When they were out on the street and Xavier saw Awromele beaming as he looked at the bike, he fell in love all over again. Xavier thought: We fit each other, we were made for each other. We belong together.
THE MOTHER HAD remained lying on the kitchen floor for a good eight hours. She had slept, daydreamed, thought without being able to say exactly what she’d thought about. At last she got up and made some tea.
She did a little shopping. At the greengrocer’s, she talked to the owner’s son. He, too, was a member of the Committee of Vigilant Parents, even though he was nowhere near having children yet. He had joined out of solidarity with his loyal customer. After he had read in the paper about the horrors that had taken place, he’d told himself, I have to do something. Joining the Committee of Vigilant Parents seemed to him like the first step.
While she was counting out her change, the mother said to him, “Did you know that I wanted to poison him?”
“No,” the greengrocer’s son said. “Who, if you don’t mind my asking? Pedophile Lenin? Well, I can imagine that.”
“No, my son,” the mother said, “when he was just a baby.” And she laughed the way she had once laughed at celebrations and cocktail parties. Charmingly, seductively, yet still with a certain distance. In fact, she couldn’t laugh at all, she didn’t see anything to laugh about.
The young man gave her a plastic bag for her groceries. He watched her go. That woman must be having a hard time, but she fought back bravely. Always cheerful, always time for a little chat.
The mother headed home, but — as though pulled along by invisible threads, as she would later describe it — she felt compelled to enter a supermarket.
The manager of the supermarket referred her to a shop that specialized in pest control.
In front of that shop, the mother stood wavering for a quarter of an hour.
Then she walked home. She was going to fix a vegetable quiche.
An Overdrawn Account
AT THE RIETVELD ACADEMY, they were more impressed by Xavier’s drive than by his paintings. Yet they still decided to admit him. One of the professors told his colleagues: “He may not have much in the way of technique, but he has something special. He has character and willpower, and then there are those hypnotic brown eyes that stare right through you. That boy has something.”
Awromele and Xavier found a room in a student hostel on Prinsengracht. The room would have been small for one person, let alone two, but they didn’t mind.
When their money ran out, they went looking for work.
Xavier found a job waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant downtown, not far from the central train station. Despite Xavier’s broken Dutch, the owner had fallen for his charm, his helpfulness, and his personality, and also for his eyes, which could have passed for those of a Mexican. Besides, the boy was always polite to customers, even when they weren’t polite to him.
Awromele found a job at the Albert Heijn supermarket. Even though he was actually an illegal alien in the Netherlands, the manager of the chain store on Middenweg told him, after flipping through his passport a few times: “A Swiss citizen is never really illegal. I’ll tell you what — I’ll pay you half the minimum wage, and we’ll leave it at that. We help you, and you help us; that way everybody’s happy.”
That was the kind of reasoning Awromele could appreciate. Besides, he wasn’t working solely to make money, but also to meet people and make friends. And he made friends, he made friends one after another. Sometimes he made out with those friends; sometimes he tactfully shared their beds.
Despite his vow to feel nothing, these activities caused Xavier a great deal of sorrow. At unexpected moments, they also caused him to fly into a rage.
When Awromele was lucky, Xavier would pick up his drawing pad during such a fit of rage and begin sketching away furiously. At the academy, they said of the drawings he made then, “You can’t really call it talent, but these days passion is a rare enough thing in itself.”
At less fortunate moments, Xavier did not pick up his drawing pad, but smashed all the furniture in their room. Then he would say to Awromele: “I hope you realize that I’m doing this because I love you. Consider it a compliment. If I didn’t love you so much, I wouldn’t let myself go like this.”
Awromele understood that, but he didn’t enjoy it. “It’s so agitating,” he said. “I’d rather have you not feel anything, like me.”
The mirror in the bathroom they shared with ten other students had been destroyed in this way, as had the bookcase they had just put together one Saturday afternoon after buying it at IKEA, when Awromele confessed that he had kissed a married man from North Brabant Province in the furniture store’s coffee corner. “I can’t help it, sweetheart,” Awromele said, taking Xavier’s hand and holding it tenderly. “I can’t do anything about it, I can’t say no. That’s how we were raised. What would you do if you had grown up hearing, ‘Don’t say no, the Jews already have such a bad name’? You wouldn’t resist, either. I do it out of courtesy.”
“But you’re not courteous,” Xavier shouted, picking up the hammer and smashing the new bookcase to smithereens. Even though he was never around when it happened, he could see the details of the kissing and making out in his mind’s eye, in color, sometimes even with a soundtrack.
The imaginative power that won him praise at the Rietveld Academy was a hindrance to him. His fantasies drove him to the brink of madness, yet it was not something he could allow himself to repress. He had to transform that energy into beauty. But it came back again and again, and every time it came back it was more powerful than the time before. “Stop saying that!” Xavier screamed amid the ruins of the bookcase. “The fact that you’re Jewish is no excuse for hopping in the sack with every man who comes along. You’re disgusting, that’s all.”
He ran out of the house. That was how most of his tantrums ended. He had never been hot-tempered before, and never unhappy, either. It had to be love, love changed you, love made a complete person out of you. But he continued to have difficulty with Awromele’s giving his body to almost any man who asked. Anti-Semitism could not be combated in bed. Awromele’s behavior only made it worse.
After these fits of rage, if the line wasn’t too long, Xavier would go to the Anne Frank House around the corner. It was one of the only places where he could regain his calm. The staff knew him. They thought he was a nice boy, charming, interested, and helpful. In addition, he spoke a little Yiddish and had a slight knowledge of Hebrew. Despite Xavier’s tantrums, Awromele had continued to give him lessons, and not only in Yiddish: Xavier now wanted to learn Hebrew as well. He took his task seriously. Every morning before breakfast, he would learn his vocabulary list, and before they went to bed at night Awromele would drill him. Comforting without discipline was for chumps.
Yes, Xavier thought as he walked through the Anne Frank House, Awromele doesn’t do much except stock shelves and screw, but I still have to comfort him. I must and shall comfort him. Him and his people. And then he would repeat these words to himself silently, in Yiddish.
His visits to the Anne Frank House, meanwhile, aroused his interest in the problems of the Middle East. He bought a scrapbook and began cutting out all the articles he could find about the Middle East. He pinned little flags to a map to trace the course of the First Intifada, and to his fellow students and professors at the Rietveld Academy he praised the courage and creativity of that ancient people. He told them, “You wouldn’t think so to see them run, but they are fighting machines.”
Xavier was a man with a mission. Nothing Awromele did could change that.