IN THE EARLY DAYS of their stay in the Venice of the North, which, as it turned out, was also referred to as “the Jerusalem of the North,” Awromele and Xavier called home regularly. Later, the calls became less frequent. The mother didn’t say much, mostly “yes” and “no,” and the rabbi’s wife mostly cried. That didn’t help anyone much. And the phone bills got too high.
Xavier quickly grew accustomed to missing his mother. He still painted his testicle, without his mother now, but with Israeli soldiers and Jewish war heroes instead — Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, Golda Meir.
And Awromele was able to compensate for the emptiness family had left behind. Amsterdam pepped him up. He began dressing differently, and once or twice a week he would violate the dietary laws. He shaved more carefully than he had in Basel, and for the first time in his life, he bought himself a bottle of aftershave.
Awromele also developed the growing urge to talk to strange men, and to kiss them. It almost became an addiction. And the more he kissed, the more frantically Xavier painted, and the more fanatically he worked at his Yiddish lessons with Awromele.
On occasion, Xavier would ask Awromele for details: “Do you take off all your clothes?” And: “Do they touch your butt, too? I thought I was the only one who was allowed to do that.” But Awromele never felt much like talking about it. He usually said: “I can’t say no. Let’s leave it at that.”
“But I don’t go around kissing other people, do I?” Xavier would say. “I feel no need for that. So why do you? I thought we would be enough for each other.”
“You can say no,” Awromele said. “You should be glad about that. Do you think it’s easy for me?”
Because Awromele himself couldn’t say no, Xavier would sometimes follow him, in order to intervene if need be. And sometimes, when he should actually have been at the Rietveld Academy working on a collage, he would take the tram to the store on Middenweg, to watch Awromele innocently stocking shelves. Spying on him like that, seeing him in his Albert Heijn outfit, lining up bottles of fabric softener, he was overwhelmed by infatuation. The simple fact that no one was fiddling with Awromele at that moment was enough to make him happy. Afterwards, he would catch the tram back to the Rietveld Academy and press on ecstatically with his oeuvre.
Although their interests these days were so widely divergent, they still worked together on translating Mein Kampf. Three times a week, sometimes a little more often. Once they were bent over that book, their notebooks and dictionaries at hand, they never argued. And at such moments Xavier did not feel even the slightest pang of the jealousy that at other moments drove him to the Anne Frank House.
Awromele said to Xavier: “Let’s keep at it. The market is ripe right now for a translation like this. If we wait too long, maybe it won’t be anymore.” Then they would sit down on the bed together, with the book by You-Know-Who and with their notebooks and dictionaries. And they translated, with dedication and love. They weighed each word — each word had to be the right one. The text had to be given the treatment it deserved.
AFTER ABOUT FOUR MONTHS, the rabbi’s wife came to Amsterdam in an attempt to convince her son to return to Basel. She brought with her a big box of cheese biscuits, shortbread, and creampuffs, all of which she had baked herself.
Awromele was happy to see his mother again, and launched greedily into the cheese biscuits. Xavier, meanwhile, did his best to comfort her.
She went home again two days later, without having accomplished her purpose.
Throughout the train ride to Basel, which lasted more than eight hours, she wept. A German railway conductor offered her a free cup of tea.
One week after her return, the rabbi died of a brain hemorrhage. Awromele flew to Basel, dressed for the last time in the clothing of his youth, and sat shiva for a whole week. Then he flew back to Amsterdam and kissed more men than ever, in order to make up for lost time.
XAVIER WAS MAKING good progress with his Hebrew and Yiddish; he learned those languages faster than the techniques of painting. But that’s not the way he looked at it. He continued to paint with great discipline, despite the occasional dip. And during those dips he would think: maybe, as a painter, I’m actually an autodidact; maybe the academy is ruining me. The spontaneity is fading. They’re forcing me into a mold. My own personality is getting lost.
Whenever he had these dry periods, he would suggest to Awromele that they immigrate to Israel together. Awromele had been raised with principled objections to the Jewish state in its present form. The Jewish state was to be established only after the arrival of the Messiah, not before.
“I kind of like it here,” Awromele would say then. “And, besides, first the Messiah, then the state.”
“Can’t we do something to trigger the Messiah’s arrival?” Xavier asked.
“No, you can’t trigger that. These aren’t contractions. What are you talking about?”
“Without Israel, every Jew is an overdrawn account. And who knows how long we’ll have to wait for the Messiah? Maybe we should buckle down and do something about it. God protects those who protect themselves. The Almighty hates overdrawn accounts. We should get to work.”
“I’ve never accounted for anything,” Awromele said. “Besides, someone has to stock the shelves. So why shouldn’t it be me?”
Xavier was not particularly convinced by Awromele’s arguments. Giving comfort, the way he understood it, was not a metaphysical affair. The place where the most suffering and dying was going on, that was where the comforter should be ready to move. The Anne Frank House was a bit too limited for such ambitions.
“Let’s go,” Xavier would say to Awromele as they lay in bed at night. “Before long, there will be more Palestinians there than Jews. Then there will be no point to it. There’s nothing left for us to do here — our lives here are empty — but there we have a task to perform, there we’re needed.”
But Awromele truly enjoyed his work at Albert Heijn. A person like him, who had never learned to say no, shouldn’t take on too much responsibility. And besides, the Palestinians didn’t worry him, not even if ten million of them showed up next week. He had traded in God for pleasure, and it was the best deal he’d ever made.
In the months that followed, Xavier made little progress at the academy. He kept painting the same subject, and his teachers slowly but surely began steering him towards photography. Though his painting was of debatable quality, his professors had no trouble imagining that their student might become an original photographer.
But Xavier stuck stubbornly to his canvases. Photography was beneath his dignity. “Anyone can push a button,” he said. “But creating a new reality, that’s a different story.”
AWROMELE BEGAN STAYING away at night now as well. At such times, Xavier did his utmost not to feel anything. It wasn’t easy. He lay in bed and couldn’t sleep. Every fifteen minutes, he would look at the alarm clock and tell himself, “He’ll be home by four.” But when four o’clock arrived and Awromele still hadn’t come home, Xavier would get dressed and go into town. Sometimes he would wander through Amsterdam till the crack of dawn and think, When I get home at seven, Awromele will be sound asleep in bed. But with increasing frequency, Awromele wasn’t there at seven, either.
When that happened, Xavier would kneel beside their bed, pick up the notebooks containing their translation of Mein Kampf, and begin to read aloud. In the Yiddish translation, he read: “Hence the lie concerning the language of the Jews, which is not a means to express their thoughts but, on the contrary, a means to disguise them. He speaks French, he thinks in Yiddish, and when he puts together poems in German, he does nothing but indulge the character of his own folk.”