Xavier lay down on top of Awromele. “I can’t sleep,” he said, “and when I can’t sleep I always start thinking, and if I think long enough the good ideas come by themselves.” Xavier didn’t know who he was lying on; he was dizzy; he pressed his nails softly into Awromele’s forearm.
“You really need to do something about that wound,” Awromele said. “It looks terrible. I don’t know who bit you, but it wasn’t a normal person.”
“I’ve been thinking. About evil.”
“About what?”
“Evil,” Xavier said.
“Oh.”
“It exists.”
“Yeah.”
“But where does it come from?”
“I don’t know,” Awromele said. “No idea. So many things exist, and I don’t know where they come from.”
“Where do you think it comes from?”
“I don’t know,” Awromele said. “Christ, I stock shelves at Albert Heijn, I know where the butter is, the yogurt, the peanut butter, the smoked sausage. That’s enough. That’s all a person needs to know. And you, early in the morning, while I’m lying here with a splitting headache, you start asking me riddles.”
“It isn’t early in the morning anymore, it’s almost late afternoon.”
“Whatever it is,” Awromele cried, “I don’t know. And get off me. You’re too heavy. I don’t feel good.”
But Xavier didn’t get off of him. “I think I know where evil comes from.”
Awromele closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep; maybe that would help.
“You know where it comes from?” Xavier asked. “Where it starts, where it arises, like a river? From the cunt. Evil comes from the cunt.”
Awromele wiped his lips. “Which cunt?” he asked, not sounding very interested.
“All cunts,” Xavier said. “Without exception.”
“Oh,” Awromele said. “Well, no wonder. Shall we try to get a little sleep?”
Xavier was shivering even more than before, as though he weren’t lying in a warm bed but still sitting in the mud beside the pond. “That’s where it comes from,” he said. “That’s where it lives. That is the headquarters of evil. The good comes from the backside, the lovely, the beautiful, the unselfish, the aesthetic — it all comes from the backside. But evil comes crawling out of the cunt. People always choose for the wrong side.”
“That’s not very smart of people,” Awromele said. “Good of you to find that out. I really love you, do you know that? But I don’t feel so well.”
Xavier kissed Awromele on the forehead, on his eyelids, the eyes of the boy he didn’t want to lose, without whom he was nothing. All comforting began with Awromele, but it couldn’t end there — a people awaited him.
“If we want to help people,” Xavier said, “we should close off the cunt.” Xavier searched around under the pillow, then farther down in the bed. He found King David.
“Look,” he said, “come on, look at him.”
“I’m looking,” Awromele said. “I know him, don’t I? I know exactly what he looks like.”
Xavier closed his eyes. He saw the moped lying in the gravel; he felt the pain in his leg when the moped fell against him. You had to find it, evil, you had to smell it in order to know where it came from, you had to go looking for it; otherwise you’d never know what life was, otherwise it would always remain a promise, a vague promise. Where it stopped and where it ended, you had to find out about that. What life really was.
I Take It You Have No Pets?
THE MOTHER WAS SITTING, as she often did in the late afternoon, in the chair where she’d always sat when Xavier painted her. She was sitting there with a cup of tea. She was staring into space. Occasionally she smiled, even though there was no reason for it and she wasn’t thinking about anything funny. It was a mechanical stricture of the mouth. Now that she was home alone during the day, her passion for her Italian lover was no longer banished to the middle of the night. At the strangest moments, she was overcome by intense desire. Then she would get up, walk to the kitchen, and take him out of the dish rack. Every time she picked him up, she whispered the words she had learned from Awromele: Shema Yisrael.
The phone rang. She didn’t answer it, she listened to the ringing until it died out, then went into the kitchen. There she took off her clothes. There was no one home anyway. She looked at the battlefield her left leg had become, and for their first time she failed to understand why she hadn’t started in on her right leg, or her stomach, or maybe her left arm. There was so much flesh left untouched.
That morning she had finally found the time to go into a shop that specialized in pest control. She had taken the tram. “I hear them running around at night, when I’m trying to watch television,” she’d told them at the shop. “The rats.”
“Then we should actually come by for a look,” the man in the shop had said.
“No, I want to try it myself first,” the mother said. “I’m not at home much. I wouldn’t want you to come all the way out there for nothing.”
Then the man sold her the most powerful poison he had. “I take it you have no pets?” he asked.
The mother shook her head. “I’d like a receipt, please,” she said.
Because the weather was so lovely, she decided to walk home, but halfway there she regretted it. The poison was so heavy.
Funny how she never missed anyone. Well, sometimes, in spite of everything, her late husband, because he’d been disgusted by her.
Now there was no one left to be disgusted by her. Marc lived with her, but he wasn’t disgusted by her. At most a little indifferent. You needed to have someone around who was disgusted by you; otherwise you had to do it yourself, be disgusted by yourself. She slid her finger along the blade, and murmured the prayer she had learned from Awromele.
DANICA SAT ON the floor of her room, surrounded by Snoopy things — diaries, pens, a little Snoopy, a big one, a key chain. The more she fell under the protection of the tall boy and his friends, the more Snoopys she collected.
Not long before, a biology teacher had asked her: “Don’t you think you hang around a bit too much with boys who are much older than you? I always see you with the same group out in the schoolyard.”
“No,” she’d said. Then she had walked away quickly.
IN BEATRIXPARK, they found a badly wounded North African boy. The papers didn’t give it much coverage; there was more important news that day. The police didn’t give the case high priority, either; a gas station had just been blown up.
XAVIER WAITED until Awromele had dropped off again. Then he got dressed, taped a bandage over his wound, and went outside.
He walked through the center of town, sweating, feverish, but in a strange way happy. He was pleased with the decision he’d made, convinced that in the end Awromele would follow him to the land where he belonged.
At a supermarket he bought a container of custard. Awromele liked custard; it had been his culinary discovery in the Venice of the North.
In the checkout lane, Xavier saw a woman with two shopping bags and a child. He offered to carry her bags to her bike. Always helpful, that was Xavier, always thinking of others. They struck up a conversation. She was a schoolteacher, but she was on sick leave. Calmly now, no longer shivering, Xavier told her about his painting, but avoided the parts about King David. There would be so much to explain otherwise.
He offered to walk her home — she lived close by — and when they were standing in front of her door she asked, “Would you like to come up for a cup of tea?”
Xavier looked at his watch and smiled. He shook his head, but she insisted, and finally he agreed.
He helped her carry the heavy shopping bags up the stairs.