“So here we are,” said Marc, “the center of the avant-garde,” and he locked the door. He had made good time.
Xavier and Awromele looked around. So now it was starting; here was where it began.
Talent — you either had it or you didn’t, and, standing there beside Marc’s Alfa, beside a canal that stank a little, an odor that seemed extremely authentic to Xavier, he knew for sure that he had it.
Marc offered to stay in town that night. “The three of us can find a hotel, my treat,” he said. The boys didn’t think that was necessary. They could get by on their own. Xavier told Marc that he should go back to Basel. The mother shouldn’t stay alone too long. It couldn’t be easy for her, having her son leave so suddenly.
“Yes,” Marc said, “maybe that would be better.” He pressed his stepson to his breast. He could barely let go of the boy; he kept throwing his arms around him, holding him tight, running his hands down his back, and pressing his mouth to his lips. And saying all the while: “Don’t deny your own talent, Xavier. Don’t let them take it away from you. Keep painting, no matter what happens, keep painting. And no matter what they say to you here, I believe in you.”
Xavier finally put an end to the embraces by saying, “Now we really have to get to a youth hostel — otherwise we’ll never find one.”
“I’ll tell your mother you said hello,” Marc went on. “I’ll tell her not to worry.”
For the last time, he hugged Xavier with all his might. The sorrow inside him grew, and at the same time he felt a strange excitement, as though he had history itself in his hands. He climbed back in the car and drove to Basel. All the way to the German border, he could think only of Xavier’s hypnotic gaze, his massive talent, the fact that he, Marc, had recognized that talent and awoken it with a kiss, that his career would be a glorious one, and international, that above all.
Only when he was past Cologne did he start preparing for his flight simulator.
AWROMELE AND XAVIER didn’t find a youth hostel, but they found a cheap hotel, not far from the central train station. They shared a bathroom with three English punks who drew no distinction between alcoholism and anarchy.
The drain in the hotel bathroom didn’t work well, which made the place smell of sewer. On the shelf in front of the mirror was an old razor blade with hair sticking to it.
“We won’t stay here long,” Xavier told Awromele when they were lying in their three-quarter bed at last. “Don’t worry.”
They cuddled up. Xavier put his arm over Awromele and planned to fall asleep like that. He was happy, despite the little bed and the smelly bathroom. “Together at last,” he said.
Awromele, though already half asleep, murmured: “Please don’t go feeling anything. Please feel nothing.”
The very next morning, Xavier went to the Rietveld Academy. His paintings he carried in a tube under his arm. He had said to Awromele: “Will you take care of King David? If you leave him alone in the room, someone might steal him.”
Awromele wandered through Amsterdam with King David in a plastic bag. He had taken off his yarmulke. He bought a knitting needle so he could scratch himself under the cast.
In a café across from the stock-exchange building, he struck up a conversation with an American who, after about ten minutes, asked Awromele to come up to his hotel room. Awromele turned down the offer. He was reminded of the tall boy’s words: “Loneliness is nothing to be ashamed of.” He did make out with the American a little, though, for he also remembered the gist of what the tall boy had said: language as we know it is becoming obsolete. The language of the knuckle, the shoe, and therefore also that of the tongue that makes no sound, at most a little smacking noise, that is all the language that matters now, that is the language we must speak; otherwise we will never free ourselves of ourselves.
At the end of a long kiss, when he no longer knew quite what to say but realized that it would be a good idea to slow down kissing the American, he pulled out the jar and said: “Look, this is King David.”
“King who?” asked the American, who was in Amsterdam on business.
“King David,” Awromele said.
The American took the jar, saw something blue, and asked, “What is it?”
“My friend’s testicle,” Awromele said. “His name is King David.”
The American laughed heartily at that. But when he took a better look at the jar, he grew a bit pale and asked for the bill.
Awromele went back to their hotel room. He lay down on the bed to wait for Xavier. After a while, he took Mein Kampf and a notebook out of the bag and tried to translate the next passage. “So first the struggle and then perhaps pacifism,” he translated. “Otherwise mankind will have overshot the zenith of its development, which will then result, not in the ascendancy of some ethical idea, but in barbarism, and finally in chaos.”
Awromele was getting better at capturing the author’s style. There was an awful lot you could say about this man, but he certainly could write. He went on to translate a whole section, without waiting for Xavier.
He ate the last of the cookies his mother had given him.
When Xavier came back, around dinnertime, Awromele had translated more than two full pages. He was proud of what he’d done. Xavier sat down beside him and kissed him. Awromele asked, “How did it go?”
“It went,” Xavier said. “They sort of have to get used to me, to my style of painting. And what about you, did you have a nice time?”
“I met an American who wanted to take me back to his hotel room,” Awromele said. He was relieved that he had made acquaintance with someone so quickly. In Basel he was seen as a withdrawn boy; he could also be boisterous and tell a lot of jokes, but he’d had almost no real friends. “And I did some translating. Listen to this,” he said. “‘He who wishes to live must therefore struggle, and he who does not wish to struggle eternally in this world will not be able to go on living.’” Awromele closed the notebook. “That’s what my mother always says, too.”
“What do you mean?” Xavier asked.
“Well, just what I said. My mother always says that you have to fight in this life. You have to stay quiet, but while you’re being quiet you have to fight.”
“No, I meant about that American?”
“Oh, him.”
“Yeah, what was that all about?”
“Like I told you. He asked me, Do you want to go back to my hotel? He said: You feel like going with me? It’s just around the corner.”
“And you could understand what he said?”
“He spoke English.”
“Since when do you speak English? I’ve never heard you speak English. I thought you spoke only Yiddish, Hebrew, and German.”
“My English isn’t perfect, but I understood what he was saying. It’s easier for me than French.”
Xavier picked up King David and put him carefully on the top shelf of the cupboard. It was a narrow cupboard. Fortunately, they hadn’t brought along a lot of clothes.
“How did you start talking to him, anyway?” Xavier asked, looking closely at King David. He had the feeling that King David had shrunk, and changed color slightly as well. “Did you touch him or something?” Xavier asked. “Or worse than that? People don’t make proposals like that otherwise.”
“I didn’t do anything, I just talked to him.”
Xavier threw Awromele back on the bed, sat on top of him, and squeezed his throat. “What did you do with that American? I want to know. What did you do with him?” Xavier saw the hairy hand of an American plucking at Awromele’s body, and the thought took his breath away. He was a reasonable person, but the hairy hand of the American turned Xavier into a cornered rat.