Xavier was still trembling, exactly like the little terrorist for whom he’d sung.
They would have to leave the Venice of the North. In Beatrixpark, beside the pond, lay a lonely moped. There was nothing left for him to do here. Marc had been right. He was made for bigger, more important things than the little they expected from him at the Rietveld Academy.
Then he fell asleep at last, shivering from the cold, dreaming that he held a stone in his hand. And in his sleep he spoke to the pretty terrorist, again and again, each time anew, despite everything.
They slept for the next four hours. Awromele didn’t have to work at Albert Heijn that day. When Xavier woke up, he had made up his mind. He would never go to the Rietveld Academy again. He had started off as an autodidact, and that was what he would remain. Awromele was still asleep. Xavier kissed him gently on the back of the neck until he woke up. Awromele was in a morning mood, the way he often was after a night when he had been unable to say no.
“Would you like some tea?” Xavier asked. “It’s late already.”
“Water. Just water.”
Xavier brought him a glass of water.
Awromele drank thirstily. He not only remembered the night he had spent with the manager and the manager’s stories, he also remembered his early-morning conversation with Xavier. “What was that about the enemy?” he asked.
“What enemy?”
“What you told me about when I got home this morning.”
“Forget it, it’s not important. I was still a little drunk, I was just talking.”
“More water,” Awromele said. He loved Xavier, so he didn’t doubt his word. But he found him so tiring sometimes, so principled, so moralistic, so impractical.
Xavier fetched some more water.
Then he lay down beside Awromele, under the blanket. The sheets needed changing, but if Xavier didn’t do it it wouldn’t happen, and Xavier hadn’t done it for a long time — he’d been too busy.
Awromele put down the glass. They held each other without talking.
“I’ve decided,” Xavier said after a while, “to drop out of the Rietveld.”
“Why?”
“I’m an autodidact.”
“A what?”
“An autodidact.”
“Oh.” Awromele wiped his lips, blew his nose in his hand, and then wiped it on the blanket. He was in every way a practical person. He knew that a little dirt wouldn’t kill you. Exaggerated hygiene only lowered your resistance.
“I thought we came here because you wanted to go to the Rietveld so badly.” Awromele held his own head in his hands, pressed his fingertips against his temples, rubbed his eyes hard; nothing helped. He felt worse than he had in a long time.
“The Rietveld isn’t stimulating enough for me. You know what they told me? Go do something with plants and flowers. Flower-arranging, ikebana, working with living materials, Oriental aesthetics.”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Why not?”
“Why don’t you open a flower shop? I think I’d like that. I don’t know much about flowers, but I think it would be romantic to start a business with you. And you have a good sense of color and shapes.”
“Because I want to do more with my life than open a florist’s, Awromele. I want to do more than arrange bouquets.”
Xavier shook his friend. It amazed him that he couldn’t see what Marc had seen. That his own friend didn’t recognize the genius in him. But he was too proud to say that. He felt lonely. It was probably a temporary thing. Once they got to Israel, his talents would show themselves. He would plant forests, orange groves, olive trees. He would make the desert blossom, the way he’d tried to make Awromele blossom.
“We don’t belong here,” Xavier said. “There’s that, too, dearest. Haven’t you ever noticed how people look at us?”
“What people?”
“In the street. In the tram.”
“They look at me because they think I’m pretty,” Awromele said. “I never knew I was pretty, but it turns out I am. People like to look at pretty things. Don’t you think I’m pretty?”
“No, that’s not why they look,” Xavier said. “They look because they’re afraid of you. And because they’re afraid of you, they despise you.”
Awromele’s headache wouldn’t go away. He squeezed his temples — he had read somewhere that that helped. “We didn’t fit in in Basel, either,” he said quietly. “So it’s not such a disaster.”
“It is a disaster.”
Awromele shook his head. “No,” he said. “Get me some more water. I’m dying. My head.”
Xavier got some more water; there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for Awromele. Especially after last night.
Awromele emptied the glass down his throat. Then he went to the toilet and tried to vomit. After hanging over the pot for ten minutes, to no avail, he climbed back into bed, sweaty and exhausted. “Never again,” he whispered. “Never again. Fucking is one thing, but I’m never going to drink again.”
“You mean you fuck them?”
“Who?”
“The people you can’t say no to.”
“Only if they insist. And if I’m in the mood. Otherwise it’s just a little messing around.”
Tears came to Xavier’s eyes. Despite his headache, Awromele saw the tears. “Xavier,” he said, “listen, I can’t say no. Let it be. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. And, besides, we weren’t going to feel anything. We swore we wouldn’t feel anything. I don’t see that happening. If you ask me, you feel all kinds of things, and your feelings upset me. Your feelings make me sick. Your feelings aren’t good for you, and I’m afraid they’re not good for me, either.”
“I really don’t feel anything, Awromele,” Xavier said. “I really don’t, just like you don’t feel anything. I know we’d go crazy if we felt anything. We’d spatter all over the place like a bomb. But that doesn’t have anything to do with that other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
Xavier caressed Awromele’s head, the same way he had caressed the head of the pretty terrorist, and for a moment, for one brief moment, he couldn’t tell the two of them apart, he didn’t know who he was caressing.
“There is one country,” Xavier said, “that was made for people like us.”
Awromele looked at Xavier questioningly. What was he talking about now?
“That’s right,” Xavier said. “That country is called Israel, and it was made for you and me.”
“When I first met you,” Awromele said, “you barely knew you were a Jew. It’s okay by me, it’s not that, but you can overdo it. I didn’t know what it meant not to be able to say no when I met you; I didn’t know that it involved taking off your clothes so often. But I don’t really mind, I’ve learned to live with it. I just moved here, and I don’t really feel like moving again.”
“We’re not staying here,” Xavier said. “This is no city for me, and not for you, either. We’re going to Israel. I can already speak Hebrew pretty well, I can learn the rest there. There we’ll be at home, there we’ll finally be among our own.”
Xavier suddenly remembered the boy’s pendant. Did a camel have one hump, or two? He needed to look it up in the encyclopedia. He saw himself again, sitting in the mud with the young terrorist’s head in his lap.
“Actually, I want to stay here,” Awromele said after a few minutes’ silence. “I just signed up at the gym. I paid for a whole year — it would be a waste to go away now.”
“No,” Xavier shouted, “you’re going with me.”
“Why? Why should I, if I’d rather be here?”
“Because you can’t say no. That’s why.”