circumcision doesn’t cost anything. Sixty francs, some people will do it for twenty — maybe with less sophisticated instruments, but that’s no problem for a baby. A baby can take a lot. My mother used to have us eat off the floor, to build up our resistance. Maybe it was a kind of revenge, because my father was doing it with her sister, God rest her soul, but still. One of my father’s cousins was a circumciser. He had a butcher shop. He moved to Australia, and no one knows what he’s doing over there. Do you have smegma?”
“Excuse me?”
Xavier began to regret bringing Awromele to this hotel. They didn’t have any manners. They were an ancient people, okay, but they’d left their manners behind in the desert. He knew it wasn’t right to generalize, but if you intended to apply the principles of science, you didn’t have much choice. And that’s what he wanted to do, to approach the Jews scientifically. To study suffering in an objective fashion, to enter the paradise of pain as a scientist. Perhaps the only justification for pain was the beauty produced by its infliction.