Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  But it was like I was crazy, I really didn’t know why. We ate, and he fed me like a little girl and didn’t want to have anything himself. He just watched me, and while he watched he became very melancholy. I think he’d been drinking all day and now he was having some more, and the sadness was breaking out. To get him to eat, I put pieces of food in my teeth and held out my mouth so that he’d kiss me and at least take a piece of bread. And to keep him from drinking too much, I drank the wine out of his mouth. And when he wanted to send for another bottle, I said, “You’ve had enough now and you’re going beddy-bye. I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open.”

  Once again, we lay side by side like a married couple, him on his back and me half-across him with my head on his shoulder. But neither of us could sleep, and finally I asked him, “Why aren’t you sleeping?” “Why aren’t you?” he asked. “I keep thinking,” I said. “What about?” he asked. “About me and about you. About both of us.” “Me too,” he said. Then I thought he had really gone to sleep and I wanted to give him a goodnight kiss, and he gently pressed me to him. He wasn’t asleep.

  I was very happy and I said to him, “Do it again. Think about yourself, not me. I’m too tired to come again. But I want to feel you in me and feel that you’re happy.” And he must have understood that this was a present. He simply rolled me over and put his cheek on my breast, and then he was inside me. It was a quiet, enjoyable fuck, like between a couple that’s had a lot of practice fucking together, and it was nice the way he came: with a moan of surrender. I couldn’t see him in the dark (we’d put the light out so we could sleep), but I know how they come—they look so wild, as if they wanted to bite God in heaven, and yet it’s their only human moment.

  We fell asleep, and it was still dark when he woke me up. I sensed that he was dressed and I was scared to death and I said, “You’re not leaving me!” And he caressed me and kissed me and calmed me. He would only be gone for a couple of hours, until I’d slept enough, then he’d come and pick me up, he said. He just had to put his things in order. “Il faut que j’arrange ma maison,” he said. And I believed him and I kissed him and said, “Hurry up, I won’t be able to sleep a wink till you come back.”

  But then, when he closed the door behind him, I got scared, and I jumped out of bed and grabbed a towel and wrapped it around me and ran after him into the corridor and only caught up with him on the stairs. And when he said, “I’ll wait for you here, hurry up,” I ran back into the room and just pulled on my shoes and skirt and sweater and coat. I stuffed the stockings and the garter belt and the bra into my handbag. I really hurried. But he was already gone.

  It is night. In a shabby hotel on the place des Ternes, in a small room with flowery wallpaper, he sits at a dressing table with a covered mirror.

  The room does not face the street, it faces an air shaft. It is now the only room in which a lamp is lit. He writes, Il arrange sa maison.

  He has four folders in front of him. They are marked “Pneuma” and “A,” “B,” and “C.” Two suitcases and several cartons of papers surround him on the floor. He occasionally rummages in one of them, takes out a sheet, and inserts it into one of the folders; then he busily continues writing.

  The first folder is open. It says:

  The most extreme language of madness is reason, but sheathed in the enchantment of the image, restricted to the phenomenal space that it defines—whereby both of them create, outside the totality of images and the universality of speech, a peculiar abusable organization, whose obstinate specificity constitutes madness.

  —MICHEL FOUCAULT, Madness and Society

  1

  AS IF HE had been cast away among the lotus-eaters, he seemed to have forgotten his fatherland. He knew he was a stranger. The thin ocean wind told him so, tossed it into his face—the wind that blew, day in, day out, sweeping across bleak marshland and weed-choked rubble fields and straying into the gaps and ruins of meandering streets.

  The heavy sky told him so, day in, day out, the dove-breast clouds, scraped by the broken rafters of gabled roofs; their shadows scoured the houses red and sore, water dripped from their feathers, till they dissolved in white; sometimes they perished from the arrows of a stinting and distant sun, brittle arrows that pierced them only to break against the struts of the loading cranes in the bombed-out harbor, where their splinters scattered over the wet stone jetties, palely brass-bright, cradled in the cold water, until new flocks of doves flew over, breast to breast, and quickly pecked them up.

  The nights hushed it toward him, step-queens, no moon drifted through his blood, no dream-drunken bird measured the stillness of a black-and-silvery landscape with its warbling. Masses of cottony darkness pressed heaven and earth together, smothered the sparsely beaded streetlights and the pitiful contents of scrip-shabby department stores into pale fog-aureolas and let their oily shimmer ooze into the black canals.

  The dropsical air carried it to him, in gull shrieks expelled wildly into nothingness, weaving the emptiness of eternity on gull wings—a nightmare carnival: Pierrots shooting clownishly to and fro and up and down, crossing, chasing one another, reeling, plunging, now surrounded by powdery whirls of snowflakes, now streaked obliquely with strands of rain. He could hear it in the city’s din, which surged restlessly like the straying wind, now and again punctuated by the walrus bellow of a ship’s siren, haunted by the ghost of the past. He heard it in the constricted voices, the faded intonations, the crumbling speech of the people he passed during his constant, futile walks: pale blond men and women who looked at him with eyes of faded blue in which blank uncomprehending amazement froze into the enigmatic gaze of nixies. Estrangement stood between him and them, and this strange place to which they were together condemned did not unite them.

  •

  Yes sir. That’s how it ought to start. Orphically. The evocatively murmuring past tense. Rubble Age in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Germany, 1945–48. Enigmatic gaze of nixies (read: Hanseatic contrariness). Cast away among the lotus-eaters (read: displaced person). Sheer poetry, that’s how I set it down. With a throbbing heart full of sacred hope: As if he had been cast away among the lotus-eaters, he seemed to have forgotten his fatherland—period. With a dying fall . . .

  The first sentence has to ring like out bell metal:

  Solidly immur’d in earth

  Stands the mold of hard-bak’d clay . . .

  Schiller, Mr. Brodny, in case your memory’s failed you. You probably call him Skyler now. Well, we still call him Shillah. We are proud of him. Singing and ringing cherub’s voice. Singing and ringing for a child’s heart. Daddy, tell me a story. Sissignore, subito! The communication of fatefulness arouses our memory (or is it our morality?). Arouses our sensuality. Okay then, tell me a story, if possible in three short sentences. Of course this would require form. (Schwab would have said, “Ni plus, ni moins.”)

  That’s not our strength, alas, us Germans. For the French, yes. Still Cartesians clear as crystal, these fellows. Infrastructural formalists each and every one of them—despite Vichy and Oradour, Algeria and Monsieur le Général de Gaulle. Despite the inundation of their intellectual world by Spaniards, Balkans, Russian Jews. A culturally homogeneous national style, you know. That’s what Scherping says too, our mutual friend and missing link, big-time publisher, mass-culture maker, so he ought to know—perhaps not without a touch of nationalist envy, but no matter, the fellow is a masochist. Arouses our sensual memorality. In any case: the Frenchman’s gift for form has always been apparent in his literature. First rate! Not a superfluous syllable. Every chef d’oeuvre its own table of contents, so to speak. Never a word too many. Exemplary. Yes, and their wines? You agree with our friend Schwab, right? And the women—let’s not get into that. And the French cuisine—mmm, mmm. And the Impressionists too, logically; and of course Paris! Paris, man! The music, needless to say, comes from us. Offenbach (a Jew, but musically pure German). Wagner (first a scandal, but then acceptance). The only native a fellow who sounds lik
e what French girls wash their pussies in: Bizet (highly esteemed by Nietzsche, to be sure).

  As for my part, sir, I’ll sing about Paris in any style you’d like—for instance art nouveau-ish waltz-wave-welling: And if it weren’t for Paree, then I might dream of you and mehehee (whirl and hop) in your most decent bed (ramtata) . . . or else brisk, with marching brass blaring: Oh come to the drum to Paree, old bum!!! (thundering drums and clashing cymbals) . . . Life is a swallow’s flight.

  For the French, that is. For us, it’s not so smooth and clear. We’re known for being musical, but verbally we’re rather cloudy, amorphous, nebulous. No wonder, what with all that hard-to-communicate fatefulness of ours. The conflict-ridden soul, you know. Too many, too vast, too stormy are the thoughts that circle our heads. The everlasting struggle between pure philosophy and great art. “J’comprends jamais c’qu’tu veux dire, mon ours”—Gaia’s constant complaint. Ours des Carpates, mind you, not a German bear.

  Actually, I’m no more German than you, Citizen Brodny, are American, no matter how set apart you may be, an ocean away, how clearly gone from one part of the world to another; no matter with what Anglo-Saxon pragmatism you can chatter on about the European nations’ gift for form, their formal strength, their formal problems. (One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as they say—or do you prefer the equivalent in Yiddish? I can be of assistance either way, not just a professional literary flunky but also a polyglot homme à tout faire, a linguistic opportunist) . . .

  But then, what difference does it make who is what? We are not simply and resolutely one thing or the other. Not in these dynamic times. Sometimes, a man is both and yet neither, a blend of nothing and everything. People like us, for instance. A refugee’s fate. An émigré’s lot. We lost our true fatherlands and then forgot them among the lotus-eaters. Or elsewhere, somewhere along the way.

  What, by the way, was your fatherland, dear Mr. Jacob G. Brodny? Geographically, in any event, Europe centrale? Am I right? Just like mine, incidentally. One of those countries that were born with the peace treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Trianon and finally Versailles (and so about the same time as me). Back then, in the Käthe-Kollwitz-horror after the first blood-and-filth-and-iron chaos known as a world war, our continent was as fecund in giving birth to new fatherlands as darkest Africa is today.

  Incidentally, both of them enjoying American midwifery in their difficult hour. Granted to them out of the loftiest moral principles, of course. Memorializing principles: the American notion of freedom and similar human rights tolerates no empires, hence no colonies either, whether black or white and no matter what continent they’re on. Understandably so. If we are to believe Nagel (and why shouldn’t we? He’s a writer of international renown, a best-selling author, the sincerest bard of German domestic probity, Scherping’s house star, the nail in Schwab’s coffin, and presumably the supplier of some of your fattest commissions)—I say: if we share his opinion, arms should be given only to sovereign states.

  Well, in adjusting the demand to this supply, I have stumbled into an embarras du choix (more poetic in German: die Qual der Wahl). For me, there are too many fatherlands, too many for me to opt for any single one.

  Lack of character, I know. Like my stance in the war as a sort of draft dodger, not honorably mutilated, like Nagel. But mind you, I thought it gave me my only chance to achieve the dignity of a Nobel Prize (in literature, of course).

  For doesn’t this practice of anointing individuals with a knack for writing—systematically selected from just about every one of today’s fatherlands, from Iceland to Ghana—doesn’t it constitute a clear testimonial that each of the chosen nations has attained the cultural level that would permit it to fly national colors in full self-assurance and have an army equipped with automatic weapons? A few of them have even got the prize several times, and this so clearly a result of confusion that one suspects that once everybody had had his turn, they wouldn’t know what to do next. Yet never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to a stateless writer. I thought it was about time. But I had to admit to an error, at least where I was concerned: the prize is never awarded for books that have not been written. Too bad. In certain cases it would come into more deserving hands.

  But let us say no more. Nagel will get the prize. Hail to him in victor’s crown! Had Schwab not been cremated, he would be turning over in his casket like Saint Lawrence on the grill.

  Incidentally, this brings me to something I should have thought of earlier. Schwab, as Scherping’s editor for so many years, must have crossed paths with you; after all, you’re a great—what am I saying?—the greatest, or anyway the shrewdest of international literary agents. I’d give a lot to know what your meeting was like. As abortive as ours? Odd that he never mentioned it to me (but then, he was so tight-lipped). I, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to set down the absurd story of our encounter. With the aim, naturally, of telling the whole world about it.

  Che buffonata! You had the impression (to my keen regret, I assure you) that I was trying to make fun of you. I suppose you made the common mistake of misconstruing my ironic tone. Allow me to set matters straight: irony is not aggressive; it is the natural expression of a sad cur, not a biting cur. Especially when confronted with over-weening self-assurance, if you get what I mean.

  Granted, my reactions are neurasthenic. But I live among Frenchmen; I am overwrought. To be fair, I must confess I’ve probably been this way for some time. A decade and a half on German soil, two thirds of it on the Baltic coast—that’s no bed of roses, either. But the French finished me off.

  2

  Now, what do you have to say, Jacob G. Brodny, full-fledged citizen of the U.S.A., with military and other honors in the European Theater of Operations, superman of the literary business in the finest neon-haloed American way—what do you have to say about this challengingly arrogant self-certainty of the French? Is it sclerosis? A sign of fossilization? Granted. Nevertheless: isn’t it a thorn in your world-ruler side? You can’t trust your senses anymore. Being French, as we are continually told here in Paris, is not simply having a nationality. Oh no: it is a divine right, a higher form of existence, sprung forth from a more valuable chthonic origin and precipitated from the mother liquor of a nobler national spirit. And this in your, in the American, century, Jaykob Gee!—when any form of existence other than the American form is scarcely possible in our part of the world! A phenomenal evolutionary obstinacy, don’t you agree?

  In the past, we were used to this sort of thing. The unpigmented, rabbit-toothed arrogance of the British, for example. Or the furious national consciousness of the Balkanese—say, the Serbs. Germans too could afford to be overtly German. That was simply normal in the waltz-wave-welling concert of nations, and it was part of the European panorama. A grand medley of peoples, and each individual a proud something: a Briton, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Dutchman, Helvetian, Hutsul. The Serbs as well, when they thought of themselves as Serbs, regarded themselves as something far more important than when they simply thought, I, Miloš, or I, Yanko. Miloš the Serb was virtually a Miloš squared, an intensified, elevated Miloš. The individual is not lost in the collective; on the contrary, he is transubstantiated into a clearer form with a higher specific gravity. Nagel writes, “To belong to a people in body and mind, to represent a people in language, in appearance, and in character, is a kind of nobility!” A cheap truism that we ought to bear in mind. Schwab, being German, found it a bit suspect—understandably. As a German, one attains one’s best form by strictly disavowing Germanism (à la Goethe or Hölderlin). But that does not reduce the universal validity of Nagel’s statement. Certainly not for the French.

  And isn’t it astounding in a time when there is scarcely a people, scarcely a nation that constitutes its own milieu, a product of which a member of that people might consider himself, so that now in fact no one can be a mold for national characteristics, no one can develop a specific style? Show me the stylistic difference between a Spanish and a Swedish gas
pump. The scenic difference between a stretch of highway or an airport near Hamburg, Germany, or Rome, Italy, and Dallas, Texas. Today, all we have is a supranational style, and this style is American. A bit of highway near Pearris, Freanss, is already pretty American and thus no different from one near Tokyo, Jippan. Likewise the airports and gas pumps both here and there. Yet the French keep getting Frencher and Frencher. The Spaniards, the Swedes, the Japanese are visibly turning into gum-chewing, computer-trusting Americans. The French, however, have never been so intensely French as nowadays.

  You will probably ask why this is weighing on my mind? Well, sir, it concerns a bizarre hobby (in the past, it would have been called spleen). I am seeking the other half of my life. Like Aristophanes’s lovers, I am seeking a lost part of my own self, the other half of what was originally a pair. I lost it at some point or other—I suspect on an icy-clear day in Vienna, March 1938. I was barely nineteen innocent years old. Those years were amputated, removed from my existence, like Nagel’s right arm. Since then, I have been on the trail of their feelings. For, like Nagel, who claims he can still feel the fingers of his missing hand move, I too can feel my then-self in an abstract way.

  And so I am looking for that other part of my life wherever I might find it: in countries, landscapes, clouds, towns—yes indeed, especially cities, which, with their lights, fragrances, noises, colors, forms, moods, sometimes resurrect in me the totality of moods, forms, colors, noises, fragrances, light effects of an entire era (abruptly, with painful bliss and, alas, only for a fleeting microsecond).

  In short, I am seeking the other half of my life in the vestiges—or rather in the echoes—of its time. A time that is growing more and more discernible as a style. To specify in fashionably art-historical terms: the era that developed art deco from art nouveau. The time of Europe’s flirtation with America (I could attend the wedding only as an onlooker).